Poems

from Now in Contest (Fernwood Press, 2023)

The first time I noticed my hands
trembling, I was still a young man,
just returned from a war, and even
pressing palms and all ten fingers
against a window pane to steady them,

I knew that like slither-quick rodent-
eating snakes in swamp-black water
or a sudden shiver in the hang
of moss, it would always be there,
that fear, quaking in each next step,
ready to pounce and remind me.

So to those now walking war’s trails –
I hope you survive the war and the coming home,
especially you young Black veterans,
pulled over one night in America,
white policemen pointing their flashlights
in your window …

 

on holding my first grandchild for the first time on Fathers’ Day

I hold you as if handed an egg
but what broke between us was light

light that rides the rail
that sets all life in motion
between two stations

What more might
might be asked of a moment

 

from Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2019)

Seagulls fly inland when a storm approaches.
Ducks and geese and coots feed in pools
where ice has not yet stitched its cold knits and purls.
Nails I drove to fast lintels and tongue-and-groove
ceiling boards to the roof’s frame, now feel
a force testing their hold, and send long shivers
through the length of joists they call home.
I hear their rusty, arthritic creak holding on,
as if the wind had teeth to gnaw
and hands to push and pull and drum,
and rip windows from walls, and set
the whole house humming like a hornet’s nest.
My life and home stand confident
as I have made and maintain them
with my own hands. But beyond
my reach are the four seasons
and the hinges and doors between them,
and we can all see how they’ve begun
to swing out of kilter with bees
and migrations, moon-tides and stars.
And under my skin, like a child
tucked in, warm and listening
to The Three Little Pigs,
I quake at what appears to be at our door.

 

If you tell me, Thank you for your service,
and I think you are sincere, especially
if I think you are sincere, I will tell you
some dark particulars of that service,
and once come to light like a stain
on porcelain, say, it will spot your heart
and blot the smile from your child’s face forever.
See, the way it happens, when bad happens,
it’s fast, you’re slow and become its keeper,
carrying it home and to your grave,
and no thanks will bless those deeds.

from Contiguous States (Finishing Line Press, 2018)

to Sharon

… we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. William Shakespeare

The deer hit and dragged by a truck
will not find the comfort of the pine needle quilt
where she slept last night with her fawns.
Flies inhabit a haunch, gouged to shattered bone,
before she can put weight on her good
back leg to haul herself into a meadow,
where I see her and come striding through wet
grass and a dusk-gray drizzle, with the single shot
cadence of mercy. I thought this story had but one
more chapter, scooping her limpness up
in a tractor bucket and dumping it in the woods
for coyotes. But all through the house
and the night, and the heavier, steadier rain,
her fawns’ hungry cries called to my own.

 

Each night, in a space he’d make
between waking and purpose,
my grandfather donned his one
suit, in our still dark house, and drove
through Brooklyn’s deserted streets
following trolley tracks to the bakery.
There he’d change into white
linen work clothes and cap,
and in the absence of women,
his hands were both loving, well
into dawn and throughout the day –
kneading, rolling out, shaping
each astonishing moment
of yeasty predictability
in that windowless world lit
by slightly swaying naked bulbs,
where the shadows staggered, woozy
with the aromatic warmth of the work.
Then, the suit and drive, again.
At our table, graced by a loaf
that steamed when we sliced it,
softened the butter and leavened
the very air we’d breathe,
he’d count us blessed.

 

from A Tide of a Hundred Mountains,
2012 winner Bright Hill Press Chapbook Award

1.
“We were talking about Afghanistan, too,”
one of the young women at the bar said.
They knew facts, news, analysis,
some important names and dates;
history – we knew what we lived.
They weren’t even born when we fought
in Vietnam.

“Do you want to know what war is about?”
Jake asked the talkative one.
“Don’t say it, Jake,” I said. My hand added
insistence on his arm.
“Did you ever kill anyone?” he asked her.
She did not know where to look.

“That’s what war is about, sweetie! Not fucking
politics! You help with the killing and the killing
helps you. Then, you go home! Case closed!”

“Shut up, Jake!”
“Don’t shut me up, Richard! I’m warning you,
don’t shut me up!”

We were sitting at one end, and along
the bar people looked up, not at Jake and me,
but at shouting stereotypes, at headlines:
Viet Vets In Drunken Brawl:
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Jake raised a hand to the bartender,
I shook my hand to wave him off.
“Who the fuck are you!” Jake slurred,
leaning in too close, no less loud.
“Did you ever kill anyone?”
“You know, Jake,” I said, “but I’ll send
you my resume, again.”
“Don’t fuck with me! I’m warning you,
don’t fuck with me!”

“Back us all up, here, Steve,” he shouted,
pushing a fist of cash forward,
and turning back to the women.
“Did you ever wake up in a rice paddy
and kill a fifteen-year-old kid? You
ever have to do that?”

“Let’s go out and smoke, Jake.”
He looked at me knowing I didn’t
smoke. Fighting did not find words,
but spoke in us like the name
of something we both wanted. He placed
a coaster over the rim of his glass
so the bartender would know he’d be back.
I pulled on my coat and walked out,
Jake and eyes following.

2.
Here I will ask for the privacy you’d extend
to lovers, because a complicated intimacy
is at the heart of what passed between us
out there; decades and allegiances carried to
and laid upon that altar. And I ask, too,
for the forgiveness reserved for those
who deserve but cannot forgive themselves
or relieve the burden of carrying
more than their own time.

3.
There is a feral loneliness you carry
from war to your grave. That isolation
is why Jake and I were outside the Inn,
forty years after.

4.
I am just an old soldier, like all the others
going back to Odysseus, his story being
the enlistment of all those before and after,
all of us forever bound to brothers.
If we stood on each others’ shoulders,
to reach beyond the screams of red flares,
the moon could roll down our rolled up sleeves
to light fields of fire for a young sentry fighting
anywhere to stay awake in the dark far
from a home he’ll never return to,
even if he comes back.

5.
So Jake and I were not alone on the outside
of the Brooklyn Inn, late, on that cold winter night.
Divisions from the expanding Afghan war
and from battles we had fought and survived
roiled awake and moved out with us,
securing the losses we had carried
to stand here, under a streetlamp that can
no more bring to light the pain of witness,
than bare the roots under stubborn curbside trees,
stripped to winter bones and dormancy,
and always, especially at night,
alive with their own shadows.

6.
Though there are no flares – only flare-ups –
to mark this spot for a medevac, I tell you this:
a brother is down here. You have only my piss
poor triage to go by: but I’d say no one is coming
for us anymore. It’s just us out here, just us.

“C’mon in, Jake. I’ll buy the next round.”

7.
Inside, in silence, Jake finished the beer he’d left
and with no more than a nod walked out.
The round I’d bought him sat sweating, even
after the young women took their leave, smiling
shyly and averting their eyes as they went. Then,
it was just Steve and me, the jukebox jazz,
and the barroom full of people
with their own stories to tell, a few, no doubt,
fueled by drink, going beyond what can be said
without disturbing the peace.

 

Moonbeams straddle your house and mine,
measuring my missing you by the sum
of darkness, miles and hours driven
to arrive in this light of callipered solitude.
I am the lone curate of this steepled space,
and the bed your absence makes vast.
Reading aloud for company, I broadcast
stanzas over sleepless pastures of night.
My voice knows the limits of reach,
but my heart beats in two places at once.

 

from That Country’s Soul (Finishing Line Press, 2010)

Some fish know the human
shape. They shimmer
and wait, like hungry
pieces of moonlight

rising through water toward
my hand. Empty, in reflection,
I stand, still
rising from sleep.

In this wash of gray-green
confusion, I could become
the pond, the air and the tight
tall stand of trees.

But my place in this wet
universe, where life
and death spring
from the same rotting,

where day and dusk
coalesce in a common
light, is not to sink
in impressions:

I am not diving
into tree crowns
or Australian crawling
in leaves. I am merely
swimming in my life.

Look! A bug between
reflection and reality.
There, a trout leaps free.
Splash! Blink!

A solar system ripples
to life, expanding perfectly,
ring after ring, as the upside
down forest shivers.

And if I hear my name
ringing out of these woods,
I will rise through this loneliness
and be nourished by the call.

 

All morning, doing the hard, root-wrestling
work of turning a yard from the wild
to a gardener’s will, I heard a bird singing
from a hidden, though not distant, perch;
a song of swift, syncopated syllables sounding
like, Can you believe this, believe this, believe?
Can you believe this, believe this, believe?
And all morning, I did believe. All morning,
between break-even bouts with the unwanted,
I wanted to see that bird, and looked up so
I might later recognize it in a guide, and know
and call its name, but even more, I wanted
to join its church. For all morning, and many
a time in my life, I have wondered who, beyond
this plot I work, has called the order of being,
that givers of food are deemed lesser
than are the receivers. All morning,
muscling my will against that of the wild,
to claim a place in the bounty of earth,
seed, root, sun and rain, I offered my labor
as a kind of grace, and gave thanks even
for the aching in my body, which reached
beyond this work and this gift of struggle.

 

from A Language Full of Wars and Songs (Pollack Press, 2004)

The year I thought
as many words for mud
as it ladled out for boots —
slogging through two-by-two
in long ballistic lines — I prayed.
I prayed when the monsoon surrounded
the moon and tracers shimmered
over the Perfume River, like ghosts
swimming. I prayed when mud-walking
sounded like chest wounds sucking.
Rice tried to be quiet,
clustered in green columns,
like an army in ambush.
Back home the world quaked
where I stepped, unbalanced,
and someone said, “It’s over, now.”
But for thirty years, the flood
plain of that ghost-river has called
me, like a bell buoy through thick fog.
I’ve navigated its night-shade
tides. I’ve watched it carry people away,
like kites swelled with wind, high
over the delta, the strings strung out far
beyond any way back.
I’ve even seen, through the muddy, conical
glow of a Brooklyn streetlight rain turn to rice.

 

Here is the left turn
where the road still drops
so suddenly, there is nothing
between us and the far, slow
roll of mountains, but the hollow
and the waiting.
We thought we might
disappear into that aching beauty,
and we did. Didn’t we?
Didn’t we fall into that exquisite
embrace with nothing to hold
us up but each other?

 

(excerpts)
2.
… She sat on a paddy dike –
black hair, silk and teeth –
a silhouette of herself,
straw-cone hat on one knee.
Her hands swept out over the water,
as if smoothing a tablecloth.
What made me think of my mother?
3.
Was she there to think, to pray,
to listen to the mountain,
and the fighters fighting
under the pounding pounding,
pounding paddy water to foam?
But her thoughts and prayers
could not stop the pounding
that fell from the sky
and shook the earth
like a rattle rolling
from the hands of a dead child.
The pounding entered
through the bones of her feet,
tuning forks pitched to ring
in her soul. The pounding
pounded pond-sized holes
in her heartland and her
madness tunneled deep:
she could not escape,
could not forget.