I don't expect to be buried

I don't expect to be buried in Noble, Guymon, or Shawnee.
I doubt my name will trace these cemetery plates
or be entered by letter in the records of Oklahoma.

No, the muted, mustard gold and the wet greens
of Easter farmland is but one palette I must process.

A process of ink-staining my cognition
with the odors of soil and tomatoes.

What raw odds

At eight past eleven, I stood outside
the roar of coiling limbs, the plastic alcohol.
Then down those slanted halls, but first ink
of two black crosses behind the knuckles.

Oh tobacco, you wash over us now.

What raw odds we give conscience,
where men prod over auction goods.
What a solid, silent association
now circles the transfixed and resigned.

Here is a commonplace exposé of the id.

The ink, a cursory scarring in comparison;
and again an immediate release to night.

A Thickness

At eight years, I'd sprawl across a solid bed.

Upon the monolith, my eyes soon dimmed.
But my fingers relaxed against a blank thickness--
a negative substance of my muscles' contraction.

Now, I romance the idea. I glorify it as a measure
of faces, of modern art, and of unfamiliar music.
Where my slackened mind finds substance,
there are bedsheets to lie within.

City,

City, I've read your gospel,
seen your banks erected
in plaster and brick.

City, your rooftops are familiar--
water towers and a highway.

And city, your avenues
will be mine again.

Draw and Pull

Ten hours out of Oklahoma,
and what can exist here,
with red Kansas highway spent beneath?

A livelihood amidst vacant storefronts,
and long-rusted steel machines?
Perhaps. Even Goodland has its way.

Morality under the dusty bedspreads,
behind the faded, floral prints of these motels?
There is a chance.

Movement past these crumbled streets,
a chance for East or West?
No, there can be none.

Night holds us--a motel room--
feet pound cement, a child screams,
a motorcycle snarls, revs and fades.
An urge for motion
and morning comes.

West again, the border and Colorado.
A deep-seated fear relieved,
the land still unchanged.

Denver comes muted first
in concrete gray and charcoal blue.
Then monuments--a gold-spired university,
a stadium, but ever less than
the edging horizon.

A city of newness, of remedies, and of wealth.
A ridged basin, a lake enclosed,
the odor of pine, sumac and we stop
fifteen hours out of Oklahoma.

The 232nd Fourth

I watch my city stop, fold up,
and sit wide-eyed across a bridge.
And the sky turns for us--
turns outward in three-four time
and fades.

The smoke remains draped
as a flag in still air,
listlessly moving west.

Now, a newfound blankness
as my city disassembles
and we flee.

Athens

July in the Old Place, La Plaka,
but awake now. A mid-day rush.
Foreign buyers brush against shops with
blown glass and aging, gilded icons
and backgammon boards of olive wood.

The acropolis breathes its presence.

The neoclassical as smooth marble, gray brick
is weighed by gelato stalls
and yet as fixed a mark.

A hospital bed

A hospital bed, starched and
bleached white
and an astronaut's visor
tinted with gold
thinly bear hot breath,
sweat and impermanence
against the infinite.

Hold and release

A shutter clicks, hold--
rubber and aluminum wane.
Hot headlight then brake light filaments
drip like mercury, molded
by weightless sled tracks.

Night and man's choice of illumination,
a bank's horizontal slats
trap yellow tongues within and
flickering neon storefronts
glint of tetra scales--and release.

I searched

I searched for you, but you were naked
below your clothes.

And under your skin were bones and they held
organs among them.

I could not find you there.

I searched for Him in grass and stone,
in paint and story, in novel and film.
I found Him there.

And there, with Him,
I found you.

To the rough misunderstanding

To the rough misunderstanding
and those who believe it,
that romantic love
should hold out
constant for a lifetime:

A psychology textbook
estimates six to thirty months
until one must rely
on compassion or empathy.

Thus requiring a man of seventy
about thirty-seven
women worth of romance.
(With even a fourteen year
allowance for youth)

Not that the sum
is unreasonable in itself
but the finding and acquiring
of such numbers is impractical.

What a person really means
is to spend a few years
in mystery and passion
and the rest in bright reenactment.

No Harvest

In dark three-buttoned suits,

sober men of import
romanticize the farmer
as an image of Napoleon
standing over fresh dirt,
hand held deep in flannel plaid.

These officing men
avoid the unbearable:
the farmer pawns used cars
and chips the white paint
off his own porch columns.

With dramatic flaunt,
the farmer sows cooked rice
on dry and unplowed ground
to fulfill the duties
of his semi-rural position.

Yet inside his unaffected children
dine with no reserve
on income from the sale
of a red side-dented Ford.
This he knows is necessity
to sustain his agriculture.