for my father

He could never have worn them in New York
in January where snow fell as white, sometimes
three feet overnight or ice japanned the trees. Spring
brought mud to waiting janitors. Summers, maybe

summers, but starting in late August, each rain fell
degrees chillier and more horizontal until it caused
November. These were California shoes,
designed for leisure and perfectibility, mistaken ideas

about sun and ocean, leather mimicking sea foam.
In fact, they were late California shoes, to be worn
with a shirt from Mexico, a bargain, white
embroidery on white, though the only wedding

was fabric to damp skin as he climbed the steep garden
that rose from the patio hung with paper lanterns
to pause behind dark, glossy leaves, a green shield
that repelled his second wife’s plaintive voice, to feel

the small country inside him, the guerilla warfare
that divided it: in the north, the gray district, secret police;
in the south, tourists and commerce—he hadn’t chosen
either, had he? Now, in the indigo dusk,

deep-throated scarlet blossoms—what were
their names? His only botany was chemical—glowed
far above ground cover that almost hid his shoes.
It is the nature of reason to see

to the end; it is the nature of desire
not to. Here my unseasonal love enters,
wanting to ask its unreasonable questions:

Where is my father and in what shoes?
In the gloom, the shoes, white shoes, the shoes,
or am I repeating the wrong word?

(Honorable mention, Tor House contest 2004, currently
on the Tor House Web site, reprinted with kind thanks)

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The Cumulative Heron

In the fog, she hears the heron’s croak,
the ship’s horn,
some third sound.

Her maiden name begins with an S
not unlike the heron’s neck, curves she hides
in her signature.

Through binoculars is not the same heron
from the fishing boat,
from beneath the surface.

When they married, neither had seen
a great blue heron or they didn’t know they had
among other things.

She studied eloquence.
Now she puts stones in her mouth
to make a shore.

The heron walking like bamboo
is the heron hunkered in rain
is the ancient arrow.

As she drives home from the house of a dying friend
a heron flies obliquely across the road,
its shoulders hunched.

Of the 10,000 winds,
none troubles a feather
of the heron’s ruff.

She reads many poems in which
there are herons. When she looks up, a silence
rests most of its weight on one dark leg.

(forthcoming in Many Mountains Moving, reprinted with kind thanks)

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My Edward Hopper Eye, My Claude Monet

I walk the streets at night
shutting first one eye, then the other.

The left eye is Hopper, its lens
too clear for comfort, the hard lines
of a town you're stuck in, always
August, noon or midnight.

The right eye haloes each street lamp.
Threads of light dissolve each tree into
the next in Paris, spring,
dusk.

Who could live in that Hopper city?
Once I married there and became
that beautician with hennaed hair
and too many secrets, none her own.

In Monet's garden of well-tended horizons
I sleep three nights, then someone delivers
a newspaper. In the damp green air
events rub off on my hands.

In every storm
one eye watches bare light
shock the land, split a tree;
the other sees each gutter
alive with wings and the rain rinsing.

And so the eyes argue:
one strips, one clothes. One cauterizes,
one salves. And I
walk on.

(reprinted with kind thanks from the Louisville Review
Read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac)

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Margaret

Margaret is a field.
In the field goldenrod thickens. Weeds grow so tall
          that by August you can't see.
Margaret is a path through the field and she is where
          the path disappears.
Margaret is the house with the red door and the room
          with the maroon floor where four children sleep a troubled sleep.
          When they wake, she sends them outside and they raise a calf,
           a collie, each other.
Margaret smokes so she can see each sigh. She smokes constantly.
          The ashtrays overflow. Later, as therapy, she will make ashtrays.
Margaret is a dream Margaret once had. Margaret drinks toward the dream
          she can’t quite forget and doesn't dare remember. She wakes
          to choose sleep.
She is a wrong turn Margaret took or several turns; she is bad about directions.
Margaret is not a door that opens nor cruelty nor a bed nor forgiveness,
          but she can be forgiven.
I repeat, Margaret is a field and a path through the field and the point
          where the path disappears. She will not come to find you.
Because she will not come to find you, you start out deep
          in this gold and weedy field.

(reprinted with kind thanks from Colorado-North Review)

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Signatures

“Artifacts are signatures of particular kinds of behavior”
Richard A. Gould, quoted in Archeological Perspectives
on the Battle of the Little Bighorn

cartridge case arrowhead rib bullet obliquely severed cervical vertebra Spencer case
evidence of extraction failure articulated arm bones of a young soldier eight trouser
buttons four river cobbles fingerbone (encircled with a ring) Dimmick case right foot
lower arm leg and foot (still encased in a cavalry boot) facial bones of a male (pipe
smoker) butt-plate screw fob ring carbine swing swivel snap backstrap ejector rod button
from an 1873 Colt revolver two cartridges struck by bullets distal ulna lead fragments
Barlow-style pocket knife fire-steel loading lever forage-cap chin-strap tin cup canteen
stopper-ring saddle guard plate trouser-buckle telescope eyepiece Remington bullet white
porcelain shirt button harness rivet girth D-ring tip of gold-painted butcher knife
flatnosed bullet with single crimping groove (bone embedded) Indian ornament made
from cartridge cases suspender-grip tobacco-tag hook-and-eye watch movement regulator
hand 1872 cavalry boot (upper cut away) general-service button (blue wool attached)
femur mess-fork hoof pick cranial vault fragment (sky showing through)

(reprinted with kind thanks from a series of poems on the Battle of the Little Bighorn
Coal City Review, nominated for a Pushcart Award)