ANNIVERSARIES Went to dinner in Columbia, Maryland at the house of your closest work-friend. Her hubby, who spied for the CIA, could be called “to duty” at any hour and he could never tell her where. She handed me a Miller’s High Life and told me to loosen my tie. We had a strange dinner of peanut-butter chicken and hand- grenades (as her hubby called artichokes) lovingly prepared by her slightly handi-capable brother who had washed his hands slowly singing “Happy Birthday to Me” three times, twirling the Life Buoy in his mitts. I once had a cocker spaniel puppy for three days who would not leave my side and who curled upon my pillow at night and farted in my face. I woke often to let him out. I’d sit on the steps of the moonlight as he chewed grass. I’d watch my breath cloud above me. :::::::::::::: KURTZ JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL Ravens play in snow. I deserve some inner sanctum time. A school kid, I’d press hard into my paper, sometimes engraving the soft wood beneath. Not much has changed. Clock above the cabinets. Smell of burnt wood splints. Bunsen burners. Mr. Williams rubbing his fingers over his forehead. Carcass of a dissected mink. The smell. Sun a communion disk through winter clouds. I’d walk home swinging my black cornet case crammed with evening’s homework. Folder full of sheet music. I’d stop for a bottle of green soda or, Thursdays, my lesson at Southtown, canyon of amplifiers, Gibson SG’s: hanged men. Played “My-Mama-a-Told-Me,” theme from “The Godfather” for Louie Cattarucci, maestro and former drummer for Captain Beefheart. The Ravens visit Thailand, look at each other quizzically. Tower of London, The Ravens wear blue bands on their legs. Julie looks at the television through her yellow Ranger Rick binoculars. Sunday evening, work tomorrow, and I don’t know what pain reliever to take. A life rich in detail— dirty snow, worn rubber, oil, exhaust and ice, a cocktail the bullies loved to wash one’s face in, cornet case thrown in a slushy drift, traffic crowing and Louie smoking calmly, watching from his storefront window. ::::::::::::::::::::::::::: LETTER TO KINDNESS ...it is...only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread.... –Naomi Shihab Nye Before I send my letter to the Great Midwestern Tornado, I tie, carefully, the laces of my shoes: Silver Spring station, my briefcase full of mail to strangers who will or will not use these letters to more strangers. Your words are the purchase- price of another survival– they are mortal bread I swallow on the streets of Washington, D.C., communion bread of a whisper. My shoes do all the thinking on the filthy pavement, on splatters like letters from a doomed language of concrete. I send my mail because it is only --what?— that makes sense anymore, letters I mail directly against "No." I purchase fresh-cut day lilies, merge the blood of petals and stems with the rain's stuttering flow. ::::::::::::::::::::::: THE DANGEROUS SUN The tinsel under which I showered this morning kissed my cold closed eyes and made me shine sadly. The soap, that fragranced my thoughts and hair, rode on my skin in the car on the street of the miniature city through which I clattered humbly to my cross and grave and otherwise euphonic emblem of a job. Later, at the Army Post Tap, my friend had a great tribal song he yelped like a coyote in shadow purpled into the corners of abandoned playgrounds, schools, rubble. The dangerous sun burned itself to sleep. And that was the only thing that kept me going. And that is the only thing I love. ::::::::::::::::::::::: WHEN WE KNEW FOR CERTAIN YOU WERE NEVER COMING BACK The water sang. I could hear all the fishes burst the surface oxygen, see them on the docks, early evening, mother and father talking softly, sitting in their Adirondacks, no traces of mourning. 1968. The world was new. A dove ate an olive branch. My mom sang, half-drunk on the dock at night, “That Ol’ Black Magic,” frozen daiquiris until the clouds swam. The water, its chill, its song of disorganized sensation. Now, the doves have gone to sleep; the crickets chirp softly in the gardens of kale, chard and dill; fire arches above. :::::::::::::::::::::: WINTER We live at the bottom of a sea of snowflakes. They fall ruled by a mathematics no one can resolve. When my brother reads my poems, his brain turns to mineral. The dawn’s yarn knits itself into an evening sky. (Flowers are snowflakes grown wise.) If I empty the wallet of my memory, evoke the mathematics of emotion, scrape the excess mineral of my loyalty, I can recognize my brother as he was, soldering the radio together. The smoke, the mineral encrusting the hot iron, the pure snow of radio static, “Woolly Bully.” Brotherhood of sparrows, mathematics of prayer, accumulation of snowflakes sloping against the basement window, night walks like a brother up from the bus stop and pauses in an urn of lamplight on the sidewalk to smoke. It’s the winter we learn to breathe mineral, every breath is a breath earned; confident I’ll see somehow another summer; not certain whether I’ll see this brother again this or any other season.
weather eye 