The Syntax of the Second Chance

Your poems make
all the right
gestures, she said.
I'm just not sure
it's really poetry.

We were driving to the place
her oldest and bestest girlfriend stays.
The roads were dark and wet,
and the rain had stopped.

There was only one
break in the clouds

They pretty much do want you,
she said, but to serve in silence.
That song was obviously written by a man.

The belt of Orion
aligns with this road;
that's some kind of omen
is what I was thinking.

We drove by Sassy Suds--
walk-ins welcome,
appointments preferred.

I was thinking about the eight
times I tried to climb
back into this conversation
and her bed after the last
and final word of rain.

I was thinking about a pot-bellied professor
who left his wife
and took up with a young graduate student.

We take four-sixty-seven through Edwards
all the way to Raymond, she said.
Dorothy said it used to be so nice,
but she's thinking
like fifty years ago,
when she moved here.

I was thinking
the Mississippi flood
of National Poetry Month 2011.

Sorry about that
racket this morning,
I said. My dog Blue
croons like a drunk
troubadour when it storms.
He thinks he's a goddamn poet.

What, Edwards?
Just a little town, she said.

Coopersville-Michigan-size?

I don't know where that is,
she said.

I was thinking fucking bastard,
dim your headlights over a hill,
dumb-fuck.

Take a left at the Pabst Blue Ribbon sign
on J's Tavern., she said, and drive
behind Hinds Community College
all the way to Sonic.

Tomorrow, the river is rising.
Tomorrow, the river is rising.

They're like
right here,
downtown --
at the corner of Dupree
and Port Gibson Street.

Tomorrow,
the river
is rising.

This Is Not a Poem -- It's a letter to a daughter or notes for a memoir

The days have been bright & breezy
& cool in the late-afternoon shade.
The birds have been rapturous
& varied at your mother's feeders.

Among the visitors, the raucous sparrows,
unruly & unkempt, are my least favorite.
We hear them gather before they
pounce on the feeders, winging straight
over the lattice fence & into the red-bud
or the golden rain-tree.

They gang-up on sunflower seeds;
they are the little
bullies of the bird playground.
Thankfully, your mother feeds
other, more alluring birds.

The mourning doves congregate in their head-
bobbing pairs, woo-woo-wooing as they land,
one, two, beneath a feeder.
They’re content with droppings,
the countless husks & seeds that
fall on the grassy hill.

Rose breasted grosbeaks arrived last week
& seem to be gone already -- like listening
to a White Stripes song too young.

The cardinals make a racket, too,
but tastefully & from a distance.

(I told your mom
the cardinals of my boyhood
sang, Murray, Murray,
Murray-Murray-Murray
in the hardwood forest
around the house. She said:
They don't seem to say that now.)

The blue jays are the serious
bullies, really, of the feeders,
especially the tray feeder
hanging in the dogwood out front.
They arrive like pterodactyls,
scattering the carolina chickadees,
the house finches, & the wren.

Only the hummingbirds, sipping your mom's
sugar-water, ignore the squawking jays –-
the hummingbirds & that cantankerous woodpecker,
who bitches at me from Mr. John's ancient live oak
every time I walk into the front yard.

I dropped a few limbs today,
from the elm behind the house
& the hackberry along the driveway.
One branch fell & nearly crushed the young
sunflowers growing beneath the tall
feeder in the dogwood. I threw the limbs
over the fence on the hill behind the house,

& not long after --
while I raked magnolia leaves
from the east side of the house
where we cut down the old magnolia –-

I heard seven pistol shots beyond the fence,
9-millimeter. Probably kids
blasting into the berm above the house,
where the ash and water oak shade
that piece of Main Street blocked off
ten or more years ago. I was thinking

about the time some kid -- I presume –-
tried & missed shooting Blue,
& the round came down through that high window,
lodging in the wall above the living-room couch.
We had just returned
after picking you up from school.
You left your book bag on the couch
before going to your room.

I know you remember.
You were in tenth grade,
I think, at Warren Central, right?

Anyway, I thought about all that today,
but only briefly & without rancor.
How could I feel rancorous this day,
when I saw the neighborhood swainson's hawk
dipping first one, then the other
outstretched wing on a wind
I couldn’t feel but only see
at the swaying pine-tops?

She was hunting up there,
looking down with those eyes.

Three mornings ago, as I backed down the driveway,
she swooped over the side lattice fence
& over the hood & windshield of my car,
& I thought, Those little birds better watch out.

This morning, I saw her take a baby bluebird
from the grass beneath a red oak.
She flew over me, & if I reached out my hand
I could’ve touched that young thing
screaming for its parents
chasing the hawk.

This afternoon,
I found eight mockingbird feathers
beside the japanese maple
your mother and I planted two days ago.

How can I help but love
such a hungry bird?

After Reading Undid in the Land of Undone, Jesus Told the Following Parable

If Lee Upton were a cat,
a slamming door
would startle the woodpecker
she is stalking beneath the dogwood.

If Lee Upton were a bird,
only night would silence her
tap tap tapping on the tree.

If Lee Upton were a noise,
she would sound like
what silences a woodpecker
just before the cat pounces
like the slamming of a door.

Math Lessons

I flunked tenth grade algebra,
and you never believed me
when I said it was because you stole
the abacus of my heart.

Right. I got it -- that sounded like
a line of bullshit, but it was true.
We were standing on the pavilion
by the school pond, out behind
the school barn. Remember

when you let me kiss you?

I gave you the Gideon Bible
I carried in my back pocket.
I gave you my only cassette
of AC/DC's Back in Black,
remember?

In my old man's pickup, we played
"You Shook Me All Night Long"
all night, like until morning,
until the last beer, at least.

You were dancing in the headlights;
I was standing in the shadows.

I wanted you to teach me
the secret of decimal fractions.
I wanted you to teach me
the infinite values of Pi.

You taught me
the history of mathematics
is not smooth and continuous.
You taught me
that some answers
have no questions.

Maybe somewhere you
saw me piss behind a horse barn.
Maybe somewhere
you remembered a blacktop road
where Galileo rode a leather-mouthed
pony, a short-haired Shetland.

Rough-neck farm trucks
shouldered that road, and the ditch
was deep. Maybe you told me
Galileo tossed empty beer cans
and a fist of pennies, one-by-one,
all along the way.

Maybe you knew
why he rode that pony.
Maybe you knew why
the pony walked that road.
Maybe Galileo called for you,
Marina Gamba.

Maybe you

taught me that night
the one-to-one relation between all
integers and perfect squares,
between finite qualities of lust
and infinite equations of love.

Next day at the dinner table,
my dad tossed me my wallet
and watched me count
six wrinkled Washingtons.

If you take your pants off in my truck, he said,
don't leave your wallet on the floorboards
when you put them back on.

The Eccentric Motions of the Bossa Nova

I found the five
unanswered equations of Apollonius of Perga
scrawled on the last
page of a 19th century German bible.

I found a formula
for the eccentric motions of celestial lovers
and the unrequited desire of planets.

I found the names of the conic sections,
the dates of their birth and death.

I found the tangents and harmonic
divisions of the bossa nova.

I think Tom Jobim wrote those notes.

This Is When We Tire of the Whole Kit-&-Caboodle

Five trees -- pecan, red oak, cedar, live oak, & magnolia --
shade my left hand every time I walk to where I teach
composition and literature to students who don't know
the names of trees.

I stand akimbo in a classroom
waving a ragged fan of red oak leaves
& a duster of cedar needles. I dance
like a catfish flopping in a flat-bottom boat,
sing like a crow, croon like a mockingbird.

Don't ask why you want to know my name.

Don't ask.

Don't wait for me to push you off that cliff,
the one from which you wish to soar into clouds
you drew on butcher-block paper for seventeen years.

I'm somewhere over there,
beyond a flotilla of cumulus freighters,
skimming winds you never see but only feel,
wide-winged and swooping with
the simple things of the spirit
that breathe the smallest dust mote
down to the singular dream.

I'm on my way,
and I'm listening to "Mary Jane's Last Dance"
and thinking about tomorrow when
we tire of screwing up. We tire of this town
again, tire of these hot summers & cold
winters necking in my lady's car.

We tire of the whole kit-&-caboodle.

When You Began to Know Your True Measurements and Dressed Your Mind Accordingly

I was toting a three-gallon bucket of goat's milk

when I saw you by the woods behind the barn.

I always carried milk to the house left-handed,

on account of my bad elbow. That's why

I only ever Indian-wrist-wrestled

the dudes at school with my left hand, too,

because of my bum arm.

You were standing there, way back by the trees

beyond the barn's flood-light. I could see you

were wearing one of your mother's dresses,

about two sizes too big. Night was shadowy and cold,

and there was no moon. You had a suitcase

I saw when you stepped into the light.

I called to you,

but I don't remember what I said.

I wanted to tell you:

You come across and you go back.

I wanted to tell you:

I come across and I go back.

I said I fed the horses, didn't I?

I fed the horses

hay and a little grain. They liked the grain best,

but you knew that already. You knew

the mind of a horse like the back-hand

midnight of Jamaica or Majorca or some other place

you'd never been and would never go

with my best wishes. You knew that sure

as a swallow's tail or a falling stone.

The weather's nice in Mississippi,

you said.

If you don't like it,
wait ten minutes
and it'll change
just for you.

Wait ten minutes,

is what you told me.

And then it began to rain

just like I knew it would.

And my elbow ached

every time I heard your voice.

361 Exclamation Points Don't Mean Shit

I love you like the Heroic Age, he said,
like that time before mathematics and Plato,
before Theodorus of Cyrene and the method of exhaustion
and all those godforsaken
mountains beyond mountains.

She said: Sand-reckoner, measurer of the circle
and the angle trisection, why must you conjugate
the diameters of our love?
Why must you break
these tangents and harmonic divisions?

Three Stanzas on Why You Must Believe Me

What the answer was and what it's worth,
how far your parallelograms,
your transcendental functions
reach -- oh, my lover, all that dust
and horizon on horizon.

I built a house between two rivers
and waited in vain for you.
I caught the felicitous fishes,
the infinite improbabilities of water,
the exponential calculus of mud.

I broke L'Hospital's Rule, I broke
all your father's fences. I won't
apologize. I won't be the one
who sometimes can't believe it.
I won't offer the synthetic
geometries of ancient Greece.

The Germanic Algebras of the Days of Rage

Richard Nixon said:
Let's recognize these people
for who they are -- the same thugs
who've always been against good
god-fearing Americans.

When Fred Hampton died in his sleep
on that west-side Chicago naked mattress,
December 1969 bit its lower lip.

That blood wasn't real, that blood
was from Bonny & Clyde.

Mi Lai bodies & god bless America
is what the poets sang.

What grand project
for the transformation and purification
of the world?

What back-break dreams and half-baked
ideologies fell that night with all that rain?

The Weather Underground,
an armful of bourgeois punks
driving to the mountains
for target practice.

When the people rioted in the streets,
fire-bombed the city offices,
the unofficial statement of the Weather Underground:
We didn't do it
but we dug it.

He said: I'd say that's the one
point in my life when I was
overwhelmed with the heaviness of it.

Everybody on the Left said, No,
this is only going to last
a few months.

The citizen's commission investigated the FBI,
hippie-acid smiles and
there's no end in sight.

Feels like winter in America.

Vietnam, Watergate, recession,
Ronald Reagan.

Feels like winter in America.

Muttsy Hugbars' Complaint

I know this cat, Captain Shugars,
and I’m tired of his gut-punch poetic.

He wrote a cycle of poems across Afghanistan,
one in the outhouse of each Buddhist monument
dynamited by the Taliban.

He plucked a turkey pen
and feathered a love poem in Bayou Pierre,
near Port Gibson, Mississippi.

With the long line of a fishing pole, he cast
the twenty-first century epic of Gilgamesh
in the desert water of the Tigris River.

He tattooed the 46 haiku of the earth-
worm on the forearm of a tsunami.

He sliced the ballad of the fallen dawns,
the sick-moon laughter and pop-song
possibilities of a government shut down
on the neck-ties of all the politicians,
regardless of party affiliation.

I saw him read his poems
at the Speckled Bird in Cincinnati.
On his balding head he wore
an pair of ladies briefs
like a beret; he waved his arms
like a Baptist preacher.

I saw him
read his poems at that dinky loft
called Chase Public in Northside.
In one hand he gripped a glass of sangria,
in the other, a fist of papers --
unpublished poems that smelled
like piss-warm PBR.

He needs to find
the corner of a room or street
where someone gives a shit.
He needs to find
mountains beyond mountains.

He sings songs
like sand in my shoes.
He sings songs
like the carnivorous feast
of identity theft.
He sings every song
Arcade Fire ever wrote
and calls them his own.

He eats tiny stars
and sweet-farts
small galaxies.

He never shuts up.

How To Judge a Poet

When you meet a poet
outside G&L's in Muskegon, Michigan,
where all the poets eat
the best goddamn chili dogs
anyone has ever had,

do as all the people do,
and say: Hey, what's up, dude?

If that fuckin' poet don't say,
Sister, I got just the song for you
right here in my back pocket --
and whip out one hell of a song --

if that poet don't do that,
fuck him or her
and the horse they rode in on.

They ain't worth the chili dog
they just ate.

The Original Pabst Blue Ribbon

We were young and happy and grabbing

fistfuls of blueberries

from her old man’s bushes.

I kissed Pammy

full on the lips.

She pushed me away and sang:

Baby, I don’t want to know.
I don’t want to know how
you never loved me.
I don’t want to know –
oh no – I don’t.

In the morning,

the Mexican migrant families picked

their berries as they always did,

tight-lipped and sharp-eyed,

and I watched them from two rows away,

and I heard them singing, but

I didn't understand a single word.

I knew they sang to Jesus.

They sang to Cesar Chavez.

Pammy sang

the corridos of Muttsy Hugbars.

She sang of the left-hand poet, the last

bastard bard of Muskegon County Michigan,

the destined exile of the dirt road,

the half-assed landslide and dirtfall

poet of small hills and his flatland people—

the flatfoot folks who walked that road,

who picked those blueberries,

who sang those muddy songs.

She sang my song.

I had a plastic milk jug of dandelion wine.

I had a can of Pabst.

I wanted to know where

is the topic sentence

we heard John Fogerty sing,

that we heard Creedence sing.

We saw all the wattles of the old men,

she and I, we saw the fat

jowls of the men in their thirties,

those flabby fucks

who prowled the horse barn at the Ravenna Fair.

They skunked around the stalls

not looking at the ponies

the girls rode.

I want to be with you

is what she said to me.

Can you hear me holler,

she said, and no one

listened but me.

I want to be with you, she said.

On The Verge of a Momentous Decision

How tall can an ash tree grow?

My neck aches
when I think of looking
up through the thin, spring-
leafed branches all the way to the top,

where a hawk roosted two days ago,
eyeing my wife's house cats
as they prowled the front yard

and wrestled under the flowering dogwood.