Dance

In all these tiny useless shops, with all this
torn and tattered furniture and too-small coats and
half-working vacuum cleaners, I have never come across
a velvety orangeish curtain like the one we hung
in the living room on Big Spring Avenue; it was
wide and garish like a Lady Pope’s vestments
and it kept the heat from pouring down between the
hardwood floor slats into the musty dirt basement;
likewise, in none of these big city shops have I ever
danced around with a cocker spaniel like I did
with ours–Cocoa–one bright Saturday morning
when I was all alone with her.  I did the funny dance I
only ever did with Cocoa, one hand in my armpit,
jumping on one foot, the sound of my skin half-drum,
half-fart, the world at last and for a moment a perfect
sun-filled room, a dappled meadow, Cocoa just
staring with all-black eyes, shimmying just to
get out of my way, me whirling and singing a song
I can’t recall, then laughing and laughing in the
sun beaming through the windows, falling down
with her, as if we were dying, as if we could
never stop–in 1984, in Newville Pennsylvania–
beautiful strange small-town Newville,
home of Laughlin Mill and the Bulldogs–
a hundred miles and thirty years away from
this dingy city thrift store I stand in, remembering
the orangey curtain and the drafty floors and the
sweet temperamental dog so confused with her
round voids of eyes, she’s gone now, so gone even
her dust is gone, oh giant universe, oh wild universe!

Anyone Other Than Me

You have rescued me from a trail of tears.
In a world of fear
did you know that I’d be there?
Every time I speak your name
there’s a shiver that holds me close;
from a pin prick famous place
where forever forgets what we should know.
Did you think it would be anyone other than me, dear?
You’ve outlasted all my friends.
I buried roots and you dig them up
and you share with me my place.
A perfect circle– never give it up.
Did you think it would be anyone other than me, dear?
Empty bottles and hallway shoes;
you whisper close to my body hush.
‘Cause if every word could change my face
not half as much as I need your touch,
did you think it would be anyone other than me, dear?

Eternal Life

Night.  Street.  Lamp.  Stop sign.
You might live a hundred years and still
this will be outside your window,
the dim and jaundiced light,
the silence, the stillness, the porches.

You’ll die and still it will persist,
you’ll be reborn and fly to the window,
the yellow light, the completeness of the light,
the street a frozen grinning canal.
Night.  Street.  Lamp.  Stop sign.

You Aint Free

I was sittin’ down in a greasy diner
thinkin’ ’bout eatin’ the food I bought
(yes, I bought).
The meals were piled ten feet high.
But I just couldn’t wait for the bill to arrive!
Well, man, you can have anything you want,
but you know there’s gonna be a cost.
No use gettin’ on your knees.
Somebody’s gotta mop these floors
and get these dishes clean–
but don’t look at me!
‘Cause you aint free.

Well I was sittin’ on a bench on Market Square.
I was sittin’ watchin’ the cars drive by.
I was watchin’ them put their break lights on,
smellin’ the fumes made by their gas,
the radios blastin’ tunes and talks,
the lease agreement tucked in the glovebox.
Well girl, you can drive anywhere you want,
but you know there’s gonna be a cost.
Somebody’s gotta keep the system greased–
but don’t look at me!
‘Cause you aint free.

Observations From a Made-Up Climb in the Himalaya

So, after all this time,
these are the Himalayas.
I have read so much about you
but never thought I’d stand here,
high inside your secrets,
your startling ripped canvas of sky,
holes punches in the sea of clouds.
Everything feels muted.
A white muting,
thrust up into nothingness.

Where is your citizen, your Yeti?
Yeti, down there we’ve got Friday,
and alphabets, and packaged bread.
Roses of deep red,
and shiny storefront windows.

Yeti, crime is not all
we do down there.
Yeti, there is beauty out of the wind,
out of the cold howling.

Yeti, we’ve got Shostakovitch,
and Scrabble, and canned pears.
At nightfall, we turn on lights, Yeti.

Up here, it’s neither moon nor earth.
Tears freeze.  There’s nowhere to turn.
It is a placidness beyond pain,
acute solitude.

Yeti, down there we have found a way to hope.
You could watch us as we birth children
among our glass ruins.
We master the art of forgetting.

Oh I would stay if I could, Yeti,
resident of the Himalaya,
never turning on lights at night
inside your four-walled avalanche
stomping on the everlasting snow
waiting for nothing.

I Know the Place

I know the place.
It is true.
Everything we do
connects the space
between death and me
and you.

If My Feet Were Spears

The urge is strong to be a tiny bird
upon a tiny limb, maybe
a LeConte’s Sparrow
standing on its spidery feet,
instead of a rotund guy who falls
with a resounding thump,
who bruises, who scrapes on sidewalks
and car doors,
who sinks in river mud
to the waist.
If my feet were spears
I’d sink all the way through the mud
into one of the tumultuous underground rivers
that are everywhere,
earthborn by the black current.
When a child I thought I’d die in my twenties
like some of the greatest poets
but now at thirty-eight I see this hasn’t happened.
Still, I am gentle with my poems and birds.
Birds are poems I haven’t caught yet.

Attendance

The minister in silent thought
among the stone markers
on the misty morning
frowns his face,
surveys the flock.

Three years, four years,
I know you still.

Shuffling gently now down
the weedgrown path
his moving hand brushes
the obelisks, the mausoleums,
the taller-than-they-weres.

Ten years, twelve years,
have you found yet a home?

Pausing at the gate
turning ‘round,
the elms at the edge of the clearing
shimmer with Northern wind,
the load of winter
promised the branches.

Twenty-five years,
I wait still to join you.

Her stone is tilted to a wavering angle,
watersluiced and mosswearing.
The world recedes in the blackness of memory.

In Flemington

When I moved to New Jersey to live with my mother on April 3rd, 2003 to begin my sobriety, immediately a lot began waking up in me–physically and emotionally I finally began to move forward and move past the stilted 17-year-old that was inhabiting my 25-year-old body.  But I also began awakening to the world of art, media and culture.  I devoured books, movies and magazines–anything that was within arms’ reach.  I had been writing poetry for many years before I got sober–most of it truly terrible.  Now that my mind was waking up to the actual artistry of poetry (I was also ravenously reading poetry written by others at this time) I quickly began to form my own unique poetic voice; if I can take a moment to toot my own horn here, crafting a unique poetic voice is not easy and most people don’t really do it, but for about four years I wrote in a style that (I believe) I owned all to myself.  Now, I wrote some pretty good poems after those four years and will still occasionally crank out a humdinger, but not in Early Sobriety Seth Dellinger voice–I couldn’t write in it if my life depended on it anymore.  It’s a conversational, almost flippant tone with an underlying promise of elemental discovery (and 75% free verse, but I did dabble in forms).  Here is one of my favorites from that era, called “In Flemington”, almost certainly written before I even had 90 days of sobriety.  My mother lived in a little town called Neshanic Station, but it was near the bigger town of Flemington.  I would occasionally drive my car into Flemington and walk around, astounded by being sober and alive and possessing free will.

 

In Flemington

On the corner at a small shop I buy a coffee
and take it outside with me.
In the air it steams to cool,
in communion with the breeze.
Strolling east, the cars and bicycles
are sparse today, even birds are few,
this close to downtown.  Passing the laundromat,
sweet, pungent softener assaults the nostrils
and the rumble of coin-op dryers is melancholy and promising.
Turning left onto Reaville Avenue a small boy
eight years old if a day
sits on the curb just sitting there
drying his hair in the sun like the sidewalk
and I almost say hi to him.
The coffee cools quickly in the chill afternoon,
I almost turn back to buy another,
but think better of the three dollars I have left.
I sidle into a quaint bookstore to gape at magazines,
the lives of others and kitchen equipment
glossy and flaxen, and the portly
latina by the register eyes me
and she is beautiful in that way
only latinas and llamas can be beautiful:
using solely the eyes.
Asking her if there is a restroom, she grudgingly gives me a key
knotted to a large wooden block
as if this were an interstate filling station,
and points me to the back corner,
but the door is open when I get there.
Safely locked inside, my pants stay buttoned
and I use only the mirror, studying my lines,
the old souvenir red blotches, reminding me
of lives and moments, other bookstores
or towns; some oversize pores poke peskily
into view begging for me to wash my face more often,
but not right now, not now, a time and place for everything.
Giving the key back to the girl, I emerge onto Main Street
and suck deep the stunningly new air,
amazed by the realization that you are somewhere far away
occupying real space
breathing just like me
and smiling right this instant,
your eyes gleaming like little coins.

Let’s Slow Dance in the Living Room Tonight After Dinner, Honey

More than putting another man on the moon,
more than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga,
we need the opportunity to dance
to no music in the living room. A slow dance
between the coffee table and the book case,
at the end of a challenging workday
after we’ve eaten the vegetarian tacos and refried beans
because it’s begun to rain and the rain
slows us down and quiets the dog.   A slow dance
to bring the evening home, to knock it out of the park. Two people
rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant.
We could both hum a little bit.  Do some cheek kissing.
It’s a little like cheating on each other with each other.
Your head resting on my shoulder
(or vice versa),
your breath moving up my neck
(or vice versa).
My hands along your spine. Your hips
unfolding like a cotton napkin
and you begin to think about how all the stars in the sky
are dead. Long dead and just cosmic dust
swirling like light. My body
is talking to your body by slow dance. The Unchained Melody,
Stairway to Heaven, power-chord slow dance. All my life
I’ve made mistakes. Small
and cruel. I made my plans.
I never arrived. I ate my food. I drank my wine.
I made decisions I knew would hurt people.
I couldn’t save money or keep my car clean.
I blamed others for my misery.  I hated.
I couldn’t bother to talk to strangers.
The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like children
running in sprinklers. Like being held in the arms
of my parents.
This is the almond grove
in the dark slow dance.
This is the sun-dappled Spring meadow
living room slow dance.
It is what we should be doing right now. Scrapping
for joy. The haiku and honey. The orange and orangutang slow dance.

You Aint Free

I was sittin’ down in a greasy diner
thinkin’ ’bout eatin’ the food I bought
(yes, I bought).
The meals were piled ten feet high.
But I just couldn’t wait for the bill to arrive!
Well, man, you can have anything you want,
but you know there’s gonna be a cost.
No use gettin’ on your knees.
Somebody’s gotta mop these floors
and get these dishes clean–
but don’t look at me!
‘Cause you aint free.

Well I was sittin’ on a bench on Market Square.
I was sittin’ watchin’ the cars drive by.
I was watchin’ them put their break lights on,
smellin’ the fumes made by their gas,
the radios blastin’ tunes and talks,
the lease agreement tucked in the glovebox.
Well girl, you can drive anywhere you want,
but you know there’s gonna be a cost.
Somebody’s gotta keep the system greased–
but don’t look at me!
‘Cause you aint free.

For Who?

I once knew a woman who lied to me about being diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Just now I was looking through some of my old writings and came across a poem I wrote about 7 years ago.  At the time of its writing I thought it perhaps one of my best pieces ever and perhaps considered it bordering on great; however, it had been so long since I thought about it, today when I saw it, I wasn’t at first sure what it was.  But after a few re-readings, it’s confirmed: it’s a great poem.

The only problem is, I wrote it for a woman who lied to me about the fact that she was dying of cancer.  I won’t elaborate because, aside from that small fact, it’s not my story to tell.  But I wonder (and I honestly don’t know): how much of this poem’s power is lost because of the fraud for which it was written?

 

For Ruby

There are men with grease-covered fingers
Who in shack-like bars
Drink strong whiskey
Night after night
And speak of earthy things
Like work and sports
Cars and overtime
Night after night.
They wear the tattered clothes of toil
And smell like mud and forgotten coffee;
These men with the grease-covered fingers
Don’t come and go
(don’t change season to season)
And for better or worse
They know the value of a passing hour.

There are wrinkled women with knitting needles
Who in large bay windows sit
As the town becomes cold
And all around them lights go dim
(pull the needle, pull the string).
They watch the cars drive slowly by
While inside their brains
The foggy undercurrent of old age rages
(the broken bones of youth?
the marriages, the foot doctors,
the miserable trips to the beach with the bee stings,
remember?)
And the smells of fried eggs and moth balls
Leak from under their doors;
These sagging women with the knitting needles
Have forgotten what they used to know about time,
And bodies.

There are the lawyers, the savages, the body-building kids;
There are men in tight pants, women at car washes, babies in blankets;
There are balloonists, enthusiasts, part-time party clowns;
There are the frat boys with the tucked-in Polos,
Women on Death Row delivering infants,
The dry-wall hangers with the nagging cough, the cab drivers who smell of leather,
Shoe salesman round every corner,
Folks asking for coins,
Mail ladies with Carpal Tunnel
Soda-guzzling fat kids
Coked-out sweaty toll booth people
The nameless the homeless the shoeless the hairless
There are the football players, the deacons, the late-night whores;

There are the gray judges, trampoline families, laughter running through sprinklers;
There are Lobster-catchers whose hands smell like salt and death;
There are Siamese twins, plow drivers, folks with no faith;
There are musty shut-ins,
Gamers, the high-fashion minded,
All of them silently ticking, ticking, ticking,
The world a massive mutable bomb.

And then there is you, Ruby, with your
Six-to-eight weeks to live
And your twirling dance ’round the dining room;
Oh how I wish I could know you more
(ask you more questions, tell you more things)
And that time could stop for now.
But it won’t
(it doesn’t; it never has)
And when your spark arcs over my roof some night
On it’s way to where you’re going
I hope we can share a brief glance
So you can see me smiling so wide
Thinking
You lived!  You lived!

Everything That Was Broken

Everything that was broken has
forgotten its brokenness.  I live now
in a sky-house, through every window
we see the sun.  Also your presence.
Our touching, our stories.  Both Earthly
and invisible.  How can this be?, but it is.
Every day has something in it whose name is Forever.

Dead People

Their reward is
they become innocent again

and when they reappear in memory
death has completely erased
the blurs, and given them boundaries.  They rise

& move through their new world with clean,
clear edges.  A man I knew–a very troubled man
who died a very troubled way–in particular has become
buoyant, unattached finally from

his histories, from the trappings of a story,
from the trappings of his drugs
and he waltzes again through the world
with firmly defined edges
in the way only dead people
and babies can do.
Sometimes I think I see his unkempt goatee
in a crowd of people and I catch my breath.

I think they all walk among us–
not literally but somehow–
wearing graduation gowns and mortarboards
breathing the air incredibly deep like drowning people
and repeating three things over and over:
‘Again’, ‘Again’, and ‘Again’.

Scenes From My Sojourn

After a straight shot drive down a highway whose number I now forget, I crested a hill around six in the morning, it still being completely dark outside, and saw for the first time the city skyline of Cleveland. I had the day off of work, and I was still exploring my immediate surroundings, since moving to what I call the chimney of Pennsylvania, so close to Buffalo and Cleveland and Pittsburgh. More than anything the prospect of Cleveland intrigued me, because I had never really considered that I might go there, or that it might be close enough, or what might even be there. So I set the early alarm, and drove straight in there with no plan. All I really wanted to do was park somewhere right in the city, find a newspaper from a newspaper

A self-timer self-portrait I did on a bench in Cleveland.

machine, and a local coffee shop, and read the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a newspaper whose name I already knew from years of attempting to be media savvy. Somehow I managed to find just the right exit off the highway, and, with my breath still showing in my car from the early-morning chill, found a parking lot that cost just a few dollars, right in the heart of the city. I hopped out of my car feeling extremely accomplished, walking across the early-morning parking lot, and I noticed many other people on foot, traveling the same way I was, heading into the city for that morning’s whatever. This was the first time I truly felt the call of the city, the desire to move in that hive, to be one of those lemmings. Wherever they were all going, it seemed like it must be interesting, different from what I knew and was accustomed to, and terribly important. Everyone made their way into their assigned nooks and crannies, disappearing down side streets and alleys and into revolving doors. In an almost astonishing short amount of time I found the newspaper machine I was looking for, and I even had the quarters ready, as I had anticipated this even before I left my apartment back Erie. I got myself a fresh-off-the presses copy of that mornings Cleveland Plain Dealer, and in an even shorter amount of time, I found myself in a local chain coffee shop called Phoenix Coffee, drinking a large caramel latte, reading about the Cleveland Browns that year, and the big high hopes everyone had for Colt McCoy.

 

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Shortly after moving in with my mother in South Jersey, a hurricane was on the way. I can’t remember what its name was anymore, because you know, they name these things, all of them. So it was on its way, and after the big news stories that the last few had been, this was supposed to be a big news story too. All the roads were going to be shut down, everything was going to flood, and we were all going to freak out. We all watched on the radar as the thing approached, and everyone from my work kept calling and texting around, wondering if we were going to have to go in the next day, and just how bad

Putzing around in the rain during our hurricane in South Jersey

everything was going to be. My mother and I were concerned about sleeping in our upstairs bedrooms, there being trees near the house, and that they might crash through the windows, like some goddamn nightmare. Eventually, it was decided no one had to go into work, and I was home with my mother as the danger approached. It started raining, and more than anything I was just intrigued. I’ve been through plenty of different storms in my life, and of course I’ve got the obligatory Pennsylvania drenchings from hurricanes that are almost out of steam by the time they get to us. But this looked like it might be an actual hurricane. Every hour or so I would put on all my rain gear and walk out to the development’s drainage ditch, to check the flooding progress. It’s one of those perfectly manicured little drainage ditches, it doesn’t look natural at all, obviously something that a few men with small bulldozer patted down on a Sunday afternoon twenty years ago. As the afternoon progressed the drainage ditch kept not filling up and not filling up, and the rain, although incessant and quite wet, kept being just that: rain. As Mom got bored from being cooped up inside and watching TV, and I got disappointed by the weather nonevent, the afternoon meandered into just another afternoon, one of those days wiled away looking at images on screens, or reading words in a book, the type of afternoon that you think of as a fine relaxing afternoon, but ultimately one with nothing very memorable. After it had been raining for about four hours I took my final walk out to the drainage ditch, saw that it was in fact actually less full than the previous time, and I took a short walk out to the small woods behind the development, and stood listening to the rain hit the leaves, and the small creek at the bottom of a low-grade hill behind my mother’s house. It was nice to be there, I thought. It was a nice place, and a nice time to be alive, and a very unique, circuitous path to be on. But it was also one of those moments when you think yourself, how in the world did I get here?

 

****************************************************************

 

 

I had been working out and dieting for about two months at this point, and had lost about three-quarters of the weight I wanted to lose. I had been living on my own in the city of Philadelphia for about six or seven months, and summer was in full swing. My new healthy lifestyle coupled with the season had invigorated me like I had never felt before. My typically high energy level was now bordering on manic, with me needing only a few hours of sleep a night, and typically reading thousands and thousands of words a day, in magazines, newspapers, books, and that was just the start of what I was able to accomplish. I would often be caught telling people that the world was actually bending to my very will. On this particular night, I had been out riding my bike all over the city, all day long. Starting out in the sweltering heat of noon, riding all the way from my Pennsport

Taken around the time I thought I could control the universe.

apartment to the Art Museum, then back again, then out again and down to the Schuylkill River Trail, making the entire loop, miles and miles and miles of riding. Every time I would come home I would just play Pandora radio, no television on this day, the universe and all its sounds and music coursing through me. At night I threw open the windows in my apartment and let the natural air flow through, stripping down naked and playing air guitar to serious and depressing Post-Rock music and laughing and crying, the music louder than my neighbors probably liked. I put my clothes back on and hopped on my bike, and went to a late night showing of a movie at the nearby multiplex. Afterwards I still couldn’t stop, hopped on my bike and rode down the side streets as fast as I could, the good paved streets, the ones you can really get going on. At that time of night, in that part of the city, you can really blow through the stop signs, when you’re really tuned into the world and the universe like that, you can pick out the headlights if a car is coming the opposite direction, at the intersection, and you can really get up a good head of steam blowing through all the streets, not stopping anywhere, feeling the ions and electrons buzzing, I felt like I couldn’t be stopped, like I could fly if I wanted to, like my tires could just lift off the ground and I could soar, maybe just a few inches off the ground but I could soar, like I could just tell the universe anything what I wanted to do. I still remember the exact smell of that night, of that bike ride down the side streets, the exact feel of that exact quality of air, the way that I knew I could not be that happy forever, the way that I knew in my heart that life is that good, but you just don’t always feel it. I rode faster and faster,  my bike going thirty miles an hour through the streets of South Philadelphia, the warmth, the music back at my apartment, the echo of the movie from the movie theater, the lights all everywhere around, everything still swirling around in me, like some great puppetmaster. Just like every stop on the sojourn, the question must’ve popped into my mind, how did I get here? But it wasn’t very important at that moment, I was almost flying.

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Here’s a poem I wrote while living in Erie:

 

A Slowing of Pace

 

 

For at least ten years you have been preparing

to feel comfortable here in your life,

not a shutdown but a slowing of pace,

a grace of peace, of stopping on your way

through rooms of your dailiness to touch

the woven basket, the plastic vase, walking

through the evening park without voices

intoning from the trees, you must, you must—

these same dreams of solitude since you were very young,

 

and you feel, have felt for years,

that this is how you most would live,

deliberate, considered, easeful, slow,

if your life will only let you,

which it won’t, and this last decade

you have been yearning toward it, plotting,

longing for the book resting on your lap,

pages spread wide, this cup, the open door,

letting in late September air.

 

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It was a rainy, cold day in early March in Erie, and I found my wandering car pointed in the direction of the Erie Zoo.  Although I hadn’t set out to go to the zoo, this new turn of events didn’t surprise me.  I found himself there five or six times a year.  Most people contented themselves with a few zoo visits in a lifetime, but the Erie Zoo was extremely affordable, and the even cheaper off-season price (seven dollars for a grown-up) seemed more than reasonable to spend some time communing with creatures that had no business being on this part of the globe.  It was cheaper than a bad movie, and these animals were real.

 

As I pulled within sight of the zoo, I became a little worried that, for whatever reason, it might not be open.  There wasn’t a single car in the lot.  It was around 11am on a dreary, cold Thursday;  I hadn’t expected it to be hopping, but I wasn’t expecting emptiness.

 

Optimistically cautious, I parked and got out into the barking wind, driving pellets of frigid rain onto my shaved scalp, and nearly trotted the 20 yards to the zoo entrance.  Sure enough, there was a woman at the ticket window, grinning from ear to ear, presumably thrilled to see a customer.  As I neared, I summoned my best “public smile”—my I’ll-

Having a moment with a giraffe at the Erie Zoo

pretend-I’m-one-of-you smile—and returned the woman’s “Hi!” with unrivaled enthusiasm.  Then I said simply, “One, please.”  She paused, then asked “Are you a member?”  I kept his public smile on.  “Nope,” I said.  And then she got the look on her face.  It was a look I had grown accustomed to in this version of my life.  It was a look a clerk or ticket-taker or usher got on their face when they were fighting the desire to say “What, exactly, are you doing here?”

 

I was sure I wasn’t imagining this look.  Aside from being by myself at functions and attractions that normally attracted folks in twos or more, the willy-nilly nature of my work and sleep schedule allowed me to quite often be at attractions and functions on days that were marooned in the desolate middle of the week, when the sad rest of the world were eating sandwiches from vending machines on their half-hour breaks in cubicles and smoking cigarettes under concrete gazebos on the edges of company property.  I had found myself alone or nearly alone in places ranging from early-season minor league baseball games to the Flight 93 National Memorial to the Cleveland Museum of Art.  And almost always, the middle aged woman working the door was quite visibly wondering what me, in my yellow flannel shirt and black

The house I lived in in Erie–the very first day I saw it. The For Rent sign is still in the door. I had the top floor.

knit cap and imitation Converse , was doing there at 8am or 10pm or whatever the case may be.  But they never quite did ask.  They liked to leave a big pregnant pause where they thought I might offer some form of explanation for my daring to visit their job.  “Just one?” they’d say, wanting me to reply Well, my father used to work here before he got struck by lightning or some other perfectly ridiculous but totally feasible explanation.  But I stubbornly never gave any of them any kind of explanation.  “Are you a member?” the woman at the zoo window asked.  “Nope,” I replied, and still smiling I stared at her.  She waiting a second or two, then said, somewhat stubbornly herself now, “Seven dollars.”  I handed the woman a ten dollar bill, and while she made change, she said “Looks like you’ll have the place pretty much to yourself today”, confirming my suspicion that, in fact, I was the only customer here.  Smiling as large as I could muster, I said “Yeah, I kinda figured that.”  I took my three dollars in change and walked into the zoo.

 

No matter how many times I found himself alone in public spaces, it never ceased exhilarating me.  It seemed to me like I’d won some kind of covert contest that nobody else knew they were playing, as though all of life were a silent jockeying for position in which, on this day, I’d triumphed.  Everyone else was being funneled through the cattle chutes of their typical lives to the choke points of the weekend afternoons and I was outside the chutes, watching from the meadow.  I knew this wasn’t true, I was being funneled by other forces, but my superiority seemed unquestionable in moments such as walking into a zoo I had to myself.

 

Of course, during the off-season, admittance was cheaper for a reason.  Almost half of the animals weren’t on display.  Too cold for them.  Lord knows where the zoo keeps animals hiding during this time.  Some sort of safe house or bunker, on imagines.  A smelly bunker.

 

But I knew where I was going.  I had been here enough times that I had “regular” stops.  Ten minutes communing with the Red Panda (so cute!), five minutes making cooing sounds at the baby (teenager, really) giraffe, and on and on, until eventually I ended up in the orangutan building.  The orangutans at the Erie Zoo were unique in that they were a bona fide family.  A mother, a father, a daughter, and a son.  In fact, the daughter was the older child, making the orangutans a mirror image of my own nuclear family.  The son, Ollie, was still a baby.  A toddler, let’s say.  He had been an infant when I first arrived in Erie, and I’d been able to watch Ollie grow up in little spurts, every few months when I’d visit.  It was when I visited the orangutans that I always got the weird and ecstatic feeling of really, this is right here in Erie.

 

Today was a little different, however.  As soon as I walked into the orangutan building (which was completely empty of humans), Ollie and his mother were right against the glass, in the corner nearest the entryway, Ollie sitting atop his mother’s shoulders.  They looked at me from inside deeply human eyes, and both smiled, as if to welcome me.  “Oh my,” I heard myself say.  I walked slowly to the glass, so as not to scare them away.  But they showed no signed of going.  As I reached the glass, Ollie (who, on his mother’s shoulders, was eye level with me) placed his hand flat on the glass.  I, sensing a moment was occurring, put my hand where Ollie’s was—like we were visiting in a state prison in some sappy movie.  But it wasn’t sappy.  Ollie and I made eye contact and kept our hands overtop one another’s for what must have been a full minute, an odd communion between a man and a baby orangutan in northwestern Pennsylvania on a rainy March morning.  When Ollie finally pulled his hand away, I turned to look behind me to see if any people had come in and maybe witnessed the sweet, unexpected moment.  But there was only an empty walkway and the silly tape recorded sounds of an African forest.  I thought the lack of a witness was both incredibly sad and completely amazing, to equal degrees.

And it was not sappy.

 

*************************************************************

A poem I wrote shortly after moving out of  South Jersey and into Philadelphia:

 

Cage

headphones in, I walk Old City

as if in the presence of an intelligence,

concentrating.  I imagine myself

scrutinized and measured closely

by the passers-by, the foreign tourists,

the horses with their carriages,

the sky and the earth.

my multiple reflections from shop fronts,

high windows, and bus glass stare back at me,

show my belly, my too-long hair, my crooked nose.

wind sweeps off the Delaware, bringing with it

Camden, Governor Christie, and further south,

my mother’s cooking.  home swirls around

this new city, this birthplace city,

where I am so far from everything.

but I keep walking and walking

and it gets darker and darker

and there is a flicker of light or two

far above and beyond my cage.

 

**************************************************************

 

My mother and I did so many things together when I was staying with her in New Jersey, it would be difficult to boil those myriad lovely experiences down to a moment indicative of them all.  We would typically do one thing together a week—from something as small as going to a movie together to an all-out road trip.  We unabashedly (ok, maybe a little abashedly) called these Momma Days.  I think we both knew these were numbered days of a grown form of childhood for both

Mom and I at a Camden (NJ) Riversharks game (minor league baseball)

of us, but they were golden days unlike the first childhood (when nobody knows how great things really are).  I remember every moment of the Momma Days, but the best memory is my ritual: every time we were going to spend a day together, I’d wake up, roll out of bed, and promptly run down the stairs, clapping my hands like a happy toddler, chanting rhythmically Momma-Day-Momma-Day-Momma-Day in a little kid voice.  It seemed, at the time, like something just between the two of us, that we could never tell anybody, because I was 36 and she was older than that even, but here it is, in my blog, because you just don’t get a whole lot of golden days.

 

**************************************************************

 

Just a few short months after moving into Philadelphia, I was riding my bike home from work on the night of New Year’s Day. About halfway between where I work and my home, one encounters Washington Avenue, one of the last large arterial streets that cuts through Philadelphia, before you get into what I called the Deep South. When I got there, about 10 o’clock at night, there was a police barricade, preventing me from going further down 2nd St., past Washington, which would’ve taken me directly home in about a mile. But it wasn’t an accident or a crime scene, and I quickly remembered what was going on. There wasn’t a whole lot that was notable about the neighborhood I lived in in Philadelphia, except the fact that it is the Mummer capital of the world. And the Mummers are basically men who dress up in very opulent costumes and dance around and ride interesting floats on a New Year’s Parade, as well as play in old world-style string and brass bands.  It is a tradition that only occurs in Philadelphia, and at that, only South Philadelphia, and at that, almost only my neighborhood. But it also turns out, that the whole city loves this tradition one day a year, that being New Year’s Day. And then on the night of New Year’s Day – not New Year’s Eve, mind you but New Year’s Day night – my neighborhood and just my neighborhood

Mummers in the 2014 Philadelphia 4th of July parade

becomes the largest party in the city all year. I hopped off my  bicycle, very interested in what this would look like. I was a bit unprepared. I’ve never been to Mardi Gras, but I am told it is much like this, and people who have been to both say that the Mummers party in Pennsport almost outdoes Mardi Gras in some ways. The crowd down Second Street was so thick, I had to quickly chain my bike to a mailbox, as there was no getting through the crowd. Huge, almost one-story high speakers dotted every-other block, where sometimes electronic, dance or house music played, and other times old world Mummer bands played corny but danceable string music. Enormous floats, gaudy and opulent, set in the middle some blocks, some of them decorated in modern ways, with heads of what looked like aliens or monsters, while other floats simply looked like a gilded golden things, big Faberge eggs on wheels, and all about everywhere strode Mummers, men and the occasional women wearing  long flowing robes of  shiny satin fabrics, embroidered gold and silver tassels, enormous red buttons, masks that looked sometimes scary, like out of a dream masquerade, or sometimes comical, or sometimes indecipherable. It was loud everywhere, chants got taken up out of nowhere that I couldn’t understand, songs were being sung like pirates about to board a weaker vessel. Everyone was drinking, the whole world was there, not just Mummers but teenagers and people in their twenties, kids with funnels of beer going to their stomachs, people on drugs screaming about things, people wearing beads as though it were Mardi Gras but it wasn’t, and nobody was taking their shirts off, weed smoke was an ever-present cloud.  There were food stands on corners, big sliced-open mangoes on sticks that you could buy, heads of pigs roasting over spits. I kept taking pictures and videos with my smartphone and sending them to people who weren’t there, people I wished were with me, people I hadn’t seen in years.  Somewhere around Dickinson Street I hung a left, popped out onto the relative calm of Front Street, walked six more blocks down to my street, stuffed the key in the lock, went inside in time for Anderson Cooper.

 

*************************************************************

 

In the winter, Erie is a cold, desolate, sometimes dangerous place. It’s not the ideal place to live alone with no friends or relatives within a five-mile drive of you. It snows almost all the damn time, and it’s so cold, and the wind just races across the lake, whether it’s the summer or the winter. Wether the lake is frozen or open, it is 7 miles wide, and there is nothing to stop the wind. On one particular winter morning, I rose to an early alarm clock, to work the morning shift at the restaurant I was a manager at. Our day start pretty early, and it’s always hard to get up, but especially when it’s dark outside, and the wind howls like a coyote, and you know there’s snow out there, and maybe more on the way, and maybe more falling even right then. I crawled out of bed, put on my work outfit, poked my head through the

Snow tubing at a work function in Erie–essentially the ONLY perk of the brutal winters.

blinds, and started my car with my remote start, one of the best features that car had. Five minutes later I was down there to hop in, excited about the warm inside of my car. It had snowed the night before, but not a whole lot, maybe four or five inches, which isn’t very much when you’re living in Erie. But it was just one of those things, one of those moments where your car and the tires are sitting just right, or just wrong, and despite the fact that you see no perfect reason why, your car is stuck. I had not left myself a whole lot of time with extra to get to work, and I was in quite a bind here. Being late is sometimes easier than others in that line of work, and I can’t remember the circumstances now, but I do know that I absolutely had to be there on time that day, and my car being stuck put me in a moment of desperation. With nobody to call – not even any small friends or acquaintances, really nobody that I knew – I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I was out of my car, looking all around it, shoveling the snow out from the tires as best I could, trying to rock it a little bit. All the small things one can do by yourself to get your car unstuck, but there’s only so much of that. Then, in the predawn darkness I saw approaching a young man walking down the center of the street that I lived on. I recognized the speed with which he walked and the

Lake Erie and the Presque Isle beaches are actually an incredible hidden gem (during the summers!) in Pennsylvania.

direction he was going as a man heading to catch a bus. Yes, there were buses, but I had never even looked into that. As he came to pass me I walked onto the street, and sent to him, “Hey man! Hi!  Hey man, excuse me!  I’m in a real bind here, my car is stuck and I really need to get to work.  I’m really screwed here.  Can you help me push it out?”

He stood still and wooden, looking at me through my pleading screed.  After a pause, he said, “But, see, I’m on the way to catch my bus to go to work myself.  What if this makes me late?”

This was one of those very touchy moments in life for me.  I absolutely, 100% needed this guy to help me.  But he had a point and I knew it.  Why should he be late to work simply so I could be on time?  I was sure if he helped me, the car could come out quickly and we’d both be on time, but time was crunched so badly, there wasn’t even the moment needed to explain this.  I analyzed my chances, as well as the look of the kid, and rolled the dice.  I said this:

“That’s a chance you’ll just have to take.”

 

*****************************************************************

 

A poem I wrote in Philly:

 

Just Past St. Augustine’s

 

where the elevated train slows

just past St. Augustine’s church

off the Delaware river

a row of busted windows

only a single one still whole

open and darkly curtained

 

that’s where I once saw this arm

slip out between the frames,

the hand open to feel for drops of rain,

another time there were two arms

raising a small naked baby

for a breath of evening air

 

***********************************************************

 

I took a trip to Niagara Falls by myself once, while I was living in Erie. It was only a little over an hour away from there, and I figured I might as well take a look at it. It was a beautiful day, and I was much more moved by the wonder there than I expected to be. I did the whole shebang, the whole big tourist thing, the boats, the ponchos, everything. But the thing that I remember most, the thing that resonated most with me, was Goat Island. It’s a small island in the middle of the Niagara River. You can take a little pedestrian bridge over to it, and walk around. When I was there, I was mostly alone, and the bulk of the island is very unassuming. It’s got a big green lawn, some pasture. You can walk around and not really know that you are

Selfie from my solo trip to Niagara Falls

so close to those enormous rushing waters, and the touristy sites, and the boats and helicopters. I walked over to the shore of the river, all alone in the little clearing, looking out at the rushing Niagara just a hundred yards or so from where drops into oblivion. I couldn’t believe it. There I was, so close to the river, so close to those falls, and nobody around me. I was happy as a clam but I thought to myself, I can jump right in there. I could just end it. Death has always felt like a very close spectre to me, I’ve always sensed the razors edge that I am on, that we are all on. In that moment, I don’t think I’ve ever sensed that more, I saw it like an actual looming knife: just a few feet away, just one slip or one jump, and there it is.  I went to Goat Island by myself and for a split second I saw through the door.

 

*************************************************************

A few months ago I met the most wonderful woman I’ve ever known.  Her name is Karla and I’ve been gifted with the good fortune of her loving me as much as I love her.  She’s from “back home”, so now, that is where I will go. Not only to spend time with my love and her marvelous son, but to now spend more time with my father and other relatives and long lost friends.  My sojourn ends—and an incredible new one will begin.  I don’t believe “everything happens for a reason”—in fact, I believe quite the opposite.  But I do believe that my lengthy field trip away from home has fulfilled its purpose in the finding of the love of my life.  I think my mom will be happy that, in fact, I am going to get even more golden days now.

 

The love of my life, Karla, our golden days stretching out ahead of us.

 

 

 

 

Dance

In all these tiny useless shops, with all this
torn and tattered furniture and too-small coats and
half-working vacuum cleaners, I have never come across
a velvety orangeish curtain like the one we hung
in the living room on Big Spring Avenue; it was
wide and garish like a Lady Pope’s vestments
and it kept the heat from pouring down between the
hardwood floor slats into the musty dirt basement;
likewise, in none of these big city shops have I ever
danced around with a cocker spaniel like I did
with ours–Cocoa–one bright Saturday morning
when I was all alone with her.  I did the funny dance I
only ever did with Cocoa, one hand in my armpit,
jumping on one foot, the sound of my skin half-drum,
half-fart, the world at last and for a moment a perfect
sun-filled room, a dappled meadow, Cocoa just
staring with all-black eyes, shimmying just to
get out of my way, me whirling and singing a song
I can’t recall, then laughing and laughing in the
sun beaming through the windows, falling down
with her, as if we were dying, as if we could
never stop–in 1984, in Newville Pennsylvania–
beautiful strange small-town Newville,
home of Laughlin Mill and the Bulldogs–
a hundred miles and thirty years away from
this dingy city thrift store I stand in, remembering
the orangey curtain and the drafty floors and the
sweet temperamental dog so confused with her
round voids of eyes, she’s gone now, so gone even
her dust is gone, oh giant universe, oh wild universe!

On Nerves

I remember
as a child
thinking about torture
(and since then I have come to understand torture is just

a clarification
of reality),

and I remember proposing
(to myself, alone, silently)
the limited susceptibility of a nerve
to abuse
(the diminishing capacity of a single nerve
to feel pain)
as proof
of some basic mercy
at the foundation of the universe.
Then, today, as I lay in bed,
my chest pressed to her back,
I hear (with my chest)
her heart beat,
how real it is,
and how separate–
how mercilessly separate,
and I wonder at the gall of nerves
to limit their susceptibility
to anything.

 

Offering

I used to go with friends sometimes over to the
hotel bar–I forget its name–that shared a parking lot
with the diner I worked at.  Get drunk and sing
karaoke.  This one time, on St. Paddy’s Day,
the karaoke guy’s father had died
earlier in the day, and suddenly he tells us this
(through the microphone!)
and I thought at first that there would be a punchline,
but there wasn’t.  Just:
“in a plane crash”.
And so then he sings a song to his dad—
that Clapton song about
when I see you in heaven—
and a woman from somewhere in the bar
goes over to him and hugs him,
and he’s singing and crying
while she hugs him.
Then the manager of the bar gets up there
and says how close the karaoke guy
was to his dad, and says
how it’s a demonstration of character
that he came in to work tonight.
I wouldn’t have come in, he says.
So let’s support him,he says.
He’s a great guy.
We cheered.
There were twenty-five of us in the dim bar
(give or take),
twenty-five souls.
We cheered.
We confessed to being still alive.
Without irony, we were suddenly able to believe
in the shapes shifting in the dim light,
able to name our fear and swat it away,
able to breathe the heaving breaths of living kings–
we sang drank and danced.
But there was nothing we could do to support him.

Orbit

At twelve, too old for but still scared of
carousels, the horses fake and painted,
the lights electric
(not reflections from the sun,
but if you squint, you can see stars,
and if you knock your head hard
on the rising-and-falling bars as you dismount
you might also see stars, not like you’d imagine—
perfect five-point-pattern David stars, no—
but stars of a kind) and if you did ride,
succumbing to the rise and fall, your horse
would be too tame despite its flashing teeth,
it would be wooden and inert and unkind,
and the disapproving onlookers would appear
every time around, their faces knotted blurs
as if on the next orbit you might break free
and take the horses with you
up over the snack bar
all the way into the long parking lot.

This Is What Is Invisible

 

In the upper small bedroom
I’d watch cartoons while she fiddled around
downstairs, doing grandma-type things,
while I waited to walk to school,
waited for Mom or Dad to get home,
or waited for things now lost to time;
she’d bring me food which I no longer
remember, and cool red drinks
with sugar in them, and when I explored
her house I found amazing things
which clearly showed the difference
between a grandma and a little boy:
swatches of fabric, long-stemmed sturdy matches,
sepia photos of men in tall hats,
endless paintings of a bearded man, praying.

Grandma’s stuff took up a lot of space,
for there must have been a lot that Grandma loved,
and in each room of her small house
her biography could have been written
from tiny items and trinkets in shoeboxes
and larger, unknown things propped in closets.
As Grandpa sat shaking in his wheelchair,
Grandma’s long life followed her around
the dark living room as she gave him pills
and water through a huge straw.
There was a lot that Grandma loved
(this is what is invisible).
I never knew her like I should have.

Today I helped carry her the last few feet
her body will ever move; she wasn’t heavy,
as I imagine that her and the things she loved
must have truly been carried elsewhere,
like the pastor said.
I rubbed my own mother’s back and timed
my breath to hers, hoping to calm her
if she needed calming, hoping to know her
like I should.

Funeral Procession on the Banks of the Yangtze

 

It wasn’t long ago that I burned with a freshly-stoked fire, all the time.  It was piss and vinegar in equal parts.  Rave and rage, rave and rage; in my early thirties I was still writing poems about the horrible old days with too much booze and darkened rooms, and long screeds about our destructive system and the persistent search for personal authenticity.  I burned for the world.

I still burn for the world, of course, but now it’s more of a smoldering, smoking thing.  Now it’s more about vintage photographs and war documentaries and less about poems called “Labia”.  It seems to be an evolution of calming that all but the most robust must go through.  For every Iggy Pop there’s a dozen Dennis Learys, their shouts quieting to quaint heartwarming television shows about firefighters before their 50th birthday.  Where does the hot blue flame go?  Why must it?  What is the fuel inside us that burns off?

Fifteen years ago:

The Duck Pond, the actual name of which is Children’s Lake, is a shallow, man-made lake in the scenic town of Boiling Springs.  It is about fifty feet across, and perhaps four-hundred feet long.  At it’s deepest point, it is perhaps five feet deep.  Large, multi-colored, boulder-sized rocks line its bottom.  It attracts a wide array of wildlife: ducks, geese, swans, turtles, beavers.  There are manicured walkways all the way around it, red park benches at regular intervals, and little vending machines that dispense corn, in case you may want to feed the ducks.  You are not supposed to go there at night, although I often have.

I make myself a fresh gin and coke in the huge plastic McDonalds cup.  Someone retrieves a few beers from the trunk.  We all make sure we have our cigarettes.  We set off, to walk around the Duck Pond.

At night, you can hear the ducks, the geese, out on the water, but you can’t see them.  They aren’t very active at night, but every now and then, you hear a splash, the flap of a wing against the heavy air, a short quick quack.  It is melancholy in that worst way: dreary foreboding.

There is a place where the path kind of ends, and you are left to walk through grass for a bit, and under the canopy of some Willows.  In the sunshine, this part of the lake is the most beautiful.  At night, it’s majesty is lost.  You can feel the grass, and perhaps the spray of the dew against your shins, but the willows are lost in the night.  The copse has disappeared.

If you were standing at this spot during the day, you would see that a narrow cement platform has been constructed, extending about fifteen feet into the lake.  This is like a small concrete dock, which serve as a place for the birds to hang out without being in direct contact with human passers-by.  During the day, this concrete dock is covered by birds; squaking, flapping, quacking birds.  During the night, it is abandoned, and is covered only in bird shit.  But it is truly covered in bird shit, like some foul Pollock.

As a group, we stop here.  We are mostly silent.  We are smoking, drinking, thinking.  I start to take my pants off.

Someone asks me, “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to run down that cement dock and jump in.”

They try to tell me not to.  They warn me that the water is very shallow here, and that the concrete dock is awash in bird shit.  I wave off their warnings.  Have these guys stopped wanting to see how far they can go?

I take off my shoes, my socks, my pants, my underwear.  I’m a naked man at the Duck Pond.  The guys have warned me, so they are no longer worried.  They are watching, smiling, ready to laugh and tell me they told me so.

I take a long sip of my drink.

I start running, down through the grass and then suddenly my feet hit concrete.  It is terribly slippery, and even while I am running, I can feel the bird shit sticking to my heels, squishing between my toes.  It is a gross feeling.

In this light, it’s not easy to see where the platform ends.  Just in time, I realize I can see the moon’s reflection in the water; I use this as a guide.

At the end of the platform, I jump hard and high, as if from a diving board.  I pull my legs up under my ass and clasp my hands under my shins: the cannonball position.

And I freeze there; I hover.  Time seemingly stands still.  See me from the back: my shaggy, rarely groomed brown hair, my pimpled back, a bit of flabby belly spilling over into view, my two half-moon ghost-white butt cheeks, and directly below that, the soles of my feet.  And in front of me, a nearly-black matte of stars, tree outlines and moony water.  Now, rotate around me, as if you were a movie camera.  Stop when you are beside me, at my profile.  My mouth, wide like Pac-Man, my ample gut, spilling forth like a sack of oatmeal, the curve of my haunches, my arms flung below me, seeming to hold me in place, to levitate me.  And behind me, a nearly-black matte of stars, tree outlines and moony water.  Now, rotate around me further.  Stop when you are in front of me.  See that look on my face?  That excruciating yawp of desperate living, desperate to feel these moony waters; see that fat, oatmealy belly, my hairy, caveman chest, nipples erect by the night wind, the pale fronts of my wobbly knees, my black overgrown nest of pubics, my dangling penis reduced to a nub by a run through the darkness.  Now look behind me: look at those guys standing there, their faces frozen in various forms of laughter, disbelief, worry, apathy.  Look at those guys!  Oh, they are probably worried about so many things; I am sure they are worried that I am about to hurt myself.  Also, looking at the set of their mouths and the glint in their eyes, I’m willing to wager they’re worried about drowning in a ferry accident with two-hundred strangers in icy cold water somewhere, or whether they’ll ever get to walk the length of South America, or what they’d do if they found a dead body in a hotel hallway, or if they’ll keep having that dream where they show up to the wrong building for a college final exam, or if they have syphilis, or if they’ll ever be the father they want to be, or marry a woman as great as their mother, and in there somewhere are the realizations, too, the realizations we are having every moment of every day: the lines of morality and sanity we keep drawing and moving and drawing again with everything we observe, and the list of Hopes and Dreams that is under constant revision without us knowing, the importance of breath and bras and bicycles all neatly ordered and the smells we love so much like old books and stale cake and the things we know we’ll never do like fly a jumbo jet or hide in a refrigerator to scare the crap out of somebody and oh look at the list of regrets written all over these guys faces the women they wanted to fuck the cars they wanted to buy the movies they wanted to see as though they were already dead as though their whole story had been told but that’s not the truth now is it we lived, we were burning to live, we were burning to live!

 

Fifteen minutes ago:

I took a long walk this afternoon.  From my house, I went west down Jackson, all the way to Broad, where I stopped in a coffee shop for a huge iced coffee, which I then drank luxuriously slowly as I made my way south down Broad to Oregon, where I turned east and headed back home.  This is a journey of about two miles, at the end of a satisfying, long day.

You pass a lot of interesting people and places on this trek.  As I neared home (still on Oregon, though) I started seeing numerous dogs and their owners, almost all small dogs.  Dachshunds, Yorkies, that sort of thing.  They were all so nice and polite, the dogs as well as the owners.  Here we were, almost as south as you can get in the city of Philadelphia—a place with a reputation, and we’re all just smiling, saying hi, waving at little dogs.  It was nice.

I was listening to Glenn Miller on my headphones, that kind of sentimental Hallmark music with just enough swing to get your feet moving.  The trombones were sliding under the trumpets, and the stand-up bass was standing up while the guitars were laying it down in a lively rendition of “Johnson Rag”.  The sun was just starting to touch the tops of the brick row-homes, the intense angle beaming those cosmic particles onto the scruff of my neck, making me hot, hot.

At the corner of Oregon and 3rd I stopped and turned around, let the sun hit my face, felt the glory of the universe, et cetera, et cetera.  It was odd, facing that direction and the long, close-cropped street stretching out before me, how difficult it was to make out what I was seeing, with the sun directly in my eyes.  I knew I had just passed an old man on a lawn chair with a dachshund and a beer bottle at his feet, as well as a Korean Laundromat and a Little Caesars pizza joint, but the buildings and the wires and the cars, so backlit like that, could have been almost anything; one moment it was Oregon Avenue, the next, enormous Easter Island statue heads, bowing in unison, and then it was Oregon Avenue again, with the little dogs, then the sun dropped another millimeter, and I could have sworn for a fleeting moment I was standing on the ancient banks of the Yangtze, 7,000 years ago, watching a slow funeral procession walking along the shore.  Who are these people, the Hemudu?  They look so sad, so weighed-down.

 

 

First House

You can recreate the view from the balcony,
looking at the brown gray neighbor’s house
an arm’s length away.
You can recreate the slanting afternoon light
through the thin-paned windows
coated in dog-nose-snot.
You can recreate the padding dog feet
on hardwood floors,
the paisley relief-map kitchen wallpaper,
the cave-like musty humid basement,
the smell of oatmeal and warm sugar.
But you’ll never recreate (or even remember)
how you got from one room to the next,
or what order you kept things in
in that closet, or desk drawer,
or how many times you fell asleep
on the cold living room floor.
And no one will ever quite know
where that little figurine of the Asian-looking man
came from (the one next to the sink,
looking at the fridge.)

 

Love and Forgetting

love and forgetting, two sides of
two different coins;

one perceives the curve of a bowl as the raw egg sliding down its side.
the other perceives the egg as a galaxy, the uncanny sun some relish feeling
on their faces.

one calls across a distance, Yoo-hoo!  Hello there!
one calls across the yard, You who?

one prefers the ornament and the closed-mouth kiss of morning.
one prefers French Horns and Trumpets with their hands down our throats.

peeling a banana, one is always posed in a thin white dress against a breeze.
one scoops the last bit of gelatin from a Depression-glass dish.

one stands waiting, expecting something.  wine, or maybe a storm.
the other comes like a horse gone days without water.

one sees a woman on her side, her stomach like pudding in the dark.
one sees nothing but the moon-drawn tide of one’s own body trespassing into the night.

love is so short,
and forgetting is so long.

The Foxes

Here is some audio/ visual accompaniment I created to supplement my recent poem “The Foxes”.  The text of the poem is underneath the video.  I apologize for my sweaty face at the beginning; it kind of looks like snot running down my face.

 

The Foxes

The thrift store was having a sale.
How forlorn they looked,
the two red foxes dangling over a hanger,
sold separately.
They were whole bodies—
heads, legs, tails, even claws
except on one leg.

My friend giggled
as I wrapped one
then both around my neck.
They seemed alive
chasing each other around my shoulders.
They were warm,
nuzzling my ears.
Sold—the pair.

To celebrate their rescue
I wore them to coffee
at a nearby diner.
My friend said the woman at the register
grimaced when we walked in,
the foxes and I.
No, I said.
Yes, I’m certain, he said.

I gently laid them down
together, by my side in the booth.
A waitress brought a menu.
Oh no, she said when she saw them.

Do these people think
I could kill these babies next to me?
I would have freed them,
opened the trap,
nursed the severed paw.
I wear them as a tribute
to their beauty, their existence.

Does anyone think it was my fault?
Monica killing herself,
so alone there in Chicago.
I wasn’t there and she had called
the night before but I never answered
and now it’s been four years,
she’s long since dead in the ground
and I’ll never even visit the grave.

Robin’s Egg Blue

I’m told they’re mating now,
full of magical noise
that draws the day closed.  I wish
I knew the name
of the fat robin
who builds her nest in the eaves
so low I can almost touch her.

Last night, my body
flew to the ceiling as She
dreamed Her way inside me,
reeking of perfume.  No.  It was
day-old wine and garlic.  She’s
always eating garlic.  I know this
is not possible.  I was out of
my body.  It was my heart that
flew away to the ceiling and my
body lay in bed breathing
shallow breaths.  As a child,

I was scared of everything,
women and bird’s nests and maybe
even perfume.  Fear cannot be
good for the soul.  This cannot be
proven.  I was levitating there,
unafraid, I had no choice, but I
said yes, yes and abandoned
my body, my robin’s egg blue body,
not knowing any other way
to the light.

Spring Morning at the Philadelphia Amtrak Station

Travelers slouch behind low barricades of baggage, backs
to the tiled walls.  Two men paired in low conversation
lean at a column, smoothing worn bills with their fingers,

faces hidden in hoods like traders at a camel fair.
Children’s faces sink behind tiny sunglasses as they fall asleep.
We observe one another like cities

on the same broad plain, scanning for relief columns,
vulnerable to the clouds, measuring the distances
through the glare as though from so many windows,

and the eyes we meet turn away to the firmament
of peeling painted signs, the ranked fluorescent suns.

The Foxes

The thrift store was having a sale.
How forlorn they looked,
the two red foxes dangling over a hanger,
sold separately.
They were whole bodies—
heads, legs, tails, even claws
except on one leg.

My friend giggled
as I wrapped one
then both around my neck.
They seemed alive
chasing each other around my shoulders.
They were warm,
nuzzling my ears.
Sold—the pair.

To celebrate their rescue
I wore them to coffee
at a nearby diner.
My friend said the woman at the register
grimaced when we walked in,
the foxes and I.
No, I said.
Yes, I’m certain, he said.

I gently laid them down
together, by my side in the booth.
A waitress brought a menu.
Oh no, she said when she saw them.

Do these people think
I could kill these babies next to me?
I would have freed them,
opened the trap,
nursed the severed paw.
I wear them as a tribute
to their beauty, their existence.

Does anyone think it was my fault?
Monica killing herself,
so alone there in Chicago.
I wasn’t there and she had called
the night before but I never answered
and now it’s been four years,
she’s long since dead in the ground
and I’ll never even visit the grave.

City Solstice

Standing here at the ATM, I have been thinking

about the mall: how the city

might be enclosed like one, like in those old

sci-fi movies—

one large clear plastic bubble, everything contained:

how I could still see the sky but stay warm,

unlike now:  and at the angle of these buildings

the sun, just free of winter, as always

would wash out the ATM screen

and I would still need to cast my shadow

across it to know what buttons to push:

what season it is:

how, then, each year

I could buy a real Xmas tree

and my friends would say

it seems so real it looks fake.

First Spring Morning

This morning a stink bug
dead in my foyer.
Even dead its three ugly centimeters
twitch my skin.

I rub the back of my neck
where I imagine its
mandibles
entering.

Then I notice how,
in this early sun,
its outer shell shines.
How gray and shiny

and beautiful
its death is.

Remembering the Hotel Stay

In the drawer: a Bible,
in the bed, the scent of a bed

that can barely bear to be
unmade.  To sleep we nearly slice

it open, our legs skimming across
pure sheets.  Our course we could not

stay here, of course this desk
could not stand work; no service

could sustain us long.  Sunday
brings the bill slipped

beneath the door and we haul
our bags downstairs in answer,

but at least for awhile we had this
hollow Eden with its view of slighter roofs,

and each afternoon, crisp white towels
blooming like fruit on the rack.

Dead Folks in Old Photographs

All they could do was act oblivious
holding their bodies still for the camera,
sometimes one of them thinking to move
and leave a blur for posterity.

Most just held their smiles, forever.
The young couple, he in a vest three
sizes too large, her in a flapper’s skirt
and Cloche hat, with a tulip in it.

Two sisters sitting on a low curb
above a dirt street, a horse behind them,
the sun casting their shadows diagonally
behind them like knives, or long fingers.

A squinting man outside a bus station
playing the guitar and singing.
A young boy in a bowler hat very close to the camera,
winking and sticking his tongue out.