29 June

Poetry

is what came before Newton
named gravity and everyone happily
flying suddenly plummeted.

2008

19 June

The meanest thing I ever thought to say to anyone
1997

When the standard against which you measure your lapses of integrity is shooting strangers, it must be easy to excuse transgressions of the heart.

30 April

The woman in question

for Cathy

1995

“So, who is she, anyway?”

the fellow from the assessor’s office

asks the barista steaming skim milk

for his dry skinny decaf au lait to go

as the screen door flutters shut

behind the woman in question.

“I don’t know her name,”

the barista replies discreetly,

“but she’s a wonderful customer.”

Might have been a waitress once,

she thinks but doesn’t say.

“Medium regular here.”

The guy from corrections hands her

his sludgy bulgy pitted plastic mug.

“Well, we saw her walking the other day,

staring at the sky and smiling,

and you know what was up there?

Nothing but clouds.”

29 April

VILLANELLE FROM HELL
1999

"Fourteen days at Slocum Creek
are fourteen days too many," moans
the river, sallow, slack and sick,
"but I am waiting for the dam to break
and will wait 'til time and times are done
if that means fourteen centuries at Slocum Creek."
"I cannot gasp, but if I could, I'd shriek,
squawk, squeal and groan,"
the crappie, sallow, slack, and sick
is rasping as it fishflops down the thick
stagnant soup that it called home
sixty-six years ago, at Slocum Creek.
"This so-called campground sucks."
“That pissoir of a lake.” “Discarded, putrid bovine bones.”
The anglers, sallow, slack and sick
are calling and responding from the wreck
of outdoor recreation. Clowns!
Just fourteen lines describing Slocum Creek
have left me sallow, slack and sick.


Note: Should you be planning a vacation here, a BLM sign at Slocum Creek Campground near Owyhee Reservoir indicates that the overnight camping limit is 14 days.

27 April

Counterpoint
1991

I am the weight
at the opposite end of the scale.
In country where it rains
eight feet a year, the green kin
in my windows traveled here
from deserts where their fleshy leaves
stored scarce water and their spines
squared off against death’s teeth.

As I meander into love with you
I dream your death,
dispassionately wonder if you’ll be
the one I get around to
murdering.

Each day we kill our loves
a little more carefully.
I say what no one wants to hear.
My laugh is loud and impolite,
my silence has sharp edges.
When my hands clap rhythm
they reach for counterpoint.
You tell me you don’t know
if anyone can dance with me.

26 April

Everything I Made
early 90s

“There is nothing left to keep me here,” he said.
“I have lost more than I knew I had to lose.

I would take my grandfather’s clock
to keep it safe for whoever is to love it next,
but I will go without it if I must.
It is a fair trade for my life.

All I was given becomes a story I will tell by firelight.
Everything I made, I can make again.”

25 April

I DO
for David, April 25, 1998


Call this my rough draft of the vow
I’ll revise and renew and never quite finish.
What I did got me here, but it won't
get me past here. Remember
those strange words I stammered,
stalling for time, when you asked
if after two decades of safety
I might consider the danger that's love?

Our compass is set for a bearing
beyond my Shabby Hotel by the Sea,
out of sight of your Shoals of Reason.
You called me Ambassador from the Edge,
Consul of the Lost and Found.
You knew me well enough to name
my Homeland. The answer is yes.

This moment light gathers around,
I promise you what I do best
yet still with least confidence:
Like my mentor the mole rat, I will
gnaw through the perimeter. I am
poised to become the new creature
this marriage calls to. From now on I do
whatever it takes.

24 April

Eggs like these
2006

Easter morning
and we haven’t colored eggs in years,
but there are two in the little hollows in the fridge,
brown already, courtesy of the chickens.
We will do our part with magic markers.
Seems it’s our histories the two eggs
wind up wearing, with the good humor
and perspective on our years of troubles
only time bestows. My egg becomes a face –
mildly curious eyes,
nose too prominent to be attractive,
smile bulging with silver –
all surrounded by ringlets on the verge of blue.
When I was a girl, I tell you,
there were men, women, boys, girls,
cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, and turtles
crowding the refrigerator door.
Though I drew them all myself,
they still surprised me every time
I pulled the handle and the light flashed on.
When you were a boy, you tell me,
you spent an entire hour
painting a Madonna and Child
on an eggshell’s curved surface,
and I’m wondering if today I’ll get to see
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
in miniature, but no, it’s Lenin.
I would recognize him anywhere,
and on the egg’s reverse, fireworks bloom
above Red Square and words you outlived
to ridicule: “The victory of Communist labor
will be ours with eggs like these.”

23 April

Underground
Late 90s, early 00s - wish I knew for sure


It’s April and we’ve planted pastel spheres
of pea seeds. We’ve had the necessary
drizzle and shy sun, and our neighbors’ lilacs -
one stark white of saintly faith, the other passion’s
violet signature - lean across our fences.

It’s three in the morning, muddy, and the night air stirs
exhaust fumes from McLoughlin Boulevard
into the scent of cold, wet dirt. I sit on my heels. I listen,
but I cannot hear the ghostly tentative roots
investigate their home’s dark nourishment.

These are the sweetest days of my life.
Only lend me the grace to wait.

22 April

GOOD FRIDAY’S GONE
2005


Every April,
when the cellophane grass, chocolate rabbits,
and squishy bitter yellow chicks appear,
I realize once again: Good Friday’s gone.
When I was a kid back home
in the second-biggest city in Vermont,
the whole world as I knew it shut down
between noon and three o’clock
the day Christ died. There was no school
and the weather was always unseasonably
warm and sunny. I used to wander
in a post-Apocalyptic daze. I loved the darkness
behind store windows, loneliness
of the streets, where few cars crawled by
all those slow three hours, and no one was out and about
but me. I admit I wasn’t thinking deep religious
thoughts. I probably caught a few disapproving glares
over the years, though I never noticed.
But I’m nostalgic now for those bleak collaborations,
the force of will that kept my neighbors
shuttered from the sun, even if snow
was forecast for Easter, as it often was.
I miss the watch I kept those hours,
feverish, morbid, but not irreverent,
and how the world came back to miraculous life
each mid-afternoon, and stirred the mystery
of my peculiar faith.

21 April

SESTINA: URBAN LEGEND
1999

Here’s how I heard
it. Some rugrat let all these alligators
loose even though the babysitter
threatened him within an inch of his measly life. She recalled the beehive
incident, had been trained to stay away from a Corvette
with a stain in the back seat, or a man with a hook.

So this ordinary creaker, except for the hook,
he was the one who heard
the sound like a Corvette
moulting, only it was really alligators
slinking in the sewers, a militia like a beehive,
but the babysitter,

who might have saved the city, that babysitter
was otherwise occupied. She was dialing 9-1-1, cradling the hook
in her boyfriend’s neck, every hair in her perfect beehive
keeping its iron grip, while she heard
the ambulance wail toward Lovers Leap and another sound that might be alligators,
which she ignored, preoccupied as she was with body fluid leaking all over the Corvette.

She coveted that Corvette,
and if her boyfriend bit the big one, the babysitter
was hoping she’d inherit his wheels and not his collection of squeaky toy alligators,
and she kind of wanted the hook,
too, she’d heard
they make attractive accessories for a beehive.

She’d never had a swarm of bees take residence in her beehive,
but she had seen a few back seats of a few Corvettes.
There were the obligatory ominous urban legend lectures she’d heard
involving various bubbleheaded babysitters,
and if they got the hook,
well, maybe they deserved it. Meanwhile alligators

were issuing from the city’s every orifice, alligators
the size of freight trains, and she was touching up her beehive.
The man with the hook
was leering at the Corvette
which he wanted more than the babysitter,
and him licking his scabby lips was the last thing she heard.

That’s how I heard it. The alligators
ate the babysitter, beehive
and all. The authorities never recovered the Corvette or the hook.

20 April

Some good news & some bad news
for Dan
1999


The good news is
my big brother got
disability to the tune
of twenty-four hundred
dollars a month,
tax free, for as long as
he’s certifiably nuts.
That’s the bad news.

He’s philosophical,
says he’s always wanted
to pull some crazy stunts -
he’s still so protective,
he won’t tell me what -
& now he sees these impulses
as investments.

Me, I’m saving
my pocket change for bail,
consulting the Magic 8-Ball,
shopping for a greeting card
that says, “Congratulations
& Condolences.”

19 April

GRAPHING OUR DYSFUNCTION
for a rocket scientist
1998


x > -4 (that's me).
y < 11 (that's you).
For instructional purposes
I'll keep it flat.

Take your graph paper, mark the axes
horizontal x and vertical y like the cross we bear.
Draw diagonal lines from the top edge
to 4 lines down from where you marked that x-axis.
All the way across. Good.

Turn your attention to the left side
of the paper and draw diagonals
in the opposite direction up and down
its length until you reach 11 past your y-axis.
There. Now that's done.

Note the crosshatching where the two graphs meet
in the upper left-hand corner.
That's where my terror of abandonment
and your ambivalence about commitment
overlap. It's the graph of our dysfunction.
It's what's wrong and why there's no use trying
to solve this problem

let alone all those trains
leaving Midwestern cities at various times and speeds,
loaded with dynamite, conductors
asleep at the switch.

18 April

Little things
2000

I cherish my bottle
of Ibuprofen
manufactured at
the Khimfarm Kombinat
in Staraya Kupavna.
It's dark brown, real glass,
the label recommends
"Keep tightly closed
in a cool dry place"
in Russian, and I can
read it! The cap doesn't
have any childproof features,
another way of saying
I can open it! When I do so,
I find no safety seal,
only a hundred sugar-coated
rosy pills and a wad of fluffy
white cotton I have been assured
is pure.

PS I'll bring you some.

15 April

SAY WHAT
1992, 2011

I am going to practice
taking note of what I say,
not what I mean,
or think I mean,
or say I didn’t mean
when I don’t care for
some response I get.

14 April

TOO LITTLE TOO LATE
2008, 2011

When a mutual friend,
whom she had been just about to inform
that news of him
was the last thing she wanted,

told her that he had said, in reference to her,
“I so screwed up,”
she found herself aloof,
dispassionate, barely curious

which of his multitude
of indefensible actions
he might finally be beginning
to acknowledge,

and she knew for sure she was done with, over, gone.

13 April

Rickshaws in the Snow
for Marta

Note: The Polish city whose name is generally written in English as Lodz actually has diacritical marks gracing three of its four letters in Polish, and these make it sound like “Woodge.” You are likely to encounter rickshaws – rikszy in Polish – if you visit, which I highly recommend.

I know the game
of hide and seek
with spring,
last year’s leaves
rustling in a tree
while this year’s
sruggle to unfurl
in a wind I do not feel
down on the ground as we turn
the corner
onto the long stretch
of the street
that people think of
if they think
of Woodge at all.

I know how summer
hovers suddenly,
briefly in between.

I know the thorough
chill of autumn
on November’s
Independence Day
as I shiver in the rush
of air against
the bicycle that bears us
south down the old part
of Piotrkowska
no one cares about.

But I yearn to know
the cold that settles in to stay,
the slushy muddy tracks
of three wheels plying
their way up and down
the long straight street
shaped by twin hidden rivers.
I dream of pedalling my own
rickshaw in the snow.

4 April

Before The Maze
1996

The sky is so wide I can see past any storm.
I have such desire for union, but I am alone here.

It is called The Neck, a narrow ridge dividing two vast families of canyons.
When we met, I was not paying enough attention.

Red, rough-hewn temples, cryptogamic earth, the mysterious marriage.
There is nothing more important than commitment.

Flash flood, water crashing down the sky, down the gutters, down my neck.
I hate it that I must leave everything behind.

We are overlooking the earth falling away, away down canyon after rivulet.
When I lost the canyons, I lost my voice.

Forgive me for my trespasses into your sanctuary.
The Flint Trail, jagged, steep, where we stood at the top afraid,

before the rain washed the road away.

2 April

The alchemy of language
2006

William, I too rise early,
write poems every morning.
I set my standards low, and wait
until later to tinker with what comes
to me, what always comes, the way
the river flows to me, the woods
gather in grace around me.
But that is all we have
in common. Though I long
to write the mystery and magic
coursing through each molecule,
each moment, William, I am sick and stuck.
Not so far from your tranquil Lake Oswego
lurk the trailer parks on 82nd Avenue
that I escape daily but only
for an hour or so by
following your example.
Show me the way further, William,
take me beyond the Clackamas County
line, get me out of Felony Flats,
give me something to write
about besides addiction,
failed get-rich-quick schemes,
small betrayals, fistfights in tavern
parking lots, scrap metal, children with wary eyes
and dirt and snot smeared under their noses.
Make me a new life. Teach me the alchemy
of language, shine the light up ahead
to where the curtain finally falls
on this sad, sordid, stupid
white-trash drama.

1 April

Just look,

the blossoms
on the cherry trees
entreat,
even if this year
you think that you’re
past caring.
You don’t have to feel
a thing, they promise.

And so, against
my better judgment,
at the edges
of my damp, stolid
scaffolding
of a soul,
gentle mysteries
begin to stir,
unfold.

2006

31 March

BECOMING A WALRUS
Blagoveshchensk, Russia
2003, 2011

In Russia, they call the people who dunk themselves in icy rivers morzhei, “walruses.” When I scampered up the ladder through the hole in the foot-thick ice on the Zeya after a swift immersion, I was christened Morzhishka, which I like to translate as “Dear Little Walrus.”

I don’t like getting wet or cold, but I needed to do something significant. The heirs to the KGB had confiscated my passport for “Illegal Journalism,” and expelled me from the country I had called home for a year and a half. I was trying to view this as an inconvenience and not a catastrophe.

It’s magical thinking, of course, but when they reconsidered and let me stay, it crossed my mind that this was a fair trade for making a commitment to do something I was sure I wouldn’t like one bit.

Strangest of all, I ended up liking it a lot. Not only those few seconds when I was submerged, but also the fuss of three Russian matrons getting me dry and dressed warmly, and the thermos of tea on the ride home, and telling this story to so many amazed listeners, and writing it just now for you.

30 March

FORECAST
1996, 1997, 2011

Wind blows cold
through a crack
beneath the door.
It’s only a matter
of time.

29 March

THE BORROWED DAYS
1999, 2009, 2011

Greedy March, says legend,
begged generous April
for a loan of three fine days,
changed their weather dreadful,
and never returned them
to their rightful owner.
This is a perilous stretch
between the seasons,
when ice glistens with schemes
of melting, and wool coats
undo their buttons.
Dangerous days these are,
ripped from jealous Winter’s clutch,
resting in the cupped hands
of tender Spring, for now.
Beware.

28 March

I DON’T WANT TO BE ALL RIGHT JUST YET
1986, 2000, 2011
for Margaret


I don’t care if I am
behaving like a three-year old spoiled brat,
now and then I need some time when I don’t have to be all right.
Go on: cajole, entreat, beg, threaten. It won’t work.
I’m where I want to be. Exactly. Not all right just yet.
Feel free to say you’re sorry - you owe a few apologies -
but don’t expect immediate results. You could just go away,
I wouldn’t mind. I don’t require a witness to my little snit.
In fact, I’d just as soon you occupy
a different room, a separate floor, a building
in another city. And it’s not about you, either.
It’s not your business, not your fault,
not yours to fix, not rocket science.
I’m not all right, and I don’t wish to be.
I choose to fuss, weep, mutter, stomp my foot,
kick this dumb cardboard box down the basement stairs.
If it goes well, I may not be all right for quite a while.
You’d best be making plans for your own upkeep until
further notice. And file for future reference:
this is what tending to my upkeep
looks like.

27 March

BUTTON, BUTTON, BUTTON

1994 I admired the insight that people push his button largely because there’s a big red circle in the middle of his chest marked “Button.”

2010 Years ago I made a game without rules for a friend: blue and rust-colored flannel squares sewn together checkerboard-fashion, and several sets of buttons, whose shapes and colors I sadly can’t recall. I do remember we liked moving the buttons around on the squares, piling them up, arranging them into patterns. I need more buttons in my life.

2011 There are odd words I learn early in whatever new language I’m acquiring, and “button” is one of them. When one of my students in Poland introduced herself, she said that her last name meant “button.” I told her I would never forget, and three years later there it was in my brain’s storage unit, gleaming like a shiny little button: Guzyk.

26 March

DATA

1992 I don’t know for sure what I’m avoiding, but I’m getting ready to know.

1993 It sounds as if I’m trying to decide something I’ve already decided.

1994 He wrapped his arms around me as he dozed and I rubbed my knuckles back and forth across his forearm, whispering, “I am running my cup across the bars of my jail. I am trying to erase you.”

1995 We had agreed to stay together for as long as we were good for each other, but we never took data or interpreted any data we stumbled over.

1996 “If you put it out there, it comes back to you,” he said the last time we spoke. He must have been thinking of the best things he put out there. I was listening to sirens wailing in the distance.

1997 One last letter, and then we’ll be strangers.

24 March

DRUNK TRIPTYCH

2000, USA
Two men with the same name, from the same city in Eastern Europe where they were professionals in the same field, living now in the same city in the United States, have a problem. The first calls the second only when he’s drunk and the second doesn’t like it.

2002, Russia
On the second day of Marina’s wedding, after two hours of trying to persuade me, her relatives finally persisted just a second longer than I did. I took a tiny sip of vodka na posashok, which translates something like “for the walking stick,” an early, less lethal equivalent of “for the road.” Do dna, the guys chorused, “bottoms up.” I summoned the most devastating twinkle in my eye and replied in English, “Don’t push your luck.”

2009, Poland
I ended up sitting across the aisle from a drunk on the train. Benevolent enough, but the slurred speech and forced merriment were unsettling, as was my empathy for the boy traveling with him. You can get used to just about anything, I suppose, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. I may have imagined the sweet, stale, nauseating smell, but it was getting stronger as the train approached my station, and I was ever so glad to disembark.

22 March

TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT
No Junk, Please

I chanced a shocking but polite reply
to a compliment on the sinuous berry-red blouse
that may have been the brief, uneasy past
of a woman just my size:
"Thank you," I answered. "I got it at the dump."

I could construct a life around items gleaned
from the Leverett Transfer Station.

I could read last year's best-sellers.
My conversations' center of gravity could become
what everybody else was just beginning to forget.

I could store my second-hand laundry
in a spotlessly clean white wicker hamper.

I could write the story of my alternate life in a journal with kittens on the cover,
the first few pages ripped out, the rest left tantalizingly blank.

I could divine my alter ego’s future with a Mystifying Oracle Ouija Board.
I could assess my prospects in modern-day alchemy
with an Erlenmeyer flask and a collection of experiments for children
published the year before I was born.

There is plenty of wear left in my neighbors' cast-offs,
a multitude of gently used identities to take or leave.

21 March

1995, 2010, 2011
The garbage truck lunges into the parking lot across the street, lurches to a halt, beeps the first three notes of “Für Elise,” and backs up. It huffs and shudders as it hulks in a corner dancing with the dumpster, flinging its awkward partner high into the air, into an instant of motionlessness at the zenith, then down again with a thud. I’m thinking of a friend who has been using the words “writing” and “dumpster” in the same sentence lately, marveling that there is only one act in my life I regret: gently placing the journals that kept me company through my teenage turmoil into another dumpster, watching out another window as another garbage truck spirited them away, nearly forty years ago. I’m just as glad when the dance ends and the truck hurtles off in search of its next partner, and I turn back to today’s words.

19 March

Bandon, Oregon, USA 1985: Whatever road I take from here, it will be a new road.
Luang Prabang, Laos 2010: It will be a river.

10 March

Policy and procedure

Waldport - The New Carissa’s stormy two-day

sea tow ended on a sandy stretch of coast that

looks much like the Coos Bay beach where

the ship first went aground one month ago.

- The Oregonian, March 4, 1999

On the same two days they finally towed

most of our local shipwreck

out to sea in a hurricane

and she ran aground again up north,

my sister was hit broadside

by an old guy running a red light,

and the elders of the church announced

that her fourth marriage didn’t count,

and until she got herself out of it

she wasn’t welcome to visit God.

It’s established policy, standard

operating procedure to prevent implying

to the other members of the flock:

“Go on, have at it, marry and divorce

any old time you like.” That weekend,

while my sister tried to shake the flu

and muck out the flooded garage

of the place she’d just moved into,

I was mostly listening.

She’s managed through all this

to stay off booze and crank

and she doesn’t even seem

to have a bone to pick with God.

All my sisters, all their husbands

and grown children know exactly

what I think, but that didn’t stop me listening,

as I did years ago when I was taught

the story of Job and silently lost the faith

that they hold fast to even now.

It’s late winter, but not late enough.

Blossoms crowd the ornamental

cherries, too early. All I know

to do with suffering is ease it.

When the mud settles I’m going to help

clean a few oiled gulls, seeing as God

apparently has more pressing matters

to attend to.

6 March

All these years, all these musings on the future, all the while the tornado was just beginning to show itself over the horizon, behind my back.
1988, 1996, 1997, 2007, 2011

5 March

Be careful what you condemn; you might wind up doing it.
1991, 2010

2 March

This journey is nearly over now

though we talk of the next trip whenever

we are travelling, whenever we are not.

These hands that grip the steering wheel

are restless to create, to find the stone hidden

in the matrix, to give words to the quality of morning

light through a thin fog on all the colors of ice plants.

These hands that grip the steering wheel ache

to grip a drill, a pen, and that is why we eventually return

to the place where the solder is, where the envelopes are,

where we have a chance at a decent night’s sleep.

Like the planet our wheels are travelling over,

we are hurtling through the dark in circles,

around and around some idea of home

we never reach.

1994 (Highway 101)

Getting restless

1996 (Coos Bay, Oregon) I feel so fortunate, so ready to be surprised. I even considered Texas briefly this morning as a place where desert and ocean are close together.

2009 (Tarnow, Poland) Is there a university in Galveston?

2010 (Kep, Cambodia) Heck, there are three universities in Kampot. Could I do a Ph.D. in the field?

Unsettled

2011 (Siem Reap, Cambodia) This time around I have to go before I am restless, before I am quite ready. People here call the place where I am going “home,” thinking that the United States means the same to me that Kampuchea means to them. Western Massachusetts, where I am going, does mean something to me, something good, but it is also where, eight and a half years ago, fresh from Asian Russia and its shifting shortages, I stood in front of 22 varieties of hummus – I counted – and could not choose.

1 March

LOVE IN A SHOTGUN SHACK

1997

Tonight in the liberty

of darkness, help me forget

tomorrow, daylight,

when we’ll be tilling

someone else’s fields.

28 February

1991, 2009

I wonder if you know at all what I am like all by myself, beyond the reach of your influence. I wonder if that is what puzzled you about my writing: it contains no part of you – save what has changed me, become me, with or without you – and in the absence of the familiarity that was your reflection, you cannot recognize me. I wonder how many of us really know who each other really are.

26 February

THE UNRELIABLE NARRATOR GRUDGINGLY EXPERIENCES EMPATHY

1995

He starts the breakfast conversation off with implications of how superior he is to one of his buddies, who doesn’t take painkillers because he’s too macho. Losing my appetite, I remind him that he himself has said he’s too macho to carry my photo in his wallet. He tries to interrupt, but I continue: the difference is who suffers. In the first case it’s his buddy with a toothache, in the second case it’s me. He’s quiet after that. I leave it there for now, but my thoughts are restless. He’s had two wives, and whether or not he carried their photos in his wallet, there’s evidence they suffered. Times like this my heart goes out to them, and I can see why they took their comfort where they could get it, the first with his buddies, the second in a bottle. Me, I take my comfort in writing little stories about what I don’t say.

25 February

You would say this could be a poem

for David

2006

I do not ever have to write the words

that I dread writing

I am not in denial

I would throw a handful

of dirt onto the coffin

but I do not want to write

the words

I have many other words to write

but I do not have to write

those words not ever

I have said the words over the phone

over and over

to dozens of people who did not

want to hear the words

I do not have to write the words

22 February

Bread

2008

One of my Polish students spoke in class of the holiness of bread in his country, how when he was a child, if he dropped a piece of bread on the floor, he was taught to kiss it. He went on to tell the story of a baker he knew who went out of business because the government taxed him on the day-old bread he gave to the poor. The student called this, “not only stupid, but sinful.” A brief hush descended on the classroom, as if his perfect words in his new language had ever so slightly shifted a balance.

21 February

Broken

1991 Moments ago, as I rummaged through the dishes in the drainer, I realized that I had dreamed of my favorite glass fractured into large sharp pieces, the thick bottom still in one piece. (A few weeks later, I would drop that glass and it would split apart exactly as in the dream.)

At a wide spot

You know who you are

Remember me when your high beams sweep the shoulder of a new back road you’re driving at the edge of speed and catch a glistening of shattered glass as chilly as starlight, those shards so dazzling they bewitch you to forget they ache to shred your skin.

Think of me when the rain’s begun to fall and you stop to change the flat at the only circle of light in miles of blackness, and the pay phone hunkering there, dry in its glassy cubicle, jangles all the while you’re loosening the lug nuts, jacking up the car, cursing the flaccid spare, all the while ringing that steady, dull, insistent peal that you don’t answer, though you want it quiet, because you know it’s no one calling you.

1993 I dashed an ugly cup he’d left behind to a concrete floor, barely any recompense at all for treating me so casually.

A Gesture of Mourning

For Steve

I was telling your story to a friend at the recycler’s

while I sorted mildewed boxes,

beer bottles all the way from Illinois,

crinkled balls of grimy foil.

Grieving the suicide of another vet who wasn’t exactly killed

in the war that ended twenty years before that spring,

you called form a Motel 6 in Arizona

to say that you had finally wrapped a rubber band

tight below the first knuckle

of your smallest finger, waited for numbness,

and sliced with your biggest knife

through the space between the bones.

There was a cracked jar with the lid still on,

which I couldn’t budge,

but I did collapse the glass into the shards

it yearned to be and sliced a gouge

in the flesh below my thumb.

“It came of like a chicken wing,” you chuckled,

but you forgot to flush the toilet where you left

the tiny segment of yourself, and a maid found it there.

I blamed inattention, but I’m thinking now

that it was solidarity. I watched my blood

pool bright on the asphalt.

“Didn’t mean to frighten anyone,” you said,

and the familiar grimace of regret

seized your voice a thousand miles away.

A man who works at the recycler’s offered

His blue bandana and told me, “No one ever

Cut themselves before when I was here,

not in five years.” I wanted to apologize.

2005 He said that spring breaks everything. “Only the ice,” I disagreed.

2009 So many icicles dangle from the balconies of this building that the sidewalk below is roped off. They glittered in yesterday’s sunshine, and I recognized my own balcony from the street because I know my icicles, the best in the lot.

I remember hurling mason jars at a barn behind a farmhouse back in 1976. I don’t remember why.

20 February

Hai(na)bun from the Anti-Portland

for David

2006

Everybody, it seems, knows these places. These vortices, cities of anti-matter, landscapes of dream. I remember one winter twilight when I had been calling and calling you, but you had probably yanked the phone cord out of the jack, tired of telemarketers, collection agency representatives. By then I was hopelessly lost, only a few miles from home. Approaching a familiar intersection from a new direction, I had no idea how to proceed. I pulled over, called once again, and this time you picked up.

-The sign says I’m at the corner of Portland and Greeley, but I know I’ve never seen this place before. There’s a car wash, a Plaid Pantry. Please tell me how to get home.

-Oh, you’re in the anti-Portland.

Like I said, everybody knows these places.

Later, we drove through our city’s dark mirror together, your sense of direction so keen I never thought you could lose your way. But you were in the passenger’s seat, and I was under the influence. Not so much that I couldn’t drive us home, just enough that I didn’t feel like having a conversation with the police about it. You were keeping me off the main thoroughfares, telling me which way to turn at each intersection as we made our elaborate way between two points on the very same street. Slowly, the realization crept up on me that you didn’t know where we were, either.

A vast park on the right, trees both inviting and intimidating, still stark against the late winter twilight sky. A floodlit housing development stretching out to infinity, pristine as if they had just cut the ribbon, held the grip-and-grin pose a little too long. As if not a sneaker had ever left the imprint of its tread in the brand-new mud. Off in the distance, a huge fire blazed not quite out of control.

-Do you see that? I asked, pointing with my chin.

-We’ll have to come back in daylight, you answered inscrutably.

The end of the line, before we admitted defeat and turned back toward anything resembling something we had ever seen before the last half hour, was a monstrous parking lot looming with big metal containers, the kind you barely notice stacked like shoeboxes on trains and freighters. Ordinarily I love scenes like this, but it was too dark by then, too late, too weird, too close to home.

We'll never find

these places

again.

(A haibun is a literary composition that combines prose and haiku. A hay(na)ku is a three-line, six-word poetic form, the reverse variation of which has three words in the first line, two in the second, and one in the third. This hai(na)bun is my combination of the two forms.)

19 February

When no one knows where I am

1991, 2011

That first time, I was seven and I didn’t tell a soul. I made a pilgrimage across the biggest city in Vermont to Cassler’s Toy Store for a troll with purple hair.

In Springfield, Massachusetts I walked down the block to the drugstore lunch counter to buy a bowl of chicken noodle soup I could have had for free at home. It’s the sort of thing the grown-ups do.

When I was ten I ran away to the woods behind our house on the Monkton road. I hid for hours under boughs draped to the ground, waiting for the search party that never came. I returned along the trail of footprints I’d left in the snow to find my father lacing up his hiking boots.

I used to wander down the railroad tracks along the river late at night, lucky to be alive, my folks would say if they’d found out, but no one in the bushes by the rails waiting to murder me knew I was there.

I searched the dark midsummer streets of the second biggest city in Vermont when I was seventeen, in tears. I never found the rose-gold Spanish brooch my mother sometimes let me wear.

On my way back down East Mountain it was getting dark and the sky-blue blazes led me into a swamp each time I followed them. I remember wishing just this once I’d told someone where I was going, but I hadn’t, so I walked back up the trail until I found the place where two trails of blazes forked, and ran down the other one singing the Doxology all the way to my dorm room.

One winter afternoon in Cincinnati I ate a pint of Jamoca Almond Fudge at a Bergman matinee, then walked toward home through the early dark past a jeering gang of men in denim and metal. I imagined my body in the morgue with Jane Doe on the toe tag, since no one knew where I was.

In the hills above what, at the time, was the world’s busiest lumber port, I hiked from my new job to the college where I sang alto in the community choir. I watched the faces in the cars blur by and thought maybe they know where I am, but they don’t know me, so they don’t count.

I remember a meeting that was interrupted over and over by phone calls, the best thing about it. One by one, each subcommittee member got a call, except for me. “You’re next,” they joked and I laughed and didn’t tell them no one even knows I’m here.

There’s a patch of ground on a slope overlooking Lake Baikal, a narrow twisting path through the tropical forest of Little Corn Island, Nicaragua, an empty compartment on a train hurtling through a snowy night toward Tarnow, Poland, a steep stretch of road spilling down out of McLeod Ganj, India to the terraced valley below where tiny fires sparkle like gemstones, a balcony in Siem Reap, Cambodia overlooking a garden that’s a wetland in the rainy season. All over the world, no one knows where I am.