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A poet’s work … to name the unnameable, to point at frauds,
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to take sides, start arguments, shape the world,
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and stop it from going to sleep.
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Pure Poetry
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This week I devote to the work of other poets I have come to admire. Their subjects in the pieces I've selected here range from moon exploration and box turtles to suburban lawn care and complex PTSD. And whole worlds in between.
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These poets are among so many that inspire me to be better. To try that much harder. To read, and stop, and say out loud, astonished: "Yes, I see now." Their words, their work, compel me to examine the world more closely, to not flinch, and to never look away.
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I collect these poems like jewels. Each one, to me, is a brilliantly polished gemstone.
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I take delight in sharing them with you here.
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Needless to say I support the forsythia’s war
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against the dull colored houses, the beagle
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deciphering the infinitely complicated universe
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at the bottom of a fence post. I should be gussying up
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my resume, I should be dusting off my protestant work ethic,
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not walking around the neighborhood loving the peonies
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and the lilac bushes, not heading up Shamrock
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and spotting Lucia coming down the train tracks. Lucia
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who just sold her first story and whose rent is going up,
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too, Lucia who says she’s moving to South America to save money,
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Lucia, cute twenty-something I wish wasn’t walking down train tracks
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alone. I tell her about my niece teaching in China, about the waiter
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who built a tiny house in Hawaii, how he saved up, how
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he had to call the house a garage to get a building permit.
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Someone’s practicing the trumpet, someone’s frying bacon
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and once again the wisteria across the street is trying to take over
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the nation. Which could use a nice invasion, old growth trees
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and sea turtles, every kind of bird marching
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on Washington. If I had something in my refrigerator,
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if my house didn’t look like the woman who lives there
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forgot to water the plants, I’d invite Lucia home,
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enjoy another hour of not thinking about not having a job,
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about not having a mother to move back in with.
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I could pick Lucia’s brain about our circadian rhythms,
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about this space between sunrise and sunset,
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ask if she’s ever managed to get inside it, the air,
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the sky ethereal as all get out—so close
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The dry basin of the moon must have held
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the bones of a race, radiant minerals,
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or something devoid of genesis, angel-heavy,
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idea-pure. All summer we had waited for it,
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our faces off-blue in front of the TV screen.
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Nothing could be more ordinary—two figures
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digging dirt in outer space—while mother repeated
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Neil Armstrong’s words, like a prayer
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electronically conveyed. The dunes were lit
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like ancient silk, like clandestine pearl.
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In the constant lunar night this luminescence
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was all we hoped for. A creature unto itself,
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it poured into the room like a gradual flood
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of lightning, touching every object with the cool burn
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of something not quite on fire. If we stepped out
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Manila would be blank ether, way station,
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a breathless abeyance. It didn’t matter,
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at that moment, where our lives would lead:
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father would disown one brother,
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one sister was going to die. Not yet unhappy,
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we were ready to walk on the moon. Reckless
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in our need for the possible, we knew
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there was no turning back, our bags already packed,
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the future a religion we could believe in.
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Before you know what kindness really is
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feel the future dissolve in a moment
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like salt in a weakened broth.
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What you held in your hand,
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what you counted and carefully saved,
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all this must go so you know
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how desolate the landscape can be
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between the regions of kindness.
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thinking the bus will never stop,
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the passengers eating maize and chicken
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will stare out the window forever.
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Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
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you must travel where the Indian
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lies dead by the side of the road.
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You must see how this could be you,
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who journeyed through the night with plans
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and the simple breath that kept him alive.
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as the deepest thing inside,
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you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
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You must wake up with sorrow.
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You must speak to it till your voice
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catches the thread of all sorrows
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and you see the size of the cloth.
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Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
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only kindness that ties your shoes
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and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
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only kindness that raises its head
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from the crowd of the world to say
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It is I you have been looking for,
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and then goes with you everywhere
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like a shadow or a friend.
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is as fluffy-white and absurd as a prize poodle, and thunder clouds sidle into the blue sky like thieves;
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because the maple's new leaves are as tiny and perfect as the hands of a fetus,
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and anyone can see that some toucans lead secret lives as tulips;
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because all the shades of green we've named are not enough, and over and over we sow the seeds,
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and peony buds bulge like bellies pregnant with overdue babies,
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while the lawn mower droning in the distance aspires to be a hive of bees—
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in spring, I should know better, but still— I want to sink down on my knees.
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by Jennifer Stewart Miller
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"I currently work for the Imperial County Office of Education.
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I have already gotten caught three times writing poetry on the job. Oh well."
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He cuts his grass three times a week,
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And sometimes I catch him on his porch at night staring.
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Small lump at his center drooping over the elastic of his shorts.
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His garage is an immaculate jewelry box.
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So much so, that I wouldn't be afraid
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To lick a pipe, or rim a corkscrew.
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His one car and two pick-up trucks
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Like a queen aside the brawn
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I often wonder how he sleeps at night
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That litters the hood of my car
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He and his wife hardly speak
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Passing each other like two guards in a palace.
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As the grass grows and grows.
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What could he have possibly done to her
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What if, I thought, he strayed?
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Fucked her best friend on bedsheets
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That told the story like a newspaper
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Or maybe he socked her one,
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Too many times beneath too much makeup
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Or maybe he simply did nothing
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But watch the grass grow and grow.
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Floodlights have flared on behind and above
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Where I sit in my public chair.
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The lawn that had gradually darkened has brightened.
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The library windows stare.
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I’m alone in a crowd—e pluribus plures.
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Far from a family I miss.
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I’d almost say I’m lonely, but lonely
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Is worse, I recall, than this.
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Loneliness is a genuine poverty.
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I’m like a man who is flush
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But forgot his wallet on the nightstand
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When he left for work in a rush,
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And now must go without food and coffee
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For a few hours more than he’d wish.
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That’s all. He still has a wallet. It’s bulging.
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It floats through his brain like a fish...
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Money for love: a terrible simile,
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But maybe it’s fitting here,
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A couple of blocks from Madison Avenue
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Where commodities are dear,
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Where all around me, rich skyscrapers
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Woo the impoverished sky,
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Having sent on their way the spent commuters
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Who stream, uncertain, by—
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And as for this whole splurge of a city,
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Isn’t money at its heart?
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But I’m blathering now. Forgetting my subject.
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What I meant to say at the start
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Is that I noticed a woman reading
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In a chair not far from mine.
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Silver-haired, calm, she stirred a hunger
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Perhaps because she doesn’t seem lonely.
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And what I loved was this:
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The way, when dusk had darkened her pages,
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She closed her eyes and threw her head back,
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Perhaps she was thinking about her story,
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Or the fall air, or a nap.
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I thought she’d leave me then for pastimes
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But she is on intimate terms, it seems,
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With the rhythms of Bryant Park,
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For that’s when the floodlights came on, slowly,
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Somewhere far above my need,
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And the grass grew green again, and the woman
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Reopened her eyes to read.
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What He Thought Belly Down, When I was 8 Years Old
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What he thought belly down, face down on the beige speckled tile floor,
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new wax, drill holes where desks had been anchored. Of the shield-thick hovering air.
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He could be a ribbon of wax, a thin trail of caulk.
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Something left over above his breath and heart sounds he could hear waiting
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like a hymn and pipe organs’ stop just before release.
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What he thought belly down, face down on the ice
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sliding between cars toward the gutter.
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Of the rifle smug and steady at his forehead and jittery sawed-off
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rushing his wife for her wedding rings. Of the streetlight shadow.
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The hydrant hunched in the snow-crusted grass. The salted walk.
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His little girl mid-step on the porch and the rod-iron storm door and front door ajar.
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When I was 8 years old I thought my father was a monster.
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When I was 8 years old I thought my father could fly.
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When I was 8 years old I thought my father was a dark room
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In a dark house with walls of eyes and teeth and banisters of thick rough skin.
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The rooms around him were also monsters and they were tall
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As telephone poles with flesh of kerosene and black fire.
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Their arms were always open and they surrounded my father,
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Keeping him warm for as long as he chose to stand on the earth
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The Death of the Box Turtle
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I’m pretty sure that when she was dying
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and sang “Amazing Grace” to him, she wasn’t
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recalling running after him down the long hill
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of Comanche Drive, spitting up burst bubbles
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of blood from some dark place deep inside her.
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He was her grandson. Old Devil, she called him.
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The before-and-after photograph of a kid falling
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from the top of the playground slide or executing
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a dive off a refrigerator-top, educating the knees
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of the umpteenth pair of Levi blue jeans
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with kneeling in tar and brake fluid blotted
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from the carport floor. Once, as a sort of joke,
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he tied her apron strings to the slats of her rocker
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as she dozed before Search for Tomorrow.
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When Bobby—that was his name—was 8 or 9,
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he would go out and come in, come in and go out,
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slamming doors until there was no escaping him.
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And he announced his boredom one afternoon
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by jimmying a steel crossbar from a swing set
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at the edge of the orchard behind our house
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and bludgeoning a turtle to death with it—
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where the steel had gone in, a shell fracture
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revealed bloody interior curves. Bobby and I
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recalled the death of the box turtle years later,
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after the other wreckage of childhood
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had retracted. We were driving back
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from my having read poetry for a good fee
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at a university in the Midwest. I was buzzing,
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full of Merlot and poached salmon. Nothing
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could’ve been further from my mind than
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his handiwork come back in the phrase
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Granny always liked you best. We were men.
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Such things should have been put away long ago,
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left to drift like the odor of rotting windfall apples
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in orchards at the end of autumn. They hadn’t been.
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I want to say the turtle expired easily, bled out,
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the beneficiary of some unexpected grace loosed
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like manna from the sky over Kettering, Ohio.
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Truth is, its going took forever—someone else
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had filled in the turtle’s wound with clods of earth,
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some plump child perhaps trying to reconstruct something
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in his or her image. Maybe some future veterinarian.
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I want to say Bobby healed and all that pain fell away,
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sloughed like shell a reptile head telescopes in and out of
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to touch smell hear see bright Nothing, if nothing else.
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But healing is part forgetting, a search for tomorrows.
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He didn’t heal. He might have, had the song gone on
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and Granny Potter, weak of heart, diabetic, come back
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from the country of memory, some “holler”—
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up from the deathbed of her terribly important one life.
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Which, come to think of it, was what she did,
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choosing Bobby to sing to before she died:
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her piercing a Capella dirge of “Amazing Grace”
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sounding in a hospital room by a creek where turtles
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drank (had forever) and trudged off, small,
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pitifully slow in the light.
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Gods, Monsters, and Complex PTSD
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I feel like the words of prophets
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spread to countries that don’t care
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I feel like taking out the middle man
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burrowing my face through the undergrowth
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slithering through the cracks
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through a mouthful of leaves.
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I feel like when someone drops a book
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and a touch of everything written in me
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shake your bathwater from my spine
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but I will never be the same
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and you will always know the difference.
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I feel like a woman’s words
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Summer Morn in New Hampshire
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All yesterday it poured, and all night long
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I could not sleep; the rain unceasing beat
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Upon the shingled roof like a weird song,
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Upon the grass like running children’s feet.
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And down the mountains by the dark cloud kissed,
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Like a strange shape in filmy veiling dressed,
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Slid slowly, silently, the wraith-like mist,
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And nestled soft against the earth’s wet breast.
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But lo, there was a miracle at dawn!
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The still air stirred at touch of the faint breeze,
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The sun a sheet of gold bequeathed the lawn,
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The songsters twittered in the rustling trees.
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And all things were transfigured in the day,
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But me whom radiant beauty could not move;
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For you, more wonderful, were far away,
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And I was blind with hunger for your love.
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The grasses in the field have toppled,
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and in places it seems that a large, now
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absent, animal must have passed the night.
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The hay will right itself if the day
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turns dry. I miss you steadily, painfully.
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None of your blustering entrances
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or exits, doors swinging wildly
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on their hinges, or your huge unconscious
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sighs when you read something sad,
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like Henry Adams’s letters from Japan,
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where he traveled after Clover died.
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Everything blooming bows down in the rain:
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white irises, red peonies; and the poppies
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with their black and secret centers
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lie shattered on the lawn.
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Women in peignoirs are floating around
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the landscape well out of eyesight
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let alone reach. They are as palpable
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as the ghost of my dog Rose whom I see
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on long walks, especially when exhausted
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and my half-blind eyes are blurred by cold wind
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or sleet or snow. The women we've mistreated
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never forgive us nor should they, thus their ghostly
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energies thrive at dawn and twilight in this vast
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country where any of the mind's movies can be played
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against this rumpled wide-screened landscape.
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Our souls are travelers. You can tell when your own
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is gone, and then these bleak, improbable
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visits from others, their dry tears because you were
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never what you weren't, so that the world
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becomes only what it is, the unforgiving flow
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of an unfathomable river. Still they wanted you otherwise,
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closer to their dreamchild, just as you imagined
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fair maidens tight to you as decals to guide
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you toward certainties. The new pup, uncrippled by ideals,
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leaps against the fence, leaps at the mountains beyond.
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I Think About Him Drowning
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The wind is loud on the water today I think about him drowning
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I walk to the store for a bottle of wine I think about him drowning
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I read to Rosie before nap in the rocker where he’s drowning
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I make her a peanut-butter sandwich cut in triangles think about him drowning
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I rinse her little blue plate and spoon in cool water where he’s drowning
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I get up to pee in the night with the light off and he’s drowning
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An old woman throws crusts to gulls in their descent I see him drowning
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Wondering if there’s a word for how birds all move together drowning
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Thinking about my father thinking about him drowning I think about him drowning
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I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions
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of prose and poetry; that is prose; words in their best order; –
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the best words in the best order.
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The painting above, entitled Compartment C,
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is by Edward Hopper (1882-1967).
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Recent Post
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Simply too good not to share.. Bioluminescence There’s a dark so deep beneath the sea the creatures beget their own light. This feat, this fact of adaptation, I could say, is beautiful though the creatures are hideous. Lanternfish. Hatchetfish. Viperfish. I, not unlike them, forfeited beauty to glimpse the world hidden by eternal darkness. I subsisted on falling matter, unaware …
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Book Sales
The Music of Leaving, my collection of poetry, is available to order.
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Order directly online — for both Canada and U.S. orders — from Amazon, Brunswick and Demeter.
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