What It Is To Be a Man

I remember the first fight
my brother John had with my father--
The sun and moon were
trading places against a burning
Autumn sky in Danvers, Minnesota,
and the kitchen air was so thick
with garlic and slate-grey smoke
that I felt I could never
fully rinse myself of it.
Too much noise, loud static,
then just bodies. Men.
So beautiful and ridged
they looked like lightning dancers
praising gods I'd never heard of.

The day Father brought John home,
he was a musk oxen carrying a
milk body still warm from the womb,
wrapped in an unmistakable blue blanket-- a boy.
Father dreamt of cheers echoing
in the football stadium at Glenwood High,
and sucking freshly cut Cohibas
on front porches stained with
Birchwood and tobacco.
He pictured them in fifteen years
inhaling the fumes--
and he tells the story of the first time
he ever fucked a woman.

The palm of John's hand
knows where it's going--
winds a path from the soul
of a foot around to curve
an aching inner thigh,
then up to graze the peach-skin belly
of a man.
It lingers there for a moment
and John's hand mimics
the steady rise and fall--
like the breath of the Earth.
And he knows he has never
felt more alive.
Somewhere under the same sky
Father sits on a thousand fading front porches--
Hard. Silent. Strong as an ox.

Trip

Sometimes
When I count the circles of my record player,
Grinding slowly, going no where,
I think about how
I measure my life the same way.
And when the streets outside my apartment
Scream into dull static,
I find that the tab on my tongue is electric.
So I draw my eyes to the sun
Until the veins throb--
Eventually, I can swallow the Earth.

It is then that I see her--
Eyes unblinking, watching me
From inside a chrysanthemum
The size of Jupiter.
She is the moon's hypnotist
The way her words, like honey,
Fill the holes in my head.
And I laugh and call her the Queen of Uranus
When she dances on the daffodils.
She is crazy
That's why I slip into her footprints
And travel close behind her.
Apart, we are nameless stars--
Together, we light up the solar system.

And I cry to her:
Oh wreck me, Navajo princess!
Wreak havoc on every backbone,
Make a Jackson Pollock of my womb,
Use your poetic license to cut open my ribcage,
Span centuries with miles of my skin--
Use all of me,
Don't spill a drop...

When I come down
My back hits the pavement.
From somewhere
I hear her call to me
As I steal air from gasoline streets.

Love Poem

Not the first hit.
The feeling that they could
Swallow the world in an instant.
Not the moment they fell in love
With a pinch of pale powder
And a plastic straw.

Not the Mondrian of adjacent white lines,
And credit cards littered on clean surfaces
Of the newly furnished apartment--
Not the late nights spent counting
The circles on the ceiling
Made from candles
Lighting an achromatic tomb.

Not the dizzy swirling of lights
Against the white halls of Sharp Memorial
Or the way she didn't touch him
For the fourteen long seconds
His heart gave up trying.

Not the snapshot of skeletons in a still room
Nor a conversation dragged on too long--
A marriage wilting like dandelions in snow.

But the lingering consequence--
The mistake in the corner of the room,
Writing, swaddled, cold turkey in the cradle.

A Small Light In a Dark Room

I spend too much time in the dark
Trying to understand
How your arms, when comforting my nightmares,
also suffocate my breath.
And it is in those moments that I can see us in fifty years,
Perched across the breakfast table like bald-headed vultures--
Your brown eyes scan the Wall Street Journal.
We are so silent, so still
That no static of poetry
or theature
or conversation of any kind
Can smother its way though
barbed-wire walls
in our stale coffee kitchen.
Knees and elbows brushing--
We fit together like the wrong end of magnets.
You lather in the morning, I loofah at night.
No whispers.
No music.
No soliciting here.

***
Or am I
a thousand miles west of there?
Passenger seat of a faded Dodge.
Mud spat across the windshield--
Prints of swirling dirt clouds
in the sky
Makes me remember
who I am.
He drives too fast.
He steers with his knees.
One hand out the window
The other on my sun-stained thigh
His green eyes, aligned with mine,
search the horizon for something
that isn't there at all.

***
Here we are in your bed
Twisted tightly in a mesh of sheets.
You open your mouth to speak--
I hear the drone of the ceiling fan.
When I speak
I let go of myself slowly.

I turn off the light.