This poem of mine was inspired by an interview with Walter Wangerin Jr. at the 2006 Calvin College Festival of Faith & Writing. I’m not sure which version I like best, so I welcome reader feedback in the comments box. The first version below is the original; the second is forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review.

The World Looks Back (v.1)

Give me the disinterested miracle,
someone else’s breakfast
made bigger, the fingertip sheared by the mower
rejoined cozy as a found button.
Give me the half-wild cat’s eye
luminescent in the twilit hedge,
her awareness catching me up in its 
      dark river.
She shakes the dust from her ruffed face,
rolls at my feet, then bolts — but not far,
looking back, her startled face fringed 
      by ladyslippers.
Let me pass, mystified, through her intense, 
      hidden story.
Why else would I shiver in the April dawn
to watch two scraps of blue defend their 
      nesting box —
sit on a pole, fly in circles, return, repeat —
a dull, dangerous life, but not my own.
I want to hear the dogwood,
its squared-off ivory flowers
tipped with rust like sheets stained by childbirth,
rejoicing in its mission.
The voice that moves the scenery
sometimes gives it lines. So give me the angel
telling my neighbor to catch a train.
The two-headed rabbits, beloved monsters
of the tabloids, the pepper with a baby inside.
I don’t want to be the last man alive in 
      the restaurant,
even if I can cook. Bees are weaving
through the pink streamers of the weeping cherry.
One interrupts its geometric language
to assault my kitchen window
with dreadful, comical thumps.
Good glass between us
keeping our lives diverse.
Let me be here and also
the strange mosaic in his eye.


********
The World Looks Back (v.2)

Give me the disinterested miracle,
someone else’s breakfast
made bigger, the fingertip sheared by the mower
rejoined cozy as a found button.
Give me the half-wild cat’s eye
luminescent in the twilit hedge.
She shakes the dust from her ruffed face,
rolls at my feet, then bolts — but not far,
looking back, her startled face fringed 
      by ladyslippers.

Why else would I shiver in the April dawn
to watch two scraps of blue defend their 
      nesting box —
sit on a pole, fly in circles, return, repeat —
a dull, dangerous life, but not my own.
I want to hear the dogwood,
its squared-off ivory flowers
tipped with rust like sheets stained by childbirth,
rejoicing in its mission.
The voice that moves the scenery
sometimes gives it lines. So give me the angel
telling my neighbor to catch a train.
The two-headed rabbits, beloved monsters
of the tabloids, the pepper with a baby inside.
I don’t want to be the last man alive in 
      the restaurant,
even if I can cook. 

                              Bees are weaving
through the pink streamers of the weeping cherry.
One interrupts its geometric language
to assault my kitchen window
with dreadful, comical thumps.
Let me be here and also
the wild mosaic in his eye.

         forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review

Come, little fly, dear mouse.
Come, my edible baby.
Before desire dries like paint
on an old house, enter my cellar.
Lost in green bottles and paperback dust,
fungal soil, the lusty dark.

Here the models sail, still oceanless
in the docks of the shelves:
ironsides, galleons in grey
plastic monochrome as newsreels.
I could be made small enough for their wars.
Come too, before you are too dear
to yourself to climb
the rigging to a gambler’s height.

See how I have been patient as preserves,
slowly turning fruit to jewels,
jars glistening red as dreamgirl lips.
Your Main Street angel is coming unglued
from the damp magazine that lies
under years of outdated faces.

The shadows want to be your monsters again,
the twilight mirror a door
to where the china doll sleeps in her 
      spiderweb hair.
Come count all the homeless keys,
read me the missing leaves of books.
Come where the one who holds you
will never let go too soon.

      published in the 2005 Kent & Sussex Poetry Society Competition booklet (4th Prize)

For the housekeeper, for the housebreaker, for the
      steel balls of the wreckers,
For the grinders of glass and the sandwiches
       of dust,
For sugar in the morning and vinegar in the
      evening, brown tears on the green leaves,
Mercy.

For mice and water, pitted stones and 
      clicking wood,
For the caterpillars dying in beer like lords,
For the foundations and the gases,
A breath, but not two.

For the pattern-trapped, loitering on the ceiling,
The slow flies, faces in the afternoon dust-light,
For the dawn moon pressing its damp face against 
      the window, seeking a squat,
A sharp-lashed broom.

For the racket of morning, the sweet shell game of
      bodies cupped in salt,
For the gold belly of the lamp and the black trees 
      behind it,
Sinking, not yet sinking into the mountains blurred
      by shipwreck dusk,
A flattering clock.

For the old angels that fall from the trees, their dry 
      brown propeller wings,
Onto the poor lawn with its armpit tufts
And the dandelions’ foolish joy, and the mower,
For everything that ends, for us,
Let it be according.


            published in Alligator Juniper (2004)

The icons on the beach, drifted over with 
      kicked sand:
that starving boy, the first
to wish evolution would give him a hand,
clap him on the back like an elder
brother, say: You won’t be bad, kid, when 
      you’re grown.
Bucks die with horns locked in the distant forest
falling tangled like trees. You’re not one of those.
Here comes the girl,
the type who’s always ready
to play Fortune in the pictures
supine in borrowed silks, her eyes asking
What have you done for me lately?
Black bikini now, teeth so white
her smile’s one continuous crescent, like the moon.

The bully barrels in, plump as a steer,
pissing on everyone’s picnic.
He’ll run to fat when he’s older,
go deeper into the forest
shattering nests with shot
and ripping the silence away like a roof,
his days on the beach forgotten.
The burning cloud of history
doesn’t show in the sky.

The end of the tale’s well-known:
in just one panel
the runt improves himself, becomes a man
with tight buttocks and a hammer fist,
the wedge of his chest blocking the sun.
His highest ambition was to hit back,
or to know he could.
And what’s wrong with that? Too many victims
tinkled out the sonatas of their homeland
on a piano of bones,
quibbled over matchstick games of cards
and honorable regulations till the total fires
swept everything flat like a smoothing hand.

Dagny Taggart’s trains
run nevertheless, though pulling boxcars
of short-weight goods and heads full of error
in the passenger cars. They deserve to die
when they smash up, says Rand, for winking at
the drunken signal-men, the corrupted routes.
Two trains can’t run on the same track.
No patronage repeals the laws of force.
Mac can’t throw
the brute off the beach till he becomes one
with the other man’s mechanism, his simple 
      switches.
The morals of a mad world
are the power of goodbye.

Dagny sees this at last,
slams the door behind her
on her way to Galt’s Gulch
where copper sunlight sets on silver metal
and all the women have heroes,
where every one
smokes Marlboros and stays out of each other’s 
      personal space.
And the girl on the beach, what does she want?
It would be a mistake
to peg her as a bimbo, she could be
a communications director or a veterinarian, 
      like Barbie.
All the more reason
why she craves a man who’ll overcome her,
who doesn’t need a manager or mother
to hide in like soft sand.

The people behind them
tan themselves in his cartoon halo,
trying to forget that
soon summer will be over and the factory
has fallen down. Someone tried to run it
as if need were the measure of one’s wages,
ability the weight of one’s chains.
As if need were anything
but the stern carver’s adze
that polishes you or grinds you down.
The trains rust on the abandoned siderail.
Somebody just like you
could still write away for the booklet
that works you into strength, for two holy dollars.
The dollar-sign over Rand’s coffin
might be translated: To call virtue priceless
means no one is willing to pay for it. “That was 
      the end
of the noble plan and of the Twentieth Century.”


      from A Talent for Sadness (Turning Point Books, 2003)

Coming awake:
The quiet tongues of the orchids.
The well-meant fruit in its wicker cradle.
Think of something other
than your breast. What is yours, what is not yours.
The light without calendars:
at the window, a rainy square of day.

You were dreaming in the flooded forest,
tucked like a worm into the earth’s brown blanket.
You were dreaming the milky whisper
of your flesh, a snowbank, dissolving.

The awakened one sees no difference
between his arm and the arm of another.
No difference between himself and the wind
breathing in, breathing out.

Your arm is wired to life,
the forest twitter of blinking, peeping machines.
Where did you go when your body slept?
They could have broken you apart
and passed around the pieces like peppermint.
Who would you be then?

The same as ever:
nothing yesterday, no less today.

If craving is suffering,
as the mad cells crowding
your breast like refugees might prove,
don’t wonder where it lies,
collapsed like an orange rind, pithed like a frog.
It changes nothing to call it yours.

But what else but craving — sour, red
and rough as wine, cracking like the claws
of lobsters plundered for sweet meat —
wakes you lost in lullaby snow
to remember your body, the dumb turning
toward heat that defines your cells as living?
Cruel therapy dangles your wants before you.
Nothing but the dirty needs of morning,
the bladder, the belly,
could reassemble you from cool white sleep.


         published in Mudfish, issue 14 (2005)

That indifference still surprises—
that the sheer scrub-haunted cliffs
pile slab on ferrous slab, dinosauric
in ancient sun, hot before there was August.
Before there was.
                              That cactus grips
the yellowed hillsides, profuse as locusts.
That anything mindless could still need teeth.

That the cold water stings like advice.
You dip your feet again in the same stream.
The pain is still there for the asking,
same as rocks jeweling the streambed.

Nothing visible moves
down the mountain, even the cooling sun now
diffuses gray light through a whale-bellied cloud.
You descend the root-crossed path
slowly, as slowly as rocks
would slide, if shaken loose.

That the cactus, even dead, raises
its arms to the sky:
neither grotesque nor wise.

Where you have no reason to be,
you lay your blanket over stones.
The pine does not descend to the desert,
nor the lizard seek the snow.
You make your camp on the mountain.

That the stars are old grandmothers
who have forgotten their names.
Beneath the mountain’s dark apron
the flat town glitters and blinks,
a hive of intentions.
                                 And you, suspended
clean as wind, between craving and unminding,
drunk on the thin air of angels,
remember which world is yours
and rise, taking not a morsel
of memento rock, lest you hope to change the mountain
by burdening yourself with one more stone. 


                  Note: Sedona is a mountain range in Arizona.

This poem won a 3rd Prize in the 2005 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Awards and was published on their website.

Cheek against the woodgrain O forgive
     (gray perfume of wax and rain)
this need of man strength of honor’s fist
     (how like a mouse into the crushed cushions)
against the rape the spit and tearing
     (I brought my pain. The small dry seeds.)
and why not stand in sun though we stand on nothing
     (sage incense of ash of libraries)
begrudge me not protection till your terrible rescue
     (everything that breathes here is already burnt)

Knees against the leather I feel the arms
     (how soon the boot blinds the battered clay)
falling and falling like axes
     (across your face is mine)
little rats the flesh worries
     (the brain waits for those other cold teeth)
who would not raise the Barabbas hand
     (seeing himself raised)

Still against the stone the silence bells
     (under the dress darkness under the soles smoke)
something passes not time but its longer shadow
     (behold the same sky prisoner torturer)
where was he night nailed to day between them
     (in the tomb in the middle of time)
terrible it passes will we fear him
     (stronger than the evil stones)


          published in Fulcrum, 2004

Ruin anyone anywhere. Your penis
could become longer. Access secret credit
histories, best loan rates, amateur wives.
This is what they don’t want you to know.
Levitra. Cialis. Viagra.
Turn your worm into a snake. Make women scream.

Go ahead and scream
at your boss, that penis.
You could invent the next Viagra
working from home! All you need is credit
and we’re here for you, even if everyone you know
thinks you’re a schmuck, even your wife.

With our hot young Russian mail-order wives
you wouldn’t have to understand them when they scream.
That’s about all they’re good for, you know.
Grow hair on your chest, enlarge your penis;
puberty’s over before you credit
it, bub, from here on it’s mortgages and Viagra.

Choke your chicken with both hands! With Viagra
you’ll never hear another complaint from your wife.
We don’t care if you have bad credit,
male pattern baldness, eat too much ice cream.
Write us a check today, pencil or pen is
fine, we already know

where you live. Learn what Wall Street pros know!
What if you’d invested in Viagra
in 1987? A Swiss bank account is open, is
waiting for you to help the wife
of dead dictator Sani Abacha cream
off Nigeria’s oil wealth. She just needs your credit

card number. “Socialism’s discredited,”
she whispers seductively, “Those in the know
take all they can.” But you’re stuck at the screen,
cubicled, dumb with choice. Viagra
or Slim-Fast? Porn or mortgages? Your wife,
if you really had one, would say you think with your penis.

But ask yourself: what if this Viagra, that penis cream,
is your only creditable shot at a meatspace wife?
Don’t press that delete key. We know more than you know.


     published in The New Pantagruel, Issue 2.2 (2005)

He lifts up the chipped stone,
strokes the tousled grass,
its scent never greener than when crushed.
He breathes soft as feathers
on the blue, abandoned egg.

He watches the salmon feed on the glittering flies
and the coarse-furred bear feed on the salmon.
Quicksilver as thought chasing error,
rough as desire blanketing thought.

He shears the glacier like a lamb,
the seas split by a blade of ice.
He lies all day in silken paralysis
in a spider’s web.

He is a dead tree, a frigate
of green moss and mushrooms.
He falls like a tree in the fire,
the crack of a legion of snapped lances
as the blackened pines topple.

He cools like smoke,
plays disappearing games with the wind.

He sucks up the soil hungry as a worm,
as a diver drinking in sweet breath.

Spring shoots up green, the spear points hinting
of an army marching underground.
His voice is red as the hollering tulips.
His voice is white as the crash of ice
on the melting river.

He breaks the sun like bread,
shares the warm pieces around
in his burnt hands.


     published in The New Pantagruel, Issue 2.2 (2005)