Ordinary Melodrama

Ordinary Melodrama

The woman squeezing cantaloupes
with her fingertips is searching
for the beginning of her bloodstream.
Her days pivot around single incidents.
Egg falls from a fork and leaves
a yellow stain that resembles
The Shroud of Turin. About that
she is certain, her father took her
to see it when she was young.
She buys a clock for the bedroom.
The dog is put to sleep.
She wraps his body in a sheet.
This is what she does with the past.
The woman’s husband is a surgeon,
deaf in the left ear. Occasionally,
he opens the coliseum of her
chest to inspect the heart
for the pain inside the pain.

Leaving

Someone important stood on a stage at a writers' conference and said people become writers in order to leave something behind. There was a time I believed that. Now I'm more of the mind that people become writers to have somewhere to go.

You leave a word on a page. You leave an impression. You take your leave. But where do you take it?

There are always more reasons for leaving then staying. I’m about to leave a job I’ve had for thirteen years. No, this isn’t a journal entry. This isn’t important enough for that, at least not yet. Everyone eventually leaves. I want to say it’s easy. It’s not. It’s almost winter. I drove home in a U-Haul van with eleven boxes in the back. I left my office empty. I left my parking spot empty. When I stepped out of the elevator that, too, was empty.

The history of leaving is synonymous with the history of premonition. It basically works like this, you believe something is going to happen and it makes you want to stay, or it makes you want to leave. Somewhere in the bible doesn’t it say gather your past and go forth? It should. We spend more time thinking of the past than the future. Most poems are written in the past tense.

You leave evidence. You leave well enough alone. You leave a trail. But where did you go?

I attempted to find evidence proving that travel was invented to accommodate leaving more than going. I found arguments for both points of view. That does little for my thesis. But leaving requires honesty. Going, on the other hand, requires hope.

When smoke leaves fire, which one is more sad, the smoke or the fire? The same question applies to a poem and a poet. Leaving can turn any day into a grave. Everything I learned about leaving I learned from women. One woman told me it take courage to leave. Another said it takes courage to stay.

This is how you write a poem, by leaving things behind. A novel is different. You write that by putting things together. You can’t leave your memories, probably why poetry is more about leaving. The poetic act of creation is an attempt to undo something. When that’s not possible, we leave.

Reading at Bergamot Station

I'm doing a poetry reading with Richard Garcia and Katherine Williams at the Frank Pictures Gallery in Bergmot Station on Thursday, Dec 17th, 7:45. I'll hope you'll drop in. I promise not to be boring.

Dedication

Dedication

My father was dedicated to his work.

No one painted more perfect dots

on dice or better understood their language.

One black dot is the doorknob death uses to enter.

Two are a man’s fists behind his back.

Three, a man and woman with a child.

Four explains a tragedy. Five is a parade of

desperate women in snow. Six, an orchestra of ants

performing the symphony of human emotion.

All of this on a single die? I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “the world is a small place.”

First appeared in The Black Warrior Review, University of Alabama, Vol. 25 No. 2, Spring/Summer 1999; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.

Inspiration

Inspiration is for amateurs*. You make a decision to be a poet, writer, artist, what-not, and then you do the work.

I was in the checkout line at the supermarket**. The checkout girl told me she wrote a short story. I offered encouragement and suggested she write more. “No, no,” she was adamant, “I’m not like you and never feel inspired.” Inspiration has nothing to do with it.

Perhaps I’m the odd man out. Perhaps I’m the only poet who isn’t inspired. I love reading poems and scribbling them in notebooks. Love thinking long and hard about poetic possibilities. Love testing the limits of language. And I would love for an inspiring moment to move my pen. But it doesn’t. Do great basketball players only launch themselves at the net, spring above others to dunk a basket because they’re inspired? Poetry is work. Work you – hopefully – love. So you do it.

I have to back-peddle just a little.

When I first became a copywriter I read many books about writing, the best of them was The Writer’s Art by James J. Kilpatrick. Somewhere in the book he said that the best writers were poets; no one pays more attention to writing then a poet. To me, back then, poetry was rhyming thoughts about love and flowers. Nothing an ex-paratrooper sort of man would be interested in. Kilpatrick suggested that if you want to be a great writer you should take a poetry class, even if you never wrote a poem after the class, your prose would be better for it.

Then someone died. Someone always dies. A poet died and they read some of his poems on the radio. They didn’t rhyme. They said he was a poet! Something was wrong.

I was wrong. Instead of what I was expecting, the poems struck me as beautifully written***, powerful short stories. I immediately flashed back to the Kilpatrick book, the best writers were poets. Right then and there# I decided I would take, suffer, a poetry class to make me a better advertising writer##. The following day I drove to Westwood and enrolled in a poetry class at UCLA Extension.

Austin Strauss was the instructor. Every Thursday night we met in the basement of a church on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. The first night Strauss read us The Death of Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell and Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane by Etheridge Knight. The world stopped. I swear it did.

I had found something to devote my life to. Or it might be more accurate to say something to devote my life to found me. Of course, it sounds corny. But it’s true.

Perhaps it’s fair to say that inspiration found me that night.

There are forces at work in the world that cannot be explained. Science and religion argue about some of them. Poetry tends to steer clear of this argument.

Though my original point was that I don’t believe in inspiration I suspect the previous does suggest that on that night in a church basement in Beverly Hills I was inspired.

An artist must live an inspired life.

Opening yours eyes in the morning, that’s inspiring.

Live fully engaged with the world. "A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. " Wallace Stevens said that.

*Not that I’m suggesting that there really is anything like a “professional” poet. Most poets make living as teachers. Yes, I know Billy Collins probably make a lot of money from his books. And while I’m on the subject, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, W.S. Merwin and a few others do so. Though all of them, with the exception of Merwin where college professors.** I lived just down the street for a dozen years, had been in there probably three times before and knew many of the employees. If I remember correctly, I went to dinner with this woman previous to this conversation.

*** Though back then I would probably have not used the word “beautiful” to describe writing.

# I remember exactly where I was when I made the decision, I was in my car driving north on Laurel Canyon Blvd in Studio City, California, on my way home from work. I was listening to NPR as I always did, and still do.

## By the way, I am a better, in fact, great ad writer for it.

Death Obscura, a new book.

I'm thrilled to announce that Sarabande Books is publishing, Death Obscura, my second full-length collection of poems in the fall of 2010.

In the Apartment Above the Butcher Shop

(First appeared Fine Madness, Issue 26, 2001, pg 34. And is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

In the Apartment Above the Butcher Shop

My mother washed dishes in the bathtub

then bathed me and my brother,

set us on the sofa to watch television.

Black and white washed over us.

At the end of each show Mother sat with us

pointing out good people always win in the end.

By the time I was eight I could hear the difference

between a cleaver chopping a flank of beef, leg of lamb

or the thin ear of a pig. You have to be

a butcher’s son to know why this is important.

My father worked for the butcher,

hanging pigs in the window.

Steel hooks through their cut throats.

Mouths open as if they had one more thing to say.

The headless chickens in the cold

box were always gone by noon, an hour earlier

Father wrapped two chickens in wax paper and newspaper,

put them aside until Mother brought his coffee.

My mother shouted

don’t track blood through the kitchen,

when she heard us come up the stairs.

Outside, shadows quietly battled

for control of the streets

-- a sound often mistaken for wind

dragging newspaper along the sidewalk,

a sound we wouldn’t identify for years.

The Woman Not Wearing A Hat

(First appeared in American Poetry Review, Vol. 33/No. 1, Jan/Feb 2004 pg 31; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

The Woman Not Wearing A Hat

For two dollars you could run

your hands through her hair.

That’s what the cardboard sign

between her hands said.

A hat at her feet collected the money.

Wind pushing against her hair forced it to sway.

I dropped my two dollars in and grabbed

the hair at the back of her neck.

I closed my eyes; she closed hers.

(I don’t recall whose eyes closed first.)

It was the middle of the afternoon.

Perspiration dampened her hair.

I could feel people looking at me.

For years I told people I only did it

so she didn’t feel like she was taking charity.

That’s not exactly true,

for years I wouldn’t tell anyone.

I ran my hand to the top of her head,

turned and left before she opened her eyes.

There’s no telling what a man is willing to pay for.

Macrocephalus

(From The Soup of Something Missing.)

Macrocephalus

After my dog was killed by a car

my parents gave me a baby sperm whale.

In a small wooden boat,

father on one oar, mother on the other,

we rowed past the swells.

The only sound was the oars’ monotonous

work followed by the sigh

of the ocean pushed behind.

When it passed beneath

mother shouted “there, there”

and pointed at the large dark shape.

Father took photos with an old Instamatic.

On the way back to shore,

the only thing spoken

was by mother who asked

if I named it and I had.

Hell's Hell

(First appeared in Doubletake Magazine, Issue 8, Spring 1997, pg. 56; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

Hell's Hell

A waitress clears away the midday plates.
The skinny cook sweats and scrapes grease off the grill,
stopping only for a drink of cold water.
The bottom corner of the restaurant’s window is broken.
The owner’s been meaning to replace the cardboard patch
with new glass since it broke last year.
The three remaining customers ask for more beer.
They’re talking about robbing the beauty supply store, or the bank

next to it, or the bridal salon, pharmacy or bakery.
Together they have enough money
to buy a gun and some bullets.
This isn’t the first afternoon they made such plans.
Back in December they had the same
conversation as they wiped their bowls
of potato soup with chunks of bread.
But today, again, nothing happens.

Wind pushes against the cardboard patch.
It swings as if on a hinge.
A passing woman leans against the window,
curves a hand at the side of her face to block the sun
and looks inside. She sees the waitress, three customers,
but not the cook who went out back to relieve himself.
The waitress briefly stares at the woman's black silhouette.
Only a moment in hell's hell could be like this.

Titles

Poems without titles are like anonymous people. Example, there’s a tall man with long, gray hair standing at the checkout register in the supermarket. You say to yourself, “there’s a tall man with long gray hair standing in line at the checkout register in the supermarket.” Not much there. But if the person has a name, title, everything changes. The example continues, you see the same man but in this version you know his name. You say to yourself. “there’s George Washington standing at the checkout register in the supermarket.” A million ideas are swirling around in your head. Knowing person’s title changes everything. Poems should have titles. “Untitled” is not a title.

Titles in a poem can also function like background music in a movie, atmosphere and tone. The article The adds nobility to a title, and if not nobility then a certain amount of importance.

Titles are a struggle, at least for me. Sometimes I go to a list of interesting words and read the definitions searching for one that might work as a title. The word should aptly describe the emotional, not literal, content of the poem.

René Magritte, the Belgian surrealist often employed and interesting titling strategy for his paintings. He would invite friends for dinner. After eating and a couple of bottles of wine he would invite suggestions for names for a newly completed painting. “The Empire of Lights.” “Threatening Weather.” “The Discover of Fire.” “The Voice of Space.” His titles are poems. I’ve used one as starting point for a poem* and titled it after the painting.

I’m one of the few poets who doesn’t read much Wallace Stevens. This is my diplomatic way of saying I’m not big on his poems. Perhaps I should read him again. I’m getting off the subject. Titles. Stevens was another one great with titles. “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”

Haikus are titles. On my to-do list is write a poem using an ancient haiku as the title. And a poem that is shorter than its title? Why not.

The title of this book says much about my philosophy on titles. Ironmongery.
Titles are poems.


* The Magician's Accomplice

after Magritte

A copper tube hangs from nothing
and hides everything above the shoulders.
Chicken wire surrounds her pale naked body.
Six feet across the stage
her blond hair rises from another tube.
The brown curtain is amazed.
Only the polished wood floor saw
the way her lipstick smudged the cuff of his shirt
as he pressed the soft gag against her mouth,
the way the velvet ropes held her,
the way stage lights smiled
on the curve of the blade.
Mountains sit in the audience
wearing hats made of clouds.

The magician bows.
The accomplice drags the body
through the alley, all the while dreaming
of pulling riddles out of eyes.
The magician dreams of being cut in half
or flying from a black hat past
the ropes that raise mirrors over the city.
The accomplice wants to learn
the magical qualities of murder,
how anyone with a knife in hand
can be a temporary god.

The Argonaut Years

The Argonaut Years

I

She dreamed she pulled her face from my lips
and they tore off, clung to her cheek
like leeches which she immediately ripped from her face.
Embarrassed by the unintended meanness
of the gesture she put them in the palm of my hand
to have them sewn back at a later time.
As she told me the dream
I finished brushing my teeth, spit the last
of the toothpaste and water into the sink.
I was an argonaut in her life, but didn’t mind,
love makes explorers of us all.
The neighbor’s cat left gifts at her door.
On the sidewalk, a broken piano
abandoned three days. A man
walking by stopped to play.
When does the decay set in?

II

This is when the decay sets in.
I wiped the toothpaste from my face
and kissed her but she pulled her face from my lips
and they tore off, clung to her cheek
like leeches which she immediately ripped from her face.
Embarrassed by the unintended meanness
of the gesture she put them in the palm of my hand
to have them sewn back at a later time.
I held a towel to my bloody face,
wrapped the lips in napkins.
It will be years before she forgives me,
years more before I learn what for.
She returned to bed, sat upright,
her knees pulled to her chest.
Her hands, she waited
until I was gone before washing.

Clowns

Great clowns move seamlessly between sadness and humor and understand the influence they exert on each other. A clown is grotesque, colorful, outlandish. Isn’t a poem? Though few people have ever hired a poet to read at a birthday party. In medieval Europe clowns could say things poets would be executed for. They probably still could.

I was in a bank in Hollywood, California. Standing in line next to me, a man with a white painted face, red rubber ball on his nose and shoes that extended six inches past the toes and curved up. Other than that the rest of his clothes were typical ¬¬- khaki pants and white collarless shirt. In most other cities the police would have been called. I’ve unsuccessfully attempted to write a poem about this on at three occasions. I wonder if a clown, who after reading one of my poems, ever attempted to perform in the smaller ring at a three ring circus while a man poked at a lion with a chair in the largest ring and chimpanzee juggled in the other . Clowns seems to exercise better sense than poets. And unlike poets, most clowns have little to say. Body language, expressions, and props carry the performance. The narrative is based in image. Often there’s music like in a poem, music does more than contribute noise.

A poet is like a clown except not nearly as brave.

“Writers are a little below clowns and little above trained seals,” John Steinbeck.

The white-faced clown is often the serious member of the troop. A sonnet would be this clown. A traditional sonnet is in iambic pentameter as a traditional white-faced clown has red ears. The similarities between clowns and poems are numerous. Prose poems would be auguste type clowns, he is the fool and lower, much lower, down the clown social scale than white-face. As there are forms of poems there are other forms of clowns.

I considered compiling a list of poems about clowns but what would be the point? Though I did compile a list of poets who at one time or another performed as clowns, make-up and all. The length of the list did not surprise me. Subsequently, each wrote to me asking not to be included on this list. This also did not surprise me.

The oldest clown registry in the world is the Egg Register in England; hundreds of years older than the International Poetry Registry and Administration in Geneva, Switzerland. Fear of clowns is called coulrophobia. Fear of poetry is more prevalent though without a name. I plan to create one soon.

There is much to be said for location. One of my favorite places to write is at the kitchen table at night. Something should be said about dress. What if put on baggy pants held up by suspenders and painted my face? What if I dressed like that while I wrote?

The man holding defibulator paddles hunched over the heart attack victim has bright orange hair, a bold stripped shirt and sad black lips painted on the bottom of his face. Saturday night, two clowns sit in a movie theater holding hands. In the jury box, three people in white-face with red ears and rubber noses. Without saying a word, image changes narrative.

The expression “clowning around” deserves more respect.

“A clown is like an aspirin, only he works twice as fast,” Groucho Marx. A poem is like an anti-depressant except it has more side-effects. A poem is liquor except the hangover lasts longer.
A man wearing a white shirt with a large frilly red color stands at the back of a bus slowly making its way through the early evening traffic in Brooklyn. He juggles bowling ball pins. Everyone on the bus watches. Three rows up from him a woman is writing a poem in a notebook. Just a guess, she could be writing a story or the explanation as to why she’s leaving her boyfriend. I am convinced she was writing a poem. The way her face lifted from the notebook and momentarily started at the passing streets, a poet looking for an image. I missed my stop, was busy watching her write.

Desperate Men

(First appeared in Quarterly West, University of Utah, No. 47, Autumn/Winter 1998-99, pg. 4; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

Desperate Men

The strangers worked nineteen hours building a chimney on the roof, pausing only to wave at a curious neighbor or eat a sandwich lunch. It didn’t matter that the house already had a chimney, they built another beside it. No explanation was offered. All the while, the occupants of the house were held at gun-point at the kitchen table. Once the chimney was completed, the strangers tied up their victims and fled. Police found no clues and could only say it was the work of professionals. It was suspected this was the same gang that held a rural family captive for eleven days while they added a second-story extension to their house.

The Woman Not Wearing A Hat

(Appeared in the American Poetry Review Vol. 33/No. 1, Jan/Feb 2004 pg 31; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

The Woman Not Wearing A Hat

For two dollars you could run
your hands through her hair.
That’s what the cardboard sign
between her hands said.
A hat at her feet collected the money.
Wind pushing against her hair forced it to sway.
I dropped my two dollars in and grabbed
the hair at the back of her neck.
I closed my eyes; she closed hers.
(I don’t recall whose eyes closed first.)
It was the middle of the afternoon.
Perspiration dampened her hair.
I could feel people looking at me.
For years I told people I only did it
so she didn’t feel like she was taking charity.
That’s not exactly true,
for years I wouldn’t tell anyone.
I ran my hand to the top of her head,
turned and left before she opened her eyes.
There’s no telling what a man is willing to pay for.

The Toy Soldiers

(from the Soup of Something Missing)

The Toy Soldiers

When he returned home he found
the toy soldiers had left,
one hundred plastic men
carrying their belongings
in sacks thrown over the shoulder
like a retreating army carries
the essentials of running away:
extra socks, blanket, stale bread,
wallets taken from the dead
to be returned as a consolation prize.
Hadn’t he nailed the windows shut?
Tied the mean dog to the door?
He began to notice other things were missing.
Laces from the black shoe under the chair,
its eyes empty, agape,
a dead man’s toothless mouth.
There was no conversation,
there was just the sound of a woman
brushing her long black hair,
a car coming to a stop,
crows flying off the telephone wires,
dust lifting from their wings.
Later, he’ll tell a friend that’s what it felt like,
dust lifting from the wings.
This was how he invented forgetting.

Heroine In Repose

(First published in the New Ohio Review, University of Ohio)

Heroine in Repose

I wasn’t sure if she kissed me
or simply used her lips
to push my face away. Yes,
the moist warmth was enjoyable,
but when my head was forced
back over the top of the sofa
the intention grayed.

Earlier that day I planned
to quit my job and pursue
a career writing romantic novels
that would be confused as memoirs.
But if I couldn’t distinguish
between a kiss and a push
what chance do I have
of writing romantic novels
that would be confused as memoirs?

After the kiss, and I prefer
to think it was a kiss,
she sank back into the pillows
and watched me
out of the corner of her eye.

The Techniques of Immortality

What’s the life expectancy of a poem? Twenty-seven minutes. Yes, the life expectancy of a poem is only twenty-seven minutes. Most poems, according to the International Poetry Registry and Administration in Geneva, Switzerland, are not written by poets. Lines of poetry are unknowingly scribbled by all sorts of people on all sorts of things, and immediately thrown away. Of course, poets would say that a poem is immortal. Twenty-seven minutes is an average*. Considering that this average takes into account Horace, Sappho and Shakespeare you could probably guess that millions of poems race from birth to trash in seconds. Most go to their fates never knowing they were poems. For the vast majority, that’s as should be. For the minority, sadness. Think of all the great lines of poetry you and I will never read! It’s upsetting to think that there are people who don’t know that they’ve created something beautiful.

Darker poems live longer. A suspicion on my part. Poems first composed in notebooks live longer still. Fact. Manual typewriters have the same effect. I hope their scarcity doesn’t bode badly for poetry. Wondering about the life expectancy of a poem while writing is similar to having sex and wondering about the life expectancy of the possible progeny. Since poems live longer than ideas it’s best to write without them.

So, exactly how many poems are you expected to write in a lifetime? How long will you live? Keep each pair of shoes you’ve ever worn and you’ll live forever. Each night before sleep, take five deep breaths, hold the last breath for seventeen seconds and you’ll live to 102**. On a small Greek island they believe the color blue is essential to longevity.

If someone neatly tears your poem from a magazine and carries it in their pocket for two days you’ll live an extra week. If someone memorizes your poem you gain an extra month. If the memorization is the result of a school assignment you gain nothing.

A few years ago an article in the New York Times discussed the life expectancy of various types of artists. It was a slow news day. Poets have the shortest life expectancy. No surprise. At least half a dozen people sent me the article.


* Remove all the poems in the Norton Anthology from the equation, what then would the average life expectancy be? I called the International Poetry Registry and Administration in Geneva, Switzerland, and left a message with a secretary. After not hearing back for three weeks I wrote to them, included an SASE, still no reply. Some of my poems are twenty-five years old. Though none of my good, or what I think of as good, have hit this ripe old age.
** You must start this by your twenty-ninth birthday for it to work.

Photography

I’m still working hard at attempting to understand the differences between photography and poetry. After years on the subject, the one, and one of the few things, I’m convinced of is that there aren’t as many as you think. One is supposedly a visual art, the other a literary art; at least that’s what most people would say. But they would be wrong! You see a poem and you read a photograph.

My undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. I was taking photographs before I began writing poems, and not just to make money. I wandered through days and weeks with a camera to my eye through four years of the army, sometimes pretending that some of the photo I took were actually art. Back then I consciously thought of myself as a poet who didn’t write poems but instead photographed them. Eventually, I became a copywriter, and then a poet. Photography took up less and less time in my life*. There was a tipping point, after that I thought of myself as a photographer who didn’t take photographs, instead wrote out his photographs. Though my nostalgia for all things photographic infected my poetic life in an unexpected way. I wrote The Myth of Photography*, a book-length poem that re-examined – and at times, re-imagined – the history of photography; and let the result mingle with memoir.

Photography is a primitive form of time machine. Poetry is always in the present tense, though it is often written in the past tense. The emotional experience of reading a poem is immediate. Just because they are called still photographs doesn’t mean they can’t move.

People should pose for poems in the same way they pose for photographs. As of yet I haven’t hired a beautiful woman to sit naked in a large red chair in front of me so I could write a poem but I have every intention of doing so. A hand gun laying beside a folded newspaper, half-eaten apple and five bullets scattered about, morning light pouring in through the window – this will be the first in a series of still life poems I plan to write.

Imagine the entire world, each and every tree, person, building and cloud in one photograph. Now begin taking things out. Take out billions of things. Keep removing until you’re left with a woman standing under a streetlight at night. She’s smoking a cigarette. Her arms are folded just under her chest. Behind her is a 24 hour Laundromat. That’s a how a photography works, edit out everything except your subject. Outside of the view finder the rest of the world might exist but outside the photograph there’s nothing. Elliot Erwitt said “photography is simply about seeing.” See something interesting and press the shutter release button. Poetry works the same way. Imagine each and every word in the dictionary forming the uncountable amount of images and thoughts that make up the world** . Now start to remove things, remove words, and then remove more words. What you don’t say in poem is as vital as what you do, well, almost.

I find it comforting to discuss a poem as if I were discussing a photograph and vice versa.

*Today I again think of myself as a real photographer, shoot with a Canon 5D and print with an Epson 2880.
**Sections of the poem have been published in the Southern Review, Washington Square, Main Street Rag, Lake Effect and Agni (online).
*** The world available to poetry is much larger than that available to photography in that poets can write about the past in a way that photographers cannot photograph it.

Moon

While the sun makes no sound, at night I hear the moon scrape against my window. There was a time, long before we were here, that Moon was much closer to earth. Everything was better because of that. Since then, Moon has moved to a position some 250,000 miles away. Though don’t underestimate its importance. We need each other, Moon and earth; Moon and I. Anything written in Moonlight is off to a richer start than what might be written under other circumstances. It is a ridiculous oversight on behalf of Whoever that the sun is vital to life on earth in a way that the Moon never was. Strangely, as I wrote that line I was overwhelmed with an uncomfortable sensation. I am a poet of Moon10 and feel that I have just betrayed a lover.

Let me start over.

Man has been attracted to Moon in a way we never have to the sun. Yes, the sun is farther but that’s not the only reason there is little discussion about visiting. The sun possesses little poetry. Moon is rich, its topography a poetic table of contents. Earth has the Pacific Ocean, Moon has the Ocean of Storms11. Earth has the South China Sea. Moon has the Sea That Has Become Known. What I might write on a bamboo raft adrift in the Sea of Crisis! The Sea of the Edge is a place no man has returned from! Though men have returned from the Sea of Tranquility. Sea of Clouds. The Foaming Sea. Federico Garcia Lorca was a poet of the Moon*. The night he was murdered I’m convinced he fell into a puddle of Moonlight. I’ll probably never wade though the Marsh of Epidemics but I will write as if I have. Make Moon a planet, that’s what I say! One night in North Carolina I threw a rock at Moon. I apologize. I was drunk. And I was young. I’ve seen Moon in a bright morning sky. You’ve never seen the sun in a dark night sky. Ian Randall Wilson** has complained about my use of Moon. In fairness to his concerns Moon as metaphor, simile, pawn of figuration or whatnot does border on sentimentality. This is a border I have hopefully not crossed.

* The Moon of the Difficult Work

The moon like a puddle of milk.
If you toss a cup of moon into the air
what will it come down as?
The moon like a pale breast.
The moon like a hole in the black sky.
The moon like paper discarded by a hole punch.
Like the back of my eye, the moon, held between dark fingers.
The moon like a stranger.
The moon like a friend.
The moon like something forgotten.
The moon, a welt in the sky.
The moon is swollen.
The moon sinks
The moon sings.
The moon is the sky’s graveyard.
If there were no moon, would the sky need a new name?
Would that name be moon?
The moon of seven days ago.
The moon in another man’s poem.
The moon where I hang my hat.
The moon, what I reach for after I spit
in my hands and begin the difficult work.

** Ocean of Storms

A shark’s tooth in a previous life,
I shivered in the mouth’s broad horizon.
Felt electric fear as I sliced flesh.
Warmth blossomed.
I could taste the depths.
If I could I’d dig a hole
in the water for a dry grave.

In the next life I want to be
a tooth in a shark’s mouth
hunting an ocean on the moon.
Wreckage like praise.
Sublime fable.
The difference between
immortality and grief is delicate.