pitt poetry series

•

Ed Ochester, Editor

catalog of unabashed gratitude

ross gay

university of pittsburgh press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2015, Ross Gay

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6331-8

ISBN 10: 0-8229-6331-0

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8040-7 (ebook)

for Stephanie Smith and Judy Gay

contents

To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian

Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt

Ode to the Flute

Burial

Patience

Ode to the Puritan in Me

Feet

Smear the Queer

To My Best Friend’s Big Sister

Armpit

Spoon

Weeping

To the Mistake

Ode to Sleeping in My Clothes

Becoming a Horse

Sharing with the Ants

Ending the Estrangement

The Opening

C’Mon!

To the Mulberry Tree

Ode to Drinking Water from My Hands

Wedding Poem

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

Last Will and Testament

Acknowledgments

to the fig tree on 9th and christian

Tumbling through the

city in my

mind without once

looking up

the racket in

the lugwork probably

rehearsing some

stupid thing I

said or did

some crime or

other the city they

say is a lonely

place until yes

the sound of sweeping

and a woman

yes with a

broom beneath

which you are now

too the canopy

of a fig its

arms pulling the

September sun to it

and she

has a hose too

and so works hard

rinsing and scrubbing

the walk

lest some poor sod

slip on the

silk of a fig

and break his hip

and not probably

reach over to gobble up

the perpetrator

the light catches

the veins in her hands

when I ask about

the tree they

flutter in the air and

she says take

as much as

you can

help me

so I load my

pockets and mouth

and she points

to the step-ladder against

the wall to

mean more but

I was without a

sack so my meager

plunder would have to

suffice and an old woman

whom gravity

was pulling into

the earth loosed one

from a low slung

branch and its eye

wept like hers

which she dabbed

with a kerchief as she

cleaved the fig with

what remained of her

teeth and soon there were

eight or nine

people gathered beneath

the tree looking into

it like a

constellation pointing

do you see it

and I am tall and so

good for these things

and a bald man even

told me so

when I grabbed three

or four for

him reaching into the

giddy throngs of

yellow-jackets sugar

stoned which he only

pointed to smiling and

rubbing his stomach

I mean he was really rubbing his stomach

like there was a baby

in there

it was hot his

head shone while he

offered recipes to the

group using words which

I couldn’t understand and besides

I was a little

tipsy on the dance

of the velvety heart rolling

in my mouth

pulling me down and

down into the

oldest countries of my

body where I ate my first fig

from the hand of a man who escaped his country

by swimming through the night

and maybe

never said more than

five words to me

at once but gave me

figs and a man on his way

to work hops twice

to reach at last his

fig which he smiles at and calls

baby, c’mere baby,

he says and blows a kiss

to the tree which everyone knows

cannot grow this far north

being Mediterranean

and favoring the rocky, sunbaked soils

of Jordan and Sicily

but no one told the fig tree

or the immigrants

there is a way

the fig tree grows

in groves it wants,

it seems, to hold us,

yes I am anthropomorphizing

goddammit I have twice

in the last thirty seconds

rubbed my sweaty

forearm into someone else’s

sweaty shoulder

gleeful eating out of each other’s hands

on Christian St.

in Philadelphia a city like most

which has murdered its own

people

this is true

we are feeding each other

from a tree

at the corner of Christian and 9th

strangers maybe

never again.

ode to buttoning and unbuttoning my shirt

No one knew or at least

I didn’t know

they knew

what the thin disks

threaded here

on my shirt

might give me

in terms of joy

this is not something to be taken lightly

the gift

of buttoning one’s shirt

slowly

top to bottom

or bottom

to top or sometimes

the buttons

will be on the other

side and

I am a woman

that morning

slipping the glass

through its slot

I tread

differently that day

or some of it

anyway

my conversations

are different

and the car bomb slicing the air

and the people in it

for a quarter mile

and the honeybee’s

legs furred with pollen

mean another

thing to me

than on the other days

which too have

been drizzled in this

simplest of joys

in this world

of spaceships and subatomic

this and that

two maybe three

times a day

some days

I have the distinct pleasure

of slowly untethering

the one side

from the other

which is like unbuckling

a stack of vertebrae

with delicacy

for I must only use

the tips

of my fingers

with which I will

one day close

my mother’s eyes

this is as delicate

as we can be

in this life

practicing

like this

giving the raft of our hands

to the clumsy spider

and blowing soft until she

lifts her damp heft and

crawls off

we practice like this

pushing the seed into the earth

like this first

in the morning

then at night

we practice

sliding the bones home.

ode to the flute

A man sings

by opening his

mouth a man

sings by opening

his lungs by

turning himself into air

a flute can

be made of a man

nothing is explained

a flute lays

on its side

and prays a wind

might enter it

and make of it

at least

a small final song

burial

You’re right, you’re right,

the fertilizer’s good—

it wasn’t a gang of dullards

came up with chucking

a fish in the planting hole

or some midwife got lucky

with the placenta—

oh, I’ll plant a tree here!—

and a sudden flush of quince

and jam enough for months—yes,

the magic dust our bodies become

casts spells on the roots

about which someone else

could tell you the chemical processes,

but it’s just magic to me,

which is why a couple springs ago

when first putting in my two bare root plum trees

out back I took the jar which has become

my father’s house,

and lonely for him and hoping to coax him back

for my mother as much as me,

poured some of him in the planting holes

and he dove in glad for the robust air,

saddling a slight gust

into my nose and mouth,

chuckling as I coughed,

but mostly he disappeared

into the minor yawns in the earth

into which I placed the trees,

splaying wide their roots,

casting the gray dust of my old man

evenly throughout the hole,

replacing then the clods

of dense Indiana soil until the roots

and my father were buried,

watering it in all with one hand

while holding the tree

with the other straight as the flag

to the nation of simple joy

of which my father is now a naturalized citizen,

waving the flag

from his subterranean lair,

the roots curled around him

like shawls or jungle gyms, like

hookahs or the arms of ancestors,

before breast-stroking into the xylem,

riding the elevator up

through the cambium and into the leaves where,

when you put your ear close enough,

you can hear him whisper

good morning, where, if you close your eyes

and push your face you can feel

his stubbly jowls and good lord

this year he was giddy at the first

real fruit set and nestled into the 30 or 40 plums

in the two trees, peering out from the sweet meat

with his hands pressed against the purple skin

like cathedral glass,

and imagine his joy as the sun

wizarded forth those abundant sugars

and I plodded barefoot

and prayerful at the first ripe plum’s swell and blush,

almost weepy conjuring

some surely ponderous verse

to convey this bottomless grace,

you know, oh father oh father kind of stuff,

hundreds of hot air balloons

filling the sky in my chest, replacing his intubated body

listing like a boat keel side up, replacing

the steady stream of water from the one eye

which his brother wiped before removing the tube,

keeping his hand on the forehead

until the last wind in his body wandered off,

while my brother wailed like an animal,

and my mother said, weeping,

it’s ok, it’s ok, you can go honey,

at all of which my father

guffawed by kicking from the first bite

buckets of juice down my chin,

staining one of my two button-down shirts,

the salmon-colored silk one, hollering

there’s more of that!

almost dancing now in the plum,

in the tree, the way he did as a person,

bent over and biting his lip

and chucking the one hip out

then the other with his elbows cocked

and fists loosely made

and eyes closed and mouth made trumpet

when he knew he could make you happy

just by being a little silly

and sweet.

patience

Call it sloth; call it sleaze;

call it bummery if you please;

I’ll call it patience;

I’ll call it joy, this,

my supine congress

with the newly yawning grass

and beetles chittering

in their offices

beneath me, as I

nearly drifting to dream

admire this so-called weed which,

if I guarded with teeth bared

my garden of all alien breeds,

if I was all knife and axe

and made a life of hacking

would not have burst gorgeous forth and beckoning

these sort of phallic spires

ringleted by these sort of vaginal blooms

which the new bees, being bees, heed;

and yes, it is spring, if you can’t tell

from the words my mind makes

of the world, and everything

makes me mildly or more

hungry—the worm turning

in the leaf mold; the pear blooms

howling forth their pungence

like a choir of wet-dreamed boys

hiking up their skirts; even

the neighbor cat’s shimmy

through the grin in the fence,

and the way this bee

before me after whispering

in my ear dips her head

into those dainty lips

not exactly like one entering a chapel

and friends

as if that wasn’t enough

blooms forth with her forehead dusted pink

like she has been licked

and so blessed

by the kind of God

to whom this poem is prayer.

ode to the puritan in me

There is a puritan in me

the brim of whose

hat is so sharp

it could cut

your tongue out

with a brow

so furrowed you

could plant beets

or turnips or

something of course

good for storing

he has not taken a nap

since he was two years old

because he detests

sloth above all

he is maybe the only real person

I’ve ever heard

say “sloth” or “detest”

in conversation

he reads poetry

the puritan in me

with an X-Acto knife in his calloused hand

if not a stick of dynamite

and if the puritan in me sees

two cats making

whoopee in the barn

I think not

because they get

in the way

or scare the cows

but more precisely

because he thinks it is worthless

the angles of animals

fucking freely

in the open air

he will blast them to smithereens

I should tell you

the puritan in me always carries a shotgun

he wants to punish the world I suppose

because he feels he needs punishing

for who knows how many unpunishable things

like the times as a boy he’d sneak shirtless between the cows

to haul his tongue across the saltlick

or how he’d study his dozing granny’s instep

like it was the map of his county

or the spring nights he’d sneak to the garden behind the sleeping house

and strip naked

while upon him lathered the small song

of the ants rasping their tongues

across the peonies’ sap, making of his body

a flower-dappled tree

while above him the heavens wheeled and his tongue

drowsed slack as a creek,

on the banks of which, there he is,

right now, the puritan in me

tossing his shotgun into the cattails,

taking off his boots, and washing his feet

in that water.

feet

Friends, mine are ugly feet:

the body’s common wreckage

stuffed into boots. The second toe

on the left foot’s crooked

enough that when a child

asks what’s that? of it,

I can without flinch or fear of doubt lie

that a cow stepped on it

which maybe makes them fear cows

for which I repent

in love as I am with those philosophical beasts

who would never smash my feet

nor sneer at them

the way my mother does:

“We always bought you good shoes, honey,”

she says, “You can’t blame us

for those things,” and for this

and other reasons

I have never indulged in the pleasure

of flip-flops shy or ashamed

digging my toes like ten tiny ostriches into the sand

at the beach with friends

who I’m not sure love me,

though I don’t think Tina loved me—

she liked me, I think—but said

to me, as we sat on lawn chairs

beside a pool where I lifeguarded and was meticulous

at obscuring from view with a book or towel

my screwy friends,

You have pretty feet,

in that gaudy, cement-mixer, Levittown accent

that sends all the lemurs scaling my ribcage to see

and she actually had pretty feet

and so I took this as a kindness incomparable and probably

fell a little bit in love with her for that afternoon

with the weird white streak in her hair

and her machinegun chatter and her gum snapping

and so slid my feet from beneath my Powerman and Iron Fist comic book

into the sun for which they acted like plants opening their tiny mouths

to the food hurtling to them through the solar system,

and like plants you could watch them almost smile,

almost say thank you, you could watch them

turn colors, and be, almost, emboldened,

none of which Tina saw

because she was probably digging in her purse

or talking about that hottie on The Real World

or yelling at some friend’s little sister to put her ass in her trunks

or pouring the crumbs of her Fritos into her thrown open mouth

but do you really think I’m talking to you about my feet?

Of course she’s dead: Tina was her name, of leukemia: so I heard—

why else would I try sadly to make music of her unremarkable kindness?

I am trying, I think, to forgive myself

for something I don’t know what.

But what I do know is that I love the moment when the poet says

I am trying to do this

or I am trying to do that.

Sometimes it’s a horseshit trick. But sometimes

it’s a way by which the poet says

I wish I could tell you,

truly, of the little factory

in my head: the smokestacks

chuffing, the dandelions

and purslane and willows of sweet clover

prying through the blacktop.

I wish I could tell you

how inside is the steady mumble and clank of machines.

But mostly I wish I could tell you of the footsteps I hear,

more than I can ever count,

all of whose gaits I can discern by listening, closely.

Which promptly disappear

after being lodged again,

here, where we started, in the factory

where loss makes all things

beautiful grow.

smear the queer

was what we called it

sometimes or sometimes

kill the man

from afar

you could watch

the savannah’s dust bellow

from the chase

the fleet boy’s pronghorn flight

his juke and whirl

his stutter-step spring

or the buffalo boy’s chug

hauling the whole

flailing pride

and one way or another

down we’d be

dragged and good chance was

there’d be some piling on

the bloody-knuckled boy

and the long-haired boy

the boy with the crooked

smile and the one

who would die bad

tumbling and swan-diving

in layers and tangles

in fleshy knots of sediment

until was made a mountain

within which a cave

where was heard

a stream’s faint murmur

and seen the mirrored glance

of an iridescent bird’s

luminous eyes

a cave

across the ridged walls

of which gallops and flickers

a herd of elk

and on the sandy

floor beneath the feathers of firelight

all of us sprawled lank

and shimmering and woven

opening our small

bodies like moonflowers

to the dark

to my best friend’s big sister

One never knows

does one

how one comes to be

standing

most ways to naked

in front of one’s pal’s

big sister who has, simply

by telling me to,

gotten me to shed

all but the scantest

flap of fabric

and twirl before her

like a rotisserie

chicken as she

observes

and offers thoughtful critique

of my just

pubescent physique

which is not

a thing

to behold

what with my damp trunks

clinging to

my damp crotch

and proportion and grace

are words the definition

of which I don’t yet know

nor did I ask the

the mini-skirted scientist

sitting open-legged

and now shoeless

on my mom’s couch

though it may have been

this morning

while chucking papers

I heard through the Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock

pulsing my walkman

a mourning

dove struggling

snared in the downspout’s

mouth and without

lowering the volume

or missing a verse

I crinkled the rusted aluminum

trap enough that with

a little wriggle

it was free

and did not

at once

wobble to some

powerline but sat on my hand

and looked at me

for at least

one verse of “It Takes Two”

sort of bobbing

its head

and cooing once or twice

before flopping off

but that seems very long ago

now

as I pirouette

my hairless and shivering

warble of acne and pudge

burning a hole

in the rug as big sis tosses off

Greek and Latin words

like pectorals and

gluteus maximus

standing to show me

what she means

with her hands on my love

handles and now

I can see myself

trying to add some gaudy flourish

to this memory

to make of it

a fantasy

which is why I linger

hoping to mis-recall

the child

me

make of me

someone I wasn’t

make of this

experience the beginning

of a new life

gilded doors

kicked open blaring

trombones a full

beard Isaac Hayes singing in the background

and me thundering forth

on the wild steed

of emergent manhood

but I think this child was not

that child

obscuring, as he was, his breasts

by tucking his hands

into his armpits

and having never even made love

to himself

yet was not

really a candidate for much

besides the chill

of a minor shame

that he would forget for 15 years

one of what would prove

to be many

such shames

stitched together like a quilt

with all its just legible

patterning which could be a thing

heavy and warm

to be buried in

or instead might be held up

to the light

where we see the threads

barely holding

so human and frail

so beautiful and sad and small

from this remove.

armpit

First it’s the balm

of light sifting

through the rafters

of the old church

from the neighborhood

I’d break into not for ruckus

but to sit and write

my name in the dust on the pews

and watch the pigeons

roost beside the dozing

and crooked eye of the stained-

glass window the racket

somehow of the street

softened but that

maybe is another poem because

I’m trying to get

to the awkward flock

of flamingoes soaring

somewhere below my navel or

in the back of my throat

or the small house

behind my eyes suddenly

lit up

when sitting in the library’s

silent reading room

above her small stack on seed

saving and plant dyes and

kangaroos

a bookish woman’s hairy armpit flashes

it is summer it is

hot and those flamingoes

as a small boy before the bus came

I’d leap into the bed

beside my father

and push my face into his armpit

his bird’s nest

he called it half-smiling

with a book

in one hand smelling of the night shift

at Pizza Hut

while my mother stood in the doorway

on her way to work

mentioning something about dinner

or maybe the car

though truth is I didn’t listen

I just watched

the light glimmer in drifts

between the rafters

making glow somehow the

wide pine boards

and the dove up there

invisible but making

those noises.

spoon

for Don Belton

Who sits like this on the kitchen floor

at two in the morning turning over and over

the small silent body in his hands

with his eyes closed fingering the ornate

tendrils of ivy cast delicately into the spoon

that came home with me eight months ago

from a potluck next door during which

the birthday boy so lush on smoke

and drink and cake made like a baby

and slept on the floor with his thumb

in his mouth until he stumbled through my garden

to my house the next morning where I was frying up

stove top sweet potato biscuits, and making

himself at home as was his way,

after sampling one of my bricks

told me I could add some baking powder

to his and could I put on some coffee

and turn up the Nina Simone and rub, maybe,

his feet, which I did, the baking powder,

stirring it in, and I like to think,

unlikely though it is, those were the finest

biscuits Don ever ate, for there was organic coconut oil

and syrup bought from a hollering man

at the market who wears a rainbow cap

and dances to disguise his sorrow,

and it might be a ridiculous wish,

but the sweet potatoes came from a colony

just beyond my back door, smothering

with their vines the grass and doing their part

to make my yard look ragged and wild

to untrained eyes, the kale and chard so rampant

some stalks unbeknownst drooped into the straw mulch

and the cherry tomatoes shone like ornaments

on a drunken Christmas tree and the blackberry vines

gnawed through their rusty half-ass trellis,

this in Indiana where I am really not from, where,

for years, Negroes weren’t even allowed entry,

and where the rest stop graffiti might confirm

the endurance of such sentiments, and when

I worried about this to Don on a cool September evening,

worried it might look . . .

Don in his kindness abundant and floral, knowing my anxiety

before I stated it, having been around,

having gone antiquing in Martinsville a few weeks back

and been addressed most unkindly by a passing truck

or two, trucks likely adorned with the stars and bars,

knowing the typhoons race makes our minds do,

twirling with one hand a dreadlock and patting my back with the other

asked, smiling sadly and knowingly, niggerish?

before saying, it looks beautiful, and returning to some rumination

on the garden boy of his dreams,

whose shorts were very short, and stomach taut

and oily enough to see his reflection in.

Don told me this as we walked arm in arm

through our small neighborhood,

which he asked me if he could do,

is this ok, he asked, knowing mostly

how dense and sharp the dumb fear

of mostly straight boys can be—oh Don—

walking arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder,

his hand almost patting my forearm, resting there,

down the small alley next to the graveyard,

fall beginning to shudder into the leaves,

and Don once dreamt he was in that graveyard

next to his house on 4th, where in real life

we sang Diana Ross’s “Missing You” while decorating

his kitchen, where I once asked to borrow

a signed Jamaica Kincaid novel at which

Don made one sound by sucking his teeth that indicated

I was both impossibly stupid and a little bit cute

and in the dream in the graveyard

where century-old oak trees look like giants trudging

into a stiff wind, and some gravestones are old

enough to be illegible and lean back as though

consulting the sun, Don was floating

into the air which, pleasant at first,

became terrifying, he told me, beginning to cry,

just a little, as the world beneath him

grew smaller and smaller, his house

becoming a toy, the trees’ huge limbs like the arms,

now, of small people, calling him down,

but he couldn’t stop going higher, he said, crying,

just a little, and I have inserted myself

two or three times into the dream, imagining a rope

cinched to his waist by which Don might be tethered

to this world, snatching it as it whips uncoiling

through the grass at my feet, and gripping it

with all my strength until it almost hauls me up

and takes the skin of my palms with it, twisting slowly into the sky

at which I become like the trees here on earth shouting

Come back, come back

running some blocks looking into the sky,

first down 4th, but as the wind sends him this way and that

I too veer through backyards, hopping a fence or two,

not wanting to take my eyes from him,

not wanting to lose him, as he sails

in and out of the low clouds, looking down

with his sad eyes, just as he did

when he said at breakfast I’m a survivor, I survived,

this 53-year-old gay black man,

to which we did a little dance

listing the myriad bullets he’d dodged,

swirling the biscuits in their oily syrup,

Don occasionally poking his fork into the air for emphasis,

laughing and sipping coffee and

shaking our heads like we couldn’t believe it,

and having survived Don wanted a child to love,

and we made plans that I might make the baby

with my sweetie and he could be the real dad, reading

and cooking and worrying, while I played in the garden

and my sweetheart made the dough,

which maybe would have worked,

though Don never once cleaned a dish, and when I told him

to put his goddamned plate in the sink, he writhed

in his seat and called me bitch before plopping it in,

returning to his Destiny’s Child tune about survival,

while he scooped and slurped the remaining batter

with this spoon in my hands, into which I stare, seeing none of this.

I swore when I got into this poem I would convert

this sorrow into some kind of honey with the little musics

I can sometimes make with these scribbled artifacts

of our desolation. I can’t even make a metaphor

of my reflection upside down and barely visible

in the spoon. I wish one single thing made sense.

To which I say: Oh get over yourself.

That’s not the point.

After Don was murdered I dreamt of him,

hugging him and saying you have to go now,

fixing his scarf and pulling his wool overcoat snug,

weeping and tugging down his furry Russian cap

to protect his ears, kissing his eyes and cheeks

again and again, you have to go,

cinching his coat tight by the lapels,

for which Don peered at me again with those sad eyes,

or through me, or into me,

the way my dead do sometimes,

looking straight into their homes,

which hopefully have flowers

in a vase on a big wooden table,

and a comfortable chair or two,

and huge windows through which light

pours to wash clean and make a touch less awful

what forever otherwise will hurt.

weeping

I’m thinking here of the proto-Indo-European root

which means the precise sound of a flower bud

unwrapping, and the tiny racket a seed makes

cracking open in the dark, which has evolved

in a handful of Latinate languages to mean the sound

of lovers exiting each other, implying as well the space

between them which usage is seen first in Dante

in the fourteenth century, elbowing it for good into our mouths

and minds, and of course the sweet bead of sugar

imperceptibly moseying from the fig’s tiny eye precisely

unlike sorrow which the assembly of insects sipping there

will tell you, when I tell you my niece, without fit or wail,

knowing her friend Emma had left and not said goodbye,

having spent the better part of the day resting on her finger,

sometimes opening her wings, which were lustrous brown

with gold spots, to steady herself at the child-made

gale, or when she was tossed into the air while my niece

took her turn at pick-up sticks until calling Emma

by holding her finger in the air to which Emma would wobble down,

and Mikayla said Deal us in when we broke out the dominoes

at which they made a formidable duo, whispering to each other

instructions, and while the adults babbled our various dooms

Mikayla and Emma went into the bedroom where they sang

and danced and I think I heard Mikayla reading Emma

her favorite book, both of them slapping their thighs, leaning

into each other, and at bedtime Mikayla put on her PJs

carefully, first the left arm through while Emma teetered

on the right, then the other, and in the dark Mikayla whispered to Emma,

who had threaded her many legs into the band of Mikayla’s sleeve,

while she drifted, watching Emma’s wings slowly open

and close, and Emma must have flown away for good, judging

from the not brutal silence at breakfast, as Mikayla chewed

the waffle goofily with her one front tooth gone, and weakly smiled,

looking into the corners of the room for her friend, for Emma,

who had left without saying goodbye, the tears easily

rolling from her eyes, when I say she was weeping,

when I say she wept.

to the mistake

It is good

to know

a thing or two

about that

of which you

speak or

even to be expert

which is not

requisite though

a thing or two

is good

like the prop plane

I know

is going to land

on the canvas roof

of my friend’s

rickety jeep

while the salutatorian

to be sits

in the backseat giddy

with her new

graphing calculator

and the driver

says something

I think

about Arsenio Hall

and he sounds like

a bunny

in an echo chamber

but it’s hard

to hear with those

propellers roaring

above and today

I am lecturing

on the miracle

of the mistake

in a poem

that hiccup or weird

gift that spirals

or jettisons

what’s dull and land-locked

into as-yet-untraversed i.e. cosmic

(I overuse this metaphor

with my students)

grounds I tell

this to 105 give or take

undergrads who mostly

don’t care

and wrestle second

to second the

by now blood-borne

drive to check

their beckoning phones

which mostly

bless them they

don’t the mistake

I say is a gift

don’t be afraid

see what it teaches you

about what the poem

can be I know

of what

I speak like

the two tabs

of very potent

evidently

acid I

dropped four hours

before this reunion

and graduation party

of sorts for

we the gifted

and talented

corn chips and Mr. Pibb

and store-bought

cookies the texture of which

sunk me knee-deep

in a desert

I imagine

I looked something like

an opaque cloud

that day when

Mr. and Mrs. Simonoski

our brainy hosts

and teachers

guffawed in claymation

the tremendous

bead of spit

balancing on Mr.

Simonoski’s lip

before a gust of air

lifted it and it

drifted to the course

fabric of his beard

all the spiny

hairs of which seemed

to screech

like crickets and

no wonder I

declined the invitation

from the volleyball

court although

I was a phys ed major

and beneath the

white arcs the ball

painted in the sky

my classmates, Lisa

and Eugene and Ik

and Becky, all

looked a bit

alien with craniums

engorged slightly

and spines

compressed if not even

serpentine their limbs

flailing about

wildly like cuttlefish

speaking only in

polysyllabics which

must have made my breathy

grunts all the

more apish who

knows where the poem

will lead you

I tell them to let go

their reins

and listen to the tongue’s

half-wit

brilliance the corner

of the mind

made light by some

accidental yoking

of two impossibly

joined things

one or two in the rear

I notice their eyes

roll into the backs

of their heads

and my plastic cup

of root beer by now is spilling

a bit while Mr. Simonoski

laughs like a hyena

plunging its face

in a ruptured gut

and nothing has ever been

as clear to me as

the bell that rang in my head that day

we were

a 12-year experiment

the garden-variety

brainiacs from a suburban

school passable genetic

mixture forgettable

location Mr. Sim’s oddly large

eyes and his long reptilian tail

now making sense

and the way someone with

an electric can-opener voice

seemed always to be inside him

speaking when he spoke

now making sense

as the night winds down

and the last of the cake

is served writhing with some

fluorescent scrawl

only I seem able to read

while all the good-natured kids

whose fingernails are chewed

raw and jaws pulse

who are so good so

very good

and soon will be hauled into

that bottomless sky

under which I stumble

to see what direction they’re coming from

and can I run

ode to sleeping in my clothes

And though I don’t mention it

to my mother

or the doctors

with their white coats

it is, in fact,

a great source of happiness,

for me, as I don’t

even remove my socks,

and will sometimes

even pull up my hood

and slide my hands deep

in my pockets

and probably moreso

than usual look as if something

bad has happened

my heart blasting a last somersault

or some artery parting

like curtains in a theater

while the cavalry of blood

comes charging through

except unlike

so many of the dead

I must be smiling

there in my denim

and cotton sarcophagus

slightly rank from the day

it is said that Shostakovich slept

with a packed suitcase beneath

his bed and it is said

that black people were snatched

from dark streets and made experiments

of and you and I

both have family whose life

savings are tucked 12 feet beneath

the Norway maple whose roots

splay like the bones

in the foot of a man

who has walked to Youngstown, Ohio

from Arkansas without sleeping

or keeping his name

and it’s a miracle

maybe I almost never think of

to rise like this

and simply by sliding my feet into my boots

while the water for coffee

gathers its song

be in the garden

or on the stoop

running, almost,

from nothing.

becoming a horse

It was dragging my hands along its belly,

loosing the bit and wiping the spit

from its mouth made me

a snatch of grass in the thing’s maw,

a fly tasting its ear. It was

touching my nose to his made me know

the clover’s bloom, my wet eye to his

made me know the long field’s secrets.

But it was putting my heart to the horse’s that made me know

the sorrow of horses. The sorrow

of a brook creasing a field. The maggot

turning in its corpse. Made me

forsake my thumbs for the sheen of unshod hooves.

And in this way drop my torches.

And in this way drop my knives.

Feel the small song in my chest

swell and my coat glisten and twitch.

And my face grow long.

And these words cast off, at last,

for the slow honest tongue of horses.

sharing with the ants

a euphemism for some

yank and gobble

no doubt some

yummy tumble or other

like monkey-spanking

or hiding the salami

of course your mind

goes there

loosey-goose that you are

me too!        me too!

you have a favorite

don’t lie

I’ve heard you say them

tending the hive

eating the melon

how’s the tunnel traffic

or as a “massage therapist”

would say to my pal

when his loneliness

dragged him to a carpeted room

in an apartment building

in Chinatown

where the small hands

lathered his body

open the door

naturally

sharing with the ants

some entymologic metaphor

the chronic yoke

in love making

not only of body to body

but life to death

sharing with the ants

or the specific act of dragging with the tongue

one’s sweat-gilded body from the tibia’s

lookout along the rope bridge

of the Achilles’ marching

across the long plains of the calf

and the meticulously unnamed zone behind the knee

over the hamstring into

use your imagination for Chrissakes

but I will tell you it is dark there

and sweet

sharing with the ants

but that’s not at all

what I’m talking about

I mean actually

sharing with the ants

which I did September 21

a Friday in 2012

when by fluke or whim or

prayer I jostled the crotch-high

fig tree whose few fruit had been

scooped by our fat friends

the squirrels

but found shriveled and purple

into an almost testicular papoose

smuggled beneath the fronds

of a few leaves

one stalwart fruit which

I immediately bit in half

only to find a small platoon of ants

twisting in the meat

and when I spit out my bite

another 4 or 5 lay sacked out

their spindly legs

pedaling slow nothing

one barely looking at me through a half-open eye

the way an infant might

curled into its mother’s breast

and one stumbled dazed through my beard

tickling me as it tumbled

head over feet over head

over feet back into the bite

in my hand the hooked sabers

of their mandibles made soft kneading

the flesh their claws

heavy and slow with fruit

their armor slathered plush

as the seeds shone above

the sounds of their work

like water slapping

a pier at night

and not one to disrupt an orgy

I mostly gobbled around their nuzzle and slurp

careful not to chomp a reveler

and nibbling one last thread of flesh

noticed a dozy ant nibbling the same

toward me its antennae

just caressing my face

its pincers

slowing at my lips both

of our mouths sugared

and shining both of us

twirling beneath the fig’s

seeds spinning like a newly

discovered galaxy

that’s been there forever

ending the estrangement

from my mother’s sadness, which was,

to me, unbearable, until,

it felt to me

not like what I thought it felt like

to her, and so felt inside myself—like death,

like dying, which I would almost

have rather done, though adding to her sadness

would rather die than do—

but, by sitting still, like what, in fact, it was—

a form of gratitude

which when last it came

drifted like a meadow lit by torches

of cardinal flower, one of whose crimson blooms,

when a hummingbird hovered nearby,

I slipped into my mouth

thereby coaxing the bird

to scrawl on my tongue

its heart’s frenzy, its fleet

nectar-questing song,

with whom, with you, dear mother,

I now sing along.

the opening

You might rightly wonder what I am doing here

in the passenger’s seat of this teal Mitsubishi

with the hood secured by six or seven thick strips of duct tape,

sitting next to Myself, who sits in the driver’s seat,

having quickly pulled into the lot of the Kentucky Fried Chicken

on Rt. 413 in Levittown, Pennsylvania,

from which years ago my father would sometimes

bring home a bucket of hot wings to share

just with me, his comrade in spice and grease and gore,

rattling the little charnel house like a bell

to indicate a joy impending and plucking

the lid to waft the scent toward the vents

into my room where I’d catch a whiff and toss my Avengers

comic to vault down the steps before high-fiving

my smiling old man, stinking of his own hours working

at the Roy Rogers down on Cottman, and plunge into the scuzzy muck,

the two of us silently cleaning the bones while the laugh track

of some rerun ebbed and flowed;

you wonder rightly what it is I am saying

quietly in the ear of Myself, and what I am pointing at

with one hand while the other rests on Myself’s shoulder,

tenderly if not a bit tentatively, for Myself

is still a very big man, and quick, and trying hard

not to take anyone with him over the ledge on which he stands,

which you can tell when he just barely looks in my direction

a bit animal with sweat glistening the back of his neck

and his temples, his jaw flexed with his hands

clutching the wheel, the slightest whistle in his breath

while beneath the looming sign of the Colonel smiling

like one concealing some awful and bloody secret

a family in the rearview parks their minivan

and not mostly noticing us makes their way out:

an older brother gripping the wrist of a smaller one

who clutches his purple and yellow jacket; an infant snugged

in its father’s arm tipping its head back to see us

from beneath its light blue cap, opening and closing its hand

as the glass doors swing shut behind them.

• • •

You likewise might wonder how Myself has arrived

at this flamboyant terror, an accretion

the way in caves, where nothing without light

is seen, minerals will gather into impossible spires

waiting to impale a thing, that, while driving home

from his dear mother’s apartment, he actually saw

in his mind with a clarity like the semis behind him

trudging toward the on-ramp to Philadelphia or New Jersey,

like the carts wandering about the PathMark lot or the woman

in a housedress and slippers waiting at the crosswalk

smoking a cigarette, his own hands working a vial

of some sort from which he poured a poison

into his mother’s half-eaten tub of blueberry yogurt,

which imagined matricide is perhaps especially jarring

to Myself, given the awkward walking he does

avoiding ants and other tiny beasts,

given the long prayer he found himself giving

the chickadee that met its death against his windshield,

lodging under the wiper blades and drumming the glass

with the one free wing until he could pull over, whereupon

Myself did kiss the unlucky thing, folding its wings into its body,

before laying it in a small hole at the foot of a dogwood tree

in full regalia, its thousand flowers like a congregation

walking arm in arm in the river.

• • •

And knowing Myself well now I can see

what murderous birds flew numerous and hungry

into the attic, shrikes especially, working

their ways in at the slimmest shims of light

between shingles and through rotholes wedging first

their heads in without blinking and collapsing

the bones of their bodies their tongues thrust out

and necks made long wriggling in leaving behind

clumps of shivering feathers blood-glued to the cracks

one after the next prying through loose boards

snapping at the tail feathers of the ones in front of them

the clawing feet skitting in one after the next

until the attic roared with soaring and the war

screams of birds clutching one another with talons

by the neck or back and veering quick

toward any piercing barb or thorn

or snapped branch jeering into the air like this

the impaled thing writhing and fluttering

once or twice its wings and twisting open its beak

from which came no sound—

which is, in fact, the wrong metaphor, the more I think of it,

for the birds in question favor the long view

of open meadows. They love exposed perches on which they fasten

their talons and unwrap their beautiful wings in the wind.

And the birds I’m talking about are not birds at all,

but common sorrow made murderous simply by nailing

the shingles tight, and caulking with the tar always boiling out back

all possible cracks. Which is to say, the metaphor here

has become the sealing up as much as any bird, has become

the way Myself had made unwittingly a habit of slathering

mortar everywhere, almost by accident,

for fear of what might forever slip in and be felt;

which was, in addition to everything else, simply, goddamn,

how sad my mother was when my father died, goddamn,

how sad was Myself; and how scared was Myself,

scared nearly, in fact, to death, at his mother afraid

or not sleeping well or not unpacking for months in her new apartment,

outside of which Myself, visiting, would sit in his car

for a half hour or more, staring

into the yellow aluminum siding’s patina and the seam

it made with the fake white brick

as he felt the bones of his chest breaking which was the feeling

of the very real terror he had at what his hands might do, which his hands

would never do, which was like the wood shake helpless against the prying

shrike, clawing and snapping its hunter’s beak, which, I am happy

to remind us both again, was not the feeling at all. All Myself was feeling,

in fact, was not feeling his heart break again and again.

The way he did for some time sitting with his mother

in her living room, watching the Eagles that year have a good season

while she sobbed and didn’t sleep well and in some way

shone in her sorrow complete though it was very hard

for him to admire for the roaring in his head, which was nothing

more, it turns out, than the sounds of not weeping, the sounds

of sadness turned back. Nothing savage, nothing cruel or vicious,

not a bird in sight—just sadness. Which is to say,

in other words, just being alive.

• • •

My Beloved Chickenshit; My Sweet

Little Chickenshit; don’t run,

My Baby. Don’t flee, My Honey.

Hunker down. Hunker down.

• • •

There is, in my yard, a huge and beautiful peach tree.

I planted the thing as a three-foot whip,

a spindly prayer with a tangle of roots so delicate,

so wild, I took ten minutes to feather them apart

before spreading them in the hole like a lightning storm

in one of those images of the brain. Now the tree reaches almost

into the grumpy neighbor out back’s yard, the one who once

snarled at me and my house why would anyone paint a house that color?,

and whose unsmiling middle-aged daughter mows the lawn

twice a day, though I’ve seen in March or April

when the tree’s myriad pink mouths unfurl

and blow kisses to everyone in sight, the burdened curl

of the old lady’s back uncoil—I’ve seen her stand up some and wink

at that tree, and, no kidding, saw her once teeter out

in a gloomy gray pantsuit and, scrubbed by the bloom,

change her costume right then and there to something

frilled and blazing, which she wore on her trot

through the neighborhood whistling to the birds swirling

behind her. In this neck of the woods you have to prune

a peach tree if you don’t want the fruit to rot, if you don’t want

all that fragrant grandstanding to be for naught. Which is why

today, this sunny April afternoon with no rain or real freeze forecasted,

I dig out my tools and sharpening stone, making the blades

all shimmer enough to skim the hair from my arm.

Then, after cleaning each with a rag dipped in

some watered-down bleach, I move around the tree’s

sprawling limbs, the ruddy young growth all wagging

at the sun, all shivering with the breezes

muscling through. And with my loppers and snips

I look up into the behemoth tree and begin clipping,

first the wisps of growth and pencil thick

sprouts, rubbing off with my thumb tiny leaf buds

peeking from the trunk, before hauling myself into the tree,

wedging my boot in the sturdy crotch and clinging

to a fat branch to keep thinning: overlapping

limbs or those with some hint of disease; those grown haywire

or deranged twisting toward the light; and those from which

last year grew maybe half a bushel of fruit, limbs

wrist thick with bark whorled and cleft by age,

but whose tight angle might snap this year

and wreck the tree, and require a saw to remove, which I do,

watching the last branch tumble into the pile of clippings below.

I do this again and again, crawling through the branches

as though through a beloved’s ribs. Friends, if you haven’t guessed,

every time I do this a little bit I mourn,

leaning the pruner’s steel flush against the flesh,

or working back and forth the saw’s grin and feeling

the smooth wood tumble or twirl into the little tomb which, after

the cutting is done, is about my size—is about the size,

give or take, of everyone I’ve ever loved. This is how, every spring,

I promise the fruit will swell with sugar: by bringing in the air and light—

until, like the old-timers say, the tree is open enough

for a bird to fly through. Which, in fact, they do—two cardinals

flirting; a blue jay flashing its pompadour; one of those little grayish

birds

I can’t remember the name of, landing on the furthest limbs

where it does nothing special besides maybe dump its teeny

chamber pot while whistling this very ditty:

half dirge, half disco, some giggly trill

loop-de-looping from its tiny beak,

while its ruffled, musty body sways on the tree’s furthest finger,

resting exactly where I put it,

singing just as I asked it to,

which, from up here, where the newly open view is good, I can see

is what I was pointing to, what I was saying quietly to Myself,

in the parking lot of the KFC in Levittown, Pennsylvania,

as Myself shivered, and looked up, trying to see,

trying to hear.

c’mon!

My mother is not the wings,

nor the bird, but the moon

across the laced hands

of the nest. The palm on a fever-dreamer’s

brow. She was born a crab, waving

the twin flags of her pinchers.

That’s one of those poetry lies. Truth is

my poor mom’s hands bruised on our butts,

so that was the end of that.

And when the monk slapped her ass,

she didn’t kick him down the stairs,

but slipped the saffron tale

in her pocket. Truth is my mother’s brave

as a bison. For years

she dragged her hooves through the ash

of her heart. Head down. Steam rising

in ghosts from her pelt. Years

where nary a blade of grass. Nary

birdsong. But one day

a small seed took hold. Then another.

Soon, beetles and spiders came back, and then,

and then, the birds were chatting

in the new growth. And right now

a family of elk crosses a stream

and behind them on a hillside

a galaxy of wildflowers

shimmers. Shimmers

and hollers,

“C’mon!”

to the mulberry tree

Everyone knows it’s good luck

if inconvenient

when a bird shits on you

but even moreso

good luck if the bird shits on you

when you’re plucking

gold currant tomatoes

sweet enough to make your bare feet

lift just so

off the ground

and the beetles beneath scurry

and giggle

and as I move to gobble one

mouth agape and swooped in a grin at once

the shit slurries half in

and half on my

sun-warmed chin which

forgive me

jiggles me from my reverie

for I am only human

swiping the slurp of turd from my mouth

only to see it is mostly

purple the goop seedy and gelatinous

and when I see the bird pitching

his swill from the branch above

I know that yes this shit

is mostly berry from

that most prolific of trees

which some numbskulls

call a weed because it’s so prolific

and not, they say, particularly

useful, these same some

call insipid the mulberry’s flavor which

I think means tasteless

or bland but given

I detect swirled in the shit

the sweet of the thing

insipid doesn’t fit the bill

but rather most likely describes

the sex life of the describer

but why should I get personal

defending a tree’s honor

mostly I’m happy the birds

feast on the top-most branches

of these tall trees and leave be

for the time being

my blueberries and soon blackberries

and grapes and these little tomatoes

though to be sure

it is a certain glee

as spring gasps into summer

and the lowest branches

shimmer with their simple booty

which I must jump for and sometimes

high which I will not, probably,

always be able to do, for jumping

and grabbing at once like this

a soft thing is hard

be gentle

she said emerging from the dugout beneath the mulberry tree

where the big kids gathered

and we mostly rode our bikes by fast

so as not to be snatched to the ground and pummeled

or worse for they were teenagers

but I knew this early July morning they would be nowhere

to be found and the tree

would be burdened

with a crop begging to be loosed

on my ice cream

she wiped her eyes and yawned

and put on glasses

and there was in her hair

a small sprig of grass

and she was barefoot

laughing and filling with me slowly my bucket

eating a few when it was full

giggling at the small burst of juice one made

on her chin

and behind her beneath the tree

there was a filthy blanket

and a pack of cigarettes

and tinfoil wrappers crumpled and shimmering

and the frayed remnants of a rope

and seeing me seeing

into the terrible future

she put softly one hand on my chin

and the other in my hair

turning my head away from what wreckage

waited in there

and back into the leaves,

which too I will do to you,

so that none of us will ever die terribly,

but stay always like this, lips and fingers blushed purple,

the faint sugar ghosting our mouths,

beneath the tree inside me,

which is the same tree now grown inside you:

the three of us snugged in the canopy

on our tippy-toes, gathering fruit

for good.

ode to drinking water from my hands

which today, in the garden,

I’d forgotten

I’d known and more

forgotten

I’d learned and was taught this

by my grandfather

who, in the midst of arranging

and watering

the small bouquets

on mostly the freshest graves

saw my thirst

and cranked the rusty red pump

bringing forth

from what sounded like the gravelly throat

of an animal

a frigid torrent

and with his hands made a lagoon

from which he drank

and then I drank

before he cranked again

making of my hands, now,

a fountain in which I can see

the silty bottom

drifting while I drink

and drink and

my grandfather waters the flowers

on the graves

among which are his

and his wife’s

unfinished and patient, glistening

after he rinses the bird shit

from his wife’s

and the pump exhales

and I drink

to the bottom of my fountain

and join him

in his work.

wedding poem

for Keith and Jen

Friends I am here to modestly report

seeing in an orchard

in my town

a goldfinch kissing

a sunflower

again and again

dangling upside down

by its tiny claws

steadying itself by snapping open

like an old-timey fan

its wings

again and again,

until, swooning, it tumbled off

and swooped back to the very same perch,

where the sunflower curled its giant

swirling of seeds

around the bird and leaned back

to admire the soft wind

nudging the bird’s plumage,

and friends I could see

the points on the flower’s stately crown

soften and curl inward

as it almost indiscernibly lifted

the food of its body

to the bird’s nuzzling mouth

whose fervor

I could hear from

oh 20 or 30 feet away

and see from the tiny hulls

that sailed from their

good racket,

which good racket, I have to say,

was making me blush,

and rock up on my tippy-toes,

and just barely purse my lips

with what I realize now

was being, simply, glad,

which such love,

if we let it,

makes us feel.

catalog of unabashed gratitude

Friends, will you bear with me today,

for I have awakened

from a dream in which a robin

made with its shabby wings a kind of veil

behind which it shimmied and stomped something from the south

of Spain, its breast aflare,

looking me dead in the eye

from the branch that grew into my window,

coochie-cooing my chin,

the bird shuffling its little talons left, then right,

while the leaves bristled

against the plaster wall, two of them drifting

onto my blanket while the bird

opened and closed its wings like a matador

giving up on murder,

jutting its beak, turning a circle,

and flashing, again,

the ruddy bombast of its breast

by which I knew upon waking

it was telling me

in no uncertain terms

to bellow forth the tubas and sousaphones,

the whole rusty brass band of gratitude

not quite dormant in my belly—

it said so in a human voice,

“Bellow forth”—

and who among us could ignore such odd

and precise counsel?

Hear ye! hear ye! I am here

to holler that I have hauled tons—by which I don’t mean lots,

I mean tons—of cow shit

and stood ankle deep in swales of maggots

swirling the spent beer grains

the brewery man was good enough to dump off

holding his nose, for they smell very bad,

but make the compost writhe giddy and lick its lips,

twirling dung with my pitchfork

again and again

with hundreds and hundreds of other people,

we dreamt an orchard this way,

furrowing our brows,

and hauling our wheelbarrows,

and sweating through our shirts,

and less than a year later there was a party

at which trees were sunk into the well-fed earth,

one of which, a liberty apple, after being watered in

was tamped by a baby barefoot

with a bow hanging in her hair

biting her lip in her joyous work

and friends this is the realest place I know,

it makes me squirm like a worm I am so grateful,

you could ride your bike there

or roller skate or catch the bus

there is a fence and a gate twisted by hand,

there is a fig tree taller than you in Indiana,

it will make you gasp.

It might make you want to stay alive even, thank you;

and thank you

for not taking my pal when the engine

of his mind dragged him

to swig fistfuls of Xanax and a bottle or two of booze,

and thank you for taking my father

a few years after his own father went down thank you

mercy, mercy, thank you

for not smoking meth with your mother

oh thank you thank you

for leaving and for coming back,

and thank you for what inside my friends’

love bursts like a throng of roadside goldenrod

gleaming into the world,

likely hauling a shovel with her

like one named Aralee ought,

with hands big as a horse’s,

and who, like one named Aralee ought,

will laugh time to time til the juice

runs from her nose; oh

thank you

for the way a small thing’s wail makes

the milk or what once was milk

in us gather into horses

huckle-buckling across a field;

and thank you, friends, when last spring

the hyacinth bells rang

and the crocuses flaunted

their upturned skirts, and a quiet roved

the beehive which when I entered

were snugged two or three dead

fist-sized clutches of bees between the frames,

almost clinging to one another,

this one’s tiny head pushed

into another’s tiny wing,

one’s forelegs resting on another’s face,

the translucent paper of their wings fluttering

beneath my breath and when

a few dropped to the frames beneath:

honey; and after falling down to cry,

everything’s glacial shine.

And thank you, too. And thanks

for the corduroy couch I have put you on.

Put your feet up. Here’s a light blanket,

a pillow, dear one,

for I think this is going to be long.

I can’t stop

my gratitude, which includes, dear reader,

you, for staying here with me,

for moving your lips just so as I speak.

Here is a cup of tea. I have spooned honey into it.

And thank you the tiny bee’s shadow

perusing these words as I write them.

And the way my love talks quietly

when in the hive,

so quietly, in fact, you cannot hear her

but only notice barely her lips moving

in conversation. Thank you what does not scare her

in me, but makes her reach my way. Thank you the love

she is which hurts sometimes. And the time

she misremembered elephants

in one of my poems which, oh, here

they come, garlanded with morning glory and wisteria

blooms, trombones all the way down to the river.

Thank you the quiet

in which the river bends around the elephant’s

solemn trunk, polishing stones, floating

on its gentle back

the flock of geese flying overhead.

And to the quick and gentle flocking

of men to the old lady falling down

on the corner of Fairmount and 18th, holding patiently

with the softest parts of their hands

her cane and purple hat,

gathering for her the contents of her purse

and touching her shoulder and elbow;

thank you the cockeyed court

on which in a half-court 3 vs. 3 we oldheads

made of some runny-nosed kids

a shambles, and the 61-year-old

after flipping a reverse layup off a back door cut

from my no-look pass to seal the game

ripped off his shirt and threw punches at the gods

and hollered at the kids to admire the pacemaker’s scar

grinning across his chest; thank you

the glad accordion’s wheeze

in the chest; thank you the bagpipes.

Thank you to the woman barefoot in a gaudy dress

for stopping her car in the middle of the road

and the tractor trailer behind her, and the van behind it,

whisking a turtle off the road.

Thank you god of gaudy.

Thank you paisley panties.

Thank you the organ up my dress.

Thank you the sheer dress you wore kneeling in my dream

at the creek’s edge and the light

swimming through it. The koi kissing

halos into the glassy air.

The room in my mind with the blinds drawn

where we nearly injure each other

crawling into the shawl of the other’s body.

Thank you for saying it plain:

fuck each other dumb.

And you, again, you, for the true kindness

it has been for you to remain awake

with me like this, nodding time to time

and making that noise which I take to mean

yes, or, I understand, or, please go on

but not too long, or, why are you spitting

so much, or, easy Tiger

hands to yourself. I am excitable.

I am sorry. I am grateful.

I just want us to be friends now, forever.

Take this bowl of blackberries from the garden.

The sun has made them warm.

I picked them just for you. I promise

I will try to stay on my side of the couch.

And thank you the baggie of dreadlocks I found in a drawer

while washing and folding the clothes of our murdered friend;

the photo in which his arm slung

around the sign to “the trail of silences”; thank you

the way before he died he held

his hands open to us; for coming back

in a waft of incense or in the shape of a boy

in another city looking

from between his mother’s legs,

or disappearing into the stacks after brushing by;

for moseying back in dreams where,

seeing us lost and scared

he put his hand on our shoulders

and pointed us to the temple across town;

and thank you to the man all night long

hosing a mist on his early-bloomed

peach tree so that the hard frost

not waste the crop, the ice

in his beard and the ghosts

lifting from him when the warming sun

told him sleep now; thank you

the ancestor who loved you

before she knew you

by smuggling seeds into her braid for the long

journey, who loved you

before he knew you by putting

a walnut tree in the ground, who loved you

before she knew you by not slaughtering

the land; thank you

who did not bulldoze the ancient grove

of dates and olives,

who sailed his keys into the ocean

and walked softly home; who did not fire, who did not

plunge the head into the toilet, who said stop,

don’t do that; who lifted some broken

someone up; who volunteered

the way a plant birthed of the reseeding plant

is called a volunteer, like the plum tree

that marched beside the raised bed

in my garden, like the arugula that marched

itself between the blueberries,

nary a bayonet, nary an army, nary a nation,

which usage of the word volunteer

familiar to gardeners the wide world

made my pal shout “Oh!” and dance

and plunge his knuckles

into the lush soil before gobbling two strawberries

and digging a song from his guitar

made of wood from a tree someone planted, thank you;

thank you zinnia, and gooseberry, rudbeckia

and pawpaw, Ashmead’s kernel, cockscomb

and scarlet runner, feverfew and lemonbalm;

thank you knitbone and sweetgrass and sunchoke

and false indigo whose petals stammered apart

by bumblebees good lord please give me a minute. . .

and moonglow and catkin and crookneck

and painted tongue and seedpod and johnny jump-up;

thank you what in us rackets glad

what gladrackets us;

and thank you, too, this knuckleheaded heart, this pelican heart,

this gap-toothed heart flinging open its gaudy maw

to the sky, oh clumsy, oh bumblefucked,

oh giddy, oh dumbstruck,

oh rickshaw, oh goat twisting

its head at me from my peach tree’s highest branch,

balanced impossibly gobbling the last fruit,

its tongue working like an engine,

a lone sweet drop tumbling by some miracle

into my mouth like the smell of someone I’ve loved;

heart like an elephant screaming

at the bones of its dead;

heart like the lady on the bus

dressed head to toe in gold, the sun

shivering her shiny boots, singing

Erykah Badu to herself

leaning her head against the window;

and thank you the way my father one time came back in a dream

by plucking the two cables beneath my chin

like a bass fiddle’s strings

and played me until I woke singing,

no kidding, singing, smiling,

thank you, thank you,

stumbling into the garden where

the Juneberry’s flowers had burst open

like the bells of French horns, the lily

my mother and I planted oozed into the air,

the bazillion ants labored in their earthen workshops

below, the collard greens waved in the wind

like the sails of ships, and the wasps

swam in the mint bloom’s viscous swill;

and you, again you, for hanging tight, dear friend.

I know I can be long-winded sometimes.

I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude

over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward,

the suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling gems

slipping into your eye. Soon it will be over,

which is precisely what the child in my dream said,

holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky

hurtling our way like so many buffalo,

who said it’s much worse than we think,

and sooner; to whom I said

no duh child in my dreams, what do you think

this singing and shuddering is,

what this screaming and reaching and dancing

and crying is, other than loving

what every second goes away?

Goodbye, I mean to say.

And thank you. Every day.

last will and testament

You thought somehow you were off the hook,

which was naïve if not dumb

though I will not berate you

given as this poem is in fact me on my knees

to beg of you a small grody chore

and though you may not know the ways

my lucky body corrodes

nor what stray bricks heaved

from what stray roofs

are headed my way—nor I yours—

degrade I do and so

am here to plead the lucky sod—

lover, pal, niece, mom—Lord God,

please not mom—charged with heaving

my luggage to chuck the gore

straight into the orchard.

Beats me by dry flame

or cauldron deep, by your granny’s

mortar and pestle to grind

my bones and teeth having flayed

and woven of my flesh two or three

mats of mulch; do the good work

with your pickaxe

or hacksaw, oh for god’s sake

have a little fun

with this grave and grizzly drill

and know I’m giggling too

and feel nary a thing;

and when you’ve lopped what needs lopping,

(Oh use the hand pruners

with the red handle; they were my favorite!

Such elegant recoil! Such scintillant snips!)

chuck my at last acheless feet to the fickle peach;

my hands upturned and open

to the village of figs where the ants pray

for fruit slather-faced; my jawbone

yoked to its tongue planted as a small forgiveness

of stupid, lonely, frightened Samson—and his

stupid, lonely, frightened God—and as some meager balm

to the donkey he defamed—give that

to the black mulberry,

tree of forgiveness, tree

of bounty; lob my head and its vaults

of perfectly useless mudge

to the persimmon, where the bleak cold

coaxes forth the sugars

shining in the long dark, and my heart

go ahead and tuck beneath

some comfrey sprawling across the plum tree’s feet,

so I might dance a long and loamy tango

with my old man. Lord knows I don’t wish to go

just yet, for the flush of flowers

and then fruit blooms me into a cartwheel

that whirls for weeks,

not to mention my knees’ little ditties are still mostly pretty,

and good lord the funks

I stumble over lust-drunk and hungry

walking the streets of most cities

and some days wake up tonguing

the laminated pages of the world map—

but when I do head out

I won’t be like the old man

who wept as he died,

wheeled through his orchard the last time,

whispering goodbye, goodbye,

running his thin hands

over the gnarled twining of vines,

listening this last time to the wind

through his lemons and oranges,

the occasional thump of wind-fallen fruit,

the night’s scarce light unspooling through the leaves,

goodbye child, goodbye little one, he says,

teetering out of his chair to clutch

and rub his neck and cheek

against the calloused bulk of the olive,

which curls into him, the one

lank branch cradling him,

its thin leaves whispering—

for some days I can’t wait

to sling my gangly bulk into the peach blossom’s sheer camisoles,

or to become the frilly skirts

of the pear which wind-blown heave

the syrupy smell of semen

and oh the joy I will be

wafting into the noses and tongues of passersby

who will furrow their brows

before, some of them, crafting their various rackets

with their loves or themselves

thanks in no small part to me

or to shimmy into the pawpaw’s steeple

where my rank bloom

tongue kissed by flies

puckers at the gorgeous world

its brazenly human lips,

not to mention, yes, of course,

to be gobbled by folks the likes of whom

I’ve never imagined, I’m saying

I’m saying to gift of my body some pure glee

which, living, I don’t know

that I ever did . . . except last spring

distracting the neighbor cat just enough

to free the hummingbird in its paws,

or the ramshackle salsa my pal and I stepped

at a café in Greece where the music was good

and the white-aproned workers stomped

and howled and sent us off

with bags of cookies,

oh, and maybe another thing or two,

but you get my point, friend,

which, getting to, I know, was a long row to hoe,

though I’m simply extolling

your transubstantiative gift to me

and whomever’s heart will be a little broke

when I kick it,

but if you think this was blabber-mouthed,

you better buckle in

when I kick it.

acknowledgments

Some of the poems in this book were previously published in the following magazines. I am grateful to the editors.

“Burial” and “Patience” in Solstice; “Wedding Poem” and “Sharing with the Ants” in Timber; “Feet” in Gabby; “To My Best Friend’s Big Sister” on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day; “Ode to the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian” and “To the Puritan in Me” in American Poetry Review; “Ode to the Mistake” in Forklift, Ohio; “Becoming a Horse” in the Sun; “Ode to Drinking Water from My Hands” in Exit 7; “Ode to Sleeping in My Clothes” in Massachusetts Review; “Ode to the Flute” in Nashville Review; “Ode to Buttoning My Shirt” in Bombay Gin; “Spoon” in Lit; “Opening” in Oversound; “Weeping” in Gulf Coast; “C’mon!” and “Last Will and Testament” in Kinfolks: A Journal of Black Expression; “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” in Waxwing; “Ending the Estrangement” in Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art.

“To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian” was included in The Best American Poetry 2014. I am grateful to David Lehman and Terrance Hayes for that.

I am grateful to a number of people whose fingerprints are all over these poems. Among them are Curtis Bauer, Remica Bingham, Alex Chambers, Nandi Comer, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Victor Lau, Jennifer Leonard, Keith Leonard, Bryce Martin, Chris Mattingly, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Michael Simmons, Dave Torneo, David Waters, and Simone White.

I am grateful, too, to Stephanie Smith, whose eyes and ears and heart on and in these poems has been indispensable. Who, in fact, knew some of these poems might be of use before I did. Thank you.

And to Aracelis Girmay and Patrick Rosal, boats and anchors in the deep water: always, thank you.

And to the people who have listened to these poems at readings, and have thereby helped me to make them with the little sounds you did or didn’t make: thank you.

Thank you to Tia Ari for sharing with us the beautiful painting on the cover.

To Cave Canem. To the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. To the Vermont Studio Center. Thank you.

Thank you to Ed Ochester for believing in this book.

Thank you to the Bloomington Community Orchard which is the ground from which so many of these poems grow. To the family that place has grown to be. Love, and thank you.

And to YOU, reader: thanks!

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Contents

To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian

Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt

Ode to the Flute

Burial

Patience

Ode to the Puritan in Me

Feet

Smear the Queer

To My Best Friend’s Big Sister

Armpit

Spoon

Weeping

To the Mistake

Ode to Sleeping in My Clothes

Becoming a Horse

Sharing with the Ants

Ending the Estrangement

The Opening

C’Mon!

To the Mulberry Tree

Ode to Drinking Water from My Hands

Wedding Poem

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

Last Will and Testament

Acknowledgments