Where are we now that we are not where we were
He woke from a dream.
He was in the garage of an old house,
riding one of those toy horses
held to a metal frame by springs.
It was not very fast, not very curious
about the horizon.
As he left the garage, the owner of the house appeared
and asked if he’d like to buy the house.
“Why are you selling?” he asked.
She pointed across the street to a house
where a long-time friend lived.
“They’re all moving on,” she said.
“They’re all moving on,” she said again,
pointing to all the houses she could see,
and the waves of houses beyond them
that she could not, “and I want out.”
Outside the dream, in the world of sorry
and brave flowers, tumped over milk, the wind
making a ball gown of a sheet on a line,
the ghost of García Marquez drinking all the rain,
people wearing masks without robbing banks,
while making love three hours apart,
to hide the breath of a virus from each other,
the long-time friend had died last week.
People wore masks while standing above his grave,
as if to keep the earth from clocking their faces.
I am tired of this shit, he writes on a pad
instead of calling a different friend
dying for his own reasons on his own schedule
of lasts: last glass of wine, last conversation
with a loon.
Crosses it out. This shit is tired of me.
Crosses it out. I will raise my arms
to believe they are giants. Crosses it out. In time
the thought of me, the spirit of my blood,
will enter the jet stream and see the world.
Crosses it out and writes time thought me spirit.
Enter the stream world. Crosses it out.
Rips the yellow sheet from the pad.
Takes it outside. Burns it. Burns the ashes.
Burns the match. Burns the hours.
His clothes. His voice. Stands there
as only bones. As only a skeleton can.
A scholar of form, advocate of gaps
and heartless spaces. Burns his bones
and all bones but not the fellowship
of the shadows of bones.
The whole thing
Shipwrecked by birth, taken from the breath
of our mother’s seas, bearing the sleep
of water in our wrists, our thigh bones,
hearing our mother’s hearts in waves, in rain,
in faucets left running all night;
the memory of immersion
a ghost behind and under us, the sense
that if we turn quietly or dig deeply,
we’ll see that a face or roots
have been looking for us,
will be given new eyes
or a way of drinking the earth;
craved and rejected thousands of times
by the sun before we can speak
of ourselves in ourselves
as a wind in a house, a rose on the moon;
holding hawks in the clear lakes of our eyes
during the day but sending starlight
back to its infinities
when the cupped hands of our dreams
can’t provide it a home;
to know what god knows, that we exist,
yet to hold that knowledge
in the feeble heaven of our bodies,
to bear the fretted sags and cancers
and succumb to the sudden shame—
on a corner or looking up
from a book at the sun
as it reads along, in the midst
of wanting to answer a waterfall
in its own tongue—over how particular
and unmirrored we are, solitudes
in shoes, hauntings without houses;
out of these fractures and disquiets
we have made our everything, war
and ankle bracelets, postulates
and cathedrals and dams, we have cleaved,
unrounded, we are inventors of absences,
of the gaps between redwoods
and skyscrapers, Hiroshima
and Stockholm, a hand on a shoulder
and a hand on a switch
connecting a wire to the testicles
of a screaming man, we have embellished
a bear’s or hurricane’s indifference
into sadism, and taught matter,
the tiniest embrace, how to commit suicide.
My guitar can’t answer for these sins
and frailties. It’s only a neck
and torso, only radiant, former trees.
My guitar against the fireplace
and my guitar against the couch, the piano
at the bottom of the ocean, the cello
naked in a field somewhere, unstrummed
but elixing, yet I have this memory
of a note crossing a lake at dusk, as clear
and wanting as the call of a loon,
speaking a novel in the second of its life
and the decades of its echo, housing
my vagrancy, giving my heart a heart
to put its ear to, proving there’s an accord
of human birth that sutures, soothes,
and leaves. Music. Our child. A wholeness
we create but cannot follow into sky.
If an angel came to me and asked, “Why
should any of you be loved again
by the stars?” I’d put headphones
over her ears, tape her head
to a woofer, ask her to make love
inside a grand piano
as a woman decides to live forever
before thousands of strangers
who know each other within the sounds
her rivering hands make for an hour or so
before she goes back to a room,
sits alone and begins waiting
inside her life, with the slivers
and nibbling rats of her worries,
for her absolution at the keyboard
to resume.
As tempted as the angel would be
to save us, I wonder
if she’d choose to stay, to fall again,
burn her wings away, and let gravity
remember her face, her bones.
There are no angels, so probably not,
but every day, the birds of morning
seem to believe they exist,
as does the voice of mourning,
as does every song I have ever loved,
and who am I to tell harmony it is wrong?
2020
A woman and her husband in the same hospital
were allowed to die together, moved
to the same room, is a story
I heard yesterday, holding hands,
within minutes, him then her,
as thousands in Wyoming marched to say
nothing’s wrong, COVID’s no more
than cold, is the next story I heard
in a horrible year, millions died, the smart,
the lucky turned ghosts, hid in their apartments
and breaths, so the danger is clearly
narrative: what if the zither
and lyre replaced TV and Twitter
and my mouth and your mouth
went to the moon and never came back,
not until cure or Walmart
gave real insurance to its employees,
whichever came first, the chicken or the egg
or the omelette or song
or cranking up the volume
so we can drown out life
and dance like merry-go-rounds
on meth and fire, and what if I told you
I saw a shadow shoot another shadow
yesterday in the head
and walk away? Would you believe me
if I told you the survivor was you?
A night out
We were in a bar and went out to pee.
She bet me ten bucks she could pee higher
on the alley wall. When I laughed,
she released her wings and wrote her name
far above the feeling booze gives me
that everything will be all right,
and in cursive: Rebecca. “I never knew,”
I said when she came down,
“that any part of heaven
would want to spend time with me.”
She kissed my cheek and said, “Your turn.”
I wrote my name at a human height
but ran out too soon. I was Bo, Bo the man
with Rebecca the angel. With the ten bucks,
she bought us another round. How, though,
did she pee so elegantly, given, you know,
that no one learns cursive anymore.
Life is full of pee and mystery.
And stuffing, cheese and otherwise.
And theremin music, in certain circles,
is beautiful, a haunted, sharpened wind.
I’m listening to some now in my head,
the only home I’ve ever known.
Which makes the sensation of being lost
hard to explain.
Balloon-envy
The crack in the drywall above my bed
is a beautiful river when I look up
and want to float away. Last night,
after staring at that river for an hour,
I went outside to share my insomnia
with the crickets, who must sleep during the day.
Moonlight had painted the backs of clouds
stretched like a canvas across the easel
of the sky with gray swirls and smudges
that reminded me of my mind as I see it
from the inside out. Do you ever wonder
if your head is a balloon, your neck a string
and your life a battle with the desire
to let the string go? My envy of balloons
is their theology: god is a breeze. Any breeze,
every breeze. Imagine going where going
tells you to go and being all buoyant
and happy about it. So I’m out there
with the all-maraca band of the crickets
and the sky’s sullen artistry and seven
or eight pounds of worry over everything
that needs to be fixed within the house
of my character when I remembered
my father was buried alive in my dream
and I tried to rescue him using my hands
and mouth, since my dream couldn’t afford
or bother to steal a shovel, and woke
from my failure to save his life
sweating and wanting to beat my unconscious
to death. At ninety-three, his mind’s mostly fog,
as demonstrated by his recently eating
a suppository to get rid of his constipation,
a meal he described to my sister in the most
matter-of-fact way, hoping she could explain
why it didn’t work. What a weird homunculus
I am now, a man buried in his own head—
since we’re all buried in our heads
until death or salsa lessons set us free—
beside his dying father and my dream’s desire
to kill him slowly in the womb of the earth,
probably to remind me there’s nothing I can do
about this, no matter how much dirt I eat.
Or maybe the point was to let me try
to give him life, a small shock of breath,
to see him rise from the ground and ask me
to help him trim his beloved trees
one last time. And maybe the purpose of dreams
is to convince us there’s a purpose to everything,
even the static our minds get up to at night,
when there isn’t, not really, not probably,
in a world where I’ll always wonder
how that suppository tasted and hope to god,
who in the church of my head
is an oak tree, that I never find out.