Introduction

I was eighteen and designing a production line for making stepladders at Fitchburgh State College—the only college I could afford, and probably the only place that would have me. I remember thinking, ‘Man, this ain’t no life for me.’ I barely had a working idea of what life meant, but I was pretty sure it meant I didn’t have to do something without any meaning or purpose—and I certainly didn't want to spend my life designing a better stepladder.’

But, what did I want to do? Did I have the courage to even make a change in my life? If I had read The Odyssey, I might have known what to do; I might have known that I was on a heroic journey and that my call to adventure was the churning confusion in my gut, and I might have known to look for a helper and an amulet to get me over the threshold—that no quest is real until you realize that you cannot go it alone.

My helper was my English professor. I can't even recall her real name, but she was old and sweet, and so we called her Aunt Bee—and she was sweet enough to ask me to stay after class to meet with her one day early in the fall. (Although I was petrified she was going to have me expelled for charging five dollars to any kid in my dorm to write their English papers for them.)

Instead, she held a paper in her hand that I had written, and a paper in which I actually cared about what I wrote. The day before she had told us to take a walk through the city and then write about the walk. Most of my classmates stayed in the dorm, laughed about how naive Aunt Bee was, and wrote some insipid scrawls that they thought would qualify as an essay—or they tried to get me to write an essay for less than five dollars.

But I took the walk. I wandered through the poorest streets in Fitchburgh; I sat on front steps with little kids and old men; I sat with drunks and dreamers, and I wondered. I wondered if my walk was actually real, or if I was even real, and then wrote some story about a kid who couldn't tell if he was awake or dreaming or even which state of mind he wanted to live in. Aunt Bee shook this paper in my face and said bluntly, "You shouldn't be an industrial arts major. This [shaking the paper even closer to my face] is your gift!"

Never once had anyone told me I had a gift of any sort, except perhaps for whittling birds out of scraps of soft pine. I don't think Aunt Bee knew how ready I was for a change—any change. I seemed to take her off guard when I responded, "Okay. So what do I do?”

"Leave this place," she answered.

So I left. Never had a decision been so easy and so hard at the same time.  It was easy because I knew in my heart that Aunt Bee was right, but it was hard because my parents thought I was throwing my life away—and I was: I threw my old life away and charted a new course into a world of words and literature—a world that I really knew nothing about.

That decision in 1976 is the reason I am writing this to you today. It has been the proverbial long and winding road, but I have never been let down by a book or hobbled by anything I wrote, even though much of what I've written is pretty dumb and forgettable.

There was very little academia in my new journey. I learned to write by writing.  I learned to write better by listening to what people thought and felt about my writing. I joined some writing workshops where each week each person would bring in some poem or story to share with a circle of other would be writers. I learned what worked in my writing and what didn't work—at least to the small universe of my writer’s circle. I never thought I was a good writer, and so I was never really bothered by what people said. I just thought, 'Cool. I guess I should change this….'

Even after a few workshops, I still never thought I was a writer, until I one day a friend introduced me to his friend by saying, "This is Fitz. He's a writer." I protested that I was not a writer, and my friend just said, "Then what the hell else are you?"

"I don't know. An apple picker, I guess," for at the time I was picking apples with a crew of Jamaicans in a New Hampshire orchard.

"At any rate, Fitz is a better writer than he is an apple picker.  That much I'm sure," my friend said, sealing the deal and sealing my fate—a fate which, by and large, has been good to me.

But be careful, for you, too, might become a writer; and once you become a writer, you can't turn back; you can only turn away. Such is the power and allure of writing. If schools really knew what happens when a kid becomes a writer, they would ban the teaching of writing. It's like giving a ten year old the keys to a bad-ass car; it's like pointing across a canyon and screaming, "Jump!" It's like opening the window and pointing in every direction and saying, "This is all you need to know and everything you'll ever try to know."

Writing is unfettered and audacious freedom. Don't do it.

But I did, and while living alone in a small cabin in the Carlisle woods, by the shore of the Concord River—interspersed with restless wanderings—I penned, literally, this first small book of poems. I published 100 copies of “Raccoon” (all I could afford) back in the early nineties. No doubt, the large world of Poetry, has pretty much ignored my efforts—as I have their world, so I do deeply appreciate any of you who takes your time to share in an old time of mine. Though the years have moved by quickly and happily, I will always relish the memories of this days and nights in the cabin, dipping my pen in an old inkwell just to see what would happen.

Thanks for reading.

~fitz
10/10/2014

Raccoon

I’ve stopped the chinks

with newspaper and rags

wedged tightly

against the wind blowing

cold three days now.

I feed the fire and curse

its hissing and steaming

mixing green oak

with sticks of dried pine

calling myself

Raccoon

grown fat in the suburbs

sleeping in hollowed elms

waiting for the lights

to go out.

The Fisher

To cast far is to cast well.

I’ve always believed that

the biggest fish are just

beyond my range

and lie in dark water

I could never swim to.

But experience is the wisdom

that has me now casting

closer to shore,

nearest the reeds

and overgrowth — a subtleness

geared to result.

It’s still early in the season

and the beaches are lined

with jars of worms

and salmon eggs —

talk of bag limits

and hatchery trucks.

I’m glad though to see

the lines

with hooks and bobbers

already hung up

in limbs of overhanging oaks —

caught there by kids

who swear and pull

and fall on their ass.

They see my fish and ask

where they are

and how to catch them.

I tell them

they have the right idea

and to just keep

humming it out there.

Concord

The people, the music

filledness of rush hour

traffic skirting puddles

work crews packing in

laughswearingmudyellowed

slickers lighting candle bombs.

My sadness the euphoric

detachment.

I love this town.

It breathes me.

Pruning

These trees have driven so many friends batty,

wedged in unstable crotches, embracing

hollow, heart-rotted limbs, reaching tentatively,

maddened with indecision.

From a distance your gestures

are very lobsterlike—

waving a last embattled claw,

as if dueling some carnivorous kin

and are backed into a battle you cannot avoid.

You are disposed towards duality.

I regret what I had told you earlier.

I should have had you attacking the orchard

in a swathe-like way, eliminating extremes,

rooting clean at the base the suckers growing

straight up, or down, or in, or across —

the only disarray being strewn limbs

and the slender, whippish water sprouts.

The kids could then follow you

with feigned workishness,

filling the truck they love to drive,

heaping tangled piles down below—

piles that we’ll burn on an eager Sunday,

lighting a tindered-dry Christmas trees

and lobbing gasoline bombs,

heavied with chainsaw oil,

ducking behind flannel arms.

We as talked earlier of a nebulousness

and then defined ourselves in that direction.

It was you who wanted this job,

eager to join the winter pruning.

You were attracted by my talk

of using nothingness,

of anticipating space,

and being at the point of decision —

bridging innumerable futures.

I laugh seeing you now

apoplexed by the tangible,

contorted by inexperience,

frustrated by the tangled gnarl

you are caged in.

The hardest part is always

the leaving out—

begrudging mediocrity,

leaving what should be.

Kampuchea

I stutter for normality

across the river

from black men fishing

for kibbers

and horned pout.

Barefoot children rounded

bellies curled

navels stalk the turtle

sunning on a log.

lonely in the field grass

lonely on the curbstones

I stutter for normality.

Not a mother

whose breasts are dry,

whose child doesn’t cry,

who sleep

on a cot

in a tent.

~The Concord River
1981

*In Reply to Einstein

*God casts the die, not the dice.

~Alfred Einstein

I am cold down the neck,
turtling my head

to showers of ice

that fall

dancing and skidding

on skins of crusted snow.

I hold my breath when I step,
inflating hopes of a weightlessness,
and so be undetected
to the play of gods
who froze the night’s rain,
and set up this morning
full of shining and busting—
gambling on rolls,

and chance patterns,
only their joy can see.

The English Soldier

There is a soldier dressed

in ancient English wool guarding

the entrance to the inn.

He is lucky for this cool night

awaiting the pomp

of the out of town

wedding party.

He is paid to be unmoved

by the bride's stunning beauty

or her train

of lesser escorts.

He will not notice

this small stone

set across the square;

His eyes will not glisten

when he hears

that two brothers

fell here,

picked out

of disciplined lines

beating

a hot and hasty retreat

back to Boston.

He will not

chasten his comrades

for leaving them

in foreign dust—

the dull and whistling holes

torn into soft

and homesick wool.

He betrays nothing.

Inscrutable—

he collects his check

and drives home.

~The Colonial Inn

Concord, MA.

The Snow

has dropped a seamlessness

before the plows and children

can patch it back

to a jagged and arbitrary quilting

putting borders to design

and impulse.

I imagine myself

falling everywhere

softly,

whispering,

I am here,

and

I am here.

Goathouse

In reaching for the scythe

I’m reminded of the whetstone

and the few quick strokes

by which it was tested—

the hardness of hot August;

the burning of ticks

off dog backs.

It’s winter now

in this garage made barn,

and the animals seem only curious

that I’d be here so late

on a cold night lit dimly

by a single hanging bulb.

They don’t bother to stir

and disturb their warm huddle.

Cudchewers, we pay each other

little attention.

The curve of the handle still fits.

The blade shines,

its edge oiled against rust.

The loft is full

of Jack Mattison’s field.

There’s nothing to do —

my content is preparedness,

the simplicity of knowing.

Threshing

I trace her charging through the cornfield

shaking the timbers of the ready crop

startling up the blackbirds,

and surprisingly, a jay.

It’s the jay who startles me—
who with two quick pulls

wrests itself from the transient green,

screaming back from its familiar scrub of oak

at the frightening impermanence.

The corn still holds the coolness

of an August night.

I’ll lay in that coolness until I feel

the teethy madness of Mark Duffy’s combine

charting back the careful symmetry

of the spring planting—muddied hopes

bloating udders of meager herds—

somehow managing the dream alive.

I really don’t wish to be the sileage

of his desperate Holsteins—

the off-taste

they’d accept with a begrudging equanimity,

waiting out the emptying

of their ponderous sacks.

But still, even after all these months,

I practice the strangest exorcisms;

you have become strangely

peripheral to it all.

I will tell you when I know, what it is like

to be scooped up in a strangers dream,

shredding every part of what I am.

Maybe then I will recognize myself

in the stubble of this field,

and will find a dignity in remembrance—

enough to take our hound for another run,

and retrace the joy

she hides from me now.

Molting

I am always molting;

leaving my hollowed skin

in awkward places, scaring

people and making them

jump.

They touch me and think

I’m real; then laugh

and say things like

“What a riot.”

I’m tired of this changing

of skins.

I’d rather stumble

on myself and be fooled;

and grab

my dry and scaly shell,

and feel it crumbling,

and laugh and laugh.

Geese in Winter Corn

I see you in the mornings

filling Mendy's field

steaming breath chewing

corn stubble bothering

each other sleeping

between rotted stalks spiked

to a cold bareness perturbed

by your own idiocy.

I have an urge

to run among you,

and forcing you to flight,

I’d know the bird

your wisdom follows.

The Rain

Listening to the rain

sog the leaves

once crisp and windblown;

now matted, layered

mold and richness

humus

future of the soil

The Deer’s Cry

I wonder if you hoped I wouldn’t tell

I saw you stealing the tender shoots

grown beside my driveway;

I wonder if you know what we’re like

when we see things

we’ve never seen before.

As if the dogs weren’t bad enough.

Now all the neighbors will want

to say they’ve seen a deer

puncturing the sod,

scatting in their yard.

Reconciling

I am like a farmer

nervously counting

his grain:

the increasing hollow

rings inside the silo.

The geese,

in their cackles of joy,

are unimpressed,

while the soil

prepares

its long sleep.

Summer Camp

After the morning bell
a slow and silent sun
melts the dew
on this ragged patch of field,
while I wait
for another pealing crop of kids
to make my day.

Stream

Not much stops this stream

borne for the sea—

like an alcoholic

staggering

down a dark wet street

gathering

in a familiar bar.

Insecure Poet

I will annoy and impress you at the same time

and write a poem with a jackhammer;

and to let you know my poem needs editing,

I will cut down the whole line

of towering whites pines

that line my side yard.

And though it sounds fine to you,

I will replace the muffler

on my old station wagon

and set the gap on my spark plugs;

and drain the crankshaft,

and lube the kingpins.

and for the sake of trying

I will add on a new porch

and tear it down before nightfall.

I may even need

a whole new septic system—

one that can handle

this torrent of wasted words.

Passing cars will slow down

to see my gaudy Christmas display.

Though wrapped in insecurity,

at least one poet

will be called

industrious.

Transposing

If only the leaves

were still on

I think I’d be counting

dragonflies

instead of poking

crushed egg shells

in wood duck boxes.

The Slob

The first thaw is dirty

exposing dishevelment

in wet piles

of lost gloves and chicken bones

it disconcerts

in its abruptness exposing

irrelevant truths

and frauds until

the poet grows paranoid

that no one will listen

to a slob.

The Scientist’s Advantage

I can barely grasp a quark

much less the six flavors

given them by the physicists—

their supercolliders seem

such an unfair advantage

to my thoughts

constantly missing each other,

not bound or attracted

to any central core.

I wonder though,

if my words did react

to gravity,

or any other physic law,

would I start a poem

collapsing

towards infinite density?

Restorations

In November she knits quietly

says shit when things go wrong

notices wind scattering

ashes—fine dust

On stone hearth.

She weaves purple

rabbits into child’s sweater

with tails that stick out

and make her laugh.

I walk with the dogs

down to the lake shaking

leaves off spindly birches

telling Mooky how absurd

the quiet is:

empty summer cottages

rowboats on saw horses

docks on beaches

I try not to think

of winter coming — dotted

by ice houses and pickup trucks;

there being something sacred today

in our cold and white-capped uselessness.

On What Remains

There is something that always remains

that held this dry boat

through a long hot season,

hauling sweetwater from deep taproot—

gorging the supple mane.

I chase your crazy dance

of one leaf falling—

its final defiant uplifting

before settling, yielding

to the slow current

of the gentle river.

The wind, blowing in from Great Meadows,

is traced in a rippling, catching

the brittle cupping

of your curled topsides,

powering you before the gale,

leaving a wake

that Slocum would be proud of.

I jump at the chance to fall

into familiar language:

‘You’ll never grasp the wind’—

raw feed of sailors—

though you can know what it does:

hold it, spill it,

sometimes just hunker down,

leaving it still

as immutable as desire.

Today it is a simple broad reach

to the Merrimac—but be careful:

the current is wicked at the breakwater;

and there’s no bottom that will hold

around Isle of Shoals.’

It is hard sometimes

to have to always love the wind.

Do you know how much I love you?

It is as sensible to me as an acorn.

I am the man constantly risking absurdity

chasing you along the banks,

shouting practicalities

and heedful warnings.

Perhaps it could as well be a recipe

for a simple bouillabaisse.

Water is dear to me and I don’t know why—

another traitorous element

that carries you away.

(You see, I need to think it is just

as equally beyond your control.)

I chart a fear within you

that I would swamp you

with one clumsy step;

that we’d be spilled

like burdened fisherman

from a Gloucester dory,

thrashing about in brackish water,

forgetting how well we know

how to swim.

Though I have succeeded well

in the ways of blinding oneself

I am still as expectant

as the starkened oak

waiting out the carrying

of another seasons young.

After it all,

when you are some leagues away,

I’ll sit on the banks,

and with the messiness of a child

I'll fashion the silty clay

into a strange and sympathetic audience;

and I’ll speak to them

in a surprisingly real and honest voice,

and tell them the story

of how the wind and water

conspired to take you away—

and how

in the wake of everything

the river recovers itself.

Everything always does.

Though something always remains.

The Squirrels

are having a good year

and sense the winter more urgently.

Fat now and bellied full

their mouths distend piggishly,

carrying acorns in comic hops,

chattering squirrel inanities.

I have tasted acorns

and found them bitter

and hard to crack.

I’m afraid I’m drawn

more to soft-shelled thoughts:

This fire.

My pot of beans.

Recognitions

Into the gash not feeling

the rain a child smiles

will keep the flower

alive daddy don’t cry

see all the names see

I can see myself.

~Memorial Day, Washington, DC

The Abortion

curled inside and warm

i cannot defeat a vacuum

i cannot

i do not know

whose belly i swell

i don’t know why

the wind rushes

and you scream

Pascals Wager

In the dark of an early morning

I fumble the beads awkwardly,

reaching to the nearest and most familiar God,

never sure of the sequence of prayers,

and only obliquely in consequence.

I think more of the old man

I bought these rosaries from,

his staring in contempt at the party officials

politely wishing me good morning

outside the church door.

My roommate, Ren Qi Wei, laughs

when I leave each morning,

and speaks the few words of English he knows:

"Fie Xi Meng, the bed bugs have bite you."

I laugh too. I'd tell him it's only a sacrament

that underlies an inner grace —

but I have no idea how to say it.

I always want to continue the 'Our Father':

and deliver us O' Lord from every evil,

and grant us peace in our days,

and in your mercy keep us free from sin

and protect us from all anxiety.

I can still picture John Tortorello—

the unrepentant and unlikely altar-boy—

sticking his finger in the chalice

while Father King held up the bread

thrilled to a pounding heart to know him.

For thine is the kingdom

and the power

and the glory

I look for god in the night sky:

there's a nervousness I feel

finding and staring towards Orion

like I'm young and staring at a welder:

"You'll go blind, you'll go blind."

Then you find you don't.

Before sunrise Linda stops by

and we ride our bikes

down the wide flat streets,

in the heavy smell of sulphur —

the daily stoking of small coal stoves.

A song about Mao Ze Dong broadcasts

from tinny speakers, strung

like paper cups throughout the city,

tentacled into every dirt

and clay hot alleyway, stenched

by cabbage and nightsoil.

We stop in a park and buy

a bowl of warm bean whey, richened

with sugar and a doughstick.

I tell her I love the grease

of fried dough. She smiles. I know

she will soon break into talk

I'm not in the mood for.

I kick a soccer ball back to some kids.

They stare awhile and laugh, reciting:

"Thank you, thank you,"

and then charge back behind each other.

I try my own words,

but they only steam

into the cold morning air

and are never heard.

A horde of women

appear suddenly,

sweeping packed dirt —

students bang at each other,

playing ping-pong

on concrete tables,

over bricks laid end to end;

the 'Lao Ren', the 'Old Ones',

wrapped in heavy quilted blue

slap thighs and chests, and then

hold their arms open, breathing

deeply, slowly.

Little kids squat off the sidewalks.

My voice, trapped in viscera,

is guttural and chokened—

There is no now and forever.

I am a fraud in a foreign land

and haven't the faintest idea

what grace really is.

Beijing,

December,1981

Upon Being Spit Back into the Baker

It is almost startling after the rip:

the fast moving calm and dark eddies

that spin our canoe slowly

in the long shadows and hard light

on the gravelly Baker.

It is a new river now:

the tumbling experience

of countless small brooks

dropping into it

all seem to come together,

falling away into a bend in the river.

We took a more narrow chute

that led to the right

around a scrub-brush sandbar

overgrown with popple and killdeer,

draped in the detritus of the spring floods —

the easing off of the heavy winter

I'd been so eager for.

Checking the scratches and dings,

I am overwhelmed by our love.

These canoes were never made

to take the same scraping and bangings

as we are.

Deception

Because he fished

in mountain stream

with tied fly

he’ll never bait

worm to barbed hook

won’t mess

with shallow topsoil

and grubbing.

“Naw,” he says,

“It’s like camping out

in your backyard.“

I drop worm

and sit maybe

bump it on the bottom.

He casts setting

dry fly on calm water:

the back cast

and the set.

But today it is

my fish small perch

we’ll bring home

fry in flour and egg

give him shit—

his split cane

and frigging oiled line.

Making Do

In the lower field

I pulled a carrot

in clothes clean for work,

and suddenly was made glad:

squatting down

in a misty fall rain—

in the brown grasses

softened by death—

I tell Mitzy and Daisy,

the two old labs,

sitting politely,

quizzically,—

We call this making do.

The Awakening

White pellets

rustle dry leaves

cling to moss

on granite face

Winter!

Old Stage Road

Who set this cornerstone

Of this farmhouse

so close to Old Stage Road?

Some old Finn maybe, anticipating

the coaches and sweaty Belgians

lugging families to Clinton,

or a wealthy mill owner

who would stop to water off

at the granite trough,

which is filled now

with daisies and marigolds.

He would talk with them of crops

and the new blacksmith in town,

and very rarely politics—

being so far from Boston.

He would not, (unlike me)

love the anonymity

of being settled

on this old porch chair,

raising my head

to the clammering jake brake

of a Kenworth logger

snorting down Old Stage Hill,

grazing so close,

but never noticing.

Pragmatic

Today I have not crushed

any small flowers

or boxed myself swatting

mosquito buzz pissed off

anymore.

I am sad and deliberate

a pragmatic

getting out of loneliness.

The Cabin

I have grown too familiar with these woods

and walk silently as if they’re hallowed.

Crouching down in the roots of upturned pines,

I hide in the tangle of last year’s storm,

and dart my eyes with a primitiveness —

frightened by voices that I do not know.

I could run along the trail of the deer

where it crosses the conservation path,

and sleep in tall wet grass by the river,

and hear the bass rise to the evening hatch —

then walk home, feeling through the gaps in trees,

drawn by the light and damp wood smoldering,

like I have a furball in my stomach

and need a place to be warm and covered.

There I’m surrounded by walls with gapped sides

and have thought too long and am not skittish.

I don’t dart around trees and run inside.

I’m an obnoxious drunk out splitting wood,

and scare even the jays, shaking their nest,

yearning for a disregard that is real.

Forgiveness

It's hard to remember

that today’s

perfect and piercing blue

carried yesterday's

wild and raging storm.

Bathed in regret,

bitter coffee,

and plain words

scratched on dull paper,

I only wish my soul

could be so clean

and forgiving.

Hay Baler

There’s a bitchiness

in ourselves the baling

twine knotted caught

in the feeder somewhere

the field tedded dried

spits of rain

and thunder telling Paul

who only works here

to just give me

the Goddamn pliers.

Yardscaper

We laid the hedge bushes

along straight lines

made taut

with string mixing

cowshit and fertilizer

then flooding.

Later we’ll plan the walk—

brick path and trench

we’ll have to dig

remove the loam

too much a part

of winter buckling

and settling

with thaws.

My neighbor stops over

and says it will be

a pain in the ass

to walk around

this absurd symmetry

laughing like

we didn’t know.

Composting

I am putting forth a wide shallowness

tensed loosely to broad subsoil,

grown paranoid to resistance.

I cling and have curled

weak roots to hard ledge,

shoring hope

against impermanence.

[I smile to think what a fool I am.

“Egg rolls is the coolest lunch.”

That was Darby‘s reply to my:

‘mixing memory and desire’

early spring drizzling hungover

slipping on New Hampshire mudshore

the morning after Dan and Beth’s party —

corn snow and soft ice

slowly giving way,

becoming something]

early drizzling hungover spring

I reach for my pen—

Bullshitter.

Wordmixer.

The Bottom Line

Around my cabin they are dropping trees—

the tall white pines that sentinel these woods,

that crack and thud before being dragged

to the landing, and then bucked and loaded

onto a top-heavy pile of harsh truck.

Every so often the machines will stop

and I'll hear the loggers gam and cuss:

"Ah, for Chris’-sakes, these have all got heart-rot."

Pissed, probably, they went and bid so high

for what the mill owners will just laugh at.

The slash is piled high and the ground scarfed.

I dip my pen and turn back to my work.

Piecing together the best of our wood

none of us will make a killing today.

Concord Country Club

I think we feel

sorry for each other.

I am singing folk songs

at the Concord Country Club

pool party,

and an old high school

buddy walks in

and puts his sun glasses

calmly into his

neatly pressed pocket.

I smile and nod

and tighten my lips.

He waves back,

nodding and stretching

his Roman chin,

as if pointing
towards something important

across the room.

With practiced tact
we avoid each other,

both of us thankful

this song is so long.

Hostel

We sit in quiet circles

and talk with coffee butt

endlessness stumbling

on the unfamiliar humbled

by inexperience.

Outside the constant

whine of motorscooters

beating the lights avoiding

each other.

I suddenly think of Willie

walking his Maine woods;

30/30 crotched:

stamping a butt —

rustle of deer

whir of partridge

~Taipei, Taiwan

Homecoming

The salt is passed with a properness

I don’t fully understand:

every gesture acknowledged, concerned

by their sleep

and friends.

They don’t spin the knife and argue

whose night for the dishes, and who

didn’t mow around the trees.

They speak in subdued tones

and love each other

differently, confusing me

my cynicism.

Parents Weekend

Deerfield Academy

Deerfield, Massachusetts

Shingles

Shingles damn things

so full of

underedges never just

quickly slopped on

whitewashed and left

never just you

poke and dab catch

the drips and

brush them back

into the grain of things.

Hanging with Poets & Politicians

Inside of every poet there is some craziness

like a magnet attracting
and repulsing.

Taylor Mali could probably write a really cool poem
about the snowblower sitting in my driveway
on this warm spring day,
but I bet he wouldn't know
how to start the damn thing;
he'd think it was a rototiller or something,
and I would have to shout,
"No, no! Out of my strawberries!"
and in the blue smoke of the ensuing chaos

Mary Oliver would return
from her long walk
past old cloth mills,
carrying trinkets
of broken glass—
shards of memory
and distant longing.

She will be surprised to find Seamus Heaney
drinking beer with Billy Bulger,
quoting Homer, and lamenting the exodus
of the Irish from Boston.

The shadow of Emily Dickinson would move slowly
away from a broken pane
in the eave of the attic room.
in a wave of whispering lace.

Robert Frost squinting disdainfully
would tell me to just
slow down, take a breath...
and throw all of this away.
(He is already annoyed
by Walt Whitman's incessant celebrating
with some guy in a bucket truck—
and my kids chalking up the driveway.)

For some strange reason,
Allen Ginsburgh is crying on my back step,
while Gary Snyder sets up a pup tent.
beside my garden,
and Jack Kerouac shoots hoops and wonders
what his mother is cooking for dinner;

Shakespeare's friends are plastering
posters on telephone poles,
while Shelley swims across
the Assabet River
and holds a painted turtle

over a cold eddy.

Billy Collin’s dances to a scratchy jazz record
and thinks he should write a poem about it.

Wendell Berry helps Taylor
snowblow my strawberries,
and Wordsworth walks away 

through a crack in the fence,

and Basho just laughs
and laughs

and laughs.

The Old Hunter

The snow changed back to freezing rain last night

bundling itself frozen to bent field grass

brittling and snapping with harsh pronouncement,

startling up some young deer, tensing splayed legs

snorting for acorns under this first snow,

more curioused by me than concerned.

They don’t remember the quiet hunter

wedged stoically in twisted apple crotch,

drenched in smokey scent and last night’s whiskey,

The awkward appendage of a clutched bow—
an awkward heir to foolish tradition.

I am more like a mawkish toothless bear,

spending my days grubbing for tubers,

singing old songs that are stuck in my head,

putting out my scent with a carelessness,

pouring myself cups of bitter coffee

before taking a nap on soft mosses.

I wake slowly to a primal stirring

and, for a moment, sense our manic bond—

the harsh uncertainty of decisions;

the inextricable predicament

of dull eyes drawn in each direction;

until I regain my brute, dumb arrogance,

the smugness of knowing I am not prey:

I only know the whispering woodsman

plodding these woods with an ineptitude,

defrocking all of the false dignities—

no longer becoming anything.

I have come so far to know so little—

satisfied the old buck is still out there.

The Gladdening

My life is small today

doing the things

I only notice myself.

I am reminded tonight

of a rhythm in my motion,

tapping out a cadence

to nothing in particular.

What Pumpkins Are For

As much as I swat I love

this bothering incessance

of mosquitos in still air

after warm rain.

Standing in the throaty exhaust

of the old Farmall

I urge the dogs

to make the trip with me,

down to the community plots

where I’ve planted nothing

but brag patch pumpkins

and a string of river bass,

if only to sit

on their immensity

in the moon cool nights

of hoarish fall.

Skip died this past spring

shoveling out winter’s heavy manure,

and so I plant her garden

with the talk of August tables:

tomatoes, corn, beets, cabbage —

ostensible things

I’m sure she’d agree with;

though planted, I figure,

somehow not quite right.

It’s just weird to think

she finally can’t

do anything about it.

But that is what pumpkins are for.

~In Memory of Skip Anderegg

Ad Poeticus

I can still hear the great expressions

of surprise when the lights go out:

the rustling of drawers fumbling

for candles, and children’s joy

breaking in squeals, bouncing

on strangers’ beds, clutching

small fists — blind now

to stern and judging eyes.

The walls of this hotel are thin plaster,

and the rooms full.

Most all of us are travelers

tired by long train rides

in hot bunks with lukewarm cabbage.

Still I sense a greater continuance:

more cynical belching of soft coal smoke

pouring from unsatiated bellies,

from wheezing brickstacks of old power plants —

undisturbed by problems in distant lines,

and down whose gullet is forced the dark fuel

torn in gashes from quiet emptied earth

quiet emptied earth

(I shake my head slowly:

sounding, quacking, calling

from cattail blinds,

drawing stray fowl,

warbling a strange prolegomena

towards a tentative coherence.)

In what is otherwise darkness

I can see the sparking wires

dancing like maddened snakes

lighting only the smallness

of a rounded hilltop

trimmed bare —

neither rhythm, or convulsion.

I am drawn that way

until my heart pounds out of me,

gushing whale’s blood on pitching decks,

sensing the idiocy of approach,

knowing no other way.

~The Lihua Hotel
Beijing 1989

Is this the poem that needs to be sung?

Is this the poem that needs to be sung,

and could catch you raptured in a flytrap’s deception

without considering the predicament?

I am not ready for this. I hope you know that.

A thousand times I shout the woods around my cabin:

the trees that lean and my attraction to happenstance.

At times I miss the howling and am consoled

by the coyotes who tear

both carrion and garbage, circling in reticent packs,

yelping a strange fervor for survival.

I ran over to my neighbor’s farm

when he shot a young male,

and we drank beer and poked at it saying:

“skinny little bastard” a number of times.

'It could have been me,' I said:

crawling with a curved back

under your strung wire

testing the line between us.'

He shot it using a thirty aught six with a light scope,

emphasizing the gun over himself,

and I wondered if, at least, that was good.

We laugh and accept each other

in the most peripheral of ways.

Do you?

A poem I guess never needs,

It is difficult to approach complexity

most of the time only seeing what it does;

and what we calmly point to as truth

is just a weariness with fraud.

Rooted from tendrils and runners

we recall a greater fertility,

and crowd each other with weakened fruit,

becoming an untilled ground of cousins,

tangled in feral heroics.

Not necessarily vague;

I’m just haltingly convinced of something,

and being a qualm it is with myself —

There is really very little I know about you.

Things just get a little weird:

going through fewer and fewer transitions,

knowing I'm not a coydog.

Catboat

Old boat I have used you

grown dry and checked,

heavy on your timber cradle,

tired of all the bullshit

and messing.

Ripping the glass cloth

they laid on your keel

I felt the power

of a labored birth;

the stagnant smell of years

of damp-rot

and patchwork.

Neither am I proud

of your plywood deck, knowing

too well I wasn’t built

for ease of maintenance.

We repair each other

to our barest hulls,

and strengthened

work from there.

The Taking Away*

I take little note of the seedlings

that burst from the forest floor

and grow in bits of ragged sunlight —

young herds of tender saplings.

If they could talk

I‘d imagine them mongering

with an unruly grace, howling

at their games, grubbing

for root space —

leaning on each other.

They will die in the shade

of the aged ones

on a day when you do not notice.

*For Jean and Chris, in memorium.

In the Bog

There is a humility in the bog

forcing an acceptance

of things close by.

In the tall

grass by the river

there is no vantage point —

no dry place to check

realities. My meditations:

the placing of my feet,

and the black snake startled.

The Harvest

The bruised apple never heals;

and so each day our labor is studied

and deliberate.

We work long days and walk home

tired, throwing apples

as far as we can.