FLICK


So I’m standing in the doorway
of a boarded up Woolworth’s
in Soothville, Pennsylvania
trying to light a lighter,
the plastic disposable kind –
flicking, flicking
until a little blue flame
rises, rises, dies. 

There’s no wind in the doorway,
no drips from rusty pipes.
It’s simply that the lighter
bought a week ago is done,
designed for early death,
to be tossed into the trash
with lottery stubs and rice. 

Determined though, I am
to eke out one more light
so I’m flicking, flicking hard,
and a little blue flame
rises, rises, dies. 

I shake it then. I slap it,
slam it against the wall –
like the guy who smacks the tv
when the vertical goes wiggly,
the guy fiddling under the hood
when he doesn’t know
a carburetor from a candelabra.
I slam, I slap, I flick,
and a little blue flame rises, dies. 

Damn now I am angry,
bad anger, without target –
I mean a man standing in a doorway
of an abandoned five & dime
cursing a Bic lighter
is a pretty sorry sight. 

Finally, I say flick it,
I’ll just ask for a damn light.
And know what, brother – no one,
no one waiting for a bus,
no one buying shoes or kissing. 

No one on the street
but me and my dead lighter
which I hereby do declare
the first and only relic of my
neocryptonihilnationalist faith. 

                        from At the Tone 

HOMER


In late quiet
he hears oar lap
in pull of carapace
and stone, smells
man stench in
fouled shallows
feels wind and
the want of wind
on wet flesh 

In the lull
before dawn
he tastes salt
on heavy tongue
the thick slick
effluvia of war
the unspeakable
suffering
of heroes 

Kelp bearded
warriors sprawled
on distant shores
dissolve into fog
gray shrouded
sand, ship bows
tilting cloudward
flashing barnacle
tight grins

WOLFIE’S TAVERN


                    in memory of Bob Fuchs


​Shadow home,
lair, the dark
place your sick
body honed 

in on. You ate
verboten burgers,
nursed lager,
excuse to pontificate 

on the tv news,
to extol, to pronounce,
opine and renounce –
as you would say: schmooze. 

What the locals
thought of your
New York jaw,
what the yokels, 

as you called
them, felt
about your purpled pelt
cannot be recalled 

but at that moment
you were top shelf,
the Alpha wolf,
and you lent 

your jejune know-it-all
to the unimpatient masses.
Blotched with rashes,
a thrall 

of skin and bone,
you bristled and scowled,
yelp-howled
on your bar throne 

as if bluster and bray
could pass for folks talking,
wit’s fangs keep stalking
death at bay. 

                        from All I Can Recall

THE COURIER

​

                   for Jan Karski


​I am carrying the sea
in my cupped hands.
Not drops of it, not liters,
the whole dark sloshing sea.
Claws pinch. Nettles sting.
Teeth rip at my palm lines.
It hurts to hold this much,
to be so small and human,
running, running,
as the blood sun runs –
 west – carrying the sea
in my cupped hands.
The faster my legs move,
the more I try to get there,
the more I fear I spill.
Rancid fish and wrackweed,
broken shell and coral,
mark my travel like a tideline.
Everywhere I’ve been
I have sown salt.
Everywhere now, the rich
green earth laid west.
But I do not look behind,
not behind and not above,
where the white moon
nightly is devouring
the stars, first in nibbles,
then vast mouthfuls,
bloating like a leech,
whipping storms
as cruel as history
inside my pressed hands,
these poor dumb beasts,
my hands. How much they want
to toss it all away,
to empty it in trenches,
to wall it up for good.
How much I want to fold
myself in pine boughs,
to lie on high ground
humming, to be free
of this thing I’ve been
anointed with, so
horribly, to make it all
mad fancy, mere nightmare.
It is not. Straight ahead,
face forward, I must run,
run, as the bloody sun runs –
west – and bring the sea
for the whole wide world
to hold. The journey is
a minute. A millennium. Both.
But I do get there. I do.
I am ushered to a chamber
of telephones and chairs,
an ordinary room
of the twentieth century.
Three well-dressed men
walk in, mopping brows
from well-starched hand-
kerchiefs. I want to beg
forgiveness, to explain
I’m just the courier,
a small man, insignificant,
that the news is not
the messenger. But my words
are lost in wind. The three
stand stiffly, staring.
They smile. They nod.
And I… I let it go,
waves of salt and bone
flooding from my hands,
drowning all the ordinary
rooms of this century.

And the next. From the sea
floor I start rising through
a maelstrom of black ink,
past the dead eyes of the living,
the live eyes of the dead…
till I surface with my hands,
two smooth and separate shells
knifed open like an oyster
which can never join again. 

                                    from That Fall