The Order of Things
In the days before temptations,
when the boys urged on by their
Everclear slip-drive madness,
consumed everything in their path,
I escaped to here, poet nested
amid disorders, a post-holocaust
Hamlet, his final failure to remain
detached from that which he hates.
For me it was love. Liberal sprinkling
vs. deep ecology. Somewhere
in-between, where natural wonder,
after an anxiety of influences,
pushes you to a decision, all
poppycock or ague,
dumdum fever, zaniness, real
as Alzheimer’s, the graying mass,
about the center of things,
how you distribute the pro/con
forces of your life. Poets take
a second name, parted down the middle.
I would give anything to return,
a bottle on the waves, bad grammar,
flit through dreams of things not said
but dreamed of saying, to that love
that life makes milky like ouzo,
the untested time accepted
in theories of the universal,
when we spoke gibberish,
turned chaos into a chant, assured
this was but the order of things.
Travel Through Many Lands
Religion, from
religâre: to bind,
form a bond
with, tie to, die
for, live through,
windowless.
Immortal matter.
Magritte’s pane,
a frame within
a frame, through
which we see
a frame. Just like,
body to body,
we come again.
My time in Afghanistan
short, a hiatus
between wars—
a coup with one tank
at president’s palace
followed years later
by the Russian invasion.
Numbers for names.
What serpentine
surety, gnostic grocery,
karmic clamor
& empty
Anatman
of a destiny is this?
Piety, ecce homo,
orderly ceremony,
credo eschatology
and dogmatics.
The only thing retrieved
was time, patched together
by red thread
that held the jamboree
medallion on army issue
backpack.
But sin is flux,
memory-sweet,
a sure thing, baby,
that singularly no one has yet
undone. Retrieve
the least but best,
all bordering on light
belief, and the seeds
of humanity.
The Kitchen Poem
I stand with my arms in the sink,
the ritual of things
passing through water,
an ancient way of life,
a ceremony, a sacrifice,
a kind of continuity.
As a boyscout, I was the one
who washed the greasy pots
in river sand, on stones
set deep in swirling waters.
At home, on a high ridge
overlooking the plains
where Carson and Cody
washed their burnt pots in clay
from Platte and Thompson
with their hair on end,
I see to the river basins
of Nile and Tigris, to Congo
and Amazon, see the swift
passage of a time that remains
changed and unchanged
as river water.
In college, I was one
who reclaimed the kitchen
from the dark ruins of night.
Where dishes and pans
after ravenous parties
stood like armies of half-crazed
black bean soldiers
and tequila queens.
Today, in a quieter stream,
I follow a hand in the weave
of suds, in nonsensical patterns,
and let my nose recall
the sweet soap odors
of pungent Indian spices,
turmeric, ani seed, and asafoetida,
currents mixing
in a black Ganges.
And looking further
to the Southwest, eyes sunk
in the spring quicksand of arroyos,
I am the word for water.
The last pot shard
on the high cliff of a ruin,
jagged lightning patterned
on burnished clay,
eater of beans,
cooker of stews,
and a tinsmith on a Delhi street,
a lightman mad with eating
from aluminum pots
scraped with steel spoons,
and stream-wader
on Burmese border,
Kariang heads dangling from huts,
the communal teak slab
of a table, Thai monks
spreading jam on hard bread,
and I come back clean:
the crucible bearer,
pot-washer,
Holy Grail knight.
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