Comics and Candy

Moreover the sky has stopped wishing I could visit.

It tells me I can stay for as long as I want.

I can cut down trees and wear shoes made of green suede.

I can eat pork rinds and ask for more time.

So now that it’s settled, thanks for the address.

I am a good person who sometimes needs a place to stay.

If a fellow drops in claiming to be my cousin

let him in. He is an old, close friend.

He sometimes needs a blue popsicle for his tongue,

which gets hot and tired from talking all day,

and then he runs his cool tongue over his red face

and gradually feels much better.

The tiger might want to come in as well.

He brushes his hair with a thorn bush

and wears a pink begonia behind his ear,

that’s how you’ll know it’s him

and not some other tiger,

also his eyes glow with a yellow gold fire

and his voice is rough and low.

My mother the clown will be coming later in the year

with her own axe, and boots made of rhino skin.

Her kind of clowning involves purple chiffon

with real silver thread woven in

and an unexpected, shocking, and ultimately funny

something or other,

that’s usually bright red.

Now I’d like to give thanks again for the earth

and for being able to stick around for a while,

and for all those who wish it were nicer

I say why not roll your birth records into a tube

and blow a trumpet to far distant hills

and wait for the echo.

Speech

I lost my way again

that’s why I can’t stop laughing

discovering items that may or may not

belong to me, or otherwise fit

not like an addict wearing a necktie

or a beast with a busted bone

like smoke, without specific intention

but with allegiance to form

I try so hard to mean what I say

to be inside my words

my songs carry across waves

I play with sound, I feel meanings

beads are strung into lines

that I wear to remember things

this is the truth, maybe

or maybe wind is my author

a hollow tree singing to me

my dna getting a good idea

water main

Beautiful Crow

Beautiful crow, you exist,

make your mark,

hide the world

in your feathers.

Bold companion,

true crow self,

your heart is clean,

a voice I aim for.

Playful relation,

return in noisy crowds

enlivening trees.

My heart needs you.

The Eve of the Eve

I was on a street in my own neighborhood

terrifying in its ordinary strangeness.

It was wild and overgrown, with tracks in the snow

leading to old arrangements of curbs and hedges

and a faucet tangled in dark bindweed.

In order to be a welcome stranger

I had to be dressed like a movie star and able to fly,

in other words, a “city traveler” (words I misread somewhere)

so I was feeling kind of crazy, like I knew

anything could happen, and probably would.

I didn’t care, I wore my velvet cape and rhinestones.

I might get beat up for being the wrong color, or yelled at

for cutting through a yard, but if there was someone to tell it to

who’d laugh at the funny parts, it would be all right.

I was also chewing a piece of gum I peeled off the sidewalk

in warmer weather, and saved in my red purse.

It had sand in it but that didn’t bother me

because of my love for gum and all that it stands for,

the freedom to chew without swallowing,

to move my lips with nothing to say.

I crouched in the street to carefully pick up the shapes

tires left in new snow.

The sharp edges tasted good.

An older girl I didn’t know said I’d die if I ate them,

but I didn’t believe her, I only believed in things

if I liked how they fit the story I continuously told

to all my friends, like the old woman

on her front porch, who showed me

how to make evergreen perfume,

rubbing the crushed green buds on my wrists.

I worried about her future, all alone in the where-ever.

I wanted to keep her company in a snow globe,

frozen in time,

dreaming privately of adventures while I got shook up

then watching the plastic flakes float down.

I dreamed there was a place I knew by heart

and I was inside it, and lived there.

riverside

Mirror of Questions

The bottomless blackness of myself

said the old man

leads me to wonder about you

and the others. Where

is the token for the ride?

We have it, the blue man

has it, the troll

under the street has it,

the man in the tree

has it. I mean the thing

that unlocks, I mean how

do you get back, and how

touch? I’m alone, leaning

toward the lamplight, but I can’t

see. I’m happy that

you’re here. I’m a boy

walking alone, leaves drifting

all of a sudden

down all the streets.

Shapes

Following in the dark mortar the blasted

gianted down ways of halls of nights of dust of bruises

shoring hard aboat beside the moonpath

sweeping scraps of shards of crumbs of broken

goodness and beams of gladness, so

sorrow jumped high

sorrow jumped low

madness dipped spoons into oh oh oh—delightful

and then now ever or even if because—

poor headless monster. Poor madam hoo hoo.

Seek ye not which is never

fall ye down which is sort of

jump ye high which is might stupid

stagger laughing

poor him! He died so lightly

poor me, I did cry so much for nothing

and now the bottom is still hard.

and never leaked much, just enough to—

one fell down, they said, and the little animals watched

one was born, they said, like an animal

who came here for a reason

wanted to live, interested

and willing to suffer

nothing is poor until it says so

nothing works until he makes room

scooping out the guts of his pretense

One solid afternoon he rented a cottage

on the banks of a river

sad river, flowing mightily, mighty dirty,

might loud highway running side by side... hmm.

Oh that river does lull me, at times, he said

dipping his toes in the water. Giant! Like me,

said the mermaid, exactly like him, touching toe to toe.

forever is a word about time but it has no time

said the man, slowly, tears dripping down the back of his throat

and forgive me, I’m crying about my story that I loved so.

Group Photo in a Cheap Frame

Some are laughing, and some are trying to look pretty,

and some don’t think it’s funny, or just

don’t get it, and some are wearing glasses and some

aren’t, and some have lipstick on

and some don’t, and one man

has on a bow tie and one man

isn’t wearing a tie at all and all the women but one

are wearing cat eye glasses and are also

fat and kind of old. One man looks a lot

like the comedian Al Franken, or vice versa, they’re all

look-alikes for someone, or so it would seem, faces

become familiar after daily exposure, like in this photo

of a time and place, and these details,

noticing whenever I look how touching

it is that this fat lady’s feet

don’t reach the floor, and this man

is laughing so hard his mouth is open

and his eyes are closed,

and his head is tilted back, the one with the bow tie

wouldn’t you know it, and isn’t it endearing

the way this woman with her beautiful

blue dress and wide red leather belt

slouches down as though to say

I don’t really think

this highly of myself it’s just

for the picture. Maybe the man with no tie

is the janitor, because he doesn’t have a jacket either,

his skin is darkened by sun, and his smile and look

are fresh and open, full of the sky.

It’s a small school, six men and six women

sit and stand in front of a curtain

with a little sign propped up in front:

“Rock Island

School

Staff

Spring 1962”.

I got this photo

from a junk store in Detroit, and got it

just for the frame, but these people

in their particularity

frozen in a not-too-significant or meaningful moment

laughing or not at a silly joke like

“Say cheese!”

are still somehow here, living in this frame

that far from lying in a drawer is propped up

where I can see it, like others of its kind

(three barrel-shaped people and a bulldog,

a soft-eyed girl), and I will probably

never find another use for it, though I still don’t know

even after living with them day after day

who these people are.

Animal Dreams

I refuse to put my affairs in order

because I haven’t lived yet.

Two years ago I rode a bus through a strange neighborhood.

I opened a window.

There were flowers blooming everywhere.

I was a certain kind of animal; a human being.

I wanted to eat the world,

to know every solid thing 

with my tongue,

but I was late for work.

I got off at my stop and walked

the same eight blocks 

past the same stores and parking lots.

While I walked I lived a thousand years 

and met no one.

I dreamed a big dream while I walked

thinking about sailors living in a whale’s belly,

hammocks swinging from rib roof beams, 

lit by whale oil lamps.

I saw a painting of it once in a book

and never forgot it.

I suggest you use my bones for picture frames

and remember the blood that was in me

and how I had hands and fingers

and I was small and then I was big

and I had brown hair and I scratched my elbow

and I fell down and cried

and I was made of a seed.

I never ate enough for how hungry I was.

My desire was for the river

of a dark city whose lights

shine on water, whose buildings hold a thousand

bodies with voices and movements and dishes and thoughts,

who dance alone to the radio

in the same way that a bird looks

with a short red beak and a crest and soft feathers

at a girl walking to school,

who stretch their legs out and point their toes

for the messes they’ll leave

when time slides shut.

I am a certain kind of animal.

My obligation is to breathe.

I had a revelation.

I had it a thousand times.

I wandered the desert sucking on a stone.

Finally I came to a tire dealership

with a boy’s head mounted on top

whose mechanical eyes moved from side to side.

I marveled at the mind that conceived it.

At a market I bought a bunch of bananas and a quart of beer

and goggled at the men, women, and children

in the aisles and check out lanes

who had clothes and hair and eyes 

and beating hearts —

same species.

If a wolf looks at a wolf

or sun hits a leaf

is it the same as chopping tomatoes

in the back room of a restaurant?

Put your finger through this hole —

what do you feel?

I commune with the dead at the public library

anxious to ask Graves a question

or dance with Collette.

On the other side of the world

I’m sewing a coat for my baby.

I’m an old man pointing a brush with my tongue.

I’ve devised a way of painting

the court doesn’t recognize,

but the peasants

prefer my flowers and bees 

for their gates.

I die a guilty prisoner, shivering

teeth clenched on the dream I never tasted.

My mouth and flesh have a taste for this and

everything else.

I run between houses and over fences

until I’m sure there’s no longer

anyone behind me

and then I catch my breath in some bushes,

look at the scratches on my arms and legs.

I fall asleep. When I wake up it’s dark,

the grass is wet and stars are out.

I walk home with the night animals

staring from shadow lairs

and sleep on the porch with the dog.

The walking dead, who don’t get burned by fire,

whose houses burst into flame over and over again,

rescue their notebooks and tape recorders,

teach the willing how to make heat,

are offered treasures they don’t accept

and leave before the feast begins.

There are twelve lessons.

There are five things.

I met a very old man.

I hid in an old woman’s garden.

Red Sky Daydream

The clouds in my mind had misery

to thank for thickness and were very heavy

as well. Because I was unwanted, I thought,

because why else was I missing

and presumed not, when I was right there?

No sooner did the rain fall, then my mouth opened

and I called out

“help me!” I called openly into the rain

directly into the mouth of my mouth, which meant

“I’m too little to control the works of this thing—

help me out, wouldja?”

So my big mouth smiled from out of the blue clouds,

from out of the clouds that hid rocket ships.

The pirates stuck their spyglasses out the windows of the ship

and noticed me howling, “wah!” just like a big baby.

“Oh my lord in heaven’s bedroom,” said the old sailor

with a stick strapped to his broken leg for structure

and stability in the face of uncertainty and possible

loss of rotten limb, “get her a safe passage up here!”

he hollered back to the young boys and girls

who had to do all the hard work.

“But why?” one asked, a girl of twelve with brown bangs.

“For to help us out with this gargantuan rocket,”

said he, and added to the yellow pirate next to him

“besides, she’s making an awful racket.”

So they bunched me up in a cargo net and hauled me

past the cold mist of the cloud’s blue lips

and patted my head and gave me some dried fish.

“Don’t cry there girl,” said the old pirate, Samuel

Lemuel Clanderswich, who was boss and dad of the ship

“for I can’t stand the sound of it.

Here, climb up on pa’s lap and let’s tell us a story of the

High Seas.” Then he waited, so I said

“Once upon a time, there was an old grouch, his name was Half-wit

Booboo Head, and he jumped off a rock into a pit of darkness—”

“That’s good, that’s a start,” Samuel interrupted, “okay so then,

after that, his mother renamed him Esther—”

“That’s a girl’s name.” “Is it? All right, Nedly then.”

“Whatever.”

I was so crabby every word pricked like sword grass

at first, but then I felt better, safe

and sleepy. The way the old man talked

was quiet and slow, like a sluggish meander

reflecting sun, with dragonflies and marshbirds.

And so the story went on and on, til twelve brothers

suddenly arrived on Star-deck Four, flying in from a forest,

in search of their long lost sister.

They all wanted sweaters, it was so cold and damp

but the ship’s store of yarn had been knitted already into a long blanket,

long enough for the whole crew to lie under while Pappy Lemuel

told the same long story, so long that he always finished

to the sound of snores, and not one sailor ever heard the ending but him

so every night he had to start all over again, except it was always

a different story, other than the parts that were

always the same. “Pappy, why don’t you just

take up where you left off?” “What do you mean? I told the whole

damn story last night, it isn’t my fault you wasn’t a-listenin’.” “Well

all right start at the part where the father goes to town to sell his

whiskey—” “No, I already heard that part—” “Never mind,” Pappy cut in,

“there’s no point in starting a story in the middle, it wrecks the mood,

the ambiance” (he said frenchly) “anyway these poor

fellows are going to freeze if they stay up here, let’s let them down

below with us.”

So Pappy kissed them special and proper, each one,

rubbing their stubbly heads with his old hands.

Why, his hands were so old and raggedy

they looked like they had been cut off an oak’s roots

and stuck at the end of his long brown arms,

which were stretched from hauling rope.

“Oh Pappy,” the twelve brothers said

“will you be our new dad?” “Why that’s no problem at all, fellows,”

old Pappy said, “I’ll raise you up good— it’s these clouds,

they make you better than you would be

if your feet clapped the ground.”

“You see,” old Pappy began, after everyone was tucked in,

“a long time ago, we had our mothers, but one day

a giant come crunching up the road to our sweet village—

oh, my, the flower beds were so neat and straight

just like a white picket fence Fourth of July picnic

and if anyone was unhappy we never heard a word of it

just went to the funeral and looked at our shined up shoes

then ate sponge cake dribbled with jello and jello

filled with cabbage and radishes, and sweet sugary slices of ham —

well, you know the routine. But then one day as I said

a giant come by and you could hear his big feet

from a long ways away. ‘Fee fie fo fum,’ said he in a normal tone

which to us just about blew our eardrums out, even though

he was still several miles away. ‘I smell the blood of a woman!’

Well, that’s when the shooken ground got up in our bones and joints

and the women looked down at their laps and started to calculate

how fast they could run and how far they could get afore the lion —

I mean giant — got along and saw them. And then the men

glanced over at the women’s laps — and so did the kids, the old folks,

the halfwits, the mad fools, and the cripples, and they all smelled it —

that sharp, metallic tang of iron, that sweet-sour recently hardworking

red red blood that had paved the way

for more for the rest of us, and the women knew

it was up to them to take care of it.

‘Now don’t worry,’ said the wisest one, ‘we’ll let

the giant have his fun, until he gets tired

and starts looking off into space, then we’ll club him upside his head

and call you all back home. But meanwhile, go jump in the rocket ship

out yonder behind the barn, take a lot of food with you,

everything you can think of, just throw it up

through the windows, then go drift inside

the biggest, shapliest cloud you can find.

One day you’ll hear us calling, it’ll sound like a wave

pouring over a city, like this,’ and she made a sound

with her lips and tongue,

‘shshshshshshshshshhssssssss.’

We all listened good

and marked it, even the bears and flies, and planned one day

we’d go home, though we knew

darn good and well we’d never

scarcely hear that sound again

among all the other sounds of the world

from up high over the clouds, but didn’t say it.

‘Don’t worry, now,’ said I to the silent men and children

as the rocket rose softly in the spring evening

in the mist off the fields, ‘we’ll just come back

ever so often and check.’

Meanwhile the women had kept the grannies with them

to embarrass the giant by staring at him, and all sat on rolls of hay

knitting or embroidering

or something ladylike, looking the picture of sainthood

from the blushing to the burnished, when the giant come up

with such a thirst

and hunger and excitement that when he saw them daintily sitting

in their sexy get-ups of female bodies upon the rustic, so-so, mild hay swirls

he was sort of salivatingly disappointed, expecting terror and weeping

and small children to tear to pieces, or at the very least

from off of their mothers’ breasts.

“Well, let not the giant be mysteriously lumpish if he can be rosy as well,”

said Pappy in the deep smooth sudden voice of a cloud

“his blush so great it lit the sky for miles around and we saw it from the ship.

A long discussion ensued, which lost us completely,

our heads were spun badly off course, and since that time

we look for rosy skies

to touch down and see if maybe it’s home.

But so far, no such luck.”

Then all the voices came back to a single note,

a wave rainbowed past,

the ship left the harbor for the open sea.

The Sizes and Speeds of Different Worlds

For some reason the garden didn’t grow taller than an inch high.

This may have been because the mouse family requested it,

but if so, why wasn’t the rabbit can informed?

This all changes according to your point of view.

If your eyes are only as big as the heads of map pins,

and are at the same height as an individual packet of marmalade,

then an inch high flower is just right.

A mouse suggested we all lie on the grass and gaze,

if possible, if our noses aren’t too big,

at the flowers from the angle at which they were meant to be viewed.

When we do this, I notice that my chest is opened

at this angle, twisted against the damp earth,

my guts are transposed.

I like the way it feels to spirally bend

like a dry oak leaf

so I look at the flowers with tears in my eyes

so moved to be full length against a presence

that breathes a coolness out

at this hour, this time of year.

Because I am so big

I can hardly see a mouse’s point of view

and don’t understand the fast life,

the urgency.

My desire is the same speed as the moon,

who, contrary to the rabbit’s secret belief,

is not cold and dead, but warm and alive.

Filterless Pleasure

Black spots grew on the leaves, darkened some of light’s voices. The plant became itself in company with illness. It displayed itself in its way but with additions and marks.

Neither rain, sun nor earth took notice. Dew crept up from the ground. Bumblebees sniffed and licked. Animals moved past on special missions.

Stockboys smoked cigarettes and spat. Trucks were unloaded. Dumpsters filled and stank. Smells of dough and stale beer pushed the air. Sweet clover sang its white and yellow notes across knapweed and lace. Chinese lanterns snuck over the fence. Sweet peas climbed it. Bull thistle grew six feet high.

A human being walked past and called the names and touched the leaves, held her nose past dumpsters and air vents with bad breath. She climbed up through the fence hole to see dame’s rockets and poppies. The old man was watering his garden.

Rx

I wish I could be everything in the world

and live in the same small village

as everyone else, but of course

I’d still have to have my own place.

Then I wouldn’t feel so sad, wondering

if I missed the life I meant to aim for.

I wouldn’t be painfully lonely, secretly afraid

and everyone would have a fair chance

to live in their real house.

It’s because I’m a village dreamer,

many in one, doing all that calls me.

My heart is full of the feeling

of life unfolding, a miracle

anyone can use.

Sometimes it’s invisible, but I don’t let that bother me.

I keep learning about love, how to express it,

how to receive it.

Then someday when I’m out walking

I might hear someone say

“There goes an artist.”

The Last Frontier

I am the animal who woke in the dark,

who broke racks, slamming pans

of frozen salmon onto the belt.

Angry heads glared in piles by the guillotines,

hearts and guts paved the floor,

slid down drains to the sea.

I envied the guy who stood in the stainless steel hopper

his silver eternity, shoveling shiny corpses

toward the lines. Zen Pete said

“If they’re stiff, they still know they’re dead.”

The weight of the kings in my arms felt the same

as hoisting a sleepy toddler off to bed.

I was a slow and lazy worker.

I liked to look at the rainbow scales.

I always pretended I was the greatest

factory technician who ever lived,

scraping out the bloodlines with my thumb,

popping out the hearts through the holes

where their faces used to be,

letting them pile up, beautiful as roses.

I slept with Carver’s Ultramarine

and a wind-up alarm clock

behind a curtain made of a flannel sheet

with scallops cut along the bottom,

with a wooden crate nailed to the wall

above my bunk for storage,

and my boots at the bottom of the ladder

ready for my descent

when the boss walked the line of bunkhouses

hollering for the start of the next shift.

I rubbed the burning pain from my feet

with aching hands, read a few consoling lines, slept

to the drone of the generator,

the factory hydraulics thumping through camp,

with the smell of socks drying on the stove,

and the door propped open a bit

so I could hear birds,

fill my lungs with fresh wind

and look out through the narrow gap

at green humps of grass and distant marshes.

I knew their names and nicknames; chum, sockeye, king.

I loved their sweet, clean smell

and admired the pretty colors they turned

as they started their terrible journey.

Later their haggard looks ruined them,

their dissolving flesh was no good to us.

People laughed like the fish would hear

and feel ashamed to be such fools for love.

They laughed like they knew better,

like it would never happen to them.

While waiting for the reds to run

a few of the old hands built a smoke shack on the beach.

During the season the smell wafted through camp.

It was the best smoked fish I ever put in my mouth,

sweet, salty and alive, with contraband whisky

to sip between bites

that came for Robbo and Louise in a box marked

“Danger! A.I.D.S. Test Results.”

I was tired and in pain. I laughed and laughed

at every joke.

The tundra was her own large beast

with green fur,

I could feel her love

that would just as soon feed me to the bears

across the banks of Big Creek

where it fanned out into the Bering Sea

as cushion my long steps with grass and moss.

The tundra was an animal lying down and hiding

under ribbons of bright water

and herds of caribou.

Seen from the sky, the estuaries

were extravagently curved and shining,

the world below looked as if it didn’t need

and wouldn’t welcome us, it was so green

and so un-useful, containing no fast food

or loud machines, and permitting our passage

with tough turbulence, which made me feel

like a cowboy. I cried for all my relations

who had never seen the tundra from a bucking plane

that was like an old Chevy Nova with wings.

Sixteen on, eight off. 3:00a.m. breaks

found the sun low on the horizon

bronzing the waving grasses.

We scrubbed our gear with bleach,

washed our hands and faces of smells and scales

at the long outdoor sink, crossed board paths

over mud to the cookhouse

to piss, rest, and smoke.

I was lonely

in spite of friends and mournful guitars.

Quite often the fisherfolk

came to our cookhouse for a meal.

We got four squares a day,

plenty of meat and cake.

It was hog heaven.

When the fish were running,

those who caught them

might work 36 hours straight,

yet they didn’t look that bad,

nothing like the gaunt fish spawning.

There’s a name for someone

who swims home to spawn and die,

but I don’t know what it is.

I should know.

I should hold on to these things.

Yesterday I went looking

for “that thing that you wear at night

to keep you warm.” I couldn’t

quite picture it but I knew my hand

would reach for it while I followed behind.

Words are a bother and a cluttered house

they climb over each other in piles

sweet white fly babies newly hatched

looking everywhere for suck-love

the I want of all existence.

My words are pining away, dying for attention

but nothing is getting through.

I’m too tired to care for them properly

and they nag at me from occasions long gone

pressing me to tell the stories.

Not for any good reason, but just because

everything deserves to exist in its fullest expression.

Stories have life, they evolve, they want to live

but first they have to be born.

Someone has to tell them so other people

can see them, so they become as alive in them

as they sometimes are in their own experiences.

All of a sudden I feel like every story I tell is fine

and the words in them are children

who think my faults and failures are fringes

who wish they could wear glasses like me,

“I want a peg leg and an eye patch,” says one

“and a parrot on my shoulder who flies away and comes back.”

They think I can do anything

because I allowed my sink to peacefully transform,

a student of evolution, observing

organic matter on a matrix of dishes,

a sublime, pungent world that I liked best

when the fruitflies came to stay. With each generation

they became more and more

“the kind of fruitflies who live in Donna’s sink,”

very tiny and polite. Because I let them live

I learned to love them. Did they grow to love me?

I’m a superstitious person, a scholar of “what if…?”

On a factory trawler I looked in the eyes

of yellow fin sole who wiggled

in my gloved hands, flopped

in the pans, disturbing the careful pattern

they were obliged to be frozen in.

I felt I should say, at least, “hello.”

Maybe the fish, being seen

would hate me, at least they’d have

someone to blame, it would be a comfort

if with their last breath they could curse me

instead of crying “Momma! Where am I?

What’s happening to me?” like the pollock, who

crushed in the nets self by self with

puzzled, stupid faces seemed

to deserve their fate by being helpless

and mystified instead of cynical and appalled.

The yellow fin with their sideways faces

and golden eyes made a nice pattern

shingled in the heavy pans. It was easy

to daydream and eavesdrop, to care deeply

about snagging more pans when El Gordo

sent them back with a shout. Cardboard

from the end of a large spool made his cap

a sombrero and his pencil thin moustache

and carnival voice were an art form

to make the time pass, to remind us to laugh.

I tend to think of myself as strong and lazy

but the truth is, I tire quickly, and my best

is nothing to brag on. I would like to believe

that if I tried I could really kick ass

because it feels better to have a choice

but the fact is my mind is adrift and my rhythm

rocks with the ocean. I compensate by understanding.

Anyway, there’s a difference between endurance

and energy, between managing to remain alive

and really living.

What’s more I can’t even endure the everyday

without taking time to talk to myself. Otherwise

I forget who I am.

I could have passed happy hours watching birds

wheel over water, the trawler suspended in sky,

but I made do with small sips of wind

hauling trash from the factory to the deck, looking out

for a few seconds, into black space and lit up birds.

No one knows my effort of desire and will

when I decide each day to continue living.

I don’t appreciate it myself, most of the time.

It irks me to be so slow, aimless, and heavy.

Being slow is okay from inside of it,

if it’s allowed, but generally the world

is impatient, and requires purpose. I prefer to do things

for no good reason, especially climbing

and dangerously leaning out, almost ready to fly.

It makes me feel like I’m realer than real

superimposed, doubled,

in a comic book, being and seen.

It’s as close as I can reasonably get

to freedom from the sadness of not being enough

because daring and foolishness are so exciting

almost like tipping over into a new dream,

a new life, a different kind of animal.

Being at the edge of sense is when

everything has a good enough reason to exist.

Useful is a junkie’s word, it means

what can you do for me? What guarantee?

It’s the trickery of being able to think.

A fat man laughs a big, broad, ho ho,

because animals like us have to make our mark

on the air, on the moment as it passes.

One of the deckhands paused to chat

where I sat on deck on a crate

about how his wife was going to be mad

because he wouldn’t be back in time

for their anniversary. He had a large pot of coffee

he was taking up to the other deckhands, who were examining

porno mags and tying knots. Even Captain Tim

in his thick loud voice bawled out he’d miss

his little daughter’s birthday for the sake

of these fat fish our radar found

so we could fill up the freezer hold

and increase the amount of our checks.

You’ve got to take it as it comes,

like the guy who got home a day early

to find his girl in bed with his best friend.

She hid naked in the cupboard under the sink for hours

afraid to come out. He wondered where she went.

One man lost a hand to the header.

He stood on a saltwater hose as he worked,

lost his balance when someone jerked it.

There’s a plastic guard for the blade, but it has to be big enough

for a pollock the size of an arm to slide under.

Amador had the crappy job of cleaning the sumps,

came up covered from head to foot in shit.

I was lucky, every time

we entered or left Dutch Harbor

it was during my shift, I’d work on deck

watching the islands, hauling lines,

thinking of my father’s mother’s father

who worked on a car ferry in the Great Lakes.

He’d just gotten his captain’s papers when polio put him ashore.

Two years later the ship sank in a storm, all hands lost, so in the end

polio got him an extra thirty years.

When the weakness returned in his 70’s

he had a trapeze hung over his bed, to get

his strength back in his arms, but it didn’t work.

That time he finally went down.