Cain

I once thought a sword
would better than a gun,
for once the trigger is pulled,
it cannot
stop.
At least the true steel of a blade might sing out
as you raise your hand
against your brother.

But no.

All weapons
kill easily,
even the first stone,
caked with dying blood
that cries out from the ground.

Distortion

Distortion

It rained last night,

perforating all my

concentration

on anything except

the drip-patter

calling from the dark windows under

wood shingles.

Outside, through the screen door

and tangle

of tree branches propagating across

the street,

the parking lot at night

sieves shapes through itself

with the bright distortion

of neon strips.

The restaurant that

serves reflection

blurs its bricks

into the black wet

asphalt under yellow streetlamp glow.

Schoolbuses

I saw it built,

the cowboys splicing the corral's

gray wooden fence posts into the landscape,

grunting in the ecstatic

grit of labor.

They forced milling cows through

the ramp

one

by

one

to be branded,

all of them in the same place

with the same pain.

I saw the corral razed.

In its place they built red brick houses.

At the entrance to the old ramp,

where the cows blew and blustered in some small

suggestion of agony,

a yellow schoolbus stopped,

paint slightly rusted off.

And I saw children

pack themselves in,

taken

to the same place

with the same purpose.

Writing Late, No Coffee

Writing late, no coffee

Scatter thoughts around you,

plucking them out of the air

into your mind.

Scatter the notebooks,

textbooks,

pages of half-eaten ideas

and bare words.

Strike a match,

then

sieve through the ashes,

but blow them back

in the face of Fate,

transient and ineffable

as decay;

slim bursts of inspiration

meeting death best foot forward

again

and again.

Break everything.

Scatter your life,

blow it in the air in words,

Erasure never saves,

so re-create, unjumble

if you dare

where words wore thin

before, and

don't despair.

Finals

Here we are again. Gray clouds nearly touch the tips of mountains capped with snow for a month now. The twilight between fall and winter is nearly over. Soon it will snow. Final papers ring our minds; the mountains ring our valley. Gray clouds cover both. We are trapped in a limbo, in between our efforts and our future grades. The clouds of unknowing fall, perhaps will always fall, over our little undergraduate minds. But sempere aude--dare to know! As much as we can. These are the times that try men's souls, but these are the best of times. Write what you know, they say. But still we must know more, and so we write in order to find out. Isn't that why we sit in libraries? Papers, exams, brought to earth, distilled out of the sun above the overhanging clouds. We will leave our valley into the light one day, although perhaps it is not this day. But we will get there, finally.

How to say it

     You could say simply, in reference to the arial ballet of a stunt pilot, that he flew. Or, in the words of Annie Dillard, you could say this:

     "He piled loops in heaps and praised height. He unrolled the scroll of the air, extended it, and bent it into Mobius strips; he furled line in a thousand new ways, as if he were inventing a new script and writing it in one infinitely recurving utterance until I thought the bounds of beauty would break." 

From Annie Dillard's "The Stunt Pilot"

Haven't we seen this already?

Yes. You have if you've been reading my blog for a while. But all the same, I give you a poem inspired by a nonfiction piece that I wrote and posted long ago.

Hello Again, St. Theobald

I wipe fingerprint traces

off what ought to be

two crystal clear sets

of glass double doors,

the entrance to the halls of knowledge

more commonly known as

the library.

Everyone smudges their hands

here, the glass the only place they

wipe off their grime, but

I wish they’d do it in the bathrooms.

His voice sounds in my mind

like thunder, or a thousand paper towel rolls

hitting tile flooring from

four stories up.

“You called? Saint Theobald

speaking, sacrosanct saint of your kind,

janitor, and here to give you aid!”

Blue jeans and a grey shirt hang

on glowing arms, head, and legs

in the air above my head,

dripping ectoplasm all over

the floor.

I wait in silence,

stand still in the presence,

watching a girl in a red coat

obliviously mush her fingertips

over the next door.

His voice grates now

like the creak of squeegees:

“You missed a spot,”

and he points a finger

at the door.

I glower.

No janitor is ever

exempted from absolute correction.

Looking down, I spray Windex

on the next door over.