The Devil Take the Hindmost

I like the kinds of poems

we used to use

to pry the young girls from

their porches.

Write me one of those, Mr.

Scratch.

This Poem is a Prayer

This poem is a prayer.

It wears that hat lightly.

You may be forgiven

if you cannot perceive the

devotion with which it

was crafted. But words

are goo. Ideas are balloons.

The desire to craft a

hopeful design fails at

the outset. And still for

Chloe these things are

built and built again

because we wish to emend

the world for her, some-

thing honorable and fool-

ish. Something dishonorable

and brave. And when it

breaks down, as it must, the

prayer, one hopes, will

still be there like residue.

In Deepened Dance

"Could it think, the heart would stop beating."
~Fernando Pessoa

She said, hold on,

this is the part where

love usually enters in.

He said, this is my

fourth, darling, this is

a meet, a just ratio.

She said, I was thinking

about a place we

went once, where there

were women, both

beautiful and mean.

He said, it’s my mast-

odon heart, darling,

it’s my celebration of

the living part of me.

She said, I’ve said

enough. He said, always

a consonant and a vow-

al, always this run-

on sentencing, darling.

She said, it’s all dying,

the part where love us-

ually enters in, it’s stulti-

fying. He said, I’m made

of lightning, a storm-

front, a way to keep moving,

inside, in these vacant rooms.

Path

            for Chloe

This is the fairy tale,

the one with

the path, the one with

the darkness.

Take my hand. You

are still wee to me.

Tell me again how you

will grow and love

and prosper. That’s the

way I listen. I

listen with my pen. I

listen like starlight,

till the fairy tale

opens its bloody rose.

Traveler

            I found myself in Y--, that strange country, with its treacherous terrain and tumultuous politics, its inedible foods and avid police squads. I was lost. I drove pointlessly, hopelessly, relentlessly. The mountains sprang up on all sides, closing in on me. The roads wandered, going in no noticeable direction. The car, a rental, seemed made of infirm materials and coughed and sputtered like an old man.

            Suddenly, like a rift in dark clouds, a town appeared. It seemed to glitter in the murk. There were ramshackle houses, buildings colored dun and ecru with brighter trim and small painted doors. There was an inn. My car shuddered under a small portico. I stopped and went inside. I was as tired as I had ever been, a great limb-heavy weariness that almost choked me.

            The lobby resembled no lobby I had ever seen.

            I stopped an old man in a military jacket.

            “Is this the lobby?” I asked him. He obviously spoke no English and looked at me as if I had offered him drugs or my daughter.

            Then I saw the desk, a desk that resembled a hotel’s check-in. I approached warily. What if no one spoke English? Would I wander this strange town, voiceless and unanswered?

            “Have you a room?” I asked the woman behind the counter. She was a heavy-set woman with a head like a dumpling. On her nose she sported a grisly wart.

            “Yours is ready,” she said.

            I hesitated. “You have a room for me?” I asked for clarification.

            “Oh, yes, all ready,” she assured me.

            She had me sign the register and handed me a key. It was made of a heavy metal, the kind of old-fashioned key you might see in horror movies. No one approached to pick up my bag so I hoisted it myself and went in search of the room. The woman smiled her encouragement as if I had solved a puzzle.

            The corridors were dank and the walls seemed to sweat, a dark perspiration. I found the door which corresponded to the number carved into my key. I turned the key in the lock and it made a sound like a jailer’s arrival.

            I opened the door on a room nicer than I anticipated. It was an odd pink and orange room, pink dresser, orange walls, dirty orange carpeting. It was small but nicely appointed. I set my bag down by the dresser.

            “Who are you?” a woman in the bed asked me.

            I started, put my hand to my chest.

            “This is my room,” I said after a moment. She stared at me. She had the sheet pulled up to her chin. She was not unattractive, with that squarish face that many people in Y—had. “The woman downstairs assured me that this was my room.”

            “I don’t know how to talk to you,” the woman in the bed said.

            I realized that she spoke English well. My heart began to calm.

            “I can go downstairs and see if there is another room,” I offered.

            “There are no other rooms. They told me this,” she said.

            I stood there foolishly looking around at the walls.

            “M-may I stay with you?” she asked me, finally.

            I thought about this for a moment. What a strange impasse!

            “First,” I said. “Let me see your breasts.”

            She lowered the sheet. Her breasts were beautiful, as shapely as a new pair of shoes.

            “Yes,” I said. “I think it will be ok,” I said.

            She smiled now and I noticed that her teeth were bad. Her breasts were perfect but her teeth were terrible.

            “Come into bed with me,” she said. “You look tired.”

            “I am very tired,” I said. And began to undress. When I was naked I stood beside the bed.

            “Come on,” she said, opening the sheet as if it were a tent flap.

            “I am very tired,” I repeated. “I thought I was lost.”

            I got in next to her. Her body was warm and smooth like fresh milk. She put her arms around me.

            “But you are not lost,” she said. “This is your room.”

Nothing Matters

Nothing matters

yet still

I rise

and step from the tub,

half dry off,

find my glasses

abandoned on the

chair over which

I hung my pants,

scrabble for

pen and paper,

and steady myself

on the towel rack,

to write this down.

And Zooey Deschanel’s Eyes

Awakened by the horoscope

I boot up as if for camp.

There is a screen there. It

keeps nothing out or in.

I love the screen, its messages,

its duende. I can find a cure

for almost anything. I can

fall to pieces in poesies. Or

I can fall into Zooey Deschanel’s

eyes. And wake again to

the dream, every night, the one

about the other place, the

reality where this all happens

twice. Once to you and once to

all the lit-up strangers. Amen.

Poem found in Bluefield Woods

            “One would have fancied that the genii of romance were illuminating their underground palaces to receive the sons of men.”

                                    --Jules Verne

In Bluefield Woods

we were children.

The ravines may as well

have led to Hell.

Or at least to the Center

of the Earth

where dinosaurs waited.

We hid in the cane.

We spit and swore and

shot off our guns.

Bobby was a prince among

us. We knew it

even then, though we knew

little else.

In rain, snow, infernal heat,

Bluefield Woods

was our refuge.

The land was owned by the man

who invented

Fleer bubble gum. This

is what we understood.

He still had an outhouse

on his property.

We thought it a land at

least as exotic

as the Center of the Earth.

And when I found

a poem there,

in the muck,

folded as if in shame,

a poem written by a man,

a love poem to

a mystery woman,

I thought it the most farfetched

of treasure maps.

What poet wandered once

in Bluefield Woods?

It was a puzzle then

as it is now

all these years hence.

The woods are gone now,

of course, as

is the poem, as are all the

dreams we had

as we hiked around together,

young Muirs.

Most of us made it here,

into the next century,

that’s the happy

ending, though,

for that, it is not an ending.

In our fifties now,

out of the woods, we are

into life’s tender

stream, with children

of our own, some of us.

I hear from Bobby still,

every once in

a while, a brief email

that lets me know

he’s still around, still aware.

I want to ask him

now about the poem

I found in Bluefield Woods.

But I don’t.

Such things as poetry, as

sexual longing,

as mystery women who engender

such things,

seem foolish, as foolish

as our immature bluster.

And when I write a poem of

my own

I still hope that I am

up to the task,

the one begun by some long

ago hiker in

Bluefield Woods, the task

we are all given,

to reconcile past and future,

to resolve not to solve

the mysteries

but to enumerate them,

given to us each

and all,

if lucky, if cursed by desire.

"Listen to me.  I want to tell you something very important.  All of writing is a huge lake.  There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.  And there are trickles like Jean Rhys.  All that matters is feeding the lake.  I don’t matter.  The lake matters. "           

                             --Jean Rhys