two trees

I can feel the immortality of my grandmother’s crust
in the dough ball itself, marbled with shortening, the secret

of flakes and high cholesterol.  I split this weighty atom
in two, the first duality in the universe of pie: top and bottom,

wrapped in plastic, waiting in dark refrigerator to be rolled
from sphere to plane over mist of flour, then unrolled

over glass dish, rough edges jagged lace around the brim,
a waiting bed for cinnamon sugared apple wedges

skinned by a man who, after years drifting in timeless bliss,
stopped to hear I wish to eat from the tree of knowledge

and leave this.  But still I stay, and homeless Buddhists,
we make pie on Christmas. Green waxy apples abundant,

a tart and hearty mound rising above the rim, waiting
for pastry lid to unfurl like warm blankets over cold

kids smiling at mother, tucking them in. Rolling
and pinching the up and down fringe of doughy discs

into rope of thick crust, thumbs echoing Granny’s, just so,
making rippled ridge, a circular bridge to eternity.

I sip an ale and grin, my austere Lutheran grandmother never did,
and so the famous crust has changed in one detail: intoxication.

And another: a wind of Hindu mantras makes my heart
a sail, makes me slice with paring knife a Vedic vent.

Ancient om, so like a number 30 cradling one-eyed
crescent grin, a personal promise: 30 is when life begins,

when lines of sunshine smiling finally live, permanently,
in skin around my eyes, and Granny’s pie the key

to eternal life. From the belly of the oven pie is born.
I carefully pierce perfection with four lines, turn

the crusty wheel like prayer, offer Adam, weary with patience,
a steaming slice of the tree of life topped with mounds

of melted vanilla ice cream. “Well done,” he says,
“Well done,” with soft eyes.  And we nod yes.

2008

angles

There is a bruise on the small
of my back under the AUM.
This morning, on the way

to watch my son wrestle,
as I settled into the seat set
at the relaxed angle you

chose last evening, it ached, tender,
and I grinned at our own gentle
wrestling with waves of hunger,

time’s currents, and soft
cries pressed against buckles.
Alone, my mouth reaches

for your name over and over,
the sound that came
through your lips teaching

mine to say s as sh.
I would multiply your name
by all the words I know

to understand the ways sound
has arranged you into such
beautiful whispered angles.

Lend me your mother tongue,
love, and I will bend into them,
a curled sh into your sh.

2008

To the Word

Thank you for the way you shape
my lips and train my tongue to flatten,
bend and reach for teeth.  How did sound
come to mean, to be, you? What strange technology
of intelligent flesh led hands to break
you down to curls and lines, now wires and waves
for which we pay? All to say: look here, listen.
Some say you were here before us all,

in the beginning, that you were God.
Perhaps it’s true and our bodies are nothing
but the curled script of you. Write, revise
yourself into being. Vibrate, move matter
in your scratching invisible ink, nothing
more than song. And song: you without spaces.
You: fluid undefined, but meaning, more or less.

I ask you, friend, what does the word of my living mean?
The ways my quarks scream and dance, our hand
cannot keep up, hand of song and sound, listening,
every pore an ear, an eye in every hand, trying to see,
to hear light or make it, stealing space between the quantum
waves of me, though me is not the word I seek.

Is there a space sound does not fill, where you do not spin?
If there is, we could not live in this inhospitable place.
Let us not think of it, or speak its name, so it will go away.
Though I is a lie, and I am yours to write or erase, I pray:
Great Utterable Word, here is my hand. Tell me what to say.

blossoms before roots

You stood me in white blossomed arms
of a crabapple tree, and then your

arms were branches, fingers supple twigs
singing against the wind of me. Flowers

bloomed from budded tongues
became our kiss and then we sprayed

a golden pollen through the air,
a prayer to coming fruit. I swear your sap

runs through my trunk and sends
me up but whispers root, take root

We never became a solution

I tried.
At the bottom,
looking up through
liquid you.
At times,
with shaking
I would float,
glowing,
glinting light in you.
You held me.
You tried.
But I
always settled,
slave
to chemistry.

And if she could, just today, she would say:

Let us not be joined by dreams of a shared house
Or endless days of children screaming.

Must there be this mundane quantity?
Let us meet, and meet, and meet, here.

Beyond stained kitchen sinks,
Beyond shared impending poverty,

Beyond my socks tumbling with yours
In an eternal laundry.

Let’s bare our feet
And run between

These domesticities.
Here is just as sweet.

Small Town, Wide Range

Brush.
Its name its natural landmark:
Fields of undifferentiated sage
Whose pungent shadows

Stoically quake in ammoniacal air,
Wrap around calculated corners
Of feedlots and whispering cornfields,
Not daring to grow along herbicidal sidewalks.

People are born, grow old, and die here.
Running, then walking, then wheeling and finally
Wheeled around their last days in one of a dozen sterile
Hallways heralded by this home of nursing homes.

People come to Brush to die, just ask longtime locals
Or restless folk seeking teaching experience
Before they move on, back to cities or mountain hamlets
More brilliant for the existence of Brush.

I have not come here to die, but to live in hushed streets,
Empty after dark, where windows blaze blue
And small town sky stars yield to American Idol’s.
Where are the poems hiding? I didn’t want to find them, at first.

It was easier to find a poem in Crested Butte
Or Red Feather Lakes. Even their names are poems.
There, poems yodel from pine needles, dawdle
In strobed dapple of aspen leaf shadows, jaunt

Across meadows with proud antlers, sparkle
Off spectacular peaks, tremble in our knees.
But we are not a hamlet nestled in the cupped hands
Of mountains.  Our poems lie low to the ground, strangled

In language unspoken in Vail, Aspen, Boulder, whose travelers,
If they linger, if monolingual, hear a mumbled muddy Nothing
On our littered river trail. Their adrenaline loving fingers demand:
Where is rock climbing, white water, white slope?  West of here,

We say, and they go home. You have to live here a while to see
Where poems hide. And even then, you have to polish your own
Damned dullness before they shine. I know. Cupped in crooked
Knuckled sagebrush sleeps a dusty wood, a hapless, unhurried,

Bird-loved river. Flat, sandy, downright swampy when you walk
Along it in places. Between quiet columns of mullein wait
Drab flat stones, cheerful lost paint balls, grey goose feathers
And rusted bullet casings. I’m no hunter.

I gather these poems in my pockets, place them, priceless
In the hands of my young boys, who, respectively, skip, pop,
Ruffle and arrange like silos these forgotten leavings, finding
Their final use: joy.

the evolution of literacy

we are making
the evolutionary shift
to sitting
hours a day, hunched
over keyboards and books
like vultures
pasty skinned
backs forgetting the shape
of straight,
shoulders in attitude of stone

remember our ancient
grandmother, shifting from all
fours to feet? they ached like this.
still, she walked
and reached into trees.
our bodies resist change,
but cannot resist it,
the need to write and read
and learn to knead
each other’s necks.

Receiving Wind

Nothing
could have prepared
me for the beauty
of ten thousand winds
moving through
your face. No
words can chase
the running
musculature
of your electricity,
or the flash that flies
the parentheses
of your slightest grin
to mine, or the pride
of your chin.

And how
your eyes from tender
wide to hunger
thin disarm, unfurl me.
Here, take my arms,
make them
four. I would open
every door
for you at once
just to watch
your face walk
through, beyond
and always, always
to me, wind
receiving wind.

Because my son announces Narnia trees! on his seventh winter solstice

Driving across Nebraska
we are witnessed

by a stand, no, a hundred mile strand,
of wizened iced trees.

From every tip, ominously fragile,
sag shining branched veins of glassed light.

I start to slough my skin,
drop muscles, organs, bones like leaves

reveal my nerves and veins,
stand up solid in the sun,

reaching, sagging,
a branched thing, silent and clear.

featured in A Prairie Journal (Winter 2008)