Prelude To Wilderness

To identify what is missing it is better to identify what is not:

brain, humor, nerves, neural networks, lungs.

Give me eyes, bone, and breast, and pour my breath
into new flesh. Ash will fill my mouth
and orphans will bring me names
wrapped in butcher paper. Give me hair, and clothes,
and leave me in a small town, in the middle of another coast.

From there I will report. From there the truth will be told

**

The Marshy Forest

Turkey buzzards hang like earrings
off the branch of the hickory in bloom,
already darkening as it eats sunlight,
leaving the interior of the forest black as a shotgun blast.

The thicket is out to kill you with stillness.
Conrad nails it, you know,
even my own thick Mid-Atlantic heart
invites wildness,
like part of it belongs among oak,
maple, the guts of the bay,
as if by stepping deeper into the interior
one gives up on love.

And the buzzards repose,
their necks graceful as swans.
I wonder if they too, mate for life,
and instead of a pond
it is road kill they skate upon,
their faces as red as a meteor stone.

And when they no longer hang over
like cartoon thunder
I cannot help but look for them
as if they could tell me secrets,
a salutation, a joke, a lie.

**

Christy, Before the Flood

Sitting on the down edge of a see-saw
my flats in the long cool grass,
how skin prickles when grass
bristles across my thighs.

There is a voice on the air,
and smoke from a pipe curling, curling, curling

then comes rumble

and flood,
the sluicing slate of earth and tide

hours later would I awake.

I thought I was on the beach,

but I was on a roof, the world a white noise
of water, water, water.

**

Surrender

Once the family that dined under the elm
turned to stone, were forgotten,
and under the stare of the sun and stars
for so many years
finally turned to dust
and became the winking ashes and lit cigarettes
of very cosmos above,
only once the family
had become the great party
wheeling in the sky
did Leroy
finally stop drinking.

“Man, it was like hanging on flypaper
and watching the kitchen spin.”
Leroy often drank Tequila
in the same street where once
he stood on his tip toes
to watch the family
laughing under the elms,
their mouths stretched back
like blown flowers.
The same street where drunk,

he once pulled a .45 caliber
and shot his cousin
in the leg over the NJ Jets.
“I give up,” his cousin kept shouting
over and over, “You’re right!”
But Leroy didn’t hear him,
as the air turn amber and orange
about his cousin’s leg,
the blood ballooning
there for a moment, suspended
in air, above the concrete
as if holy.

What Leroy did under the elm
that made his adopted family
throw him out.
He never knew
never fully could know,
having turned to ash that weekend.
They politely asked him not to come back
as he drank and pilled
and kept falling down
in the lawn, the grass cool
and ticklish against his cheek.
Once he lit a cigarette
when the family had sat down to dinner.
“It’s like he has a wick in his mouth,
and he wants to explode,”
said the oldest son.

Leroy could never be trusted
because Leroy despaired,
but didn’t know it.

It was the card trick he kept on believing.

When he was a child his father once took the back way
to his grandmothers, taking his time,
easing his beer back on the slow curves,
and Leory surprised, rose up when he saw
his grandmother’s house appear from the honeysuckle,
as if by magic his father had found a hidden way.

Leroy had never thought there was more than one way to arrive.

Sometimes when Leroy’s father drank whisky
he’d talk about the war, and how his battalion
surrendered to the Viet Kong. “Don’t get me wrong, son
we didn’t throw down our guns, we just gave up.
See when dark came they came out of the jungle.
But one night, instead of fighting
we just weren’t there. Poof,
like magic. We bugged out. We quit.”
Sometimes
he would tell more, sometimes
would say nothing.
“It was the best thing we ever did.”
He would often add.

It was when his father had given over to booze
that Leroy would roam
the neighborhood and find himself staring
through slats at the blonde girl
and her family who preferred
to dine outside. They were Italian,
or Spanish. To Leroy the accents
and nonsense words were like old keys
that were useless to him
for he could find no doorway,
but liked to hold them in his hands anyway.

Leroy would watch them
for hours, ignoring
his bladder, the cold damp
seizing his fingers,
his toes, giving up to the music
of their fellowship

The family,
like the rest of the neighborhood,
became still
and stopped, and became
ghost lights,
but Leroy marshaled on, working
on cars and renting from the same landlord
that had rented to his father,
even as the neighborhood
became a series of empty houses.

Sometimes the landlord comes by
to adjust the boiler,
and counts the warped and water stained beer cases
Leroy’s crammed
into the trash can. He gets lost
in the counting because he gets confused
what & who he’s counting,
the beer cartons or the ways Leroy has surrendered
to his father.

The landlord shrugs, who cares anyway,
most of the world lives
lives that would give Leroy’s existence
the stink of royalty.

He shrugs
And adjusts the boiler, and slings
the wrench back into his bag.
And above,
the milky way moves,
its lights and smoky gases
slinking from planet to planet,
the great party aloft and continuous and always.