My Stepfather’s Cars
When my stepfather returned
from the machine shop, all
he wanted to do was get under
the hood or chassis of a junked car
in his backyard, trying, against
the odds to fix it with parts
taken from other cars and failing
over and over. What did it all
come to? Where was the world,
and where was poetry? I couldn’t
wait to get away from that house
far from town, yet now, an old man,
I see that I never left it, living
apart from others while I work
each day on a poem, raiding
junked drafts for parts and trying
against the odds to make it run.
When They Lay Down
They didn’t close their eyes when they lay down
As if getting ready for a long night’s sleep.
My old, truant father rose for work hung over.
My mother gardened in the dark with a headlamp.
As if getting ready for a long night’s sleep,
My stepfather lay under his jacked-up car.
My mother gardened in the dark with a headlamp.
At the end, my parents were so tired.
My stepfather lay under his jacked-up car
When it suddenly gave way and came down on him.
At the end, my parents were so tired.
Some days, my father forgot his socks.
Then it all gave way and came down on him.
On his knees in my dream, my father tries to speak.
Some days, he even forgot his socks.
My mother couldn’t feel her whole left side.
On his knees in my dream, my father tries to speak.
He rose for work every day hung over.
My mother couldn’t feel her whole left side.
They didn’t close their eyes when they lay down.
Amber
You’re trapped. You cannot stop once you begin
Smashing plaster statues. She crooks a finger.
(And you feared the virgin dead.) You start again.
Dram after dram. Basking in Baltic amber.
Ossified resin. You peer through the heel of a bottle.
A mouth contorts. There must be sound. You’re deaf
To all but the insult of that tongue, that spittle.
The concussed room starts checking for its breath.
You’re a battering ram hammering sacred mosaics.
Tesserae like tears of bone scatter all over.
The heavens never the same, the picture puzzle
Of the stars, the runic zodiac, apocalyptic.
Your blood is sticky resin. Your piss smoky amber.
You’ve finally damned yourself to Hell, Ezekiel.
West
I’d chased the sunrise so far east, I’d risen
With it, now west of any west I’d known,
Freshly mown hay, a baby’s flesh, that scent
On the edge, the wind a scythe, the grass as flat
As a monk at prayer. I look down, towering, sheer,
My bold career soaring like that gull over there,
Where a goat picks his way down to the pounded base,
Shrewd hooves sticking to each chance protrusion,
Fishermen, all comely, one like Jesus, row me
To an island across a boiling, craggy strait.
Our ribbed, leaf-light, empty boat floats high, then sinks
To the gunwales with death in it. Puffins eye me.
Smoke rises from huddled hutches like breath in the cold.
It’s dusk at the base of a hill as bald as a crone,
Then golden tresses, molten ocean, the other
Side, the prairie at sunset, and all before me.