Happy birthday

Spine taller
voice lower
but scratchy
feet longer
jeans skinnier
four and
ten years
my son.

Eyelids crinkle
brows narrow
lips turn
up one
side only
until no
containment possible
laughter leaps
treetop high.

Valentines day
is his
no stupid
cards, no
forced love
just heart
every year
the same
love only
much bigger.

Conspiracy

All the conspiracies
are true:
guilty as sin, as an apple
hitting Newton's head
or water finding the easiest path

which if you've seen a riverbed isn't
straight until the Army Corps
paves it that way.
Forget evidence
or long thinking

forget anything which challenges
complexity. After all Occam's razor
cuts out all the difficulty
leaving only the simplest behind
so it must be true

that the weather isn't any more wacky
than we are used to
and that 6000 revolutions of the earth about the sun
are all the years passed since Genesis.
And faggots will cause society to crumble

just like the niggers did, like the kikes did, like
the nips and towel heads and micks and wops
the wetbacks and feminazis and viet cong, commies
and unions and journalists and and and
everyone who won't support what's right

it's a god damned conspiracy
that I can't find the remote
the price of beef went up
the government won't pay my doctor bill
and when I step on the gas now it don't go fast

like when I was 17
could see my feet
bluejays and redbirds fought for seeds at the feeder
not these black crows and gray pigeons
and I didn't need a pill to be a man

Admit

40 years in the wilderness

What can we admit? That words matter, yes: the how-to instructions sprayed pixel by pixel onto this now yellowing page. That power tools require power. That a world that never sleeps means the world never gets to rest. Now we can admit that digging into the earth for cast-off remnants of the sun – when the sun itself continues to shine – well, tunnel, mine, burrow, cave, treasure, riches – they all belong, and return, to the sun.

On the taiga, in the lee of the west hills, Karp and his family prepared. Each morning they prayed for the hideous torture death of the anti-Christ. Dmitry might not be there. He may have been gone for some days, barefoot in the frost, hunting with snares for rabbit and weasel. He might return tonight. The forest might provide. Or not. Time isn’t an issue where there are no clocks. It may as well be a series of tableaux, like turning pages in an art-history book on the Middle Ages, before perspective was permitted, before the separation of onlooker and the viewed was understood.

The geologists were dowsing for oil, or gold, or some precious metal like uranium. They always are. Lewis and Clark’s famous expedition paved the way for the looting. Darwin’s Beagle spawned evolution and the meticulous cataloging of flora and fauna. Who bankrolled Columbus and the litany of Spanish and Italian explorers? It’s what they do. For us. So when they stumbled onto Karp’s little encampment, furrowed dirt passing for a garden, birch-bark hovel little more than something Brer’ Rabbit might have dug, and they took pictures and brought presents and television and perhaps maladies so that 3 of the 4 siblings died, and Karp died, leaving only Agafia to tend her garden, she remained unafraid. After all, what could hurt her? 40 years of Siberian cold? Starvation, that wicked hunter who clambers up inside skulls found no purchase – she had never eaten a feast, so he had no images to taunt her with – he had no claim. Loneliness? The last remaining hermit – no. She lived further removed than any human, except the scientists on Antarctica, and they had each other and satellite connections.

Let the explorers depart and search for their eye’s content, something from the earth no doubt, some mineral or gem or liquid, condensed by eons of pressure, something that allows the onlooker to be transported into some place where they can escape from having to search the most challenging terrain. 

ice

I'm certain
you're not
the only one
to hear the crinkle of broken ice
underfoot, after a night freeze,
like laughter through a window
or the tug of tumbling stones
broken over and over
by incoming waves.

Have you ever stared at sepals
pursed tighter than a scowl
patiently waiting past
setting and rising suns
certain they'll open
more sure than the sweet tang of ice cream
that your reward
is just
moments, a minute, just a minute

then the sound
maybe only your imagination
and you glance away
but in that instant you weren't attentive
then
that's when

the clink and crash of ice underfoot
sounds like a broken promise.

E

My first favorite letter
must be E
for exuberance. For effort. For the first big animal
the elephant on a flash card, its arm of a nose
like a trumpet made of laughter, and E
gets to be big and loud and different and noisy.

You're past the slow beginnings, but it's still early, 7:15
on a sunny morning, when steam rises off grass
like a gassy promise, the alphabet has so much future
and here come the big words, exultation,
electric, ecstatic. Here is the rest
of the day ahead, the year, the life before us,
it's turning 12
and knowing your A-B-C's is commonplace
but now you get to the meat, the heart, the future of life
and little words haven't crawled up
to weigh you down, words haven't emptied you out
leaving you exhausted, waiting for the end.

E isn't like that. Not in the morning. It carries
the future. It's in everything, it's everywhere
it follows love and makes it complete,
it's even in absence

which is why I can spell sons
without it
and still know my favorites are in there.

for D. and A.

All the big
words don't matter
much in the quiet

days following the final exhale.
The beautiful woman whose gossamer garments
filled up moments
colors bright as a butterfly swarm
with lives just as short

her fingers empty of fingers

coolly inhaling, still
heart still beating

and none of the words matter.

13

He wears his shoulders higher
so much so mine no longer drape
and must climb a bit

while he gravels his voice
and places foot astride my shoe
apprising how soon

he'll be lord
though in practice
he manages his minion brother to distraction

in the frozen section at the market
the same spot I once leaned over
his feet dangling from the carrier

squirming at the cold
so the kind lady reached in
handed the box

to him, cooing, both
smiling
completely

unlike today, brothers bickering
like a murder
of crows