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RAIDERS OF THE ESKATON

In the world but waiting to opt out, these wide-eyed men

          baptized into hyperawareness during tenth grade

by total immersion into John the Revelator and Nostradamus

          and the end times foretold by the Prophets of Zion,

whose reveries featured the Illuminati and the Knights Templar,

          Roswell and Rosslyn, Atlantis and the Grassy Knoll

and Tower Number Seven, whose fathers went into the Navy

          just after they were born and never came back,

whose mothers should have sent them off to the grandparents

          in pastoral Arkansas but skidded off into valium

and Black Velvet and a succession of controlling boyfriends,

          who went to junior college on a grant and bailed out

just before midterms and hitchhiked to Gainesville or Tampa

          or Fort Meyers in search of college-town tolerance,

who begged unconditional love from a fifteen-year-old runaway

          under the palm trees of midtown Daytona Beach,

who joined the Army but got a General Discharge during basic

          for general indifference and general inattention at drill,

who moved to the end of Zero Street in a city that repented not,

          who felt unworthy of the gift of grace and prayed nightly

for the thumb of justice, who begged change at the Dollar Tree

          and the Winn-Dixie, who gleaned aluminum from gutters

and parking lots, whose apotheosis finally came by eating a tab

          of Snoopy-Come-Home in front of a full-length mirror

and watching their skulls burst into flame, who then endured

          mandated rehabs and halfway houses, who now live in

charity wards run by Jesuits and Presbyterians, who sometimes

          rake leaves and empty trash and mop out the kitchen

but most of the time lie on narrow cots, immobilized by the fear

          that when the Rapture comes they will be taken up

only halfway: forever suspended in the middle of the clouds

          as the checkerboard earth and the vast blank oceans

revolve beneath, as cryptic patterns left by intercontinental jets

          slowly fade away against the blue-black dome above. 

                                          -- Gettysburg Review 26.3 (Autumn 2013)

 

SPARROW-HAWKS

Sparrow-hawks are returning to the City: their numbers are few,

            and since they roost in the eaves

of high buildings or in the tops of the oldest trees in the parks,

            no one pays them attention.

Once one swooped down between two tables at an outdoor café

            and flew off with a mouse

at the edge of my sight, and when I turned toward that sudden wind.

            that rushing sound,

nothing was there.  I see their silhouettes float over monuments

            as they circle for game

above dark alleys, as they pace back and forth on the narrow ledges

            that give them vantage

over Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill, as their shadows form hieroglyphs

            in the recesses of bell towers

where they take their ease and rear young.  I find it wonderful

            that eyes of flesh, unaided

by the green sweep of a radar beam or the ghost of a digital image,

            are able to discern,

from a half-mile up, their targets: I thought of Davy Crockett,

            whose feats of marksmanship

were done with a hand-built flintlock; I thought of my uncle Merle,

            who shot Expert at Camp Perry

with an ’03 Springfield and iron sights on the thousand-yard range;

            I thought of the old-time ballplayer,

gifted with raptor’s vision, who could read the small round label

            on a phonograph record

when someone sailed it past his shoulder high toward center field,

            way up in the middle of the air.

                                                                  -- Toledo Review 2 (2010)

 

LOVE STORY

An old man and an old woman sit together on a green wooden bench

            in front of the local rest home, staring at rush hour traffic.

The man sees a blue Buick stop at a red light, starts to talk about the time

            the phone rang at one o’clock AM

and when he ran downstairs to answer it he damn near broke his big toe

            on the leg of the sofa and it was his brother

all drunked up calling him from the beer garden to tell him that the war

            was over but it really wasn’t over and then his wife

got real angry and said she was going to call his brother up on the phone

            and say to his face just what she thought.

The woman watches him as he tells his story, and when he has finished,

            she reaches out with a fingernail and gently

scrapes a bit of dried egg yolk from his sleeve.  The man looks at her

            with an expression of affection and amazement,

but she takes no notice.  The woman sees a truck with a Pepsi-Cola logo,

            begins to talk about the first house

that she and her husband ever owned, it was nice but it was near the river,

            she never really liked it there, she was always

afraid that the water would come up too high and wash everything away,

            she didn’t like her boys going down there

and swimming, one day she told them that if they ever came back drowned

            they’d get a whipping, the boys just got

so tickled at that, they got to laughing so hard, but the next year the river

            rose up to the bottom step and they moved to town.

The woman plucks a hanky out of her purse, dabs at her mouth.  Suddenly

            a gust of wind snatches it out of her hand

and rolls it toward the highway – the man gets up and shambles after it.

            “Come back!  Oh, come back!” she cries, but he does not hear.

                                                                            -- Tampa Review 28 (2004)

           

DARK

Dark is so shy.  As the sun is going down, it reveals itself

            like a bashful child,

wanting acceptance from gas stations, fast-food restaurants,

            convenience stores,

but harsh quartz lamps on tall steel poles chase it away.

            It keeps on hanging around

like a persistent kitten that waits for a chance to slip in

            when a screen door opens.

It is afraid of red plastic signs that loom near the interstate

            like flags of blood;

it is afraid of lights on strings that hang over used car lots

            and throw a glare

on the Chevys and Fords lined up in rows like riot police.

            It likes yellow porch lights,

radium dials, disco neon – things that glow from within.

            It likes the spirits of the dead

who take up the mantle of smoke as penance, who drift

            all over the earth,

ridding themselves of nostalgia for the places they liked

            a little too much, wandering

here and there with both arms tucked behind their backs,

            looking for old friends

who might remember them as they once were long ago,

            looking for someone

who will accept them for what they’ve now become.

            The quest for God

begins in the dark: look at the stars that travel there,

            secure in their orbits, light years apart.

                               -- Prairie Schooner 73.1 (Spring 1999)

 

CANCER FAMILIES

Q:  Doctor, how did all this happen?

A:  Years of doing all the wrong things.

It’s almost as if they enjoy it, that word that hacks and hisses,

And they use it fearlessly as they wait for the inevitable knife,

The irradiated metal pellet.  They are smug genealogists of doom,

Lifting old shrouds, plotting out each tier of family history,

Scrying the future in the dials of perpetual calendars.

 

They take righteous pride in foreknowledge: the world’s

A breezeless, hermetic bubble of predestination, where choice

Is frivolous and futile, where every television commercial

It a parti-colored path to the grave, where ping-pong balls

Clatter in the weekly lottery trough like finger bones.

 

The men are obsessed with large-frame handguns, pausing

At display cases in discount houses, buying glossy magazines

With the latest blue-steel semiauto on the cover,

Scouring ordnance maps of national parks, marking optimum places

To go, when the pain gets too great, to do it.

 

The women keep bright, brittle pills in light-safe bottles.

They study the Physician’s Desk Reference, mark colorplates

With scarlet pens, shop for the lingerie they will wear

When they retire to their boudoirs for the last time

And arrange themselves like an armful of long-stemmed roses.

 

But these things seldom happen: they want company on their journey

To the last-act glare of family concern and helpless disbelief,

And when they see themselves in the mirror of the hospital room,

Watch their skulls about to bud through the membrane of heir faces,

They smile, say I told you so, and lie back down.

              -- Gettysburg Review 7.3 (Summer 1994); reprinted in Harper's 289.1735 

                  (December 1994)

 

SOCIETY

My brother cannot see us when we visit: his eyes

Are glazed and dead, and the half-shut lids

Do not flutter to keep them wet.  Yesterday

We carried all his magazines downstairs:

Town & Country, Vanity Fair, European Life.

The nurse has told us what to expect

When the myriad sieves within him

Begin to clog and close: hallucinate, she said,

A gentle word that rustles and taps

Like a drift of mapleseeds, a clinical word

As bright and naked as reason itself,

And those of the invisible who may be

Hovering above his bed are of no importance

To our busy, seasoned caregiver

When she climbs the stairs to his room.

 

Now we are only voices and hands

Who disturb the stale air that clings to him

As we stroke his head and whisper and clean,

As he says My God who are all these people

Is this heaven it must be heaven

And as his shoulders tense in the effort

Of reaching out, he turns his face

Up to the corner of his room,

Brings one thin hand to an open mouth

In the ancient gesture of astonishment,

Tries to wave at the people who wait

Past the black, empty trees and the powerlines

Heavy with dulling ice, past the twin chimneys

On the steel mill behind our fence:

So glad you could come   How marvelous

                  -- Illinois Review 1.2(Spring 1994); reprinted in What Comes Down to Us:

                     25 Contemporary Kentucky Poets (University of Kentucky Press,

                     2009)

 

WATER

Early evening on the river: a moon

Launched from a stump on the other side

Begins an angular flight

To the dark.  A small boat, riding

 

Dangerously low on sluggish water,

Whines against the current.  In the stern

A man bends over an outboard, frail

At full throttle, close to a stall.

 

Tilted, riding a wooden seat

Over the middle thwart, a small boy

Watches the trees on shore.  For him

The illusion of speed

 

Is incomplete: he turns to his father,

Wanting him to go faster.  In the prow

The family dog, alert, elevated

Over the others, looks straight ahead –

 

Free of the backyard chain, tail

Rapping the boat at each new smell,

He braves a vanishing horizon

Mouth open, gallant with delight.

                         -- Zone 3 2.2 (Spring 1987); reprinted in Mentor and Muse (Southern Illinois

                     University Press, 2010).