33 - This Is What You're Supposed To Do

There are still half-feral cats

in the back gnawing dog food

poured into dented tin trays,

still the pool table, drab felt

chalky, ripped and piled with

flashlights, shoeboxes of papers

bolts in zipper bags, nickels.

There is still wood stove heat

slow-burning the empty

kettle’s thin copper base on top,

front door propped a crack

and drying enormous wool socks.

There are still endtables piled

high with library paperback

mysteries, lent VHS tapes in crates,

baskets of junk mail, all

addressed to “Loser.” There

are still two separate beds

in two separate rooms, still

that proud solid pine carved

stopped clock and fine

undisturbed fur coats on the rack.

I am still seated at the kids’ table,

twenty-three years running,

and I find a turkey bone

in the stuffing you assured me

would be vegetarian this year,

so I could still eat something.

I’ve never yet heard you

tell my father you love him,

but everyone, even

my aunt’s butch girlfriend

and those damned cats

get fed when they come.

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.

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.”

23 - Follow Your Natural Bliss!

My family raised me a skeptic of disease,

an atheist scornful of diagnostic gods,

and Hippocratic demagogues who would ensnare us

in fear of a treacherous body.

Infection’s perfidy, we knew, was cheap suspense

like any flimsy drugstore paperback,

like Gideons’ gift to weakened travelers.

We respectfully knew not to lambast the medical tradition,

but it wasn’t ours for use. It belongs to foreign realms,

where holy books of clinical narrative knit up the parts

of anatomical mystery into ethnic motifs:

Avicenna’s Pahlavi patterned roots,

wax cloth animalcules of Leeuwenhoek,

Vesalius’ woven Fabrica Corporis Humani.

Artifacts of the culturally early.

Enchanted modern minds still literarily tour the halls of Kos,

but remember this asklepeion has met Atlantis’ fate.

Too much love for myth bespeaks the folly of

malingerers, of fools.

Wise folk put those mad compendiums away.

I huddle in a bedsheet tent, flashlight turned

to pale my face, to mimic death’s angelic visitation,

my body transformed into a text of fantastical plague

I will read after dark and in secret.

One hand to my chest to catch the shudders

of elaborate coughing, such hellhound barks

that rattle my bedframe’s brass knobs.

I am hot in the bright with a countenance of fever,

so I prey on my health for deliverance,

honing the taboo art of summoning

the Catarrh demon for testament

to my possession by mortal ills.

They’ve denied that I’m sick for years, by now,

but I believe, I believe, I believe…

Yes, the skeptical method trumps all superstition,

and we soberly forfeit those childish things.

No Pasteurian oracle of etiologies can foretell

the body’s sovereign courses,

no pharmic idolatry procures

the myopic dreams of men.

Paracelsus’ opiates shall never

be suffered to dull the reckonings

of nature in we who are

fearfully and wonderfully made.

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.

16 - Evangelicalism

Their warding curses
write in gold and black.
The first, enforcing rarity.
Second, making sure we don’t
forget our getting off the track;
conjuring one unseen eternity
in front and leaving yet
another nigh and chasing
at the back.

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.