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.

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.