Statement of Fancy #1

Stars die each day
In brilliant throes,
Flinging deathlight
Across trillions
Of galaxies,
Each one of which
Whirls dervishly
In the sudden
Flash of your eyes.

First Sunday in Advent

Fervently I wished for white, a silken wan today.
Instead, I got gray wind, gray sky, gray soul.
The cold kept us in, left us only ourselves.

So many prayers paralyzed on my lips,
So many subtle slips of the waferless tongue,
When, like David, all I want to do is dance.

I found You hiding between the bars of hymns
The wind discovered in the barren branches.
Hand in hand, We left to look for Lazarus.

Upon the Advent of Advent

Oh, Good God ¦ who hides Your holy head
Above the clotted clouds ¦ far from our faithless sight,
Your perverse peek-a-boo ¦ grows old and gray—
The dubious discern you ¦ on tortillas and tavern walls,
While we, the why-cryers, ¦ belief-longers, Bible-stunned,
Sick in our salvation and sin, ¦ peer into a white pit
Of near-nothingness, ¦ ephemeral fog fading in wind.

I’ve learned Your lightning, ¦ Your terrible tornadoes
And horrid hurricanes, ¦ Your dying leaves and dead children,
All changes explainable by chance ¦ and fickle fate
So far as we can see. ¦ Damned to doleful ignorance,
We wail into the wasteland, ¦ Your presumptuous, proud
creations.

Pink

Sunrise and bloodypale sunset,
Sex, sunbleached blood on cotton,
Hot ham fleeing the oven,
My eyes the morning after wine,
Shrimp, God’s favorite memories,
Sun-baked adobe deep in the desert,
Rosé splashing into my fancy glass,
Little girls, flamingos, flagrant shame—
Muscles buffering my bursting heart.

Thanksgiving Day 2009

After the dinner, the dishes, the naps,
My dog and I stroll laps around campus.
She stops to sniff random turds, blades of grass,
Discarded fast-food wrappers rustling
In the cool northern Oklahoma breeze.
We see exactly two other people outside
(not counting those passing in their cars),
A tall, lean, lonely Russian athlete
Stranded here over the long holiday,
And a blonde boy-child madly throwing leaves
In his grandparents’ huge, unraked yard.
Otherwise, this corner of the world
Isn’t saying much of anything,
And that’s a good thing when
You’ve got a belly full of turkey and pecan pie
And you’ve just awakened at 4 p.m.
And all you really want is to be alone
With something who doesn’t talk,
Just barks at squirrels and falling leaves
As the sun pirouettes towards the western edge
Of all that our four eyes can ever truly see.

Autumn Haiku #5

On Thanksgiving Eve,
Indians hold their red breaths—
White coyotes come.

Desert Rat Haiku #9

“Vodka” means “water”
In the Russian mother tongue:
Eight glasses a day.

On the Eve of Another Birthday

Tick tock: slow clock speeding ever up.
The things I’m needing dwindle daily.
Time doesn’t fail me. But I fail time.
Rhyme tries its damned best, gets tired, retires.

Someday these days will suddenly end.
I tend the garden of this black thought.
Late at night I plow this fertile plot.
How these dark blooms wither on the vines!

Seeds of a North Country Song

Together, they slipped into their sleep,
Sleep so deep they didn’t hear the slow,
Sure sliding away into no-sound
When it finally ground to an end.
Could simple slumber mend what troubled?

When they awoke, hungover, she hissed
At him, but he missed the sign, mangled
The chance she dangled for makeup sex,
Missed his ex- in his morning shower,
Felt his power fade to naught by noon.

She had slept soundly but woke troubled.
Love had hissed to a slow, mangled end.
By noon, he missed her, so he got pissed.

Psychosonnet #2

Christ, that was a crazy old man,
Cranky, with rancid wino breath
And darkness of death around him.
The brim of that funky fedora,
Those clunky black Dingo boots,
Thick cheroots smoldering on his lips:
He was in cahoots with the very devil.
Still, despite his evil, leering eyes,
The chill in his every whispered word,
Something stirred down in my gut.
The rut I was in, this wretched town—
When down fell that old drunk fool,
Every rule I’d lived by fell too.

Psychosonnet #1

So I’m always being asked to
Think fast, do more and more—
Such a bore, like politics,
The dirty tricks we all play
Each bloody day to survive
In this hive of crackhead bees.
Someone please make it stop.
I drop to my wounded knees,
A sad, sad loon. Did God give
Rules to live by before She left?
We’ve cleft those 10 “suggestions”
Down to a few questions: Dearheart,
They all start with “Why?”

After Many Years of Marriage

Sometimes
The darkness
Seems like light
After much dim reckoning—
And we’re left
To puzzle
Paradox

Happiness
Surprises us
Late at night
When our bodies part—
And we’re left
To ponder
Love

Step, Aluminum

A lonely ladder leans against a wall
Seemingly oblivious to its incongruence.
No workmen wander our halls,
No painters in their mocking whites.

We’ve simply no sufficient shed,
No refuge for our random tools,
So they loiter in our living room,
Damned Home Depot refugees.

Still, the top’s toward Heaven,
Though a ceiling seals it away.
So I lean, and loaf, uselessly shiny,
Stretching my arms to only air.

First Frost

The almond days, awful, delirious,
Pass as do memories of pastel nights
When the moon shone like youth
Lumbering through death’s land
And your eyes were sufficient light
To guide my hands to your breasts
And morning came just as we did,
thrusting all grave thoughts away.

The stars tonight barely winked
Under winter’s white lashes—
Breath before me like incense
Glowing under the streetlights,
And in my mawkish, wormy mind
The moon’s a mere lonely votive
lit with devoted, trembling hands
suddenly so small and so cold.

Melancholia

These environs
Encompass no
Horizon, just
The day-to-day
Play of plush light
On this window,
On that widow.
Everything

Will die, it’s true.
In the meantime,
This stream of rhyme
Serves as sandbag
Against the plash
And pull of time,
Party killer,
Filler with rue.

Authorities
Scamper, intent
On some duties.
Lights blink on and
always back off.
She coughs into
Her small, black hand,
And night slams down

On the tense town,
Filled with promise,
As all towns are,
for a moment,
and then it’s gone.
The rubber smiles
And random miles
March ever on.

Autumn Haiku #4

No one’s out today—
Rain has kept the wise inside.
I dance, a wet fool.

Autumn Haiku #3

A cheap Scotch whisky
In an orange plastic tumbler:
Not rice wine, but fine.

Autumn Haiku #2

Mist chills the morning
Without any sun in sight:
Has winter caught us?

In the Midst of the Recession

Trees arouse from their trances
As last leaves gyre to the ground
And the wanton north wind advances
On that terrible, tiny, drowsing town
Where day flashes, a dying flame,
And night lands—no noise, no sound,
Only repetition, randomless eternal game
Of the wind and the moon and the stars
And the clouds, always and ever the same.
Across the lake, the lingering drone of cars
Going nowhere, really, on random drives,
Crunching under tires leaves, falling lives.

In Praise of Doubt

Long the lingering, last-minute mind games
When faced with what, and who, and why…
Father Winston in his fat white collar tries
To soothe, to salve, to somehow save,
But this boy’s already around the bend,
With absolutely no one behind that wheel,
Wheel which spins when the tires spasm
And we finally fishtail off the highway,
Bearing down on many bushes burning
Only from the freakish Oklahoma heat,
Crashing through the thorny thicket
Surrounding this ultimate emptiness.

Just Another Poem About Time

Orange juice and vodka
With a slice of the moon.

Soft-boiled eggs warm
With sea salt and pepper.

You away, voice on the phone
Cracking across distances.

In these simple moments
The future is decided.

With each heartbeat,
A new world blooms.

Indian Summer's End

Sky’s been dry for weeks now,
Unseasonable autumn heat,
And while you’re enjoying
These searing, surreal days,
You know that the lightning
Licking the western horizon
Promises, at last, an end
To fall’s lingering fantasies.
Thunder, wind, and sudden rain
Sweep over your rooftop,
And drops from the broken gutter
Gradually coalesce into a cascade
Of November’s stern realities.

Before Anyone Else Has Risen

This little lake near Seminole
May not even have a name,
Yet has a face open
To the morning sky—
Clouds rouge its shimmering,
And autumn leaves float
Like tiny ducklings
Across its wide, wet eyes.

Autumn Haiku #1

Listen carefully—
Within yourself you will hear
Silence bursting free.

Desert Rat Haiku #8

The sunlight, morning,
The sounds of nothing at all—
Cross your legs and breathe.

Retreat at St. Crispin’s, November 2009

A simple wooden cross
Bisects the cabin wall—
A blue-bound Bible
Weights the table down.
Outside, the distant stars
Do their best to teach us
The very simplest Gospel:
Shine brightly, speak softly—
So softly that your words
Will light some far-off world
A billion years from now,
And a poet will raise her pen.

That One About Peace in the Middle East

And so I listened as the learned lecturer
Profiled the problem of peace in the Middle East,
The need to speed the distant day
When the Jew and the Arab, the Jew and the Muslim
(and let’s not forget the Christians and other infidels)
Break bread together on the holy Temple Mount
While flocks of white doves float benignly above.

And so I left the crowded lecture hall
With his wise words lingering in my mind,
His charge to change the ways we view the world
so as to usher in a sweet, so-shiny day.
I walked out into the full-mooned night
And watched the stars burn coldly
Millions of miles from where we fight, and dream

Of a sometime when words take shape, stand up, and walk.

Desert Rat Haiku #7

Hustling the whole day—
No moment for reflection—
Busy, but wasted.

Desert Rat Haiku #6

Fat full Buddha moon
Floating amid glowing clouds—
Grace in eastern sky.

The Morning After Time’s Fallen Back

So far the day’s flying right,
Dispelling night, dispensing light,
Causing coffee to brew on time
And words to wobbily rhyme.
The birds from their perch bitch
As I pull the paper from the ditch,
But it’s sunny and I’m alive still—
Just say it’ll be good, and it will.
At least that’s what they all said.
Trouble is, of course, they’re all dead.