Black Squirrel
The first thing I notice about Michigan
are the black squirrels
We have one in our yard
Margaret feeds him popcorn
three times a day
She’s fallen in love
Missouri squirrels are plain
If from the city, mostly bone
If from the country, fat
It came this close to eating from my hand
then you rattled home in that death trap and ruined it
He scuttled up that tree
There it was
a sun spot
hissing at me
Margaret can’t get over it
the color so dark
I’m getting worried
And the squirrel
with its hissing
scares me
I miss the dishwater gray squirrels of Missouri
those ugly old things
They are plain
common enough
scavengers
but they have a certain resilience
You have to hit them square with a car to kill them
even then, like gray hairs, they double
A Missouri squirrel will not come close to you
They’ve seen what people can do
As I child I ate them
even the meat was tough
But we were poor
our teeth tougher
When I came home from work today
Margaret was feeding it
It ate from her hand
a communion
I’d never be part of
She waved turn off the car
I pretended not to see
The squirrel sauntered away
on its fat black haunches
I will try to give a diamond ring
later this year
if we can afford it.
Ashes like a cathedral
I knock upon
I’d made Chili and you
were not hungry
This house is a resultant tone
just for rhyme
I’ll say that I haven’t felt my bones in ages
fat grows when bodies stall
I ask you to eat
but there are the headaches again
Let’s strip this to the bare bones, shall we
I’m ill
The map hanging in the hall
is outdated
but walking my fingers across it tonight
Montana, Wyoming
someplace is warmer
I look for images
but they aren’t found
at this computer
they aren’t found in poems
It’s important that you eat
before you disappear
Sometimes I think
I’ve taken a curtain
in my sleep
and held it over you
made up a few words
and poof
This time the magic is real
You have vanished a little at a time
I need my dictionary
perhaps there is something in there
to untwist these knots
Nothing in my day
works
It’s like a vine on a snake
My eyes are closing
I’m tired
My father said
there is nothing in life for a man
but work
And for a woman
God knows
Perhaps starvation
I noticed
you raked the yard
and the leaves are still falling
The tree strips
like a sleek black bone
It’s slow and it’s meaningful
When I settle down enough to concentrate
these things happen
I noticed a knot in our pine
I thought of Freud
It didn’t even make me horny
My poems for you always turn out like this
snap out like a light
Do either of us
remember what it meant
to be young and in love
In love pays the bills
and takes us to the occasional movie
The risk is gone
We shit in front of each other
and the days stall
like that
And there are nights
when the fingers of my left hand
want to keep walking
And my right hand stops them
with a grasp more violent
than I’ve ever shown you
We are poor and we live
that is love
And you are falling off
falling off
eating nothing
falling off
if i was magic
sortilege of sorts
knowing
milky white film
like the skin across an eye
stops me from you
if i were a king
i would decree
something or other
make laws and lands
the innards of a pig gut cut
carried in a bucket
and buried
is the only thing
to know a pig
its digestations
watching you as you slept
i wondered if you’d ever done the same
you were alien to me then
everything you’d ever told me false
if only from diversion
we bought drain-o today
the sink has gone slowly
we found it on sale
the tidy things
the tidy sink
below tidy cabinets
where tidy medications await tidy hands
and mouths
you made me sunflower curtains
to hang in my room
i covered the windows with them
you had given me a room to be alone
i watch you as you sleep
breath seamless
even as stitch
there is not enough yelling in our house
especially at midnight
to be a sorcerer
toss bones to the floor
what is to be seen in those things
words cannot conjure
the scary face of contentment
safety
fat
your lover voice
to your wife voice
to your mother voice
my days chew cud
the goddamn winter in michigan has begun
it buries in white 8 months long
a snow shovel is a pathetic deterrent
an illusion of salt and plow
if i would have written this when i was younger
i’d know how to end it now
i’d fall so close to something
that i couldn’t see it anymore
i’d stop watching you
my chest rising and falling
in tune with your back
Tonight the New Poem
Here is the new poem
you have been asking for
It is not about bees
And I am leaving out
the tissue papered hornet’s nest
so delicate and deadly
that you noticed clinging
to the roof of our Garage.
The cat killed a squirrel
I stepped on the carcass this morning.
It felt like a wet tuna fish sandwich.
I look through the journals when you sleep
Light pays me a final curtain call in fragments
The cops have pulled someone over
outside the window
There are just so many I do not like.
The cat killed a squirrel:
too many adjectives for that alone.
The world is full of words
Few of them are good
All of them are hollow
We make the meaning
fill them up with sand
for weight
Like the hole of the ring I lost
or the piece of paper
that tells us we are married.
There are poets who make a game of it
pick words at random from a dictionary
twist them until they connect
braid them like twine
Wrung like the washing
of a cloth diaper.
I could never quite do it like that
I’m no damn contortionist at least.
Foot steps knock down the hall
faint
the game is over
The cat killed a squirrel
and neither one of us can sleep.
