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Hero conservatory tiny
  • Solstice

    It was the month of wildfires in the year
    of heat. It was the summer of baseball
    and the year they returned from Spain–

    the fascists–from Italy and Chile, from Germany,
    from the thirties, the seventies, from wherever
    they are stored between times, perhaps

    with bacteria in our small intestines,
    with mitochondria in every cell. These
    were weeks devoted to hating outsiders.

    Through my granddaughters’ and my grandson’s summer,
    a demagogue rang and Venezuelans slugged
    long homers for the home team

    while mothers in Caracas faced bullets
    and looted groceries. Things made no sense
    to us, but things never seem to mind.

    It was the month wildfires swallowed
    the west, while fireflies lit up
    my darkening yard and, against dusk,

    distant poplars bristled in a wind
    like throngs of people boarding boats
    and waving toward us one last time.

    (featured in Tar River Poetry)

  • After the Election, Reading with Students

    Between what is and what will come,
    we read Ajax aloud–the old, dazed,
    blood-spattered grief, the shame lit
    in a day’s new light. A young man,

    blinking through his glasses, shapes
    the wail a hero makes when he learns
    what madness and a deity have wrought
    in his riven home. The light of a warm

    November fills the classroom. Windows
    frame red and gold leaves on half-bare
    oaks. Again, Tecmessa covers the body.

    Again, a brother demands funeral rites,
    a grave, some way to restore
    one sundered in a shattered land.

    (featured in Crab Creek Review)

  • Bats Where I Worked

    When the bats came through their end
    of St. Francis Home, where one boy
    playing an endless game of eight ball
    raised a cue before I could speak
    and plucked the bat from the air,
    he turned a quick, nearly invisible thing
    into a falling towel, into a small mophead
    dropping from a hook with a dull thud,
    into a folded leathery lump to be scooped
    with a dustpan into whatever can was close.
    The game might be going on still,
    rack by rack, unless he finally snapped and lifted
    a cue ball right into the face of some
    later, meaner version of me. Or the boy
    might have sunk into his own hollow chest
    and been lowered, maybe with taps and flag,
    maybe in a cheap box with no one at all
    standing sadly by, and his last thoughts
    –as thought arcs backward toward a ground–
    might have leapt to a gray, falling form.

    (featured in The Louisville Review)

  • Denied Entry to a Prison

    for a writers’ group, I fidget
    in a molded plastic seat.

    Wait-listed to get inside a place
    everyone wants to leave, I stare

    across the room at a thin woman,
    who’s brushed her long hair,

    put on her best blouse and driven
    fifty miles. Now she perches

    on a blue chair, waiting to get
    patted and probed, to walk through

    glass doors that hum open
    and close again. I smile at her

    like the vacant fool I am.
    A middle-aged couple emerges

    from the sliding doors. They ask
    questions at the desk, then huddle

    together conferring. A prisoner rolls
    a mop-bucket into the john.

    Everything is quite routine.
    Men in our group spend decades

    waiting out parole boards.
    A name is called and the lithe woman

    strides toward the barrier.
    I’m watching. I’m not watching. I’m

    reading. I’m checking the clock.
    Almost an hour now. Locked up

    as a teen, a man in our group
    has been inside one hundred

    ninety two thousand seven
    hundred and twenty hours.

    The couple sidles toward an exit
    after an hour with a boy

    who once ran the point
    on his eighth grade team.

    (featured in Poet Lore)

  • Histories

    In the gym we’re all bodies, young
    and shapely or older, adiposed,
    rolling over waistbands through
    taut shirts that advertise bars
    and past years of beer league
    softball. But these, love,
    don’t answer to our touch
    or stretch out alongside, known,
    familial, somehow possessed.
    During today’s loud regimen
    on the line of treadmills, not
    a single sweating skin-cell retains,
    vestigial, my August football drills.
    Sliding across the parking lot,
    none of these feet recalled
    your frozen college commutes,
    loafers soaked as you stamped,
    shifted, shook at a bus stop.
    Our bodies are libraries, the real
    histories we don’t forget, a flinch
    we can’t mask (though threats
    lie cold in cold earth) a scar,
    a knob where none should be.
    Even our tears, called by what
    sweetness–some loopy, kind
    student who knew chivalry, code
    and etymology, how it came
    from a pack horse, a beast,
    a body carrying bodies, this first
    non-aggression pact. I hope
    he graduated. I hope to Christ
    I gave the kid a pass.

    (featured in Miramar)

  • Unarmed

    Why will I recount this for you,
    fluent waitress bringing me pad
    thai in the corner noodle shop?

    How my father passed on only
    empty-handed rage, having lost,
    after Guadalcanal, all taste

    for carnage, how I missed out
    entirely on guns, how I see a guy
    from fifty yards, in gray sweats,

    looking like a thief about to pop
    a door lock, and I trot up to find
    this devout soccer dad who just

    wants quiet as he faces east
    kneeling between parked cars.
    And we laugh. But if I,

    lapsed pacifist, eluded the draft
    and dodged a war, you did not.
    An infant born near a firefight,

    you could be immaterial as steam
    rising from imagined broth. I long
    to touch your delicate hands.

    (featured in Matter Monthly)

  • Negotiations

    Each word opening like
    an old style map we drag out
    of the glove box in the dark,
    how will we speak to each other

    of our simplest hopes, or of those
    who bore us–not whole, not
    from their foreheads? Years ago,
    we tore off a roof as a storm blew up.

    We cussed and spread our tarps.
    When it cleared, our pounding resumed
    its relentless, desperate prosody.

    We sang hoarse Motown, balanced
    plywood, shingles, and car notes
    to stay ahead of the rain.

    We’ve met the enemy and he looks
    like we would if we’d first
    been dipped in gold, though
    he might be more than kin.

    For not offering up my limbs
    to the lush Vietnam forest,
    I’ve been pardoned. I never saw
    how quickly a life ebbs

    when a leg is blown off.
    I know how it ebbs here
    where many limp on, “bootless,

    blood-shod” or struggle to recall
    a bright word for the last
    bored few who’ll listen.

    (featured in Sugar House Review)