My Freedom Lawn

Blackbird First Wednesday Readings, August 3rd

2011-07-23T16:53:00.000-04:00

First Wednesdays, a series of readings, performances and wine-tasting are held at the Blackbird Wine Shop, 4323 NE Fremont, 7-9pm. This show is 21 and over. Contact Julie Mae Madsen at maemadsen@gmail.com or http://www.facebook.com/pages/First-Wednesday-Readings/111063515598491 for more information.

The readers for August 3rd are John A. Blackard, Matt Love & Kim Cooper Findling.

John Blackard is a graduate of the University of North Carolina. He has three books of poems in print (October Queen, 2007; House-Painting on Liberty Road, 2008; Pulling Apart, 2010) and a book about the golden age of paperback publishing (Vintage Paperback Sources, 2000). He has received Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. He lives in Portland, creates hand-made books in his basement man-cave, and works part-time as a medical assistant in a senior assisted-living community.

Matt Love is Caretaker of Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge. He is the author of Love & the Green Lady: Meditations on the Yaquina Bay Bridge: Oregon’s Crown Jewel of Socialism, available at independent bookstores or through Nestucca Spit Press.com. Love is the author/editor of The Beaver State Trilogy, Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon’s Sesquicentennial Anthology, Super Sunday in Newport: Notes From My First Year in Town (part one of the Newport Trilogy) and Gimme Refuge: The Education of a Caretaker. He writes the “One Man’s Beach” column for Oregon Coast Today and the “On Oregon” blog for Powells. In 2009, Love won the Oregon Literary Arts’ Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award for his contributions to Oregon history and literature. He lives in South Beach and teaches English and journalism at Newport High School. He’s currently working on a book about the filming of Sometimes a Great Notion, the third installment in the Newport Trilogy.

Kim Cooper Findling is a nationally published essayist, journalist and author. She writes about just about everything, but mostly the people, places and stories of her home state, Oregon. In her debut as an author, Kim Cooper Findling’s Chance of Sun: An Oregon Memoir, unfolds the story of an Oregon girl coming of age in the 1970s and 80s, navigating her way through pick-up trucks, dive bars, higher education and backwoods trails before finding a place she belongs.

My First Chanterelle Hunt Yields Freezer Gold

2010-11-01T10:36:00.009-04:00

Somewhere in the Pacific Northwest on a beautiful Friday afternoon before Halloween weekend, I went on my first hunt for chanterelles. Tall Douglas Firs filtering the sunlight and a thick, wet tangle of undergrowth made for tough-going at times.

After climbing over fallen trees and inching my way down a ravine, I found a small clearing dotted with clover and a vein of chanterelles. I had entered chanterelle paradise! Suddenly, mushrooms were everywhere.

Several hours later, our bags filled with chanterelles, my guides and benefactors, Anna and Phil, helped me to celebrate back at the car.

After setting aside some for tonight's soup, I began preparing chanterelles for freezing. While I was able to brush away most of the Douglas Fir needles and leaf debris in the woods, I obviously still had a little cleaning to do. Now that the mushroom were drier, the remaining debris came off easily.

I rinsed away with water only the most stubborn dirt. Chanterelles are delicate and don't hold up well to washing. If you take care to cut them a little above ground level, you won't have much dirt to deal with at this stage of preparation.

The sauteeing recipe for freezing that Anna and Phil recommended called for dicing up some onions and garlic.

I discovered that shredding chanterelles lengthwise was a lot like shredding cooked chicken.

After heating a large frying pan, I began dry sauteeing a batch of chanterelles. This means that the chanterelles, which are filled with their own water, sweated enough liquid to begin sauteeing.

When the chanterelles stopped sweating, I added butter, olive oil, diced garlic, and diced onions.

I sauteed the chanterelles until the onions were translucent and most of the liquid had cooked away. As our house filled with a wonderful aroma, I continued to cook the chanterelles in small batches and set them aside to cool down.

When all the chanterelles had been sauteed and had time to cool down, I packaged one-cup quantities of the them in Ziplock baggies. My chanterelles were now ready to freeze.
I look forward to bringing out a bag at a time for pasta dishes and soups this winter!

October Queen

2010-10-31T11:22:00.007-04:00

It’s hard to deny how October makes a woman
want to burn a man because she can,
as if by formula or witchy spell—
how the month is a room
in an old hotel with a mountain-view
where their clothes drop off
like brightly colored leaves—how goth girls
go berserk at the county’s harvest fair
in the big-box parking lot,
and strippers make their living in a dark tent
on the edge of town,
setting fire to corn husk dolls
between their thighs.

There is no carnie’s finnegan pin
to make the season click into gear and hum
along like a ferris wheel— only
the decorative dried cornstalks, hay bales,
and pumpkins in front of the grocery store,
disguising something on sale
that will slowly kill me—
only the shelf-shout of black blood and guts
hanging slick and stringy in yellow poplars
on the Trail of Terror—
only fear’s effortless effort chilling
every step along my six miles of nerves
as I go out of my way to find the one
I know I cannot find—only the infinity pool
of constellated stars plunging me
to the bottom of some older, darker anarchy.

A wine moon illuminates the nightly harvest
of decay.
My poor heart wishes it were as dry and
empty as a bean pod. October, my queen,
with your silky fingers of frost,
rip open the seed sack of the world, spilling
what can never be gathered up again,
and I will tell you my ghost story
that ends with the lines, Know that
the moon’s yellow face is fixed in an old yellow
book, the lord of every story
holds the shepherd’s crook. How many times
will I look through the eyes of your death mask
before the final walk down the hill, the final
turn on my street
toward home?

John A. Blackard
http://www.johnablackard.com/

A multimedia version of the poem-
http://www.vizzvox.com/stories/fnHRLMMNzmkZk02fms

Labor Day, September 6, 2010

2010-09-06T12:08:00.000-04:00

Committee Work

He imagines outside his building
a tree full of magpies still
roosting in the middle of the day.

Inside no coups or shake-ups
planned, no Mein Kampfs about
to be written. The seated slap on
My Name Is ___ tags, office geishas
serve up today’s numbers.

Old business follow-ups:
motivational posters pulled down;
studies show they have negative
effect on morale.

Whatever happens in Vegas
stays in Vegas no longer an acceptable
reason/excuse for maxing out
the company expense account.
Outrageous.

Token IRA contribution set up
to compensate employees for
the 2.4 seconds it takes
the government to spend
their lifetime tax payments.

Promising new business: R&D
brainstorms entire population
of US could fit into ten major league
stadiums in liquid form.

Cutting-edge research to begin on
products and services appealing
to twelve-fingered humans who will
achieve majority status by 2412.

Secure six golden handcuffs,
extend seven golden handshakes.
Notify legal.

Employee #131313, John Blackard,
scheduled for interview without coffee
Christmas Eve. No severance package.

Nothing else for the good
of the order; everything appears
copasetic. Meeting adjourned.

Circling the parking lot in
his head, magpies chase and peck
bad dogs with chicken carcasses
wired around their necks.

John A. Blackard

House-Painting on Liberty Road

2010-04-30T22:21:00.001-04:00

Of all the old houses still standing—
blurred, alligatored, crumbling—
on the outskirts of my memory,
when even Weatherbeater paint from Sears
guaranteed to capture, transform, and process
the flow of sun and weather through 1996,
whatever I knew about that one’s
last occupants—friends of my grandfather—
preaching apocalypse, matter chaos,
and heat death,
I heard in their hallelujahs and amens
over my paint-spattered radio
playing the Stones’s Gimme Shelter.

Of all the ladders I raised under
open cornices and brackets—
my weight a bouncing pressure on the rungs
angled against the rock garden wall
and buckled German siding—whatever
I learned about the poor people
who lived in such a ruin,
I glossed over while perched between my myth
of home and their New Jerusalem,
an anchorite wedged into the cliff-face
of the second storey, scraping and painting
the palimpsest of a twenties Craftsman
dissipated and diffused to its
most disordered state.

I was always taken in by the work
on the ladder— scraping down
to old-growth oak, brushing on the hillbilly
chrome of polymer paint—
rather than the nothing that seemed to happen
below me in the hardscrabble of their life.
Of sixty year-old paint flake storms
and blinding fogs of space-age spray rising
over the mast of that reef-wrecked vessel—
even as sea hags and backwoods teasers
stood at the kitchen screen-door and plied me
with Cheerwine and Mountaindew.
Whatever life on the ladder I had
was compromised as I leaned into
the pock-marked skin of
that collapsing organism— smelling
its sour sweat and foul breath,
calculating the exponential growth
of its wasp population whose vespiaries
in the eaves swelled to the size of sunflower heads.

Even as solitary life on the ladder
brought windows around occasionally
for me to trim,
filled with candlelight panes of bubbled glass,
I imagined I looked into a darkened room
and saw a cradle built like the house
in miniature and the child’s sleeping face
showed a perfect peace,
but what I really saw was a dirty
toddler in sagging diapers—
part Cherokee, part Black— standing in
a catbox, crying for her life.

I Wish Mr. Hyde Had Talked More About This Last Night

2010-02-04T09:23:00.000-05:00

Lewis Hyde-- The Gift and Art

How, if art is essentially a gift, is the artist to survive in a society dominated by the market? Modern artists have resolved this dilemma in several different ways, each of which, it seems to me, has two essential features. First, the artist allows himself to step outside the gift economy that is the primary commerce of his art and make some peace with the market. Like the Jew of the Old Testament who has a law of the altar at home and a law of the gate for dealing with strangers, the artist who wishes neither to lose his gift nor to starve his belly reserves a protected gift-sphere in which the work is created, but once the work is made he allows himself some contact with the market.

And then - the necessary second phase - if he is successful in the marketplace, he converts market wealth into gift wealth: he contributes his earnings to the support of his art.

To be more specific, there are three primary ways in which modern artists have resolved the problem of their livelihood: they have taken second jobs, they have found patrons to support them, or they have managed to place the work itself on the market and pay the rent with fees and royalties. The underlying structure that is common to all of these - a double economy and the conversion of market wealth to gift wealth - may be easiest to see in the case of the artist who has taken a secondary job, some work more or less unrelated to his art - night watchman, merchant seaman, Berlitz teacher, doctor or insurance executive... The second job frees his art from the burden of financial responsibility so that when he is creating the work he may turn from questions of market value and labor in the protected gift-sphere. He earns a wage in the marketplace and gives it to his art.

The case of patronage (or nowadays, grants) is a little more subtle. The artist who takes a second job becomes, in a sense, his own patron: he decides his work is worthy of support, just as the patron does, but then he himself must go out and raise the cash. The artist who manages to attract an actual patron may seem to be less involved with the market. The patron's support is not a wage or a fee for service but a gift given in recognition of the artist's own. With patronage, the artist's livelihood seems to lie wholly within the gift-sphere in which the work is made.

But if we fail to see the market here, it is because we are looking only at the artist. When an artist takes a second job, a single person moves in both economies, but with patronage there is a division of labor - it is the patron who has entered the market and converted its wealth to gifts. Once made, the point hardly needs elaboration. Harriet Shaw Weaver, that kindly Quaker lady who supported James Joyce, did not get her money from God; nor did the Guggenheims, nor does the National Endowment for the Arts. Someone, somewhere sold his labor in the marketplace, or grew rich in finance, or exploited the abundance of nature, and the patron turns that wealth into a gift to feed the gifted.

Artists who take on secondary jobs and artists who find patrons have, in a sense, a structural way to mark the boundary between their art and the market. It is not hard to distinguish between writing poems and working the night shift in a hospital, and easier still for the poet to know he is no Guggenheim. But the artist who sells his own creations must develop a more subjective feel for the two economies and his own rituals for both keeping them apart and bringing them together. He must, on the one hand, be able to disengage from the work and think of it as a commodity. He must be able to reckon its value in terms of current fashions, know what the market will bear, demand fair value, and part with the work when someone pays the price. And he must, on the other hand, be able to forget all that and turn to serve his gifts on their own terms. If he cannot do the former, he cannot hope to sell his art, and if he cannot do the latter, he may have no art to sell, or only a commercial art, work that has been created in response to the demands of the market, not in response to the demands of the gift. The artist who hopes to market work that is the realization of his gifts cannot begin with the market. He must create for himself that gift-sphere in which the work is made, and only when he knows the work to be the faithful realization of his gift should he turn to see if it has currency in that other economy. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.*( * Artists who sell their work commonly take on an agent as a way of organizing this double economy: the artist labors with his gift and his agent works the market.)

A single example will illustrate several of these points. For years before he established himself as a painter, Edward Hopper used to hire himself out as a commercial artist to magazines with names like Hotel Management. Hopper was an expert draftsman, and the illustrations and covers he drew during those years are skillfully rendered. But they are not art. They certainly have none of Hopper's particular gift, none of his insight, for example, into the way that incandescent light shapes an American city at night. Or perhaps I should put it this way: any number of out-of-work art students could have drawn essentially the same drawings. Hopper's magazine covers - happy couples in yellow sailboats and businessmen strolling the golf links - all have the air of assignments, of work for hire. Like the novelist who writes genre fiction according to a proven formula, or the composer who scores the tunes for television commercials, or the playwright flown in to polish up a Hollywood script, Hopper's work for the magazines was a response to a market demand, and the results are commercial art.

During his years as a commercial artist, Hopper created for himself what I have called the 'protected gift-sphere' by spending only three or four days a week at the magazines and painting at home the rest of the time. He would, of course, have been happy to sell his gift-sphere work on the market, but there were no buyers. In 1913, when he was thirty-one years old, he sold a painting for $250; he sold none for the next ten years. Then, between 1925 and 1930, he began to earn a living by his art alone.

In a sense Hopper's work for the magazines should be considered not a part of his art at all but a second job taken to support his true labors. But the point is that even when a market demand for his true art developed, Hopper still preserved the integrity of his gifts. It may be hard to formulate a rule of thumb by which to know when an artist is preserving his gifts and when he is letting the market call the tune, but we know the distinction exists. Hopper could have made a comfortable living as a commercial artist, but he didn't. He could have painted his most popular works over and over again, or he could have had them photographed and, like Salvador Dali, sold signed gold-flecked reproductions. But he didn't.

It is not my intention here to address the problems and subtleties of the various paths by which artists have resolved the problem of making a living. There are second jobs that deaden the spirit, there are artists who become beholden to their patrons and those whose temperament prohibits them from selling the work at all. Each of the paths I have described is most often a way of getting by, not a way of getting rich. No matter how the artist chooses, or is forced, to resolve the problem of his livelihood, he is likely to be poor. Both Whitman and Pound make good examples. Neither man ever made a living by his art. Whitman's description of the 'sort of German or Parisian student life' he lived in Washington during the Civil War could be translated almost verbatim to Pound during his years in London and Paris, living in little rented rooms, wearing flamboyant but secondhand clothes, straining his coffee through
a cloth in the morning, building his own furniture. (By Pound's own estimation, one of the attractions of Europe was its acceptance of an artist's limited means. Remember his letter to Harriet Monroe: 'Poverty here is decent and honourable. In America it lays one open to continuous insult on all sides.')

If we are to speak fully of the poverty of artists, we must pause here to distinguish between actual penury and 'the poverty of the gift.' By this last I intend to refer to an interior poverty, a spiritual poverty, which pertains to the gifted state. In that state, those things that are not gifts are judged to have no worth, and those things that are gifts are understood to be but temporary possessions. There is a sense in which our gifts are not fully ours until they have been given away. The gifted man is not himself, therefore, until he has become the steward of wealth which appears from beyond his realm of influence and which, once it has come to him, he must constantly disburse. Leviticus records the Lord's instruction to Moses: 'The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me.' Likewise, we are sojourners with our gifts, not their owners; even our creations - especially our creations - do not belong to us. As Gary Snyder says, 'You get a good poem and you don't know where it came from. "Did I say that?" And so all you feel is: you feel humility and you feel gratitude.' Spiritually, you can't be much poorer than gifted.

The artist who has willingly accepted such an interior poverty can tolerate a certain plainness in his outer life. I do not mean cold or hunger, but certainly the size of the room and the quality of the wine seem less important to a man who can convey imaginary color to a canvas. When the song of one's self is coming all of a piece, page after page, an attic room and chamber pot do not insult the soul. And a young poet can stand the same supper of barley soup and bread, night after night, if he is on a walking tour of Italy and much in love with beauty. Artists whose gifts are strong, accessible, and coming over into their work may, as Marshall Sahlins says of hunters and gatherers, 'have affluent economies, their absolute poverty notwithstanding.'

I do not mean to romanticize the poverty of the artist, or pretend to too strong a link between this state of mind and 'the facts.' A man may be born rich and still be faithful to his gifts; he may happen upon a lucrative second job; his work may be in great demand or his agent a canny salesman. Actual poverty and interior poverty have no necessary connection. And yet, as we all know, and as the lives of Whitman and Pound testify, the connection is not unknown, either. For one thing, fidelity to one's gifts often draws energy away from the activities by which men become rich.

For another, if the artist lives in a culture which is not only dominated by exchange trade but which has no institutions for the conversion of market wealth to gift wealth, if he lives in a culture that cannot, therefore, settle the debt it owes to those who have dedicated their lives to the realization of a gift, then he is likely to be poor in fact as well as in spirit. Such, I think, is a fair description of the culture into which both Whitman and Pound were born. Theirs was hardly an age of patronage, as my brief list of return gifts indicates; nor was theirs a time that would have likely understood that Trobriand social code, 'to possess is to give.' Theirs - and ours - was the age of monopoly capitalism, an economic form whose code expected and rewarded the conversion of gift wealth to market wealth (the natural gifts of the New World, in particular - the forests, wildlife, and fossil fuels - were 'sold in perpetuity' and converted into private fortunes).

In a land that feels no reciprocity toward nature, in an age when the rich imagine themselves to be self-made, we should not be surprised to find the interior poverty of the gifted state replicated in the actual poverty of the gifted. Nor should we be surprised to find artists who, like Whitman and Pound, seek to speak to us in that prophetic voice which would create a world more hospitable to the creative spirit.

Lewis Hyde

Three Snow Day Triolets

2010-01-30T12:57:00.000-05:00

The jet stream’s sudden dip creates a lovers’ coup:
a snow day when children are staying with friends.
Should we spend our day reading, writing, and making stew?
The jet stream’s sudden dip creates a lovers’ coup.
Morning kisses on the couch, making love in the afternoon.
Who cares how long we’re snowbound or the school year extends!
The jet stream’s sudden dip creates a lovers’ coup:
a snow day when children are staying with friends.

All day I bring in wood to make a White Man’s Fire.
In comfort we write gloses, triolets, and sometimes kiss.
Our corpse poems burn as one on the same funeral pyre.
All day I bring in wood to make a White Man’s Fire
that will match the sizzle and spark of our desire
while you keep one eye on the weather and closing lists.
All day I bring in wood to make a White Man’s Fire.
In comfort we write gloses, triolets, and sometimes kiss.

Feeling brave, we walk at night on the blessing of new snow,
our gloved hands grip and save each other if we slip
on black ice. I point between trees at the sky’s orange glow.
Feeling brave, we walk at night on the blessing of new snow.
You kiss my numbed face, someone’s car will need a tow.
Should we consider taking a quick California trip
when the weather breaks? Walking at night on icy snow,
our gloved hands grip when one missteps and slips.

John A. Blackard

Chinese New Year

2010-01-06T09:51:00.000-05:00

Husband, how will you celebrate all the ways
that I please you and promise to obey you
in the year of the rooster?

I will honor your purest deceptions with a flock
of frightened bird aerial repeaters and a score
of musical pyramid mines, my wife.

Husband, will you hold me in your arms like
the moon's brightness is held within the spaces
of the parking lot across the street?

Yes, I will send out some black diamond missiles
that climb at least twenty-five hundred feet
and finish with reports as loud as our ecstacy.

Husband, I'm listening to a symphony by a composer
that I do not remember. Will you come in
from the porch and conduct with me?

No, but I will perform a duet of peacock fountains
and golden snowflake candles for you that
will help you put on the master's wig?

Husband, I found a lock of our baby's hair
in this book and I thought about that old stucco
house... do you ever think about...?

No, I only remember the crazy jack ground
spinners and catherine three-drive moonwheels
that kept me on the rim of night.

Husband, when you leave for the plant in the morning
and walk beside the piles of dawn-streaked mud,
will you write my name there for me?

I will launch whistling gemini missiles and light
marching cicada comets at the bus stop so
you will know the wild flower of my heart.

My personal top ten fiction reads of 2009

2009-12-31T15:55:00.003-05:00

In no particular order-- other than alphabetical:

Barbery, Muriel. The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
Barry, Sebastian. The Secret Scripture.
Campbell, Bonnie Jo. American Salvage.
Dexter, Pete. Spooner.
Foer, Jonathan. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
Kingsolver, Barbara. The Lacuna.
Meloy, Maile. Half in Love.
Michaels, Anne. The Winter Vault.
Phillips, Jayne. Lark and Termite.
Strout, Elizabeth. Olive Kitteridge.

If Lenny Bruce had been a librarian...

2009-11-22T18:57:00.002-05:00

One of Johnny's photos picked up by The New Yorker website. What the?

Carnegie Library, circa 1903

2009-10-12T21:41:00.003-04:00

He wanted a library with Doric pillars,
rotundas, pediments, and porticos,
he wanted a library that looked similar

to a French chateau or Renaissance palazzo
with arches, sweeping staircases, and marble floors.
As he left the pavement, he wanted to know

his journey toward truth was through these doors:
a poorly-lit foyer he felt his way through,
a long climb up stairs to a reading room tour,

the clerestory window’s dazzling light imbued
him with the hope he'd be surrounded by Freedom,
Progress, Opportunity, a Modern World View.

A diorama of King Tut’s tomb,
the Winged Victory in plaster-cast copy,
and Venus de Milo stood around the room,

busts of Homer, Shakespeare, Dante,
Goethe, Emerson, and Tennyson peered down
from tall, oak bookcases holding the canon,

gilt-edged classics, wisdom leather-bound—
all warned him with whispers to abandon
such bourgeois claptrap and get out of town.

My books are now available on Amazon.com

2009-09-13T18:11:00.000-04:00

John Blackard's House-Painting on Liberty Road now available on Amazon.com

John Blackard's October Queen now available on Amazon.com.

October 1st Reading at Rilassi

2009-09-12T12:51:00.001-04:00

Portland poets Valentina Gnup and John Blackard read new poems and poems from their books.

When: October 1, 2009 - 6:30pm Doors Open
Reading 7:00pm
Where: Rilassi Coffee House & Tea, 3580 SW River Parkway, Portland, OR 97239
Free drip coffee and tea. Snacks for sale.
Sponsored by: Buzzaroonie.com. "The booklovers place to be"

Reading of "Intimate Isolation" poem by John Blackard on 8.21.09

2009-08-21T11:30:00.001-04:00

Intimate Isolation

Pulling Apart

2009-06-29T19:01:00.009-04:00

1. Sitting in a Rusted-out ’40 Ford Coupe in July

Of all the dream machines (now scrapped,
abandoned, forgotten) that seem to rumble
to life as the morning sun burns the dew
from their rusty hoods and fenders,

when even the dusty weeds and creepers
overtaking them sport a sheen almost
lovely before the day’s heat wilts them
into submission,

whatever the puller is feeling
about it, he doesn’t put into words.

Of all the days he has roamed the hills
of Level Cross Auto Salvage when the dry,
rutted lanes and crossroads trailed his dust
alone—

whatever his don’t give a shit looks convey,

if they could unmake these wrecks, restore them
to factory specs, re-roll them off Detroit’s
assembly line, give them back to families
taking vacations, business men calling
on clients, lovers cruising Main Street,
old folks going to Sunday church,

the puller would do it, but he can no more
do that than pull his life together.

He can’t affect Predictable Patterns,
lay a Destiny upon them, imbue
objects with Probability Energy;
he is improvident.

Of the way his grease-hardened coveralls
crackle when he stretches on the old Ford’s
rotten bench seat, when he reads the big
story in Racing Rumors of the dirt
track legend’s auto-erotic death,

if that sound mimics moving a gasper
strung up with an antique racing harness,

whatever casualties from heat death
he may witness, even though he might not
get it—and our don Quixote of the salvage
yard doesn’t get much about the choices
people make—

What brings a man to make his spot
in a hot, rusty ’40 Ford coupe
in the middle of a field just this side
of hell?

2. Iron Jungle

There’s a rasping like the rasping of
a cicada that tells him where to look:
walkie-talkie static is the echoed
order to find what he already knew
he was looking for.

The honeysuckle, kudzu, and sumac
give their veiled replies from broken headlight
housings, cracked chrome grilles, punctured
trunk panels concerning loss.

The coded question is why iron is
always so phlegmatic about its own slow rot.

It’s as if the yard were shrinking
since Detroit forgot how to make cars.

A car can repeat its name only
so many times before the mud-daubers,
lining its sheet metal cavities, start
a chorus for Mustangs, Firebirds,
Barracudas, Impalas.

The checkered flags strung up between the light
poles always tickle him: someone’s idea
of a lame junkyard joke.

Like it was his daddy’s corn maze,
the puller threads his way through the yard,
stirring up rabbits and black snakes.

3. Finding the Eyeball

Check wrecks for empty cupholders
and ashtrays.

Shake off the feeling that if you don’t find
the victim’s eyeball there, it will be rolling
around under your seat the way a kid’s b-bs
roll around inside the puzzle until
they find their sockets.

The eyeball is out there in the junkyard,
rolling around, searching for the familiar
curve and bone of its face,

flesh whispering to flesh until it finds
you: you’ll be pulling a part and look up
and it’ll be staring you in the face.

It’s happened to him, the puller tells
first-time yard visitors to spook them.

Tells them it’s the ghost eyeball of
St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers.

The sheer unlucky fact of being there
proves the puller has learned something about
locating Disorder.

Shake it off now: the relic will save
your life.

4. Pulling a Fender

Because the day is one rusty bolt
after another to flout his efforts,
he tries not to suffer any false
dichotomy between knowing
and doing.

Whether he scraps a few knuckles or
curses the rounded-off cap, those are
his proof that the world is as it is,
if only that they make him respect it
and the limits of his temper.

Isn’t removing a fender
about matching stubborn against stubborn,
showing rust what you’re made of?

He had been raised that way, and so
he opened the car door first to look
behind it for the two main retaining bolts.

A socket wrench broke them loose and launched
a dozen yellowjackets.

Along the hood recess, he took out six
more bolts before the fender pulled away
from its steel frame, leaving behind a little
ragged skin and a few more drops of blood.

5. Reflections in a Wall of Convex Hubcaps

It isn’t that he can’t see what’s hiding
in its chrome mirrorings: automobiles
melting like ice cubes on a July day.

The reflected structure of the cars
lose their created shape as they melt,
every particle of their iciness
becoming liquid and mixing in
with water.

He might’ve expected the oracle’s
entropic reflection to be more
dramatic: on the other side,
all of the original car particles
are hidden, but they’re still there.

Now he knows, right? all those shining
hubcaps can mutate Ephemera—
how they cause his mind to wander in
some mirage of the past—or how they reweave
Destiny to choose him for its relic.

That tiny figure he sees multiplied
by the wall’s hundreds of hubcaps
could be the patron saint of travelers—
or just the junkyard’s dog.

6. Auto-Cubism

When the hydraulics of the crushing plate
force it down, the four stacked car bodies
snap-pop, lose all coherent sense of depth,
and look as though they could be one car
moving in four directions at once.

Like four snowflakes melting
into each other, re-freezing, falling
through layers of warm and cold air,
clumping on some traveler’s admiring
eyelid.

It’s not a question of 2400
psi, accelerating the process
of inaccuracy and failure—they
were created to fill new ambiguous
space by the Detroit avant-garde
every year.

A cube of crushed cars is a puzzle
for june bugs, red dirt, pokeberry stalks,
new-born possums, cigarette butts, mob
murders to roll around in, to find
their resting place— forklifted closer
to eternity.

7. Barrel-Rolled

Wherever would he be if a window
crank in his father’s car had not come loose—
an unexpected weight heavy
as a capgun— in his four-year old hand,
the first part the puller ever pulled.

As though that day were his whole life,
under tall pines at the back of the salvage
yard, he sat in its rusted-out shell,
foundering, not knowing what hit him.

Some say when Lee Petty barrel-rolled
a borrowed ’48 Buick Roadmaster,
spraying red mud and flashing chrome, he cheated
death, and Part One of a family racing legend
was in the books.

Don’t worry, one day Christ’s hooks will grab
everything and pull it apart,
and a tall stranger will carry what
remains across a dark river on
an unknowable errand.

Scribd-- My book, October Queen, online

2009-06-17T12:31:00.001-04:00

http://www.scribd.com/doc/16520238/October-Queen-

Scribd-- My book, House-Painting on Liberty Road, online

2009-05-23T12:58:00.002-04:00

http://www.scribd.com/doc/15600459/HousePainting-on-Liberty-Road

Pack Blues

2009-05-22T09:28:00.009-04:00

Strays, growling around the farm, crack night’s tomb
as though to set twitching every zombie
nerve in my sleepless body, each howl
sounding more joyous, each of them ambushing
the fatted calf of lack.

For them now, all is garbled anthem,
a serial song of the insane;
and so, uncovering the closed rose of
my ear and attention’s thorn, rolling my head
away from the pillow, I’m like the old
shepherd of unnamable regret:
tethered by, and wholly conscious of the wordless
currents of the night wind, the sudden
humming of the wood’s organ.

They have stopped yelping, I think to myself,
and so, quietly they could be grunting
with glee now the neighbor’s bitch in heat has
been brought down.

But on the flickering screen of insomnia,
there’s no going back to bed, nor comfort
in my wife snoring lightly there,
nor in the memory of when the network
signed off with its hypnotic test pattern.

For now though, I should be out there with them:
hackles bristling to dismember last night’s
nightmare, leaping the frozen ditches of
the same old worries, instead of raking
up the spilled cans and gutted bags
of my wasted life.

Scraps of Gold

2009-04-17T09:28:00.005-04:00

They look neither greedy nor held in thrall
by the ten thousand things of life, though
their postures make them seem sold out.

Tonight the two sit at their kitchen table,
stuff pieces of broken gold in a padded
envelope, and do not try to make
the past better than it actually was,
for the hour is late.

If they believe themselves to be figures
in a medieval woodcut, hermetic
or commonplace, they aren’t saying.

If one has weighed a piece in a
graduated cylinder while the other marked
its density, mass over volume,
or streaked a porcelain cup for proof,
it isn’t obvious.

They might be here together reading
the catechism of Paracelsus,
or at the beginning of their financial
meltdown.

I don’t know if the man really expects
fair value for the Neil Young broken heart
of gold locket, the three-legged golden
calf charm, the battered golden sombrero
ashtray, or is sad because the G-Pak
he received from Faust & Co.—Gold
Broker to the Stars—won’t hold his magnum
opus, his mutus liber, illustrating
the dialectics of the Unconscious.

I’ve heard there is dross of all kinds that can
be turned into cash, but don’t ask me to know
if the fires burning in Gehenna,
stretching from the foot of Mount Zion eastward
to Kidron Valley, burn away what
the trailer trash left behind.

Of this man, who might have committed heresy
during the Inquisition and qualified
for the rack or stack, and this woman,
who probably saved her first grader’s dried-up
stars and fed the table scraps—like gold they
were—to her little dog, what have you heard?

They will pay lip service to wisdom,
and speak of gold metaphorically to
accept their failure.

But I wonder: is it allegorical
or obvious, perhaps just tv ad
nonsense, when the woman lays a golden
egg for the man to swallow whole?

Do they glow from the alchemy of love,
or moan au au auauau over
the element of their desire?

How often have I been conjured by them?

Am I hammered until I bend, or
until I bite my very own tail?

Is this the Faust & Co. Scrap Gold
Refinery, or the fiery furnace
of a medieval woodcut?

Is this their scrap gold or mine?

Poets.org Announcement

2009-04-15T22:59:00.000-04:00

http://www.poets.org/viewevent.php/prmEventID/7749

Feathers

2009-03-21T20:46:00.000-04:00

Feathers

2009-03-21T20:43:00.002-04:00

Not just pots of machu soup bubbling over,
fry bread sizzling in long-handled fire pit
pans at the Julyamsh Powwow campgrounds
in Post Falls, Idaho, but—harder to sniff out—
J.J. Lonelodge’s large ice chest with trays
of raptor heads, wings, and claws.

Bored with every other vendor’s cheap
souvenirs—hand-made leather moccasins,
traditional woven blankets, hand-carved
wooden flutes—dancers, looking for an edge,
are thrilled with his feathers—young golden
eagles, balds, red-tail hawks, northern harrier
hawks, and red-shafted flickers. He tells them
he finds them like arrowheads in a plowed
field, they fall out of the sky on the path
he walks—it’s his gift.

J.J. doesn’t talk about shooting eagles,
but he sells their feathers. Their weakness for
wild mustang laid out in a clearing lures
them; one volplanes down from the thermals,
the kettle of eagles won’t hear the shot.

From his truck-bed perch, he hears the powwow’s
strong drumbeats, the ancestral songs calling
the dancers in their feathered regalia.
J.J. and his son wait for the jaded,
the ignoble, knowing you can’t make
a crow fly like an eagle—or look like one—
counting on the powwow hustlers to finger
his bags of feathers.

It’s understood some will buy illegal
feathers for their dancing regalia,
hoping the big-shot circuit judges will
notice them. Nowadays they have no more
choice than characters in a folktale.

How much they owe the ah-hey-yah-ho
vocables, connecting the old spirit
words, has to be forgotten to be somebody
at the Seven Feathers Casino.
Honor is just a feathered headdress
money puts on, says J.J.

Place your bets when the host drum’s sudden
hard pattern beats a warning: on the feather-
glistening top-paid dancer, or an eagle
messenger from the Creator
in the money circle.

1957 Ferrari 315 S

2009-03-01T18:37:00.002-05:00

Notes for Le Mille Miglia Libretto

2009-03-01T15:33:00.001-05:00

--The Italian Grand Prix road race was banned after
the 1957 accident.

Overture

Harmonic suspensions of the bone saw
behind energetic flutes, violins, and tympani.

Act 1

Urgent surgeons and nurses around
the dying racer, and the coloratura
of their choral voices in the theatre,
rising to revive the quaint belief that
it is good to be alive.

The chaplain peers in, and he feels a
compassionate disgust toward those serving
the illusion of earthly health, as tragic
a burden as those who wait for ease of
suffering or the day without addiction,
body brokers and underground traders
in human remains seem as heroic in
his aria of ill will.

The waiting room is like purgatory—
with radio—white noise for the parents
of the injured still in surgery that
lasts longer than they expected.

The father’s baritone recitative
declares that to be helped without God’s help
will cost you more than to be healed.

Act 2

Dolore (Pain), in the slumgullion
of the recovery ward, begins his aria
with two chords featuring the devil’s
interval.

No nurse on her rounds sees him,
but smells something like primitive fear mixed
with hothouse flowers and body fluids,
as he sings in bass bel canto to his
victim that the pain he does not want
to stop is himself, the pain that hurts him
perfectly is the one he will love
the most—irresistible words, effortlessly
sung above violins and bassoons.

Will the injured give in to Dolore?
Will he die and leave everything to
the ex-wife listening at his door
to the beautiful aria and monitors
beeping and clicking?

No, sings Morfina (Morphine), she will be his deus
ex machina, she will bring him red flowers
and the comfort of dreamless sleep, singing
that if he accepts his suffering he will
be human, but it will not bring the peace
he needs.

The orchestra begins a romantic
melody to introduce the injured’s
girlfriend who caresses his face and gazes
sorrowfully on his broken body,
hoping he can hear her dream song from
the night of the crash.

Competing with elevator hydraulics
and flushing toilets, she sings that they cut
the race car out around him, and rain fell
through the windshield on his face, and his eyes
opened on darkness flickering with lightning
and emergency flashers, and his ears
unstopped to indecipherable
walkie-talkies and thunder, but he was
late now, so he left his body in Montova,
found his way home and climbed into bed next
to her.

Already asleep, she turned into him,
pinned him fiercely as though she could crush him
with her arms and legs, and kissed him hard,
as though she could make his lips bleed, and called
his name as though he could never hear
her again.

Act 3

But he does hear her, echoing in some dark,
liminal place like a mountain tunnel—
that sweet soprano he loves—and he inches
toward her, inspite of being whipsawed by
pain and morphine, slowly backward mapping
the mille miglia to champagne nights
in Rome.

What had turned him into a slobberer,
a drooler, a slaverer he slowly
belts out in elongated baritone
wails in front of plaintive flutes and violins.

Finally putting it together that like it
or not, ribs and vital organs heal the same,
with or without the dark song of the injured,
trying to find comfort, unobliged to
resume a supporting role, unconvinced
the accident was not reckless squander,
they pronounce the painful sentence the nerves
carry out. Why can’t they become wings,
the broken ribs seem to sing.

Cradled in the arms of his beloved,
his aria ends with the god of sleep,
Hypnos, casting the net of coma over
the stage, bringing on a week of dreamless
healing.

The bold chordal cadences, introduced
in the overture, are now resolved by
violins and cellos, as he awakes,
surrounded by a chorus of family,
crew, and fans there to sing, applaud, and roll
him out in a Ferrari red wheelchair.

They happily sing that in no time Signori
Corridore, their grand prix miracle boy,
will resume his blind, Gadarene rush through
life, having learned nothing from his accident
if not that we can never end our own pain—
that life is an opera verismo
about four-wheel drift and the flat-out
race to the finish.

Review of October Queen, 2-7-09

2009-02-08T15:34:00.001-05:00

October Queen, by John Blackard

Posted by Kenneth Arnold on February 7, 2009 at 9:08am in Uncategorized
View book reviews

I attended a poetry reading at Black Bird Wine Shop here in Portland last week, where John Blackard was one of the readers. I picked up October Queen at the reading; it's worth your undivided attention.

This is a book of poems steeped in memory. The photo on the back cover shows the author as a child beside an old pickup, an icon of the book's mode. What's recalled has been lost, the tone often elegaic: "Your talent made your family forget for a moment / how far you could fall."

One of the most evocative poems in the book is "Old Woman at the Well," accompanied by a photo of a child on a tricycle beside an old well. What looks innocent can be dangerous, as we know.

"Let me tell you about the sad little boy who was
your father. He waited in the blazing sun with a
dipper of water for his mother picking tobacco.
Every day she'd tie that boy to the windlass of her
spirit and lower him into the merciful darkness.

The poet's sometimes rocky past is woven through poems that balance on the edge of despair but in the end are redeemed by a deeper hope. Remembering his childhood in the company of bakers, and a potentially life-shattering event, he concludes one poem:

When my own child wakes from a bad dream,
I will tell her a worshipful company of bakers
makes hot cross buns full of grace every night.
I will hope her life rises like a flock of birds
above a harvest field of golden wheat.

Photographs accompanying the poems are by the author. John Blackard is the new assistant managing editor for Poetry Northwest and a poet to watch. His book is available, along with his other publications, through his website.

Walking

2009-01-25T12:17:00.000-05:00

What is this heroic gait
in the indoor riding ring, that it can be prized by
kings, and can make a young girl feel like Joan of Arc,

and even her father, waiting
in a hot, airless viewing room, can seem charmed by
the art of one hoof on the ground at a time,

and the handsome gelding, which pays
for its keep by carrying the stable’s academy riders, can
seem to calm all tensions as soon as the lesson begins,

because his neck is so gracefully arched, because his head
is up and ears are forward, because his strong, level
back and well-sprung ribs inspire all who see him—

especially the young rider, with her weight shifting
in the saddle to let the horse know she is ready to
move from a rhythmic four-beat trot into an easy amble,

her trainer who offers the bait to the circling horse, in and out
of cathedral shafts of dusty barn light, her father who
doesn’t speak the language of the horse,

but wants to believe the horse can speak words of love
to his daughter. How does her father look away from the magic
ring to witness Mexican hired hands carrying bags of feed,

mucking out stalls, curry-combing horses
in the barn’s breezeway. How does he work out in his heart the
dead horse he has been riding, whipping harder,

denying he could ever have ridden it
into the ground, when all he can do now is simply
dismount. In the ring, the horse has no hidden agenda,

no misplaced anger, because there is no self-deception
or scission the rider doesn’t make, their atonement affirmed as
each foot meets the ground at equal, separate intervals,

until they all will feel that no matter
how beautiful the ride, much of life is
about walking around.

Four poem wordle

2009-01-10T16:19:00.001-05:00

Reading

2009-01-10T14:51:00.001-05:00

Oregon Literary Review

First Wednesday Readings: John Blackard, Ron Bloodworth, David Hill, Alison Apotheker

When--Wed, February 4, 7pm – 9pm

Where--Blackbird Wine Shop, 3519 NE 44th - off Fremont

Description--Oregon Literary Review co-hosts First Wednesdays, a series of readings, performances and wine-tasting at the Blackbird Wine Shop, 3519 NE 44th off Fremont, 7-9pm. Readers and performers interested in participating should contact Julie Mae Madsen at maemadsen[at]gmail.com with an expression of interest and sample work. The readers/performers for February 4 are John Blackard, Ron Bloodworth, David Hill, Alison Apotheker

Oregon Literary Review online

2009-01-08T23:28:00.001-05:00

Hypermedia version of "October Queen" in current issue of Oregon Literary Review:

http://orelitrev.startlogic.com/v4n1/vidarts.htm

Intimate Isolation

2008-12-31T00:17:00.005-05:00

Another gathering of the newly-wed
and the nearly-dead that clearly needed
more than food and music, which, anyway,
were better than the conversation.

Language in all its forms seemed
a rant of betrayal to the taciturn and tight-lipped,
just as the last leaves of fall scratched
and scribbled off the back porch
into the oblivion of fields overgrown
with sumac and scrub pine.

This farming family’s golden age
of harvests was what they wouldn’t talk about,
left for the cash wages of public jobs
in town, as if their sin of omission
was forgettable.

There wasn’t much anyone could have said
that would scowl well, to use a farming
term about how earth falls away
from a sharp or dull plow.

I felt like a young fool once
again, overhearing my estranged brothers
tell about the time I drove
the tractor into the pond. Wasn’t a man
foolish to his family a man freed
in the world?

I stopped thinking long ago
I ought to be a tool like a hoe, made to clean
up a weedy row, the branching of
the family tree had anything really to do with me.

The master of ceremonies, one of those
old men who spoke in biblical rhythms,
kept pushing through his phlegmy recitation
of the family begets, a story always told
vaguely for the children among us.
I imagined our forefathers’ amens
for whatever they and God approved.

We are only blood-intimate, after all,
isolated by our common past.
Who can see himself in others, and not see
the worst? Day-dreaming or
demented—I couldn’t tell—the oldest
honorees seemed embarrassed
by the litany of silence between them.

Eventually, each dish of food was
blessed, tasted, and left on a table
or window ledge, the father and sons’
gospel quartet—minus the son just killed
in the war— ended its set with Before
the World Began.

Family secrets are what we tell
against ourselves in private, the scapegoats
and scapegraces pinned together
in the same rocky pasture.

Christmas Animoto Revised Again

2008-12-24T12:37:00.001-05:00

Inauguration Day Cold Reading While Blindfolded

2008-11-30T17:14:00.005-05:00

The future will be different; you cannot see the end.
--Frank Bidart

Part 1— The Humble Public Servant

Is it an ill omen in Virginia
that a bald eagle, scavenging a deer’s head
from a landfill, snags on a power line
and is electrocuted? I’m not Professor Marvel,
but I can see the steel speculum
of change opening America wide,
exposing its burned-out heart.

Part 2—The Shotgun

I don’t have to get the skinny from
our leaders to know you are facing ruin
upteen different ways: I see you losing
your home, your friend being laid-off
from her job, your father’s pension
evaporating. This is the whole
Megillah for the down-and-out.

Part 3—The Barnum Statement

When you find a man crying on the curb
with his head in his hands, pretty soon you
will be sitting next to him crying, too.
Job’s comforters say things just keep getting worse.
Starting over won’t be easy as pie—
or as the Chinese say, easy as
cooling wontons.

Part 4—The Rainbow

If someone breaks your trust, you feel deep-seated
anger. Can an Imagi-Nation sustain
you? Let no one cause you to lose hope,
to crush your cooking pots and burn your boats.
Let the scavengers know the world holds as
much ant flesh as human flesh.

Survivors Walk in Battleground Park

2008-01-07T15:29:00.000-05:00

And the pale girl in the wig plays
the cancer card for Radio Nueva Vida.
Their dj spins live media sympathy
like cotton candy for the crowd gathered
at the registration shelter.

A bugle calls in the distance—
ironic anthem to her heroism today.
Confederate re-enactors overtake us
on their own shank’s mares, trot off
to the first historic skirmish of the day,
saber tips furrowing the ground behind them.

What a story of denial we make—
the survivors troop past beds of yellow tulips,
wearing t-shirts emblazoned with
the face of the ingénue,
who will be as cured of her innocence
as a country ham.

It was as if we’d all become toad-eaters
for a medicine show trailing Sherman’s March—
as if we believed the white-haired gentleman
wasn't a fake and sold an elixir to cure anyone.

Our girl, exhausted now, sits on a bench
beneath the general’s statue—her bald head
shines with sweat, her wig balances on the bush
where she threw it.

Pinned down in crossfire or high-tailing it
in retreat, could those long-dead soldiers
have seen the beauty of these spring woods?
We want to see that beauty now in
the craven face of our Creator.

My Freedom Lawn vizzie

2008-01-01T14:47:00.001-05:00

http://www.vizzvox.com/stories/9CQcxZrhrQgH601fms

Lines Written Near the Lawrence Ranch, Taos, New Mexico Vizzie

2007-11-27T19:07:00.000-05:00

http://www.vizzvox.com/stories/9C6evN2MPZmhF01fms

October Queen vizzie

2007-11-22T11:57:00.000-05:00

http://www.vizzvox.com/stories/fnHRLMMNzmkZk02fms

Quidnunc vizzie

2007-11-12T15:54:00.000-05:00

http://www.vizzvox.com/stories/fncOmBK9uS49002fms

Quidnunc (What Now)

2007-10-25T19:28:00.000-04:00

Just to hear it say yes, maybe instead of no,
occasionally I ask my town something
obvious, something that simply is—
like... is that bulldozer idling beside a pile
of smoking pasquinades and a large hole
on a downtown demolition site,
is that cardinal singing like Robert Johnson atop
a section of busted up chain-link fence on the corner,
is that guy (that would be me) in a parking lot
trying to balance liquor boxes
and open his car door—bless his heart—
about to end his longueur in this southern town.

It would be easier if these old, vinyl-façaded buildings
stopped telling us about ourselves, these old one-way
streets stopped going where they think we need to go.
Then the rat at the dumpster—so hard
to poison because he only sniffs
at the bait, remembering what made him sick—
could pack his bags and bear witness somewhere else,
the butchered trees along Elm Street —
that dropped their leaves over the old-timers
in the churchyard—could let this town forget
the shady place it used to be, the circle of
its conspirators barely making an arc anymore.

Already bats by the hundreds pour from
an abandoned cotton mill into the tale
of the dusky sky, and Hamburger Square’s
streetlights stain the happy-hour crowd like verdigris
on ancient statuary, and the moon
seems notched with the witness marks of favorite sons
who never leave, yet claim to search
every highway for buddhas to kill.

How lovely to begin again with you
now that we’ve started—
so in love have we been with the moment
between going and not going—
how much time we have wasted trying
to rid ourselves of now.

House-Painting on Liberty Road

2007-08-20T10:32:00.000-04:00

Of all the old houses still standing—
blurred, alligatored, crumbling—
on the outskirts of my memory,
when even Weatherbeater paint from Sears
guaranteed to capture, transform, and process
the flow of sun and weather through 1996,
whatever I knew about that one’s
last occupants—friends of my grandfather—
preaching apocalypse, matter chaos,
and heat death,
I heard in their hallelujahs and amens
over my paint-spattered radio
playing the Stones’s Gimme Shelter.

Of all the ladders I raised under
open cornices and brackets—
my weight a bouncing pressure on the rungs
angled against the rock garden wall
and buckled German siding—whatever
I learned about the poor people
who lived in such a ruin,
I glossed over while perched between my myth
of home and their New Jerusalem,
an anchorite wedged into the cliff-face
of the second storey, scraping and painting
the palimpsest of a twenties Craftsman
dissipated and diffused to its
most disordered state.

I was always taken in by the work
on the ladder— scraping down
to old-growth oak, brushing on the hillbilly
chrome of polymer paint—
rather than the nothing that seemed to happen
below me in the hardscrabble of their life.
Of sixty year-old paint flake storms
and blinding fogs of space-age spray rising
over the mast of that reef-wrecked vessel—
even as sea hags and backwoods teasers
stood at the kitchen screen-door and plied me
with Cheerwine and Mountaindew.
Whatever life on the ladder I had
was compromised as I leaned into
the pock-marked skin of
that collapsing organism— smelling
its sour sweat and foul breath,
calculating the exponential growth
of its wasp population whose vespiaries
in the eaves swelled to the size of sunflower heads.

Even as solitary life on the ladder
brought windows around occasionally
for me to trim,
filled with candlelight panes of bubbled glass,
I imagined I looked into a darkened room
and saw a cradle built like the house
in miniature and the child’s sleeping face
showed a perfect peace,
but what I really saw was a dirty
toddler in sagging diapers—
part Cherokee, part Black— standing in
a catbox, crying for her life.

We're Not in Paris

2007-07-16T10:43:00.000-04:00

We’re not in Paris so much as we’re in
our story about Paris.

Lost in the nightlessness of midsummer’s eve,
in the lost arrondissement of the honey moon,
every cobblestone Rue de Debauche
murmurs like Baudelaire’s L’homme ivre d’une
umbre qui passes—Men, crazed with shadows
that they chase—

every Musee des Arts Mort enshrines works
so famous we can’t see a face, a mountain,
a flower any other way—
it’s like God himself was an impressionist—
haunting us as we stumble through our
second sleepless night.

It is the dream of lovers.
It is the story of women who wash
their faces in tonight’s fallen dew,
hoping to become more beautiful—
their beauty the passé partout to the only
thing that really matters.

What art will hold them?

Whatever croissants the boulangers bake,
whatever oldies the metro musicians cover,
whatever promises the sidewalk sex workers dangle—
snap the photos and pass them by.

We breathe out the slow le sigh of Sartre’s ennui,
dissolve into the anonymous crowds
along the boulevards,
write our own billet doux to Paris
over petite dejeuner in the morning.

French Cathedral Ennui

2007-07-07T08:38:00.000-04:00

Kneeling, I feel the sun come through my high
windows, long shadows fall around my feet.

I rub my face on the sky, trying to wake up
or find comfort in some old worry.

Fallen angels peel off my walls like flecks
of dead skin.

If I could slowly melt away—a dune
flattened by the wind—stop like a clock
whose parts had worn out, end like a song dying
in the throat of its singer.

Hands keep shoring me up against the rising
tide of some old fear.

I want to bolt my doors and keep them out.

My back aches from the infernal dampness
of this region and five hundred years
of arched meditation.

My God—to stretch out on this rocky ground.

Fear of life keeps my head pointed upward,
the heaven of a stony design on my face.

Untitled Rothko

2007-06-03T14:09:00.001-04:00

God made everything out of nothing. But the nothing shows through.
--Paul Valery

Blackness—like a pit grave in the middle of the canvas—swallows their failures, unburdens them of their victims.

Many years of image storms—each might have been a place to hide—and then his signature style of clarified silence—a loneliness washing over flat fields of sunlit or clouded color.

The painter crouches—brush dripping on his shoes—in front of a new world and lets it draw him in like a breath. In his ear, the voice of Fra Angelico whispers, The artist must be a thief and steal a place for himself on the rich man’s wall.

Jewel-toned bands of ruby and emerald like unrolled bolts of seamless cloth—threads vibrating over the abyss.

Old worlds of woe—in their blood-stained rags—decompose grain by grain, blown by the wind until mountains flatten.

If he could stand in the spaces between losses and still be himself, if he could find the windy dissonance between his world and theirs, if he could keep method from overwhelming beauty, they might not look for The Next Big Thing but become engulfed in the sea of their own tears.

They might hear Arbeit Macht Frei rising up from the darkness and find new life—use a razor to cut ribbons from a shroud.

Incident on the Drive Home from Myrtle Beach, SC, 1964

2007-04-23T19:10:00.001-04:00

Burned almost beyond recognition,
three brothers—Solarcaine streaks like contrails
on their sun-poisoned faces— raised frogs
on each other’s blond forearms in the backseat—
the twelve year-old half-dreaming of the afternoon an ocean breeze
blew open a door, revealing Aunt Krystal to him
as she stepped out of her one-piece spacesuit.

He felt a high desert-like blast of hot air flowing through
the family sedan, imagined the voices of his parents obliterated
by sonic booms, gazed across the optical illusion
made by row after ragged cottonfield row
until his eyes crossed and suddenly he was going nowhere—
caught between old atomic bomb sites,
secret Defense Department airstrips, and giant sombrero billboards
announcing, SOUTH OF THE BORDER FIREWORKS
IS STRAIGHT AHEAD, AMIGOS!

More feelings of otherness invaded his imagination—
drew him on to meet for ice cream businessman Kenneth Arnold,
who vividly recalled June 24, 1947, when he saw
nine bright objects fly across the face of Mt. Rainier—
to greet with surprise at the local hobby store George Adamski
and a tall blond Venusian named Orthon— to listen between laps
at the YMCA pool as former astronaut Gordon Cooper offered
to show him confiscated negatives of flying saucers
intercepted on May 3, 1957. Yes, he had the feeling that behind
everything lay something else.

In the rear-view mirror, the robot-laser eye
of his old man angrily monitored a foreign sports car
overtake and pass them on the two-lane state road—
damn teenagers impatient with the bumper-to-bumper line
of station wagons, campers, and trucks towing boats— not caring
about security risks, but gathering speed,
gathering nerve, hooting and hollering as they passed car after car—
They’ll let us in—those slow fucks don’t wanna’ die!
imagining their plodding parents in each car they passed,
laughing as their road rocket—a red-lining blur—
disappeared in the uproad glare.

He witnessed no orange sodium vapor
or xenon glow from this close encounter, no cigar-shaped craft
tracing a rectangular pattern above Joshua trees
and abandoned Quonset huts in the Nevada desert
to show him they were shadowed by perils—
making you think he was pretty good
at distinguishing the risks likeliest to do them in,
but you’d be wrong. At twelve, he worried more
about alien abduction than death by motor vehicle.

The G-force of sudden braking caused his sleepy head
to rebound against the car seat. Traffic backed up in the middle
of nowhere, and flashing lights from an unseen source
froze in time the rural South Carolina tableaux:
a ruined tobacco barn in an overgrown field,
farmers leaning against their trucks at a gas station,
tv screens flickering in open-doored trailers,
an old black woman feeding her dog chained to a tree,

the wreckage we crept by eventually,
as uniformed technicians threw tarps over the evidence,
took photographs of something dead.

Recovering at Crabtree Falls

2007-03-17T11:54:00.000-04:00

Because my love of something I cannot name
has become my affliction—real as broken ribs,
as a missing limb—we drive by reservation casinos
glowing at night like war camps in the mountain valley,
ignore the rubber tomahawk crowd at Chimney Rock—
and instead stretch our legs where we walk down
in the earth to remember an eden.

Whether we believe it has been covered up
by layer upon layer of human need—
like cities built on top of conquered cities—
or didn’t listen well enough to grandparents’ stories
of a world that remained about the same
from the time they were born until the time they died—
this is a place to live in the moment—
like my Cherokee ancestors who had no word
for yesterday or tomorrow.

If only this place would let us shed our worn-out bodies,
descend into the gorge and stand purely spirit
by the river, help us accept that once inside a laurel hell
we can lose all sense of direction
without losing a sense of who we are,
delight in the carried sound of rushing water
without worrying we are nowhere near our destination,
slow down enough to find the best awkward footing
on stones and roots without wondering
why we are even going.

Aren’t we all just wounded animals needing
the sanctuary of healing mountain waters?
I found out the hard way that the steepest
descending path can always be steeper.

One time I saw a blind couple dressed for church
being led down the river gorge before Easter sunrise,
another time I saw a family clustered around
its young soldier home from war on one leg—
still awkward on his crutches—
but for every four hundred people I’ve ever met on this path,
I’ve heard sixteen will lose one or more toes,
five will lose one or more fingers, two will lose an arm
or a leg, one will lose even his head—
and lucky me—I had only to break a few ribs,
shed a couple of pounds of skin like a snake sloughing
last season’s self across a chestnut log.

Hearing in the roar of the falls a voice like my own—
yelling out my own dumb luck to have made it—
I want to cast an Elwood Perry spoonplug, watch the light
on its silver face as it arcs into the plunge pool,
or break the surface in the deep dive of my vicodin
and lie down in the river bed among forty rainbow trout.

Onward, Christmas Soldier

2006-12-29T11:20:00.000-05:00

To lure the sun back on the longest night of the year,
ancient people kept bonfires going.
I meet my neighbors in the street to place white bags filled
with a scoop of sand and a tea candle for the annual lumieres.
Before the night has ended, the battery-powered light
of three less-than-wise men will give out
in their snow cave near the summit of Mt. Hood.

I can’t tell you why the early Christians chose December 25th
to celebrate the birth of Jesus, but I can guess
it had something to do with the power of the flame,
a kindling of faith that a new day will come,
an angel’s sword flashing this way to heaven.
And I remember thirty years ago keeping a log on the fire
throughout those December nights in an old farmhouse we rented,
the covenant the body makes with the soul to carry the light,
the soul’s gift of the body’s brilliant nakedness.

Had you looked in a window one of those long, cold nights,
you would have thought you saw a young woman ironing
a coat of many-colors, a hooded robe of a monk,
a soldier’s camouflaged battle fatigues.
Had you followed her toy soldier as he joined the moon’s mad march
across the night sky, you would have felt their trackless arc,
the spear of their white light.

Look how the light in his eyes mirrors
the exploding roadside bomb of the sun at daybreak.
Watch as she vacantly sorts through the tangle of coat hangers
on the floor of an empty closet, drops the mouse king’s corpse
on the porch for the cats.
That sad season I was under house arrest for speeding
down Main Street, DUI at the wheel of the Steppin’ Out
Dance Studio Christmas float with nineteen people holding on
for dear life, and I did not care about the fly named Rudolph
buzzing against the parlor ceiling,
open a window to let it meet its frosty morning death.
And I did not smile when it dove into the fire and burned
to a crisp black star.
I did what a man does when he’s born several thousand years
too late for the Roman festival of Saturnalia.
I lit up like an altar boy and quietly got stoned.

Viewing Edward Hopper's "Gas, 1940"

2006-12-14T14:26:00.002-05:00

We see a country road cooling down, the joe-pye weeds
in the ditch and the sultry white pines.
It’s a little after sunset—deceptively beautiful—
a streak of pink hanging above the earth,
and the station attendant is a man doing the routine jobs
of locking the gas pumps for the night, dragging in the rack
of oil and wiperblades , a scene we knew well.
We can feel the loneliness of the station
in the way the road is empty of automobiles,
the way the light escapes the station’s open door,
inviting the man back inside.
Overhead, in the white sign’s spotlight,
a winged horse still soars, as though keeping watch
for motorists invoking the power of the gods.

All day something has kept the dials spinning
on the pump, dinging the owner’s tiny money bell.
All day something has pulsed through the black rubber
hose, making splashing sounds in the cars’ metal tanks.
All day some voice in the attendant’s head has stuttered,
Filler up? Check under that hood? That’ll be $1.80
for ten gallons of ethyl, sir. Come again.
And finally, some familiar euphoria has lifted off the man
at the end of the day, leaving his head achy, body sluggish.

Should he not think of the world as a vast engine,
purring along under his care?
Should he not want to climb behind the wheel
and joyride until the wheels fall off?
Or should we, the witnesses, point out how the artist
chose not to paint any oil rainbows or gas stains
in the white sand of the driveway, chose not to let us see
the attendant’s ash-gray face, his eyes dull as lead?
If we didn’t know who we’d become, we’d almost believe it.

Extended-Stay Motel Story

2006-11-12T12:39:00.000-05:00

Jim poised his killers between two existential fears—
that of remaining unknown and unseen,
and that of being known so completely they couldn’t escape.
Nothing quite like schadenfreude—
the fun of watching people make mistakes.
Only readers who weren’t suckers
could grin meanly.

And one hung-over morning, his second week
at a motel beside an interstate,
he recognized his neighbors for what they were—
a couple of gay men loudly fucking
on one side (tv evangelists who’d kill each other in bed)—
and, on the other, a Hispanic father and son making
cockle-doodle-do sounds in Spanish (cockfighters
who’d deep-fry anybody who didn’t pay up).

No wife or editor to tell Jim some day was not
a day of the week. Get the vomit draft down on paper.
There to sober his thoughts—Hopper’s honest sunlight
on a plain, white wall. For the first time
in a very long time, they were.

Then all day his mind had nowhere to rest—
like a man homeless and on the run,
like a man who never felt at home in his own skin.
But he made his killer wait for the gray-area moment.
More than anything, he made him want to face something
he was not really equal to—a real 3-D job—
dirty, dangerous, difficult.

More than peeling a chicken’s foot,
stuck with dried blood and sinew, from the windshield
of his stolen car—more than emptying a bottle of tequila,
sitting midway down the stairwell with a hooker
on a Jenny Crank diet—more than wanting to be
the next great ex-con author to grace Oprah’s couch.

October Queen

2006-10-23T18:06:00.000-04:00

It’s hard to deny how October makes a woman want
to burn a man because she can, as if by formula
or witchy spell—how the month is a room
in an old hotel with a mountain-view where their clothes drop off
like brightly colored leaves—how goth girls go berserk
at the county’s harvest fair in the big-box parking lot,
and strippers make their living in a dark tent on the edge of town,
setting fire to corn husk dolls between their thighs.

There is no carnie’s finnegan pin to make the season click
into gear and hum along like a ferris wheel—
only the decorative dried cornstalks, hay bales,
and pumpkins in front of the grocery store, disguising
something on sale that will slowly kill me—
only the shelf-shout of black blood and guts hanging slick
and stringy in yellow poplars on the Trail of Terror—
only fear’s effortless effort chilling every step
along my six miles of nerves as I go out of my way
to find the one I know I cannot find—only the infinity pool
of constellated stars plunging me to the bottom
of some older, darker anarchy.

A wine moon illuminates the nightly harvest of decay.
My poor heart wishes it were as dry and empty as a bean pod.
October, my queen, with your silky fingers of frost,
rip open the seed sack of the world, spilling what can never be
gathered up again, and I will tell you my ghost story
that ends with the lines, Know that the moon’s yellow face
is fixed in an old yellow book, the lord of every story
holds the shepherd’s crook. How many times will I look
through the eyes of your death mask
before the final walk down the hill, the final turn on my street
toward home?

Tawdry Sacrifice

2006-08-28T14:25:00.000-04:00

Nothing reminds me of you more
than the smell of a New Orleans whorehouse,
knee-deep in floodwater on a Sunday morning.
I inhale the polluted paradise of you:
the Indian tuberose of your hair overlaid
with the stale cigar smoke of industrial smog,
the Calabrian bergamot of your thighs smeared
with the pale semen of herbicidal run-off.

It is hard to believe that one morning a walk
through the dark streets of their doomsday vaults
will have power enough to bring you back to me.
But will their bottled specimens ever really satisfy
my longing? Why else would they build frozen arks
deep in the earth while glaciers melt?

I guess back in the day alchemists ignored
the standards of impossibility as much as we do now
(that carp grow naturally from reeds along the Nile,
mice hatch in sealed jars of spoiling wheat grains,
bees swarm from the horns of butchered bulls after
a few days)— the terrifying, blind logic of it.

Putting our money on today’s basement bettys—
Is that what round tables are doing to rescue you?
Is that what these natural alarms going off
are all about?—killer heat waves and super tornadoes,
colonies of mutant pests without predators,
diseases spreading unchecked by winter’s chill.
Is that what all the cruel fecundity of life
has been prophesying?

Southeast of Eden, behind the worst house
in the worst neighborhood in the worst town
of the worst country, is Darwin’s smelly little pond.
It slowly percolates a pre-biotic soup
of interstellar spores in the olive light
of someone else’s universe.

I could be buried here, an eco-warrior
bound hand and foot.
I am buried here.

Lines Written Near the Lawrence Ranch, Taos, New Mexico

2006-07-27T12:37:00.000-04:00

There is something wild in the night wind.
It roams sagebrush and pinon, plunges
through flowering arroyos, ahead of lightning
strikes over the Sangre de Cristos Mountains.

Maybe somewhere Trickster Coyote is peering into
Jackrabbit’s grassy nest, telling him to be strong,
the pain of being devoured won’t last longer than he
can stand: Then you will take on coyote muscle,
coyote blood, and see with coyote eyes, he says.
If it seems cruel, it is at least the truth.

Lawrence could have told this love story:
the solstice moon sacrificed,
the black-on-black pottery of the stars holding
its light, the mythic Avanyu snaking across the desert
toward the source of all waters, and the two of us
finding the trail we thought we’d lost.

For a week we imagine the small adobe—
five miles out a gravel road on a mountain— is ours.
Every breeze rifling our pages under the ponderosa pine
reminds us that this land has no need for words.

Like fire spreading across the high plains,
we try to write what burns down old growth,
makes black soil for green stalks to sprout.
Is this the phoenix moment he offers us?
Notebooks fill up with dangerous journeys,
untamable horses, and the trembling balance we risk.

If our Penitente deathcarts overflow with more corpses
from the past than we can bear, perhaps the grievance
of growing old alone will one day be ours.
That could be the worst that awaits us.

And then there you are, Lorenzo, like some masked
cacique holding out the ceremonial blade
dripping with your own heart’s blood.

Etaoin's Ring

2006-07-02T15:03:00.000-04:00

Nothing—in that hot room of burning metal with its globs
of greasy ink, half-drunk cups of coffee gone rancid,
buckets of cigarette butts, and loud linotype machines
of the newspaper—meant much to me at sixteen,
and everything was a lead slug in my brain, used for little
more than pulling punched Associated Press tapes, unknot
and roll them in case an editor wanted one set in type.

No inverted pyramids on the make-up dump of my workday,
no hooks in my composing stick to lure me, no story leads
that I could find buried in the hellbox.

But brass matrices fell through metal channels, liquid lead
poured into stacked molds, cooling lines of typed words
in reverse lay scattered on tables all around me.
It was as if the compositors—a cranky, unreadable bunch
of bastards to observe at a distance—lived to curse
over make-up stones, fight columns of type, headlines,
and photo engravings until they fit inside steel chases.

As a young writer, I taped a photo of Raquel Welch
to my second-hand Royal at home and called her my word whore,
my story slut, my news nymph—even though I found nothing
to write about in the mile of teletype tape I sorted everyday,
nothing in the stone-faced press men as they struggled
to put another paper to bed.

Change happens quickly and what seems improbable,
a matter of science fiction, is suddenly obsolete.
Like the short story Fredric Brown wrote back in the forties:
out of nowhere an artificially intelligent linotype machine
tries to take over the world. Only a precocious teen typesetter
thinks to feed the monster every possible Buddhist text
he could get his hands on. The moment of world crisis passes
when Linotype realizes that controlling anything is mere illusion.
The story hardly makes sense anymore.

That was the last summer anyone watched linotype men run
their fingers down the first two rows of their keyboards
and blame ETAOIN SHRDLU for their fuck-ups.
Nothing significant about that to me, nor that the word evil
shows up in the paper more than the word good.
But when heavy, gray words appear reversed in my dreams,
I imagine grabbing handfuls of cast-off lead slugs
from the hellbox and assembling them into stories
I could make into a life.

Tongue

2006-07-02T14:27:00.000-04:00

The way tongues lick and spar without
liquifying down to their chewy centers,
without shedding a drop of blood
or risking dementia in later years,
never fails to inspire sighs of longing,
quickening breath, and cries of love.

Who knew it’s the evolutionary cousin
of the octopus tentacle, so sinuously rolling
its goodies into bite-sized bolus,
and the elephant trunk, strongest muscle
for its size, ready to lift the heaviest
logs of rhetoric or the most delicate flowers
of poetry.

There you go: whistling for the dog to come home,
blowing bubbles in pink sugary gum, shoveling
spit down my throat so I don’t wake up
in a pool of drool every morning.
Just your pound of muscle, taste buds, and mucous
membrane that hardly change over a lifetime.
You are my ironman of orality, my steady eddie.

If only you weren’t the source of worn-out
metaphors—for what won’t come easily to mind
but so many feel is on your tip.
If only God hadn’t insinuated you into two
of His Commandments—that tempting name
in vain one, that satisfying false witness thing.
If only you weren’t the last muscle to stop
moving after death, making me wonder what
you will say—and to whom— without me.

On Hearing Jimi's Star-Spangled Banner, Georgia Speedway, July 4, 1970

2006-06-07T20:53:00.000-04:00

Anthem of Revolution, psychedelic pledge
of our youth, carrying in your machine gun distortions,
bursting bomb decibels, feedback choked screams,
our protests, our cries of love go over
the parched Georgia fields and pecan groves
with you.

Renew this living flag of dirty, hung-over,
runaway children of America—hippies,
bikers, students, Hare Krishnas, bare-breasted girls—
dancing here in this field, with jagged rhythms,
deconstructed improvisations, whose wind
of guitar riffs lifts us up.

Deliver this snake biting its own tail,
this tie-dyed, makeshift camp of refugees,
to the country of peace and love it imagines.

Where fathers shout, Don’t let the door hit you
in the ass on the way out, where leaders promise
that Vietnam is over yet send troops to Cambodia,
where Baptists call a monk’s self-immolation
a Buddhist barbecue,
what can truth and wisdom be.

Whose new nation gathered in the 115 degree heat,
beside a brown river, slow-moving miasma
of field discharge and industrial flush
this Fourth of July weekend,
welcomed cooling racetrack fire hose blasts
while sheriffs’ deputies smiled at our brave nakedness
shining like new peaches after a rain.
How could Gov. Madox arrest 150,000 peaches
in the state of Georgia.

Midnight whippoorwill of our generation,
whose call echoes through this festival in the pines,
can your music keep us from dancing,
our minds from building an invisible university,
bodies from living on light and dust,
meditations from focusing on nothing much.

Whose love brings us heroes then makes
them burn-outs, tragedies at twenty-seven.

Then the sky exploded in falling blue rivers
of independence day stars, shrieking firebirds
gold and green spiraling toward the moon,
and a sustained guitar note climbed the night sky,
a final taps-like warning.
No playing behind his back, no burning
his guitar tonight, Jimi unplugged and left
the stage, an after image in the darkness,
ground-thundering detonations
vibrating every eardrum every sternum.

3:35 pm - 4:35 pm, November 5, 1962 in Camelot

2006-06-07T14:10:00.000-04:00

(the only hour on record when no one died)

This is an eternal hour of a fall day with no promises
to keep that you know of, no one making predictions
or prophecies about it on television or the street
corner. It is perfect, November, afternoon,
but you will barely hear a long-haired girl sing
“Blowing in the Wind” and look across an empty
college lecture hall at one black student, alone
as she is, because you are not there, you are only
watching a secret service film clip shot from outside
the only open door in Mississippi.

And tall, silver trees, lining Pennsylvania Avenue
since Lincoln’s day, dropping their last leaves
in a light breeze, hardly seem like the ominous weapons
of a few days ago to you, opening at this hour
the French doors overlooking the wide lawn,
because in your atonement you are remembering
a similar day last year, sailing in a golden bay
with your arm around someone never coming back,
and without the cool air blowing through the doors
or line of black limousines entering the gates,
your brief daydreaming would go unnoticed
in the black and white paparazzi photos.

This is how you might have written about this hour—
several pages have been excised from your journal—
this capital sky clearer than Seattle’s Space Needle
vision of the future, this Aquarian news of a man
one day sailing off in a space ship to the moon
where no one has ever been turned away or died.

A Worshipful Company of Bakers

2006-05-18T09:09:00.000-04:00

Zombified, two white-capped bakers,
my dad and his father, shuffled into our kitchen
for morning coffee after their shift.
Like the ancient Greeks, my mom should give
them a slice of cake for the dog at the river,
or worry that sleep deprivation is
a tempting defense for crime in this state.

That school year, I drew a picture of an Egyptian
discovering leavened bread in 4000 BC.
He left a pot of gruel out for the sun god Ra,
wild airborne yeasts blew in from the Nile,
and the mystery mash started to bubble.

That’s pretty much how I began to rise.
A high school girl surprised a baker’s son
one morning with a howdy and the news:
Hon, we’ve got a little bun in the oven.

The bread of Wonder, of Little Miss Sunbeam,
of Holsum, of Merita, of Bunny,
the Twinkies of Hostess, the Pies of Moon,
the Cakes of Little Debbie, minus the wrappers,
filled my metal lunchbox each school day.
Culled hosts of my fathers.

While Dad tried to sleep, one eye open
like a duck, and dream up a better life,
Mom listened to women tell their hard luck
“Queen for a Day” stories. Her mother
taught her how, against the odds,
to achieve oven spring and a golden brown crust.
Emptying the hot pan, she felt
the vantage loaf of a forgiving heart.

Glory be to a worshipful company of bakers,
she prayed. For they prepare its body carefully,
roll away the pin of stone or wood, keep vigil
outside the tomblike oven throughout the night,
and in the morning give praise for it is risen.

Later on, our hard luck story might’ve
registered high on the applause meter.
Our brown house no longer looked like a house
made of bread. After work, Mom cracked open
a can of biscuits and bought day-old
loaves at the outlet store. She told me that children
who couldn’t be quiet and play in the yard
might be lead out into the woods and lost
like Hansel and Gretel. I learned to drop
the nightmare crumbs of want.

When my own child wakes from a bad dream,
I will tell her a worshipful company of bakers
makes hot cross buns full of grace every night.
I will hope her life rises like a flock of birds
above a harvest field of golden wheat.

Breaking Ball

2006-04-30T12:19:00.000-04:00

How great to believe that fried chicken
for early supper was a strike, Mom fussing
about clothes scattered on the floor
before a big game a ball.

Just listen to the whomp
against the brick wall of our house, my fastball
hitting the sweet spot inside the chalk-drawn
strike zone.

Just imagine the skinny, freckled southpaw,
aged eleven, hoping he’d be the next
Sandy Koufax. Will the day come when a baseball
seems like the ghost of someone
he used to know?

And what was Uncle Richard
thinking, even if egged on by my dad
who called him “the Babe”, when he grabbed
the catcher’s mit and squatted.

From the first pitch, I loved
a new game ball, skin soft as a pumpkin lily,
but not more than a ball in play,
discolored by dirt, grass stain, maybe even blood,
slightly warped by blunt trauma with
a blonde Louisville Slugger.

In my dreams I counted the miracle
of 108 waxed red cotton stitches: 108 to make
Hindu pitchers remember their mantra; 108 to
make Taoist pitchers thank their sacred stars; 108
to make Tibetan pitchers repent their evil deeds.

Every game the dirt pile
I would stand on in the middle
of the diamond felt like Mt. Olympus.

Every wind-up felt like being sucked up
in a tornado— pulling the right knee to the right
elbow, turning the chest
toward first, hiding the ball below
the left knee—
while riding a pogo stick.

In a vacuum, the terminal velocity
of a baseball and a body are the same.
Should I also throw my body in parabolic
kamikaze flight toward homeplate?

Get the hips free by pushing off
the front of the rubber. When the right leg stops
the torso, the left arm uncocks
like a pistol shot. Duchamp’s nude descending
the stairway from heaven should
have been a big league pitcher.

Then, resting my middle finger, like a lover,
inside the ball’s long seam,
I pulled down hard to make it rotate
thirteen times, and not reveal
its true nature— that it was a killer, that its color
was black—lights out—until
the final two-foot break.

In the front yard, we heard Sam
the Sham sing “Wooly Bully” on the kitchen radio.
Chicken sputtered in the frying pan.
And blood from the Babe’s nose flowed between
his fingers, dripped off
his white shirted elbows into the grass.

Old Woman at the Well

2006-04-17T09:55:00.000-04:00

If I never took Sunday walks with you
to the old home place, if I never held you over
the well’s wooden edge and guided the cool metal
dipper to your lips, if the shaft of darkness
wasn’t there in dreams for you to fathom,
then you might not feel the rough hole in the bucket
and worry about your unquenchable thirst.

Let me tell you about the sad little boy who was
your father.
He waited in the blazing sun with a dipper of
water for his mother picking tobacco to put food
on the table.
Every day she’d tie that boy to the windlass
of her spirit and lower him into the merciful
darkness.
He’d sing out the damn cat’s in the well again.
He’d touch with blind fingers the pickaxe claw
marks of the old men who dug down to the deep
water.

Our bucket runneth over, saith the preacher.
But the dirt seeped through our pores, because
the land found its level in us.
We wove pine roots over our heads, stacked up
walls of white flint.
There is a story in the Bible about Jesus asking
a woman to draw some water for him.
I don’t think it happened that way, but still
we should learn to have wary faith.
There is a sun to parch us, and underground
a river of living water to carry us to the end of the row.

My memory floods back then sinks heavily to
the bottom of the rope’s reach.
The splashes of light break the black circle, the rope
coils again around the windlass effortlessly.
When you poison a man’s well, be very sure
of what you’re doing, be very sure.

After “The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove”

2006-03-26T13:35:00.000-05:00

“Let no one hope to find contemplation an escape
from conflict, from anguish or from doubt.”
-- Thomas Merton

There’s a root like the root of a mountain
that runs out radially from the bamboo’s heart:
my old man— no Taoist— had little use
for bamboo but couldn’t rip it out of family
ground, even with his John Deere tractor.

The jade skin, stretching between nodes,
reminded me to be virtuous,
the hollow core between septa encouraged
me to be humble, yet its fruit could bring
rats and plague to ancient China, and maybe
to our North Carolina farm.

It’s as if I’d forgotten how the seven graybeards
toasted the Tao of “presence in absence”,
the yin within the yang, and if I’d never left,
the old farmhouse might’ve become a shrine
protected by its own sacred bamboo.

After a hundred years, an entire stand can flower
and die, starving all the pandas on the mountain.
And the same sprouts, popping through
the ground on a quiet spring night, delighting
the gathered devotees, on another night
can pierce a prisoner’s body, stretched
and staked out above them.

The clump brought by an artist-friend
in a metal bucket took hold in red clay
and inspired the artist in me with its elegant
rhythm in the wind, its shimmering color
in the southern sun. The threat of foreign
growth was too much for my warlord father,
raised to poison what he couldn’t control.

Like the emperor’s court, hiding corruption
and intrigue, the sanctuary of the bamboo grove
can hold a nest of giant hornets in its roots,
ready to sting the heads and rumps
of farmers and wisemen alike.

Is that what caused Ji Kang to hope alchemy
might transmute base metal into gold,
the two Juans to lap up wine from a wooden bowl
with the neighbor’s pig, Liu to walk around
naked in his home, which he considered to be
the whole universe?

The chi of twisted bamboo held
the great Min River Bridge for a thousand years.
The breath of Liu’s bamboo wife,
that beautiful basket cylinder he embraced
on sticky summer nights, cooled his sleep
all of his long life.

If the three nameless ones left the grove,
the changes of nature showed them
the path onward.

Something I read in the I Ching helped me
divine my own rootlessness: “A flight of
dragons without heads. Good fortune.”

And the silk fan and screen artists painted
the truth like lover’s tricks, but these lines,
written on green bamboo strips and sewn
together with sinew as a book,
may lead some reader to see behind
dragon leaves.

Committee Work

2006-03-16T15:22:00.000-05:00

He imagines outside his building
a tree full of magpies still
roosting in the middle of the day.

Inside no coups or shake-ups
planned, no Mein Kampfs about
to be written. The seated slap on
My Name Is ___ tags, office geishas
serve up today’s numbers.

Old business follow-ups:
motivational posters pulled down;
studies show they have negative
effect on morale.

“Whatever happens in Vegas
stays in Vegas” no longer an acceptable
reason for maxing out
the company expense account.
Outrageous.

Token IRA contribution set up
to compensate employees for
the 2.4 seconds it takes
the government to spend
their lifetime tax payments.

Promising new business: R&D
brainstorms entire population
of US could fit into ten major league
stadiums in liquid form.

Cutting-edge research to begin on
products and services appealing
to twelve-fingered humans who will
achieve majority status by 2412.

Secure six golden handcuffs,
extend seven golden handshakes.
Notify legal.

Employee #131313, John Blackard,
scheduled for interview without coffee
Christmas Eve. No severance package.

Nothing else for the good
of the order; everything appears
copasetic. Meeting adjourned.

Circling the parking lot in
his head, magpies chase and peck
bad dogs with chicken carcasses
wired around their necks.

Santa Barbara Shopping Party

2006-03-09T16:36:00.000-05:00

While I’m pissing out an overpriced
chardonnay, I overhear nine-year old Finn
fearlessly talking to some stranger.
I turn around to find a homeless guy
with tattoos covering his skinny arms
wetting his long, greasy hair at the sink,
while our friend’s son, sporting his first Mohawk
(spoils of a battle his parents decided
not to fight this summer), seems to find it
harder to stifle a war-yelp with every word
the guy says: “Dude, go slow on the tattoos;
you might mistake a girl’s name or a dragon
for something they’re not.” I can see
young Finn wasn’t buying it—just more
adult crap. When I say that only one in five
people with a nautical tattoo had ever
been on a boat, the homeless guy laughs.
Back in the restaurant courtyard, packed with
people attending a wine-tasting,
Finn’s mother and my new wife talk on
about the fun of impulse shopping and
the many things in life we don’t really
get to choose, as the boy pretends to bury
the hatchet in his mother’s blonde head.

A Book of Matches

2006-02-24T13:59:00.000-05:00

will not be catalogued or found by
Library of Congress classification.
Although a kind of paperback— good for
a little light reading— it probably

will be overlooked for Oprah’s book club
and the Times bestseller list. Could it have
a story to tell? Ephemera of
consumer culture, hardly worth noticing

until a man lights a woman’s cigarette
with it, writes a phone number on it,
puts it in a pocket. Then it becomes
part of a story, a detail remembered

about a certain time, a certain place.
Whoever opens this book expects
a brilliant beginning, a consuming
plot, and a tossed-off ending: a man may

be sitting at a bar, staring for a long
time at a matchbook next to his glass before
absent-mindedly picking it up. Here
the author perhaps tells us the matchbook

becomes a door, the way everyday objects
open up and allow us to wander
deep within ourselves. Anyone else sees
the cover with some advertisement,

which he untucks and retucks behind the sand
striking bar: did anyone actually
go back to the “World’s Most Romantic
Restaurant—Shangri-La” in Sisseton,

South Dakota, “Learn Basic Computer
Programming at Home” and become one of
the “Experienced Men Earning $7-12K
Per Year”, or see “Bill and Fay” at “Southside

Pool Hall” in Caldere, Kansas, “You’ll Like Their
Beer”? Opening the cover, he finds stapled
inside two rows of ten matches—dipped red
phosphorous heads, cardboard tinders and

handles—that can be torn out of the book
to strike, followed by the familiar scratch
and sizzle in the dark, the comforting
small glow inside a cupped hand. Twenty

little tales to tell, he imagines, each
one beginning a story: one to light
a joint an old high school buddy offers
him, one to illuminate a forking

path on a moonless mountain, another
to light a candle beside a bed where
his lover has waited for him.
Not the light of a firefly, a star,

the eye of a cat, but the spark of
something just as brilliant, something
that makes him feel there is
no match like love.

Her Book of Hours

2006-02-16T18:59:00.000-05:00

1.

Her marriage had been like the Euplectella,
a tropical sponge of transparent silica
columns and calcium lattice,
a protective cylinder for tiny bioluminescent
shrimp who enter and feed on whatever passes by—
and each other—until they are too large to leave.
Finally, only two remain in their glass house,
mating and consuming their own offspring
to stay alive.

2.

An old survivor waiting in the maw
of darkness, she dips raw calamari pieces—
cold, slick, slightly sticky slivers of meat—
in a special marinade and has a cocktail
before her guests arrive. She looks forward
to the silence of serious conversations amid
the general party noise, the aquatic echoes and
shimmering reflections from the surface.
She always thought that distraction—
not meditation—would become the abiding
habit of her life.

3.

The night rises like the ocean at high tide,
filling up the kitchen window with sand and shell detritus.
She remembers how the Sixties
filled her with a kind of madness—
she was called the Kim Novak of Old Irving Park—
how the half-drunken company men,
with their bourbon breath, their beard stubble rough
on her neck, their groping hands
in the poolside torch light,
excited her.

4.

Our faded beauty lights lamps of Himalayan
salt crystals, balancing positive and negative
ions, bearing the burden of balance
against the turning night tide—
and the burden of memory suddenly dredges
to the surface the time he pulled all of her lingerie
from the bureau, cut it up with a fishing knife,
then sailed off to Maui with his young office-wife.

5.

The lucid interval of romantic love passes
as she leafs through the jewel-toned, postcard
illuminations in her life’s book of hours
and nibbles a sprig of mint,
the bitter taste of his sex on her tongue.
If it is the Hour of Vespers,
it is the Hour of Solace—or at least
the Hour of Mohitos—to wash away what none
of us would choose.

6.

Against her still wet skin,
the silky antique kimono reminds her to dress
before her Spiritual Cinema Circle friends arrive.
The film tonight features Azurus,
the Polynesian tantric siddha who reads soul
frequencies and charts horoscopes.
Is it fated that her grand-daughter will ask
for breast implants for high school graduation?
Of course she remembers the urgency
to be desired when who you are is not enough.

7.

To leave her children a few beliefs
instead of the ruins of an old courage,
an empty palace beneath the sea—
is that too much to hope?
Let them find wild manzanita,
purple jacaranda, and a view of Big Sur—
like the one from the deck of Nepenthe,
crowded with seekers,
drunk on the wine of God.

Her Eyes

2006-01-28T16:53:00.000-05:00

They are blue meadows
where lovers meet in deepest shade,
they are heirloom jewels
of rarest sapphire made:
they peacefully hold her face in place.

One seizes Johnny’s heart
but his puffed-up reason dismisses,
one winks at him in his dreams
and offers him mind-numbing kisses:
oh, how they sweetly hold her face in place.

One swears to slay him
for the impertinence of his pursuit,
one promises him sanctuary
as long as his love is resolute:
with justice and grace they hold her face in place.

They are a heroic couplet
of blue bedroom secrets untold,
they lead to the threshold of the inner eye’s
fragrant, fleshy folds:
they mystically hold her inner and outer faces in place.

They are sometimes veiled by the warp
and woof of her emotions,
they stitch a winding sheet around the past
and sail it flaming upon the ocean:
they loyally hold her face in place.

She has more eyes than your
average girl--I always said,
you’d better believe she has eyes
in the back of her head:
lord, how they never fail to hold her face in place.

I know I’d better be on my toes
when both her eyes slide
left of her nose,
then I’m in for a bumpy ride:
jeepers! how I wish they’d hold her face in place.

Problem Patrons

2005-12-23T16:37:00.000-05:00

Morning—
You are working at your desk
When the security alarm sounds:
A woman is squeezing past the checkout gate.
What would you do?
Would you ask her if she has been in tight
Situations before and did she get away?
Who hasn’t felt they deserved more
And shitty when the break they were expecting
Didn’t happen.
How desperate do we have to get
Before we panic and make a run for it?
When it hits us hard— the breakup, the lost job,
The lump— we may be anywhere,
Even in a library with a book in our hands,
And all we want to do is find
The nearest exit and get outside ourselves.
All we want to do is take a deep breath.

Noon—
You are rounding up unshelved books,
And you see a young woman in a study carrel
Razor-blading prints out of an expensive art book.
She defiantly stares back at you.
What would you do?
You see the straight-line scars on her arms,
The pierced nose, eyebrows, lips,
Then tongue which she points in your direction
And vibrates before telling you that you can’t possibly
Understand. She needs beauty in her life,
And you try to remember what Picasso said:
Something about art destroying beauty?
Ask her.

It is late afternoon.
You are working the reference desk alone.
A man doesn’t give you enough information
To let you know what he is looking for.
Your questions make him angry.
He begins to shout obscenities
And threatens you.
What would you do?
You feel the world slow down,
That you can dodge the flecks of spittle
Spraying from the man’s mouth.
You want to tell him it will be alright
If he sits in this chair and looks out the window
At the cherry blossoms blowing across
The courtyard and into the street,
If he remembers someone he loves waiting
For him to help them bear their sorrow.

Evening—
You are shelving books.
As you round a corner, you see a man
Take something from a backpack on the floor,
Slip it into his pants pocket,
And walk rapidly away.
What would you do?
You follow him and find him sitting
In the stairwell, looking at the letter he didn’t
Leave behind, weeping and telling you
About a daughter who won’t talk to him
Since the divorce. She mustn’t know he followed
Her to the library and watched her study,
She is so grown up now
Ready to go to college.
He isn’t just another dirty old man
Hanging out at the public library,
He wants you to understand what it feels
Like to lose a daughter.

Near closing-time:
The woman again, crying and distraught,
Finally tells you that when she was looking
For a book in the stacks a man took
Out his penis.
What would you do?
You ask her where did this happen,
And she holds out her hand.
You ask her to describe the man,
And she wants you to know his penis
Was smooth except for the veins along
Its shaft. The tip was purplish pink
And spongy while the balls were
Covered in a down of red hair
And were lighter than they looked.
Yes, but which way did he go, you ask--
When you know there was no man.

Giving Bad News

2005-11-29T15:14:00.000-05:00

Tell people bad news
they already know:

Like marauders taking
what little is left,
the days of peak oil
are upon us. We hoard
water and a few precious
cans in cold, dark houses.
We see on the horizon
towers of black smoke,
signalling the death
of the last city.

Repeat bad news
again and again:

The joke is dead:
a man stops walking
into a bar; St. Peter isn’t
waiting at a pearly gate;
the blonde has a Ph.D. now.
Laugh-tracks goad
us to find the humor
in fake-news shows,
wanna-marry-a-millionaire?,
extreme makeovers,
celebrity cook-offs,
and Seinfeld re-runs
we’ve seen a hundred times.

Be sorry about bad news:

With a heavy heart,
I must tell you
That car owners, especially
those who own Hummers,
Dodge minivans
or retro-styled vehicles
and cover them with bumper
stickers, score fourteen points
lower on IQ tests.

Tell people bad news
they’re going to find out
anyway:

When you are retching up
your guts in bloody clumps,
remember that I told you
that seventy-nine percent of
all drugs approved
by the FDA cause nausea.

Tell people bad news
they probably won’t find out
anyway:

Men, while we’ve been busy
killing, pillaging, raping
and causing havoc in the name
of God and country,
an insidious network of geneticists
has quietly spread the word
that the days of the Y
chromosome are numbered.
What makes us male
has recently been described
as “the most decayed,
redundant, and parasitic
of genetic accessories”.

Tell people news that isn’t
bad but might sound
bad to them:

Our eternal dissatisfaction is
a fact of Darwinian evolution.
Soon used to the very
things we once craved—
the sleek new shoes,
the hip new gadget,
the prestigious new car,
the sexy new lover—
they lose their luster,
and we take them for granted.
Their desirability
Wears off, we adapt,
and move on.
Ensuring our survival
for another day,
the thrill of the hunt
returns.

If you haven’t given people much
bad news in the past,
explain the change:

Now that federal agents have
the house surrounded, I want
you to know that one in twelve
Americans over twenty-one
has never paid taxes.

Don’t blindside
anybody:

I have some difficult
news to share with you,
which affects us all, but
I’m confident
we can weather
together,
so here it comes:
The typical kitchen sponge
is home to seventy-five
thousand kinds of
bacteria.

When explaining
the causes of bad news,
consider the stupidity
defense:

By the authority
of the President,
the federal government is
classifying documents
to be kept from the public
at the rate of one-hundred and
twenty-five
a minute.

Alternate Endings

2005-11-04T15:56:00.000-05:00

1.

Action painter Jon Blakart died yesterday at the age of eighty five while painting a nude of his wife Valentina in the garden of their Portland home. Made famous by the Reality Nude Series, permanently installed on its own floor of the Modern Museum of Art, in which the artist first painted his lovely wife in Sherwin Williams housepaint on kingsize canvas beds before live reality tv show audiences. His ashes will be mixed in housepaint and sprayed on family and friends at a celebration of his life tomorrow at noon in Portland Riverfront Park.

2.

Fifty year old John A. Blackard checked out on Cinco de Mayo around 9PM at the scene of an automobile accident on Horsepen Creek Road in Greensboro. The beloved middle school media specialist lost his life on his way home from a school event when his VW Fox skidded out of control on the rain-slick road. Authorities found in his home on Percy Street an unpublished manuscript that education experts are now saying will revolutionize the teaching of research skills at every level of learning. A Nobel Prize nomination for Mr. Blackard has also been rumored. Skin from his body will be tanned into leather covers for an undisclosed number of his books before he is interred next to his grandparents at Sedgefield Memorial Park next week.

3.

In his Jesus year, John Anthony Blackard was found poisoned to death by eating home-cooked meals laced with arsenic. CSI forensic experts have concluded that Mr. Blackard had enough arsenic in his body to kill the entire European rodent population responsible for the bubonic plague of 1641. His widow, Genevieve Blanche Blackard, is being held without bail until her marriages to eleven other murdered men around the world have been thoroughly investigated. He had one surviving daughter, Bonnie Raitt Blackard Pitt, who will remember her father for his lawnmowing.

4.

Twenty-two year old Juan Antonio de la Vera, known to his family as John Blackard, has been declared legally dead today. The award-winning poet disappeared somewhere in Bolivia over a year ago while on a Latin American book tour. His meteoric climb to fame in the international poetry world began when he re-invented himself as “Juan Antonio de la Vera”, the illegitimate son of freedom fighter Che Guevara, and began writing political poems advocating the overthrow of all capitalist and imperialist regimes. Even though undocumented sightings in Argentina, Columbia, and Cuba keep his fans’ hopes alive, his business-minded parents filed today for a death certificate in order to begin collecting the millions in royalties his books continue to earn.

5.

Seven year old Johnny Blackard went home to Jesus yesterday when a neighbor’s cat ran out in front of his speeding Western Auto two-wheeler. The animal-loving youth slammed on brakes and was thrown over the handlebars in an attempt to spare Mrs. Vail’s tabby, Mittens. Johnny’s little league baseball teammates have built a roadside memorial out of cast-off construction site plywood and Twinkies wrappers in his honor. Friends of this darling little boy are encouraged to send their donations to his favorite charity, The Three Stooges Pension Fund.

My Freedom Lawn

2005-10-13T15:52:00.000-04:00

“A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full
hands…
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition…”
-Walt Whitman

is full of chickweed and wild violets
the way a child’s mind is full of games.
I say to my neighbors, Let’s play hide
and seek or roller bat sometime,
but all I get are sighs and headshakes,
their leashed dogs pulling nervously
past the waist-high wilderness
that surrounds our house.
To think that a blend of fescue
and rye, unmowed and unedged, says something
definable about the self
is a riddle I answer to suit myself.
To think that a plot of lawn grass
is “me” to neighbors is more than I hoped for.
I give my yard its freedom as a father
gives a child a box of crayons and paper,
hoping its imagination will discover
Eden.
The lawn is not the glacier nor the ocean
that once covered the ground here
with their secrets.
The self is not a green pasture to lie
down in nor a graveyard of unmarked regrets.
You can’t step in the same lawn twice,
or so they say.
If my neighbors erect molded concrete yard art
and birdhouses, must I do the same?
What would it be like to find a satyr
in every blackberry thicket,
a wood nymph behind every kudzu leaf?

Dead-line

2005-07-04T19:12:00.001-04:00

When truth comes out
like gravity’s jaws yanking bodies out of the air;
when truth comes out and starts a suicide dive

they can’t pull out of, and it makes a hole
much smaller than the authorized footage shows;
when truth comes out
like a cloud carrying paper dust and screams
out to sea;

when truth comes out
like inmates of the asylum clammering
at the gate,

I want the old woman hanging out wash,
the gardener digging up bulbs,
the salesman driving to his appointment,
the general weighing strategies,
to hear holy voices asking:
what form of surrender are the children
holding in the cups of their hands?

And slowly realize that the life they lived
has been re-written in the history books
as strange new birds flock to their trees,
and I try to clean your thigh smeared with birth-blood,
and I try to tape the broken window against the cold,

and I think of each plot as a stew we must eat,
and each building of the city
casting shadows like fallen tears.

When it finishes with us, I hope
they still carry the emptiness
of the betrayed wherever they go;
a curse will follow them a thousand miles.

When it finishes with us, I won’t know
what country I’m flying over,
I won’t know whose eyes are shining in the moonlight.

Wedding poem, May 14, 2005

2005-05-17T19:36:00.000-04:00

Crossing Over

That’s what love is like. The whole river
is melting. We skim along in great peril,

having to move faster than ice goes under
and still find foothold in the soft floe.

We are one another’s floe. Each displaces the weight
of his own need. I am fat as a bloodhound,

hold me up. I won’t hurt you. Though I bay,
I would swim with you on my back until the cold

seeped into my heart. We are committed, we
are going across this river willy-nilly.

No one, black or white, is free in Kentucky,
old gravity owns everybody. We’re weighty.

I contemplate this unfavorable aspect of things.
Where is something solid? Only you and me.

Has anyone ever been to Ohio?
Do the people there stand firmly on icebergs?

Here all we have is love, a great undulating
raft, melting steadily. We go out on it

anyhow. I love you, I love this fool’s walk.
The thing we have to learn is how to walk light.

William Meredith