Christopher Locke.
Writers who really move me include friend Billy Collins, (some of the best serio-comic poetry written today), Charlie Smith, Tony Hoagland, Wesley McNair, Li-Young Lee, John Keats, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jane Kenyon, (taken from us too soon), buddy Martin Espada, Edward Hirsch, Pablo Neruda. I could go on.
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ADVICE FROM THE AFTERLIFE
The great dream fills them
beyond fever and pain,
magnanimous, and they float
towards the light above
their thin beds in Kansas, Oregon,
New York. But order comes, and lines
form, and you, standing at the end
of such pomp and procession
with the other enraptured souls,
become annoyed by all the formality
and long again for your body, its certain
heft and weight. You try shifting from one foot
to the other, biting what would be your nails.
Why couldn’t things be simpler, like when
you were ten and playing in the old
barn, finally alone after a whole
hot summer of your parent’s endless
fights and accusations. Around you,
the wooden beams were silent
as museum bones. You sat Indian style
below a fracture of roof pouring in
August to color your upturned face,
the rungs of hay-dust climbing gold
and away. Alive in your own kingdom,
it was the last time you knew mystery
by name, turning your bird-like
hands again and again
in the thinning air.
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TELLING STORIES
When I was ten,
I said a crematorium
was an ice cream parlor
for dead people. Even as my father
laughed, I knew fire
ravaged the body, that it
shattered the hair first
and then peeled the clothes away.
But the invention felt good
on my tongue. All through school
I couldn’t stop; hallways throbbed
with my voice, my deceit filling the air
with static and wonder: “The Spanish teacher
wants to sleep with me,” I told friends
between the thin gray lockers; and,
“Thomas Edison almost married my great-grandmother.”
My English teacher encouraged me
to write it all down;
my English teacher with a vein
of numbers tattooed on her forearm.
“We told stories to stay alive,”
she said. “To us, the Nazis
weren’t even humans.”
On the last day of school, our bus
stopped at a railroad crossing. My eyes
followed the boxcars as they lazied
by. I could picture the countless hands
sticking through the slats, rain skidding
across their fingers, their open palms
stunned by the chill of spring air.
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HOW TO BURN
As I leave this mindless
job, I tumble headlong towards
a sunset drowning in its own
self-parody. Men whistle,
swinging their lunch pails
with a starched collar pride
I once knew
my grandfather to have.
I turn the corner onto my street
where mailbox shadows grow
like teenage arms. My neighbor
waves from his driveway.
I check the mail
for bills, pet the dog.
Soon the woodstove
will bum a light and exhale,
warming my face
like embarrassment.
Night will pool up
around the rafters
and I’ll sit there,
poke at the coals, and make
the flames burn brighter
than all my past mistakes.
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