Gazing
The mountains are black bears
sleeping on their sides, snow dusting their fur.
In the summer as children we sat in the front yard
long past dark and watched Brush Mountain crackle
orange with fire. No sounds but the crickets.
Gleefully we pointed out airplanes flashing
through the stars. One night we stayed out late
to wait for Telestar, the only white spot
moving in the sea of stars. The grass was cool.
We lay on our backs looking up like the ancients.
Katie at Seven
She wanted me
to keep her
Susan B. Anthony dollar.
As if it was safe
with me. As if everything
is safe with Daddy
and couldn't disappear.
As near as i can tell
she thinks I'm a small god.
Awful! She'll soon learn
the truth. I'll spend it.
Purely by accident.
Judy's Family
All of us,the boys,
we didn't know anything
about men. So, we hooked
ourselves to our sister
as she went shooting through
her twenties, and a little into
her thirties.
None of us believed
it would end. And when
it did, we went crazy, running
around, bumping into each other,
making startling accusations
about love. A whole family dying
from the inside out.
When her life stopped, all the lines
went slack, and we fought ourselves
for the best places in the mourning line.
We pounded everything.
I bruised. And when
we came to the edge where
you're finally free enough to believe
yourself, we shuddered and went inside.
He was waiting.
He took us in, and we
became sons again.
We hooked our lines and started
down.
The Dog
nudges my pen hand as if saying, 'begin,'
sniffing the empty page, gives me hints
where to start. The head of the river
where it trickles from the rocks
isn't necessary. 'Go downstream,' she nudges again
around the bend where the water has forgotten
about flowing slowly, and beats itself white
Against the boulders. You can stay
all day on shore, hesitant, resisting
that first chill, and go home disappointed
you didn't try. Or you can step in on
any phrase that passes, and then move on
to the next, not knowing if there's sense
in any of it. Eddies are just that.
The river is more than cold water over stone.
When the rush of the water is deafening,
and you forget the river you are in.
When I Read James Wright
when I read James Wright, I write like him. an editor told
me once that two poems I had submitted to his magazine
was the best Wright poems he'd seen since Jim died in 1980.
if I read Dick Hugo, I write like Dick Hugo. his
imagination and rhythm are so enthralling
that I swoon.
here I am nearly 40, and I love my children, my wife, certain others,
and two poets who have died.
i don't know if it makes any difference.
now I believe in god
who is in every living thing, or dead one.
The Honeybee
Laden with sacks of pollen, he drops
suddenly from the sunlight into the sawgrass.
He shinnies over two long blades and falls again
weary in his tangle. His body glistens with ancient wisdom,
and the yellow worries of the early nasturtiums.
When he reappears staggering around the bend
of a white juney root, he is the young Miwok brave,
Michael, heavy with old histories, Harbor Square, Seattle,
1983. Drunk and forlorn, he is lost in the sacred air of his fathers.
I take him into the curve of my palm, and he is Leland,
my grandfather, with the one good lung
the Pennsylvania Railroad left him, exhausted
and thinning on the couch in the weeks of his dying.
He wobbles up my finger, pauses at the tip
to read the current winds, then leaps off
across a sea of small scallions into the arms of an ochra fern.
Don't ask me where he was going.
I have had my own burdens and gone nowhere
many times. He was a honeybee. He was beautiful.
He knew the journey of burdens and was not lost.
He was just trying to get up.
And an ochra fern is a kindly body from which
a bearer of honey can be raised.
What about us? What about Michael?
How come our blood teaches nothing
we understand? It does nothing to blame anyone
there is no balm for us in the high grass.
Christ, I am moaning again.
Excuse me, anyone listening.
I know the journey.
I suppose I am just lazy, not lost.
I will mumble a little more and then get up
sooner or later and go toward my own light.
Sleeping with Grandchildren On Vacation
I lie in a bed of elbows and open mouths,
a spoon tossed in with forks.
These bones take things personally.
I need pajamas with feet.
This rain keeps me cold.
The lake is a gray scar.
I startle like a fox that suddenly stops
stalking. Who bangs this carillon by water?
That boy on his skateboard last night
after dark was a tank on a street in Belgrade.
By the bridge, a catfish holds the current.
Above, a mouthful of stars keeps breathing.
Tending Us
They fish us from the Potomac in the early morning.
Depending on our dress and clean-shaveness,
they either scatter our i.d. back into the current we came from,
or stuff it into our pockets in no manner we would carry it
and pack us off to the city morgue for reporting.
If they send our papers floating lonely out into the dark channel,
they whisk us away in the early morning darkness
in the back of a pickup to the University Medical School.
We arrive, still in darkness.
What will these future fathers of medical specialities discover
about our bodies we could not have told someone
had they only asked a little?
when the student in Gross Anatomy finds the corner of one
of my special organ severely bruised or slightly turned up
and away from him, will he identify the problem?
will the instructor in charge suddenly know me and my disease of loneliness
and flip the sheet back over my face?
Recovering quickly, will he say, "Disregard that. It's nothing. A silly mistake God made while he was making us."
And am I wrong to guess the student will like his teacher all the more because,
though amusingly, he has once again connected all of the dots
between science on this planet, and God?
I remember the sodden shore I waded from.
Just North of the 14th Street Bridge I walked in and finished
how hard this life was.
Go on?
I went on
many years.
By the time I found the calling river
I had been to several other planets in the system
and found nothing.
Maybe I could not reach for their hands.
maybe no hands reached down for me.
Anyway, I was exhausted, satisfied my journey
would never find the splendor my body longed for.
I didn't give up.
Not once.
I just decided to wade into the shallows and find
if this river, this small arm of sea,would have me there better.
William Stafford
Sometimes I carry his paperbacks in my coat pocket
and use his poems as guides.
In the wind this morning over the apple orchard a hawk
hung like a kite.
I stared hard, trying to burn the scene into my memory
like a line from one of Stafford's poems, feeling something more important
was happening than a hawk circling over apples, but I couldn't say.
Legacy
I think of you sitting in a kitchen chair,
The only customer of your granddaughters' salon.
You lean over For Ellie to curl your hair,
Extend hand for Grace to paint your nails,
You chat with talkative Jane, of whom you marvel because she is
"Actually Happy to sweep the floor and do it well,"
"You should meet my three precious granddaughters", you say,
and "oh, it would be splendid if you could meet them. And they giggle at that because they are the splendid ones.
"Recently Ellie hung a sequined-filled watercolor in the hallway gallery
Just over there.
Grace had the big double in last weeks championship game ("It wasn't the championship, Nanny",Grace corrected). And,
"Just yesterday, Jane cart-wheeled across the entire backyard,
Like a pinwheel. So surely next year she will star in gymnastics".
This first spring they have embroidered your gravestone
With painted pebbles. They worry about how to keep the crab grass from overgrowing your stone.
Grace is ten and says she wishes she could drive so that she could tend to it more often.
All Day
All day snow fell upon snow.
Darkness closing in.
I pulled my sled up third street
Following my mother's call.
Passing through the dark between the streetlights,
My snow pants swishing, I chewed the ice
Caked around my wrists.
Falling flakes melted on my wool mittens.
On up the hill, up across the yard
Snow to my knees, I saw my father
Sitting at the kitchen table
Reading the paper, my sister and brother
Teasing one another across the brisket.
The yellow light from the window
Shining on the snow waiting for me.
Hallelujah.
Father and Son
When I put in his dentures, his face
comes awake. he motions me closer.
"I can't walk", he whispers.
My father is 93.
I whisper back, I still take xanax.
Later, I said to myself, I feel weak,
Like a coward on his knees
Begging life not to hurt him.
I forget the simplest lessons.
I forget paying attention.
We're both old enough for death and have it not be a surprise
but what do we know?
A Dream of a Funeral
I propped myself up on my elbows to show them I wasn't dead
but they kept arguing.
some were angry that they hadn't been told.
others said they didn't know it was that serious.
The young funeral director was out of sorts.
People wouldn't form a decent viewing line.
In my pre-funeral directive
I had requested that people bring wine,
and toys for their children to play with,
trucks and blocks.
But nobody did.
On Poems
Read a poem,
don't lose your way,
don't wander or hurry,
the poem is saying something,
and if you are not paying attention
you'll miss it, all that work the writer put in,
there is a consequence to not
understanding what you're reading.
maybe the writing isn't any good
and it's not your fault, but still, someone tried
piecing together a poem and it should be read with care.
they may have written down a true piece of their life
and you can read it, can know it. Imagine the rarity.
Hands
At birth your whole body suddenly gave a damn
and quaked at the cold air and light,
at the quiet twister the night nurse let in
when she pushed the swinging doors and left.
That urgent evening was a mean intrusion.
A red beginning. Air,
a sudden burgeoning your lungs keened for,
I whispered to your mother's breast
your scream meant nothing but good.
I saw your blotchy skin. You, just fished
from that true sea, scaled in mucus.
I watched the tender black hands
of the nurse. How they spoke to your body
like the son of her only daughter.
She liked your red wrinkled hands
coming out as if they'd stayed too long
in a bath; how they attacked the ceiling light
with mad jabbing fists, convinced
that steel shrouded sun
wasn't the sun, and didn't belong.
I saw her last at the bus stop
near the hospital. She tugged a bag
of groceries up three steel steps.
Something in her said
she had tugged forever. I didn't stop.
I didn't take her hand and tell her
how your five fingers took my one
and made it yours, when you walked
the top of your first stone wall. Or
how each of your steps balanced me more
as you brutally pretended to flatten
that rocky world with your small feet.
