Honeybees
I’ve felt myself changed simply walking
into shade along a street; I’ve come suddenly
upon the scent of snapdragon or heard
a distant car crash and found my every thought
stalled at the gate. And when I read
that honeybees are dying in thousands,
an epidemic no one can explain, I wondered,
Have I forgotten something? Who am I now?
There are theories, there are whole histories passing away,
but I can’t describe them. So, from the next table,
bits of conversation break into my soliloquy
or my neighbor’s phone rings through the walls
and I join a dialogue with a stranger. To call any of it
a change of scenery or costume is to misunderstand.
The world is not a stage and the honeybee
is not the soul it once symbolized. This is why
I’m fascinated by bricked-in windows,
old tenement buildings throughout Jersey City
with their view closed up, so I daydream
about who, on a hot summer day, leaned on that sill
breathing in the confusion of car fumes and flowers,
himself daydreaming until his elbows ached
and he remembered there was a clogged drain
in the bathroom and he turned back,
pausing for his eyes to adjust to the dark room.
(First published in The Louisville Review, No. 68)
______________
The Risk of Listening To Brahms
I like action movies for the same reason
I like Brahms, or undiluted scotch,
the constant flux of the sea,
or the sun’s light and heat stripped down
to raw fire, to the burning sine qui non,
like the first time I fired a gun and felt
deliriously naked and in that denuded moment,
remembered what I was chasing after when
as a teenager, without telling anyone,
I hopped on a bus for Philadelphia
and checked into the first hotel,
struggling to dodge those who knew me
to find if I wasn’t something more
than they expected, or could become
something other than they could know,
thrilled by the risk and uncertainty, the same
as when I hiked a mountain without water
on a humid summer afternoon,
trudging deeper into heat exhaustion,
the nausea stopping me every twenty feet
to gather strength from the pleasure
of wondering if I would make it home.
(First published in RATTLE, Summer 2009)
______________
Crickets
The sound of crickets is the distance
between our childhoods: even one
of those saws in the dark keeps you awake,
while it sings me to sleep, and even more
pushes me up through the summer leaves
into the green dreams of youth and clarity,
when my belief in vision was harder
and stronger than the rocks in the field.
Days in the summer of 1984, I entered that field
to sit by the lake where dragonflies
strafed the reeds, mosquitoes punctured
flashes of sunlight and mallards overhead
dragged their shadows through the water.
I thought, this is how a mind works,
even in the dark, when bats come out,
feeding on what floats to the surface of a day,
because that is what night is:
the thin line at the top that bends light
and changes everything. For that summer
my best friend died and became
another rock buried in a field, another spot
where crickets, all night, hack, and saw,
and cut away the differences between us.
(First published in The Same, Vol. 8, No. 1)
______________
Reading for Pleasure
I sometimes — no, often — have to say things out loud
to understand them because that voice in my head
doesn’t sound like me, doesn’t know that words
have hard textures like a canvas bag or wool sweater
that need to be rubbed roughly to make sense and he
is a too clean-shaven idea about me to really get
what I’m about, with flaky skin that crusts around my nose
when I don’t wash regularly, roughage shading my cheek
on days without a razor and how wise and forgiving
the mere rhythm of language can be, like a stress ball
that’s more comforting tossed in the air than squeezed,
feeling its heft and fall, its body slapping the palm when it
comes back down, as all things do, even stinging, as if to blast
the lines in the hand and reroute them, change the schedule,
the mapping and the simple work that a hand can do, like
pointing through a window or beyond the anchoring ground,
past familiar oceanic weights and measures, toward something
like an interruption, as when we reclined on a beach at midnight
and one flash of bioluminescence hyphenated the breakers
making the dark into a thick scribble of text, where an aqueous
editor tested the buoyancy of each rewrite, and we sat back,
silent the rest of the night, watching for the next revision,
mindless of the final version and who, in the end, would own it.
(First published in Upstreet 6)
______________
Bioluminescence
Old philosophers would call this look melancholia,
but I see in this photo of my wife thinking
weathers of competing beauty,
someone who can be in two places at once:
there on the couch, leaning into the cushion folds
and somewhere else focused on the unseen,
beyond the clock’s exhausting rap,
working an idea like dough into the necessary bread.
All moments of clarity narrow like this,
the periphery dimmed as in a Rembrandt,
his “Philosopher in Meditation” sitting in a shaft of light
as if at the bottom of a well, because the profound
leads into dark places, like the ocean floor where
the only light comes from the bodies of fish
swimming through its miles of perpetual night.
(First published in Askew, Issue #10, Spring/Summer 2011)
______________
Poems on the Web
Turpintine
(Adirondack Review, Fall 2010, Volume XI, No.2)
______________
How a Bridge is Built
(Waccamaw, No. 7, Spring 2011)
______________
Birdwatcher & Secret Door
(Loch Raven Review, Winter 2009, Vol. 5, No. 4)
I’ve felt myself changed simply walking
into shade along a street; I’ve come suddenly
upon the scent of snapdragon or heard
a distant car crash and found my every thought
stalled at the gate. And when I read
that honeybees are dying in thousands,
an epidemic no one can explain, I wondered,
Have I forgotten something? Who am I now?
There are theories, there are whole histories passing away,
but I can’t describe them. So, from the next table,
bits of conversation break into my soliloquy
or my neighbor’s phone rings through the walls
and I join a dialogue with a stranger. To call any of it
a change of scenery or costume is to misunderstand.
The world is not a stage and the honeybee
is not the soul it once symbolized. This is why
I’m fascinated by bricked-in windows,
old tenement buildings throughout Jersey City
with their view closed up, so I daydream
about who, on a hot summer day, leaned on that sill
breathing in the confusion of car fumes and flowers,
himself daydreaming until his elbows ached
and he remembered there was a clogged drain
in the bathroom and he turned back,
pausing for his eyes to adjust to the dark room.
(First published in The Louisville Review, No. 68)
______________
The Risk of Listening To Brahms
I like action movies for the same reason
I like Brahms, or undiluted scotch,
the constant flux of the sea,
or the sun’s light and heat stripped down
to raw fire, to the burning sine qui non,
like the first time I fired a gun and felt
deliriously naked and in that denuded moment,
remembered what I was chasing after when
as a teenager, without telling anyone,
I hopped on a bus for Philadelphia
and checked into the first hotel,
struggling to dodge those who knew me
to find if I wasn’t something more
than they expected, or could become
something other than they could know,
thrilled by the risk and uncertainty, the same
as when I hiked a mountain without water
on a humid summer afternoon,
trudging deeper into heat exhaustion,
the nausea stopping me every twenty feet
to gather strength from the pleasure
of wondering if I would make it home.
(First published in RATTLE, Summer 2009)
______________
Crickets
The sound of crickets is the distance
between our childhoods: even one
of those saws in the dark keeps you awake,
while it sings me to sleep, and even more
pushes me up through the summer leaves
into the green dreams of youth and clarity,
when my belief in vision was harder
and stronger than the rocks in the field.
Days in the summer of 1984, I entered that field
to sit by the lake where dragonflies
strafed the reeds, mosquitoes punctured
flashes of sunlight and mallards overhead
dragged their shadows through the water.
I thought, this is how a mind works,
even in the dark, when bats come out,
feeding on what floats to the surface of a day,
because that is what night is:
the thin line at the top that bends light
and changes everything. For that summer
my best friend died and became
another rock buried in a field, another spot
where crickets, all night, hack, and saw,
and cut away the differences between us.
(First published in The Same, Vol. 8, No. 1)
______________
Reading for Pleasure
I sometimes — no, often — have to say things out loud
to understand them because that voice in my head
doesn’t sound like me, doesn’t know that words
have hard textures like a canvas bag or wool sweater
that need to be rubbed roughly to make sense and he
is a too clean-shaven idea about me to really get
what I’m about, with flaky skin that crusts around my nose
when I don’t wash regularly, roughage shading my cheek
on days without a razor and how wise and forgiving
the mere rhythm of language can be, like a stress ball
that’s more comforting tossed in the air than squeezed,
feeling its heft and fall, its body slapping the palm when it
comes back down, as all things do, even stinging, as if to blast
the lines in the hand and reroute them, change the schedule,
the mapping and the simple work that a hand can do, like
pointing through a window or beyond the anchoring ground,
past familiar oceanic weights and measures, toward something
like an interruption, as when we reclined on a beach at midnight
and one flash of bioluminescence hyphenated the breakers
making the dark into a thick scribble of text, where an aqueous
editor tested the buoyancy of each rewrite, and we sat back,
silent the rest of the night, watching for the next revision,
mindless of the final version and who, in the end, would own it.
(First published in Upstreet 6)
______________
Bioluminescence
Old philosophers would call this look melancholia,
but I see in this photo of my wife thinking
weathers of competing beauty,
someone who can be in two places at once:
there on the couch, leaning into the cushion folds
and somewhere else focused on the unseen,
beyond the clock’s exhausting rap,
working an idea like dough into the necessary bread.
All moments of clarity narrow like this,
the periphery dimmed as in a Rembrandt,
his “Philosopher in Meditation” sitting in a shaft of light
as if at the bottom of a well, because the profound
leads into dark places, like the ocean floor where
the only light comes from the bodies of fish
swimming through its miles of perpetual night.
(First published in Askew, Issue #10, Spring/Summer 2011)
______________
Poems on the Web
Turpintine
(Adirondack Review, Fall 2010, Volume XI, No.2)
______________
How a Bridge is Built
(Waccamaw, No. 7, Spring 2011)
______________
Birdwatcher & Secret Door
(Loch Raven Review, Winter 2009, Vol. 5, No. 4)
