The Things We Write

Tupelo

2010-08-31T13:58:00.000-07:00

I heard you folded up your leaves,
canceled class, and left
the ivy walls that dropped you
... like ripe fruit broke from
fifteen years’ work,
dissertation slung like a vine
from your weary southern back.

I heard you raked up all those tomes
left your cold water kitchen
dead palm, type ribbon
and took a Memphis train
for tall blue grass
and a house-on-stilts
knee deep in bayou mud.

I heard you went back to Tupelo
where your tree moss roots
remembered Daddy’s bitter
heart wood and Mama’s
blue magnolia shade.

American River

2009-12-30T15:29:00.000-08:00

Under the frozen water

Trout lie in

Blue shadows cut

Through with rays

Ice coats the rock where

We sat holding out

Our poles hoping for

A bite, heads together

Over a knot, piercing

waxy pink eggs

with barb-less hooks.

Don’t die!

You jump up

holding the silver muscle

of a brookie in the moon

of your hand,

and bend, red cheeked,

white fingers twisting

out the hook

You float him,

sifting water

through his gills.

He sleeps on his side.

He’s dead, you say,

eyelashes

Ready for tears.

The tail moves

Flips a sickle of water,

We laughed then

done fishing

While our luck holds.

2009-05-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

You come to the lake for blue water, but it's the reeds standing hip deep, yellow dragonflies holding along their spines, a maze for birdlets, bedevilled fish hooks, snakes to wind through. Rooted down beyond the prism of water, it's how they only move in wind or waves but sift oil from the surface, and gather up and hold the evening fog.

2009-01-25T12:12:00.000-08:00

How the cold lingers
holding back
the thaw, holding up
a fine lace of crystal
a powder white scaffold

built to the tree side
sharing the bark with
moss, lichen, pitch,
pollen, insect
shards. How an eye
stumbling in pointless
boots tries to freeze
this picture.

Theodore

2008-11-14T12:06:00.000-08:00

At a moment, what seemed only leaves will erupt like this: color, nectar, ants. No reason is given, only this gesture, saying what, I open? Still, if you look long enough, their purpose will arise in you, a wordless shiver, an unfolding.

She sees a bloom, out come the clippers. At home she'll jam their ends in a glass, watch the rot creep up the stems until they nod, spilling pollen on the sterile table top.

Theodore

2008-10-01T17:56:00.000-07:00

I hear the snow before it comes, the flakes hit one another as they form high above, sharp against sharp, powder on powder, they send down a collective, audible creak long before one falls, a sound my veins stop the blood to hear. Then the smell that says flakes are in the air that can’t yet be seen. Sometimes it stops there, the dusting known only to me and those with minuscule perceptions, dogs, birds, certain insects. I walk through the trees, breathing it in, watching out, yearning for their chalk white geometry. Snow is an example of the system, how it works, why. Nobody invented snow – it unfolded before us as part of the great unfolding I witnessed, a mathematical unfolding, a reasoned unfolding: checks were in it, balances, the stunning revelation of it, the perfection, the symmetry flavored with the random. So beautiful, heartrending in its noise, its grace, the ugliness giving it savor, the surprise built in, the spontaneous.

Bones

2008-06-24T12:54:00.000-07:00

What became of Kaja? I can tell you how her teeth hang looser in their bone, how a molar will fall on a day in August, slide to the dirt, move three inches in a hard rain and then sink in before the bed of decaying leaves hardens to hold it in place. How it will stay there in the drying ground, ready for a bite. How it will stay there and then, in the freeze of autumn, crack audibly, startling a vole, a jerk of the head, just one of a thousand twitches in an afternoon of foraging, watchful for sound, vibration, movement, startling often for none of these, out of anticipation – this perceived by no one but the weak essence that lingers over the bones, eight inches from the vole, the essence that is our Kaja, and she will sigh with impatience to see it wasted.

2008-05-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

House in a river town.

Yellow paste licks the walls.

Iron rusts the sink upstairs.

near a bathtub bearing down,

to shatter the plaster below.

Spiders paint corners soft–

nobody will live here again.

Greenish curtains crawl down

window frames, stale with meat

long since cooked, eaten.

Nobody will bring salt,

peel oranges, fire up this stove.

These pipes will only sing with

beams falling, clang their splintered

crash into a truck bed,

hum on the ride. People sang here,

spoke, whispered. Ironed dresses,

combed hair, broomed away cobwebs.

They came home.

Caucus Studios

2008-04-28T22:03:00.000-07:00

Ivy and bricks, dust in the hall,
paint peeling down the walls.
We found these when we came
to say so long. We brought flowers,
stories, poems. We snuck in of course.
Blue winter light washed the kitchen,
silence held the huge space in the hall
full of the presence that always said
to anyone lucky enough
to wind up that stair, Stay a while,
what are you dreaming?
Stay long enough and it's yours.

Caucus

2008-04-13T10:26:00.000-07:00

Strings of lights winding down a hall lined with secret rooms, avocados, dancing, stolen coffee under the floorboards, dust burnt by a space heater.

Breakfast at P.J’s on a winter morning, cold seeping in through the glass. Thick socks and a huge borrowed sweater, angular toast, oil on the coffee, waitress with black rimmed eyes mirrored in a green glass ashtray.

A friend walks by the window. The day opens.

2007-12-09T19:01:00.000-08:00

The sight of her driving that thing by the creek. The shifting of my silt; its oil on the water. These are the moments I’ll remember as I remember them all; that first house on a rise, the burning and plowing, the death of the grass: a woman sits on a tree root, leaning against the trunk, she opens her eyes wide. What are you doing, I say. We’re here, the eyes tell me, we’ll do everything you can imagine. I see it all in one flash; I hardly have time to think what I’m doing before the tree cracks above her. For a moment she’s looking at me and I at the tree and it hasn’t yet responded to this inner splintering, it hasn’t yet dropped the branch.

Composite Transformation

2007-11-29T12:08:00.000-08:00

Composite Transformation

(Les Demoiselles d’Avignon)

Pablo painted five of you,

mute cubes, wax flesh packed

in his geometries, a cornucopia

of tesselated fruit

Two he pressed against our pane

until they broke - a third he pushed

aside to graft her, hugely

with his own feet and hands.

Pablo only scribbled on the face

of number four, but yours

he cut eye from eye, sat you down

and burnt the lips, you must have spoken

while pablo painted, the other tarts

just stared, bones snapping

under his brush thinking of

the money he paid for nothing

but eternal infamy

with incongruent limbs

2007-11-19T15:52:00.000-08:00

Iron Horse

You again
the catch in the throat
the fact of tomorrow
of the one after that
the what have you done to her
the how did we get here
the resonance,
the slow turning
of something behind all this
the evidence
the deep blue echo
of machinery at work
the what have we done
the acting all casual
while hooked
on the gears
through pink gills
breathing blood and air
the small talk
the trying to shake it off
the harder we swim
away, the deeper the tears will get
the smell of oil
the creeping awareness
we can’t see the cogs
or soften their teeth
only try and dissolve
over them with some grace
We can’t see who turns the crank,
only wonder at the benevolent
or cold expression
as he blends our entrails
does he have the benign
savagery of jesus,
the cool focus
of a butcher grinding up
the lesser meats,
the virgin’s brow
of bland sorrow,
or the thumping vigor
of a reaper mowing off heads?

Photograph by Theresa Brandabur

2007-11-09T14:09:00.000-08:00

The Things We Write IV

We write about the struggle
The stake in the ground
the declaration of intent
the trying to do right
how it falls before
a deeper current,
a drive to bloom,
to sweep in like waves,
the tip pushing up
through blacktop
like a tree of heaven
that knows no no
that knows no barrier
but pushes heedless
up through all that
would stop it, even
the promises, even
the intentions.

2007-11-09T12:16:00.000-08:00

I'm not much; a shell, a vortex, a transitory wave. Those things in me that I think are solid soon fall away. I try to stand, as you do on a beach, but waves dig away the sand from under my feet. Sinking, inwardly crumbling. People and their promises; they come in and seem to make a solid presence. But it dissolves, sooner or later. The solidness of a person leaves a hologram, the place in me where, even for a while he or she was real, solid, one thing I thought would never change. I am many holograms, many waves. I hold the images of all these waves that came and went. We hold them for each other, all the people that ever were solid enough. We are all these waves, all these holograms, all the people we've ever lost. The idea of you - who I thought you were I stuck with it, even after I knew, no arguing, that you were gone.

Wildlife

2007-11-09T11:50:00.000-08:00

They both marvelled at the astonishing wildlife. He saw all the potential for the hunt. Blood on his arms, the bow springing back aside his cheek, a series of cooling furred forms splayed over the hood of his jeep, hooves and pelts draping a basement room. She saw the web of life, the way the creek would host an endless calendar of creatures to drink, to bathe, to wash food. To her, the birds and chipmunks that kept the canopy rustling and singing were signs that nature lurked in the woods in concentric spreading rings of shyer and more exotic beings, while he salivated for the salty metallic smell of their blood.

2007-11-05T16:37:00.000-08:00

The Things We Write About II

These are the things we write

the ones that scald

the coffee off the day

and answer back with silence

that says never, never again
We write these things

because we can’t bear them

staying over us we write in hopes

of chasing them away

well not entirely

the not having them is causing

all the seeming trouble

These are things that trouble us

long into the night, the ones

that got away or tried, but

linger just enough to make their

writing a necessity or else

why bother to write at all

why not scream?

Why do we even write these things

when nothing will change them

even writing, even scribbling epithets.

2007-11-05T16:10:00.000-08:00

Monticello

Gold flavored windows
of a small town,
darkness falls
on a brick porch,
urns of flowers,
a basketball hoop
over a black tar drive.

Pome

2007-11-05T16:00:00.000-08:00

Night Heron
Stooped by the water

on top of the moon path

what green nights

have you seen

under a crown of grass
the egrets have fled

to the trees

you glow celery pale

watered moonlight

shimmering on feathers

I couldn’t spend

a night, furled

on the cold bank

but you get to watch

the foxes hunt, bats

flock over the moon

and dawn comes up

to send you home