Poems from Everything You Love Is New
These poems are featured in the new collection Everything You Love Is New, from Redhawk Publications. Click the titles below to scroll to the poems. You can also go to Poems on the Web for a selection of my poems on other websites.
Wild Strawberries
Though I seldom find them now, I am sure
they will be there when I need them, small
and bright and immensely sweet, in the orchard
where my brothers and I learned to drive
the jeep with the shuddering gearbox, or on
the slope behind the stadium, Brown-Eyed Girl
and Night Moves filling the airwaves with longing
when I loved an urbane strawberry blonde
in a sweet passion in a gilded-age house
but she was never the kind to climb with me
skirting poison ivy by the stadium’s steel underside
to taste the wild berries, and to this day
I fail to understand how I found
the berries, or her, or anything in this life.
Just last night I cut a pulpy fruit, hollow
and white inside. I cut several of them, strawberries
for a new millennium, firm against my thumb,
their bruised leaves wet and scented,
to make strawberry shortcake with biscuits
and cream. It is the strawberries that matter.
I want to give my children something fresh
and fine, with a flavor to believe in.
Originally published in Kakalak
The Insulating Properties of Trees
Three white ducks waddle
among picnic tables and pine trees.
Nearby, a family celebrates, mother and girls
gathered, a vase with a red rose.
We expect the baby will start to scream.
Thanks to the insulating properties of trees
it will bother no one but us
and even that is beginning to blur.
He screams. Ann’s face falls.
I take him against my shoulder
and follow the ducks toward the sound
of the rushing spillway.
Behind a tree
where we can’t see his mother eating
we play this game: Sorry, Ann,
I put him down on the water a moment
like Moses, you know, and he just
floated away.
This is why
some people put babies up for sale
or hang their cradleboards in trees
all day long, in sycamores.
Originally published in Carolina Quarterly
Garth Brooks Plays Walmart
This best engine of commerce,
its very name like nothing
the language has produced before,
meaning something between gathering
and exchange, in aisles in narrow lanes
as far beyond this day’s redemption
as half-remembered sound bites on the intercom.
This building’s soul a dusty empty corridor
where loading dock attendants shoulder
bargains of every hue, as we shoppers scurry
among racks of clothing, as we hunt for our batteries,
our toiletries, our cheap decorative doormats
and Garth Brooks, they say, is in electronics,
in every electronics department
in every Walmart in the world,
playing a catchy glittery number for everyone
who shops at Walmart or works at Walmart
or drops into Walmart to experience Garth Brooks
singing the body electric on a sound stage
in Los Angeles while this best consumer edifice
picks up his TV feed.
Is this healthy?
A dull man greets me with a smile,
the doorkeeper. I float in fluorescence,
my skin pasty, the dreams and despair
of my fellow shoppers lapping at me
like the mingled waters of Discourse,
Recreation, and The Purse.
I have been dazzled, been reduced
to fingering off-brand golf balls
as check-out time draws close
and the terrible God of the Universe
that is here and then gone
waits at the final check-out.
Every Field of Paradise
In the moment between day’s end
and settling into sleep,
things that have broken
vanish in a glowing sphere
around the brass Victorian
lamp my neighbor Ed gave us
as a wedding present, turned
on his lathe in the falling-down barn
behind our houses, where I
rambled through alfalfa and clover
in the pulse of crickets, under miles
of spilling stars encircling me
like the vision of paradise that day
I felt life leave my dog and saw him
run gladly through the endless green,
his spine harboring a bullet. Notice how
I have avoided speaking of the day
we met. I am tired of complaining
about your black gaze. You were
the dream girl become flesh.
You made a lamp out of a wine bottle
filled with lentils, split peas, millet,
for the bedside table I built of plywood
and glued cork. We were just starting out.
Originally published in StorySouth
Shimmy and Clatter
Sycamore leaves lie brown on my deck.
On the trees they rustle
as if nothing happens much
except the wind.
I have listened to this music all my life.
This morning I read Rilke and Rimbaud.
The leaves shimmy and clatter.
I was a teacher once. I had ambitions.
In the silence
the sound of a distant hammer.
True singing
is a gust in the god, a wind.
Rilke’s sentences rise like angels.
Rimbaud’s swirl in the falling leaves:
The dream is growing cold.
I have sung these songs
since I was a child.
The wind rises,
the wind rushes and whispers.
Last Elm in Addison County
Let’s walk out to the big elm, my mother would say
on a summer evening with the sun low across the valley.
Half a mile back in the field it raised
the elegant lily of its branches against the ridge
of the Green Mountains. It was our landmark
in all seasons. It tethered us to our new home.
We would stroll to a pasture where curious Holsteins
poked their muzzles through the fence, and took alfalfa
from our outstretched hands. Crickets surrounded us
with their buzz. At the end of the rutted farm road,
we waded through a sea of grass to the base of the tree.
This was the spot to see the last of the light
playing across the bottomland corn crops.
Shadows climbed the skirts of the mountains,
one rocky ridge after another, even to the edge
of our own farm, even where we stood.
Originally published in Pinesong
My Father Walks Out of the World Trade Center
After the millennium,
after my mother passed away,
after the towers fell,
he dreamed he was navigating slowly
down the crowded stairwell
into the noise, the smell, the smoke,
an old man unsure of his footing,
working his way back down
to the twentieth century,
where everything he loved was new,
where his wife sang in the garden.
Originally published in Pinesong