40 - Mobility

Easy, these shields

are light as beetleshells

protecting and unfelt but off

carapace carom some things

I can’t know now.

Look back to see what I saw

new child, tell

the shames of a then-child

too well in it to flame in

flush confessing its guilt

of low-class stain —

accuse with the bite

of a tidy kept babe

palate clean to taste tang

of humid shag and unwash pride

the slim slick inch above hunger

above the floor by height

of a secondhand bedframe

having only found that

one time vermin in

the vermicelli

left the bedding pissed

for a few days because what

what does an animal really care?

but our used clothes

had no holes in,

not even the sock-bottoms:

that kind of unselfaware

willingtodowhatever

then wave the flag

of a last remaining dignity —

show me its outside,

show me seeing me shameful.

Groping for my own life

in dark senses

I can’t tell you how bad it was.

But I can tell you the precise

moment when some food

is still just okay enough to eat.

38 - Going Lightly

Do you remember that famous Christian book about cults?
On the cover spun rainbow waters in a down-drain spiral —

America the melting pot, or, an oil slick was in our sink but it’s going away!

What were we doing on the rim of it?

What was I doing, learning how subtle variations in the gradient out

from pure light all end in the same darkest gone-away?

We were prodigies of collapsing space

forgetting pipes to waterways covering two-thirds

of a planet made just for men, who don’t swim far.

We were forging the ways our bodies go as minds move —

that is, self-limiting, or, why I can’t now unfold all

the crushed wax-paper skies above regions I belatedly see.

The weight of our bones in the world is decided early.

And even as I’ve strained to widen my eyes

for the dim of unholy wilderness I know

the being-in-it feeling is no known quantity of light.

Others muscle in pressing-going through the friction-real;

I stay thin air, where solid things vanish.

34 - Eating Spam for Dinner Again, Looking Out into the Yard

Divorce brings all manner

of truth to light; a plant

can become a corpse.

There lay Charlie Tree,

a Norfolk Island Pine

older than me and raised indoors,

mom told him daily she

loved him, told him

he was a beautiful tree.

Still gave him up.

Dad dumped him

under the backyard hedge

of his bachelor pad,

a new duplex

with sliding glass patio doors

for easy viewing.

We watched him,

being dead out there,

thinking about why

custody is called a battle.

31 - So Insulting, So Enlightened

One year, my sister and I

subjected Christmas mythology

to empirical testing.

“Sign here,” scrawled on

cardstock, “if you, Greenie

the Wonder Dog, who we love

so so much, are truly real.”

Then a hand-dotted line,

the length of a linchpin.

Folded over, addressed,

blessed with a gold star sticker,

scotch-taped to the pebbly wall

above the obligatory cookies.

We’d play the powers that be like

cheap psychics fed false

leads on how to flatter us best.

Come morning, bypassing presents

we opened the card to find

our stepfather’s scrawl

dyslexically confirming

the existence of a recently

invented flying dog.

We frowned a little at the gifts,

realizing they had been sacrificed

to the idols of magical thinking.

We both got just what we wanted.

30 - Passer Aux

God fell the morning we kids found

a baby starling on the lawn.

Stepping close cat-softly

our gasping pupils gulped

the light off thick grass

swelled with verdant juice,

arrogant to outdo the absurdity

of a bird in the dirt. Everything

was strange. I pictured

his feet black roots, feathers

shoots and fronds of night

and scattered white seeds

for planting flight in Earth.

But silent, hurt, and sunk in

adolescent bloat his downy

starscape a wilt of absent heaven,

stolen on the descent.

Order: passeriforme, passeri

same as those penny-sparrows who

never fall without the Father.

We tucked the little aeronaut

into a shoebox bed and blanket,

cradled as the car flew to

wherever white-gloved

ministers could right this

blot on invincible birdhood.

We couldn’t stay to see

if he would fly again, though

they all smiled nicely

in that lying way.

Who is responsible for flight?

Where does it go when birds die?

De passer à travers ma vie,

passer aux oubliettes,

mes passereaux infinie.

28 - Fluid Offenses

At dinner, sat in a high-backed wood chair,

trained to gulp tepid milk silently.

He coached me to open my throat so the drink

could pour down without resistance,

no deep inside churn of wet gush heard,

taught soundlessness so no prim ear

could tell that I did things to live.

Swallowing was the first way I learned

that my body, traitor, was an unfit home.

I would also learn, later, some other ways.

I sat by the bay, listening, all the water safe

out there and my mind became an ocean.

In nautical lore, the swallow is an omen

a sign of the shore, to follow for harbor

by cries from their velvet brown throats.

But I, I in my wood boat flung far from the earth

knew no birds could find me to sing.

For the roaring wide sea sprawls

and swallows my edges and anchors.

27 - At the Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary

They sell dried yellow corn in

fifty cent brown paper sacks

taken past the concrete embankment

on down to fowl pondside, where

goose beaks bicker on

my corn cup palms,

hard plastic tong mouths of need

pinching kernels, me.

I, five, am flushed with an eminent

sense of importance.

We kids learn on these educational trips.

My grain-grown flock would do

anything for cheap gold

magic beans. And I

made them eat off my shoes.

Learn, and repeat.

Back home, my father

would dangle Circus Peanuts

over my head, saying

“Dance like a dog.”

22 - Undignified

I couldn’t handle it, and I felt strong

enough to admit it back then.

So on the third day of 6^th grade,

I cried not to go back to school.

I’d just come there from a 42-student,

two-room K-8 church school

on Marinette County farmland,

where the playground stretched for acres,

and the sky over cornfields was clear for miles.

But Crivitz had half-lockers, chain-link fence,

each hour was a classroom change.

The rules seemed arcane, and I wanted rules,

but no one would tell me them straight.

My lone friend was a lisper, and I needed friends,

but I couldn’t hear what she said.

I complained of an upset stomach.

The counselor sat me on a dusty sofa,

made me shoot Koosh balls

at the poster of a basset hound’s sad face,

which didn’t help out a kid getting hit

in the head by boys pitching fistfuls of paper

on the third day of 6^th grade.

So I cried not to go back to school, back then,

when I was strong enough to be undignified,

in the dim inside of a doublewide trailer,

where we sat on the sofa and it puffed out dust.

And my arms flung out like bedsheet ropes,

from the window of my anxious gut.

And they hung midair an instant too long

because you had to decide if you’d catch me.

Then you leaned in, conceding to catch me.

Well, I felt our unhitched moment.

Two train cars on the frozen north rail

which ran by both schoolyards,

two train cars just uncoupled and running

together in wobbly, failing momentum.

Then one sped ahead, as the other slowed,

and no one really got hurt.

But the distance is impossibly huge now.

I felt it, but like I would so often stash

my chore allowance in several odd jars

I spent all my strength finding

hiding spots for my hard-earned anger.

So I hated the sofa, and I hated that dog

for holding my stupid pain. And then

I thought differently about throwing things.

But you kept me at home after that,

and I kept careful about being dignified,

and I learned a whole lot in 6^th grade

in the doublewide trailer on farmland

cut through by the frozen north rail.

21 - A Feeling

When all my color bled out, the white room was left,
where I learned I’m not the source of my own desire.
You gloved your fingers safe, to “take a look inside.”
I owe you this feeling; you know it is dangerous for me to be empty.
Your face, frontispiece to knowing all about me, rises close.
“My head is filled with you”
and
“This is what you want, too.”
I have a vision of that milky seed pod bursting.
For now, I am shut up in the mind of a rigid bud.

Brittling stalk of papyrus sedge, my body plied gets bent.
When you had gotten what you came for
I also took something from you.
I took the probing hand and I keep it inside;
it gives me a feeling.
And it teaches me
And it points me
To flowers grown from my white paper,
your soiled gloves left to rot with the reeds.

9 - Christmas Casket

You built a box for the birth of salvation.

It was cedarwood, stained.

Nestled underneath a Yuletide spruce, the hope

chest crouched like some anthropic bud

off the conifer’s dying body,

trampling its skirt with

blockish feet.

It was ugly, misaligned, and guilting:

The lid was crowned in twisted,

viney wire, applied with spikes

driven down in woodflesh,

and opened, you could see

the tips protrude inside,

reminders, maybe, of your

hard toil.

You would always remind

us of your

hard toil.

Resin-scent would henceforth be

everpresent at my bedfoot,

cloaking me in the aromatic

afterlife of trees

and filling my throat

with presence,

an admonition that my future

was your gift.

I was meant to make my dowry in it,

Assembling the sundry lot of

coupled life:

towels, cookery, bedthings.

But I filled it with

cheap, broken junk.

7 - Pine and Porcelain

Remember my satisfaction

in knick-knack shelving: pine

riddled with phloem, xylem lines

cheerily cohering in supportive

chorus that yes,

finespun gewgaws shall be upheld in this place!

Yes!

(Lacking power,

I had twisted screws through drywall

to sturdy the board by all

the torque my own right shoulder had.

As if this deed would compensate for

fragility elsewhere.)

The artifacts were inane.

A matte black Bastet cat with

inexact gold embellishments,

bought for twelve dollars out of the

import store cat pack,

and also hollow;

a white plate, glazed

to seal in a fingerpaint print

of a child’s pawlike foot;

two identical porcelain dolls

from a forgetful giver,

both named after me.

They all stood in a vague line

saying nothing decisive.

The dust now crowds

around the absence of their bases,

chalk lines,

anxious tracings of a murder scene.

Well, they were cheap.

Convincing, I professed my loyalty to the pine—

a venerable tree, bent to an unfit purpose—

But oh, did my skin prickle with

a sympathy for that porcelain.

5 - A Kind of Treason

Level-headed.

In that home, poise was a virtue honed through

a sardonic attitude toward the use of books:

The gravitas of classics and

weight of histories were transmuted

farcically into literal gravity,

to calibrate a muscular keenness for

interpreting imbalance,

adjusting response.

Columnar girls,

holding up virgin

tomes, with the straightest spines.

Yes, it was still like that recently.

Who knew this prim tutorial in

feminine comportment—

to help grim sisters stiffly pallbear

their uncracked, funereal lives—

was necessity encrypted, an urgent warning

obscured by its own

comic obsolescence.

The stuff of old films.

Funny and sad.

These days, I bear myself,

an atlas of cryptogeography in

two hands.

I balance the glass orb of my

empty eye,

refracting cartographic distortions

when I tip.

It rolls, and

I scry this crystal ball for direction

but it changes.

My arms have tired of keeping such a fragile balance,

the way a still head

never made me tired.