who spread your uncle’s ashes
over our desert crater. Didn’t you
want to add The Sun about now?
Watch page by page so much thought
on our world go up in smoke?
You know this very moment
hundreds in Samoa and the Congo
are roasting supper on a stick
while hungry thousands abide outside
the stone circle. And countless
homeless here at home are rubbing
hands together over flames
as if mere hands
were keeping flames going.
Battle Grounds
Never really geared up
before. Sure, I’ve gotten
dressed in the morning
to go to the office.
On Saturdays I’ve put on
sweats and old shoes
to clean out the garage. So,
how’s everything look?
Helmet on straight?
Bayonet shiny bright?
Canteen squared away
in its little green holster?
Let’s go reconnoiter.
Let’s stick it to ’em.
Let’s draw some blood
and when we’re done
redefining the topiary,
let’s cut a new hole
through the arbor
where a boxwood
can just be a boxwood.
Local Report
By the time the news team got there,
it was way too late.
The fire company’s biggest hook and ladder
was in full extension, its longest hose
aimed vainly at the going-down sun.
Then the moon showed up
and called the firemen home
to their wives and girlfriends.
Up next, sports,
followed by the weather.
Three
Moves
I kid myself in thinking I am
ten again with Timmy on maneuvers.
We survive on penny candy,
tales we twist into the rugs of b’ars
we kill as Davy Crocketts.
Only stars of major
constellations look in on us asleep.
The arms of leaves, pup tent
we have pitched are all we need
to shed what rain will crowd
throughout the night and move us
ever closer. Morning glares,
its hatchet falls and splits us
into fire builder/water hauler
roles that burdened us from birth.
His hands would grow out
into mauls, mine into ropes.
Right now he’s bleeding
like a just-stuck pig in ketchup
and molasses at my birthday
barbecue, rotating flats of ribs
and heaving me a beer. I catch it
even though I do not drink. It is a move
I see he understands as he is sparked
into remembering a touch inside
a sleeping bag. A touch he now
exchanges with his wife who comes
out from the kitchen with potatoes
and my partner who could use a beer.
Ribs burst into flames!
Charcoal must have touched
the lighter fluid. Timmy instantly
recalls the night we almost
set the deepest woods on fire.
This conflagration on the patio
will take more than a pissing to put out.
Juice
It takes juice to make
a night like this. It’s like
everything that’s anything
takes juice. Take cotton candy.
Prize fish in bowls and
paper leis. Pancake
on the barker’s cheeks, his stack
of muscles.
I give my last nickel
to ride the Ferris Wheel
and rise in stages, backwards,
rocking. Stopped at the top,
it’s like I left my body down
below, bent double. My arms,
tight around my knees,
each other.
Puke in the sawdust has juice in it.
His hand is steady on my back.
His voice in its advanced state of change
assures me I will live. His breath
is like the sweetest juice I remember
and oddly, metal.
In his other hand, a dime.
Dreamboat
Hindus think you are a god. They’ve lifted you
from your grassy plain on the peninsula.
You have the heart and lungs of a dirigible.
You are Ganesha.
Here, Dumbo,
daft and two-dimensional with ears
to fly. In a dream
I saw you in suburban Cincinnati. You went
from gray to brown when you saw me
and I got pinker.
I loved you like my first pig,
wanted to take you home
but no rooms were big enough and Dad
was driving a Beetle.
Come by and visit. Don’t fly,
as many out there cannot
picture elephants in clouds.
They’d shoot you down
and then you’d make Ohio
it’s only crater I’d have to share with tourists
when all I ever wanted was to have you to myself
and call you Al.
Hookey
I ask Titus, an alien from CX-48
in the constellation Cassiopeia
why he doesn’t want to meet
the gang down at the bowling alley.
He says they’ll take one look
and want to knock some pins down
with his head. He’s right.
So let’s go fishing.
We wade Paduka Creek halfway
where Titus reaches down
among the rocks and picks up
trout, three per hand. Trout,
he says six times before he lets them go.
I’d like to get some pictures first,
and he agrees but when I look at them,
he’s barely there, only trout
that look like they are roosting
in the aspens. I forgot Titus
really doesn’t capture well,
if at all, and my pics look like I ran them
all through Photoshop.
I ask Titus why he’s always
stretching his arms up in the air
and he tells me that he’s reaching
for his long-lost playmate
back on CX-48. I ask him
if he’d like to stand up
on my shoulders. He does.
Titus starts to cry. His tears
come out all purple
and silky like Johnson’s baby oil.
Then he disappears.
But only for a moment and then
he’s back. I ask if he’s forgotten
something and he tells me
he was told it’s not his time
but I know he misses the trout.
Flower Power
When the boogey man bent down
to turn over a new leaf,
something told me he was expecting
an ugly grub. Not a periwinkle.
What good’s a periwinkle
to a boogey man whose job
is scaring daylights o
ut of people?
From the corner of my eye I watched him
touch it with his half a finger.
This little wink of blue light
in the shallow dark of woods was sky
and indeed, more winks
under more leaves and fallen bark.
The boogey man later told me,
after all he was my brother,
he felt the day breathe
like the black of night breathes through stars.
Next chance he got, he shaved
his beard and combed his mop
and fell for Myrtle, the girl
in the blue tank top next door.
In Season
Steve’s raking oak leaves
with his shirt off.
Summer skin,
color of the leaves.
I’m in the diner
across the street,
sipping cider in a booth
until he’s done,
puts his shirt back on.
Then’s when I’ll know
it’s time to cross,
bring up winter.
Spring?
Last Call
We watched the door swing
on its own. Remember?
We took a table by the wall
and cupped our ears to it
when no one looked.
We snapped our fingers
and waved our hands
over each other like magicians.
Drafts slid from the back bar
with its tiny globe above the sink.
You got to shimmy
with the half-naked girl.
I got down with a bag of chips.
We both threw up a little
leaving the joint. Hangers-on
guffawed. Some even foamed
at the mouth a little.
We did too, remember?
There was an eclipse.
Different Directions
I promised my neighbor, Neil Jr.,
that’s right, the one on the left
with the Wild Yonder Blue Toyota,
I would cut his grass for him while
he was away on Pluto. I know,
I know, that’s a lotta cutting,
not to mention the gas and blade filing,
but damn it, a deal’s a deal
and a trip to Pluto’s no walk in the park.
When no one was around pretending
to be twiddling their thumbs
I asked Neil Jr. why not just close
your eyes and go out on the ice
and jump up and down from one
to four in the morning like everyone else
who could never afford Pluto fare.
At least when you’d come back inside,
there’d be waffles waiting with steam
rising to melt the frost off your lashes
and juice from a real orange. The kind
you’re always going on about,
how it keeps you “in the pink.”
Neil Jr. said he’d think it over,
just because I asked, but I knew
he’d been tired of all that grass growing
in so many different directions
for what’s it been, decades, ice ages,
so I just gave him a little hug, you know,
the kind you give a hometown hero
who’s been to hell and back and damn
if he didn’t hug me back with both arms.
Wonders
Stu loves to stroll
in the gutters
this hour of morning.
Finds his first
styrofoam cup of the day
with lipstick on the rim,
fresh as the first
drops of coffee inside
and ignoring what
mothers everywhere warn,
he tastes it
and wonders if
he’s ever really lived.
He sets the cup on his desk
where the secretaries
stand around and giggle,
wonder if
it belongs to any of them
and best of all, Stu
wonders too.
Postcard from Vermont
I met this waiter
who could take an order
without a pad and pencil.
I took him home to dinner
but he disappeared
before the soup. I found him
in the pantry with a pie
and we went straight to bed.
I love him in his black bow tie
and apron with its white
long strings. I love those strings
as much as I love any man.
We finished with two chocolate
cigars and placed their paper
bands on each other’s fingers.
Now it’s official.
Less Is Milk
You could drown yourself in that
much milk. I wish
you’d shake some flakes instead,
add nuts, cuts of fruit,
show the fridge your swell belly.
What didn’t make it to the bowl,
barely made it to the table. There,
mere drop, a northern hemisphere,
brain without a skull.
Ask the tension on its surface:
are you looking for an iris, pupil?
Call in the professionals. Have them
march around it, slightly bent
at waists, hand behind them,
folded on rumps. Would they then
knock out reports? Would we cry for
what’s been spilled?
It changes faces, places,
settles for a ring in varnish. History
is what a drop can leave, left on its own.
I see another gather, promise
on my spoon’s bright silver.
Down it quick.
All gone.
Bone.
That You, Dawn?
Will you please
pick up that pink appliance you call
a princess phone?
I bet I caught you in your celadon chiffon,
feet on the ceiling, cigarillo bobbing, ashes burning
through the same old hole.
So what’s up?
Who’s goin’ down on who?
Still walking dogs and disorienting in the underbrush?
I’m at that jewelers on the Black Horse Pike,
adding one more jinglet to my ankle
cuff. And adding you
to the tattoo on my ass you should be so lucky.
Been watching Idol?
Are there no men left in America who make you
sob with song? I know, I know,
not every boy’s a Dream Girl.
Not every girl’s a girl!
Uh-oh, nature’s on the mend and it’s been days.
Stop for tea when you’re on the block.
Remember,
no matter who,
you will always be my first
second third.
Call It Kiss
When I put my lips to his, it is
unspeakable because
my lips are still. My lips
stick for eternity
but of course I cannot know this, only that
they do not part
nor his.
We both think we are stone, or stoned;
either way
no one moves between us for the longest time
and ours.
Laughing
Next to me my boyfriend wakes up laughing.
He says sleep makes him hold it back
because he might wake others up.
He says in some beds, it’s against the law
and you can wake up with a ticket
under your pillow or stuck in your ass crack.
Now he’s got me laughing and the dog showing
his back teeth and drooling. Now the dog
is pissing himself. Without so much
as a tickle, my boyfriend and I are too.
We get out the garden hose, hose off.
Next thing you know the whole neighborhood
is out washing their cars, laughing
at the bird poop on their fenders.
Eventually the city shuts the water off
and my boyfriend and I check into a motel
until everything dries out. There’s where we see
ourselves on the 6 o’clock news holding back
laughing at the anchor’s gone limp coiffure.
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