Poem: November 26, 2019

Love It Or Hate It. I'm Still Making It.

I understand that my stuffing is not the usual stuffing,

not your typical, simple, Midwest farmhouse fare. 

In fact, it is not for the regional purist or the culinary

faint of heart, artful as it is, a collage, a food mosaic,

made with Granny Smith apples and dried cranberries,

savory bacon and andouille sausage, crunchy toasted

walnuts and hazelnuts, wild rice and cornbread and

the trinity for a base, its a graceless embrace of your

tastebuds. If it had arms and legs it would parade about

and slap you on the face. My stuffing is a celebration

as much as it's misbehaved. It's an unrefined mash-up

of all the stuff I like, an embarrassment of riches that

is meant to stand alone, not in service to any turkeys.

Poem: November 25, 2019

Mastery

I watch her in dance class,
the way she listens, nods,

then raises her arms, kicks
her leg and spins too far

and tries again until she is
able to stop precisely where

she began. And I like to see
her this way, through the lens

of this glass wall, reflected
in the studio mirrors, learning.

She is making mistakes, but
she isn't broken by them.

She laughs and shakes her
arms out, pulls her hair back,

and spins again, stops, and
pops her hands up above her

head and cocks her wrist
in time with the music, happy

in the practice of mastering
movement, her body, self.

Poem: November 24, 2019

Tradition

This Thanksgiving week
I am grateful for the gallon
of peppermint ice cream
I will share in cool, smooth
scoopfuls with my daughter,
who is home from college
and who still enjoys slow
things the way they've been,
despite her fast and changing
life. This is, I hope, fixed
and perfect, a tiny crunch
of delight in a soft calm
late at night, a hoped for
point at which two circular
paths converge, annually,
a still and settled center in
all the maddened spinning.

Poem: November 23, 2019

A Dream I Had

If only every walk was a walk
with friends on wide, down-hill
paths on quiet property with great
shade trees and mossy stones on
which to sit, and as we walked,
if the sun would shine down, green,
filtered through the canopy, and we
were free of plans but not of purpose,
so that when we came upon a barn,
painted blue and full of room, we
would see a future there together
and fall easy into it with only
the tools we have at hand and
nothing on our backs, nothing we've
carried in from the world behind us,
nothing owed or spoken for, no
chance for storms on the horizon,
no words that take the form of cages.

Poem: November 22, 2019

Morning

Because I get up earlier, I enjoy
the quiet pleasure of seeing you
first, still in the shadowed slant
light at the beginning of the day.

I like the curve of you there,
the contours of arm and hip.
I like the slow movement of you.
Your rise and fall, your shifting.

In this blue grain of morning,
before the definitions of our day,
you are the horizon, the first pull away
from myself, a center, a returning.

Poem: November 21, 2019

Toothache

Steel splinter of sudden shattering
pain that overtakes the bone and flesh
around it the way Hitler took Poland,
the way Putin took Crimea, outrageous
and out of bounds, grinding, pounding,
heavy boots and cold, angry pressure,
overwhelming, screaming meanness
in my jaw and ears and eyes and mind,
nothing to contend with rationally,
more than enough to make a person
too weary to fight, open to the drilling.

Poem: November 20, 2019

Looking Forward

At eight years old you had
this amazing, brown-eyed stare.

I could look at you and you
would look right back,
straight-faced, eye to eye.

I have pictures of it. Your face
head-on, serious, clear
and honest eyes, not lifeless,
but not complicated, just
a straight and steady line,
enough to startle me, between
your eyes and mine.

I see one of those photographs
and I am reminded how
the world winds around us,
how we are defined and redefined,
and how our eyes are drawn
away and to the side until
we don't look deeply anywhere,
until we muddy our straight lines.

And maybe nothing's lost in that,
if we look askance in photographs,
or connect through stranger,
twisting paths, but I know
I miss the looking and I miss
the looking back.

Poem: November 19, 2019

Boys

I remember it started with
an email you sent to a few
of us in which you linked
an article about a company
that was selling Jesus-
scented candles, and to
which you had added the
comment, What fresh Hell
is this? (which I thought
was really funny). And I
remember that your email
set off an exchange in which
all of us riffed on the idea
via Reply All that lasted
all day. What would Jesus
smell like? What other holy
Bible-themed scents might
be marketable? I wouldn't
want a Lazarus-scented 
candle or Jonah inside 
the whale! The emails
tumbled in throughout the
day, branching off of one
another deliciously to the
point that I was hitting
refresh constantly like a
lab rat hits the serotonin
button, giggling at every
new email, and racing to be
the first to write the best
response, gleefully chasing
the high produced by clever
and irreverent friends, all
focused on absurdity and
determined to never stop
delighting one another.

Poem: November 18, 2019

Islands

How nice it is to find spaces
to connect. Great, friendly
tables and art on the walls
and comfortable chairs, sturdy
enough for learning forward
and leaning back, places where
we smile and talk about what
matters- our families, our work,
the songs and books and jokes
we carry with us. How nice it is
to find safe and serviceable
spaces where we close the door
and step away from pain.

Poem: November 17, 2019

Cringe

What is the point of
an honest reckoning
of the self? All these

memories of foolish,
thoughtless moments.
Unintended cruelties

attach themselves to
the mind, hard and
rough as concrete.

Fossils of narratives
we abandon, but can't
erase. Unlovely. Itchy.

Not even so terrible,
except they tell stories
you wouldn't tell yourself.

Poem: November 16, 2019

Not It

I hear my co-worker pick up the phone,
sigh and say, Still pregnant. So ready
to be done, which I think I understand.
Who wouldn't be done after nine months?
And don't think I'm sad I wasn't the one
who did the heavy lifting, worked the long
workout, ran the pregnancy marathon,
when my own kids were born. I'm not so
foolish as to wish for time at the extremes
of cruel and sticky biology. Who could
wish for that, having born witness, except
to know that at the end, you could never
have been more vital and never any closer?

Poem: November 15, 2019

When I Am Old

When I am old, I'll still drink whiskey
with great big ice cubes and Italian cherries,
and I will fill the house with the smells
and sounds of onions and bell peppers
frying in hot oil, and I will wear romantic
clothing- vintage overcoats, pocket watches,
vests and bowler hats, and I will write poetry
on nice paper with fountain pens and send
them through the mail to friends I suddenly
remember, and I will not bother with politics
or pop culture or the latest fashions. I will
listen to what I have always liked at loud
volumes and only read books I have already
read, swimming in the memories of the lines,
and I will sit on a sturdy chair on my porch
and light cigarettes with the click of my
Zippo lighter, and I will own and use
a telescope and a walking stick with a
sword hidden inside. And I will have nothing
plastic in my house. I will prefer leather
and brass and linen and wood, and I will fill
long stretches of hours with crosswords and
colored pencils, photographs and cabernet.
And I will play chess out in the garden on
warm days. I will contemplate the dogwood,
and I will keep a cat, and I will make lists
of things that, when I die, you'll wonder at.
And I will try not to be difficult or worrisome.
And I will fail at that. But I will love those
around me, while mostly keeping to myself.

Poem: November 14, 2019

Sweater Weather

On this cold day.

Inside all these layers.

What mad desire
it is to want to fold
myself

under all these covers,
into you, exposed,

trembling, skin
to skin, and
single-minded, driven

to excavation down
through wool and cotton
strata, human

strip-mining, ripping
away the sweaters,
socks, thick mittens.

Drilling down to bedrock.

The grinding shudder.

The heat that's stored,

then released when we
breach the core.

Poem: November 13, 2019

Say What You Mean. Mean What You Say.

I'll go ahead and state the obvious:
teachers are underpaid and able to see
what's empty and what is irony and
generally tired of being told how noble
their work, how cruel the necessity
of their sacrifices for the children,
the future, the public good. They are
tired of all the people who seem to
agree what a pity it is that teachers
aren't paid more, that there is only so
much public pie, that more people
with power don't prioritize supporting
the work of those, who like me,
wouldn't do otherwise than to love
every child and awaken within them
the possibility of wise and good lives,
to pack each child's bag with great gifts:
the unfolding density of all we have,
the treasures of our past, and the blue
crackling electricity of their own
potential energy, and great fistfuls of
catalysts and earnest wishes, and the
magnetic arrows of curiosity, and
the far-off songs we hope to sing.
Which is to say we see our long and
grave work, we know the mythic
nature of our worth, and we are worn
through and saddened to hear the world
say the empty words, Too bad. We wish
things weren't this way. It's a shame
we can't increase a teacher's pay.
We see now where we failed.

Poem: November 12, 2019

November 12, 2019

Today isn't exactly the type of day
that one might choose to immortalize,
as messy as it's been, with the leather-
booted plumbers traipsing in trails
of ice and dead leaves (the products
of this rare November snow day)
back and forth for hours between
their work truck and the basement
office where the old galvanized pipe
finally wore too thin and dumped its
black sludge over ceiling tiles and
desk, carpet and scrapbooks, and
some things will clean up and some
won't ever be right, but we have
chili bubbling on the stove and hours
of new television to stream, and the
laundry is all folded and all of the
homework is complete, and unranked
UE just toppled top-ranked Kentucky,
so my phone has been lighting up
with texts from friends all across the
country, on a night with record-low
temperatures and extra blankets on
the bed, and I like it because it is
human and true and ours to share.

Poem: November 11, 2019

Trappings

I'm at my desk, late
afternoon, mid-November

and a soft piano jazz
soundtrack suggests

"White Christmas" which
I hear because just enough

of my co-workers have
gone off into the dimming

autumn light, and I am
thinking about IKEA-

all of those tiny, perfect
spaces, acres of them,

like post cards, the fantasy
of uncomplicated lives,

the pleasure of pretty things,
the replicable set-pieces

of our own future stages,
clean and unscratched,

the place where we could
lay our scenes, and soon

we will decorate the house
for the holidays and hang

boxes of glass ornaments
on our artificial trees,

and burn pine-scented
candles and fill our rooms

with thousands of sparkling
lights, and hope to see

the first white Christmas
we've had in fifteen years.

Poem: November 10, 2019

Still Life

I watch you flipping through ten years
of photographs that have travelled
across multiple generations of your phone.
I like the way you pause and touch your
thumb to the screen as if to touch Sophia
at five years old, all blonde hair and
baby teeth, yellow shirt and purple shorts,
as if to splash the green-gray surf you
touched in Hilton Head or to wipe away
Drew's forehead sweat that July day by
the pool, as if to feel the cool of the new
white snow in New Harmony the morning
we celebrated our engagement for a quiet
hour before anyone else knew, and I get to
watch you smiling, swiping through so
many lifetimes of children grown, and
animals adopted and lost, and rooms
redecorated, and the holidays we've cycled
through, and you and I, neither of us,
the same, our shadows changed and
changing still. I am lucky to get to see you,
ten feet away, loving, still loving the times
that have passed right at the tips of our fingers.

Poem: November 9, 2019

This Morning

the frost glitters
on the hard stubble,
the mud and dry husks
of the cornfield,
because above
the sun rose high
enough to light
the white and long
clouds against the pink
and blue palette, the
smudge of the morning sky.

Poem: November 8, 2019

First Do No Harm

There is much that needs healing
and much that rots away.

Everything within our spheres
seems fleshy and susceptible
to harm, exposed and bruisable.

Apples, dry wall, democracy,
all teetering and impermanent,

each a place to put our hands,
a thing to tend, to shine
or patch, to smooth or defend,

and ourselves, too, blind and
shambling collections of flaws,

given to service and convinced
there are reasons to be hopeful,
not less than time, not less than
steady wind or lapping tide.

Poem: November 7, 2019

Dark

November- grey and
below freezing, and wet so
colder still- dripping.

Dead leaves pasted like
papier mache to every
surface, like sorrow.

And afternoons black,
inky walls painted outside.
Impenetrable.

Poem: November 6, 2019

Diversion

Most days my life makes
a good bit of noise. I bang
about, a symphony of pans
and slamming storm doors,
declarations and jokes,
brakes and cable news,
mostly crescendos, very
few rests, no tip-toeing
hushes, no period, no pause,
a comma at best, I swim
my long swim in my many
stimuli: the noise of hands
and tongue and eyes, always
and improvised, as big as
the spaces, as bright as
the light, a mighty kazoo
among mighty kazoos whose
music repels the non-sounds
of truth, the blank echoes
of stillness in great, empty
rooms, the eternal hard stop.

Poem: November 5, 2019

Settled

Burned as I was and distrustful
and selfish and untethered and
in no particular order, really just
a bucket of unfinished poems,
rough surfaces and earnest aching,
I am grateful that you found in me
something worth fighting past,
some place to plant a flag, so that
today, you and I, our home and
family, are so obvious as to be
the only answer to the only hard
question I was afraid to ask myself.

Poem: November 4, 2019

Stones

I take three stones
and stack them.
I like their smooth
surfaces. I like
the clack of them.
I like that one
is greener and two
are bluer and that
I plucked them
from a river and
they fit into my hands.

Poem: November 3, 2019

Education

All this agriculture,
all this muscling of nature
into geometric shapes,
whole academies devoted
to defining our resource needs,
preparing the soil, killing
the weeds. All the might
of industry brought to bear
through algorithms and
automation, big machines
that flatten and process
and restrain the chaotic
tendency of nature to mingle
and defend itself, to bloom
too soon and overgrow.
All of this careful measurement
of yields, all of this trading
of futures, all of this tampering
and modification toward
desirable traits, all of this
energy to bring them to market.

Poem: November 2, 2019

Forward

Let's all just listen
as the wind kicks up
and the leaves flutter

in the grass and
scratch along
the sidewalk and

seven blocks up,
a church bell, then
a rooster, marking time.

Poem: November 1, 2019

Great Expectations

It's tough to be a conscientious kid
trying to keep your shit together.
I've lived it, and I am still living it.
Time, uncontrollable, bigger than
the ocean, rolling slow and then
crashing fast, and money just the
same, always there until it suddenly
isn't, and everything resistant and
ready to jump the fences of my lists,
to overrun the fluid borders of my
calendar. And I get it. There was a
time when a kid would just have
had to sink or swim, to fit into the
systems or drop away into the dark
and dirty bottom. My parents, raised
just on the other side of crisis, of
world wars and financial collapse,
brought up by parents with tightened
belts and great moral authority, still
carry the clear timelines and life
targets given to them, and so their
borders are sharp and do not bend,
and so they are impatient for their
children and grandchildren to dot
certain i's and cross certain t's, in
a time that demands certainty, where
all paths are definitions, and our
straight lines equal our worth, and
success is measured (as everything
is measured) in thirds- above or at
or below- and, yes, we have to have
standards and deadlines, maps and
efficiencies, and all the things that
did and didn't come before, or else
we fail one another, and we fail
ourselves, and this is how it feels
when we carry all the pieces of
other peoples' puzzles and we let
ourselves be measured and we let
go our options to define ourselves.