When the Mockingbird Sings in Mississippi, I Think of Home

You're never, ever there
when I draw
that straight line on the thin
parchment of my heart.

I know your spring-melt creeks,
your muddy fields and woods,
your lonely roads.

The half-blind headlights of my old man's pick-up
cast a sallow eye on your darkest blacktop --
Heights-Ravenna Road --
a country highway that still pours
all my youngest years into the deep
water of my midnight soul.

When did you do it?

When did you wash away
all my most secret maps,
Ravenna, Michigan?

When did you
lose track of me?

Early Spring in Mississippi

First light, and he follows the levee

two-track across the spill-water culvert.

A beaver hears him and slaps the lake.

Rings ripple out across the languid surface.

Three crows wing high above the mist

rising from the water. They call

down day to the long-leaf pine forest.

A startled tom gobbler

flurries toward him from a red oak

so loudly he remembers

a Black-Hawk helicopter

and a hot LZ in Iraq.

First Story

The Last Dream of John Lennon

You remember when the moon rose

like the death mask of Oliver Cromwell, he said.

The stars were his cavalry, she said,

and the King's men fell before their trotting charge.

He said: Today I saw a parliament of crows

consulting in a pecan tree along the Natchez Trace,

and I heard what they had to say.

You always did, she said. You always did

look for trouble when it wasn't coming your way.

I'll Let You Borrow My Four-Leaf-Clover

Go on. Do what you want to do.
Say goodbye and get off the bus.
Send your Aunt Hazel that postcard
you promised twenty years ago.
Send secret kisses to all the ponies
your father never bought you.
Reach out and take it, the only sin
you wrapped in a white sheet
and dropped in Lake Michigan.

Go on. Take it easy on me
and the three crows of your desire.
Take it easy or any way
you can get it. Your father, the knight,
lies slain under his shield. You know
his body waits in that field
where the crows rise
like a river into the trees.
You have been watching that field
for twenty years.

Go on. You've thought about it
for a long time. And there is no
love like ours, and no one knows
where we're headed. We have
no consolation prizes. You know me,
and I know you will crank shut
every folding window in your house trailer
when your black dogs yank
their chains tonight.

You know I will be
prowling round your place.

You know the three crows of desire
have stolen the key to your back door.

And Darling Is What I Wanted To Say

I dreamed about the raining man again last night.
He was looking at me as he always does,
and he was saying:

When winter tells a heavy tale,
when the white crows curse the frosts and snows,
and the ghost of every untold truth remains
silent as the naked birch trees and brown grass
behind your father's barn,
when you miss your lover
every time she's in the room with you --
then give me ale and whiskey to melt my icy heart.

I will bring spring rain, he said.
I will bring the moon and her sister stars
down to the water, and the fish will feed.

The fish will feed on all the dreams
you have discarded.

TR & Me & All The Ladies

I dreamed Teddy Roosevelt was there 
when the women resorted in the monastery.

They were dancing with the relics, 
tossing the coals on which St. Lawrence was toasted, 
flicking the toe-nail parings of St. Edmund, 
pilfering the penknife of St. Thomas and wearing his boots. 

And I was there, too, 
when TR offered all the ladies 
the skills for the morning headache.

from: The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You

MLK & the Flying Pulpit

I drew Dr. Martin Luther King
& his flying pulpit, 
&  I was thinking: 

Now, there was an American 
who believed in God 
& collective bargaining.