Past Work (week 1)

Here is a collection of poetry that I wrote last spring.

Reclamation
At El Dorado Lake, Kansas,
the drift wood rises dead from black water
the petrified bones of some beast,
catching migrating eagles with its mossy suckers.
My pickup follows currents across the sea floor.

In this limestone basket of dried walls,
weaved from wheat shocks milo, and bound with barbed wire
road EE points to the scenic route lining the lake.
Touring caved-in factories and shotgun drug stores
the wind jostles my Ford.

A glint of tin siding in the rear view mirror
and the tires squirt gravel,
screening entire towns
where rebellion meant
dancing on Sunday.

Coronado Street, Cortez Avenue,
a red-eyed drunk watering his cactus
with obscenity.
A five-stringed guitar,
a three-wheeled car on an altar of cinder blocks.

In the dreams of the drunk
Coronado wanders this Abyssal plain,
still flooding whole towns
precisely so gold can be found.


Camping Near Logger Trails

Into the smoldering rib cage of that pine forest
Too late for loggers and turpentine hearts,
We kicked shadows deeper into twilight,
Tripped over limestone, and roots:
The gnarled knuckles of the worn and sleeping.
The trail wheezes through the still smoking earth.
I hack along dead brush and the promise of richer soil,
My lover three burning steps away.

In the clearing, a logger’s cabin
Roofless and drained of color,
Its planks splintered, two broken windows and a caved-in door:
The face of a logger a few years from collapse.
Charred tongues of its timber creak and moan,
The windows offer only flecks
Fractured portraits of our stares.

I want us to fall here,
Split by the logger’s swing
Our hair stirring the scorched ground.
I tell her to take my hand, hold me down.
I tell her we can sleep in the ash,
Smear sooty hands across our faces, and black out.
I want her mouth to fill mine with dust
I want her to smolder like an ember.


A Coal Miner in Retrospect

Summer stripped the leaves of him,
dusted his hands
into a bowl of soup.
He rolls white papers
between stained fingertips,
taps the ember in his bowl:
some liquid ashtray
floating flakes of grey potato skin.

The shadows outside—stretch and filter
through the naked tangle of the willow.
Spider-webbed roots choke the cellar windows
that drape the room in dusk.
He wipes the last slice of day from his plate,
his wine matured without the memory of seasons,
cured by monotony.

To count each inhalation
his coal miner hands drag
down the slick stones heating winter
down the oily veins ejecting electric promises,
down the summer sun he felt but never saw.
The throaty release, smoky fingers
blown against the frost bitten window pane.

To count each filtered breath,
thinking of the thick air
swallowed nightly, tasting the day.
The sulfuric of that place
filling his mouth with scorched earth.
Downing beers with neon suns flickering
until tomorrow’s hands scrape and score
the raw underbelly of mountains.
To count the warm air
sucked between his fingers,
hands exposed by work that peels
the doer and the done.


The Girl on the Third Floor

She slides red and yellow into the water
of a room of evenings. Shadows
hang their thick X’s on the wall.
We sneak away, press old wood floors
polished by her father’s consistency.

She opens the window for a cigarette,
and in the sun’s final act, behind a chorus
of birch and pine, I hold her naked.
Last summer passes underneath us,
in streets exploding with children and bicycles.

Later, cicadas whine in the cut grass.
The air cools. She blows smoke
on my body, tells me about her Russian dolls,
her fear of ladders. I slide her into my arms,
into damp covers on the third floor,
the moon peaks around floral curtains.
Soon, I will fall out of the window,
down to the street, will ride my bicycle
past a house, and shout toward her
opening a window on the third floor.


Robert & Morris Drug Store
A white that burns your eyes, an alcohol white. This brilliance, an outpost on the fringe of town in the late burn of summer when the sun’s a beacon. Across the street you hear birds thud the windows, fall to the porch, where, a few moments later a tall man appears with a squat stool and a yellow rag. The man and the mess gone in minutes never to disturb the well maintained purity of the house; a purity of blue-clean glass and deep shadows that keep the interior activities quiet. At night, the windows’ crème shades were eyelids half open to the town and the shadows within moved through a florescent glaze. The house, blanketed in the moon’s white covers, kept its pulse in the tick and tock of a grandfather. Perhaps if you passed by on a nighttime stroll, you might hear the faint murmur of that grandfather chiming in synch with the thump-a-dump of your beating heart or perhaps you might not.

We knew only a few, inconsequential oddities within the house. We knew only what the crisp glass showed us. By the light of day you could see the clock, gold-trimmed and snug against the wall. On the shelf behind the window an odd assemblage of watercolor portraits and green glass bottles gathered. A wooden bookcase—empty and an antique cash register lay directly behind them. If you came into town on a day trip you might catch yourself staring in and think, “These possessions clutter my view. They degrade this place. They are nothing worth my time. Look at the windows that mirror, see the purity of this radiant house.” These thoughts might cross your mind or they might not.

A house so tidy with its white pillars propping up the town’s pride and allowing us to sleep sound in mind and still in body even as the old man piles earth upon another fresh cut in the backyard. “It must be the birds, large ones like the albatross and pelican,” we murmur in our sleep. Their white feathers prove the whiteness of the house and, after all, who would notice the dirty, pocked earth around such clear windows, such a brilliant place.