Once Upon a Time

                        —for Dominic "The Dominator" Todd

Once upon a time, 

there was a small white smudge

that hung low in a vast blue sky, 

hovered way down at the very bottom

where earth meets air.

The smudge was a cloud,

a cloud named Smudge.

Smudge was so low in the wide blue sky,

in fact, that he lay in a grassy field

near an old-growth forest. 

If you were there, you would have heard 

Smudge make sad, quiet sounds. He was sad 

because he was all alone and lonely.

All his family and friends—his mother and father,

brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins,

classmates and neighbors—had moved off

somewhere beyond the horizon, 

grazing on a southerly wind.

They did not mean to abandon Smudge,

but they were so content, their bellies full

and getting fuller on a wind so delicious,

so moist and sweet.  So they left Smudge that morning

as he lay sleeping in a sunken field,

hidden by a thin blanket of fog.

If you were there, you would have seen

how the night-fog hid Smudge,

how fast to the earth

Ground Fog pinned the little cloud.

At first light, as the fog slid away 

to hide from day, it snickered to leave 

Smudge all ground-bound and alone.

The one who woke Smudge was Screech Owl.

As she perched on Red Oak, 
Screech Owl sang a small, mean song:

This will be the day that you cry.

This will be the day to go bye-bye.

So cry, cry, Little Smudgling, cry.

Yes, cry, cry, Cry-Baby, cry,

Until you go bye-bye, Baby.
Bye-bye, bye-bye, byeeeee.

Screech Owl taunted Smudge
because she was afraid of the fallen cloud.

She was afraid he might smother her babies,
the way Ground Fog always whispered threats
to choke her three fat fuzzy owlets
nesting in the branches of Red Oak.

This is what Red Oak understood.

Red Oak watched the whole scene,
and Red Oak understood

but did not like such cheap behavior.

Hush now bird, said Red Oak.
Hush and fly by night; stay away from day.
(Red Oak had gone to grammar school

and loved to use the semicolon

even when he spoke, an unheard

bond of chance and possibility.)

Because Red Oak protected her owlets,

Screech Owl did as she was told,
and even to this day she mostly obeys,

which is why we rarely see her in broad daylight.

Red Oak shushed Screech Owl into her nest,
where she tended her owlets (who were quite safe,
as you would, but she did not know).

Red Oak reached down a friendly branch to Smudge,
who lay at the tall oak’s roots 

crying tiny rain, weeping teensy droplets 

that fell on fallen leaves and squirrel-forgotten acorns.

Red Oak extended a kind branch and said:

Now, now, Little Cloudling. What’s the matter?

I’m all alone and lonely, said Smudge.

Everyone left me behind!

You’re not alone, Misty Seedling, said Red Oak.
You’re with me, with a whole forest of me and my family,
and we can help you find your people.

Yes, we can! chorused the forest.

This made Smudge feel a little better,
but he was still frightened.

He looked up, up, up the thick, tall trunk of Red Oak,
all the way up to Red Oak’s broad-reaching branches.
Such a tall creature, thought Smudge.
Such a thick and solid leaf-topped tower.

Come fly up to my eyes, said Red Oak.

Come on, Fluffy Wonderling. Come float up here

and look me eye-to-eye.

Smudge puffed once, then twice, then hopped

three times up and down, but could not leave the ground.

He puffed once, then twice, then climbed

three feet up the oak trunk, but fell back to the ground.

Here was it, as Red Oak understood.

Here was the real problem.

Smudge had forgotten how to fly,

for he had fallen under the spell of Ground Fog.

Red Oak knew all about Ground Fog,

for his roots went numb every cold night

Ground Fog crept out across the field

and slipped in amongst the tree trunks.

Red Oak liked the fog, for it brought dew

and all manner of small news to the forest,

but he also knew about fog lullabies.

This is how Red Oak told the story to Smudge:

Way back when the world began, 

when the very first trees reached,

inch-by-inch and night-by-night,

up through earth’s first mists,

many saplings grew

distracted by  fog-lullabies,

bewitched and bemused

by small secrets they had

no right to hear. The little whispers

kept the treelings from full height; 

stunted and runted, they languished 

as bushes and shrubs.

If you were there as Red Oak told the story,

you would have seen Smudge begin to float up, up, up 
the long trunk until, finally, he hovered 
face-to-face with the ancient tree.

Red Oak said: 

This is no place for high-soaring clouds,

way down here near earth and trees.

You must fly way higher than an oak can grow,

little Smudge; you must chase the wind,

drink it to grow bigger and stronger.

These words made Smudge feel proud of being a cloud,

made him feel just a bit bigger and stronger,

but his elation wilted almost as soon as it bloomed.

I’m still all alone, said Smudge.

Everyone left me behind!

The forest had never heard such a deep-full-smiling laugh

as when Red Oak rumble-tumbled his reply:

Oh, Smudge, how you do not know yourself!

You are a prince of winds, a son of air and water,

You live in vast and invisible rooms,

wind-fed balconies billowing curtains of thought,

breathing songs and all the secrets of earth!

Really? said Smudge. Where is my home?

Why, it’s up there, said Red Oak, pointing his longest branch

up to the mid-morning moon in the wide sky.

Your house is the space above all earth-bound creatures.

You drink wind and dream distant horizons.

As if language could make language tremble,

words brushing words to make some kind of meaning
beyond meaning, Smudge understood. 

He understood.

If you were there, you would have seen Smudge 

inhale the moist, earth-bound air

deep and deep and deeper still.
You would have seen 

Smudge expand and darken,
assuming a shade of shadow-blue

neither you nor Red Oak had ever seen in a cloud.

You would have seen Smudge 

soar into the open-armed sky,

smiling down at Red Oak,

whose highest branches waved

to and fro and to and fro.

As Smudge ascended on a swift wind,
he drank deeper and deeper,
growing larger and larger—
bigger than a boulder, heftier than a hill,
more monumental than a mountain.
Now he was a lofty summit
jutting into immensities of space.

Suddenly, something miraculous,
something remarkable occurred—
Smudge began to multiply,
first becoming two Smudges,
then four, then eight, sixteen, thirty-two,
and more and more and more and more,
mountain beyond mountain, ranging from horizon to horizon,
a colossal metropolis of cumulus clouds.

Smudge and his new family drank and drank and drank
invisible rivers of wind, oh voluminous rapture!

They smiled down on the forest.

Red Oak could see this, and so could you

if you were sitting in his highest branches.

Red Oak and you could see

all the sublime family of Smudge,

innumerable anvil-clouds crowning the thin blue sky.

And it began to rain, a heavy, happy, fulsome rain.

And in the dark soil at Red Oak’s roots,
an acorn cracked; a tiny oakling sprouted,

a child of chance and possibility,

small and silent but insistent as a semicolon.

Just a Precaution

This lip-touch, this tight-kiss,

like spring light unveiling fist-cold

hope in a lover's breathless embrace.

There's a place in your heart

bright and cold as the grim-

grin of Ronald McDonald

standing out front of that Katrina-gone,

Biloxi burger-joint, that cement slab

edging Highway 90.

There's a place in your heart

bright and cold as the skin-sin

and thin-gin of a first kiss,

the thrust-lust teens once

touched, the softest egg

trembling in the last

minute of innocence.

All teens touch that clean dawn.

They slap that dawn

the way Amelia Earhart tumbled down

a forlorn morn, stumbled on a long-gone

archipelago. There's a place

where yesterday breaks the shore of today.

Where is that place?

If you have to ask,

you have no right to be there.

Broken Hopeful Dialectics of Marriage

This is the language that speaks us.

What language?
What language speaks us?

We are where we do not speak.
We do not speak here.

What is the name of the missing thing?
What name do we miss?

A language binds us,
inscribes us from birth.

What end of the egg,
thin or fat,
do we crack first?

No one can tell us
how to suck this egg.

Where are we going?

It remains to be conceived,
what steps down what corridors.

What do we call this dance,

this undertaking of grammar
that cuts our knees from under us?

Ha!

How well we sing
these fallen grammars of love.

You Will Let Go

You could just hand me

my compass, this roof-iced,

house-empty day.

You could ignore unmeasured clouds

that breathe such lifeless latitudes,
such godforsaken platitudes.

We read the Bible

your father gave you

twenty years ago.

We read all the books

prophets and apostles never wrote,

all the stories they said

they said.

We make love to the Old Testament,

ravish the words of David’s Psalms of Praises,

kiss-lick his gut-punch love songs.

Way beyond these clouds,
stars are blue frost,
feather-thin snowflakes.

The stars ignore the day.

This is a story
that day won’t give morning
any time soon,

is what you want
to but never will
say.

This is a story that day tells.

Your snow-touched thoughts

and three spring-pressed Maple leaves

mark the Song of Songs for me.

Another Poem About Chrysanthemums

No, I will not smoke

your cigarettes.

I won’t drink your wine

when you’re dancing drunk,

head-bowed about the room.

You kiss the rising Pleiades

and hug Arcturus going down.

You are like Simon living on a marble pillar,

casting soddy judgments on emperors and plebeians alike.

How powerful a man is

who demands his 

hat and single pinch of salt

but forswears a lover's touch.

At our place, peace reigns,

peace and a quiet song. 

All the rain-littered birds

raise placid eyes to you.

Though from Another Place I Take My Name

And every evening,
this one desire of mine
saw her face in another man's wine.

I looked. She raised her arms
and moved her dance along,
tossing flowers to everyone
and spending herself in song.

She pirouetted past a window.
Surely no human hands
turned those pages.

That her face was soiled linen in that light,
like a jaw-clenched winter sunset.
That her lips (the palest blood-clots)
whistled again and again.

Hear!

A snake-heavy, dull-dusty voice
dragged yesterday like a corpse
onto tomorrow.

I died. I started again and all
will be repeated as before.
The frigid snickering of a frozen creek.
The night. The barn. The dog coop.

All the snowstorms of my youth.

There was present in her secret song.
Wedding wreaths crowned
the imagined mountains of Michigan.

And behold,
                    I'm so feebly mute.

And Be with Caution Bold

I dreamed my moth-winged soul — 

all splutter-smogged, all dirt and thought —

lit close to a thistle’s eye.

I dreamed a butterfly — all color, rainbow, shine,
two silken circles on her wings —
fluttered by.

I dreamed we danced flamenco on the wind,
flaunting laughter-flight and laced 

escalloped lines of flame-desire.

I dreamed we flew all curious and curlicue,

rose skyward on such fist-warm air,

wing-twisted with each other into blue.

Oh, my tangled soul!

I'll forget my wounded deeds.

I’ll forget my wing-
broke dreams.

When Ezra Understands

I’d like to walk home,

smile and jest, just

as everybody has —

is this too much? —

asked, no, prayed
to go home again.

Still, foot by foot,
I’ve learned to run,
lung-paced in step with everyone.

I chant frost-linger songs,
sing lost-finger stanzas,

tongue-touch gloss-glove notes.

Stand up! I stand.

Sit down! I sit.

I’ve learned

my sentence by heart,

and for that roof of words —

admit my virgin soul
died running in the dark.

Andrei Rublev Never Painted Icons in Mississippi

I said: Provisions for the foot

dug-up and the unwatered foot

appear in “Excavations for Tower Footings.”

Tonight spreads, she said,

a knobbed laticlave across the sky.

Oh, how that purple bleeds, I said.

Who says the quality of distinct sides,

she said,

is derived from the name of a man?

Who says after the usual time

that the mitigant day forgives

even the fallen arch of your left foot?

Is what she dared say to me.

To forgive and receive the like thing,

as to exchange thoughts, I said,

is next to—oh, here it goes,

here it goes again.

Should have known again.

The Devil’s Rag Piano

High above
the sluggish Mississippi,

way higher than
the southern pines

that reach like nervous virgins up

this hungry valley—

a crow flies.

I go

it alone.

See the crow fly.

Ya'll pass me
that bottle.

I go it alone.

Honey, I spit-comb
my gray-black hair back,

and I go

it alone.

I come round your room,
sweet-heart, I come.

Pass me
that bottle,
baby.

Six is this
and seven is that—

I’m coming over, 

hands in my pocket.

I’m coming over, 

girl, and I’m coming

alone.

I bet I go it alone.

Some Love Don't Got No Right to Speak

We asked for the noir suite
with a flashing neon sign

outside the window.

I closed the door behind us,
and here's what she whispered

in my cauliflower ear:

When two equally dangerous people

sniff around the same flame,
they both lose 

their wings in fire and smoke.

Her father was attorney general

a few years back.

You're not a turnip, she said.
You're not, are you.

I blew cigarette smoke out my nose
like a cartoon bull.

No advantages known by the police, she said,

putting faith in an obviously dubious turd.

This is a story 

told from the point-of-view of a crook

with the hots for a high-heeled

daughter-of-privilege
and lots to lose.

A self-centered way of looking at it,

she said, like an undistinguished actor

playing an undistinguished human being.

Listen, sister, I know
the difference between a good

and a bad girl — so's I can,
so's I can
spit in anyone's eye.

I did before and had my share.
I got nowhere, she said.
It doesn't matter what you did.
We could see this night through.

What are you,
I said to the naked
two-pane window,

a bunch of cock suckers?

Stop laughing

or kiss my fist.

When the Revolution Came to St. Petersburg

Night came galloping over hills

like a troop of blue hussars

chasing a wounded bear.

Sleighs along Fontanka

split the icy air.

She told me last April:

Here’s a perfect place to plant

a garden of Pushkin sonnets.

This morning she told me:

We’re quits, and we don’t

need to inventory a rash of stars.

White horses slashed

ice on Liteiny Street.

Muted guitars pressed

cold stilettos to our necks.

She said someone—I think

the moon’s footman—

kissed my collarbone.

And the tiered soldiers

sipped their clean vodka,

humming songs they didn’t know.

The moon, master assassin,

came out to pull a job.

Don’t put on your sword, she said.

Don't take part. You know

how many snowflakes 

it takes to kill a heart.

I was watching the horses

trample acres of winter-hardy songs.

If to the Left, Suspicion Hinders Bliss

Clouds hang low

like a gray veil across the night,

the corduroy face of God Almighty

bent over the flesh of the world.

One and just one

shape of the mouth

pronounces the ineffable name.

All existence opens like a wounded sea,

but only infants read the fishes and the stars.

They know the moon was born above

such questions, during a warm hour

when winged darkness held

the earth in its breath.

An orchestra watches

all the layered

depths of existence—

and is at best

noncommittal.

A violin whines

herself to silence.

Somewhere, a silly cymbal

crashes.