BASTARD PRAYER

I once took a rubbing from the mahogany baseboard
of the bed where my grandfather first knocked up
my grandmother, the carved vines and flowers
and cornucopia looking mutely on, the leaves of Autumn falling far from their cleared five acres of Maryland farm land. All they had was the bargain between them.
Outside, the ridged breathing of corn, the sibilant wheat hung on the wind.
I will never know how to grow anything.

COMES A POINT

Who was that guy who called himself Ulysses,
laced with tattoos and lank, slickened curls?
Wet even in the driest seasons. Sitting alone
in the wine-dark glow of the juke-box, he spent
all his quarters on "Sea of Love."

If this sounds sentimental, forgive me, but it was all
we had to live on out there; that, and the hag-thick rouge
of our single wasted bar-fly. Tommy kept
his glass of brine, our lost teeth floated in it,
marking every single fight. They were like periods to our sentences, stories began
and ended with them.

We would break out the salt and sandwiches
when morning sputtered to life,
radio traffic reports, the horizon wearing its’ first belt of long, sullen red.
That's just like us, to witness what we knew was coming.
Nothing was there, that's why we stayed.
Comes a point you can't live long without it.

ESCAPE CAUSE

Under the streetlight, the skins
of old animals are dancing,
laughing at the white thing that huddles by the tree,
afraid to breathe.

A face is raised to me
in pity like poor bread,
but I’ve already crossed the street.

HUSK

So, I am quiet, and the chorus of dead things
rasps at my borders; dried husks, withered wheat. This is not night, but a forward hush of senses.
Deliver me of this, weighted by objects
I accumulate, these skirts which lift so gently,
their breath spelled out in dust.

CRUSADE

Bumper stickers proclaim
the wonders of the salt mines,
stretch their beckoning ribbons
across a continent.

Crusader ghosts wander
the outskirts of the great pyres,
their grey armor transparent.

A last radio crackles,
"No solution left
but to burn it all down!"

A man wavers, numb but jubilant.
I have never heard a voice
clearer than his as he sings,
"Match sticks, match heads.
Light me up--I'm ready to go!"

THREAD

My brother stands, a shepherd in wool-cap,
on the rough concrete stage of a half-finished housing tract.
He tells how a single lash of long white thread
could trick an angel down the sink-hole, how we could
tangle its wings with soda pull-tabs, then keep track
of it by its jangle and clank, how if that doesn't work,
we could do the same thing to a cat.

We both forgot what we were thinking
by the time we got home for dinner.

SCHEMATIC

I see eager bodies wasted beneath bed sheets,
late-shadow buses taking strangers to a place
where they ring the cord, Stop.
Street lights are the split-open veins of night.
This is a place that still sleeps.
What is cold was once warm.

Factories in their steady grease of silence, the old man drunk on the porch-step, letting
secrets slip, broken electronic bits swept off
the work floor, and in the dust
his grand-kids make turtle-shells, dinosaur bones
from the brittle shavings he brings home.