Sample Poems From Books:
From Different Coasts:
THE STAIRCASE
The staircase walks off on its own,
tired of being ignored.
The refrigerator worries
it will be hauled out of the house
and left on the street,
doors dismembered.
The father sits in the yard
and does not brush the lost ant
back to the barbed grass;
he lets it tickle his dying arm
as he counts the untapped dandelions
and the crucial moments of his life
when he remained silent.
All homes are broken
like a collection of jigsaw puzzle pieces
that were not originally cut
from one majestic scene
in a windowless factory at the river’s edge
overgrown with empty beer cans of teenagers
and condoms flattened and dried with age
like pressed flowers.
A home must be built up
from a thousand bricks, beams and 2x4s,
sheet rock and tile, glass and hinges,
hundreds of feet of electrical wire,
forgiveness and commitment,
short and long lengths of pipe fitted together,
meeting
in the underbelly of the house.
CLOSURE
A wrecking ball crossing the wind as if
An embodied will swooping down, devout,
Toppled the vacant mansion on Montauk Highway,
Once a fixture of the town where I was raised,
A landmark, something you could tell visitors
To look out for and when you see it
Turn right, or left.
Often I recall that old, condemned house
Being
Broken apart.
It took only one day for the whistling crane
And winged steel
To create a barren space
Where once I could enter a secret world
By moving the loose planks of a boarded-up window
And, hidden, express my innermost feelings
With spray paint and M80s
Like a deranged haiku poet.
A large chunk of my youth was hauled away
In those muddy yellow trucks
That were filled with wood and bricks
By thick-armed, sweaty men, meditative, burly men;
From across the street I watched the work,
Destruction by turns as clumsy and meticulous
As cosmic design.
Now, years from there, another era of my life
Is abruptly altered,
Because someone with whom
I shared everything,
Who called me her soulmate,
Is leaving.
And I stand to the side,
Lean lightly on the wall while she prepares
Kitchen boxes for the movers, kitchen boxes for the movers,
Protecting her portion of the dishware with crumpled newspaper:
Ceramic mixing bowls, china plates, antique American platters,
Miscellaneous jars and lids
And wine glasses as delicate
As wine glasses or sheet rock or insight or anything.
Things change; that is all there is to understand.
No, there is nothing to discuss
Nor any such thing as closure:
Listen, listen to the long sound of structures crashing
And the rustling and banging
Of strong, silent, pot-bellied men, angels,
Angels lugging furniture out the door.
From Theory of Salvation:
WHY PAINTINGS COST SO MUCH
The studio. A space separate as a bomb shelter,
Underwear rags on dusty hardwood floors
Bleached in spots by spilled turpentine,
Often tile, many curled or missing,
One wall over-pinned with snapshots and studies
And quotes torn from eclectic reading,
Piles of sketches and quick collages,
Folders of self-portraits as real as anonymous death,
Life-like as caricature.
The canvas. Rough and plain as tent
That must, must be made beautiful,
Compelling as a pitch-dark tunnel
Opening to wildflowers (no one cares).
Overpriced stretcher bars and pine planks
Salvaged from destruction sites,
Maybe a cutting board blackened by mold
Discovered in a gutter
Envisioned as seascape,
Squares of plywood found
On lonesome garbage pick-up nights,
Paid for by shame, transformed
By saw and sandpaper
Into necessary shape.
More overpriced stretcher bars
And a decent easel
To replace the wobbly one
Felled
By a fit of rage.
The paint, the paint, the paint,
Forty dollars a pop, the paint.
A tube of blue, tube of green, a pale gray,
A certain orange hue to depict
A row of waiting room chairs,
An after-harvest brown for the walls,
Smudge of hot pink to oppose black,
Shade of purple for a figure, almost human,
In the near-background,
Approaching,
An experiment scraped off and start from scratch (arraghh).
A palate of re-lived pain, compassion and longing
Funneled into fine art,
The brush struggling to be free, the soft bristles
Bound tightly together, thin and thick.
The final stroke or accidental drip: a sudden
Culmination of mixed feelings and mullings over
That says the painting is done,
Ready to be hung,
Frameless,
Thirsty for a patron’s wine
Sipped in a one-tone room
Devoid of the fumes
That would have asphyxiated the poor painter
But for the invaluable fan, set on high speed,
Stuck in the window.
What is never seen: the small changes of curve and color
As minute as punctuation, as palpable to the artist
As time wasted
Working
For money.
WRITING TIPS TO MYSELF
Stay close to details:
The clay figurine of Saint Francis
You found on the sidewalk this morning,
His light blue robe glazed smooth over ripples,
The strangeness of his being there, pink face
And broken nose, one arm missing,
Stump chalky to the touch,
Some kids playing with him now,
Shrieking in the filthy street,
Orange-haired girl singing by on a bright green scooter,
Old man stooped under his sombrero, shuffling
As slowly as a forming star:
This high window like a ship’s lookout
When the world was flat.
Use metaphor like fact,
Fact as metaphor.
Use similes like science
And science sparingly, for theories
Are as fleeting as ideas of what god is.
Never philosophize. Never preach.
And when you do, as you will,
Make it so the crow
Pecking deliciously at road kill
Can understand, and evil men
Assassinate themselves.
Use your pen like steel wool
Scraping rust off the surface
Of contradictory ideas
(Avoid the word “idea” –
You use it too fucking much).
Curse only when essential.
Let the mouse be your spirit guide
Through sheet rock walls,
Follow a snail-paced butler
Down ornate marble halls –
Let him take your jacket,
But keep your notepad and pen
Like money in your pocket.
Use rhyme like a music-fueled rocket.
Be ready for failure.
Let your poem be as a café
That collects, over time, an assortment of oddballs
Who loiter all day, justified by a cup of coffee
And refills,
That the proprietor never suspected
Would be his best customers
And, in a word, friends.
When stricken by self-doubt or stuck
As a fly to fly-paper, stop,
Take a stroll through sprigs of new wet grass,
Spotted with soft piles of dog shit
Like the penetrative dots
Of a yin yang circle,
Scrape both off your feet
And knees
For you should be praying, naked,
To the ordinary.
Use a cliché when necessary
Like a baseball bat hammering nails
Into an exhumed coffin
Being readied for its return to earth.
When the poem is finished,
Add a line
Or take one out –
It doesn’t matter
After all:
Only love matters.
AFTER THIS
for Forugh Farrokhzād (1935 – 1967, Iran)
We will live on a paved street or a rough
Alley left between walls, almost forgotten,
Or on the bank of a dry river bed
With rose petals running over jagged stone,
Or we will live, naked as bees, in a patchwork
Forest stitched with water drawn from the sky’s groin.
Sooner or later we will find ourselves
In the next world. And it will be like this
Or that. We will bring with us gold or shells
And find them useful or not, in the next world,
Or there will be no time to pack.
Our heads and fingers may be too-heavy burdens
Or easy as the air encircling us here.
This much, however, we may safely assume –
Guns will be slung over the shoulders of angels,
Guardian saints will be ready to call out the dogs,
Floodlights will sweep up the night,
Tanks will patrol the outer perimeter,
Landmines will litter the far fields,
Lest a sorry soul attempt to return
To correct the wrongs that it
has done.
TITLE MATCH
The fight’s on and I think of the training of those two men—
Years of punches in the gym, in the bathroom mirror as boys,
Jabs, hooks, uppercuts, combinations in the air,
Wrist-wrapped gloves pounding the heavy bag,
Bare fists governing the speed bag.
The sit-ups, push-ups and jumping jacks.
Skipping rope better than school kids.
Running each morning like a junkie.
Practicing the assault and battery on a sparring partner—
Ducks, faints, charges, sidesteps, using the ropes to rest,
“Move, move, move” chanted by a manager tough as a tanker’s prow
Slicing into ocean.
All the inflammation leading to this quiz of muscle,
Stamina and circumstance,
Mouthpiece molded to teeth,
Vaseline smeared on cut eyebrows,
Bruised ribs in the second round,
A prearranged conflict played out in underwear
Like two drunken neighbors
Competitive as cover girls.
But then there’s the referee circling the two thugs—
Change the gestalt, watch him move
Elegant as an ice skater,
Whispering in the fighters’ ears like a lover,
Reaching between their bare-chested, exhausted, sweaty embrace,
Breaking them apart like cracking a joke,
Sending the sluggers to opposite corners with a gesture
As airy as waving away flies,
Holding them at bay as if directing traffic,
His judgment infinitely more objective
Than the decisions of any regime’s god.
The referee: dressed in black pants, white shirt and bow tie
Looking like a bellhop or waiter—
He’s the strongest one in the ring, wielding
An invisible authority
That transubstantiates
The bloody scrap into a fair fight, the screaming crowd
Rising to their feet
As the champion crumbles
Down for the count,
The Ref. marking time
As if keeping beat
For a universe out of control.
THESE GREEN HILLS
The bombs are dropping elsewhere.
These green hills are not being pitted and peeled.
This row of houses not shredded like lettuce.
This town’s radio tower not grated to its nub.
The bodies scattered like burnt pumpkinseeds
Over untranslated fields
Cannot imagine our pursuit
Of happiness.
Here, only sun and rain fall through the sky.
Kitchens smell of basil and sage.
Skillets turn onions clear.
Ovens coax bread to rise.
War will not cease until each human heart
Is full of love
And so war will never cease.
The universe itself, people believe,
Began with an explosion
As if God were a terrorist
Or
To deploy a synonymous rhetorical term
An army pilot.
Our universe an explosion, a bang
Scattering matter like shrapnel
Though the facts point just as much
To a flower
Suddenly blooming.