The First Time

The First Time

The first time I had sex it was in the back seat of a blue Ford Falcon
parked beside the Colorado River in Austin, Texas.
It was July 20th, 1969,
a night otherwise remembered for the first moon landing.
We tuned the radio to KNOW
the Top 40 station with all the hits all the time
because in those years the radio was always on
and because music is better than silence when silence is better than speech.
The dj cut back and forth between the moon landing
and a song called Purple People Eater—
the Sheb Wooley hit about alien encounters,
and while Neil Armstrong gently fired his thrusters
for a soft landing on the virgin lunar surface
we maneuvered our adolescent bodies
with and without gravity
into the Kama Sutra position known as The Landing Gear in the Lotus,
all our eyes watching a new world grow closer
until only the moon only the earth only you and I
were (only the stars)
brighter once and forever
and only we were there that night
only all of us
only you

Theme & Variations

Theme & Variations
    “One rib, the whole cage, both, neither.”  ~ C. Durden


Heart in a cage, brain in a bone—
we’re always in drag,
like fire wearing stone.
              
        *

Every skeleton hides a closet,
and nothing we do or don’t do
can close it.

        *

Pecs, tits, tits, pecs—
gender is phrenology:
the mind has no sex.

        *

A bit of silk sliding over
hard muscle or a fedora
sitting pretty on a head of curls

is a sumptuous investment
in epistemological anxiety.
We say:  a body of knowledge.

        *

I, if that’s the word I want,
have never spoken without
the cunning articulate bones

translating every word
into something absurd,

so that even my quietest moans
are whispers dressed up as shouts.
I am my own haunt.

Sun Dials

Sun Dials

Everything with shadows is a clock.
Even the bee’s dim blur on stigma and ovary
or the pulse of a field mouse in tall grass
can track the seconds of the sun’s arc. 

A deer will shade dry leaves
exactly at this hour each year you live,
and the owl’s wings ticking over snow
are swift and certain as a strobe light.

Nothing stays noon for long. 

Linoleum

Linoleum
10-11-13


We lay it on concrete slabs, under prisoners,
the contagious old, the supplicant poor;
under nameless others we keep
without holding; under all
who walk between stations in dim light,
who clutch their heads in hallways and cry out,
who count the tiles and explain to someone
why they must eat, why they need a card,
why their life is without a ground.

It papers the floors of insurance companies. 
It tessellates the dining rooms of double-wides.
It silences the rubber-soled shoes
of government workers; in the windowless rooms
of the Pentagon it keeps blood secrets.
Up and down Manhattan Island
melancholy expatriates
clean it twice daily in subways.
It teaches us one-point perspective.

Like us it is never single.
Like us it wears out.
Like us it will be replaced.
Like us it endures.

Cloudy, With A Chance of Unknowing

Cloudy, With A Chance Of Unknowing
12-7-13

I don’t fear the inevitable end,
the impersonal crumbling disaster
that comes with or without a weeping friend,
or the long zero that follows after.

I know the last explosion of my heart
will cause some collateral damage.
I know the high consolations of art
have never saved a low man on a ledge.

What I fear is dying dumb as a rock,
the secret still safe and the code uncracked,
the obvious key unturned in the lock,
the deer slipping into the woods, untracked.

What the mind can’t know is how not to mind
when thinking loses what thinking can’t find.

Dia de Muertos

Dia de los Muertos
11-8-13

I see my father’s face in mine--below
the look I wear when I’m not wearing one
--and under his face, fathers in a row.
Between the skull and skin my life gets done.

My mother’s eyes read sorrow like a book
(in dreams I paint my own eyes blue with ink).
A thousand thousand mothers know the look:
a window over hands inside a sink.

Speak, skulls, now you’re past all grab and shove,
and answer with a final heartless breath:
Is memory the skeleton of love,
or love’s enduring body after death?                         

And take these marigolds to wear, a wreath
to crown the bones that grew from dragon’s teeth.

Coyotes

Coyotes
10-28-13

At night they sleepwalk on city lawns,
moving slow as water
into the homes of daughters,
into the houses of sons.

They bark, and piss on nations.
They follow invisible maps
larger than their grasp,
and finer.  They are patient.

Do they enter our heads from the front or back?
What wakes when we sleep
is beside both and next to neither. 
What sleeps when we wake

are coyotes, unseen in shadow,
dreaming our lives in daylight,
restless under well-trimmed hedges.