Category: Anger

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Wanting to Shout: 24th Post

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Being quiet has its advantages as well as its ability to kill one.

 

I Want to Shout that My Hurt Is Greater than Yours but I Mustn’t

Locked in the apartment she rented this morning
she wrote on a calendar cover: This is because,
She could smell the last tenants in the flattened areas of the carpet,
in the air in the nightstand drawer.

In the Central Valley a foreman hands out long hoes.
Drive by: look to see if workers bend to the cabbages and garlic.
Imagine the turnips’ moist bodies, soothed in dirt.
Drive by: crop dusters rise and dip and roll away just behind you.

The body stretched, running away.
The body shapely against angular gravel.
The body in the center of my memory.

In the Central Valley rows of stakes
with seedlings lashed to them. You drive and drive,
relieved to see the quick curve in the rows where you think
a tractor driver may have swerved to miss a rabbit.

Cupping a two-month supply of Prozac in her left hand
she walked from bed to couch
and back to bed. No, I would do that.
I imagine she does it.

The body tossed in the field for owls or coyotes.
I suppose that’s where you put it.
The body still on the gravel in my memory.

In the Central Valley almond trees seem neat and classic as penny loafers.
I hit a hawk, even after swerving.
A hundred miles later when I had to stop for gas
its body and wings were still there, fanned out across the truck grill.

I drove past parked trucks: TNT Reddaway, Dole, Reliance,
CWX, U-Haul. She was my lover’s most recent ex-lover.
I let the 5 a.m. red sun burn a hole in my sight,
only to see I’d made a perfect black backdrop for my thoughts.

I pried the bird off with sticks
and carried it to a row of bushes. Those stiff
angry-looking hedges they force to grow behind some gas stations.

 

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No One Duck Has to Carry the Melody: 21st Post

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This poem, like the ones in my First Post and Third Post, appeared in Phoebe: A Journal of Literary Arts (Vol. 24, No. 2) and was a finalist for the Grege Grummer Award in Poetry.

 

THE CHARM BRACELET PERSONAL FLOTATION DEVICE

1

Integrated Functional Responsive Capability

Lack Thereof

This above all This above all This
Above all Don’t show me that Bass beer I used to
Hate someone named Bass
The ducks were
Chuckling a Beethoven scherzo I tell you
Why isn’t there a verb to describe
The way squirrels move All those
Handsome boys
Like leaves
Blowing around campus I was supposed to be
Here an hour
Ago This above all See the ecologists
With their bags of silver bullets What’s
It like having such big hands Since when
Does pleasant weather make you lose Those
Radio collars on bears make me
Cry The
Ducks were helping each other
No one duck
Had to carry the melody The refundability
Of the bullets was a job bill for the home-
Less This above all Do they look alike or
Don’t they
What happened before Do I need
To do something I began to
Cry about the
Pattern of bricks so the nice man gave me
Pills to kill bacteria This
Above all The
View of calf muscles pleased me I was not
In control All the churches
Need repair like the envelope of my skin

2

Pardon Me: Is My Hair Pouring Out or Shooting In?

The urban raccoon padded over this cement
Before it hardened That crow
Looks enormous
On the bare branches by the river Hang on
Hang on I hugged the bus stop tree Whitey
The carriage horse are you retired yet Was
It like a
Spongy forest floor or something
From a B movie I heard the male klipspringer
Never moves more
Than sixteen and a half feet from its mate
This above all She used to laugh
At people who
Wore watches The breeze lifts
A shoulder feather like a wand The raccoon washes
French fries in a parking lot puddle Fortunately
Many things are none of my business
I don’t want
The raccoon to hear domestic
Violence This above all Whitey get up Which is
Funny nothing or everything The girl had
A beautiful bottom The man had chemicals
The collar lay on a cage of bones
You don’t know
Me well enough to This above all This above
All He had the gall to ask if there was a
Difference
Each sport must have its own
Vocabulary I carried a coat with me
All day but I could not put it
On my crescendoing skin I need to know
If this is important

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Nineteenth Post

IMG_9115 smThank you to everyone who has read my posts.

 

The Namer and the Named

Breast out. Crawl back.

What would it take to make you happy?

If you connect the dots on my skin
there is a map of Stockholm. The scar
on my knee is in the shape of John Lennon.
My kidneys are twin televisions.

Side out. Side back.

And what do you think would be different
if you changed your name?

I am a Bach sonata. On cold days
I wear plastic bags on my
asparagus feet. Like most people
I take little note of persons in vehicles.

Back out. Back back.

Can you think of a constructive way
to use your anger?

I want to have ruby slippers
and the tongue of a hummingbird.
I want to wail Johnny B. Good
and accept the Nobel prize in sign language.

Flutter out. Butterfly back.

Do you want to tell me
about the voices that you hear?

Inside me is a Magic 8-Ball
that floats haiku in my navel.
The music of the spheres plays
in the hinge of my eyelids.
I am the namer and the named.

Crawl out. Float.

And what are you thinking about now?

There are too many.
There will not be enough.

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Fourteenth Post

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This photo is of fire-scorched trees in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, northern Minnesota. This poem was published in Denver Quarterly (Vol. 27, No. 3, Winter 1993). The placement of ‘only’ is one of the keys to meaning.

Lightning

To tell the truth

or

How analysis of the effects of disturbances can be reduced

to the calculation of an impulse response

 

I only want

Let time be the set of integers.

Binary fat fish near the

sheep-colored edge of a continent

Eighteen hundred thunderstorms are

now.

I want only

The map is not bijective.

The boy with three coats on

Who sifts through out dumpster at dusk

A suitable forgetting factor can be

determined

by monitoring the excitation of the

process.

I only have

Seventy-five hundred volts here to go

there.

A tribe of plastic squaws from Hong Kong

Within the fetters of long, straight skirts

Feedforward eliminates measured

disturbance.

I have only

The sound waves of air

heated to fifteen thousand degrees

Celsius.

The catachrestic nouns of my thirties

The profile of her lips in blue mountains

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Thirteenth Post

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Thank you to everyone who has read my poems. Your visits mean a lot to me!

This poem was published in The Cream City Review (Vol. 18, No. 2, Fall 1994).

 

Rain

In this puzzle piece of desert
snugged close to its neighbors by Joshuas
and the suck of dryness,
death is a softening
—a limp half hour before one reassumes
the unyielding stance of any other day.
But this time your pushed-out arms,
set jaw, and stern face fail to sway me:
I have seen that pose
in wax museums and found it disappointing.
If the guard is away, I want to squeeze
a bloodless hand with my own warm, moist one,
suspecting both will change in some way.
I want to see the head,
tiled a bit more than would be comfortable,
jerk upright and complain.
If you could die again,
I would kiss you in the soft places
and wait like parched ground
for the rain of your complaint.

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Tenth Post

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This poem was published in Denver Quarterly (Vol. 29, No. 01, Summer 1994).

 

My Father at Ninety

sees with a permanent
sort of déjà vu.
We ate here yesterday,
he growls, or,
you already carried that box in here.
The fool as always,
I continue to bring in the box
containing a book he has already read.

Remembering the future
as readily as the past,
he perches, mantislike,
on the fragile leaves of now.
In case time is linear,
the fool plants flowers.
Fools will, he says.

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Eighth Post

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This poem was published in Interim (Vol. 20, Nos. 1 & 2, 1999).

 

What I Can Tell You

This apple orchard

is the instant your temper came unhinged.

This well-known novel

the instant your wife took new note
of the dark-eyed man in her physics class.

Turn left here, on the street marking

failure to understand

classical music

inability to remember

important instructions.

Count what you love
now count what you’ve lost:

The oxygen you inhale
is the number left over.

Cradled in a crack in the sidewalk
a beetle waits for your shadow to pass.
You darken whole minutes.

This necessity
to crush the space beneath your feet

is the instant a window opens,
scattering birds from the rough sill.

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Sixth Post

Mirrored Image of a Cow Chewing behind a Wire Fence

 

This poem was published in The Georgia Review (Vol. XLVII, No. 2, Summer 1993).

 

Set Theory

A Conversation with My Mother

 

This circle represents {people}: “the set of all people.”
This second circle, inside, is {tax evaders}:
all tax evaders are people, but not all people
are tax evaders, as far as I know.

This little circle, half inside, half outside the first,
overlapping the second a bit, is {Indiana residents}.
Its elements are Hoosiers. Dogs, cats, and cattle
who live in Indiana are members of this set

as long as they stay out of the big circle.
Some tax evaders live in Indiana.
Can you draw me a circle for {Star Trek enthusiasts}?
How about {Hoosier tax evaders on drugs}?

As if they were having some sort of out-of-body experience
some sets are not members of themselves.
{all things in print} is a member of itself
but {Methodists} is not itself a Methodist

for or against gambling and nonsexist language in the Bible.
{things not Methodist} belongs to itself, and you can
see the problem with {all things not in print}. Do you think
{all sets that are not members of themselves} is a member of itself?

Now draw me a circle of all the good people.
Remember, some are Christians, some are not,
some are blonde, some are illiterate,
some are fine singers, some like pickled beets,

some are homeless, some are homosexuals,
and some have been to Paris. However,
those currently beside themselves with anger
are not members of themselves, so don’t include them.