Far-Fetched Read online

  of a pay phone

  half buried in a hedge

  of wild rose

  and heard it ring

  The clapper ball

  trilled between

  brass gongs

  for two seconds

  then wind

  and then again

  With head cocked

  the bird took note

  absorbed the ringing

  deep in its throat

  and frothed

  an ebullient song

  The leitmotif

  of bright alarm

  recurred in a run

  from hawk

  to meadowlark

  from May to early June

  The ringing spread

  from syrinx to syrinx

  from Kiowa

  to Comanche to Clark

  till someone

  finally picked up

  and heard a voice

  on the other end

  say Konza

  or Consez or Kansa

  which the French trappers

  heard as Kaw

  which is only the sound

  of a word for wind

  then only the sound of wind

  TEMPERS

  Hot days, violent storms,

  high clouds, cold rain.

  *

  Sheets and curtains cast

  a white-diamond gloom.

  Are you asleep?

  Wind heaves

  against the glass

  and slow breathing

  fills the room.

  *

  Soft pillows, soft

  blankets, soft sheets:

  Her kiss? Sweet,

  and hard enough

  to crack your teeth.

  *

  Dark at noon

  and darker still

  beneath a tossing oak

  where subaquatic

  light renders

  ironwork remote.

  *

  Clouds purl

  in a conch whorl

  around a center

  yet to be declared.

  CIRCLE LINE: LONDON

  Curve of recurrence

  Horns of dawn

  Wheels touch down

  on the smooth

  ceremonial runway

  a grand plaza

  of stenciled arrows

  to and from the sky

  *

  Soft clatter of plates

  Clack of rain coming on

  Her head sunk

  in a leather menu

  Her white fingers

  turn a fork

  and harrow the tablecloth

  with tines

  *

  At the Electric Cinema

  a hand waits its turn

  outside a bag of popcorn

  *

  Browsing through a bookshop’s

  narcotic dusk

  she comes across

  an aquatint

  of brook trout

  in the bargain cellar

  submerged from street life

  Day slips past

  *

  Stout and tobacco smoke

  Tail end of a head cold

  Bespattered pigeon cote

  *

  A bathtub

  brindled with rust

  glows in the dusk

  Her white knee

  sleek as a seal

  breaks the surface

  Estuaries

  overflow

  across the tile

  TWO FROM CATULLUS

  1

  You ask how many kisses

  would leave me satisfied?

  As many as the grains of silt

  that flow from Alton south

  across the wide

  Missouri’s mouth,

  as many as the stars that shine

  through quiet August nights

  on tangled forms

  of humankind,

  so many kisses might

  leave this craving satisfied—

  more kisses than the curious

  could tabulate

  or bitter tongues malign.

  2

  Lizzie, you once said

  I knew you as no other did

  and that you’d rather lie in my arms

  than in the light of Jesus.

  I loved you then, not

  as most men do their women,

  but as a father loves his children.

  These days I know you better,

  and though I’m more

  aroused by your touch,

  you flaunt and flutter

  through my thoughts

  without much hold.

  You wonder how this happened?

  Such betrayal as yours excites

  more desire and less affection.

  BRIGHT THORN

  Excrucior,

  the crux of it:

  torn between

  two states of mind,

  the axes of

  a new life

  and of the one

  you left behind.

  Time and time

  again, you learn

  nothing but pain

  from pain.

  Behind the school

  each bright thorn

  collects

  a bead of rain.

  GLOSS

  Not long before your tongue

  flutters inside my mouth,

  nimble tip searching out

  something to be said,

  just as the deaf and blind

  brush hands in tactile signs.

  VISITING DAY

  Do not share food or drinks.

  No rubbing arms or touching faces.

  Visitors and offenders may

  hold hands across the table.

  You will only be permitted

  one greeting and departing kiss,

  a closed-mouth kiss

  of one to two seconds.

  Do not leave children unattended.

  FIXED INTERVAL

  When he turns fifteen, you’ll be fifty-four.

  When he turns thirty, you’ll be sixty-nine.

  This plain arithmetic amazes more

  than miracle, the constant difference more

  than mere recursion of father in son.

  If you reach eighty, he’ll be forty-one!

  The same sun wheels around again, the dawn

  drawn out and hammered thin as a copper sheet.

  When he turns sixty, you’ll be gone.

  Compacted mud, annealed by summer heat,

  two ruts incise this ghost-forsaken plain

  and keep their track width, never to part or meet.

  MEANS OF ESCAPE

  The courtroom, clad in wood veneer,

  could be a lesser pharaoh’s tomb

  equipped for immortality.

  A civil servant drags her broom

  around the bench and gallery

  as jurors darken a questionnaire.

  One coughs against the courtroom chill.

  One drums her fingers atop the bar.

  One finds escape through Stephen King,

  as through a window left ajar.

  One talks and talks, a reckoning

  of who got sober, who took ill.

  The talker seeks me out at lunch,

  a bond of passing circumstance.

  He slides the food around his tray

  disdainfully and looks askance

  at those nearby, as if to say,

  In here, you can’t expect too much.

  Across the hall, five years ago,

  the talker fought for custody

  and lost, his daylight blotted out.

  He’d spent the decade carelessly

  and sucked a mortgage up his snout.

  He never sees his daughter now.

  They meet online for Realms of Ra

  as siblings, catlike humanoids,

  survivors from the Hybrid Age;

  or Foxen riding flightless b
irds

  across the plain, a scrolling page

  above which two moons light their way.

  They gather gold coins as they roam,

  and relics, sometimes holy ones.

  They seldom map attentively,

  but swing their swords and have some fun.

  They chat—backchannel strategy,

  but not of school, her friends, or home.

  Last night, they entered a castle keep

  infested with the living dead,

  whose breath abruptly turned the air

  to crackled glass. A pop-up read,

  Initializing Griffin’s Lair:

  please wait, and soon he fell asleep.

  Of course, he can reboot the game

  tonight, with nothing lost or missed.

  Meanwhile, a case of larceny

  awaits, from which we’ll be dismissed

  (we both have too much history).

  I wish him well in his campaign.

  STRANGERS

  On an overbooked flight from Houston,

  I find my seat beside a woman

  in black shades, with the hard-bitten look

  that sometimes follows addiction,

  nails chewed down to the quick,

  talking too loudly into her phone:

  Yeah, I got my dad a new amp.

  Rocking must run in the family!

  As we level off in the tenuous dusk,

  she orders a Red Bull and Skyy,

  scarfing down her portion of pretzels,

  shifting abruptly from side to side

  to cross and recross her legs,

  swiping through files on her phone.

  Meanwhile, I skim an Audubon guide

  and pause at the boat-tailed grackle

  with its iridescence, yellow eye,

  and long, harsh trilling song.

  You like that book? she interrupts.

  I got some crazy shit to show you.

  Here, a silky fantail

  from the State Fair of Texas.

  Have you ever seen a mule pull?

  This team’s dragging five tons.

  Oh, that’s me, getting an award.

  I’m a doctor, you believe that shit?

  In the snapshot, she wears a white lab coat

  with a ribbon pinned to her lapel,

  her arm around a soldier’s waist

  in what looks to be a shopping mall.

  I love birds! So check it out:

  I raised fuckin’ racing pigeons

  with my dad, a top geneticist

  at Baylor—total brainiac.

  We banded squabs, flew them in batches,

  drove them out for training tosses.

  This one, with a Belgian pedigree,

  came first in the Texas Showdown.

  Fuckin’ A, I loved those birds.

  On and on, an improbable mix

  of tough talk and expertise

  that finds no resolution.

  But then, consider my own account,

  withheld: an invitation

  to read my poetry aloud,

  tequila and a fine lechón,

  a morning free to watch a pair

  of caracaras take apart

  the carcass of a wild hog

  along the Chocolate Bayou.

  What would such scraps mean to her?

  Even in our final descent

  she pushes past my doubt

  and reticence, to say,

  I started as a dancer,

  and now I’m a goddamn doc.

  Looking back, it all makes sense!

  —the incidents of a life

  fanning out in a strange display.

  NIGHT AND DAY

  Newly a father, half asleep

  between the dark and dawn,

  I lean against the kitchen sink

  and struggle to recall

  a riddle of the sphinx,

  the western sky a color

  that the Greeks refused to name

  because it extinguishes all others,

  their sea of green or wine,

  their sky of hammered bronze.

  What starts as a faint

  migration of light

  extends itself alone and widely

  across the kitchen tile,

  pewter on a soap bubble,

  bombycinous, endored,

  adding word to word until

  everything gets remembered.

  There are two sisters: one

  gives birth to the other

  and then is born from her.

  OWL-EYED

  A golden hand

  imprints the dawn

  figurative

  intent forgot

  A black jug

  with beak and brow

  returns the owl

  face to Pallas

  Countless broken

  pots unearth

  evidence

  of deep thirst

  an afterlife

  in earthenware

  three thousand years

  of twilight

  THE SUDDEN WALK

  after Franz Kafka

  When evening comes to find you still

  at home and settling down to stay,

  when the last rays have lit a cloud

  of fingerprints on the storm door

  and television’s lambent flame

  plays across veneer and glass,

  when you have dealt a hand or two,

  the dinner dishes cleared away,

  and shrugging on the familiar robe,

  you open an atlas of the world

  to archipelagoes engraved

  with light of other longitudes,

  when a cold fog descends and drives

  every creature down its hole,

  when you have sat so quietly

  that your least movement brings surprise

  to everyone, and when, besides,

  the stairs are dark, the deadbolt locked,

  and in spite of all, you start up

  in a sudden fit of restlessness,

  shed your robe, snap a coat,

  and bang the door shut more or less

  emphatically, according to

  the pique you fancy having stirred,

  and when you find yourself once more

  at unexpected liberty,

  absorbed in rhythms of breath and limb,

  attention racing on ahead

  and then returning like a dog

  through hawthorn blooming in the dark,

  that rich potentiality,

  when Mars and Jupiter ascend

  above the cloudbank, bright and crisp,

  then you become a clean stroke

  of ink-and-brush calligraphy,

  a lone figure strolling west

  on Shenandoah Avenue.

  Returning home, still full of such

  euphoria, you stop to watch

  flitting across your window shade

  at this late hour, the silhouettes

  of children loosed from all constraints.

  TURNED LOOSE

  On Friday afternoon, turned loose

  like cattle dogs across a slope,

  kids fling themselves out of doors

  with a thin shout as though through bronze,

  descend on idling cars en masse,

  and then disperse on separate paths

  as we distinguish one of ours.

  On Saturday, stunned by the week

  of school and work, we rise late

  and linger at the table

  above the morning’s residue

  of orange peels and magazines.

  Light and unobtrusive,

  a pencil rustles paper

  to sketch a horse with arched neck

  and whipping lines for legs.

  Does anybody have the red?

  On Sunday, after small delays—

  the ritual of a coat refused

  or shoe misplaced—we find ourselves
/>   within the hall of mastodons,

  our clothes still radiating cold.

  We scrutinize an arc of tusk

  and chronicle of bone.

  Among so many strangers,

  the children cling to me like burrs

  and I disregard the impulse

  to be free of them.

  Monday in my office,

  a day that will not bring them near,

  I want nothing but their presence,

  my ears attuned to outdoors

  and the timbre of their voices,

  the damp friction of their shrieks

  so primitive and freshly peeled.

  WANT

  Let the child cry awhile

  with a rasp that strains his throat.

  Let him learn what can’t be satisfied

  and break him like a colt.

  Beneath a blanket, let him find

  some solace in himself.

  *

  I need mine cuddy!

  —the family word

  for a blanket frayed

  to a snarl of yarn,

  a mushy cud

  that smells of spit.

  As the soporific

  takes effect,

  eyes roll inward

  and night unravels

  the wale

  that day has knit.

  *

  Tilt this lacquered disk

  against the sun

  tap tap

  its pendulum

  pulls each head in turn

  to pivot in a slot

  and peck at painted

  flecks of scratch

  the hollow tap

  of appetite

  SCHOOL DAYS

  Passing our porch, a girl of ten

  holds a drum against her stomach

  as you might a covered dish.

  China trembles with a truck’s idle

  or the white hum of compressors,

  the morning air muted

  as though near the ocean,

  lightly ruffled by subaquatic

  scales on a clarinet

  and the tuning of strings.

  When she passes again, near dusk,

  the insect chorus subsides

  to a pinprick of cricket song.

  Narrow pens of fenced yards,

  as yet unraked, lie thick

  with indotherms and agitrons.

  Something keeps brushing against me!

  Around a plot of ragged mint,

  the lemon zest of walnut leaves

  illuminates the lawn,

  brickwork slowly revealed.

  LATE OCTOBER

  Kids crowd the stoop

  backs to a darkened house

  so close to nothing

  yet incurious

  *

  Across the brick façade

  a kestrel

  races to meet

  its shadow

  *