Ninety-five

"I think I would live to one hundred,
but I've run out of husbands,"
     said Grandmother
     on the eve of ninety-five.
"Oh, but God gave me good ones,
they never cursed or yelled,
they were good to me.

"On our move, Bill told me
'I'm going to spend the rest
of my life making you happy'
and I just laughed

"that will last three months, I thought
but he sure was a good husband.

"The cigarettes caught up with them.
You know, in my generation,
if you were a man,
and you didn't smoke at thirteen,
you were a sissy.

"It would be something to live
to be one hundred, yes,
they were good men."

The wildflowers

The wildflowers from your wedding strain
     from my windowsill to filtered sun.

They grow soft like hair from black soil,
     roots contained in peanut butter jars.

You were braided together with rings,
     sowing, even in summer, a new plot.

A conversion

My mother cried, my father frowned,
and the living room grew tense and full
like the Tolstoy I sheltered behind
as my brother admitted atheism.

Calgary customs

Calgary customs dissected my heart,
opening handwritten notes
collected in my wallet,

unpacking my clothes, and cycling
through photographs and phone
calls like a gossip.

I was whittled down to my marrow
and brother to a guitarist with
his pockets out too.

The empty airport exhaled when I,
like a stray, limped outside
in search of sanctuary.

With cropped hair

With cropped hair, your laughs

were cut short too.

So we folded our newspapers,

so serious in our

new, misguided sympathy for

the printed word.

Tonight spilled

Tonight spilled bourbon,
tears, and red bull across my
fabric composure.

The City and her orange tape

The museum's height forgave the City her orange tape,
while sunlight forgot each east office in limestone
glass, and red ink.  Yet what altitude absolved
and evening hid, still echoed through my voice.

Home by bicycle

My Schwinn spokes vibrated the neck of Sooner Rd

like a violin string, the lone Stradivarius in a roaring 

Stratocaster line under this Oklahoma, stratiform sky—

and I tuned this autobahn precise as Audubon. 

Breathing

White practice jerseys and shoulder pads outpaced my

stung lungs each season, I lagged heavyhearted.

So I learned the light patterns of my checkerboard 

campus with a camera for companionship,

but black, knit flowers, in hovering lace swathed

her dress and me—I never could breathe.

Lamplight

The black birds across the waitress's shoulder
fly from bar to table to a purse among the
well whiskey with a bright activity not found
in the dim lamplight of her eyes,

Open air

Grandpa made hot air balloons
from light bulbs and wire.

I imagined them sailing
through the kitchen window.

I too needed an escape
to fresher sky:

he with emphysema,
and I with asthma.

Response to Oscar

"Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility. If the contemplation of a work of art is followed by activity of any kind, the work is either of a very second-rate order, or the spectator has failed to realise the complete artistic impression.

A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse. All this is I fear very obscure. But the subject is a long one."
-Oscar Wilde  

I think Wilde is wrong, wrong in that flowers are useless
or that art is a mood
I think it's more like a mind that is displayed
on a pedestal
and so we have a conversation with it.

discussion brings reform and we want to be reformed!

not polite or civil, but constantly reshaped and resharpened
by the world in a painter's creation.

and today, the trending photography in blurs and browns?
oh, it's fashionable
for a reason
and thus for only a use. then let's not overuse!
let's not follow the shy colors and mixed shapes of Fall
with Fall with Fall with Fall.

it's old because it's in style.

and on Miro, is art more than the aesthetic
we give to it?
can we revel in the ugly because we appreciate
how it hasn't been done before?
I hope so, in that case we can relax our critique.

no! no! ugly is easy. too easy, almost accidentally easy
and art is in the challenges
that make it profound.
it challenges me and I want to admire someone
who can overcome better than I.

there isn't a disconnect
between what we make and what influences us.
you'll never separate our habits
from the atomic structure of our hands.
meaning this: as detached as we make ourselves
there is always a cause
which is often unseen and unnoticed by the viewer.

but art is an effect! effects have causes
and causes are us.

and who is a sculptor
besides the person who visits the quarry, the tool store
and prepares the garage space?

or a painter
besides the student who learns the right techniques
and has a set of brushes.

there's no distinction between who is real
and who is an immature creator. And we wish there was
a divide
but we aren't sure what side we'd be on.
and there's beauty in the comparable
when the man and woman behind them
are so dissimilar.

I for one am done comparing myself
to my peers
to find any worth. I want to match up against my heroes
and find a similarity
and say 'yes, this is valuable in me as well'
and move on
and keep creating.

yes, I'll never be known as the artist
or writer. OK.

I can agree with Oscar on one point:
art isn't about selling or the money.
apartments are and their rent is
food is
gasoline is
galleries are
but not the works themselves!
when we make a new friend we like to show them
our home, as with a painting.
and then the price is born.

the artist has to get by.
but aren't artists motivated by the money?
yes. yes. yes.
but money is made more easily elsewhere.

Lift

The silver maple limbs
     split the south wind
          and wove the warm
               draft into braids.       
The hair lifted from her
     tan brow and shoulders;
          she stood and let
               grass bow instead.
   

Dry riverbed and old erosion

I looked for purpose and place the way
     a mailman thumbs through his bag
at the doorstep, assured he'd find
     that goddamn stubborn postcard.

I carved the Black Mesas with a red
     Camry, certain the fossil valleys
would yield peace in my dumbfound
     appreciation of this rich earth.

I perched on my twin mattress
     while 3 o'clock hovered in the
background of my bedroom, yet
     I found no home in the darkness.

I listened as Cohen sung brokenness,
     I sought out my steel carton of letters,
and let the writers tell of foreign refuge
     with the calmness of being known.

Haiku for sleep

Early, when I skate
consciousness, my dreams dive like
submarines; I chase.

This town of drunk Christians

The bakery opens as a man hunches 

over his motorcycle and shoulders 

into the August exhaust.

His wife nurses a cup of creamfoam 

outside the cafe—her last sanctuary

of the morning.

Children hit baseballs 

over my head toward

students leaving home again.

So summer ends 

with broken glass and a new

ream of university letterhead.

The researcher lives in the basement

of this goodhearted town where my
waitress drinks at her own bar.

    

An arsonist tunes his truck radio

and accelerates.  Under white smoke,

I met them all.

 

Heat comes and lifts 

Norman from the plains like a storm

cell of self-contained fervor.

This town of drunk Christians 

sings a last hallelujah

in late-morning sleep.

I had to drive

I had to drive northwest to prove the world's round,
I had to improvise rite of passage
in the wetness of the Sound.

Where reverberation brought each wave up to a crest
and thrashed the coast in faster time
than the rising of my chest.

On the sloping hills of richness, a path outside my reach,
I was a foreigner to the families
burning fires along the beach.

But her warmness was solace while I was lost
to the openness of the interstates,
to the future and its cost.

Dallas again

Every wheel kicked up mist

and we swallowed the water interstate
along our tail light itinerary
where the rain bathed us, and drowned us,
and calmed us enough to drive.

Bread and tea

The girl across the room
absentmindedly
put her arm between her legs,
held her thigh, leaned forward,
and laughed.

I took a bite of bread,
finished my tea,
and left.

I named and drew each week

I named and drew each week of my waking
     like a new species of orchid.
I held that Audubon open to the foreword
     and read my parents' old prayers.
I found the volumes too heavy to carry,
     so I tore out the Second Week of August.    
And I kept my sins on paper napkins
     at bedside for reference.

In the Fourth Week of December, 
     a bright carriage crossed downtown,
holding two beneath a warmth of white glow.
     And the horse leaned forward up the hill.
Inside, I let a beer chill my palms
     and had Christmas with the twelve
coarse patrons of pool and laughter.
     The exit was my rebirth.

In midnight Mass the night before,
     we groaned like the hull of a Roman galley.
We pulled forward in a heave,
     and fought in darkness for the course.
I let the First, Second, and Third Weeks
     of July fade into our movements.
But the cathedral's arcing routine
     was no solace.   

This year, I released all February
     and September for a new joy and weight.
I let the pew, the bar, and my home persist—
     I kept my fists calm.
Out of my sudden, broken calendar,
     I unearthed a week of faith.
Out of my empty-handed work,
     I wrestled in the wake.