M E N T O R S

in celebration of two decades in the supermarket trade

My job is to orient the labels
on catfood and shitpaper: Lush aisles
sell. In second-language English Shido
asks, "So actually what does your father do?"
Hell. Here it come and nothing for it.
"A professor, boss. Business."
Confusion, as forecast,
surprise, and finally pity.
He doesn't ask actually why I never learned any,
how I missed the lessons.
Which is fine. I have no information.
    It rhymes but its not pretty.

Tsering - Chinese prison, six months,
"Student resistance movement," laughing,
"Not very bad. Just talking talking talking." -
was another man who knew his business.
He and a buddy took a truck from India
loaded with generators
after some disaster (a flood?) in China
and sold them to his jailors.

They spent it all in a week
in Hong Kong. Girls and drink.

He worked my shift for years. Bought a house.
He offered one of us a last advice:
"Work eat sleep work eat die"
He threw himself from a bridge to end his sentence.

I've told these stories before,
and they are all true.
But they don't get to you.
Spicer said it
and he's fucking right -
"No one listens".  And I still work there.
   I can't make it pretty, I can just make it rhyme.

Handgame singsong

Mr. Jack tapped his head

   with a ball peen hammer.

Miss Marie fixed it up

  in half an hour.

Some spin round in circle bound

  some go straight.

Which one is the carnival train

  and which one freight?

from Parade Music

A beetle then a bruise then a bride then...

Shiny beetle

Black and blue

On my knee

Begging please

Before the judge

God above

Dark below

The lifted stone
Shiny beetle

Harvest

Cut melon's fieldhot seed
and wet sweetness leak
from the bright tenderness
of the gash

No inspiration
Can last five minutes without
Its own needful things

sa voix ce fut celle la

 Mais cett'autre histoire de la pie, de laquelle nous avons Plutarque mesme pour respondant, est estrange. Elle estoit en la boutique d'un barbier à  Rome, et faisoit merveilles de contre-faire avec la voix tout ce qu'elle oyoit; un jour, il advint que certaines trompetes s'arrestarent à sonner long temps devant cette boutique; dépuis cela et tout le lendemain, voylà cette pie pensive, muete et melancholique, dequoy tout le monde estoit esmerveillé; et pensoit on que le son des trompetes l'eut ainsin estourdie et estonnée, et qu'avec l'ouye la voix se fut quant et quant esteinte; mais on trouva en fin que c'estoit une estude profonde et une retraicte en soy-mesmes, son esprit s'exercitant et preparant sa voix à representer le son de ces trompetes: de maniere que sa premiere voix ce fut celle là, de exprimer perfectement leurs reprinses, leurs poses et leurs nuances, ayant quicté par ce nouvel aprentissage et pris à desdain tout ce qu'elle sçavoit dire auparavant.  - Montaigne

In an Italian story from some time ago

there was a parrot that could talk in a cage at a bar.

Goofy stuff like "Polly wanna cracker!"

Now one day the barkeep turns on the radio...

Incredible! Miles and Coltrane on Flamenco

Sketches is the first thing they hear.

Everyone is silent while those horns blow.

For a week the parrot wouldn't say a word.

Like it was deaf, and in silence couldn't speak.

But no; deaf and devoted look alike, 

and it hadn't been hurt. It had been moved.

Then the bird sang: a great, vivid

triumph of trumpets. And now that music

was all it would ever say. Bright. Loud.

Swimming Back

In darker water we are parted

every time. This water is cold

in August. Along the beach the sunblond

stretch and oil every delicious inch

of nakedness. We part. I crawl ashore.

As as a boy I stood every day

on the black wreck of an asphalt pier

and peered at the dark behind it – that water

I could not swim nor mother watch.

Without a word for what it was

I came to see. To keep my eye on.

The pier was awash with pulling waves.

Ashore, bright children castle sand.

Men and women show themselves.

Couples walk. We coupled here -

dark hair darker in the water,

cold skin, cold lips, her heat

inside and mine spilt there.

The criminal trembling that came with.

What we showed ourselves and parted.

As as young men we stood at the end

of a pier in winter and stared at ice.

I cupped a cigarette's hot coal

and dismissed the readings of dreams he offered.

We had both begun to fail and failed. Drawn

to the water, driven home by the cold

from the edge my daughter and I would fish from -

casting into the August evening.

Heavy with her my wife

had me hauled from the low combers

that patiently pushed me back under

as as doomed men we swam out

too far for me. He saved himself

that time. His ashes were scattered here.

I crawled and failed and she hauled me.

Now the son and daughters we have are blond.

They love the surf fearlessly. Shout

and play in it. Their castles mount and fail.

Always I am eyeing the dark water

and swim out to it every time.

Roll and float and breathe on the swell

of its breast. Dive. Taste it.

Crawl back to her through push and pull.

I save myself now. Every time.

Sugar on snow

Forty damn gallons

of sap for one gallon sweet.

Cold spring's industry

works dilute joy from bare trees.

In Florida: oranges.

This tanka is also on display as part of Montpelier's PoemCity project.  Over 200 Vermont poets have their work shown on the shopwindows downtown during April- anyone who can get there should.

In Babylon After Ezra

My brothers' people have gone away.

They loaded their truck with conviction yesterday

and left our street for some Godawful

dirt town where their kids will play

with sticks. They said they want it simple:

work and church and babies. All

the noise (They mean others lives

and skins and money and how our sons fall

in with their sons and with their daughters.)

was too much. To them it was noise,

the street music. There was one

uncle lingering with dark, full eyes

who said (hand on heart), “ I must find in

here something as big as Babylon.”

He should have stayed. Should have kept living

with destitute men collecting littered tin

into shopping carts on Saturday morning

and the noise the neighbors are always making

and the helicopters and the mummers.

With the smell of injira cooking

just there, eight feet across

the alley. It is street music. Downstairs

the mulatta angel and the Polish boy

hopscotch and wait for our girls

to join them. The neighbors begin to play

the theme from Bolero loudly, repeatedly.

I make coffee to carry down

to the stoop. I look up and see

a naked girl put her hair in a bun

through a far, open window. She's gone

just as suddenly. I laugh, gather

up our mugs. We sit on the steps in the sun.

At Market Street I watched my daughter,

age five, trying to piece together

the meaning of “Girls! Girls! Girls!”

in blinking neon. She asks. I tell her,

then take her hand and walk down Babylon's

mainstreet. Every night there are gunshots.

Hasidim mix with hipsters at the fishmarket

in Chinatown where they will sell you eels

born in the Euphrates. Too much here that

is real for laws in books to keep straight

however often they recite what is written.

My pale, bookish brothers blink their exhausted

eyes and find their Scripture too thin

a veil to conceal the lovely body of everyone:

the world. You can see from here where God

made the tower we made together fall down.

We're at it again. Did you hear that Spanish kid?

I can understand most of what he said.

Mary, Mary Quite Contrary

The movie ends when they marry.

The sequel, backstory more ornate - contrary

and regular motions together grow

complicated, confused, fascinating. Wedding bells

harmonize with the sea heard in shells.

Their days mob and mingle. Nothing tidy. No rows.

The drone of bees (of drones?) and drivers

rolling along asphalt on rubber

talking on phones to one another, the theater

of the world's doings at my doorstep,

seems today some serialized soap,

a story that spirals a drain or orbits

a weighty center without winning it.

A songbird sings from the wire

then quits it, the line it plucked

playing some low tone it's deaf to.

A Little Winter Sutra

Winter empties this

valley completely. Two miles

of hollow silence.

Just four ounces of songbird

will fill it. A bell, ringing.

"Rut with me and eat!"

Music sells the animal

moment while it lasts.

Not even breathless, this thing

returned alive from Brazil.

There is still still air

after. Snow wants nothing.

Is without question.

He considers it. Adjusts

his wings. Makes note. Takes the air.

You? I?

Who the bucket: rusted
unzinced, overscoured, holed
by the wet mess
spilt and hauled?

Who the swine
whose name rhymes mine
fat up on slops?
Whose pen?

Whose the muck track
pen-gate to shack
by the tree with the chains
hanging, and hook?

Cold blowing rain shakes

drenched hedges and birds shiver.

The woodpile is soaked.

A little of their grace

I crawled in bed with Papa and lay down on his chest

In there with Mom and Papa and my head upon his chest

I heard the steady beating of the heart within his breast

And I felt the greying stubble on his cheek and chin

I saw in the light this morning the gray hair on his chin

I pressed my ear above his heart to hear the life within

His heart was low and slower, mine was quick and small

Greybearded, so much older, and I so safe and small

And he'll just keep getting older while I am growing tall

My mother reached her hand across and gently touched his face

I watched my mother wake and lean and softly kiss his face

I think that I this morning saw a little of their grace

I crawled in bed with Papa and lay down on his chest

In there with Mom and Papa and my head upon his chest

I heard the steady beating of the heart within his breast

After Tom's Heart Stopped - a true one

Man , its all good. I been tellin' myself that. 

You know I died three times on the table when I was shot?

Got this fuckin' scar. 

         And lifting his shirt shows silvered black elastic waistband to breastbone

At 'time I was mixed up in some shit, and I tryin' to be slick an' all, but they not havin' it

and straight shot me.

Doc said my heart stopped three times.

In hospital 'most a year.

So now I'm like its all good. 'Cause I been dead.

Like the other day, they shootin' on my street and Keesha my daughter,

 tryin' to come in. She cryin' 

and I'm just holding the door closed

and I'm laughin'!

Circus Smirkus

Early morning the grass was matted and gauzy

with spiders' silk barely seen in the low-

angled sunlight: ten minutes only

did all that fantastic industry show

in the field where we still pitch circus

tents in July. Delight camps out,

sells us snacks, souvenirs and three tries

for four dollars on our way to the tent

and popcorn and noise and this is the show we came for.

Look at  them pretend to fall! So

many clowns in such a little car!

Tonight for an hour and a half we watch and ahh.

The vastly ordered outside world is ignored.

More stars than we know for farther

than we can ever fit into our head

above us while we follow the ringmaster's patter.

After, we jabber back to the cars we parked

over the ruined acre of spiderweb. Still

under stars we cannot see for the head-

lights' glare. The world's own marvels

ignore us, too. Now in the dark

stars and spiders spin. We drive

home in our machines amid their work,

chatting on phones. We attend to ourselves,

and why not? Who cares if we laugh

at our own jokes? Applaud some kid

in tights and bells who just juggled five

balls in each hand (or nearly did)?

We are the only ones laughing anyway,

or trying to be funny, and sometimes we're pretty good.

We want a smaller, warmer joy.

The night sky is huge and very cold.

Tonight, a joy like us: little

monkeys laughing, foolish, the world's fools,

the ones in big shoes and baggy pants,

the stars of the show, grinning, with pie on our face.

Manual Dexterity

They wheel him in asleep and she begins
to cut his throat a little. Finds the vein
to open, to thread in the line. She spills her
balms into his heart's first chamber.

I've dropped my drink and kneel down in the kitchen
to mop a puddle of glass shards and bourbon.
That quick my hand is opened and my fingers
run with blood and burn with wasted liquor.

Or she is painlessly flaying his face,
carefully freeing the seventh nerve's lace-
work of feeling. She bends over the man on the bed
and mends him. Her brilliant hands are wet and red.

Or your hands run down my back and hips
while fine things are being done with kisses.
Afterward we lie damp and flushed,
spilled like opened gifts across our bed.

Bacchanalia

After some hesitation I lay myself down

drunk upon the rainsoaked grass.

I'll be damned

if the liquor doesn't ease the pain.

Naked, I am told, before God.

Naked. Rhyming.

Another evening it was a thunderstorm,

strobelight thunderstrokes bang bang bang without commas

tremendous cold rain gusted and me

out of bed in the houselee: watching, in love,

sublimnity,inhuman greatness, sweet relief

from my own poor estimations.

Grinning, worshipful naked ape in underwear

wetfaced.

All the bullshit will, in the end, win

over me but I'll not be won over

Please Please

I'll crossdress before the dry

with the thunderborn, bullhorn shouting

about everything, drunk

upon the wet grass, tears maybe

Pine

Grey bark

wanting and would

make lightening

split open

a gorgeous kindling

the heartwood made

a shower of gold

sparks that get

the Western wood

with flame, with flame

that only can open

the seeds of the others