Standing on the cold porch,
steam stealing away from my lips—
grey and snowy,
stuffing my hands into their
pockets, scarf a fluttering flag.
Snow, the ash of stars...
A new fire stoked from cold smoke and embers.
The quilt of Midwestern winter
air is unfolded from storage.
Taken down from the wooden shelf,
dusted off, opened up,
fluttered loose;
patches glowing purple-grey,
stitches burning bright—
movie marquees blinking through the evening
scarved sacred ice fishers, lights glinting off the ice
minnehaha and hiawatha, spectral and quiet
the snow thrown from the plows sparkling in the storefront lights
and downtown tree-lined streets, alight;
the glory of the
frozen city.
Wake up, the morning found us,
sore and freezing cold;
there is no sound at all.
still the smell of electric heat;
cold sweat, shivering body.
Through her red hair across my eyes I see
the sunlight pour through the open blinds and
fill the walls.
I prop myself up
on my elbows and look around.
Body blanket-wrapped I stand and move through the apartment
She sleeps, a kitten, a bearcub,
as I rise
she grabs what warmth she can, from
blankets, cushions, pillows, kicking a leg out
to feel for the sun.
The sleeping bearcub...
as I turn back to watch, the pink-orange light of dawn
pulls its giant quilt across her.
She begins to snore again.
I drive around Saturday morning
sky and snow blinding white -
blizzard’s done and plows have opened the streets.
The sunlight dances across the rooftops of the city,
pulsing out onto the street in the quick spaces between the houses,
flashing as through a spinning pinwheel
everything in a whitewash shimmer,
the windows of the houses and skyscrapers gleam and glow.
The wind blows paper across the 4th Ave bridge,
skittering off and fluttering down, pulled up,
pulled down, pulled up and down to the road below.
It’s almost frightening when I feel my heart really beating,
fully and proudly and sloshing with life,
but to feel it – I expect each beat
to break ribs and crack through, split and dribble,
and I will crash across the railing and that will be that.
Ah, this is joy so grand it’s become painful.
Above the sky is clear,
crystalline,
wintry deep.
There was a letter once,
from one poet to another, and in it he said,
“Is there every really need to close my heart?”
The sun pulsates against the city, the edges of people and houses,
blurring color and shadow.
The dawn horizon fills the sky.
As I merge onto the highway,
the trees and houses fall away
and the skyline grows before me.
I roll down the window,
lean my head out, and
bellow breathless into the cold,
cold air.
As I rattle over
the rail lines
I see this monk talking on a cell phone
orange swath and shaved head
in the cool dusk,
blue and filled with faces.
Compassion, simplicity, and patience
This poetry is
my still-beating heart,
bloody and warm,
which I invite you to cradle
in your calloused hands;
I took the bracelets
off my wrist
because they reminded me
of things I’d already forgotten;
If we keep flapping
our arms
we’ll never grow wings.
I wake up one
morning
closing the book I fell asleep with;
touching the the ink-pressed pages,
fingers sensing each serifed letter—
on the porch is
the smell of lilacs.
Far, far above a plane flies
and minutes later its hum follows
soft and obedient.
Leaves pirouette
in the intersection;
the air now smells like melting water.
The sun rises in the southeast from
behind proud buildings.
And in the southwest
the moon
sits, still far above the horizon, diaphanous.
Shining and fading.
I find myself
in some halfway part of the day,
an intersection of forces.
I’m still
young, yes, but growing older,
and I’m scared.
Tucked away in quiet Stillwater,
where the backyard of the world begins;
just me and the dogs, the newspapers,
packages to friends and letters to old professors,
mail filling the mail table,
this tablecloth, these napkins,
quiet music, fat books to read,
a fire made of old piano parts,
some photos to look over,
and a big mug of iced coffee.
The sun lights up a haze of clouds
in pale yellows and light greys.
There’s enough time in the day
to think about whether it should be
“grey” or “gray,” which song
should follow Iron & Wine on this mix CD ,
and whether writing poetry means you believe in God.
You wait while the answers come, or don’t.
And you realize that joy visits you
when you least expect it; on a Saturday morning in March
when you ask nothing of the world.
The constellations spit fire like children running with sparklers
in the swaying wheatfield of the galaxy.
I spin the star chart like a child
and read the glowing lines slung
between the stars like thread
finding the outlines of hunters,
queens, and mystics, the flying house,
the doomed heroes, the dragon.
I needle those stars, pull through the string,
and knit the thread into a blanket
to keep me warm
and to tell me,
“don’t be afraid, Jack.
It’s all around you.”
Daylight Savings
brings a
Sunday dawn,
lurching upward
and cracking its back,
shaking its fiery hair, launching
warm spit into the sky to wash away
the straggling snows—
Spring comes.
Barn swallow spring,
tilled-soil spring,
plant-pot spring,
which belongs
to the cute Lake Calhoun girls,
to calloused hands healing,
to Lutherans in shorts,
to First Ave buskers,
to Sculpture Garden romantics,
to the final shovel,
to ice-cracking creeks,
to the green of hail-sky,
to Uptown yuppies,
to tops down on Franklin,
to the Grain Belt sign watching over the Hennepin Avenue Bridge,
to floods,
to your thawing ribcage.
I know the great
hot Minnesota summer is coming.
Tornado Watch summer. AC summer.
Shimmering Minnehaha Falls summer.
Inflatable raft summer. Lake Harriet family summer.
Banana seat summer. Lock and dam summer.
Toe-wiggling lawn summer.
The great hot glorious sweating
thunder gutter-ocean summer of Minneapolis.
And I smile.
The pastor sings
a sopping psalm,
a song of red-eyed sadness, red-eyed joy
of lakes and rivers,
the pores, birthmarks,
and scars in the planet’s skin, where the grease
for the gears comes rising up and keeps us living;
of dew, the spit in the Earth’s kiss,
it kisses our
feet when we stand,
thighs when we sit,
hands when we tip our gravity
upside-down
the congregation
understands Noah
and his diluvian pain, passed down to us
it makes us creekbeds,
it makes us geysers,
it makes us swimming holes, it makes us swamps
when it rains we yawn and fill our mouths til overflowing
we remember what
out bodies are;
patches of soil sliced by a muddy divining rod
when you cut us we bleed a bubbling spring.
Sometimes when
you look down on the river,
in the moonlight or in the sun, each molecule
has become a shining supernova, and the
whole thing a dancing pipeline of stars.
Your fingers a
warm
summer pulse
bury them in my skin;
take off your
shoes and shirt
a sweet poem will be written
when you’re done.
I know you're this feisty kitten
smelling like a sneeze from the soil
smile shaking like hips and bells
and I bet you feel good
like corduroy on my shoulders
on a long walk home
and though i ain't even kissed you yet
you stole my blues away
and I don't want 'em back, not even now,
not now, not now.
and I ain't even kissed you yet
The building creaks an
echo for each footfall of the thousand tenants
that have walked the floors,
beams warp and
doors
slam into tired jambs.
A hundred hands
hit the wall in grief.
The bedroom walls
don’t even touch
the ceiling and in the space
between the two, cats calmly
rest and watch life move about.
The hallways smell
like curry
and Kraft Dinner and pot.
On the back porch
we smoke
and watch the punks ride their
tall bikes in the Hard Times lot.
Nobody can tell
me the cute girl’s name
after she picks up her mail.
A hundred headboards
hit the wall in triumph.
The front door
whispers
a welcome to each of us
as we come home
for the night.
Out front the
streetcorner signs
sag with the added weight
of vowels and rare letters.
I think about
how the stakes would
change in Somali Scrabble,
laying down those elegant long words,
dressed up in U’s and A’s like ruffles,
coated in X’s like saris;
the English language,
unfortunately,
could never bear such excesses.
Riverside Plaza
stretches high above.
It’s called the Ghetto in the Sky.
Steam slips from the top like a gash
bleeding gold into the evening.
“GLORY”
spraypainted on the
buildingside, the exact height of the
first blinding
dawn-peek
above the horizon.
My favorite part
of the summer day
is the sparrow-song early morning,
still chilly and wet.
The blood rushes up to my skin,
and I can see the barest wisp of breath
before it is absorbed
by the
pink yawn of sunlight.
The world is a
body
and each map is a lip or a hand
The world is red and dripping
like a sliced
strawberry
or an opened heart.
These clouds remind
us of the coming sunset,
and we do need a reminder now with the days so long,
like loose threads fluttering from the shoulder of a sweater,
like the hair on a girl’s legs after a cold and drowsy winter.
Oh, these clouds fly and flourish above us
like prayer flags slung from mountainsides
like fur if God were a kitten
like tall sails blown through with cannonfire, billowing down to the calm ocean
like pink grapefruits unraveled
like an air show tragedy
like a hiked-up skirt on a nineteen-year-old Nature Goddess,
for anyone who’ll have a look
like the sign in the window of the Tibetan place that reads,
“authentic cuisine from the roof of the world.”
Driving north
out of the city
the summer constellations
show themselves, and
the lamps lighting
the highway
flicker as they pass
between the steel rails
of the overpass.
Glittering leaves
and
the freshwater smell
of a childhood shared
in memories;
windows swung
open
to enliven the smell of
generations,
to rouse
the old dust
and push it to our noses;
the smell of sawdust,
gasoline, sunscreen,
warm skin, drying hair, and
the love and lust
of our
great-grandparents,
which brought us into being.
for LH
You should hear to this song—
the heat on a
cold Minnesotan’s skin,
the sunset and the blackest blue,
or the bluest black;
the rainshower
caress the Confederate gravestones,
listen to the crickets as the song fades out. It seems so right.
The porches, the
wet breezes and the swaying,
and the next Kozelek song picks up—
the magnolias,
the dead tallgrass,
the greening red cedars, the crickets,
the rustle and hum, the bluest black,
the wet breezes and the swaying,
the ghosts walking
down among the farmhouses,
the night, the nighttime,
the gravel road,
the piles of
wet forgotten cotton, the
charcoal wind.
for AM
Hometown brownie
basket
your thawed knees creak and bask in awe
crook and turn your fingers like origami doves
and your toes wiggle in harmony
ears ring with the dangling spangle of crushed orange sodacans
and who could resist a Guthrie shuffle?
skirt a shiver
of patterned clover
I’ll pull on your shirt like an origami crane
and pluck this little bit away
a singing baseball card stuck in your spokes
and you smile like a coin flipped in the sun.
The wet maple
leaves cling to the curb,
red-pigmenting the smooth concrete.
Our laughs and
shouts slide down
the green-soaked sun-sparked street,
following Drew as he races red-wagoned
down the hill into yesterday’s rainwater.
The wagon a rocketcar, a land-speed record.
We are elves,
we pilot starships,
we’ve got claws and swords and
we’re itching to use them;
we’ve got evil twin sisters,
we’re muscle-bound and brilliant
with hearty laughs;
we’ve got masks and capes and spandex;
we’ve got fortresses and vast armories
and wily tricks up our sleeves;
we know these streets,
we know the Minnehaha up and down
and plied its waters;
we’re brats,
snots, little shits.
We’re Longfellow’s princes and princesses.
And like the great heroes, we have our arch-nemesis:
The streetlights.
They mean the shouts of parents.
They mean separation.
The curse even we can never break.
Is there any sound sadder then a bulb’s flickering hum?
Still we play
and play, we use up
every second owed to us by the
standard parent-child Summer Evening Contract.
But we can almost feel the bulbs
warming up high above,
and we succumb
to the strange nervousness
we’ll later identify as
heartbreak.
For we can see
the moon
come up over the other horizon;
for the sun is
a lantern,
carried by a young guard who has walked
too far ahead of his company.
He walks her home through the leafy Northeast streets.
In the August darkness, the leaves are just thinking
about changing. Winchimes ringing from porches.
Awnings quivering in the low breeze.
They fall over,
caught by a sloping patch of lawn.
Dizzy and beet-blushing
he kisses her before he realizes
what he’s doing.
He feels the bobby pins in her hair.
At first they laugh, exuberant and scared.
Then, they are quiet.
They are cloud patterns
floating across the dewy grass,
Altocumulus undulatus, cumulonimbus with pilaei.
They curl and spill,
mist, evaporate.
Valleys looking up to see the
sunrise already hitting the mountaintops.
Of all the lights in late-night Minneapolis,
just this one streetlamp illuminates them.
They shine pink and orange,
a slow flare. A long silent miracle.
His fingers cradle the back of her neck.
The short invisible hairs are almost like clouds themselves,
high stratospherics, cirrus uncinus.
His fingers are cool on her sunburn.
She pulls at his shirt in return.
Their are soaked with humid early morning.
They feel blessed to see dew before the dawn,
to roll in it, to taste it,
this wonder never seen until it’s
burned off by the sun;
here they are witnessing creation.
From off in the distant day to come,
the smell of Minneapolis summer,
lake wind, oak trees, blooming grass in unkempt lawns.
They listen to the hum the city makes.
He can almost hear phones ringing, people snoring.
This is not their lawn.
———
For once, reality turned out to be far greater than imagination.
This is not usually the case. But sometimes, it happens.
———
Their radiation fades,
and the chill of the night begins to catch up with them.
Alcohol slowly seeps from their pores.
Yet there they lay in the predawn
for another half hour, still, quiet,
until the cold earth finally forces them up.
Walking home,
he watches her curls swing
back and forth in the breeze.
He leaves her at her house,
watches her go in, watches
the path of lights as she moves
from the kitchen to the hallway,
to the stairs, to her bedroom.
She’s gone.
When the last light darkens
he continues down to his apartment.
He changes out of his clothes;
he drinks some water and has an aspirin.
He finds his bed and quickly falls asleep.
He dreams.
Summertime is a sweet and strange amnesia.
We forget everything
about ourselves
and begin to move with the world
we forget the
hibernation that held us fast
and we forget the feel of fabric
on our shins and shoulders and toes and ankles
we dance like
treelimbs, we shake like bells at dusk,
wild hair wind-whipped like leaves
we speak the slang of childhood,
we have flings and fall hopelessly in love with imperfection;
we turn brown
with the sun,
we can hardly recongnize ourselves with the soil
on our wrists and knees and cheeks,
we all begin to smell alike: lakewater, sweat, grass, pollen
our shoes have holes and we feel the grassblades on our toes
we sing like cicadas
but soon grow quieter with a cricket-like hum,
then there is only the crunch of gravel beneath our soles
and we glow silently like fireflies.
After the forgetting—
after the forgetting, there is a strange rememberance.
Our shaky bodies
sing along
to a song we’ve known since birth.
A knowledge that this how we once were and how we should be.
The world’s worries shake from our shoulders.
We catch a yawn from the treelimbs and stretch out to sleep on the lawn.
In our sunburned dreams we are weightless.
