“You’d be surprised by how many chairs people leave on the street.”  Maira Kalman

WITH BOTH ARMS AND A BACK

At dusk great cushions of humid air unstuffed

Themselves beyond our windows, opaque and torn,

Littering the edge of the lawn as if it were a green alley

Between hand and eye play, upholding an old craft.

You sent me a picture of an almost broken chair

In a broken lot, your rucksack slung there to soften the scene.

It hurts my elbows to look at Kalman’s abandoned chair

In the new issue of Smithsonian.  August is heavy.

I am replacing gin with Bragg’s apple cider vinegar.

I married a traveling man. Long ago

In the parlor my father slipped off a horsehair chair.

I’ve seen straw stuffing become nests. Repositories.

You built me a throne and called it Penelope.

It has ears, a rug, and a hard boarded seat.

Mary Todd Lincoln sorrowed upon an upholstered sofa.

The coil springs pricked up through the scrim like weeds.

COUNTING BLESSINGS

Locked beside the white Christmas,

Safe and sound behind the pane,

Colloquial speech presents

Its soft lick and chilly chew

In the form of the forecast:

Wild Weather Causes Deaths

Dollar-sized flakes and icy

Cocktails out there folks.  Indoors

We toast the warm, white bulbs,

The pickle-shaped ornament

Hidden in the branches of luck,

The happy hum of the furnace,

The dread witness of hard math.

IN AND OUT OF THE FOURTH WORLD

Why are you here?

You have called yourself 

Out of nothing to see

What sort of world this is.

You passed through

The opening and lived

With what is alive

On a certain day 

And in a certain place.

You found a few people,

But now you are left

With the sound walking makes.

So you speak quietly to yourself,

And, you speak to no one.

No one is always with good heart.

No one always asks 

Permission, and no one will

Always let you know how things are.

You are not afraid.

And you do not know why you are here.

You wanted great knowledge.

You have some footsteps.

No one gives you permission.

You had land, some water.

It was never yours.

No one knows how only a small

Part of who you will ever be

Will ever be remembered.

Still, you walk with good heart,

Even as you bring along your arguments.

For there is no one coming after all. 

You know you will walk facing nothing.

Somehow this helps you see a little better,

A little further in the clouds.

You will not know why you are here.

But you will see how no one knows

There is always something still to be done.

St. John Reconciliations

The word was made leaf

And then the leaf made me.

I was conceived on the dust of stars

And rendered through the galactic black

Until finally I made my dwelling

Along the braids of the earth

Where the trees lowered their arms

Along the water’s edge.  They waved their long arms

And they sang their loud song

And, as inexact as I am, I was born

Through the instrument of their wind.

My song sang their song.

Now grown full of something I've been taught

Is grace and truth, I know what I desired

Was to breathe the earth, and so I will

In and out, out and in, I take in

These braids of my days

And all the glorious glory between us.

Stormy World

I see how my wishes were only weeds

Though I lived near those dark old trees.

I woke and worked upon awakenings

Still I kept choosing the earth's unhonored things.

I don't know how to speak.

I lift my eyes to the edge of a mowing field

And survey the claim of what must go wild.

The measuring turns into a blind critique.

My brother tells me it's a stormy world.

I am young and tell him right back

The weather will never bother me.

In time I regret my rude art with the human tool,

The way my tongue was rough and inexact,

A thistle struggling with headstrong leaves.

I see how my wishes were only weeds

Though I lived close to those old dark trees.

I worked and woke upon awakenings.

Still I kept surging with the earth's unhonored things.

Desire As Translation

Do you remember the language?

A sweet speaking in tongues,

Ancient talk in its boldest version,

Grown from the place where the tendrils you love

Fold and unfold in their persistent delicate touch,

Grown in the old garden that is such a mess of time

And rendition that your temper threatens to shovel it under.

But you don’t. Instead you study the earth. You listen.

Their language is muffled and you are barely part of it.

Desire as translation: Who is pronouncing your name,

Pronouncing what will never be your name? You are both

Alive and dead to the interpretation. Your heart floods.

Bottom is what you want and what you will never touch.

So you drift, handing over your own nimble, tough story of need.

Origins and Destinations

South and east

The early morning fog

Is disassembling

From lime and fly ash

Into some kind of ruby glaze

And the sky starts to open

In the middle of free flow speed

Merging and diverging

Jacking and cribbing

We drivers are in service

Our hands are dry and fixed

Upon the wheel

When somebody’s tires

Throw spray against windshield

I turn down the radio

And beg inwardly again

For some way to love this time

That is and is not mine

I ask the landscape

But the trees refuse

Cross hatched, unconcerned

Quietly brooding

The guardrails stay masked

Corrugation after corrugation

Seam after seam

The median strip unfolds

In long stretches of green

Ragged eavesdropping edges

Clinging to markers and eroding

When I wish for whispers

The bow pit hurries off some dirty

Songs not for my ears

They sing their intentions

For a specific date

At a specific location

You are off to work

Or what you call work

Not for you, not for you

We sing the song that is not for you

They will not excite

With unwanted sounds

They will not give way

To simultaneous demands

And though their song is dimly heard

I know they will carry on

Their hard tune

Beneath our shiny dark medium

Reminding me

                We are wearing away

                                Wearing away

Everything but the road.