Before we start

Before we start
lets place a dime next to our plates
to tell us where the chatter stops
when the words get hard as the water
in the streaked water glass.
I could stop on a dime
back in the day
when I drove a station wagon
to the store,a trail of tread
behind me showing me
every light I skirted.
It was your skirt that turned my head
when I stopped for a paper,
fingering the dashboard ashtray
for a dime.
All those screaming headlines
never stopped coming,
the news didn't change
when we married
after months of talking about
current events as we ate
Asian take out.
Today I drive
nothing but trivial paths,
you are the keeper of the dimes
and the traction in the tread of my shoes,

I sing your name
when I buy a paper,
you are the music
the headlines never had.

A credo mislaid

A CREDO MISLAID

Not this day or that

or even a day in spring

when I might sing

or dance three—legged across the floor

hailing the end of the night

as another eve of

hedged bets,

Not even a month of Sundays

could cajole easy praise for

proper nouns naming roads

that honor killers

stitched together with

the cheapest-oar

the pins won’t stick,

the alibis won’t adhere

to St. Peter's beard,

Never in the lightest years

would I dream denying the

truth of a

small flower blooming across the street

from a three car pile—up:

Irony is cheap

when the market bears a grudge.

        

 

 

Karma

There is a gun
in the kitchen drawer and 

ants in the pantry,

your is husband ,

drunk on the couch, as always,

'though sunshine
expected in the after life

unless it's canceled
and replaced with reruns.

In fishing stories I read

In fishing stories I read
a slither of histories that peal

drying on the gray wooden deck
and get pried loose by a youngster
who has no idea that

there's anything more important

than finding a dollar
in the street and putting it
in his back pocket, for keeps.

As is, flies buzz around
the lights in bow-tie formations,

poised at a minute in history
when I couldn't do anything else

except watch as they dive bomb
they seem to worship.

Detroit cars and sand dunes

in towns forgotten by interstates
pull down my eyelids

like the whispered fringe of Andrew Wyeth drapery,
wheat fields surrounded by large sky and spectral maps,
someone tonight is in the highest building

on the water front playing cards
as the cow jumps over the moon

and the spoon finds a drawer
to sleep in until a meal appears
as if by a magic that makes
the heart sink.

An Idea of Fantastic Moonlight

An idea of fantastic moonlight

on the water's wavering surface,

we are concentric in our desires

for the rest of the meal,

it's only during full moons

when the dogs feel like singing

and the trains and trolleys,

running along parallel tracks,

to screech and whistle and yowl

into the black slants of downtown

in the iron grey sheen of lunar gleaning

that makes the arid

and thirsty with desire as all the cars

rattle in line and the steel wheels

grind around the bends of the tracks that

move between buildings of cracked brick

and scarred, grey cement,

cutting through old neighborhoods

where trains are go to and come from

places distant as the face of the moon

rippling and quivering in snaking white lines

from the horizon, over the water,

to the beach and the mirrored hardness

of the sand,

I want to you scratch my back

and rub my neck,

you are saying, turning around in your seat,

your computer screen on a web page decorated with

floral print and drawings of naked men,

there is so much left to write about before deadline,

there's a mountain of data that needs indexing and

some other line of scrutiny, you place a finger

over my lips, you say Listen and there are barking dogs,

car horns and train whistles sounding

in cryptic orchestrations, shrill,

and thirsty among the ashen hues

the full moon brings us,

it's time to let data just pile up

so we can pile on each other

and books fall to the floor

as they would in perfect love stories,

The camera pulls away and floats to the window

to settle on an image of the full moon,

the full moon would be smiling, yes

but no, not that, clouds drift over the orb

and the world loses some of

the grey glow,

yet the sound don't change,

whether trains, dogs, cars stalled on an over pass,

both of us stuck on each other,

noises stuck on the black tarp of evening.

You turn your head,

you cough and recover,

hand at your throat,

the mike buzzes but not before,

You shuffle your poems

and read yet again,

you go on in a room

where everyone has a first line,

I would read about your eyes,

Wide as they are as saucers,

cups that are deep as pans of bread

that come from the oven

and into my heart,

and that's a start, I think,

You fold your hands

on the podium as you read;

you've got this memorized,

yet it all seems extemporized

from the bottom of your heart

which hasn't a bottom at all,

Now some one else reads,

a guy with tattoo of his tongue

across his left cheek, he screeches

to hip- hop clicks of a clock,

but he's young and

not far from done as long as

His homies throw their signs

with fingers that cross a language

of quieting the flutters of the untested heart,

I will read you later, on the phone,

with every court and hand gesture,

you wave goodnight, I know the line,

You'll see me in the funny papers.

NEVER THE SAME

All this time standing here
waiting for a man
to step through his door
to catch the air he couldn't breathe
from his windowless room,
half hours and then hours
of vapor trail and jagged cups of coffee,
my fingers cannot feel

the edge of my papers
through the calluses and gloves,
we'd been experimenting
with pronouns,
the way "I" comes after a catastrophe,
and how "they" are invisible and ubiquitous,
how "we" are strong through the week

of the ugliest possibilities,
the man was late
and so were the buses,
things were never the same.

The old drawers are pulled open

You worship the ground
that took me in full shovel embrace,

you wished me well
as I trekked past
skulls on post
lined up like
road signs
advertising a place
to sleep for the night,

I dreamed of you
while in hotel rooms
in cold cities,
steaming breath
twined with steam from the coffee,

I wrote your name
a hundred times
on stationary paper
in a hand I couldn't read,

We remain
in present tenses
with senses confused
by what where we've been until now,

in photos
drinking cocktails
waving to ourselves
when the old drawers are pulled open.