Free Verse

First light of day in Mississippi
son of laborer & of house wife
it says so on the official photostat
not son of fisherman & child fugitive
from cottonfields & potato patches
from sugarcane chickens & well-water
from kerosene lamps & watermelons
mules named jack or jenny & wagonwheels,

years of meaningless farm work
work Work WORK WORK WORK —
“Papa pull you outta school bout March
to stay on the place & work the crop”
— her own earliest knowledge
of human hopelessness & waste

A boy who knew enough to save for something
like the whim that took me downtown on the bus
one lost Saturday morning of my mother’ s birthday,
I sat in the back where the gasoline smell
made me dizzy and I closed my eyes but didn’ t
think of her, only of myself, basking in the light
and love that would fall down on me when I

And that’ s how it is; everyone standing up from the big silence

of the table with their glasses of certainty and plates of forgiveness
and walking into the purple kitchen; everyone leaning away from the gas stove

Marie blows on at the very edge of the breaking blue-orange-lunging-

forward flames to warm another pot of coffee, while the dishes pile up in the sink,
perfect as a pyramid. Aaah, says Donna, closing her eyes,

and leaning on Nick’ s shoulders as he drives the soft blade of the knife

Pure veins of bogus blue-blood and such fancy hungers
~
In the end no surprise of reports of you dying younger than your gods
~
Kicked back in the classic toilet scene
~
With a spike in your arm and twelve large in pocket
~
Thanks to a lucky day scamming the dumb Social Services folks
~
It’ s a human thing, pants at your ankles, leaving unclean
~
Because life’ s road is only one night in a bad motel
~
Harry, you could play basketball in your bare feet, and win
~

Our embrace lasted too long.
We loved right down to the bone.
I hear the bones grind, I see
our two skeletons.

Now I am waiting
till you leave, till
the clatter of your shoes
is heard no more. Now, silence.

White hail pelting the frozen bog,
I’ m stuck in the first line of January,
following my host’ s dog
on his walk through the stone century,
around the quarry, slices of marble and mud,
past a herd of miners exhaling smoke,
past a barn smelling of merde,
and back to where I’ m stuck and broke.
The fucking dog barks at the night,
mad at the stars all his life and then again.
I rethink kicking him out,
but being cool, I let him in.

sometimes you know
things: once at a
birthday party a little

girl looked at her new party
gloves and said she
liked me, making suddenly the light much
brighter so that the very small

hairs shone above her lip. i felt
stuffed, like a swimming pool, with
words, like i knew something that was in
a great tangled knot. and when we sat

None are more familiar with dew
than professional footballers. From early
grades they are used to running through
practice drills and hurling their burly
frames through rucks while the moist chaff
of wet grass under the winter lights
softens their fall, accustoms the half-
back to the slippery ball and writes
green cuneiform on wet sandshoes.
And they fear it in the morning,

In the ditch, half-ton sections of cast-iron molds
hand-greased at the seams with pale petroleum waste
and screw-clamped into five-hundred-gallon cylinders
drummed with rubber-headed sledges inside and out
to settle tight the wet concrete
that, dried and caulked, became Monarch Septic Tanks;
and, across the ditch, my high school football coach,

Sweetheart
when you break thru
you’ ll find
a poet here
not quite what one would choose.

I won’ t promise
you’ ll never go hungry
or that you won’ t be sad
on this gutted
breaking
globe

but I can show you
baby
enough to love
to break your heart
forever