At Gloaming Read online

  cruising the cafés

  beneath turquoise sky

  sampling nectars

  like lonely lovers looking

  for amor

  An Accordion, I Think

  (A poem of privilege on a good day)

  I’ve got all the sunrise my eyes can gather.

  Every time I need a breath of air,

  it’s there;

  and every time I need to exhale a stale breath

  I just do it

  and there’s a place for it to go.

  When I am thirsty, there is water,

  all manner and mixture of foods for when I hunger;

  black-eyed susans, blue-eyed grass

  swaying in a puff of wind

  when nothing else will soothe me.

  I hear you downstairs;

  you don’t sing or shuffle your feet,

  but I hear music,

  an accordion, I think.

  Juli and Blue Violets

  My task is to paint you

  and blue violets,

  all abloom on the wood’s edge,

  the splash of sunlight on your face,

  your hair, a tangled weave

  of fallen maple leaves.

  I will paint you on a poet’s page,

  with subtle shades,

  and I will paint shadows

  and tall grasses

  where I can hide,

  a spy who would reveal

  the secrets you conceal.

  Rhubarb

  By April, sour red stalks

  push elephant-ear leaves

  into near-earth atmosphere.

  Rhubarb plans ahead,

  years, decades even,

  lives sustainably on the interest

  of sunlight stored underground,

  having folded up its solar collectors

  in September,

  when the days grow too short

  to make sugar.

  See how simple is a miracle.

  Thoughts in the Rhubarb Patch

  The president interrupted programming

  to announce that we killed the terrorist.

  Ding dong, the witch is dead—

  the people are rejoicing,

  waving flags with a vengeance,

  but it doesn’t mean much in the rhubarb patch.

  Violence begets violence,

  death begets death;

  it seems no excuse for a dance.

  Sunlight begets rhubarb,

  rhubarb begets pie,

  which seems more reason for celebration

  than perpetual retaliation,

  an eye for an eye for an eye,

  ad infinitum.

  You Could Fool Yourself

  If you fold up your paper,

  turn off your radio and TV,

  sit on the steps and sip your tea,

  watch the birds and speak no words

  as the sun rises yellow and round,

  making rainbows on the dewy lawn,

  you could fool yourself into thinking

  there’s no bloody war going on.

  II: Just This Side of Invisible

  Caucasian

  I’m classified as Caucasian

  by government agencies

  though I have never been

  to the Caucasus Mountains

  or Asia, for that matter,

  but judging by the tint of my skin,

  the shape of my face, I can guess

  that somewhere in pre-European mist,

  a peasant woman was raped by a soldier

  in the army of one of the great Khans,

  swooping into her village on horseback,

  burning it to the ground,

  killing her husband, father and brothers.

  Perhaps that’s why I dream of horses,

  know that nothing I have,

  not even the blood in my veins,

  has not been stolen from someone.

  Vinegar

  There was nothing either of them said or could say

  that night they saw so much of themselves in each other.

  He saw himself in the boy behind bars

  and from the son’s point of view,

  his old man was locked up too.

  At times like this we tend to think in clichés—

  what goes around comes around.

  The pain they gave, maybe each figured they deserved

  when it was given back to them,

  though neither of them meant it to be like this.

  But her? She didn’t deserve what she got

  from the two people she loved the most.

  She stuck with them, her love cured them,

  but she didn’t live long enough

  to see their best years together.

  It’s always too late for sorry,

  but sorry doesn’t go away.

  The old man took his sorry to the grave

  while his son lives with a heart full of sorry

  and only ghosts to tell it to,

  having learned how time vinegars sorry into sorrow.

  Like Father, Like Son

  The odor of stale smoke and alcohol

  enters my bedroom before daylight.

  My father wakes me with a whisper,

  softly squeezes my shoulder,

  gently brushes my cheek,

  the way you might expect

  a barber’s hand would touch you.

  I pretend I’m asleep;

  my father pretends with me,

  each of us trying to reconcile

  the night before.

  He knows he kept me from sleeping

  him and that whiskey;

  the fighting with my mother.

  I can feel his guilt and shame

  and I know he knows I’ve been crying,

  but we don’t say a word about it,

  so like each other that way.

  Me and Jimmy

  We got no driving lessons from our fathers,

  no advice on how to negotiate the pot-holed streets;

  they just put us behind the wheel, told us to go,

  and so we drove, pretending the road was smooth,

  like it seemed to be for everyone else.

  We ignored the ruts of hurt and bitterness,

  the bumps of isolation we felt,

  paved them over with self-delusion, false bravery,

  thinking that if we turned the radio up loud enough

  we could cruise down the road that shook us,

  barely hanging on to the wheel,

  each so ashamed of our own white knuckles, wide eyes,

  we couldn’t admit them even to each other

  because we were brought up by fathers

  who didn’t talk about what they felt in their hearts,

  both of us afraid of running head on into our drunken old man,

  out of control again, swerving into our lane.

  The Allman Brothers Singing

  (For B.)

  We hear the song from an empty street,

  The Allman Brothers singing

  “You’re my blue sky,

  You’re my sunny day.”

  The song draws us to a joint so dark

  we can’t see each others’ faces.

  We order beers,

  though beer would kill us in waking life,

  your soul, my body.

  I wake before the bartender

  can pull ba
ck the handle on the tap,

  saving both of us,

  not the way the blues usually ends.

  My Mother Crying

  I remember that it was snowing,

  cold enough in the house

  we melted the frost on the window

  with our hand prints

  to see the car that stopped in the street,

  the man from the church coming to the door

  carrying a frozen turkey.

  I don’t remember

  if my father was in the hospital, sick,

  or in the other hospital, drying out.

  I remember my mother crying,

  then calling her sisters,

  and that the next day, Thanksgiving,

  the house was crowded with cousins,

  aunts and uncles, but absent my father.

  I remember how quiet was the house

  that evening after everyone had left

  and I lay in bed with my brother,

  unable to sleep, my mother crying,

  alone in her bed.

  Angels

  Teary-eyed, Mom said

  God needed another angel;

  that’s why he took my baby sister,

  all of ten days old.

  Another angel; it made sense to me,

  just a child, myself.

  She stayed in her room days on end;

  we heard her crying and did our best

  to be good boys.

  We played outside all day,

  made snow angels all over the yard,

  some outside mother’s window,

  our way of showing love and sadness

  and trying to offer comfort, I suppose.

  Wet and cold, when we came inside,

  we ate the soup Mom had heated up for us;

  She brushed the snow from wings

  only she could see,

  a different kind of tear

  rolling down her cheek, just then.

  Kisses

  I

  I was there, hovering somewhere

  over the horizon of their first kiss,

  that first real kiss,

  the kiss where my father got lost,

  forgot every lonely moment of his orphaned past;

  realized this touch of lip to lip, tongue to tongue,

  was the beginning of a new life

  where he could finally settle.

  II

  I sat in the back seat with my little brother

  that Saturday Mom drove us down to Willmar

  to pick up Dad from the “hospital”

  where he went to dry out.

  She told him she loved him,

  was so proud of him;

  how life would be better now.

  She was all over him, kissing him in the car

  like we’d never seen them kiss.

  Young boys, we were embarrassed, I guess,

  by this show of overt affection.

  Mom just laughed, kissed him some more,

  then turned around and kissed us, too,

  while Dad drove us all home,

  somehow keeping his hands on the wheel

  and the back seat suddenly became crowded

  with five more yet-to-be born babies.

  III

  It was a lingering peck on the cheek,

  a goodnight kiss,

  though it’s hard to really kiss someone,

  with all those tubes in the way,

  those monitors blinking,

  your wife barely breathing.

  When the phone rang late at night,

  he answered with a trembling voice,

  afraid of what he knew he would hear.

  He kissed her one more time,

  her skin cold against his lips.

  Every night during his last years,

  after his tears had dried,

  he kissed her in his dreams

  and, sometimes, he swore,

  she kissed him in return.

  Andy Williams Died Today

  After a day of waitressing,

  my mother came home and waited on her family;

  then late at night, finally off her tired feet,

  she’d wind down by reading romance novels,

  smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee

  while listening to those clean-cut crooners hippies hated,

  Dean Martin, Perry Como, Vic Damone,

  Andy Williams, her favorite,

  on the old cabinet stereo, turned down low.

  If there is a heaven, I’m pretty sure my mom’s there,

  and I hope Andy Williams is there now, too.

  And I hope some angel perched on Andy’s shoulder,

  will whisper in Andy’s ear, ask him to croon

  “Moon River” for my mother.

  The Old Guys at Kay’s Kitchen

  The old guys, the “regulars,”

  sit in the same corner booth every morning,

  comfortable as brothers with each other,

  coffee cups in hand,

  laughing like children one minute,

  becoming loud when old arguments surface,

  then going silent as stones when talk turns

  to their war or old friends passing.

  Four old friends and I, newly retired,

  gather at Kay’s for lunch today.

  I see us as if from outside, how we must appear

  to the young working guys eating their lunch,

  and I realize that to them

  we’re the old guys in the corner booth

  as we reminisce about old ballplayers,

  our war, friends gone too soon.

  We’re the old guys.

  I say it to myself, we’re the old guys,

  though we’ve not admitted this to ourselves.

  I wonder how this could be possible,

  that the years have left so many footprints

  on the fading trail behind us.

  We bask in the warmth of each others’ presence,

  knowing something we could not know yesterday.

  this young guy,

  workin’ dude, I’d guess,

  cap on backward,

  sleeves ripped off his t-shirt at the shoulders,

  just being respectful,

  true to good upbringing,

  holds open the door of the Holiday store

  for an old guy I see reflected in the glass.

  It’s me. Holy crap, it’s me.

  I’m an old guy.

  When did it happen that people open doors

  for me?

  I can open my own god damn door.

  I’m the one who holds doors open for old folks.

  I think, I’m gonna tell that young pup

  what’s up and I do;

  I walk past him;

  right next to the Nut Goodies

  I nod once,

  whisper like a truck on gravel.

  Thanks, Dude

  Diagnosis

  On the same day

  the doctor called with my lab results,

  one of the old sisters at the convent

  told me about the fate of an eighty-year-old maple,

  just a sapling when she entered the sisterhood,

  standing beside a building just as old,

  scheduled for demolition, unsavable

  with faulty wiring, leaky plumbing, crumbling brick.

  That maple tree’s got to go, she said,
/>
  its insides are as rotten as that building’s

  and it’s in the way of new construction.

  I didn’t tell her about my failing infrastructure,

  my withering leaves, disintegrating heartwood.

  I haven’t come to terms with it, myself;

  and though my demise is not as imminent

  as that of the old building or maple tree,

  and it won’t be a wrecking ball

  or screaming chainsaw that takes me down,

  the earth’s pull on my transient and evanescent bones

  feels suddenly stronger today, more insistent.

  Sailors Becalmed

  I try to summon enough wind

  to fill both our sails,

  but have barely enough breath

  to keep my own sail full.

  I fear losing sight of you,

  becalmed in my wake

  as I ride a fickle wind

  over the horizon, knowing

  that even if I drop my sails,

  I can’t give you the breath

  that propels me on my journey,

  it blows for my sail alone.

  The best I can do is drop anchor,

  wait with you as your ship sinks,

  keep you afloat in my memory.

  Memorial

  Spirits are conjured in these songs you loved,

  sung by your friends—

  a Tennessee stud horse,

  a Mexican cook named Ben;

  even Frodo, the three-legged dog,

  comes limping out of the past

  when called by a poem.

  But this night belongs to you, old friend,

  remembered as you’d have liked—

  a barn dance, not a wake,

  your ashes blasted starward by a fireworks rocket,

  exploding as a fountain of light eclipsing the moon.

  Many people report seeing you tonight,

  returning when the poet speaks your name,

  when the singers sing their songs for you.