I’ ve never seen the land
of milk and honey, but at
the Iowa State Fair I glimpsed
a cow fashioned of butter.
It lived behind a window
in an icy room, beneath klieg lights.
I filed past as one files
past a casket at a wake.
It was that sad: a butter cow
without a butter calf. Nearby I spied
a butter motorcycle, motorcycle-
sized, a mechanical afterthought
I thought the cow might have liked to ride.
You don’ t drive a motorcycle; you ride it.
What god was it that would open
earth’ s picture book and see the two
of us on a road, snowfields glittering
on every side and poplars bent like
the fingers of an old man clutching
what he loved about the sun?
Which one was it that would peer
into our thatched, white-washed
farmhouse, and see the fur, flies,
and shit-stained walls? Which one
laughed at the barbed wire fences,
the wall topped with broken glass?
That whine is the sound
of waste, rot, the frantic,
grinding inability to attend
to anything but sere thwarting
of yourself, a dry corrosion
which some say they know,
but you and I —
(my jaw clenched as you
turn a page,
you with a heart like drywall,
I who would
lace my arms with razors,
then press them
slowly to your lips,
the metal taste
mixing with flesh,
and through gritted teeth
I making the sound
of you, you, you
do not know, meaning
only me, me)
The sneck's aye sweirt and ayont
a doverin cratur wi a lit o the lowe
they ken ilka gadge on the bowe
bi the soond o thir foot-fa
glisk the skyrie lamp
hingin on the smittie ceilin
a spreckelt green plaunt is deein
a wandert bairn greets
aneath thon laich an gowstie lift
at lang an last the onfa.
As we sipped and mingled,
regaled
with oldfangled
canapés and beguiled,
or entertained at least, by gargled
oldies, I disengaged
and angled
across grass tenderly groomed,
past where electric tiki torches gleamed,
and, alone, gazed,
now truly beguiled,
at my hosts’ grand
expensive vista, mortgaged,
yes, and, yes, remortgaged.
A low gold
moon glowed
against a plush black sky gauzed,
even filigreed,
with stars. Gowned
in old-growth oaks glazed
Rain so dark I
can’ t get through —
train going by
in a hurry. The voice
said walk or die, I
walked, — the train
and the voice all
blurry. I walked with
my bones and my heart
of chalk, not even
a splintered notion:
days of thought, nights
of worry, — lonesome
train in a hurry.
Older now, he is among us in diminished form,
clothes sagging, hat large on the fine head
Some days I am happy to be no one
The shifting grasses
In the May winds are miraculous enough
As they ripple through the meadow of lupine
The field as iridescent as a Renaissance heaven
& do you see that boy with his arms raised
Like one of Raphael’ s angels held within
This hush & this pause & the sky’ s lapis expanse?
That boy is my son & I am his only father
Even when I am no one
How were we to know, leaving your two kids
behind in New Hampshire for our honeymoon
at twenty-one, that it was a trick of cheap
hotels in New York City to draw customers
like us inside by displaying a fancy lobby?
Arriving in our fourth-floor room, we found
a bed, a scarred bureau, and a bathroom door
with a cut on one side the exact shape
of the toilet bowl that was in its way
when I closed it. I opened and shut the door,
admiring the fit and despairing of it. You
discovered the initials of lovers carved
At the end of my stepfather’ s life
when his anger was gone,
and the saplings of his failed
nursery had grown into trees,
my newly feminist mother had him
in the kitchen to pay for all
those years he only did the carving.
“You know where that is,”
she would say as he looked
for a knife to cut the cheese
and a tray to serve it with,
his apron wide as a dress
above his workboots, confused
as a girl. He is the one I think of now,
lifting the tray for my family,
the guests, until at last he comes
