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.

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.

12 - Avian Laze

I lie nested, a moony, rumpled bird,

dreaming up caricatures of flight.

Lax-limbed waiting proves that wings are unlike sails,

demand a casting out to snag their hooks

on the tumbling silk of cloud-marbled sky.

Blue the dispassionate banner of heights

flown by my eyrie — as indifferent toward furled feathers

as blown-away hats and casual mortality —

I should know better the unlikelihood of wind

to net me in the tangle of its sheets,

all a ruffle and rousing of slick pinions

spiriting me high like tented paper.

But I’ve forgotten the flex and crackle

of a sober climb’s full musculature, and

how to measure out the needed

tendon-lengths like strings

for a taut kite:

I’m indolent for the dim and shifting

shadows cast in the caves of my eyes.

8 - If I Can Make It Here...

Here on the Atlantic coast, lip of the deep cup drunk in migrant faith,
I am on the cusp of seeing Truth:
        The postulant’s scopic skyline embossed upon the blue,
        like layered shadows cast by fresh eyes’ bright dream of it,
        city-solid, life-alight,
        but the ocean bedevils unsteady heels.
I feel the border’s weight from this changing place,
and follow history’s dark reverse, away.

Against the concrete inner curve of dock the water
beats a muddy waste:
        chopped froth upon the rough wall.
        Up rise brown peaks, and peaks
        of damp remains, debris, expelling
        the hushed filth of waves.
The Hudson paints its image on the city’s porous coast,
delivering banished revenants, drowned ghosts.

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.