In Which There is a Catamount, or My Uncle Frank

I look for inspiration in Northern Woods
and see only the spring-coiled body
of a mountain cat, treacle colored and
oil sleek, slipping through the pines
languidly, liquidly. Frank, if he were young again.
If he were young again, Frank––
I never even knew him. All that was left were flat bones,
marrow sucked dry, alien
in the detritus of Massachusetts’ green-brown
forest floor, not unlike my carpet now
though I’ll lick no bones clean. And yet the sun-dapple is the same,
circle-and-square-hitting-ground
birthing pictures like Braque,
compositions giving body to this boneless room––
Écoutez! Listen! I can hear them:
delicate legato notes,
interior music of the white November light. Frank when he was young like me


Eulogy for a Burnt Church

Today we are gathered in remembrance––– please forgive me
if I speak too quickly; I have always feared a crowd–––
of a church once whole:
I will not visit you again
and so I mourn.
I feel guilty when I think about how I never liked you,
my only reason for visiting to sit
in your balcony and draw with too-small pencils on offering envelopes,
or perhaps to sing
from the purple bound book. I exalted my predecessors,
their greasy fingerprints like brands on the silk-thin pages:
I will not visit you again
and so I mourn.
My memories of you are the too-high voice of the soprano,
wavering like a sick tree about to break in a storm and
the thick odors of mothballs and linseed oil squatting heavily
in my nose like a winter sickness and
the sight of outstretched, wrinkled palms, imploring me to pray:
I will not visit you again
and so I mourn.
It burned on a cold January night.
I was not there to see the pyre but imagine the flames licked the bruise-black sky
with their swollen tongues
and whispered something like Our father who art in Heaven,
on earth as it is in Heaven, maybe more like Hell, with the flames––
all that I learned from you was this prayer.
I will not visit you again
and so I mourn.
This morning I woke with the taste
of your teachings on my tongue. They always did leave a bitterness, like the aftermath of a mug of yesterday’s coffee.
And I always looked for things I could not find
between lines or the breaks in song, but
instead, found the dusty carcass of a roach beneath the pews and
I thought I might die there too.
They would find my bones on the balcony and say aha!
so that’s where she’s been hiding,
all this time!


Season Thirty-Nine (Appendix 1.)

Port-side of tern flight patterns, the hull of the world.
I would take three round trips to the moon
without coming up for air
if only I could ascend from my seat in time to escape the Black Friday
battle charge, the mad-eyed craze of this jerkwater
day in November
which promises to steer me nowhere.
November is my favorite month.
A basket of fresh caught fish and something
like cream on my tongue, fruitless words of dissent
that never made it down from the roof. Por qué no los dos?
Margo replied, when I asked if the sharp, pointed toe of my new shoes was
witch-like or nice. I resented
her answer but said nothing.
Now, I have completed my molt. This is a low pressure trajectory,
though the sand in my eyes, this new grittiness,
tells me otherwise.
Did you understand the news and the weather, the rules
of that last cavalry of British soldiers coming home from war,
the rules
which were explained to all of us in our sleep?
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME,
for adopting a flight strategy better suited to modern day life, and
please remember that you must make it round the globe
before the morning. HURRY UP PLEASE,
ITS TIME.
I’ll confess
that the black-ice mornings got me before I could follow
my instructions and I fell–– an example of poor flight
performance. The blood from the scrapes on my knees reached
the tarmac and froze.
The risk of uncontrolled drift is too great: I was shown fear
in a handful of dust and now I know
everything. Nothing brings me more joy than watching the southbound migration passage
of my brothers and sisters. The Magritte
of it all, how they vanish
in the bright heat of that clear-cut winter sun.


Invidia’s Soliloquy

I was joyful, comparing myself to the girl in the mirror,
even as I dreaded the scratch of the golden hair growing above Rex’s thick upper lip,
coarse and tawny as the mane of a lion, that regal creature’s cornfield-yellow crown.
I have always hated wine but two nights ago, I choked it down
while Rex sang “O Children” in that voice made for the thick of muddy battles
and not for songs. And I tried to appreciate Nick Cave, but couldn’t.
I asked the doves in the birdbath why they couldn’t
bathe elsewhere, why they needed to witness themselves in the artificial mirror
of the stagnant water. Rex assured me that this was a losing battle
and I affixed my eyes to the splintered toothpick dangling from his lips.
It was only recently that the old beech tree in the yard got blight and Rex cut it down
but I grew used to the absence quickly, the yard’s lack of purple leaf crown.
My second molar on the lower left is decayed and requires a crown.
I understand this is the most difficult tooth for the procedure and I can’t
bear the thought of the needle, the pain. But I swallow my worry down
and every evening I plant myself before the mirror
and I peel back my lip
and I scrutinize that tooth until it loses all its meaning. My battles
seem quiet in the face of the all encompassing-ness of Rex’s battles.
But then, Rex’s teeth are strong and straight and will never need a crown.
Rex was five Coronas deep when he decided to pierce his lip.
There were no needles in the house and eventually he gave up. I couldn’t
easily forget the crazy expression etched in his face; I tried to recreate it in the mirror
but every time, I failed to nail it down.
That teeth-bared beer-breath half-grin becomes Prometheus, chained down
to a rock and eaten alive by vultures and I wake sweating at 2 A.M.. Too many battles
were fought between me and the girl in the mirror
over the nature of my weakness, whether it came from me, or her. My crowning
achievement is that despite her pearl-pink nakedness, she couldn’t
feel the sweaty heft of Rex’s flesh or the burn of his tight-pressed lips
against her own lips, her thin and cracked and joyless lips.
Through the sliver of window, the moon sinks deep, deep down.
I can see that we’re older now and the light is not so warm. Maybe I never could’ve
won that battle between the juvenile promise of a diamond studded crown
and the bare, bare head in the mirror.
Too right, she couldn't be a queen. Foolish lips in a foolish face
always mirrored by a downward slanting brow and slouching body
that no battle-weary soldier would pay even a crown to fuck.