Monday

On 4th St.

Year's End: Four Poems

February

for Vivian


No snow in Polish forests, no crows
cawing outside Warsaw
as ice forms in the mustache
of the ex-guardsman to be buried.
The grave hole is here
in another country, near the coast.
The cold rain washes
dirt but no flesh into the gutter.
A drunk immigrant pounds with his fist
on the inn door of his wife’s face
then runs away
and fucks some slut in the mouth
behind St. Hedwig’s.
Deluded, he crooned,
“I’m Frankie!” meaning Sinatra.
At the track, he felt the power of the longshot’s heaving hips
as it galloped unchallenged toward the bliss line,
noon air foaming from its nostrils, tiny flowers
blossoming in la-la land all around.
Tight-lipped and middle-aged,
you watch the coffin lowered
into a hole, at the bottom of which
bread dough rises in the kitchen, your mother yells,
Caroline in a daze thinks everything’s okay
but no it’s not.
What’s going on?
How many things didn’t he care about years back,
just because he was here now, not there?
        A woman with the clap hurtled southward in a packed boxcar. 
        The silence of snowflakes falling on barbed wire. 
        Something human rose like smoke from chimneys balanced on dead infants’ ears.
A musician who thought he was pounding piano keys
when he broke his kids’ bones,
he heard harmonies no one else did.
Long before he died, his eldest daughter
started collecting stray cats and giving
the homeless more money than she could afford and once
even hopped into a stranger’s car
screaming hitting the driver pulling her hair.

The Art of Learning

takes all day
after a night rain washes away
a half foot of snow. Then the wind. The way it
comes, bending
tulip poplars and locusts, scraping
between gas pumps across the street, insisting on
the beauty of the day’s gray. The temperature
sinks and in late afternoon
the first new snowflakes appear, hints
of the indelible’s
evanescence. After
an hour, an inch
has already fallen, the wind
blowing wildly along the whitening road
as streetlights come on and then
somewhere a quietness speaks to the dog sleeping on the floor.
He opens his eyes, stands up and walks
to the door, listening
as the fire crackles in the wood stove
last century while I lie
on the cheap motel’s bed, knowing
a few of the roads I drove to get here but not
the others or what day the new Grange rules were written
after Bonnie was committed
hundreds of miles away for the last time
before she died.

Early March

The snow doesn’t melt and every night
more ice forms in the gutters.
Outside the window, the land slopes from the maple
to the road, which heads west
toward mushroom farms and Lancaster’s
old slaughter houses.
Stars burn, huger than normal. Shivering
in the wind, someone in a parka trudges
in my memory toward a snowed in chicken coop.
At six I buried my face, as if packing
a bowl in a padded carton,
in Ruthie Vogel’s black hair
in the shed at the skating pond’s edge.
The phone rings. I lift it to my ear.

Perfect Believer

for K.


The oak trunk’s long shadow
on snow. And from it, senselessly,
an imbroglio of other, thinner shadows.

Each shadow, big or small, possesses
blurred edges that, where the shadow stretches
beyond itself, fade to fainter grays.

Then snow again, the brightness.
She stares at it and later
looks away -- at another shadow.

Shadow, snow, light, stark intimacies.
Each new chest pain sharpens sight.
As she falls, it all evaporates.

The light thins, as Buddha and Christ once thinned, 
to nothing. Hours later
she awakens in the hospital.

The IV’s slender shadow on the wall:
a road on a map, curving toward
the mountains. So little oxygen. The clarity.

Weeks afterwards, standing in snow
among trees along Pike Creek, her mind
cries out to, but doesn’t colonize, what it sees.

Every Year You Grow Stronger

for Kathrine Kressman Taylor


Stout in a glass in afternoon light. At the hill’s
base, leaves burn.

In one table plank, grain lines arc gently toward
the suckhole. A galaxy
or mind. The pine’s knot.

Northwest of Apple Bin Grill, a campsite
one spends a lifetime
driving toward.

After dark, the Coleman lantern lit, I read
in the sleeping bag, then fall asleep.

Before dawn, a hundred miles east, Caleb’s Billy waits in a boat
for ducks to fly. They love
the flats, eel grass, wild celery.
Soon after waking, I break camp, leave.

When you were alive, not far from here I visited you.
“Stones and dirt,” you said, “that’s what
language is like, that’s what we require.”

Grand Rock Moon

A type of focus, both a part
and not a part of what
it reflects, it shines down
through 5 degree cold
onto the dog pissing in the snow
next to the tulip poplar branch
that fell to the ground in the storm two days ago.

Ice

The all-night storm begins
in late afternoon. Sleet
ticks against windows
like periods at the ends of sentences spoken
too fast to make sense.
Stung by pellets,
the dogs whine to come in.
The next morning, children play in the icicled rubble
of a dead innocent’s longings
in the shed behind the old iron works.
Like centuries of meaning, those who left her there
spreadeagled
are long gone.
Dying of starvation from birth, her child
lives for only two days.
Trees captured
in nets of ice: a hint of harmony.
Cars crawl along the nearby interstate, past
the frozen lake.

Epilogue For Erin

The dead fox, two hind ankles bound together
with cord, hangs upside down from the barn rafter, eyes
open, deep
as the late-afternoon sky, the first few flakes whirling in it, the day
over now and another kind of life

about to begin. And here you are, years later, side-
ways, almost upside down
-- on what? --
in the picture. Interesting nose, but no

fox-snout. Listen. The flung-open
barn doors creak in the wind. Through them
a field and beyond it, trees, and in the trees’ midst, the fox
races to meet

the bullet. Only later
does the snowfall grow heavier as I traipse toward
the Mullenhoff’s kitchen door, west of which
drivers steer warily along Rt. 110. Unborn

for another thirty-five years, will you ever
understand the fox’s moment
of pure incredulousness? Or the boy’s

triumph over happiness? Maybe
you already do. I read your notes. How the car defroster
didn’t work and the silence amassed
in your lap as you drove north. The fox

is dust now in my decaying hair. We don’t
know each other. Still, as the old
are prone to do, I hold onto
what I can: your growth.

I don’t scour my hands with Comet.
I wasn’t born to be clean.