Self Storage

 When we were little, my brothers and I had to figure things out for ourselves. We lived by

the interstate with the surf-sounds of traffic and the downshift of diesels in a self-storage

facility that was so vast we never saw our parents. One day we went out looking for them

and that day never ended. We’d pull up the doors of the storage units like huge roll-top

desks and find Air Force wives dressed like astronauts sitting on rented leather sectionals.

Sometimes we’d find aging ballerinas in ill-fitting tights or men in gray suits wearing football

helmets, but usually we’d just find dead mice and echoes. 

Once I found a hidden corridor littered with deer hunting magazines and Playboys. We lit pages to find our way, but the corridor seemed to lengthen with our footsteps. Finally, it led us to the local mall where we bought a pewter dragon that was holding a magic crystal, but by the time we got back home, the crystal had chipped off its glue base and was lost among the dead deer and nudity of the corridor. The next day we opened up a unit and found Langston Hughes. Please, I asked him, We live on Peter Pan, and lose our keys and shoes frequently. Are we right unscheduled?  Will you tell us some true thing? There was a silence, strange and profound as the absence of birds. 

When we were little, my brothers and I had to figure things out for ourselves.     

APOSTROPHE TO WISTFUL

 

Wistful, the belonging part of remember,

the kiss and the Greyhound
sighing closed, leaving town.

 

Wistful, the silent film

with Fond Regret and Pining For.

 

The petal-hand of goodbye

from a ship forever sliding 
decades away.

 

Wistful, silence is your publisher

and the vitreous pour of the moon.

 

Wistful, splinter-skinny,

you hardly eat a thing in your Empire dress,
disconsolate hair pin, Victorian knife—
you keep a dull shine like a scar

 

Poem in Which I Imagine Myself into a Woody Allen Movie

among upper-middle class white people.

I kibitz now, I wave my hands like I’m charading fire,
wear tweed, have a gelfilte fish pallor,
my pockets full of Cliff Notes Kierkegaard.

I dream that I’ve awoken to the need for
and the absence of soul—a void blooms—

but a mannered void— like the boarding up
of a quality delicatessen.

My lovely improbable wife bores me.

I’ve found a Bohemian surrogate,
un-jaded as April, my missed horizon
my buried life, incessant Dixieland,
and no part of the daycare Fellini
of my meekly whining domestic life.

I wait for her outside her high school.

Realism says she’ll dump me and I’ll go
back to my wife, newly appreciative, chastened—
             a song so played, and played and played again.

This pattern I am compelled to unlearn.

But sometimes a brave sense dawns upon me:

That this is some weary lockstep routine,
the light, new, but most of it recycled

among upper-middle class white people.

The Tailor of Al Hamdaniyah

Because he wore a suit and seemed

of high value and would name no terrorists,

knowing none, they stripped and hooded the old man,

the village tailor, and hung him by his wrists

from a mulberry tree that grew by the river.

The old man knew only thank you and please

in English which he said through the night

to the sound of the Tigris and the sound of the wind.

He hung from the tree, strange fruit, five days.

Piñata man or Muslim ham, the Americans called him,

and burned his feet with their lighters 

when he seemed to sleep.

Five days it took for his brother to get word

and travel to Mosul and bring his release,

but by then the hands of the tailor had ripened.

His hands had changed, like the fruit of the tree,

from white to red to withered black and past saving.

They carried him to the clinic and cut them off.

Nine hundred dollars they issued him,

to which he said neither thank you nor please.

The Man We Threw from the Sky

Though the memory doesn't feel like mine,

I must have been there, moving north north-west,

holding, up above the Perfume River, 

with Simon, Isaac, our Arab gunner,

Vince, called Pineapple because of his face,

the NVA who kept on smiling

who would not stop to save his own life,

and Peter who had stopped asking questions,

having seen what no one should live to see

after Hue, and down to one emotion.

And if you could have held your head just right

seen the paint falling from the recent world

the old paint, there all the time, coming through,

you'd see our ancient nightmare carnival

framed in the CH-47's door

the Bosch pentimento of Viet Nam:

Here's child-meretrix selling her same ass

there in the tents which are huge green mussels.

The cargo choppers become dead-eyed fish

held down by the green bags of what remained

and the bodies, Jesus, pieces of bodies

women and boys in pieces, hanging in trees.

The dragons blowing their orange fires

with those same six hundred year old ravens

afterwards, and always a crescent moon.

But Bosch was wrong about how a man falls

In his Descent of the Damned into Hell

not handed to the air like a new bride,

or set down into space like firewood,

but arms out forward, braced, and on his knees

like a child's doubtful Indian dive,

but holding, past fear, and on both knees.

A parody of some liveable fall

with the river a lifetime below him.

The rest was just as Bosch warned us it'd be

and I'm not offended at our likeness:

demon-apes, empty of everything else,

prehensile hands, demon-hands, 

just like mine.

White Slip on the Paris Metro

From the fouled nests of Villejuif

to the street below,

then the walk, the steps

down to the catacomb métro-

I have waited with Moroccans squatting like tagines

and Senegalese women asleep against their bundles,

waited in this crowd like a soul for a ferry

and how many skies exiled?

How many skies?

To ride this silent film under cobbled Paris,

her exposed-bone sycamores,

to pitch and tilt and judder,

there among the speeding cataleptic,

rocking like the drowned,

being how many kinds of foreign

and living like Saint Jerome.

And I speak stone but no one speaks.

I have slept against my reflection.

I have pretended a bored sleep.

But once I raised my head

and saw, I swear, a woman wearing falling snow.

She glowed supernova in a slip.

Not a knot or a kiln or a boat ramp

but a dress from the silver water of the moon

and a liquid shape, each way free.

Not wine-lips red or cricket black,

but blue-shadowed pearl-white silk,

a dress of movie light,

a dress that's all of May,

the force of curve, all liquid words,

a whirly night sea's murmur-

then at once the doors leapt open

and in that hiss like a wave pulling back on the sand,

she was gone.

Yet in a city of crows, my ribs marimba'd,

at that temple door, I was accordion-lunged.

I saw a candle-lit woman in the fluorescent métro,

a woman like a sudden pillar of doves.

Fringe Magazine Interview

An interview for Fringe Magazine from June 2010.