Sketch

The happiest day of his life was as if it hadn't happened, or happened twice. At four A.M. he stopped the alarm, got dressed and went outside in the dark, intending to go to the lab. He scraped the snow and ice off the car, looked at the driveway, reconsidered shoveling, and went back inside to bed. With an arm around his pregnant wife he felt the baby kick and tumble. In that pocket of warmth, he was as content as the fetus. And when next he woke he had already lived, and had yet to live, a day worth living.

Sprout

If you have a child you can let it grow beans

and get such a kick out of seeing the sprout

seeing the sprout, seeing the sprout

yourself is great.

You can show the little thing anything

and get such a charge 

out of seeing your charge

seeing anything, it is new to you too.

All you need to be fairly happy 

is seeing these things you could show a child, 

alone, if you have an open mind,

redoubled if you have a child.

   How My Father Caught His Hat

On a bridge

  make of planks,

over muddy water,

  on a horse

at a trot,

  on a windy day,

he stood in the stirrups

  the moment it left,

and shot one arm

  straight over his head,

and seized its brim,

  and held it there,

as if— and he was— ecstatic.

My First Wife Liked To Sit On My Back

My first wife liked to sit on my back,

a pretty Black, her naked pussy

flattened as if to hatch my ass,

the ostrich eggs of a white boy’s bum.

What she liked to do back there, back then,

was take between her thumbs and squeeze,

the marble-, or shall we say, boil-sized, pimples.

And what she got, with abrupt spurt,

was a bounteous burst of pus and blood,

Gotcha! she’d say, and I’d say, Ah!

as she continued to ply her thumbs,

making decoration galore

for a paper towel, till she had it all.

What a searing, white-hot, painful pleasure—

it felt like a bite from I don’t know what,

but something or other that knew its mind,

like Love, surprising, great.

Grandparents

Grandfather was a farmer and a blacksmith,

with large arms gentled by a kind wool shirt

that dripped its colored waters in her kitchen

behind a stove converting firewood to puddings.

His powerful hands were thick and tanned,

like strangely leaven gingerbread

she might have made from flour and molasses

on a whim, tranquilly after noon.

His back withstood the tons of hay

his arms forked up to cattle

that made it vanish, like the dinners

she loaded onto plates she stacked above her oven.

He clucked at horses and they jumped great tension

into traces, jingling trinkets on their collars, 

like the ornaments she put on wreaths

she hung upon their door at Christmas.

His mind imposed itself on iron

and tempered it to resist changing,

like the spirits of their children

whom she shaped against her breast.

Loving Dad

I love Dad but have to try.

He has the same struggle with me.

We work so hard it would wet your eye.

The results are satisfactory,

If not, perhaps, as spectacular

as what one feels in First Love,

which is what, in exact particular,

we share, and what fits us hand-in-glove.

I am speaking, of course, of none other

than the reason we both keep trying—

the one we adored was my mother,

who owns us decades after dying.

Had To Reconsider Dad

I've had to reconsider Dad:

We may assume he once loved Mum,

not for herself but for her bum

and face and youthful radiance,

and that good matter let him down.

But did he quit?— He stuck around.

And all good men should do the same.

Oh Love! What horrors in thy name!

Poetry School

My mother held up the empty snowsuit,

boots and all, she had husked me of,

and made it dance on the kitchen floor,

clippity-clop, and sang this rhyme:

Diddle diddle dumplin, my son John,

went to bed with his trousers on,

one shoe off, and one shoe on,

diddle diddle dumplin, my son John.

She tried to shake off one boot at the right time.

It was only a shell, without a head,

mittens for hands, and my name was not John,

but that was my self that jumped and danced,

that was me in Poetry School.

Trying To Get Me Mum In Perspective

I’d like to think of her, even once,

except in relation to me, 

a being intact and functional, 

not so concerned to help me advance,

to comfort, feed me, rest and love, 

so convinced of my goodness, even, 

herself a mere help

to find whatever good I might be, or was, or lost,

at any time, laying down her work,

that I, her first and foremost work…

I’d like to think of her once, just once, 

without my name upon her lips,

loving me more than I, love myself.

If I had known she existed too,

as a person with appetites, fears and ideas, 

struggles other than my own struggles,

if I'd ever thought she was other than I,

then I, by golly, I’d have married her. 

The Bobsled

I was a kid and I had a bobsled,

and the great big slippery clattering

bold-cock of an ice monster

accelerated long strings 

of children down Appleton Street, 

bound for winter in bright snowsuits,

arms and legs interlocked

hugging happiness, howling 

above the runners' rumblings,

screeching into the home-made wind, 

an ecstasy, frozen in memory now,

along with the credit—

my father built it.

Home

Mid-July,

the sky starred,

the moon full,

the window open,

the trees growing,

the river rushing,

the bed resting,

the wife sleeping,

the pillow propping

the head knowing

the mountain looming,

day coming—

The only living

I can imagine

is here, 

and only here.

Sketch

He had been so long without his children that seeing them was like a brilliant portrait in a grey foyer. They made a barbecue and chased each other under huge, hurried clouds.  He ended this at their bedtime, and they cried in surprise and disbelief that they could not change his mind.  He was Johnson on Vietnam. When they were in bed, consoled with kisses, wrapped in yarns and ready for sleep, he came himself to the edge of tears. Like a child he wondered why they hadn't run forever when they could.

Sketch

One day, in a good mood, he set out to check his mail. The walk took him along his gravel road in warm sunlight. He had let his children go swimming an hour earlier and forgotten them. The road passed above some bushes and he heard their voices and looked down to see them returning along a path from the woods. They were wet and shining in the sunlight amid glossy leaves, laughing and talking childish fun. When they saw their father on the road above them, they squinted into the sun and said hello with more amusement. The shock of joy that went through him then was as great as his anguish could have been had he learned they drowned.

Waking On Saturday

The voices arrive as faces in the remote bedroom,

conversation between his wife and daughter

eating toast in the kitchen, only their tones

leavening his consciousness from sleep.

The room admits a summer morning,

vague with promise, 

the sense of Saturday, free time.

His eyes are yet the only force

carrying his mind from the pillow to sense,

the wood ceiling, thick rafters,

the body left to know its rest in loose bedding,

muscles weighing the idea of movement.

Then the rain begins, benignly on the felt:

the infinite keys of a soft, cosmic typewriter, 

invisible ink on themes of life.

He likes this slow beginning.

His Father’s Code

Remember, when you are stuck,

you are not stuck.

There are tools:

shovels, levers, ropes, boards,

inventiveness and determined patience.

There may be times when you seem stuck, 

as when off the road and without tools,

upside down, below grade, 

But especially then, you are not stuck.

There is a solution and sometimes even 

before you find it there’s help.

Dear Mum,

The sun has warmed a brown coat of paint

on this picnic table in Quebec,

and the lunch you gave us flows

eternally from the paper bag,

like the magic porridge pot.

The kids are playing by the forest

and Carolyn and I don't contemplate

the coming grey Atlantic:

the road develops only where you are

and where you were,

the buoyant emptiness of travel.

It moans rubberly beside us now, a sad monster.

But it leaves me free

to eat chocolate cookies and think of you.

Edict And Prayer

Our Mother, 

who art in the kitchen,

frying us an egg,

Thou will be done,

we hope, when we get there,

else our ire be higher.

Give us this day

our buttered toast, 

as we descend hurrying, 

and take from us later,

if not from our hands, 

the laundry, of course,

and lay on us lavishly 

great big lunches,

scarves, etcetera,

as we hit the road

to Importance.

Make no mistake, Mum,

Thine is the kitchen,

the cellar and the drudgery,

work without end,

Amen.

Poem Coughed Up In Pieces

I take my father to see my son

play the violin for judgment.

Dad has a cold, hawks up oysters,

but ratchets them back down 

the top of his throat,

with indoor, clicking, swallowing sounds.

We’re sitting behind a cellist’s mother

whose head can swivel three hundred degrees

during the upbringing of a clinging clam.

Dad doesn’t notice her.

Khhhrrrrkkkkhhhh, he says,

in her child’s whole notes.

His Mother's Birthday

His mother is born on the day the sun

comes back to the northern hemisphere.

Spring and his mother can hardly be noticed then,

the Earth still twisting in the fact of winter.

But the vernal equinox is past, and however quietly,

Spring and his mother have arrived.

There are blossoms and warm days to come,

astonishment at the marvel she is.

Mum And Dad Parting

My mother and father almost never 

confided about their marriage, 

but a few months before she died of cancer, 

they shared a little of their routine

as we sat in the kitchen, drinking tea,

the atmosphere, as it is among friends,

and the subject, our mortality. 

She said they basically lived their lives 

as they always had, however she cried

if he criticized. 

He said that got him started too.

Sketch

Three months after his mother died he saw her ghost, as follows. He was in a deli on a London street; had not sat down when a woman came in: old, small, poor and decrepit. She approached him and put her hand on his side. He relaxed and allowed their eyes to meet. They stood, not speaking, then he turned away, because of her need and to avoid being touched, but watched in a mirror as she went to the counter, stole a sandwich and walked out. Congratulating the quick old witch, he thought: Who, hungry, would not steal? And who could be more deserving? She was practically a ghost of a person, a rag ship, floating around London. Yet hadn’t he just denied her touch, and turned away despite liking it? As he tried to recall her face, he could remember only his mother’s.

Mysterious Origins

My mother said, when she was a boy,

and I objected, and we laughed, 

and whatever it was she recommended,

I probably did, and was well advised.

‘Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot—

I more than once at Noon

Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash

Unbraiding in the Sun…’

Proves that Emily too was a boy.

And with these two compelling examples,

I told my daughter: When I was a girl…

imparting, no doubt, more perspective.

Sketch

Mum would be 94 today, so light you might tie a string to her wrist to keep her from blowing away. Not being here and yet being held in memory, she remains ours, a virtual treasure— her eyes, the clearest, deepest, earnest, smiling brown you have ever seen; her voice, an even, loving tone, encouraging. Memory is what you sometimes use to feel right, act right— an anchor of truth that keeps your self from blowing away.

Life Compared To A Sack

Life is like a burlap sack you put things in,

and some use space, like oranges and rice,

so nice that much of what else goes in,

you think, Why wasn't that oranges and rice?

But it wasn't and, heavy as raw meat,

bones and all, the sack bleeds through.

The bones being sharp, the meat, red,

the sack gets holes in it, and unsightly.

Later on you go to a graveyard

and look over the guilt monuments.

How we loved them, you say! A fortune! 

And that came out of the bleeding sack.

You put a tombstone in your sack, 

which, from then on, is going nowhere.

You can't lift it. Sit down, clown.

She’s all abroad. How we loved them!

You made this your home, and it's worthy of you.

Your family is in there, kids and shit,

who knows what all, you’re losing track,

still trying to lift it in middle age: 

stinking carrion, wet rice, granite, rotten oranges.

Crawl in, son, peel an orange. Cook up some cow. 

Clean a bit of the rice for weddings.

Make that piece of granite your floor.

You are sacked.

Conditioning

This, he thinks, is conditioning,

the excitement he feels

in the sound of a zipper

in a dark room,

on a soft boot,

implying the ideal leg;

or a long, delicately humming zipper,

snaking on a light dress,

the music of good memory.

He thinks,

when the zipper goes into a valley,

maybe in the small of her back,

or between the calf and ankle,

that there it moves him most

as a brook might move a thirsty stag.

And after that, the brook stops,

a lake of silence, only a zephyr

rustling the trees, her dress, 

water beckoning the swimmer.

Sketch

His father was a little hay-maker in New Brunswick, thirteen when he got the ideal job, driving a tall black team. Too small to reach the horses' withers, he watched as the men did the harnessing, then he got up on the high steel seat and rode. They walked and pitched hay. He rode. Twenty-five cents a day, his wage, handsome enough in those times, but more than that, his position was high, way up over singing blades or the dancing rake, or just ahead of the lumbering wagon. The mower broke down frequently and the men had to fix it. At such times he got down and relaxed under a tree. The sun and heat were terrific, and with them, the perfect soundscape: insects, wrenches clinking, horses blowing and stamping, men muttering as they barked their knuckles. One day the owner cried: "I had a chance to sell this thing for a hundred dollars and I didn't take it!" One of the workers straightened and said, "A hundred dollars! And you didn't take it? That was when two fools met." His future father screamed.

Snowdad

One day, in a snow storm his father went courting

in a light jacket near the U.S. border,

and on the way home nearly froze to death.

What if he hadn't dressed that way?

Maybe his mother would have said, No.

Go and forget me in a thick wool coat.

Thus properly dressed but sent packing,

he'd have passed his true self, a ghost of a fellow,

the guy in the sports coat, walking the drifts,

Lamenting this page be forever white.

By The Frog Pond

My wife took me once to a frog pond

and showed me the fun of it, all that was there,

slippery and pretty, slimy and live,

things I would never have seen alone,

but would have walked by, unknowing.

Standing there in sunshine with her,

peering, pointing, talking, enjoying,

we might have been like a mother and child,

or brother and sister, or two little friends

going home to fuck.

On My Wife’s Snoring

My wife of late, my old wife,

my preferred wife and the wife of my life,

through thirty-seven years of varied delight,

has become my Muse, and she snores.

I wouldn’t sleep in another bed

for all the tea and virgins and opiates

and exotic excitement there ever was,

unless pretty sure she wouldn’t find out.

For she draws me to her like leaves of paper

blown about in a breezy room

and come to rest by a thickness planer 

at work on a contrary hickory plank.

All is going well with the feed,

till she nears the end of that hard board

and hits a knot that adds chatter—

a Kalashnikov firing a short burst.

After this, a moment of silence,

still as the grave. The ears open wide.

Then follows a powerful, deep-rooting snort,

such that, had it been made by an actual hog,

It might have unearthed a whole pot of potatoes,

or perhaps uprooted a small tree,

or opened sky onto treasures of truffles

and won any number of prizes pigs win.

Through all of this I am pure patience,

wakeful, diligent, at work on the poem.

This is not the kind of snoring, you know,

that will cease by my saying, Tusk, tusk.

Nor is it even worth broaching at breakfast.

The best one can do is to search for words

that, left lying around, may win some sleep.

Oh! Winsome sleep! Oh! Winsome sleep!

Two Women

Almost all I know I learned 

from two good women,

my mother and wife,

one short, the other, tall,

both, however, peaches in all,

Both peaches, and both sages,

peaches and sages, peaches and sages,

agreeable in every imaginable way,

tastes, looks, the works.

From my mother I learned attitudes:

calm, slow, deliberate, ridiculous,

lunatically funny and kind.

From my Mrs., I learned the ways of the world,

nature, information, science, 

how to find my way down the road,

especially to the bank.

I miss them now that I’m on my own,

comfortable, as they would have wished,

trying to make sense of everything past.

Is it possible I make things up?