Markers. Ants. Tectonics. X. & Pain. & Illness.

I hope this letter finds you well though of course I know you’re not or that you soon won’t be which is fine because now I understand everything and I’m only sorry that it took me so long to figure things out but it’s not every day that a dream splits me the way a maul splits an oak round into wedges, each wedge showing the error of my life and the future and the past and the direction and purpose of your life, my son, my son lost to me through suicide though not yet of course, of course that’s why I’m writing to you now to let you know that your suicide will not be purposeless because I was blinded in the dream of you where I was walking holding the stick I have held for years its wood worn with my fingers and burnished with my palms and there you were standing before me on the path the snow melting around your feet in an every widening circle and your back  was to me and all around was the end of winter but it was still hanging on the air crisp but from you the heat radiated and you were wearing your white T-shirt and your jeans with holes in them and your sneakers like you wore the day I left you only of course then you were a boy and in the dream you’re a man the hair on your head long and curly and dark and you reach out your hand and a crack of thunder of pure electricity snaps the hairs along my neck and arms but you have only touched the tree in front of you but from where a moment ago its branches were bare now there are buds of new green and you crouch to the dark patch at your feet and dig your fingers into the earth and grass sprouts and a single daffodil rises up its yellow as if you’ve crafted it from saffron and then I realize that you’re bringing life you have taken your own life you suicides all of you, your cousins, your friends, and now you you’re the bringers you snap the death of winter and bring the life of spring and summer you have a purpose you’re not lost and I didn’t leave you for nothing I didn’t abandon you I set you on this path this purpose without which none of us could survive.

Example 14

Gregory had the main gallery wired a week before Elise started installing her paintings, his microphones strung and hidden above the bare rafters, us vacuuming up the dust Gregory knocked down while he climbed the ladders, saying, I won’t have one of you getting famous on my account, but he even crawled on the floors affixing the contact mics, and mudding the pickups of his own design into the walls themselves, all the cables and wires and wireless sound Gregory’s amalgamation of sensors picked and snatched from the air or culled from the walls and floors captured our conversations but also the whispers of the ceiling fans slow blurring, the scratchings of the mice at night and sounds we couldn’t identify, pressing Gregory’s headphones to our ears while Elise tapped her feet next to floor sensor seven making dull booms and Gregory said, OK, OK, and then he switched on the analog to digital converters which parsed each sound into a one or a zero and the hard drives spun in a separate dark room where we could go and watch our breaths puff even as outside Elise’s exhibit opened to the largest crowds we’ve ever had not even the July heat keeping people away and we mingled but had been ordered by Gregory to speak as little as possible but not too little which is harder than it seems and Elise’s paintings it turned out had a shelf life of one weekend as the four by eight foot paintings of heaps of broken toaster ovens rendered in crisp chrome brought out the heat in the viewers and the arguments became so common that we became experts at lowering our voices to create diffussions and though the day the show came down there was only us Elise was beaming and handed to all of us tickets to the water park from her prized collection of tickets from defunct amusements the water park having been shut down after years of decline with the final push into extinction being a pair of dolphins teaching an entire fifth grade class that birds and bees not only existed under water but at least half the duo had to be upside down and because I had been there I was the star of the pull down as we packed Elise’s work into crates except for the largest set of canvases, three paintings each ten by twenty feet and featuring cell phones from edge to edge and in a an unusual display of generosity Elise even let me have that story as I had held her waist as she had stretched out over the cat-walk while the cell phones were being shredded by a machine that wouldn’t even have hiccuped at us and she took the photographs she needed to work from and her series Phones Calling Home we handed off to the men from Nokia who had purchased the paintings to adorn their lobby and it wasn’t until the next month when it was Gregory’s turn and he had installed speakers where the paintings had been and speakers above the water fountains and speakers at floor level and speakers above below and beside the refreshments cart that we realized he had never stopped recording and was even recording as his exhibit opened and the people moved through it whispering listening to what was said about Elise’s work, about each other and because it’s a small town they heard what words were about them and how few words were about them and they were hungry to find any mention of themselves and because of the feedback loops even as they whispered their words were added to the mix and at the last blank on the wall where Elise’s final canvas had been they stopped and said, That’s not all? and, Is there nothing else? and Wait, listen, I think that’s me, and from where I stood in the corner I could watch Gregory watch them reaching out with their hands as they spoke, their hands hovering over the wall while all about them Gregory said in his low voice, Don’t touch.

Example 15

Glen followed his robots around the gallery, although to say he followed them suggests that the robots were moving or that Glen was moving when what was happening instead is that Glen was watching his robots when the reviewer from The Hostel Happenings came in and because I was in between projects at the time I was there too and while the reviewer did her best to engage either Glen or the robots she didn’t start off well when the first robots she crushed under her sensible flat shoes and then gave her foot an extra turn before she realized that she wasn’t stepping on an especially crunchy roach but the very thing she had been sent to observe though she was desperate to explain to Glen as they sat at the only table in the room she hadn’t been told that all the robots were no bigger than grasshoppers though the hoppers she had known back home in Mississippi were no laughing matter ha ha and Glen had looked at her with the level of interest he reserved for his robots when he was waiting for them to do something and since the opening of the show the robots had moved three inches, if you counted the progress of all fifty of them, she wrote in her article that she had felt very uninteresting indeed and that she was all for the Green Movement in art but that Glen had taken it to the level of composting and we were all worried about how Glen might take it but he stayed in the gallery watching the robots though Sheila suggested that robot was a pretty big term for a clockwork bug that reminded her of the first alarm clock she had ever smashed against an early morning wall but these has small bottles on their back, filled with liquid, black or green or blue and even gold and there had been one silver one but the woman from Happenings had finished that one while the rest carried only clear and while they were marvelous in their making and stood up from the ground on thread thin legs springs and gears and in the silence of the gallery I could hear Glen’s breathing and the January drizzle while outside the cars scarred the streets on MacArthur and the sun refused to shine which Glen said mattered his beings being solar powered but I couldn’t see any panels of any sort and the night of the opening approached and I wasn’t sure but that they did move a bit, their legs dragging in the dust on the white painted floor their legs flowing with their ink tracking patterns of veins or limbs or some skein that I wasn’t sure but what I could be imagining it while Glen I was sure sat in the same place and even curled up there his head on its side saying he wanted to be on their level and even on the night itself as the room filled up with people in their gallery best the wine glasses belling out into the room and the clothes rustling and all of the sounds loud after the days of such nothing the whispers in the room of Glen and how this would be his first failure and more wine and I had turned off the fans as Glen had asked me and the sweat pooled under people’s arms and the women laughed and said they glowed, I remember that, a woman saying she was glowing, right before the robots, their ticking gears, their windings springs, their heat formed metals tilted from all the body warmth and on their thread steel legs Glen’s clockworks sprang into the room, twanging, one after another, spattering their liquids across the crowd that to its credit screamed and danced and slapped and from the floor  where he had the best view of the colliding shoes and ankles Glen said well it’s about fucking time.

With Death, Tupelo I.C.U.

We talk of tubing, their curves
Plastic? Rubber? Your touch

Flexible but my skin burns
You. Instead you shout into

My mouth. The echoes we
Watch bounce the lines

On the machines. Monitors.
Motors. We talk of karaoke.

Of the kidney bean plastic
Vomit buckets. Just right.

You twist the EKG snaps
Which too fucks the bouncing

Line of my heart. The nurse
Bunches in. Tells me to quit

Playing around Mr. Vickers.
I’m twenty-four. A new Mr.

We laugh about her. I dare
You. The black cloak arches.

You reach beneath my skin.
How I’m connected by hooks

And eyes. Strings and Wires.
Which you undo. I vomit. Twist.

Then I’m loosed. Roll about.
You shake the hospital bed

To bring the glowing small of me
Up to rest behind my eye.

Then you lean close to me.
Peek-a-boo. We see.

Example 16 : The Repeated Meals

Simon trained us so it was of some surprise when he was the one who tripped me on the order of sole by asking for salmon instead when he damn well knew there wasn’t any salmon or white fish or tuna or catfish for that matter because each dinner on the menu had been planned down to the ounce, half ounce, eighth, sixteenth of all the ingredients from the steak platter with nine point seven five ounces of potatoes and half a pound of filet mignon seasoned with thirteen grains of sea salt and tenderized for four hours and hell it doesn’t really matter the point is that each of the twelve meals was all planned out and not like at a normal restaurant because we were in the Museum in Simon’s constructed rooms that together constituted his latest installation work where we all were trained to repeat our motions and words and to lay out the silverware with the same gentle motions of our arms and the perfect half bend to our knees, in particular, my knees had come under quite some scrutiny from Simon because I’m taller than the other waiter, Melissa, by nearly a foot, and Simon had me bending at the waist and flexing at the knees to lower myself to precisely six inches above Melissa’s as I bent to take the orders and for six days Simon had been eating in the gallery three meals a day with a different critic or friend each day each meal and things had been going splendidly as at night we sat around after the restaurant closed and counted the grains of salt in the shakers so that Simon could pour them on his hand for the critic from his favorite art blog and pulling a small scale from his pocket he told the critic there would be two point three eight grams of salt and there was and then he licked all of it off his hand and together they laughed while Simon told the critic that Gregory, the chef, always salted each dish to perfection and Simon had to destroy perfection and so he made sure to ruin his palate before each meal and the critic got a kick out of that and the quote led the review on the site and Simon seemed very happy and we were all looking forward to the closing meals and it was in the middle of the day when the artificial sun was burning through the rose windows and forming the perfect rhomboid of light on the carpet and I had watched the light crawl through its shapes for the week we had been open and the thirty days of rehearsal mapping itself exactly the same each moment and I was clueless when I came by the table and smiled at Simon and asked what he would like for dinner and Melissa poured the water and the critic from the big glossy magazine showed his teeth and sucked his lips and peered at his own menu while Simon closed his and said to me, I’d really like the fish tonight, but ask Gregory to forget the sole and let’s have salmon, OK? and then he had slapped me on the butt and Melissa had dropped a glass which didn’t shatter on the thick carpet but thumped its ice and water the water darkening to black as it seeped into the carpet and the critic had turned to me and said, you know, that sounds good, me too, please.

As he’s dying because he’s listening to his third wife describe their latest litter of St. Bernard puppies and pondering whether to name the runt Thor in an attempt to give him something to inspire the pup to scrap beyond his scrawniness and overcome the hip dysplasia that tends to run in that particular bitch’s offsprings and his mind isn’t full in no way is he not simply not thinking of me he has forgotten me though he did not forget my half brothers who he did not get to name after Greek gods though he wanted to and his second wife rattling gin and ice guessed with me that was the reason for the divorce how she hadn’t given him an endless supply of breedlings upon which to bestow names and instead only the two of which I’ve met one and my father’s breaths pause and then pause filling the hospital room with a cloister of condensed milk because he has asked for condensed milk and because he has this way the nurses allowed the milk and he had the can cupped in his crumpled brown hands while his third wife waits but no one else as the third wife doesn’t like the second wife and neither of them know of the first wife as only he knew when he was full of life and that’s where I fit in or rather don’t but my father’s hands tremble and he can’t get the can to his lips so that the third wife takes its red and whiteness in her own hands so white that the milk he sputters onto them vanishes and her carnation fingernails match the can and he notices this synchronicity and then he says his last word, Thor, and she looks into his eyes for some recognition while he coughs once.

Fall Falling Fallen

Dusk.
Sycamores.

Cupped
Shoulders.

Salty
Vertebrae.

Carve.
Lick.

Pick Me Up

Brushing his teeth, a piece of bark falls out of his mouth.
It cannot be bark, he says, and from the other room, his wife says,
What?

But there the black thing rests beneath the sudsy toothpaste
And then washes down the drain.

His wife stands in the bathroom doorway, their daughter, five,
At her side. They smile at him.
What?

I might have lost a filling, he says. Oh, the little girl says.
Oh, the wife says.

Later, the man and the daughter walk to get the mail.
The flag is down, she says. And there you are, she says.
What?

He has been scratching a scab on his arm, which falls,
Twirling to the ground, where she points.

Ha, he says, that isn’t me anymore. He didn’t rake last year’s
Leaves, they crumble as they walk and she says, anymore?
What?

They have no mail. His daughter, in her white dress, dances
Up the walk, singing, Dust to dust, we must, we must.

His arm itches. His fingernails catch under his skin. He pulls
And a strip of skin unwinds. His wife and daughter, they watch.
What?

The daughter looks up at the mother, this one lasted longer.
The wife looks at the man. Her blue eyes, cobalt, Yes.

He stumbles, falls. I should have raked, he says. His wife
Cradles him. His hands fumble in the dirt and grasp a hard stone.
What?

The daughter pulls the tooth from his fingers. It’s OK,
The wife says. The women hold him and pick him apart.

Up until now, it has been letters in long cream envelopes, stolen from his office, his embossed return address crossed out, his name inked in its place, the letters I insisted on after He tried to email me, email, me, and though I have nothing against the Internet, He owed me letters, for the gaping years, even if written on the back of whatever scrap of paper He appears to have had at hand, coupons for gutter cleaning, unpaid electrical bills, my own letters sent back to me, words x’d over, blackened, smelling of His cigarettes, and handwritten letters, after He tried to type one, because if He owes me nothing, which He doesn’t, but WTF, He can put His hand on his fucking Mont-Blanc and use his muscles and then allow His sacred spittle to dampen the envelope, though most of the envelopes arrive taped shut and I rip them open thinking His Mouth beyond hoping for a paper cut to curse Him spinning along His red lips everyone says we share because while I have nothing against Him or against making things easy on the one hand on the other hand emptiness as deep as cistern as black as tendon so when He called His voice oiling the cordless air and asked if I would have lunch with Him that would have meant I would have had to breathe His air and I waited for Him to dissipate and on the other end He was asking Well, don’t you think it’s about time? and I looked at the floor where the battleship gray wood slats beckon because they’ve shrunk over the years but the darkness does not open to spill me under the house to rest in the dust so I said what I had to say and He said Look for my sports car, it’s a BMW which will be easy to spot dusted in the Traceway Restaurant parking lot the only not-pickup but it’s certainly not Ferrari though this is the first time He’s asked so I go and wait in the pink plastic booth behind the globe filled with gum globes of every color so many I can’t even name them and the tabletop clear as a spring the Webster County Daily Progress sealed under polyurethane with photographs of men hefting cat fish and the Progress surrounded by silvered wooden hooked bait fish and while looking at that bait and the waitress her hair brown enough to roll in the deep fryer and at the lack of BMW that I say Shit but it’s too late and sure enough enough by the time I get back to my house small and nothing as it is with its sagging porch with no pillars only the rough boards I stole from Debby Ponder’s wood pile holding my front up, my house with one shattered window covered in black garbage bags because of some kids with rocks who I’m going to shoot in the knees if I ever catch them, my house empty as His offer which was no offer but a feint so that He could get here and talk to the ghosts of my wife and the ghosts of my little girl and steal them them going with Him because He has always had that damn way with women and damn Him their absence damn crowding in on me even damn though the door’s not even open yet their hissing gone and damn I look at the phone not damn begging for Him asking for Him to at least call and explain damn Himself this time but He won’t He never damn does as if He even damn could.

I don’t normally draw out my poem structures beforehand, but I thought I’d give it a try, and this is the result.

I thought it might be interesting to anyone who wonders how such things burble in my poetry mind.