STRANGE LIGHT
The late call and drive through empty streets
The locked doors and red-stamped folders
Flights on supply planes’ folding seats
The checkpoints with jumpy soldiers
But today, strange light under leaden skies
That seems to come from the pelted leaves themselves
Was it ever real?
Real as this is …
Hours on winding country roads
Hours on household touchups
The weekend fairs and tractor shows
The land-use-planning dustups
Where once the words that you typed at noon
Crossed the desks of presidents by dusk
Are you who you were?
Were they what they seemed?
Now, with a heave of the fickle mob
The clowns that you harried out
Have retaken that town.
As you watch silver seaming the mountainside
From afar comes the muffled thud
As your work is torn down
These towers that divide the blue
Scaled to our aspirations
To find who will acknowledge you
To find out new sensations
The patterns traced out in stone and glass
As intricate but clear as a new idea
And then a briny air
Comes up the river
She crossed a square of sunlit floor
Her figure an apparition
She’d heard the names you dropped before
But still she stopped to listen
And there she sits sorting index cards
Still as slim as she was that afternoon
And then her eyes meet yours
And a puzzled smile …
The end doesn’t come like the final rhyme
But amid one more bid to ease
Some discomfort or pain
And till then there is only a slow decline
But you may still look out to find
A strange light in the rain
TIDES OF AUTUMN
Your anger was magnificent that autumn
Burning brighter than the hammered golds and reds of autumn
The students dress like poets
In their long wool coats and scarves
Like little sisters, leaves pursue them
Across the yard
Summer games grow sad played into autumn
The cry of triumph quivers in the early dusk of autumn
No bare-limbed crowds at night
The street fair stalls are latched and locked
Now laughter falls from lighted windows
On leaf-blown sidewalks
With every word, the courtyard spun
But still I thought, “It’s not too late.”
But I just couldn’t do it
I just couldn’t want what you want
It’s strange how childhood rhythms stamp our autumns
As though we might create ourselves anew again each autumn
Last week I saw you on the common
Waiting for the bus
Your cheeks were flushed with the autumn air
And you looked gorgeous
We might create ourselves anew each autumn
But each new self is born into a world with one less autumn
MOUNT NEBO
They had a pot of fondue and IPA on tap
And there was some kind of gambling going on out back
But when they dimmed the lights and hung the disco ball
I grabbed my drink and almost knocked you down in the hall
I said, “Sorry, but the Swedish pop has got me on the run.”
You said, “Clearly, you don’t know how to have fun.”
So you said come along and took my hand and led me
To the dance floor and cocked your arms above your head
And spun like you were on a potter’s wheel
A satellite a song outside my gravity field
I was telling myself, “You moron. Whatcha trying to prove?”
But I just said, “Sorry, this stuff leaves me unmoved.”
A pretty girl in town for the weekend: I could see it all
The Alcott house and Walden delighted her
As soon as we met, she started in about Heidegger
But oh …
It’s like emerging from ordeal to find you’re back where you began
Through trial you reach a prospect on a town destroyed by sand
It’s a flaw self-medicating can’t correct
I try now to treat it like a birth defect
Then it’s quarter to two, and the fondue’s congealed
And all but the hardiest have quit the field
So I stagger up and say, “About that dance … “
And spill my scotch and soda down the front of my pants
When you started to laugh, I said, “You know that’s not polite.”
You said, “Sorry. Wow, it’s late. Nice to meet you. Good night.”
You said, “Sorry. Wow, it’s late. Nice to meet you. Good night.”
TONGUES OF FLAME
Elms throw up their dark arms
In the limestone urns, there’s just stubble
But in this cafe, sunlight glints off brass and steel
There’s frost on the panes
But jets of steam shoot toward the ceiling
A book and a glass of wine on a cold Paris day
And back at my hotel
The concierge greets me warmly
The girl at the desk says a car will call at five
My room isn’t large
But it’s elegantly appointed
Fit for a traveler of some small renown
But when my bed was a steel-framed cot
And my walls were water stained
At night in the Boul’ Mich’ bars we spoke
With tongues of flame
And in the clash our concepts took on
Forms both hard and strange
And if we could find how they interlocked
The world would change
Then it’s drinks with the dean
Overlooking a flagstone plaza
The street lamps come on
As he grinds some ancient axe
We’re joined by his wife
Slim and chic as she hooks an earring
Then start for the restaurant
On foot through the cold
There’s a girl at my side
A student in the department
Dark hair and eyes
And so hungry for ideas
That to me are just husks
Of creatures that long since perished
So I do my impression
Of someone I was
But when life lay before us
And we thought we’d change the world
We trolled the Boul’ Mich’ bars at night
For pretty girls
And when their eyes were on us
We could speak with tongues of flame
But after forty years
The world is much the same
SWAMP PEOPLE
Tearing up the swamp road
Bellies full of beer and gator
Mississippi bound
Gonna learn about southern girls
Gonna take some tables down
Rolling round the gulf coast
Four hundred hands of blackjack later
The water’s streaked with gold
Dropping c-notes at Waffle House
Isn’t getting old
Blow our winnings spending every night
In a different Pensacola dive
So when we’re reabsorbed
By our grey northern towns
At least we’ll know
We were alive
All of this was swampland
For twenty years they hauled in gravel
Six thousand cars a week
Beneath the towers the caissons stretch
Down 180 feet
Rolling round the Back Bay
Looking for that old-time hoodoo
And some sobbin’ slide guitar
A respectable family man
In a fancy foreign car
All the sordid passions of our youth
Silted up and lined with bright facades
But there’s a swampy taste
That still comes to your tongue
Amid the parks
And promenades
All the desperate passions of our youth
All our disillusionments
And all the wounds we bore and those we caused
And everything we risked and all we lost
And all of the shame that nobody knows
And all of the soiled sheets and clothes
SALLY AND KATE
Sally and Kate took a cab back late
Too flushed with wine to care about
The prodigal expense and sure
They could make it up fixing
Beans and rice rather more than twice
That week if that’s what it took
The simply couldn’t tear themselves away
From that party uptown
Where Kevin Clark said Sally’s hair
Caught the firelight like hammered gold
And David Baker called the tilt of Kate’s chin
Fetchingly bold
Sally ran a brown paper parcel down
Three flights of stairs when she heard the bell
But found instead of Dr. Haas
Who’d commissioned some typing
Kevin dressed in a freshly pressed
Cord suit, and though she tried to hide
The testament of common toil
Still he said he admired her courage
Which, alone, set her apart
From those painted dolls
And he hoped not to presume too far
Were he to pay her calls
On the day Sally left, her father said
“After all, I’m a local boy too.”
But his gang boss assured him
In her part of town, if she were provident
Nothing untoward would ensue
When he learned her young man would dine
He appointed preparations as for a holiday
But even with a ten-dollar wine
His fingernails and coal cough
Would have given him away
Kevin turned a page that had yellowed with age
In the ring-bound ledger of an upstate textile mill
And sipped his sherry
But all he tasted was rust and ash
Saw the grime on the welcome sign
To a town whose schools let out at 2:00
So boys could take the late lift down
So his duty seemed clear
And Sally said, if he were sure
That was all he had to say
She never could get used to
All those extra forks anyway
Kevin up in his room
Trying to wrest from a footman a buckled valise
When the housemaid announced
A middle-aged caller in the south wing
Her hair done “anyhow, if you please”
Sally’s mother offered him a rough, blunt hand
And said, “No thank you, sir. I’d rather stand.
I’m not going to stay, and all I have to say is
I don’t understand what you feel you have to do,
But don’t drag my daughter down with you.
Do, sir, what you have to do.
But don’t drag my daughter down with you.”
TRAVELER
Bells sound and the waves pound
Our city by the sea
Along the jetty, spray shoots in the air
Bells toll and the clouds roll
And the shore’s strewn with debris
The captain’s wife sends up a prayer
In the dark little dockside bar
A door’s hauled open then blows shut
The traveler sets his pack beneath his stool
Rain on the rooftop starts getting loud
But out at the edge of the storm cloud
You can see that the light is breaking through
Crows cry in the wide sky
Of our city on the plain
Far as you can see, the roads run straight
Trash burns and a crow turns
Above a field of grain
There’s a cheer as the bull rider leaves the gate
The traveler walks past the midway stalls
Gazing at the signs and lights
He buys a bag of popcorn and a beer
The feds declared the drought a disaster
Whole herds with nowhere to pasture
But it’s three weeks now since the rains moved in …
Red streaks on the white peaks
That surround our mountain town
The scent of the orchards sweet and strong
The last lift for the late shift
In the mine is headed down
As the lights of the football field come on
By the drugstore a bus pulls in
And a single traveler disembarks
And pulls his pack from hold in the bus’s side
His shoes are cracked and his jacket is frayed
But he’s straight-backed and sharp as a knife blade
His eyes close as he drinks in the evening air …
HEART OF GREEN
The party sealed behind sliding glass
The music seems to start to sink into the past
The warm summer night
The shards of day reclaimed by garden lights
The bored replies of haughty girls
Are whispers of a vanished world
The contour sketched beneath a satin sheen …
So why this ache at the heart of green?
But beyond the trees
Can you hear the sound of the waves?
The night creatures flit through the dark
And the moon is the fist of judgment
And the moonlight across the water
Is a reprieve
An afternoon of uniform light
No shadows at your feet, the sky a milky white
You have to slit your eyes
But nothing dazzles under milk-white skies
And green is just another fact
Like how your shirt sticks to your back
Or how the bookshelves fill with the unchecked
Permuting of a single symbol set
But their senses stripped
Symbols move like counters in a game
The horizon forever recedes
But the moment the pattern flickers
Is like the last weary step that vaults you
Into the sky
An afternoon of uniform light
… and suddenly it seems I’ve lost the will to fight
The bright, unblinking screen
Even desperation grown routine
The days receding, all the same
Like the links of an iron chain
That disappears beneath you in the murk
And drags you downward, jerk by jerk …
I will rise and go
And the scales fall from me as I move
And I’ll go where the river grows wide
And I’ll watch sunlight fleck the water
And the wind stir the leaves above me
The heart of green …
THE CALIPH OF AMITY HEIGHTS
Lights like holes punched in the night
One thousand one uptown flights
Trust the blue genie, the warrant and seal of
The Caliph of Amity Heights
A lamp in his basement incites
Revels in jaded dendrites
Boiling alembic, conducting their fumes
The Caliph of Amity Heights
Sunk in blue sands
Witness your hands
On the edges of nightmare his caliphate stands
In the fall air, lunging kites
Eddies of warm neophytes
Watched with indulgence from the jungle gym slide by
The Caliph of Amity Heights
Jake’s Bar and Grill, Wednesday nights
Undercard welterweight fights
In the backroom by the pinball machine
The Caliph of Amity Heights
Sunk in blue sands
Witness your hands
On the edges of madness his caliphate stands
Jafar at a concert, a sheet at his breast
It rains until his blood is filled
He ends as a full glass of orange juice
Rigid and damp with terror lest he be spilled
Hairless children with razor teeth
Green eyes and office chains round their throats
Watch the lurking dark shapes beneath
The lake where their city floats
There they will hail you the child of the sun
Sun-smelted child of the scabrous land
The web of surveillance grows tight
Rusting blue van in their sights
Infidels plot the demise of the faith of
The Caliph of Amity Heights
A bullhorn voice reads him his rights
Out on the ledge he alights
Over the chimneys a frayed carpet flies
To the Caliph of Amity Heights
Sunk in blue sands
Witness your hands
At the last reach of wonder his caliphate stands
I’LL KNOW
I’ll know if you ever regretted saying prayers that were answered by whoever watches over people like you
I’ll know if your mother slipped out in the afternoon, if your daddy came home poured a drink and withdrew
I’ll know if you breaking out
Or making up
Or if it’s just bred in the bone
I’ll know if that fitted black dress that you had to gather to climb through your bedroom window hid stains
I’ll know if you still sit alone by an open window and cry when it rains
I’ll know if you’re trading up
Parading hopeless causes
Or flattering doubts
I’ll know if that tempting glimpse of careless flesh and the gesture that revealed it were planned
I’ll know if you really retreated so far that you still can’t name the tricks trained into your hands
I’ll know if you’ve cried enough
And lied enough of love
To know just what that’s worth
I’ll know if raven hair spun to flaxen flues your upper thigh; I’ll know how careful you’ve been
I’ll know every freckle and scar, every bend and branch of the reds and blues that marble your skin
I’ll know if you’ve paid enough
Betrayed enough
To think there’s no more I can take
You’ll know how the minutes repeat, how the one long night drags day around our little pellet of stone
You’ll know for the first time in years when you lie at my feet how it feels to face the darkness alone
You’ll know how averted eyes can burn
How lives can turn
On the hope of a smile
They’ll say, What a beauty she was, how alive, how strangers’ eyes would follow her wherever she went
I’ll say not a man alive could have been a stranger to her; they’ll know what I’ve done and why I’ll never repent
I’ll say, There are things that are just too real
And just too pure
And just too beautiful
Just too beautiful
To be
THE AVENGING SON
The city is crumbling; the fountains are dry
But you refill your glass
Dressing again for the games
The weight of it on your head
Time but stone from stone reclaims
Blood still greases the wheel
For blades of stone or bronze or steel
CHORUS:
So … what’ll you take me for
As it dawns on you what you’ve done?
A lunatic preaching doom
Or the avenging son?
A frayed, blood-basted tendon
That lodged itself in lion’s teeth
Whips his eye and whips him to a clumsy lust
And whips the flagging crowd to cheers
Until a cringing clown sings,
“Oh my God, take me home”
Where lions disgorge a fountain
A woman and man entwine, and laughing
They sway across a cobblestone square,
His skin a sun-patined olive
The soft effusion of her hair
CHORUS
But scrutinize them more closely
Their flashing eyes and their perfect teeth.
At what whetstone were those canines ground?
Can you see the skull beneath?
But never mind: they’re happy
Wouldn’t you be if you were me?
But if I concede this moment,
In stone I conceive an age, a gesture
The last collapsing stars will repeat
Against that you weigh this wet love
That fades with tumescence and heat
CHORUS
The city burns under a ceiling of ash
A fate that may in time
Render wonders from a garage
You’ll have your moment too
I still have faith in you
If you’re all there is, you’ll be all we’ve been
And since you need a place to begin
Why not start with original sin?
CHORUS
YOUR HAND IN MINE
You know this isn’t something I was counting on
So much that I still felt I had to do
But it’s a leap of faith
That I agreed to take
Because I saw it meant so much to you
And it’s the best thing that I ever did
’Cause what I had no way to know
Before that little girl
Came into our world
Is that I would love her so
Didn’t know I’d love her so
And everybody says that they grow up so fast
It seems she’s learning something new each day
Once she learns to crawl
It’ll be no time at all
Before I’m chasing teenage boys away
And every year she’ll need us less and less
And one day she’ll leave us behind
We’ll wave goodbye
And you’re probably going to cry
But I’ll be there to take your hand in mine
I’ll be there to take your hand in mine
And who knows what we’ll do when it’s just us again?
All those things that now seem out of reach
Like movie matinees
And weekend getaways
And sunset margaritas on the beach
And someday we’ll start winding down
And someday we’ll be out of time
We don’t know
Who’ll be the first to go
But at the end I’ll have your hand in mine
At the end I’ll have your hand in mine