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.

Bucket List

Cooking beans & rice.

Returning every goddamn cigar butt

Samuel Fuller left smoldering on my Persian carpet.

Smelling cornbread & watching dust-quiet songs

falling on the tongues of handmade shoes.

Tasting a well-turned phrase. 

Pondering the distance between heaven & hell 

in the eye of the bee. Watching glass melt.

Lassoing bot-flies with a lover's hair.

Mailing turn-of-the-century postcards.

Singing with Sandy Samantha & Miranda

& writing their names in the river with a knife.

Standing beside chiaroscuro mannequins akimbo.

Making continuous line drawings with a green pen light.

Dancing mazurkas in moonlight

& soft-shoeing sunrise.

Witnessing the singular moment.

Thumbing the petosky stone in my pocket.

Ignoring the glass eye & tattoo of the last

mukhtar to sing down rain in this desert

Not Guilty, I Said

When I was 19 & drove my car into Lake Michigan, 

these are the things I gave away.

I gave nineteen palm kisses to all the girls who didn't love me.

I gave an Abhayamudra to my twin brother, Night,

sitting in the seat beside me.

I gave the Bellamy salute to American Legion Post Number 1964.

I gave the clenched right fist to my high school teachers;

they knew what I meant.

I gave the fist bump to intangible friends

who feared the handshake.

I gave the Moutza to all the people who wanted to do

away with collective bargaining.

I gave the ILY to all the girls who didn't love me.

I gave the Varadramudra to the crows who would pick my bones.

I gave the thumbs up & the thumbs down

& the telephone gesture to all the girls who didn't love me.

I gave them the sign of the horns.

When I was 19 & drove my car into Lake Michigan,

I was a saint

who didn't want to be found.

Southerly Wind

The sky is the color of Regina Spektor's eyes, 

a water-thin turquoise ocean, you say,

and clouds rush like an anxious flotilla northward. 

The Japanese magnolia is blooming, you say,

and the pink-white blossoms 

open like the cupped hands of our daughters. 

Would you believe me, my wife, if I said

I lied to you, if I said I lied

about talking to you in my sleep?

What would you say if I said

I never thought I could love anyone,

anyone but you? Would you believe me?

The Japanese magnolia trembles in this wind.

The tree unflowers, you tell me, one-by-one, 

the nine petals of each bloom.

 

Oh, my friend, we have no words 

for the blush and tumble of these petals

littering the winter-bleached lawn.

Look, I say. A  ragged line of crows 

meanders against the wind, calling 

onesies and twosies to one another. I suppose

I need this day to flow, to keep right on flowing,

just as you do, my darling, just as I wish it to

keep on pouring into my heart, into our hearts.

Tomorrow, I'll write a poem

and say we walked barefoot on the lawn. 
I'll say we danced like teenage lovers

beneath the Japanese magnolia,

and we watched, we watched each other

kicking the fallen petals windward.  

And I'll tell you the truth. I'll tell you the truth.

The sky is the color of your turquoise eyes.

Metropolis Maria

She whispered my desire 

through a smoke-ring smile.

She said: You think you're in love, 

but it makes you kind of nervous 

to say so. She said:

My pistol is the Devil's right hand.

  

I touched you with my bronze epistemology, 

she said, but you never know what happens 

until the deal goes down. Nothing touched 

the trigger but the Devil's right hand.

I said: I think I’m in love. 

Think I’m in love. Think I'm in

the Devil's right hand.

When Yesterday Was Young

You saw the new moon last night, 

and it was holding the old moon in its arms.

Four-and-twenty stars fell,

twenty-four brief needles of light

that kept my deepest secrets.

You saw night lean on me, my lover.

Tom Waits was singing something

about moon-shadow mosquitoes and sour lemonade

and the forgotten lyrics of  “The Nut-Brown Maid.”

You saw night look back and wait for me,

and I didn't wait for you.

Desert Sand Blues

I was not intent on standing 

for the next elections,

said Hosni Mubarak.

I thought I

was in your sight,

your heart.

I sobbed and sighed.

Adieu, love,

adieu, love,

untrue love.

In Scarlet Town, Where I Was Born

If I thought I saw Bill Evans 

leaning like the smoky shadow of a crow 

over cracked piano keys, 

if I saw his narrow shoulders hunched, 

pale hands poised like two forgotten thoughts, 

his corduroy jacket wrinkled at the spine—

if I thought I saw all that,

I'd tell the horns to shut their goddamn mouths.

It only takes one smooth pull on a cigarette,

one long push—and the smoke smiles

dark thoughts of a room

you can't remember. 

That's what I said to the man at the door,

just before he tossed me and my military ID 

card onto the curb.

Mark Winkler was playing piano in a club across the street,

and the rain was falling on New Orleans