Peel apart a thousand years

And wash up in the Ganges

Before it fills up to the ears

With human waste and antifreeze.

Or maybe stop in Normandy

And sign up for the fight

To file down the Byzantines

With Melus’ righteous might.

Tap and temper the finest steel

On anvil and the back of time

To bring back home where things more real

Don’t fit themselves to rhymes.

I wake up from a dream

About you and some song

From Middle School. The

Sky has opened up its mouth

While I was sleeping on the

Couch, and the rain is crashing

Down on the shoulders of

The men digging the new

Well out back. The spinning sound

Of the drill is the lullaby today —

The thing that brought me back

To you and all the others

That live inside my head.

Everything is so real today,

Except for the last

Few words we shared.

Fireflies lighting up the wheat like electricity as I drive the length of three generations or one and a half counties, I watch them light the path from beside the highway. Dipping in and out of view like they’re just flipping all their switches. I met a PhD student in a bar once who told me that fireflies could be used to highlight cancer for surgeons and medicines and old family friends. Is there anything bad or unwholesome in those little bugs?
Regardless, They’re making me feel better right now. I’ve curled my fingers around a few of them, breathed into the black, and wished for something big. I should have wished for something small, like them, instead.

I picked a fight

With God and lost

Track of the time

It took for me

To actually talk to him,

Face to face and

Yawning at the lateness

Of the hour. After

he had gone to bed and

HE had floated in

On feathered wings

And golden teeth,

Whispering outside

Of time and space – –

The recipe for the thing

I’d been looking for.

Salivating over truth

And breaking all the

Promises I made to

What I could see and

Touch, I wrote and read

And remembered what

Was said.

I’ve been listening
Out here by the
Lake, in the
Land where cellphones
Go to die, to ring
For the last time
Just below the surface
And lose their photos,
Friends, and addresses.
We’ve lost some things
Ourselves. Our fingers
Spread wide and grasping
As all time stops
And with a splash,
Starts all up again.

 

My family owns some rocks

and the holes underneath them,

dug by the same old man

over the last sixty years, up

just north of Bellefontaine —

Pronounced ‘bell fountain’ —

and downhill from the lake we were

all born to swim in, drinking

almost as much as the whole thing’s

Mass capacity, in the high tide

of summer vacations and growing old

beside six sets of cousins, all at one time

removed and yet returned to be

sitting together while the old man’s trembling

Hands, wracked from years of amber poison,

chisel some names, dates, and sad old

sympathies every time another dies.

And the same hands start the elevator

that Charons the casket down

and over the inky black Styx.

Perseus and his pals found a way

back out, but she still hasn’t, and it’s

been years. Memories will

always get grayer with age, like my

grandfather’s hair, or my hopes for

ever getting another one to come home,

so that they can say goodbye to all the

dead that they have missed, and who have

missed them since taking off to another county

and leaving this one behind, for what we all suppose

to be better, less subterranean obsessions.

You rattle off your stories,

Years ago drinking forties

And taking convertibles

Through the only car wash in town.

Light up another one

And breathe out a smokey tune,

Embracing the web of the old rowboat

You and your best twelve friends smote,

Caused to stop its purpose, its float,

And sink out front your father’s home.

The water rose up to your nostrils,

And breath came slow and bubbly.

Safe and sound and now you ground

To a stop in the middle of a corn field

In that same, soaked Firebird

After losing the cops out on RR 13

And laughing it off every year since.

I’d like to write all of them down

In your own, God-given voice,

But ink doesn’t quite match

The years of laughter, smoke, and booze etched

Into your throat.

We sat, parsing out the thousand

Sounds that croaked and cawed,

Chirped and chickadee’d

Out from the woods behind us.

The fire, low and burning

Lower, was pumpkin skin,

Ever-ripening with the point

Of our stories and our pasts.

Road trip bathrooms in the form

Of shrubs, cups, cans, and pans,

But not yet hands. We one-

Up in extremity. Our voices

Add in and make the forest

A thousand and three croaks,

Caws, chirps, and chickadees.

About yesterday.

I forgot to say

Heads up on a heartbreak,

Hot and heavy,

Ready and deadly.

My God, is the only way to communicate

Through clacking cliche,

Rhythm and alliteration?

Metered out into today’s dosage.

Watch the News Room elegy

For the American Dream.

I watch my line to the outside

Flicker and turn to static,

White noise and swallowed up

By the ticking tracker

Of what is worthy.

A hundred years between us all.

We hum our lives and let feet fall.

She asks me if I know the moves

To jitterbug, the jump of youth,

And goes to teach me,

Hand-in-hand and spinning

Off the decades, wrinkles,

And arthritis. The symbols

Of her teeth begin to seem

Like thirty-two beauty queens,

Give or take, and they tell me

I’m lovely,

With rhythm and heart.

“It’s nice to meet you

After all these years.”

“The pleasure is all mine.

I’m sure, my dear.”