Seeing and Believing

We are born with a mandate. We must strive to live in a perpetual state of surprise, experiencing the sensual world with wonderment. We achieve this variously. One way is to seek new places and experiences, which becomes a kind of drug for some people, a restless desire to abandon what is familiar.

I am less adventurous, perhaps, and more compelled by commitments to people and places -- so I tend to stay in one place for long periods. Therefore, another way to achieve constant awe is to look or listen or feel the familiar from unexpected positions -- as if it were possible to be born anew each morning, each moment.

Seeking out the unfamiliar experience in familiar surroundings requires a subtle discipline, rigorous in its way. Until this way of living becomes habitual, one must practice it. Do the unexpected, and see what happens. Make outrageous claims that even God could not support. Put your fingers in your ears and listen to your heart beat. Stand beneath a white pine while eating molasses-soaked grain and thinking of the first cigarette you ever smoked, the first dog you ever shot. Stop and observe the smallest details.

Once when I was up at Oxbow Lake, near Ludington, Michigan, where my extended family has owned property for generations, I watched a dragonfly free itself from its cocoon attached to the roots of a tall oak.

The creature was translucent at first, the color of milky tea, and its four, shriveled wings looked as if a child's hand had wrinkled them. It crawled up a blade of grass in a dapple of sunlight. I'm not sure how long I watched, but I witnessed its soft, pale skin harden and darken, and its wings unfurl into transparent iridescence.

Still, the dragonfly clung to the grass blade, and still I waited to see it take flight for the first time, which it did, finally and gloriously, launching toward the lake, its wings buzzing, and I was wondering how it viewed the world, and then a swallow swooped low and snatched it away.

What a miracle. What a gift to have witnessed such a small and perfect spectacle of creation and destruction -- and to have the honor of remembering it in words.

Love Poem

I danced for my lover under the Japanese magnolia --
slender tree whose every leaf is a tongue,
each one singing with a single breath this simple song:

If I am not with you, where will you set your heart?
If I am not with you, against whose thigh
will you warm your hands? My lover, bury me
and my words in the river
your father turned to water your mother's garden,
if I am not with you when I end this song.

What She Said

In the chamber of destinies,
she donned the first of her seven splendors.
I prowled the night forest,
sniffing and pissing to mark my passing.
I saw her putting on her splendors.

I spoke and broke the silence.

When my lips gripped her name,
constellations died. My words
toppled the hall of designs,
and she flew into the ancient forest,
dropping her splendors like glorious feathers.

Enkidu, you stupid, stupid man,
she said.

This Is How We Steal the Fire

This is the forest of affection

where we find the tree.

This is how we stand

when we chainsaw the tree from its stump.

This is the stroke that limbs the timber.

This is how we stand

when we chainsaw the logs.

This is the stroke that splits

the oak of affection,

variously and always.

This is the cord-wood we

bequeath to our children.

This is the furnace in the belly of love

where we heap the kindling.

This is how fire comes knocking,

selling bibles door-to-door.

This is how fire

moans in the cellar

like a wounded angel

who visits for a day

and stays on

blowing

hot breath through organ pipes.

Spread Out the Maps on the Hood of the Gun Truck

--For Daniel Todd

I got home three days ago.

I spent a day

stowing my uniforms and gear.

I spent the next day

rearranging the furniture,

finding avenues of approach and egress.

Today I walked my property line

three times. The sun was bright,

and I couldn't find my eye protection.

I gathered a pile of dead-fall limbs,

which I'll take care of tomorrow.

I stood on the hill behind the house

and surveyed the leaf clutter

and twig litter on the roof.

I stood on the hill behind the house

and took my first sip of whiskey.

My dog Blue has forgotten how to fetch.

What I Share with You

Last night, I caught my last hour in Iraq.

I wrapped it in a black burka

and stuffed it in my rucksack,

next to a copy of A Farewell to Arms.

When I get home, I'll go in the kitchen

and place that beating hour on a cutting board,

put an edge on my cook’s knife,

and slice that bleeding hour in two.

I’ll grill the halves with olive oil,

red skin potatoes, Michigan asparagus, and a pinch of salt.

We’ll share a bottle of valpolicella on the patio.

The Diamond Tree

Though I can't see the future

Another Word

You are the only answer.
The only answer
to a question
I keep asking.

I keep asking
who will be there.
Who will be there
for me
twenty years from now?

Yes. Another word.
Twenty years from now,
you are the only answer.

Lucky Number, Lucky Life

The morning of her birthday,
she sang the 13 songs of the Aurora Borealis,
her voice more subtle
than the 13 petals of the corn marigold,
more secret
than the 13th constellation of the Zodiac.

Still in her nightgown,
she danced the 13th waltz of spring,
her bare feet bathed in dew-wet grass.

The morning of her birthday,
the setting moon and the rising sun
paused in the sky,
and night and day held their breath
for 13 seconds,
long enough to hold back time
for just a little bit.

I Dreamed You

I dreamed you in your black concert dress,
standing on the shore of the Tigris River
with your violin.

You played the immaculate motive of crows,
the exquisite lust of desert rain.

The ten sisters of dawn
and a mute troubadour
sang for you.

I was dancing with three moonstruck sheep dogs.

The sun shouldered the eastern horizon,
but the stars refused to fade.

Shakespeare on Valentine's Day

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, -- yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go, --
My mistress when she walks, treads on the ground;
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

Read and Explore Worlds

Lucifer in Starlight

Von's Bookshop, West Lafayette, Ind.

I drew these posters around 1996, while working at Von's Bookshop, one of the last and among the best independent book stores in America.

I worked at Von's while attending graduate school at Purdue University, managing the kids' books among other sections. Von's is a social focal-point of the community, a place where people browse shelves and talk books or current events -- the Sunday morning New York Times patrons, the skater punks, the retired professors, the undergrads, the high schoolers, the politicians, the drop-outs & eternal grad students, the factory workers, the farmers, the musicians, the school teachers, the writers, the readers, the kids. That job remains one of the lowest paying but most gratifying of my life.

Next time you visit West Lafayette, Ind., stop at Von's and say hi to Jim Martin and all the rest.

When the Levees Broke & the Moon Surrendered the Stars

Each morning, she watched me leave

my white chalk drawings on the blackboard
before the other students

shuffled in to first-hour English.

I drew the cloud cats

dancing with the rain fish.

I drew the blue 'coon
and the haunted playground.

I drew the doomed river's

dime-store soliloquy,

the wounded moon's final scene.

I drew the buzz-saw at Wilson's mill

screaming through pine logs.

I drew the sawdust piling up

faster than the shadow boy could sweep.

She folded the note
she left on my desk
into a paper crane.

You dress my memories in a shroud,

she said.
You perform the last offices of night.

Thank you, J. D. Salinger

Mrs. Glass, who did some of her most inspired, most perpendicular thinking on the threshold of linen closets, had bedded down her youngest child on the couch between pink percale sheets, and covered her with a pale-blue cashmere afghan. Franny now lay sleeping on her left side, facing into the back of the couch and the wall, her chin just grazing one of the several toss pillows all around her. Her mouth was closed, but only just. Her right hand, however, on the coverlet, was not merely closed but shut tight; the fingers were clenched, the thumb tucked in -- it was as though, at twenty, she had checked back into the mute, fisty defenses of the nursery. And here at the couch, it should be mentioned, the sun, for all its ungraciousness to the rest of the room, was behaving beautifully. It shone full on Franny's hair, which was jet-black and very prettily cut, and had been washed three times in as many days. Shunshine, in fact, bathed the entire afghan, and the play of warm, brilliant light in the pale-blue wool was in itself well worth beholding.

(Franny and Zooey, 1961)

Iraqi Children

Tigris River, Near Al-Qayarra

Say Goodbye, My Baby

There was the bronze horse
rearing at the courthouse,
the no-name soldier
waving a saber.

There was the barefoot boy
who took you swimming
in the blue hole north of town,
below the high bluffs
the Yankees couldn't take.

He gave you
a bailing twine bracelet
for your left ankle
and drew a horse of spit
for your right ankle.

There was your grandmother
who told you the story of shoes
designed by Perugia
she bought in New Orleans,
the story of a gray-blue gown
made by Madeleine Voinnet
she called, De La Fumee.

This horse is me, the boy said,
as sure as Orion swings night
like a sword into the river.

This horse is me and you
will know my pole-barn dreams
long after you leave
this one-horse town.

The Dreams that Come Between Us

Last night I saw four foxes
flashing in the highbeams of a gun truck,
dashing across those cratered
highways of northern Iraq
into the dark desert.

I dreamed of chasing fox tails.
I dreamed thin fingers and piano keys
and an empty violin case.

I dreamed dust-quiet songs
falling on the tongues of forgotten shoes.

My Sweetest Friend

The desert was cold tonight.

A thin, orange moon
tilted on the western horizon,
and to the east, beneath Cassiopeia,
a satellite’s iridium flare
streaked southward.

I remembered
the smell of cocoa butter
and thought of your hair
bleached by a northern sun.

The compass you gave me
points always to Ultima Thule.

And I feel just like Jesus' son

What Became of the Likely Lads

This cloudless night has opened vast arms
and released the stifling day.

An Army convoy crawls a dark road
like a sparkling centipede.

Where do bad folks go when they die,
sings the turret gunner in the scout vehicle.

They don't go to heaven
where the angels fly,
he sings into the headset mic.
They go to a lake of fire and fry.

We'll see 'em again on the fourth of July.

What the Lieutenant Dreamed

Winter arrives in the night desert
with rain and silent sheet lightning.

The Lieutenant keeps
wiping the windshield
but the mud is on the other side.

The convoy rolls along a pocked road,
and someone sees white-bellied frogs
leaping in rain-shimmered headlights.

The Lieutenant keeps
thinking of a song by The Libertines,
What Became of the Likely Lads.

Someone says
I saw this on the Natchez Trace,
the frogs and the falling Live Oaks.

The Lieutenant keeps
three dusty carpets and his heart
rolled in a cardboard box
that he plans on sending home for the holidays.

The Lieutenant keeps wiping the windshield.

Raymond Chandler in the Desert

A dead man is heavier than a broken heart
is what he said, and the big sleep
is only a lullaby away.

Beyond a hill, an old man chanted
the call to prayer.

A dry wind tugged
the lapel of his wrinkled suit
and sprinkled sand in his glass of whiskey.

I know a guy who sells Turkish carpets
cheap, I said. Just say the word.

Jen @ 17

There is Jen at 17,
standing alone on a Lake Michigan dune,
listening to the hush and mumble of waves.

The slightest breath of June
teases her long, dark hair,
and the sun settles
a score with Wisconsin.

She presses her palms together,
then opens them.

This is when she releases 37 seconds--
soft & quiet as cottonwood fleece
drifting from light to shadow.

This is when she sings a song
that won't be written for 20 years.

There is Jen at 17,
dune dancing and last-chancing youth.

One by one,
the street lights of Lake Shore Drive
begin to bloom.

Thank you, Raymond Chandler.

The main hallway in the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.

(The Big Sleep, 1939)

My Last Dance

She sang the forty-four madrigals of night
and the forty-four canzonettas of day.
She played a mean violin.

She said
twice is more than we deserve.
She said it twice.

She bought my shadow for a kiss.

She bought my shadow
and poured it in the river at St. Louis,
and I waited under the Vicksburg bridge
where the pylons rise like Solomon's pillars.

I bare-hand fished my shadow from the shallows,
and it fought me like a channel cat,
my fist in its throat. I wrestled my shadow,
and she played her cat gut violin on the muddy shore.

She cut on those strings and sang
the forty-four canzonettas of day,
the forty-four madrigals of night.

Into the White

Snow was falling on the city

like a language we didn’t speak.

We stood alone on a bridge

watching ice knuckle the pylons.

This life is bound to happen, she said,

and I don't want to know your name.

This life is bound to happen,

and there's a hole, a hole,

a white hole in heaven.

She said.

She saw singed feathers

falling from heaven.

She said God’s an angry father

who won't keep.

He won't keep his hands.

He won't keep his hands to himself.

She caught snowflakes on her tongue

and in her upturned palms.

She was praying.

Her hands were folded wings.

God's a handsome debaser, she said.

He debases the finest nights with his grin.

This life is bound to happen,

and this monkey's gone to heaven.

The Habur Gate Run

Battle Rhythm of a Convoy Security Company

Up north here, the dust
twisters race across the base
every afternoon, three tall sisters
leaning forward as they run.

The aerostat balloon tugs its tether.

Ring-necked pigeons
circle the chow hall and land,
circle and land.

The convoys leave and return.
They leave and return and the days
have no names.

I stab the desert with my knife
once a night to measure time.

I carry a fist of filthy air
that I am waiting to release
when my knife hits bone.

Grad School Morning

When Richard Sings the Blues

I saw the fallen

hero of his own story

take a journey down the tracks.

I saw him by the trestle

waving his untucked shirt tail

and kissing his shoes goodbye.

He had places to go.

The sun leaned over

his left shoulder.

Twin dust sisters danced

for him and him alone.

This ain't no long gone

and low down walk-about, he said.

He said it twice.

The Yellow Dog hollered down the tracks.

The Yellow Dog hollered down the tracks,

and he ain't looking back.