The tides rise up and clamor for your coastline.
   Your fortune’s lost its clear liquidity.
The lovers you have crippled all have specters,
   and ghosts possess uncanny memory.

You held too long to an image ill-begotten,
   of hard-earned and repentant piety.
But now one loud-mouthed sun, one moon too precious,
   announce, through smirks, your pilfered pedigree.

Your field is still a place of friendly fire.
   It’s time to stir the weeds for enemy
for who’s read the rules of the Convention,
   and knows to cut your heart out mercifully.

For all your noise and claims to high ambition,
   it’s not your name we see on that marquee;
so take your time now strutting down the boardwalk,
   the salt air’s good for wounded vanity.

To find just one who knows life’s simple pleasures:
   a wider bed; a mate of fair esprit;
a jug of wine that sometimes wants refilling;
   and, yes at the end of day, fidelity.

There is fortunate air tonight. Not a hint
of choking gas; canaries sing
that truth. Earth rumbles the vein,
creaks the locust poles that stand

between us and the world.
We cough black dust and prophecy.
Helmet lamps round our sight
and narrow our view. At dark day's end,

the squeaking elevator lifts us to the night,
to dump our pickax and shovel in a box,
and walk to the company town to close
our eyes to still more black.

You say, "Take off your clothes,"
but I don't know what you mean by that.
They could be clothes I merely found
or a gift from a vagabond.
What makes them really mine?

I might have made them myself
had I had the time.
I might have bought them myself
had I had the funds.
So when your hand moves to unbutton me,
there's not a stitch of mine to touch.

Now you make a shirt-over-the-head motion.
You signal "togetherness" and "love,"
but I'm worried about the harmony.
You might telephone later and say,
"So long, my beautiful man";
you might abruptly move to the street and whisper,
"Goodbye, brave being, you'll fare well without me."

So when you say, "Take off your clothes,"
I'm not sure what you mean.
With so much of everything else in the world,
what makes them really mine?

I've long waited for more than wayward
letters and Verizon chats.
Flights of mail and cable conversations,
like "B" movies, portray little
with minimal art.

What seems a lifetime spans two brief hours.
When the show is over
there are lasting rumbles, at the middle:
a face off by sweating necks,
at the ending what is not expected,
but most often life.

Take a risk, choose a movie,
say how it will begin, live out the middle,
then skate to the end.

Put your hand in mine,
your artist's hand that sculpts,
the calluses on a hand that works.

Take my hand, my writer's hand.
Sit with me on the porch swing
as fall flows by. A kingfisher dives

from the silver birch,
into the hidden river,
dark river of trout,

emerges flashing a silver fish.
A moment stolen between careers,
juried shows and competitions.

The swing creaks in the silence,
and we sit hand in hand.

I left her crying,
with little kids dancing in halls
and TV’s that’ll only play the wrong station.

Today I left her
to smoke cigarettes alone, on a cold porch,
because I couldn’t stand not loving her tomorrow.

Today she cried for me.
All she wanted was me
to stay and hold her,
but I left her, crying,
in the arms of lepers,
bucolic walls
and lights that don’t make any sense.

To be your Mayakovsky,
a bedbug to make you itch
I'd write a longer sentence
and throw it into Yeats,
who'd take it in his gyre
and free this falcon from
the talons of the Captain's Verse
where I will drown my song.

To be your Mister Thomas
a summer boy in ruin,
I'd climb a single Coleridge
and play upon his harp
where Kubla Khan himself could spear
my doubt to call your name
and deliver to this Waste Land
a lesser cruel angst.

But I am not your butler,
and no sonnet fills my ears
I wish my silence into harbors
where Neruda whispers words.
So be it thus, I resign,
I'll write three separate strokes
on this piece of paper
and will them out to speak.

Jesus the fisherman walks half a mile
west in open water, works nets
at day’s end, appraises a catch
much reduced. Nipponese trawlers
now carpet fish the high seas outside Goa.
He doubts even his Father will arrange
for the meagre sardines and mandeli
to be divided amongst the congregation.
Southwards, the apprehension of an incoming
grey line that might make him lose even this.

Two hundred feet above the shallows,
Christ ascends the high altar of St. Diego’s.
His Plaster of Paris finger follows
the storm beyond his iterative flock
kicking a football outside the narthex.
Fra. Aubreau keeps goal as assiduously
as he tends to his laity. He pushes the hair
from his face, spies the moving finger
and rubs his eyes as it points to the sky.

This vindication of his faith fleetingly
overcomes his skills as a keeper:
he misses the penalty and takes the ball
full frontally on his crotch, belief
systems are compelled ephemerally
onto an entirely different focus. Aubreau
suffers the extreme barbs of piety,
as he rolls in the dust like a supplicant.

Above the belfry, the squall slows.
The sun brings absolution, lighting
at the last instant palm fronds
that line the beach all the way
to Sinquerim, revealing a gleam
of His heavenly kingdom.
Christ postpones resurrection
to keep the rain at bay, enough
to convey the fishermen and footballers
of Bardem to vespers. A Bodhisatva,
the messiah has a job to do
and pits compassion over destiny every time.

he squats
with the black leopard;
his urine running beneath
the chonta palm.

He knows this is the moment
when raiding parties strike
having named a tribe
through the visions of a wishinu
" bearers of death, bringers of misfortune".

He has hunted heads himself
lifted gored throats, avenged deaths,
brought peace to tortured souls.
Tonight the jungle breathes
its warm, narcotic breath nearby.

A spirit
regards its own head, another
piked and danced around,
menaced with tongue and lance.
A host of spirits roam

turning leaves in a storm,
smashing clay pots
into petals,
following feathers
out of place.

He has tended the pits today,
tipped their points with fresh poison,
covered them with care.

He takes the safest route back
weaving among the tall trees,
hurdling the rope-like lianas
tied to bent saplings,
quietly covering the distance to the clearing.

Nothing stirs.
Even the river seems to have stopped flowing.

A lance shatters a rib.
A stone axe cracks a clavicle.
He reaches toward the door.

In this twilight, my eyes gape upward.
Darkness seeps around the edges
of my vision. The texture of everything
is beyond my grasp.

My cessation on this plane
liberates me. I am weightless, unyoked.
Awareness and imagination
are still fellow passengers,
slowly releasing their grip,
paling toward nothingness.

A blur of color bends over my vacancy,
I remember that, earlier,
those pastels belonged to
faces that loved me.

Harmonious silence and inner questions
on the matter of souls
flood my fading ken
with snapshots, memories.
I imagine what comes next.
I await.

When I first looked upward
I saw tethered figures
cavorting to tinny music,

surrounded by a multitude of colors
impossible for me to comprehend.

The pale, blurred blobs of color,
the only important ones,
brought sustenance,
eased my discomfort.
When my understanding grew,
those blobs resolved into smiling faces
full of love and somehow,
I knew those faces belonged to me.

Settled comfortably in my barred crib,
I imagined what it would be like
to be one of the tethered figures;
one of the incomprehensible colors
or one of the smiling faces.

And I waited to become…

Canto III

Nine years old, laying
atop the old wooden picnic table,
gazing at the stars, full of imagination.


Stationary on the right bench; my younger brother,
   the left;
Dad on top. A pyramidal family observatory.
Described as precocious, and since I didn’t need
to look up the word, I half-believed them.
Not usually communicative or expressive,
Dad pointed to constellations, doused for satellites
and expounded on theories of space-time,
all suddenly important to him that night.

To share that imaginative evening,
alternately filled with spirited discussions
and harmonious silences, to experience my father
animated, inquisitive, youthful; was a semi-truck
passing within inches,
concussion tearing the wind out of me,
leaving me numb.

I imagined travel among those stars,
writing novels, what it would be to be a father,
whether I’d make a good one,
and what my Dad was thinking
when he looked at the stars.

Staring upward at twenty-two
the glowing dot of a cigarette
dangled between fingers.
I pulled it to lips and dragged.

The cherry would stoke
a hellish aura of red
that exposed the girl next to me,
snoring in post-coital slumber.
I concentrated on the ember
and a face it occasionally revealed.
I picked at the scab of memory,
wondering at her last name.
My only real concern:
not wanting it to end up being mine.

Threadbare in parts, rusted in others,
my armored suit of sex, drugs and alcohol
needed alteration.

I imagined what a forever girl would look like,
signing autographs of the great American novel,
how my new armor would fit,
what I’d be like as a family man,
and what to do if there really were
such a thing as an unredeemable soul.

Reclined in a favorite chair,
fingers wrapped around an imaginary beer
I hadn’t drunk in ten years,
my fifty-year-old eyes tried to unravel
the amorphous swirls in the textured ceiling.

The living room echoed all my dreams;
children escaping every time I let my guard down,
a wife’s interests, that didn’t include me
and an unfair sobriety that never sank in.

Middle age was the dream-hallway;
the end, my goal, always just there in front.
I’d rush headlong, noticing side doors but
never averting my eyes. When I reached the end,
     I could see those doors,
but didn’t remember where
     they led;

I imagined myself as a grandfather,
living in retirement heaven with the wife,
finding time to finally write,
the oily cool of a gin and tonic
and the ability to live forever.