Carpenters whose wives have run off
Are sometimes discovered weeping on the job.
But even then they don’ t complain of their work.
Whitman’ s father was a carpenter.
He was so happy hammering houses
That he jumped with a shout from the roof beam
And rolled with a yawp in the timothy.
This led his son to conclude wrongly
That all workmen are singers.
If on your grandmother's birthday you burn a candle
To honor her memory, you might think of burning an extra
To honor the memory of someone who never met her,
A man who may have come to the town she lived in
Looking for work and never found it.
Picture him taking a stroll one morning,
After a month of grief with the want ads,
We here at Progressive Health would like to thank you
For being one of the generous few who've promised
To bequeath your vital organs to whoever needs them.
Now we'd like to give you the opportunity
To step out far in front of the other donors
By acting a little sooner than you expected,
We tied branches to our helmets.
We painted our faces & rifles
with mud from a riverbank,
blades of grass hung from the pockets
of our tiger suits. We wove
ourselves into the terrain,
content to be a hummingbird’ s target.
We hugged bamboo & leaned
against a breeze off the river,
slow-dragging with ghosts
from Saigon to Bangkok,
with women left in doorways
reaching in from America.
We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds.
I’ ve been here before, dreaming myself
backwards, among grappling hooks of light.
True to the seasons, I’ ve lived every word
spoken. Did I walk into someone’ s nightmare?
Hunger quivers on a fleshly string
at the crossroad. So deep is the lore,
there’ s only tomorrow today where darkness
splinters & wounds the bird of paradise.
On paths that plunge into primordial
green, Echo’ s laughter finds us together.
In the sweatshops of desire men think
if they don’ t die the moon won’ t rise.
The victorious army marches into the city,
& not far behind tarries a throng of women
Who slept with the enemy on the edge
Of battlements. The stunned morning
Opens into a dust cloud of hooves
& drums. Some new priests cradle
Stone tablets, & others are poised
With raised mallets in a forest of defeated
Statuary. Of course, behind them
Linger the turncoats & pious
Merchants of lime. What’ s Greek
Is forged into Roman; what’ s Roman
Drunken laughter escapes
Behind the fence woven
With honeysuckle, up to where
I stand. Daddy’ s running-buddy,
Carson, is beside him. In the time
It takes to turn & watch a woman
Tiptoe & pull a sheer blouse off
The clothesline, to see her sun-lit
Dress ride up peasant legs
Like the last image of mercy, three
In the day’ s mirror
you see a tall black man.
Fingers of gold cattail
tremble, then you witness
the rope dangling from
a limb of white oak.
It’ s come to this.
You yell his direction,
the wind taking
your voice away.
You holler his mama’ s name
& he glances up at the red sky.
You can almost
touch what he’ s thinking,
Fast breaks. Lay ups. With Mercury's
Insignia on our sneakers,
We outmaneuvered to footwork
Of bad angels. Nothing but a hot
Swish of strings like silk
Ten feet out. In the roundhouse
Labyrinth our bodies
Created, we could almost
Last forever, poised in midair
Like storybook sea monsters.
A high note hung there
A long second. Off
The rim. We'd corkscrew
Up & dunk balls that exploded
The skullcap of hope & good
Intention. Lanky, all hands
& feet... sprung rhythm.
The sun slides down behind brick dust,
today’ s angle of life. Everything
melts, even when backbones
are I-beams braced for impact.
Sequential sledgehammers fall, stone
shaped into dry air
white soundsystem of loose metal
under every footstep. Wrecking crews,
men unable to catch sparrows without breaking
wings into splinters. Blues-horn
