Stray Read online

  Men beg to fumble change

  deep in my pocket, to shoot blanks

  against an open, empty locket.

  I’ll only get drunk enough

  to achieve a higher pastoral plane,

  rapt, dropping clothes with a hypnotic clap

  every time someone says leave.

  Fluid Dynamics

  I’m only awake to his body

  while asleep at the wheel,

  spinning into traffic cams

  I didn’t see until the last moment.

  That’s not true — watching myself

  being watched is a new ball game,

  the kind with chandeliers.

  I want to unsee all the passed-out

  cocktail hours of my life, glowering

  in the glow of hunting décor.

  Listen, I would never Jolene your man,

  but he may not put up a fight.

  He’s solid when everything’s sopping,

  a barrel-aged object of objection.

  One time, his double swayed me

  south of where I’m supposed to be:

  stirred into a mind’s eye levity.

  I want a love that flows preternaturally.

  Midsummer Signal

  O, it was sunny above the cloudline.

  I climbed steep ridges,

  suffered shrub-bloodied ankles

  to call you and left the same

  message each time.

  Once, armed to the nines

  with appraisals, guts spun

  inside me like soft serve.

  I described the archipelago

  until your mailbox was full.

  Rinsed my wounds

  in brackish water.

  In a crumbling castle,

  I traversed a velvet rope

  to the royal weapon room

  and counted so many guns

  I got vertigo.

  On a guided tour, I learned

  that when the sun shines

  for years on leather wallpaper,

  it splits and shrivels; storied lore

  in colours is ruined slowly

  over time, as everything is.

  Lo, sometimes even in the lap

  of baroque luxury,

  you can’t escape daylight.

  The Wetlands Draw Conclusions

  Three people saw me naked with Mercury in retrograde.

  Each a Sagittarius, they had nothing in common.

  The sky fell in blurry chunks at my side.

  My Leo died, is why. His particular sneeze, his urges,

  noted then thrown out on a crumpled sheet.

  You can’t unsee the crease in paper once you fold it.

  In my binoculars’ beam, a grackle sunned itself

  upon the atmospheric rubble, puzzled, but content

  to shine. There may not be light enough for all of us.

  Living is waving your arms for help in pitch dark.

  The fire-signs took me to a swamp with live, rowdy things:

  flowering water, grass electric with hum, ribbit, tweet.

  I cleaved the wetlands to chase them back to city grid.

  A new orbit started. As though it couldn’t wait.

  If they had a birding goal, I didn’t find their blue jay.

  Party Favours

  Dressed as Maximilian Kolbe on All Saints’ Day

  but you found no glory. You looked good in stripes.

  By Christmas you stopped gleaming in the light.

  You put a puss on, insistent, carving out your place.

  Aside from sex-sputtering nightmares you’re warped inside.

  Party favours are handcuffs; cake is dead weight.

  Unwrap the companion gift of permanent high tide.

  Glory Days

  I quit music for Lent, but sighed

  so loud a tune came out.

  See, I can never tell

  how I want things to be.

  That’s why I’m unlovable

  or at least hard to please.

  I want every song sung by Springsteen.

  I need a boss for my home life.

  Sketch me the monuments

  I tried to forget. Let’s meet halfway

  in a green card marriage, so I can swaddle

  my bouncing baby boys to Born in the U.S.A.

  I figure Bruce dreams the same

  way he sings, plainly, earnestness

  drawn out so clear I am embarrassed

  by my secrecy, by all his feelings,

  eyes closed for the good parts.

  There’s a dream there

  and I’ve earned my slice.

  Lime Kiln Ruins

  Your wolf birds are starting to show.

  I pretend not to notice.

  On this trail winds are shushing,

  crows croaking over dead

  grass tracts. Clustered ferns dither

  and bounce, we practise leaf peeping.

  Those kids know the route better

  and shimmy up the rock face

  where we skidded with their dog Sierra.

  I’m tired of this struggle to stay

  upright on slick ground, of overhearing

  and being afraid to heed. In a day

  you’ll be gone east, tucked in

  or haunting the river beasts

  of another bed, but not too deeply;

  I’ll be central, sleeping,

  splashing around. We’ve lived

  in all the same places, settled

  bodies in ditches, buried fools.

  Sierra barks somewhere uphill.

  Your stiffened posture mimics

  the cliff. Where are all the human,

  earthly things?

  My passerines become visible.

  You’re scattering seeds.

  We share this swift trail, the mist

  rising off the escarpment,

  each red tree fatigued and huffing.

  The End of Grief

  When the end of grief was announced

  the houses on our street

  slouched until all were lopsided.

  Those of us who dwell

  on the mysteries of our dead

  wedge our bodies into the foundations.

  We want as long as possible to figure out

  what might be beautiful about loss.

  The river rushes anew,

  water so opaque it looks

  pleated. We want clothing

  that hangs as loose as river.

  Knock on the underside

  of floors but nobody answers —

  this, too, is a sign. The houses

  heave with our pulses.

  Children whisper through dirt

  that since the declaration

  and resultant slanting of their beds,

  they only dream of flying.

  We feel sorry for them.

  Our dreams do chores.

  They self-repair, dig trenches,

  throw leaves into gutters clogged

  with competing impulses:

  eke out consolation

  in what’s fixed, or hazard

  the pang of stranger gravity.

  Fraterville Coal Mine

  We are all praying for air to support us,

  but it is getting so bad without any air.

  In the absence of air

  did it feel like your body split

  or tempered?

  Ellen, I want you to live right

  and come to heaven.

  There are things

  you should know, Jacob.

  I live according to my impulses

  part time. Other men paw

  the sticky ladder of my neck bones

  as they stoop over me too fast,

  too close to the woodstove.

  Raise the children the best you can.

  Goodbye Ellen, goodbye Lily,

  goodbye Jemmie, goodbye Horace.

  I woke the children

  as you p
uttered into the mine.

  Lily’s mute since the nightmares,

  Jemmie’s a real middle child,

  Horace has something to live up to.

  Elbert is filled with your blood,

  I am filled with Eddie’s.

  Each kid slipped

  too quick from my frame,

  breathed up all the wind.

  Oh, how I wish to be with you, goodbye.

  I let the horses out that night

  to buy some time in bed.

  I have a favourite child.

  Your face will be indelible,

  your nakedness will fade.

  I’m afraid that nothing

  is fast approaching.

  We are together.

  What did it look like within the roof fall?

  An expected hush, wet cotton?

  Or colours I can’t thread together,

  a caterwauling stirring dust

  until the impulse stopped.

  Is 25 minutes after two.

  There is a few of us alive yet.

  I cave in. Time becomes nature.

  You spill through the mouth

  of a mountain.

  Perseids

  You shave paint from shingles for days

  in a way so angry it’s graceful.

  Yellow confetti blankets the ground.

  Our archives are returning to you,

  not in paint, not even in colours,

  but in repetitive tasks.

  Today, my work is to transcribe.

  I write clumsy, then cross it out.

  The list could become a map,

  and if you follow it, you might fall.

  Instead I jot accomplished, alongside

  other words you’ve long disowned,

  and in their foreignness I hope

  to confer some illumination.

  The future is sealed

  because night will come.

  In sleep we walk through unlocked doors

  to planets with perfect, humid air.

  Your body is exhausted, crouched

  and tender even in recovery.

  As we trade pillows,

  Perseid meteors dash across the night.

  Come morning, you’re launched

  onto scaffolding.

  That feeling, like watching someone

  use your furniture as if it were theirs.

  Ricochet

  A body walks by

  on my legs.

  Stretched out, I

  recollect, watch

  myself become

  a child, immobile,

  in a place

  that captures

  youth and holds

  it hostage. Supple

  limbs propel

  and flex, then fade,

  ache and stiffen.

  Age implying loss

  of movement:

  to be desiccated

  into shape.

  There’s a point

  at which one

  cannot reconsider.

  It’s the same place

  where I realize

  I’ve never

  been weightless.

  In fact, I’m sinking

  into quiet.

  Where to go

  if one is eager

  to forge ahead?

  Towards the sound

  of the rightful

  owner.

  In a twitch of tendons

  I clutch elastic

  sole skin, girlish

  before it got bullied

  by plough-trenches

  and barrenness.

  A trail wears out

  from door to

  field to grassy

  cellar to roadside

  stand and back.

  No mistakes.

  Always a return

  route tracing

  the boomerang

  path of thoughts.

  My knees buckle.

  Coven

  Till I was sixteen, I thought Sylvia Plath

  put her head in a lit oven.

  I’ve never wanted anything

  enough to melt my face off.

  In the evening, I pick my stigmata

  scabs, and show myself out.

  I slap my face three times

  and come like Beetlejuice.

  It’s the why not that stings.

  How stubborn I’d prefer to be.

  My beard of bees mourns

  razor burn in a sallow sink.

  I’ve not wanted plenty, a dead dad,

  arts asking too much from their faker.

  MEAT

  More or Less at the Canal

  Something about the criss-cross of the contrails today made me nauseated. I read about a father-son murder-suicide one town over. I conjured a teenager into a pattern of the part he’d play. But the boy was only six. It has to do with dimension: a spider, magnified in a grotesque shadow, racing across my ceiling. I’ll have to kill it. I can’t live my remaining years with the responsibility for crushing insects. It’s about proving something. You’d admire the way I kept rolling on my bike from the lift-lock into the dark. I heard the glass and felt the shards around my legs like rain. I hyperventilated to keep the tires full. Because you once told me sleeping was one of the things I ruined for you, that holding me was like a hailstorm, and I believed it all.

  Horses

  Say horses and my hands fill with hay,

  I’m at the fences hoping for affection.

  Skipping ropes were reins

  to control each other in the baseball diamond.

  Turns taken as jockey or racer,

  girls asserting themselves as Appaloosas,

  or subduing their wildness to be corralled.

  Blank pages quickly filled with horses

  drawn when I wasn’t riding horses.

  Pastern, snip, socks, blazes and stars,

  and the origins of their expression.

  Say rodeo and I can’t associate.

  In the saloon last night was a Stetson

  on a man other men lined up to talk to.

  I heard a cowboy say the mechanical bull

  grip is different from the one for riding broncos,

  but the how was swallowed by the crowd.

  I’m not obliged to stay here

  and watch history hammer nails into itself.

  My future is about to break an ankle.

  I thought of this in the ladies’ room

  where in eyeliner a mirror asked,

  what are you looking at.

  Race, Stock, Kin

  To scout the scavengers,

  coax them across the median

  with fast food bait. A grand passage,

  like hay worked through a bowel.

  The quills and fur of the departed

  remain alight with hibernation’s glow.

  I catalogue roadkill by the overpass,

  measure their wounds against

  the circumference of to-go cup lids.

  Once dead we all disappoint someone.

  On the highway’s gravel shoulder,

  life dribbles out of bottlenecks

  like a slo-mo New Year’s Eve.

  I ration time in pepperettes

  and diesel prices. Find me amidst

  trophies, defending a pedigree.

  Home Team

  I apologize for connective instincts,

  like how I think of my father

  each time I eat a nectarine.

  I am the grandbaby of a MLB player.

  Yes, two generations away from talent.

  I wear my goals and failures like ankle weights.

  Take me out. I could learn to make him proud.

  Years pile up enough to swagger.

  It’s on me to hew time into palatable chunks.

  I think of my children with each bicep curl.

  My body is a joke —

  maybe you’ve heard it before?

  It lives in an overprice
d apartment,

  prefigures its own dysmorphia.

  I started out too far behind, that is,

  was born late in the day. Warmth

  pours into me. I can’t retain it.

  Sun slides off my back. The burn

  is aimless, so I carry, carry, carry.

  Natural Crime

  I allow myself skin, not the meat of the animal.

  It’s better to eat what will grow back.

  This I learned from a children’s program

  that turned out to be sponsored by endemic plants.

  Look at the blazing sun refracting

  a magenta shroud for city buildings.

  Nature was once America’s

  pastime, but times are tough.

  The matryoshka doll in an orca’s belly

  bleeps its location to marine biologists.

  Whales are the new heartthrobs, one day

  they’ll fulfill their purpose, then disappear.

  I plated the whole fish with its lidless eye,

  reflecting that I’d never scaled, seldom gutted.

  Evolution gives me hope that my children will be

  immune to mosquitoes, which might mean they’ll be tasteless.

  Have you ever heard of the funnel theory?

  Bred for size, we’ll shrink to occupy Victorian dollhouses.

  Ultimately, we’ll succumb to the influence of ant colonies

  who’ll chant: Behold the twilight of your species.

  Regard the blood moon while a man howls.

  An untraceable myth has failed us.

  Summer Vacation

  This is not my first memory,

  but the first I care to talk about.

  It’s summer. I weep, silent,

  as doctors test my reflexes.

  My friends ride bikes

  without training wheels.

  At night I count cricket chirps.

  By an open window I pick skin

  raw as it itches with insomnia.

  The dentist retrofits me

  with canines that curve, sharp,

  adept at crushing bone.

  Days flop their uniform bodies.

  I learn a new means of chewing.

  Carrion tastes of all the charred flesh

  I’ve molared on backyard patios;

  it reminds me of meaningful

  eye contact shared with raccoons

  and dogs, as if to say,

  we are all hungry.

  If you’re just joining me,

  blood has stained my chin,

  replacing my puberty’s