False Friends

There’s nothing on the other side

Of this slice of pie

Just like the dress you want to buy

Began with nothing and

That slim bottle of cool white wine

Is a bridge between

Nothing and nothing

Now he arrives with doe eyes and hard hands

To be your everything

For an afternoon

You stole from nothing

And when he’s standing in the shower

You can wait on the wrinkled bed

A skin full of nothing

The next afternoon’s day dream will be a nice break from nothing

The trip you’re planning to a warmer place

Will be a relief from nothing

At the end of the day there is a plate of warm food and a television show

To take you somewhere until it’s time for bed

Your body needs its animal sleep

That’s something, you think

Someday we will have cheated death and that thief of hours, sleep, you think.

Won’t that be something?

We Lived in a Beautiful Time

We lived in a beautiful time

There were dancers and young musicians

And every other thing we loved came

Through filaments and ether

To flicker in our hands

We photographed our food

We visited hot countries

And when we could not press our faces together

We sent our love by tapping our fingers

It was always meant to shatter

It did.

Grief coats lead upon our wings

Grief coats lead upon our wings

It makes us small and earthbound things

It stripes our sides with blue and blood

Stains us with the words we didn't say

And turns our mouths to maws

Soon we feel too bright, too hot

An aching spot

That cannot stay and shine where others smile

Their happiness is the color of mud

Against our nights of blue and days of blood

Grief does not lift us, but beneath

Its pretty, heavy wings

Each muscle learns its strength and springs

Us into the air

You say you'll never be ready

Time knows when you'll be ready

I see you there

Flying wounded and bright

Now a glittering, cherished, airborne thing

You Must Get in the Habit of Doing

 

You must get in the habit of doing

And now

Because soon the scrawled, reluctant lists he wrote

Will lose their cogency and, without doing, 

You will forget how to light the oven of his ancient stove

Or when to feed his parrot and what to do

When yellow blisters creep between its toes

And your first and oldest title, Beloved Daughter

Will never grace

The stone above your final resting place

Because no one will stand then to recall

How he touched your chubby baby face

Or how you asked him to write them down, every task

That would help him leave in peace

When fate follows proper order

Fathers die before their children

And because grief will not let us to call it grace

We call it mercy

Hog Hunting

The old man lost his license

Now they say he'll lose his leg

But he still drives his old jeep to town

And of the leg

He says

“I think I'll keep it.”

He sleeps in a borrowed trailer

On land electric lines don't touch

On land water pipes don't reach

On land gone acid with his sweet-smelling piss

When you want to see him you drive out and holler

He'll come to the door waving a rifle

The trailer's stuffed with his smell

And old saddles

Old gun stocks

Magazines with young girls in them

Old women still bring him pies

He's not supposed to eat

He wears that shirt his first wife sewed for him

Though now he can only button it at the top

He wants to go hog hunting

Thinks he still knows someone with some hounds

And do we know anyone who's still got hogs on his land?

Used to be

That open country was prime for hog wallows

They'd root out the ground, keep the young firs

From taking over and swallowing the grassland

Now the young firs are tall

His chin shakes

His stubble is dyed orange with dip

“I'm going hunting this fall,

Hog hunting.”

“It'll kill you,”

We tell him

“Oh I'll die,” he says

“But goddamn

I'm gonna die

With a gun in my hand.”