Fallor Ergo Sum

The Shame Flute

"The sestina villanelle is a dull thing. Many modern poets have tried their hands, or feet at it, as they should. Unfortunately, some have published the results." --Michael Baldwin DB, unfaithfully paraphrasing Michael Baldwin

Pick up a flute, I dare you, and try it,

in olden times when they honor the singer.

They fit you with something to help with your diet:

A tight metal collar, locked on your gullet,

A false flute protruding, with locks for your fingers.

Pick up a flute, I dare you, and try it.

This gadget will make you a bit more compliant.

Molest not the muse! Harass not the singer!

Injure their ears and you may start a riot.

Bury your music, and learn to be quiet.

Learn sewing or dance if you cannot sing, or

Pick up a flute, I dare you, and try it.

Find you a woman to help to you pry it

from your shivering neck and sore fingers.

Nurse your rage. Let ego supply it, 

Then play, fool, like everyone’s listening,

And shape your shame into melodies defiant.

Pick up a flute, I dare you, and try it,

Or bury your music, and try to be quiet.

Prayer While my Computer Boots

I live between Arabic numerals,
between the integers
1 and 0,
between doubt and electricity.

To receive a pause as a gift,
an instant of clarity:
Lord, how to begin?
How to breathe?

How did you endure, Lord of calm,
those anxious moments between
rebooting Lazarus
and the light spreading over his face? 

My Therapist Says I Need to Learn Grace

When young, you will think the world balanced
on the sharpened tip of a pencil, changes tracked
to the decimal point. It will seem as if time inches
rather than unfurls, and that love is sure as gravity.

Older, you learn the answer to everyone's question:
good enough? is not always yes or no, sometimes no, but--
and in that very but rides the long energy of grace,
where things seem more like improvisation than arithmetic,

where the moon pulls shuttles toward her in welcome,
and everyone you wronged is winking fondly
behind your back. This conspiracy of mercy baffles
more than heals, yet something rings clear

in the way her body adjusts to yours, tiny surrenders
in dance, blast of rain seconds too late to ruin the day,
the way the world makes room for you, only you, mismatched,
forgotten part, and grace the secret grease of a grinding world.

Previously published in Relief! magazine

Jubilate Agno

My favorite poem was written by a crazy English poet in the 1700s: Christopher Smart. The name of the poem is Jubilate Agno. Smart starts the poem with a prologue-like section enumerating countless obscure classical and Biblical references, and then the meat of the poem begins with this line: For I will consider my cat, Geoffrey. And Smart does. For stanza upon stanza, Smart parses the Almighty through the actions of his cat.

It may be fair to say that I like the idea of this poem more than its substance, but it has moments of real beauty. One is particularly appropriate in this time of war:

Let Jael rejoice with the Plover, who whistles for his live, and foils the marksmen and their guns. For I bless the Prince of Peace and pray that the guns may be nailed up, save such as are for the rejoicing days.

The insane English poet knew what we forget: Christ broke into the world in the body of a carpenter's son, and he whose power is without limits instead chose forgiveness, grace, and peace. I pray these things for you this Christmas season.

Just as a Thought Experiment

Just as a thought experiment, imagine
that the Mexican who works at the restaurant
down the street is a real person.

Suspect he has sharp, three-dimensional desires.
Conjure his doughy, dew-eyed wife in their trailer,
a ruddy Mexican baby wailing in her arms.

Picture their backyard, a new propane grill
on the 8x8 concrete patio, colored lights strung
from tree to clothesline pole. Maybe he even has

a no-good brother crashing on his couch
for an undefined length of time. Perhaps her father,
the pastor in Monterrey, no longer speaks

to his gringo son-in-law. Possibly his dreams come unraveled
late at night, after a couple of cervezas, certainly no more
than four, the tapestry of their possible life

picked apart by the hard, plodding days. You might
have had a beer with him, in other circumstances.
Most likely he even has a name that seems normal

in Spanish, like Mike or Steve or John.

To Women Whose Families I've Wronged

Apologies fall short.

Awful regent,
I’ve raided your kingdom.

To regain your grace,
I must erase myself.

I will choreograph
my implosion.

Remix of a Conversation

We live among mute, stunned cameramen.
Eyes bulging like fish, our children,
tiny outriders in an elephant’s graveyard.

Therefore I want a love letter made of skin.
No more telegraphs. Stop-motion wrens
are on the porch, chickadees are gargling at us.

When you drive to work, engine trilling
at a red light, consider our union’s odd safari.
Recall how we squeezed the new flesh

of our hopes, extracted pulp, rinsed it down
with bitter water. We no longer see each other.
And sex, after all, is only stuttering at God.

Little Drama

Last night, while I sat at the kitchen table with the exterminator, discussing how best to kill termites before they became a problem, my wife came in with a baby bird cupped in her hands. The strong winds that preceded the storm had blown it from its nest. My wife was determined to save it.

While I talked with the exterminator, she squeezed our new car through the fence gate into the backyard, and stood on top of it to replace the bird in the nest.

Later, when I let our dog out for her last bathroom break of the night, my wife asked me to keep the dog away from the tree that the baby bird was in. Out of curiousity, I walked up to the tree, and winding its way up the trunk was a snake. Knowing the futility of intervening in nature's order, but humoring my wife, I got a broom and she got a flashlight.

We poked and prodded the snake with the stick, and when that didn't work, she got a canoe paddle and used the handle to try to pull the snake out of the tree. The snake resisted until it was out of reach, heading for the bird's nest. We went inside, and weren't there when the storm brewed and broke, dumping rain. The truth is clear enough, but we might be forgiven for not watching.

Tonight, I Could Leave the World

Oh, damn your soul, Chater! Ovid would have stayed a lawyer and Virgil a farmer if they had known the bathos to which love would descend in your sportive satyrs and noodle nymphs. I am at your service with a half-ounce ball in your brain.
--Tom Stoppard, "Arcadia"

What luxury, to be so happy
that we can grieve
over imaginary lives.
--Lisel Mueller, "Late Hours"

Snow on the ground today and Shiloh, new, taut dog, enters the backyard cautiously, tries to move about without actually putting her feet on the ground, one foot up, oddly cantilevered to the sky. Indian food for lunch, Kelly Joe Phelps and Townes Van Zandt on the stereo.

And Elvis Costello, and my favorite song on earth, "Jack of All Parades," track 13 on the "King of America" record. The song, to me, is about refusing to live in light of the expectations of other people, and it has lines like this one:

Now the way that I feel is no longer news
You know my love, and how to refuse it
Cause you know where the door is, and how to use it
Oh, you know you do...

But mainly, because on the first note of the chorus, he hits a major 6th note on top of a major triad, which is not quite the right note, but he hits it with such confidence that it echoes the theme of the song, but musically, and then he reluctantly resolves it right before the chord changes.

No one really knows why we laugh or cry, but we do, oh, we do. And if you step away from things, like I can't help but do, you find that we are strange and tender creatures, either the conceits of an epic poem or the punchlines of a dirty joke, but never nothing, and always raw, tense, burning.

Or were we ever anything but possibilities, dreams of God's? Have you ever wondered, my friend, if we live imaginary lives?

Creation

I sometimes exchange writings with a buddy of mine who is a journalism grad student at the University of Alabama.   I had fun with this assignment ("write a creation story"), so I thought I'd post it here.

---

In the deepest slums of Ragtown, the poet awoke.  He put on his worn cap and boots.  He made his coffee in the slapdash kitchen, listening to jazz waft down from the roof, then walked down the fire escape into the streets.

He bought fruit from the stand on the corner, ate the papaya with a pocketknife.  The flesh bloomed in his mouth, rolling over his tongue like promises.  The sun shone around the steeple of the old church, and he could hear the whores giggling in the bar as he passed.

He flipped a coin into the wino's cup, was rewarded with a wink.  He almost tripped over the brown cat on its way home.  He set up his chair next to the fire hydrant, got out his best brown paper and fountain pen.  He set up his sign: "Poems for sale."

Business was slow.  He wrote a poem for a businessman's wife.  (He always kissed his poems when he gave them out, knowing he would never see them again.)  He wrote a poem for the drunk rector of the old church, who never could resist.

When the sun dipped, he folded up his sign, put away his best brown paper, and walked towards home.  The stars were bright wet paint, dripping light.  They dripped on the old bed frames and apple cores, and on the daffodils in the window boxes.  He opened his door and went inside.

His dinner was beans and rice.  He doused them with hot sauce while he read the funnies.  He could hear the neighbors next door making love, like they always did this time of night.  He threw open the windows to smell the river, and climbed into his bed.

He closed his eyes, and dreamt a world.