Poetry
For a more extensive collection of my work, please visit A Hundred Visions and Revisions.
Veterans Day:
I planned with such military precision, you must have seen it coming. From the towering steps of the colonnade, where we kissed that first time, we watched the mallard with her column of ducklings bask in the noon sun. The veterans filed through the tunnel, toddling toward the community center, adorned with hearts and badges and stars. We felt so far off from that. I would talk sometimes impulsively of joining, flaunting my manliness, but you would give me those eyes and shrug it off impossibly. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, I married, My Lord, you. I still revel in that kind of repetition. Two years later, our anniversary has become simply Veterans Day again, a time to lament our irretrievable losses.
Sunday Blues:
After they're gone, the Sunday blues set in. Last week's laundry chugs along inside the washing machine, like a worn-out choo-choo train. The Bears upset the Steelers in a tragic dumb show, played out upon a fuzzy TV set. Twisted and disused, beer cans drain on the carpet. What is that smell? It must be the trash compactor acting out again. If it's not one thing, it's another, my father always says. Even the world of books looks provincial, ascending and descending on the shelf, like mountains (but a lot more like hills). Out the faintly shuttered window, night is disturbed by a few passing headlights, reflecting off a few sticker-ornamented stop signs- what the punks and degenerates think of the city's cause to Keep Your Neighborhoods Clean. A burger wrapper rolls through the grass, like tumbleweed. What happens in the house across the street when the lights go out is a mystery, but it doesn't stop me from looking in and wondering, Does anyone wonder what happens in here?
Rain:
For Sam Butler Driving Main, I think about you for the first time in a long time. The street lights blur in the night, filtered through my near-sighted view, but the rain squats on the window panes, clearly there, clearly white or clearly blue? I dry up, go numb, turn on the radio when you drop into view- four months away. What else to say or do? I think back to your friends dressed in the usual black (but given away by their tennis shoes) as the preacher chants ashes to ashes, dust to dust, like an African rain song. Nobody moves out of the rain. Your girlfriend's white blouse turns see-through. But not, not you.
Postcard from Mackinaw Island:
Sunlight barely breached the clouds as I ferried back to Mackinaw Island. Gale winds held the seagulls in midair, like marionettes. Above boardwalk shops, banners announcing the lilac festival blew up like silken dresses, uncovering windows without the taffy treats of Sweet Surrender or the sailboat models of Whistling Moose. Behind plywood boards, May's Boutique was hidden. Clydesdale horses clapped their hooves down the garbage-strewn alleys I used to wander. The children who used to gather shells at the shore left in the sand just the faint suggestion of tiny, awkward footprints. From Fort Mackinaw , I surveyed the valleys of buttercups and lilacs that were not there. Flying above the gates, an eagle carried a trout away. Or was it just a shadow? Today things felt distant on that hilltop, as though I never once dressed in Union garb, or launched the cannon to impress my girlfriend, worked the saloon, or performed in recreation trials. In the jail, where I used to escape to, black ash once again clung to my face.
Some Like It Hot:
Life never pans out with a sunset behind your get-away boat, the busty blonde wrapped around you like a shawl, your best friend in the front seat, still dolled up in drag. Your life lacks that certain movie touch: the music, the framing, the punch line. You can't find happiness on the Gulf, but you try. There are a few good months, wine-filled and lethargic, until the storms arrive. The girl becomes bored or hurt, like a few of the others. The best friend jumps ship and becomes food for the sharks. She follows after him. Then what? You're stuck floating on the interminable sea with another summer millionaire. "The End" flashed on the screen long ago.
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