Airplane Hill

My father is a big man
so big he once
heaved the kitchen table
out the front door
of our sturdy red-brick
single story home

did so easily

and with such velocity
it splintered impacting
the lawn and continued on
manic tumbleweed
that cleared the horizon

I hauled a folding card table
from the basement
and wiped it down
with bleach but couldn’t
get the smell out of my nose

So we moved to the floor
still holding the outline,
meals taken without four legs

It was after this that my father
took my hand and we
walked up the hill and through
the wheat field
to the trailer park at its edge
serpentine s-curves
occupying a long narrow middle
abutted by a single lane of tarmac
for the amateur pilots
whose single props buzzed low
for the landing

I remember we were looking to rent

It’s easy to paint grain
in golds imbue it with luster
forget the soil and pig shit
but where it met the landing strip,
I found it glinting in the
wake of engine exhaust
the stalks gilded by sunlight and mirage

And this is impossible
which is to say:
single props don’t weave great wakes

I cannot say
if this is present memory
playing field medic
or child’s imagination,
a-not-knowing if the paint is still wet

This is a liturgy of finding
which is to say:
it is child’s piety

Which is to say:

I would dig in the soil seeking incantations

ablutions in the muddy stream

common stone found and named talisman

I would remember all this with hot cheeks
and sweaty palm in my father’s hand
passing scrub yards
like so many slipped discs
the vertebrae gone
rectangles 10 by 30
the insides
plastic and stain and rot

I stayed in that same sturdy
red-brick ranch house
until I left home

One year later
a tornado tore
the whole field
and each lot from its foundation

did so easily

They would find the residents
ten years a field
eyes still swiveling
shiny and concussed

Which is to say:
there was no tornado
but the rest is true

Long Path, Day 2: Palisades Farmer's Market

Two days ago
I slurped a thin sheen of grease
off a dollar slice
with a new friend
local hustler,
a Sec-8 All Star

Now it's mid-morning
Two days walk
from city limits
and the farmer's market
a couple hundred yards
from the trail
hustles smiles

It's a social occaision
my feet are propped
It's smiles and puppies
and air smelling slightly
like fresh yogurt
its tang plays free association
with my childhood
and I am as easy as my feet

Outside Sal's
J told me excitedly
he'd love to go hiking
says it eagerly
knowing he's not going
to get clowned by
a white boy from
Pennsylvania

In Palisades
a man gives me an apple
after I offer a quarter
west Africa trills softly
on his tongue
the Orchards of Conklin
have farmed Rockland
from 1712

A woman watches
at the trash can
as two white men
mistake her table as empty
and then seated
ask to join her
and she politely excuses herself.

Petals in D Minor

  White chrysanthemum

its billowing ostrich plume

     is music's flower

This Spring
is baptism by chrysanthemum

                                              The air so sweet
                                              its current plays
                                              in opacity

                                                                       Like how
                                                                       the saddest notes
                                                                       float as apparition

Nylon strings 
mingle with Jamaica rum

                                           And from the street
                                           the melody sways
                                           in the weaver's audacity

                                                                  The flowers bow
                                                                  they weep then float
                                                                  their beauty is their contrition

         Across the water

Chrysanthemums bone white

  reserved only for the dead

Revision: Brooklyn Dervish

Around and around, inward revolutions

             Inward and around, still increasing speed

                        To you and around, won't you join her?

                                   Around and around, all through the night

This night:
I saw a woman spinning
on the street corner
like a Brooklyn dervish,
holey sneakers
smoothing the concrete,
kicking up gravel
and old candy wrappers                                       

This, the story
of her life:
ecstatic visions
born of mean streets,
now muttering mantras
One of a choir

                        all
unheard & unheeded—
again and again

for so long,
why expect
different this evening?                                        

I try to listen,
I want to see
what I might learn
but quickly find
I lack the vocabulary:

palms too soft,
my shirt cuffs
are unfrayed                                        

I have nothing to offer
but cold change
culled from couch cushions

I wouldn’t dare interrupt.

Dirty Laundry Haiku

A collaboration with Derrick DeMaria.

Worn this shirt six days

Seven cum stains, two blood stains

You can't Shout this out

.

Cornfield Elysium, a composite eulogy

I wish you
had met my Papa-
gotten to know him.

Please don't ask me to explain:
January is cold and blue

Like you
when
we found you

and freed yourey rise to plains-as sou knotted bicep-
let valll rose to peaks-

But cold and blue
is blurred for both

So this telling is only
existential stenography:
a carbon print rolled hard

This telling puts you in the backseat
of a rented car
tearing through
the cornfields--Baldwin City, Kansas
after a too-long funeral

My mother at the wheel
her set-jaw and quiet eyes:
Definitive eulogy;
a testament to father's daughter

    Years later, Ma
    I'll thank you for
    teaching me about death
    but right now
    we're just kids
    ten years
    and one younger
    and we're terrified
    and shucking tears
    like corn stalks

And even though
I'd known Papa
the way youth knows
Christmas
as sweets and treats
with no long-view
for blood or betrayal

Borne by
oak bench
brass tube
vibrato shock
I learned him

And in simple black
bolt-straight
I learned my mother
as she whipped vitriol
Gale force
to the cosmos

but wish I'd learned you, too

fuck-all if you
could have
sat the pew
with me and
heard that hardscrabble
Methodist organ
ring out with
stories:

Of ever present
overalls,
farmer's habit
worn long after
his palms had worn soft
as middle school principal

Or of the basement steps
he and my father started to paint
before the divorce
that stand as relics still
like the half-steps on the piano
where Granny reared my mom, and Steve, and Fred

I wonder if these stories could have been yours,
could have soldered soul-cracks

So that
I wouldn't have found you
cold and blue

On a January day
just the same.

Lion Heart, Eleventh Hour

I

Great Uncle Pinderhughes
lay in his great
clawed-foot bathtub
trusty Rosalita
kneeling on the
freshly pressed
bath mat
by his side

Grasping his
knee's crook
she struggled mightily
to wrench it uncrooked

With a loud pop:
it's release:
endorphin shot,
starting gun

Sent him careening back
a half-century;
memories:
oak pipe
turns Lucky Strike;
Peeling scalp
sprouts lion's mane

Rosa leaned close
to clean
the ear wax
normally caked
to his ear canal

But the sandalwood
jumping from
the pulse in her neck

was just enough
to restart
Great Uncle's
sagging heart

II

Knocking her hand away
He stood
and sloughed
wrinkled skin
from his shoulders

Rosa gasped
and
it took only that instant
before
withering
he crumpled
back to dirty suds

Deep pocks
marking cheeks
that just before
had been smooth
as a swaddled babe's
ass