lit

it is hard to guess

what dead friends

are up to. we try.

is jack still scat-

steering the night,

one hand waving

an onyx phallus 

overhead like a flare,

the other wild 

on the wheel

of the moon?

are james’ big sky 

country eyes still 

sharp as down

on the angel of shavano,

climbing her lone pine?

do you hear her

baby talking the

red wing blackbirds, 

cooing at that squirrel,

patiently snapping 

elm twigs

for the final fire?

or have they both

long ago flown the smoke,

mesmerized no more

by visible breath,

gone, swallowed up,

inhaled by light, each 

the pure silent word

they always were,

flint at the lips.

in loving memory of poets Laurie James and Jack Mueller

Deliverance

From wherever you are, I guess you’ve seen 

I’ve written all the ways you abandoned me. 

But not today. There will be more: soggy little 

madeleines waiting to unearth more grief, 

but also more of something else I can’t quite find 

one word for: joy? love? warmth? Too simple. 

Your diamonds, Dad, so few in the proverbial rough: 

that matted teddy bear. That antibiotic syringe 

you delivered after midnight from Chicago 

to my Sangamon river childhood fever. 

That Illinois sunset drive—me just home from college 

abroad—you driving us through the low, orange light

of the neighborhood, slow, talking about the meaning 

of life, not the usual Mormon lines, but yours, 

that pithy philosophy earned by imperfect living 

and loving Louis L’Amour as much or more than scripture,

those good ‘ol boy aphorisms only white guys

dream up, pass to sons and son-like daughters 

like campfire liquor. I wasn’t quite the right audience,

but still I polished off every shot, happy just to talk.

That Utah hike, the one that made me cry for hours, 

mountain love our new and short-lived bond. 

That one a few years after that. Two hikes are what 

we got. Our Rocky Mountain smiles. That phone call 

after my second divorce, the one in which I said 

I understood how you could leave and forgave you

and your voice cracked into 3 words: Thank you, buddy.

That other precious, pacing call, the one in which

your recent Lewy bodies diagnosis made you say,

If I ever forget you, just know I’ll never forget you. 

I always wanted more of you. That’s all. Hungry, 

I picked you apart, all your warts and flaws, piled high

your bigot bones to talk myself out of needing you. 

I chewed you up, your every rib of error my fuel. 

I don’t think I am cruel. I even made a costume

out of you, tried on your blues. Learned and buried

you. Birthed, exhumed you from my chest, the whole 

mess of us, no longer a child stuck at the precipice

of your absence, forever six. Today, I am fifty-one, 

full grown, sprung like Athena from your head-

stone. When my throat burns with pride at my own

daughter’s life, firefighter like you, proudly displaying

your retired helmet and walking in your huge boots—

lifting severed legs from cars, their warmth a rising mist; 

pumping life back into crumpled children; shrunken, 

pallid drug addicts; stinking, stained homeless men; 

suburban mothers and CEOs hunched over plates 

of steaks, choked; delivering dogs from flaming 

windows; finding them dead under beds (which makes 

her cry); scolding hotly the father who taped shut 

his disabled daughter’s mouthy mouth, a joke, he said—

I realize while you weren’t saving me, weren’t building 

my bones with the million moments many fathers 

give like milk to children weaning from their mothers, 

that milk of presence, fortitude, you did give thirty 

years of mornings and interrupted sleep to pulling 

countless people out between the legs of death, 

the mother of their worst moment, delivering, saving 

multitudes of sentient beings, every one my mother, 

your mother, in myriad other lives, the Buddha said. 

For this, I thank you, buddy. Your mother, we all, 

are proud, hold you in the arms of our gratitude, promise, 

in turn, with love, to save you—from yourself, your dead, 

that lineage of fathers who left you in the womb.

Though I Cringe When White Poets Write Poems about Coyotes

tonight one howled north

at the foot of the mountain

and its echo howled south

talking to itself, enlarging

its lonesome pack by sonic

subterfuge. One times one 

still equals one. Stopped 

in our tracks by the eerie

symmetrical tune, my dog’s 

head followed the howl back 

and forth, back and forth, 

a slow metronome.

The Story Goes

Did you ever cry, Granny, as a tiny girl, an old woman,

missing your missing father—sun-stroked in an Illinois field,

so the story goes, and never quite the same (tap the head)

after that. Or torn by some disorder without that helpful word—

found by grandkids in a 1950 census to have spent four decades

behind security hospital bars, having once thrown a man

down a flight of stairs, declared criminally insane. (Dead,

you told your sons, my father died when I was young). It is not

your lie but truth that feeds my terror. Did you decide

to spare your boys that swallowed pain, that shame,

stoic, your mouth ever turning a cheek to their kisses,

to ours, no granddad for them to speak of? Did they know?

Or did you simply fear his seed in them and pray for drought.

Pregnant with my father, holding the hand of a toddler,

did you watch your husband, lost inside, exhausted,

drive off past the last gasp of the Great Depression?

Did he truly leave you three for California gold

as you always told them: that no good S.O.B.,

the family refrain? Did you know he later claimed

he tried to see them but was told to stay away

by your husband? Your sons don’t need you, I imagine

you spat like bloody teeth from the door frame.

They think you nothing but a no good S.O.B. So, he gave up.

You changed Dad’s middle and last name to match

his new father’s, a gentle dairy farmer, who saved them,

like my stepfather saved me, made them tough.

Thank you. If only erasing a father’s name were enough.

I want to think you did it all to stop the secret crying,

so young, so old, the way I did, the way I spent a lifetime

trying to matter to your son after he left us four kids

for his own 70s gold: freedom on a yellow-striped road,

a nurse’s bed—that rumor sent through a slant-lit phone

that shrank my mother down to a mute claw. Still,

I didn’t escape my father’s wily thread: left husbands,

too, for more, for more. Gave up on marriage to live.

Those years I loved him best, Granny, bested him,

your ex and your dad, too. (I wish I knew. I wish I knew.)

My kids would never miss their fathers, never long for me.

We fill the emptiness inside each other like nesting dolls,

seeking, never finding, the smallest nor largest doll—

that ancient animal one that holds or is the core

of us all—nor even the doll we are, just sensing that tiny,

receding, insatiable hole, as if it were only ours.

Knee Deep in the Water Somewhere

For Brittany

When your husband has gently 

requested a break from the constant stream 

of Jimmy Buffet, and you’ve finally

given away all the flamingo flotsam

your family thought you loved—you, 

whom they mistook for a beautiful, pink, 

strange bird, balanced on one foot 

in the front yard of their lives—

and your new, somehow oldest friend, 

on a scorching alpine desert trail 

that burns beloved dogs’ feet, assures you 

after hearing the longing in your voice 

for cool sand, your heartsick song for the sea, 

that, yes, yes, you must go, go to the beach—

well, then, you must go. Go where the body 

wants to go. You cannot lie to the body.

And while her heart breaks to send you out 

of this quiet, dark sky valley, with its cacti 

and sand dunes, its desperate children

in whom you believed, its blood-red string 

of sunset mountains, she knows this place 

is not your home, this crusted graveyard 

of a once inland sea. “Fly off, sweet friend,”

her heart thrills. “Though, you are no bird. 

No net ensnares you. You are a free

human being with an independent will.”

with thanks to Jane Eyre, our first book, for the final lines

A Party of Pinyon Jays

I wake to dozens of dusty blue pinyon jays laughing nasally

at the feeder hanging on the piñon outside our bedroom window.

They decimate the suet brick in minutes—neither they nor I know

they are going extinct—peck with great lust, share the small feast.

Two orange headed, yellow breasted, black winged western tanagers 

hang back, do without—neither they nor I know they are abundant—

lick remaining grease from the empty basket when the jays go.

I notice I prefer their sunny timidity to the greedy racket of blue. 

On a nearby limb, a magpie watches me mount the stool. Takes off 

to tell its mate. I refill the basket. Wait. Each bird plans a coup.

Muted tanager approaches the feed. Giant magpie drops. She flees. 

I clap. All clear till her return. She nibbles. Flits off. Nuthatch takes a turn.

Late morning, a single jay discovers the suet full again. Scout perched

on a tall piñon, he chortles and cries across miles of chaparral.

Come! Come! Come! Come!      Come! Come! Come! Come! They do.

A recent report on the threatened status of pinyon jays:

“Defenders of Wildlife Seeks Endangered Status for Pinyon Jay,” Albuquerque, NM, April 26, 2022

The Last Cut in Our Limited Series

A shared glance of joie de vivre

then turning back to what we do:

the book, the broom, the pen, the seed,

the plate, the drill, the trail, the moon, 

the sprout, the dog, the tune, the leaf,

the pill, the wash, the snow, the croon,

the call, the pan, the sigh, the cream,

the tea, the cloud, the deer, the room,

the egg, the wine, the bill, the screen,

the sink, the child, the road, the bloom,

the grill, the pine, the hen, the weed,

the wood, the soil, the hand, the shoe,

the fire, the nap, the cat, the creek,

the bowl, the knife, the rib, the coop,

the prayer, the salt, the dome, the peak,

the leg, the rhyme, the fish, the tooth,

the smoke, the time, the rain, the sleep,

adieu, adieu, adieu, adieu.

Past Fifty

Who knew I would feel 

young? Except in 

my bones, poor posture,

parched mornings 

after nights of bottles 

with mountain poets,

patio music, chosen brothers, 

liberated sister-mothers

toasting the post pandemic 

opening of this 

end of the road town.

How can I say it?

I used to run and run.

I know that high.

My body did my bidding.

And so much wanting.

Such a drug. It wanes.

The constant longing

for more than life

can offer a young mother

already rich with children.

Joy and regret.

Strange bedfellows.

All of that in me today

in the quiet, and my love

dozing here on the sofa,

his long legs draped across

my lap, hands folded

on his belly, head tilted up

on a pillow, beautiful

in that awful pose.

We both and all of us

are for the pyre.

It’s not a metaphor.

We’ve watched it burn.

Absorbed its warmth.

But now! We are alive, 

my love and I, these bones,

turning to look at each other

from time to time,

my writing arm in the sun.

The Wayback Machine

Sally Jane Seck is not only my web guru but also a time wizard. She found The Wayback Machine, an internet archive with snapshots of all kinds of old wordweeds content. This discovery is strangely comforting, like the time I found out my old dog Mojo hadn’t yet been cremated weeks after her death and was still curled up as if in an afternoon snooze in the vet office deep freeze. I got to say a second goodbye. B minus Buddhist that I am, I have a hard time letting things go sometimes. Now I can say a proper farewell. Here’s the old wordweeds homepage featuring a 10/10/2020 post. Rest in peace, WW.

Fish Heads

after Raymond Carver

Ted Fish made heads out of clay.

He was known for it, loved.

These heads are all over Salida.

Pinch lipped busts in shop windows. 

Bobbing ornaments in dead trees. 

One, a skinless, meat-red monolith 

sits on a bank among boulders, 

casting the line of its low gaze 

over the Arkansas, a marker 

for boaters to measure depth.

I never knew him except through

others’ grief. He died a few 

weeks before I moved there.

On the table. Under the knife. 

His heart.

Two heads came into my hands

in round about ways. One

from a new friend, fellow artist

and co-worker, Ben, whose

eyes teared up when he handed 

it to me, a porcelain, grimacing, 

two-faced thing with a hole 

clear through the crown to

the throat, passage for some jute 

rope I’ve planned for years to string

with fat, glass beads the color

of Caribbean swells. Maybe  

I’ll finally get to it. After a story,

Barbara, poet who refuses

public farewells and left his funeral 

early, gave me the other: a black face— 

blue edged, sort of grinning—emerging

from white porcelain slab. The whole 

thing attached to a small black canvas

with two long copper wire stitches.

I placed it on the piano where sheet 

music should perch. The piano 

is always out of tune, but my son 

plays it anyway. Two nights ago, 

on a stop as he was driving through,

the tiny head rang, watery

with my son’s invented song.

When I hugged him hello

and later goodbye, hard, I felt him

tremble, quaking in the core, a dark

face pressing through his body

into mine. In the kitchen, he talked

in low, steady tones, like there

was earth under his feet, said 

when he gets back he’s drying out, 

going to stop filling the hole

with every dead sailor in the sea.

“You can do it,” I said, “change karma,

consequence.” Which was too much,

another hole. You can do it is all I meant, 

but saying less is hard for me. He knows. 

“Thank you,” he said, and for a second, 

soft eyed, lost himself among crumbs 

on the counter. Then raised his head.