modern woman, cold salad

modern woman, cold salad of disbelief,
I want to break you all apart
and take your breakfast, steam
your bloodlines—Hades or some Trinidad.

knock all week, brass on oak
like a turquoise scattering back
and forth in a bathtub until you
find the drain, then a lead ess pipe.

hello conquistador! go expand your
neighborhood, allow the plague for boredom.
find 'outside' as your father left it since
he never expected you to follow.

a swarm of pores, weak
but your skin's still living. "ah, Andrew
you're very kind."  keep listening then—
a new priority, girl!

crush the alphabet, at least.  your elbow is an ell
lead pipe on the keyboard. you're a lovely dialtone,
there are no vocals, no pulse on the line.
you are all lead pipes, it seems.

go to hell, you

go to hell, you transcendentalist, I'm still here in the thick of it on the 23rd st exit by a man with the crumpled sign, "every little bit helps."

and come swim with me in reality, in an explanation of winter, all bitterness but bold self-miracle of survival.

I stalled, while you planned your escape through the turnstiles of the fairgrounds, your parents' kingdom, and your love books.

soon is "we're so glad to have you back," but I've run out of canned soup and ice has me wrapped up here, buried in a sunday paper.

it's monday, so forgive me tuesday and I'll be welcome again.  I'm no threat to your sleep, I won't stir much. can I give him my gloves and hat, and you what's left over?

I need no gravity to fall into my old order, but give me a week to control my mouth.

how many times?

how many times have I walked over your empty acreage
while you're away at work or asleep
in a comfortable house nearer the city? thank you
for leaving it open for me. thank you for not farming it
or developing it.  thank you for letting the grass grow
and the trees age in peace.  you're absent and generous.
and tonight in the dirt, my feet draw a line—
everything that's beautiful, I like to think is mine.

you were 17 when we met, I think I remember the time
or the place, at least.  I couldn't trust my eyes then
and you laughed.  it ran though all my days
in that school and I liked to call you 'friend.'
I remember your expressions and I keep a file of each one
like an eager secretary who can only shake his head
at his own foolishness.  a bolder man saw you shine
but everything that's beautiful, I like to think is mine.

in Crime and Punishment are two pages I won't read
aloud to anyone because they are my story of redemption
from sin and murder and are not Dostoevsky's
to share with anyone else.  how could he have meant
it otherwise?  I can't be honest with my favorites
or I will give too much of myself away.
I'll claim a radio lyric, a story, a rhyme,
because everything that's beautiful, I like to think is mine.

an old watch on Main under plate-glass display, your hands
at the end of the day on the dirtied windows of my car,
the smell of grease at the airport that means I'm home,
and your voice on my answering machine—all grit my teeth
in possession.  how can I be full without these accidental gifts,
without this rich landscape?  how else can I stake my plot
in this gold rush of identity?  there's peace in what I find,
because everything that's beautiful, I like to think is mine.

when my feet are cut up

when my feet are cut up and red
I have nothing other
than to walk on them.

when my sleep is short and dull
I have only to wake and revive.

but when the cosmos is sore
for expanding and needs a rest
then I'll lay out too.

oh time persists
like beard stubble and rough weeds
in each season.

Wooden printing screens

Wooden printing screens half-fill my apartment.
The place is hot and closed, a courtroom
or a kiva for decisions, but my mind is wholly away
in the plowed, foamy dirt south of Slaughterville.
 
The house was white once, the two aluminum sheds
are still painted and padlocked.  And I park under a tree
facing my own home, twenty-five miles back the black road.
I catch my breath, take a leak, and count my steps to the middle

of land owned by insects, a broken porch, and me.
Four meteors in an hour.  The heavens break in Halloween
like champagne and the air is as cold.  The ground is warm yet
and a patch of straw is my pillow for the show.

The stars are salt, preserving the nightsky
so I am an archeologist, though a pauper, and alone as well.
I am healthy when I become empty here,
collapsing in the hollow ruts.

I want to sleep here tonight, curled in my car
with my suede coat and flashlight
but I make it only to four before the job is done
and I crawl home in peace.

here's what music can do

waiting long, outside the gate, I told a keyboardist
"your music has helped me write many english papers"

and he replied, "if you help one person write a term paper,
you've helped the entire world get a PhD, it goes something like that."

another night, I quietly held a pen towards a guitarist, who asked,
"what exactly do you want?" and he laughed.

"I like to make people ask me directly for an autograph,"
then he signed "yo! -TL" and we shared a sense of victory.

if I drank tonight, I'd drink too much—for the other, empty end
of a booth, for the headache, and for the music.

added up

added up
the zenith of every rocket ship
makes the earth a porcupine
and the nadir
of the appalachian hills
is a collapsing coal mine

added up
the migration of gulls
would be cirrus cloud cover
and the atlantic would be flat
like the face of my brother

added up
I'd be stretched out thin
like a headlight photograph
and for the time and light and speed,
I couldn't do the math

colorful honeycomb

in this dream
I was the size of my two-inch
plastic airplane.

and while the rest held onto the wall
I held onto the plane
and took a leap into the bright cavern
of that colorful honeycomb.

I think Andrew Bird
was whistling "Heretics" somewhere nearby.

"Hold your breath!"
it worked! and when I inhaled,
I swooned upward through the warm air
and my thin, orange propeller
went "zzzzzzzzzzz."

we all rose and fell
with the rise and fall of our lungs
and we swam in circles through it all.

I get distracted easily.

I think the way to enjoy a live performance
is to pick out the most beautiful woman in the audience
and laugh and clap only when they do.
or
I think the way to enjoy a beautiful woman
is to take them to live performance
and laugh and clap only when everyone else does. 
or
I think the only way to enjoy laughing and clapping
is to do a live performance
with an audience full of beautiful women.

all I meant to say was

all I meant to say was

"here's the place that made me,"
or at least
"here's where I don't feel guilty
for my mind drifting."

and
"here are my margins
and necessary empty spaces
all pushed outside"

location, location, location
like a constellation of thumbtacks
in a cork-board map
or a chorus of crickets, each loud voice
specific and unknown.

all I meant to show you was
my state, a field, my origin.

water, place, and names

Along the heritage waters of Corinth,
triremes once knew the coast
and held along the continental shelf.

I have to be known by a landscape, scoped into the diorama...

A gudiye is silent, it pushes the floes
of Icy Bay along its ridges
and the Tlingit hunt seal this way.

...where the landmine is sacrilege to the Earth.

The canoe and the kayak are their places,
with the personality of a river
and the width of a man's arm.

a vivid cinema dream I had in the middle of the afternoon

I was probably eleven years old with a younger brother
who ran behind me out of the station wagon,
around the A-frame and through the woods.

Mother had worked out a deal for childcare and vacation
at the cabins of our friends.
The first night set up the scene of a pale savanna landscape
and dust in the 70's.
It was immature exploration and news of a grandfather
who had recently and unfortunately gone away.
Then, "come in, have dinner and go to sleep, kids."

The second day was a drive to an estate sale at his house.
The widow was there in a chair in the corner
and my brother and I explored the trinkets
of an early time
in this man's life.
On overhearing the adults' conversation, I learned
he had spent the last several years
journaling evidence to convict a man, who was deep in crime.

That man came into the house next, dark and rough and tall
and he brought three others with him.
He had no respect or use for us boys, so he ignored us.
I think my mother was petrified, my father wasn't around.
They had come for the proof.
He had passed away but the grandfather's
paper trail was still haunting them.

They figured it out soon enough, that what they came for
was hidden in the second-hand sale.
An old camera still had film it in, so they ripped it out
but the film wasn't ruined, it showed black outlines and schematics.
I pretended to help examine the negatives, holding them to the light,
and I found it.
I had to quickly hide the incrimination in my lap.
Then they found a sticky typewriter ribbon of his article
and that too I had to wad up and shove beneath the table.
I had to show them everything they found was meaningless,
"It's just his transactions and stories," I lied.
I had the feeling they wouldn't be merciful if I was found out.

I wrapped everything up in newspapers and colored paper
and made an excuse for leaving,
though I know I must have looked guilty on my way outside.

I came out the front porch and onto the dry lawn.
A brown sedan was gently coming down the dirt road,
a man with his young son in the right seat. I think he knew the family.

I made them stop, threw my armload into the backseat
and said "here's all the evidence you'll need
now get the hell out of here."
He heard the urgency in my voice.  He understood me,
he turned the car around,
and he sped away.

But the road was quickly blocked by the henchmen
and their long cars and the tall man was soon there too.
From where I was down the street,
I could hear him yelling and see him look into the backseat,
freeze for an instant,
then shoot a dirty glare down towards me
and I knew it was all over.

It was dusk by now.  I quickly climbed into my own car
and though it took me a moment to understand,
I put it into gear and accelerated as fast as I could
toward the group in the road.
I could feel myself picking up speed.

I could feel myself waking up, now, in anticipation of the crash.
I had to decide whether to wake or recommit.
I knew the story wouldn't be authentic, so I got up.

east is a vector

east is a vector,
on the maps a stubborn serigraph
though two blocks east of here
the gyros are concrete
and the used furniture is nearly abandoned
and a recording studio is dressed like it's abandoned
for safekeeping.

an atlas is the compass-card collage and key.
I can adore a place name
before I meet the landscape.

at a backyard sale were biblical texts, ancient blazers,
and high school primers
for each subject three decades ago,
and an outdated road map, more valuable now.

in western thought, life is directions:
high school is a venue, university an avenue
marriage a journey, and the furniture store
is still two blocks east.

there's no love in a punch card

oyster once a week and morning twice a year,
short fragment of synesthesia and memory
like an old time card, a routine perforation
so my faith is in card stock, correction.

what a visceral road trip! the whole effort
reminds me of catching a fire with fishing line
sleep moves us both, I think, more than anything.

an outline

still above

violent spiral
hot damn hurricane over
satellite image

the crust of a planet - part one

whenever I look down--straight down if that were possible--
I see all we humans have done to the landscape and our infrastructure
we build to make life optimal or efficient or easy or familiar.

but what strikes me
is not that we are tearing up the soil
or ripping off rings of bark

nor is it that we're becoming advanced
or that our civilization's blueprint is spelled out in roads.

what strikes me
is that we're all children
digging holes to China and not getting very far
before we give up and try again a little further along.

and that we're clawing at our planet to make it a reflection
of ourselves, but our fingernails are still only in the varnish.

the crust of a planet - part two

along the wooded hills of the South we carve long corridors
for our power lines, the grassy pencil marks through the geography,
the graphite that links our spaced cultures.

electricity takes the shortest distance, but highways wander
at an engineer's whim and follow hillsides for the view.

between Purcell and Lexington, 77 is a bridge
cleaner than the mud and river it spans, and riding its correct latitude.

and we fight with nature to prove there are four cardinal directions
but water doesn't mind direction, only height and temperature.
we are laying our graph paper over ink blots and wax drops.

the crust of a planet - part three

but I've forgotten two things:

we aren't foreign and our metropolises are spiderwebs or cobwebs,
a creation of nature and in turn part of the natural world.
we like to claim we're apart from it like a tattoo is foreign
to the complex biology underneath

or like the printed word doesn't interact with the cells
that were pulped and dried and bound up underneath.
but life and the inanimate are only a series of steps apart.

the other is that I've only been looking down.

the clouds are a part of our earth's crust,
they have only escaped upward for a turn.
and our engines send plumes, which I contend isn't poison
but oil paint that's difficult to manage.

take time

Take this time for yourself, but to be healed.
I think you are complex with nothing on and nothing on your mind.
You are a colorful universe puzzle like an apartment complex.

For the women of these last years

an outlaw

I sleep fetal, an armadillo

you said

The discoveries of the camera

The camera discovered the horse,
airborne a fraction of each gallop

and we realized that our family memories
are our grandparent's embellishments:

in film, the hues were transient but memorable
and they reproduced our faces like mirrored glasses.

Now, we know our genealogy
is effortlessly preserved.

you were the wife

I learned comedy and speech

I learned comedy and speech from radio static
and the exotic late-night hosts
who crackled in the airwaves on routine.

And as I fell asleep I heard the false TV formality
and the casual importance of tonight's guests.
"the amazing, the lovely, the talented!"

I knew and I was the spontaneous studio audience:
We shared in each gag, pet, band, monologue
and there in my sheets I heard it all firsthand.

Through radio, they preached no glory in celebrity
but in the good-natured innuendo between old friends.
It was "here's a woman famous for her beauty."

The world came as a challenge through headphones
"you've never done a good thing twice, never
had a sin by itself, never made a joke that would last."

this is for you, johnny

all that can be cured

'all that can be cured by coffee, milk or alcohol
is short-lived, only side-stepped and thirst is stubborn'

'but you are the freest kind of man' I said,
'an artist at least, surely you can overcome this'

'in its nature lacking and empty--jealous even!
you are yourself in your craving'

'you printed the mosquito so cleanly
that it lost its form, you are powerful
as a shape-shifter like an alchemist or a landscape painter.
this has the least of influence on you'

'oh, but the kitchen is the closest place for it
and the chandelier makes the dining room table safe.
but I'd like to escape that sofa and the eccentric
wet halos that will laminate this night for us both'

Let me outlive my grandmother

let me outlive my grandmother
let me reach that age when I understand
storytelling as it's spoken by the mouthful,
when the muscle memory
of food and sex
are no longer encouraging in their repetition,
still, let me reach my arm around you.

I will stretch into these orange mornings
long enough to see through my eyelids
and feel their warmth in my ripening organs.
I will live more than I have been asked.
I will live for the privilege
of recounting it all when I am old.

though it's not enough to see
to live and remember;
I will hand out all I hold sacred,
my idealized women who have flown
from all but my memory, I will tell
of all the lies I've told to my friends
and in poems,

do you remember the way we sat then?
so uncomfortable
at our desk, but we wouldn't admit it.
I want to give myself out.

spell my name

My birthright, my name and health

live in your plenty

missing the pavement

I miss the pavement when it snows and our short, summer stint
at cheap theater shows.

When the moon is new, giving life to the night and we see orange and blue
in the neon light.

When we sat on iron furniture to watch a motorcycle float into the evening's overture
as a low and growling note.

meant with a meal

that time

nightswimming

My father taught me caution

I have worn through two decades

I have worn through two decades
the way grease and sweat rub
into my white undershirts.

The clothes I bought are threadbare now
and the food I've stolen
no longer fills my stomach.

There is no loss, however,
only comfort in what is used up.
I'd like to hear my voice, once, unrecorded

though my throat is dry now,
here's to a new time of wholeheartedness
found in the vapor of tea, then crushed ice.

And a second laughing toast
to the undeserved health we find
always in our ribcage and lungs,

where we breathe like the rise
and fall of bike pedals, and say again
'bring light in the end'

when we raised our sandy arms

I refrain from the old faces

I refrained from the old faces
and the stretched, corded phone
leaving each untouched and unanswered.

A new refrain is singing
that love is found like coins--
raked, gained, and horded.

But sleep tonight in confidence
that I'll return home without appointments.
A clean calendar for january.

A tired woman and an old friend
came with shears to cut their cables from me,
but we watched as they fell as cobwebs.

when we first sat