Poem for Friday, July 15, 2016

Bird Watching

A crow steps out into the uncut grass
to warm its wings.

A bluebird lands on a windowsill overtaken by kudzu,
vanishes in the vines.

Three blue jays eye the birdbath;
one levitates toward another tree to change positions.

A male cardinal becomes a single flame
streaked against the cloudless sky.

A robin guards her speckled infant eggs
in a nest on a low-hanging limb.

A mourning dove coos in the elms.

An indigo bunting appears as a bright blue flash,
scouts the ground for worms or seeds.

A mockingbird kamikaze dives
to claim a strategic branch.

A wren stubbornly builds its home
in the sealed off corner of the porch.

Two blackbirds glide up and away together,
dissipate like dark mist.

Poem for Saturday, July 2, 2016

Gospel

The brick steps on my mother's back porch stay warm
well into the dark like oven burners set to simmer then
neglected. This summer is pure and proper: the watermelons
are juicy, the leaves curl into the heat. A few days ago, I drove
to the cemetery on a whim to search for my grandparents and
finally found them on the edge where the grass met the asphalt:

        suddenly, the history of this place unfolded
        like a patchwork quilt, the kind once stretched
        across an old country bed where people bled
        in the cloth.

Sometimes, I feel like the night before me is an enormous painting
that I must interpret, derivative of all previous nights until
a new season is born. Sometimes, I think I don't want this anymore 
when I hear the metallic shriek of a lonely train.

Sometimes, I give my eyes to the absence of color, my ears to
the chorus of tree frogs, my gospel.

Poem for Sunday, December 27, 2015

Delirium Poem

I.

This time, the sweat leaks from curved pools
behind my knees, trickles down my

motionless legs. My legs are turning pale

in a foreign winter. My skin hasn’t breathed
in months. Now, I must run—

barefoot along the tracks, kissing steel,

wood, and rocks. I am the Union Pacific

cutting across America’s heart.

I pass the exact place where a young boy

fed up with life stood and waited for a train
to take him under.

They wrote about it in the newspaper the
next day. They never said the engineer’s eyes
turned into moons and then went white.

II.

In the woods, everything is asleep. The pines

are bark-stripped. I knew a girl like that once;

my legs are still pale, too.

I pull a locust skin from a branch, stare into
the amber eyes before I crush it into dust
and let the wind lift it from my palm.

There could be someone buried beneath my
sore feet. It is time to stop running.

Here is my routine when a fever breaks:
wash my face, take brightly colored pills,

wonder if my body has betrayed me or
the other way around. Still half-dazed,

I say to no one but myself,

“And you were there, and you, and you.”

Poem for Saturday, November 28, 2015

Above the Ground

Two men on the roof of a Soviet-style block
apartment, the evening against their broad
backs; there aren't any tools, none

that I can see. They're either testing the
integrity of a recently repaired spot or
making sure the turbines spin beautifully.

One of them walks the ledge with just
enough finesse necessary for balance, arms
wing-spread and eyes down, examining

each step. What he doesn't realize is he's
bisecting the universe; his arms are splitting
two halves of the world that would normally

embrace in an air-kissed collision. The other
man kneels down, strokes the edge of a scrap
of tin. He cuts his finger, winces as the blood

pours out like lukewarm beer, shocked at how
smooth metal has betrayed him. In the same
moment, the sky glows fierce: a fire, shrouded

in a negligee of wispy clouds, consumes
everything above the ground. Then come the
blackbirds, flying north to south from one half

of the world to the other, straight across the
tangerine sky. The man on the ledge looks up,
letting his arms fall slowly to his sides.

The man spilling blood looks up, forgetting
about his pain. And I look up, lost in the colors,
wondering why your hand is far from mine.

Poem for Monday, October 19, 2015

Flight Patterns

I never learned it was autumn from the trees
because their transition from green to gold
was too subtle. Instead, I depend on

the white-breasted magpies, the cerulean
trim of their wings streaking against
a Central Asian October sky.

Make no mistake: these birds are thieves,
clenching shiny metal objects in their
beaks, depositing them in nests tucked

among anonymous branches. Back home,
Canadian geese fly south in v-shaped
patterns, honk in unison when they feel

the first bite of cold. But magpies fly alone,
bullet through the clouds with a certain
stoicism. They seek shelter in treetops,

chirp like a freight train collision. I walk
below them, expecting to catch the gleam
of a silver bracelet, a piece of tinfoil.

I look up to nothing but frantic sounds.
Darkness drapes my once-blue eyes, and
my ears ring in the shadows.

What they are saying is this: love migrates
faster than any bird, with no guarantee
to return in the spring.

Poem for Sunday, October 4, 2015

How to Greet a Man in Samarkand

Make sure the palm of your hand
is spread wide over your chest

like a sun-blotting canopy,
covering as much of your heart

as possible. Nod your head
slightly; you cannot wish peace

upon someone without succumbing
to gravity for at least a second.

Look him in the eye during
this exchange, pupil to pupil.

Half of the work comes before
you utter a sound, and when

you do, your pronunciation
doesn't have to be flawless,

but your intentions must be.
If he reads you correctly,

his chin will shift downward,
his respect is yours for life.

Poem for Friday, July 3, 2015

Backstory

Death is at the bar, always the same bar,
waxing defeat with his cards on the table,

looking exactly like what he is: a cracked relic,
shoulder-slouched, skin the color of

neglected wood, the shade of a certain surrender
that no one else can understand.

*

We assume he's just old and thirsty, that
he'll eventually step outside, cross the threshold

into the night: wind in his face, the shadow
of a dotted line snaking down his chest,

dividing his body in half, 103 bones 
on each side, perfectly symmetrical, and

it's uncanny how he's so much like us,
how he takes in the smell after it rains and

dreams of beautiful girls waiting for him
in the meadows. Do you know that sometimes

he looks up at the crescent moon, compares its
shape to that of his sickle, wonders

how much longer before he enters.

Poem for Monday, June 22, 2015

Summer Solstice in Lonoke County, Arkansas

On the longest day of the year, the water-pocked air
has managed to drown in itself as the sun descends
into the final embers of the evening sky.
It's a quarter past eight, but it only takes minutes
for sweat to salify on my skin, to tumble down
the creases of my forehead towards a slow little
death. From my grandmother's porch, feet dangling
off the edge into a thicket of ivy, I gaze up to study
a flock of birds perched on the power lines
that bisect East Main. There are at least fifty of them,
charcoal-breasted, poised with the posture of
disciplined soldiers. Some are motionless. Others
flap their wings and shuffle around the wires
to find their appropriate place in the hierarchy of
a new summer. And then, there are those few that
are easily scared, maybe even ashamed, so they
fly away, tempted by the anonymity of the clouds.
Consider how you and I aren't so different
from them, how we've behaved in all of these ways.
Do not think I have forgotten those nights
we learned the order of each other with the sky
at our backs. Those mornings that slowly bled
into the moment where one of us was suddenly
not there.

Poem for Thursday, February 26, 2015

At the Spillway

The fish have been reduced to flashes
of silver streaking beneath the current, and light
has never seemed so slow.

We set down our rods for a moment to
bait the hooks. You opt for an artificial jig,
fluorescent like sin. Now is a good a time as any
to say that love cannot be articulated.

Instead, I slip thread through a new hook,
banking off a metaphor while the sun
exploits my forehead. Before we recast,
I am branded a child of this earth. Consider this:

our lives, the tepid water spilling over

the edge.

Poem for Monday, February 23, 2015

You Can Find My Secrets

Like aspen in winter, stripped naked
of my gold, my limbs extend upward;
I am ready

to surrender to you, if only for a season.
We are not meant to know some things;
I will change

this. You can find my secrets scattered
beneath me, snow-tinged. Sift through
them carefully,

as you would with undiscovered photos
excavated from an attic, bleak with no
insulation.

Please tell me I am not like that
inside.

Poem for Saturday, November 15, 2014

Straggler

The day after she buried him, a layer of ice
had formed, covering his plot and creeping
up the granite to preserve the epitaph:

                        No Blood on His Hands.

Fifty years earlier, they were sweating on their
South Pacific honeymoon. She remembered
lying on the shore. He fed her June plums
picked from the vine.

But now, the cruelty of winter was apparent:
too cold for fruit, flowers, or birds except
a single flock-shunned goose, flailing
through a merciless gray sky

                       in fear and disbelief.

Poem for Friday, October 17, 2014

Spilling Wine in Your Kitchen

When the wine leapt from the bottle
into the air, your shriek became
a quartet of violins.

A hurricane of red had smashed against
the side of the refrigerator, the kitchen
wall, our newly washed skin.

Confronted with this aftermath, we began
our work, scrubbing each blemish
with paper towels and water.

But somewhere, a single drop remains
inconspicuous, embedded like history
in white gypsum, reminding us

that time is not meant to erase
                                                everything,
                                                anything.

Poem for Saturday, September 27, 2014

Deluge

I.

A white car struggles forward with sweet
caution, then a red, like infant herring testing
the Atlantic currents. Where are you
going in this weather, I want to ask them all.
A deluge like this has been known to drown
lesser things; even the highest trees are
only so high

II.

when the wind is this vicious, ready to strip
us of our skin, do not go outside except
for bread or for love. Do you need anything
else to keep you alive, I want to ask
them

III.

the advantage that rain has over us is simple:
we cannot detect from where exactly it is
falling. All clouds converge into a new concept:
gray. A histrionic pause, then thunder is born,
then the drops speed up, then we are struck
with daggers

IV.

when we were children, we played in puddles
that collected where the earth sloped down,
where the contours of its surface gave in to our
weight. This is how we learned our world is
askew

V.

the cars slice through the post-storm thinness.
Somewhere in the night, a man is pulling up to a
house and turning off the headlights that kept him
alive. Somewhere in the night, a new river has
emerged; that which it takes was never ours
to decide.

Poem for Sunday, August 24, 2014

The Consequences of a Falling Sky

I.

The oceans reflect nothing; everything will shrink in the cold.

All the ships drift towards Lethe; everyone will grow thirsty.

II.

Molecules scatter like frightened sheep; our blood will turn thin.

The sun is not as bright as we thought; the wind will not relent.

III.

Language becomes paralanguage; we will kiss our words goodbye.

Poetry becomes our last concern; we will kiss our words goodbye.

IV.

The storms inundate the fields; all the earth will be a single field.

Our bodies are drenched; we will droop like naked stalks of wheat.

V.

When everything succumbs to darkness, my reaction will be to

extend my hand in your direction, to wait for the slightest brush

of your fingers.

Poem for Sunday, August 17, 2014

The Inventor

One night in August, I retreated inside from the thin summer air
and encountered an old man already three or four drinks deep.
We secured a table for a friendly game of eight-ball. The dim
bar light above betrayed the scratches on the green felt, and I
don't remember who broke or who hit what first, and I don't
remember much about physics and not enough about geometry,
and that's really all the game is.

A couple games later, and I don't remember who won. We cut
through the lobby and went outside for a reprieve from the
ruckus, the mangled music, the dead skin floating everywhere in
the air. There was enough light to see the streets and the people,
engrossed in dozens of conversations, trickling by. But the
silhouette of the mountains had long been veiled behind the still
darkness to which this town is accustomed.

The old man knelt on the sidewalk and began to roll a cigarette.
He mentioned that he lived down the canyon, that he was
designing some jet pack and had been a small-time inventor
for several years. He mentioned that he'd been an alcoholic for
even longer and had fought in a war. He lit the cigarette. His
weary lungs accepted the first trace of smoke before it plumed
upward towards the indifferent sky.

Which war, I asked.

He said it didn't matter. He said life itself is the greatest war
any of us has ever fought.

Poem for Monday, August 4, 2014

The Monsoons, Reluctant to Fall

By late July, it is brazenly summer here, and everyone takes some
heat with them, unknowingly hiding it beneath their skin. The rest
seeps into the sun-punished land, beige like unbleached wool,
cut by yucca and cacti madder than hell, and there is a dead raven
lying on the side of the road, desiccating while the world spins,
and its beak is beautiful and curves like a sickle.

And then, some respite: rain. They say monsoons here, the gravity
of the term lessened compared to when it emerges in the drawled
speech of the lush, vine-tangled south. The monsoons, then, are
reluctant to fall, but they must fall. You smell them, the freshness
of newly split atoms mingling with the pines. You watch them
pound against the orange Chinese boxcars until they glow.

Think of it this way: a memory is inevitable. It may be some other
rain-covered moment in your past; yes, you were playing in some
puddles that had collected on the slope of your driveway. Your
hands were much smaller. You cut one of them somehow, and the
blood sprang from its own well dug in the wound, and you had to
stop it quickly, very quickly, because it is so hard to get back
what is lost.

Poem for Tuesday, July 29, 2014

The Fire Gods Are Always Hungry

This is not the first thing you will learn there, but when you do
learn, the iron will make you sweat, the blood-heavy organs
will make homes beneath your fingernails like parasites in their
hosts. Someone beside you will be kneeling down; this is
for certain. They will pick up a knife, cradle it in their large hand.
They will thumb the blade into a piece of the stomach and toss it
in the stove where the flames are dancing.

You will begin to learn the hierarchy of the land. You will
deconstruct the grass on which you stand, first by the patch, next
by the blade, next by the cells inside each blade. You will never
forget how things once living grazed there under countless suns,
under countless moons, before they made it into the fire.

Poem for Thursday, July 24, 2014

These Things Are Gone

At the slope of the mountain is knee-high vetch,
violet like a storm, fields of it.

You stand there among it all,
coffee on your breath, feeling finite below
the aspen, clenching a rock in your hand.

Before you carve anything in that trunk, think
how these things are gone:

        letters we once saved in drawers,

        our footprints parallel in the snow,

        the flowers that sat on your desk

        over the years, how they all wilted

        in the same surrender.

God, there must have been thousands
of flowers.

Poem for Thursday, July 17, 2014

A Rooftop in Kentish Town

                   From such places,
                   we finally confirm
                   all our suspicions:

yes, the light dies more slowly
farther north, spilling cobalt
instead of black around
the moon;

yes, things get lost in the thickets,
a lap dog yelping from one
of the nameless gardens
below;

yes, when sitting alone on a bench,
implications vary according to
how close to the center
you are;

yes, for reasons lost in the ineffable,
this breeze-sliced night is not
meant to be reduced to a
photograph.

Poem for Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Pine View in June

I.

A woman walks her dog on the sidewalk that passes
in front of my porch. She is wearing cutoff denim shorts
and a black feathered hat that Victorian women likely
wore during periods of mourning. Try as I might, I cannot
recall how her dog looked.

II.

The children play softball and soccer in the little league
diamond behind my apartment. After a practice concludes,
the coach says to his team of Hispanic girls, "Let's not forget
the number one rule: you pick up the equipment, not us."

III.

In the same little league diamond, some drunken youth
shout from the dugout at night while I try to sleep. The
words of Naomi Shihab Nye come to mind: we were
all born like empty fields. What we are now shows
what has been planted.

IV.

In the pine outside my window, the songbirds pause
from their communication to swallow whatever is
clenched in their beaks. How similarly all creatures
live, I think, lifting my sandwich towards my mouth.

V.

A man is sealing up cracks in the weathered asphalt.
They are unpredictable in depth, in length, in pattern.
He is outmatched, but he remains dogged, convinced
that he is solely responsible for saving us all from
melting in the earth's core.