1. a night in the barn
The deer carcass hangs from a rafter.
Wrapped in blankets, a boy keeps watch
from a pile of loose hay. Then he sleeps
and dreams about a death that is coming:
Inside him, there are small bones
scattered in a field among burdocks and dead grass.
He will spend his life walking there,
gathering the bones together.
Pigeons rustle in the eaves.
At his feet, the German shepherd
snaps its jaws in its sleep.
We have been cruising, half a block
at a time, my wife, my two children,
all morning, and I have been pointing out
unhurriedly and with some feeling
places of consequence, sacred places,
backyards, lush fields, garages, alleyways.
“There,” I say, “by this big cottonwood,
That’ s where I dropped the fly ball, 1959.”
Perhaps her cook, come under the influence
Of a few discreet piastres, had spoken
Too indiscreetly. Or just perhaps,
On a hot day along the azure of the Mediterranean,
Rue Fouad bearing a stream of traffic
To Muhammed Ali Square in a riot
Of klaxons and shouts, and the whole city
Gleaming white as it must have from a distance,
The former President lost his temper. Why did you yell in my mom’ s house?
She sounded like she does when her hands shake.
Was her reading too intense?
-- Did I kill Bin Laden? No. But I tried.
Your head is still
restless, rolling
east and west.
That body in you
insisting on living
is the old hawk
for whom the world
darkens.
If I am not
with you when you die,
that is just.
It is all right.
That part of you cleaned
my bones more
than once. But I
will meet you
in the young hawk
whom I see
inside both
you and me; he
will guide
you to the Lord of Night,
who will give you
the tenderness
you wanted here.
The old wound in my ass
has opened up again, but I
am past the prodigies
of youth’ s campaigns, and weep
where I used to laugh
in war’ s red humors, half
in love with silly-assed pains
and half not feeling them.
I have to sit up with
an indoor unsittable itch
before I go down late
and weeping to the storm-
cellar on a dirty night
and go to bed with the worms.
So pull the dirt up over me
and make a family joke
for Old Billy Blue Balls,
the oldest private in the world
In the warming house, children lace their skates,
bending, choked, over their thick jackets.
A Franklin stove keeps the place so cozy
it’ s hard to imagine why anyone would leave,
clumping across the frozen beach to the river.
December’ s always the same at Ware’ s Cove,
the first sheer ice, black, then white
and deep until the city sends trucks of men
with wooden barriers to put up the boys’
hockey rink. An hour of skating after school,
John-O was given a key to the apartment. The deal
was this: if Phil died suddenly, and John-O heard,
he would rush on over, enter the apartment, leave
unseen with Phil’ s brown suitcase, and secretly pitch it
into the mounded deeps of the city dump.
Simply, there were things that Phil didn’ t want
to hurt his family with. Do you have yours?
i.
I grew up an anxious painting by my dad’ s shaking hand.
In the painting of my dad, a quiet hole beats
through the dull, black night. I’ m heir to an orange heart
in the rhythmic black where a man leans quietly
and wonders. I wonder about my dad, a hole
in my painting. I used to think my dad was dull,
but his shaking hand gave rhythm to my body.
In my dad’ s painting, a hole glows orange in the dull night
where I sit beneath the canvas looking up.
My dad looks down and laughs.
Her head bangs against the window
and dash when I stop and turn,
my legs too short to work
the brakes.
Mama’ s crooked
brow, her makeup smearing away,
slurs something about good
ol’ boy music, a pint of Kentucky
Deluxe in her hand. Two hours,
she said, and three days later,
Tuesday, she is finally wanting
to stop. I am getting better
at the turns, guiding her
Cutlass through these hills,
ten miles an hour, gravel roads,
the Cutlass
