Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.
It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.
Because one must be naked to get clean,
my dad shrugs out of his pajama shirt,
steps from his boxers and into the tub
as I brace him, whose long illness
has made him shed modesty too.
Seated on the plastic bench, he holds
the soap like a caught fish in his lap,
waiting for me to test the water’ s heat
on my wrist before turning the nozzle
toward his pale skin. He leans over
to be doused, then hands me the soap
so I might scrub his shoulders and neck,
suds sluicing from spine to buttock cleft.
Up from wood rot,
wrinkling up from duff
and homely damps,
spore-born and cauled
like a meager seer,
it pushes aside earth
to make a small place
from decay. Bashful,
it brings honeycombed
news from below
of the coming plenty
and everything rising.
And I was born with you, wasn’ t I, Blues?
Wombed with you, wounded, reared and forwarded
from address to address, stamped, stomped
and returned to sender by nobody else but you,
Blue Rider, writing me off every chance you
got, you mean old grudgeful-hearted, table-
turning demon, you, you sexy soul-sucking gem.
My father in the aluminum stern, cursing
another fouled blood-knot: all the shits
and fucks as integral to the art of fishing
as the bait-fish, little silver smelts
I sewed like a manual transmission,
the same inbred order and precision
needling the leader through the ass,
out the mouth, through the jaw, out the nostril
At dawn, down in the streets, from pavement grills,
Steam rises like the spent breath of the night.
At open windows, curtains stir on sills;
There’ s caging drawn across a market’ s face;
An empty crane, at its construction site,
Suspends a cable into chasmed space.
Even in fortunate times,
The nectar is spiked with woe.
Gods are incorrigibly
Capricious, and the needy
Beg in Nineveh or sleep
In paper-gusting plazas
Of the New World’ s shopping malls.
Meantime, the tyrant battens
On conquest, while advisers,
Angling for preferment, seek
Expedient paths. Heartbroken,
The faithful advocate looks
Back on cities of the plain
And trudges into exile.
Your death must be loved this much.
You have to know the grief — now.
Standing by the water’ s edge,
looking down at the wave
touching you. You have to lie,
stiff, arms folded, on a heap of earth
and see how far the darkness
will take you. I mean it, this, now —
before the ghost the cold leaves
in your breath, rises;
before the toes are put together
inside the shoes. There it is — the goddamn
orange-going-into-rose descending
circle of beauty and time.
You have nothing to be sad about.
Because I am not married, I have the skin of an orange
that has spent its life in the dark. Inside the orange I am blind.
I cannot tell when a hand reaches in and breaks
the atoms of the blood. Sometimes a blackbird will bring the wind
into my hair. Or the yellow clouds falling on the cold floor
are animals fighting each other
out of their drifting misery. All the women I have known
have been ruined by fog and the deer crossing the field at night.
I flew into Denver April.
Rock salt and sand peppered the asphalt
reflecting myself on a downtown street
where I’ d paused on my route to smell lilacs.
The wanton winds chortled wickedly
over remnant snows in gray clumps of doom
and my heart soared gladly at winter’ s death
but an hour later I had whiskey breath
at a dead end bar full of Indians.
A Winnebago woman waltzed with me
and told me how handsome I truly was
so I bought her drinks and felt her hips
and somewhere between the grinds
