The Window Facing The Street

Guilt

2011-01-04T20:42:00.000-08:00

All the layers of sediment
watch from the hills;
a reel of sandy tape,
rusting red in the ever-steady sun.

The same life dramas played out
eon after eon, predator and prey,
predator and prey..

stretching back to lives lived
without skeletons or spines
livers or eyes.

Only now do the hills
record new dramas;
predator and prey
and jury duty,

Our town is built of sandstone.

The Idea of Order

2010-11-27T17:03:00.000-08:00

In a house painted by Hopper,
in a town built by Whitman,
lives the lady of Wallace Stevens.

She turned to me and she whispered,
"Poetry has failed. Poetry has
failed because we have no way
to build poems out of silicone.
We could barely build them
out of steel and glass"

Limbs

2010-10-27T18:34:00.000-07:00

Limbs

I began, "we could live
in the octave-work
of night and day,
understand rush-hours as
biblical events,
or we could live on the scale of weather,
knowing that foothills are museum pieces:
mountains in transit from
monument to emptiness."

"But we must always remember that glass
is sand relegated to the borderlands
of the house, remember that ice
is fragile water."

Allow me to break for a moment,
because this is important
and I have no other voice.

We have found planets in orbit
around other stars, stars that you can
see from your porch in the evening,
and when you look from your porch
at these stars in the evening
a little bit of the light from these planets
orbiting other stars strikes the back
of your eyeballs and registers somewhere
in your brain (think of the language,
ganglia, vitreous fluid, optic nerve,
egocenter, cerebral cortex!)

This has always been true but now
it is known and now we might
call it planetshine and now
it registers in a different part of your
brain and perhaps you are thinking
of martians, or perhaps you are thinking
of me sitting here with a beer,
taking a break from this poem to
tell you something maybe
you didn't know.

I continue, "do you remember
the color of the sky (absinth)
on the evening of the big bang?
and sitting atop that cliff,
in the green autumn light,
how you watched me play with
these words in my scrawny hands?"

"One solid tension of skin pulling
my thin fingers towards my
esophagus, rubbery tendons
inside pulling at intervals;
calcite and carbonate
histories of our universe,
past stars exploded, future stars
waiting to coalesce
around this language,
around our choices,
before exploding again
and again."

Decouple

2010-10-20T12:08:00.000-07:00

Once God was a child,
all hydrogen, helium, and heat,
no gravel, no granite,
no soil for the breathing.

His early warmth fills this room still,
three degrees from absolute zero,
in the gray snow falling in
the broken television screen,
in the static hissing on the radio
in-between stations.

Young God is all things random,
and all things are random.
Young God dies the great heat death,
all filament freezing; igneous!

And as we go about our own adult days,
we too are dying the slow way,
letting our thoughts turn to
winter.

For James Baldwin

2010-10-14T20:24:00.000-07:00

Be forever a keeper of signs and symbols,
Know that we have left this mote and flown,
Go and tell them,
there are no names in the street!

There is a dead dog at my bed; night is afoot.

From Thomas Merton To Boris Pasternak

2009-05-31T07:38:00.000-07:00

I.
For a long time I threw faces
to the world, waiting
for the stuccoed arrival of evening;
now I hear the ping ping ping
over in the camp of night
where they've been holding my breath.

II.
In the public square men with
wet cheeks build a machine
that runs on milk and it leaks milk
and someone's aurora borealis
struts down Alaska Avenue.

III.
These are difficult mathematics-
we're forced to solve with
our limbs and fingers.

IV.
I need a drink of acetylene,
wicked and laced with alpenglow,
to rid my nights of this restlessness,
to forever end metaphor and semaphore,
to just once say it out loud.

In a Tent

2009-03-22T23:24:00.001-07:00

In a Tent

The universe is gifted and waiting out front
engine idling and mountains roaring
sharp quartz gathering into fingerprints
tearing identity from the guts-
gay boys at work in the alley
forcing the perfect symmetry
of awkwardness to governors
too drunk and fucked to know better.

Work from my thesis

2008-11-19T15:03:00.000-08:00

It's been a while, but I have been working. The pieces I'm posting are from my thesis, which is a project where I travel to each of the 77 "well-defined" community areas of Chicago and write a poem about the area. The community areas were defined by the University of Chicago in the 1920s and related to the neighborhoods that existed at the time. Since then, the boundaries of the community areas have not shifted, however the neighborhoods have gone through immense change, whether it be gentrification, white-flight, industrialization, blight, and so on. My poems try to capture the impossibility of place in the light of change.

None of these are done and if you compare them to my earlier work I think you'll see I'm trying out a bunch of new shit here, so be patient with me.

O’hare

Some deaths crawl and some breath
tall enough to reckon an equal violence
but a disparate imagery of grey
these words of mine unknown to you
unknowable to me a wing in the air
but not the way you might think
I know I use too many pictures of fire
when I speak but I had tickets on that flight.

(October 24, 2008)

Prophecy in Bridgeport

I awake to the noise of morning light
running down the slats in the hall
and Rachel out the window weeping
for her children ideal skies snag in the willows
up the road scenes are waiting for me
future jackets hang over the backs of future chairs
the texture of salt under soft-white GE
electrics and a dash of birch from outside the gates
so this is my aspen grove brick tied to brick tied
to sewer and all the time bound to boundaries
always without momentum reading aloud
“we are one” but we aren’t so now

Undying I drink at the shore undying I tumble
to the forefront a fervor now in the slats drunken
flood of sun ripping the ceiling to white crushing
white white white
and now undying I too sit beside her, weeping.

(November 9th, 2008)

Lake View

Signs in windows:
shocks and struts nuts on Clark for rent
maple cherry hickory ash old growth
chestnut oak pine black walnut black walls.

There is a man who cuts down houses
he speaks of the day when all forests were
virgin forests trunks heard at first new music
strange music strange intonations bounced
from limb to limb somewhere silence watched
a leaf fall but now the new deaths are not
easy deaths the gash of sky growing forever
under portent of clouds tumbling eyes ripped
out by the potential sun

westward, westward.

Old growth before old growth meant anything
then came January before January meant
anything what do we make of the human
fire that which we need that which destroys
feeds before need can ever lose meaning

listen, listen.

(November 10th, 2008)

Lincoln Square

Tall buildings were as errors in the sky
on the day we learned the name of the place
a slingshot downed a common raven voices
crisscrossed over white lace and ironed linen
tables set by granddaughters grandsons play
football in the street lined with imported trees
under streetlight curfews and fireside chats
by the warmth of the wooden radio in school
they taught us how Kepler’s laws applied
even to planets inhabited by the common raven.

(October 22nd, 2008)

Beverly

There will be the breath of prescience
and a pause before lichens become
the death of stone walls ivy choked
windows fall from skeletal steel

The smog will be done
with our rattling skyline silence rocks
the infinite and the sun will rock
our true ceilings and somewhere

A stranger now waits for news
from the wind of our demise
There will be the breath
of prescience and a pause.

Austin

To stand and refute the light
the day and the life to trace
and fail to find meaning in the day
to ask a Roman façade knowing
Corinthian flames lengths of stairs
falling knees breaking faces shuttered

To watch the news slide across
our horizon and to see the afternoon
die in a flash of night
under the sky in May
and the sky in November to wait
for the funerals and to wait for

The sky in August you’ll never
find memories of laughter
but only the memory
of long hallways when you stand
to refute the light

Lincoln Park

Under dampened white sky
low silken sidewalk of cloud

red brick running cracked hands
birthing ferrous lifeblood red-white

over and over and the sidewalks
of a glassed over river dying:

hands of Her nature saddened
by piles of strychnine steel

completing the complete
closing the cycle

but our nature knows
no end to the cycle

and strangles onward
deaf-blind, dampened

The Last Snowstorm

2008-03-04T08:48:00.000-08:00

A waltz: the snowflakes fall in threes.
Ukrainians on English language bicycles
Fall along mirrored streets.
A chill runs up the spine of streetlights
Watching me watch buildings collapse
Under the weight of clouds and evening.

Say it with me:
The last snowstorm of the year.

Skin stretched over the calcium loom
Pulled taught with goose bumps,
Rumbles of shivers, and five months of fluorescence.
Fire crackles in a brick fireplace, somewhere,
But not here; our brick fireplace
Long ago choked shut by plaster.
With Old Style carpeting on hardwood floors,
And the sound of snowflakes on the pane
As our rhythm section,

Say it with me:
This will be the last snowstorm of the year-
As if we could speak with our hearts anyway,
As if we didn’t know our paths are fixed.

Offshore

2008-02-19T18:47:00.000-08:00

Factory work lights dim
Fog and smoke and something
Along the lines of memory
Circling, warping, rapt.
A wave of train
Steel surf and coal
New Orleans off to sea
Dire nothing and me
Lost in silver mirrored sky
Abstract and concrete
Contradiction is impossible.

Or,
Say we lived through the storms,
And I watch you playing with my son
Now almost nine, splashing in the surf,
Sand in his blond hair- your blond hair;
Laughing at me lost
In my ocean of memory.

The Poem Where He Gives Up

2008-02-10T19:12:00.000-08:00

On a train to Home in February
(we’re taught to always include setting when we write)
I pass an abandoned hill,
As if nature had given up early,
Deciding this was not the right spot
For a second Mt. Everest.

In winter trees get introspective.
Where else do their leafy thoughts go in the cold?

Long rows of stony walls crumbling
Look like the ribs of the earth.
As a kid I believed in dreams, and dreamt that
All fences were body parts, and all body parts fences.

I too get introspective in winter-
Sometimes I wonder what a fifth season would be like,
Wedged between spring and summer.
Would we have a new kind of sleet to go with it,
Or just more snow?

Or what if alternate universes do exist,
Parallel and strange of course,
Where school buses are painted fire-truck red (school bus red)
And fire trucks are painted school bus yellow.

They inhabit the streets of a Dayton, Ohio
Just like our Dayton, Ohio,
And I write this exact poem,
On this same cold Sunday,
Only with those little bits
About the colors reversed.
(how strange those red fire trucks look!)

We’re taught that poems always need strong endings.
But sometimes I can’t bring myself to say what I mean,
Somehow I can’t look in your sleepy eyes,
And tell you I’m leaving this universe.

Super Tuesday

2008-02-06T20:26:00.000-08:00

The day hits me as if daylight had ridden into town
On a greyhound bus from Jersey.

I squint through window to see a smirking sneer cross
The long face of winter, laughing at the “greater Chicagoland area”

Or maybe it was a sneering smirk.
I don’t know.

Let’s split the difference.
(it’s that kind of day)

The alarm clock sounds like a collect call from prison

February has left the streets full of slush and sleep
Beneath the sad rhetoric of lonely stop signs.

In the dying wig district on division street,
I remember seeing an old brick building with a highline of graffiti
Showing where a house once stood next door-

It was under a newsprint sky exactly like this one
When the house receded back into the sea of broken glass
From whence it came.

Watermarks and floods remind me of Iowa, where it’s always February.
Or July. And where all of my ex-girlfriend’s parents grew up. Really.

I hate the phrase ‘Chicagoland’ but something about the term,
So ready to sell out the speaker as a phony,
Seems like the kind of word I should use today.

In the paper I read an advertisement for ‘pre-need cremation services’
And again it makes me think of New Jersey.

Some days I’m glad to live in Chicagoland.

Today, for instance, when I skipped poetry class
To write this poem.

Apogee

2008-01-27T20:45:00.000-08:00

the first poem I ever wrote. Have I gotten better, worse?

The moon wanes.
You just lie there naked,
A coal train keeps time.
Endless hills of sage painted
The color of forgotten history.
The farmhouse where your father died,
The farmhouse where you learned how to count.
Only a fence defeats the horizon,
Pins it to the ground and counts to three.
You say the spaces between the stars
Are bigger than when you were six.

You just lie there naked
And say someday the spaces
Between the stars
Will swallow us all.

And thus we reached an apogee.
Turned, and marched home.

Instructions for the Temporary Hero

2007-12-21T01:54:00.000-08:00

We carry our separate moons
Along our sides as we walk-
Mine tarnished, oxidized;
A memoir of neglect.
I address a constituency
Of shallow graves and turn,
Face the flames;
Fall flat when they ask
Where I’ve been.

Reply quick with a laugh,
A deep, bright, belly laugh,
Whisper: “Valhalla!”

Concord, 1985

2007-12-16T18:54:00.000-08:00

Bird boned flashes of hungry light
Pale men with their quick carbines
The office of subterranean flight
A mouthful of brunette leaves
A pause before the blast
White translucent moth wings
A pause after the blast.

And it was done like that,
Without verbs or recollection,
The day before my birth.

Paper Anniversary

2007-12-04T17:42:00.000-08:00

We cannot write poems about silence,
And that goes for the non-poets too.
We cannot write poems about nothingness either,
Although nothingness and silence have little in common.
So we are left with our brushes, pens, knives, tools of all sorts,
And our own mouths even, rotting and wounded,
With nothing to talk about.
I sit here day after day confronting my memory of you,
Looking at this green sad little picture of you,
All wadded up and dry in my mind,
Your hair curling in parabolic waves,
Your Mathematical eyes dismantling my every move,
And day after day I must remind myself-
We cannot write poems about silence.
This is why I fail every day,
Because you were never more than silence.

Song For my Grandmother

2007-11-30T17:54:00.000-08:00

Did I ever tell you about the afternoon,
Several years ago now,
Hiking through a far away meadow
Of native Timothy grass and tall cattails,
How I stumbled upon a new tense,
One that exists to the left or the right
Of the past, the present, and the future,
And did I tell you how, after making this
Surprising new find, I turned to see
A quiet tornado sweeping up my footsteps.
Soon I was lost there in that meadow,
Both forever and for less than a moment.
I suspect a part of me still lives there now,
Because ever since I’ve been thinking about
The patterns of swaying grasses, like velveteen,
Only in gold, and so proudly ancient,
Swaying to a brighter wind than ours,
Swaying for the sake of enchantment and glee.

Moving over a ridge now, a small twine of stream
Washes into my mind visions of your wise smile,
And I hear your old warm voice lark “this too shall pass”

Meditation on Small Victories

2007-11-22T14:57:00.000-08:00

The cruel verb ignorance
Hangs tonight in stirred wake-
So what if I don’t care anymore,
So what if I now find myself alone,
So what if I wait here
For the simple twilight to arrive
And crush our vehement skyscrapers
With so much cosmology?
Take stride with me now
And watch how we,
As a city,
Run slow fingers
Over that void
Between 6:35 and 6:36.

We All Grew Up in the Suburbs

2007-11-16T14:21:00.000-08:00

A latticework of gutters weave
Our many discrete lives tight,
So even if neighbors stay nameless,
At least we can claim community;
A community of refuse and runoff.

In between passing cars,
The fresh black streets shine at night
And dream in asphalt vocabularies.

Our winter sledding hill
Reclines over the tall remnants
Of forgotten native tenements-
A burial mound from that-one-tribe.

In split-level raised-ranch outposts
Twelve distinct Sarahs
Fold cootie-catchers
And pray for twelve Steves
To notice them.

On the corner, an old man collects
Cans and regrets and talks
To his silhouette every night,
Lit by the electron glow of 1967.

We call the man ‘old coot’
Or ‘geezer’
And the less witty joke
'he's no spring chicken'

His sepia toned monarchy
Of war stories and gin
Rules over his half-acre of sod
Like some ancient bastion
Of memory and loss
Fortressed by stacks
Of aluminum cans.

The smaller domains next door
Curtain their obligations with
Refrigerator calendars and
Fall asleep to the sound of
Idling Suburbans in the street.

It’s here in the hounds-tooth geometry of
Shingled American Dreams
We find our weakness-
Security, stability, and all that grayness.

The old stranger watches intently
As a pack of teens waltz down the sidewalk.
“Look!” the excited codger says to his shadow-
“Steve has dropped a Dr. Pepper can in the gutter!”

Rollicking

2007-11-13T17:04:00.000-08:00

Boys with concave chests,
Ribs as tent poles,
Mouths as tenterhooks,
Today cornered a common
Prairie mouse and with it beckoned
The novelists and poets
To coming-of-age clichés.

The shit stained Texas sky
Seemed to say “so what?”
And wafted on towards the gulf.

The nearby motorists too
Ignored the game and
Pubescent squeals.

Houston, on the horizon barely,
Swung a wrecking ball,
Cleared debris, and called it a day.

A quarter moon played a cameo role
As a sketch of potential energy-
But even God himself,
Haggard with craters
And veiled by smog,
Could not prevent the amusing death
Of a common Prairie mouse.

This poem originally appeared in "A Word", a publication of Colombia College's Graduate Writing program.

Bipartisan Politics

2007-11-12T18:44:00.000-08:00

I wear the sleet hat and soft snow suit-
Call me the bureau of bad decisions
Made between rush hour and witching hour.

I’m descending these tragicomic stairs
Like so many crashing pianos,
As if I didn’t know acrylic emotions lasted forever.
As if the department of abstract aging hadn’t already closed.

The phrase ‘landside victory’ runs through my mind.

On the wall of my office hangs a picture of a lavender girl
With blown out eyes and a James Joyce haircut.

She’s an old assistant who once gifted me the complete history
Of park benches as told by expired parking meters.

I lent the book
To the milk-carton missing persons portraitist.
And haven’t seen him or her in a decade.

Tomorrow’s election day.

Below me, dead bushes
Skirt green glowing parking lots
And the office park complex falls asleep.

I think of my secretary
Who only spoke in the past tense
And wore an ellipse for a necklace.

She reminded everyone
To turn their clock backs a month late.
To ‘fall back’ as they say.

We’re down in the polls.

With coat-rack fingers
I sift through a colony of cardboard
Behind the dumpster.
Here I find a new home for my roll-a-dex
And a black bodied nameplate with my name on it.

Mothers and Daughters

2007-11-11T17:51:00.000-08:00

Mid-level marketing managers
Frequented strip-mall chapels
And lunchtime nail-salons
Before returning to whatever
Mid-level marketing managers do
On Thursday afternoons.

The serpentine mountain road above
Seemed just as godless,
And nobody at all heard in entirety
The malignant sounds of glass and steel
Rupturing over boulders.

On the day the minivan rained
Down Cascade canyon,
We ignored algebra and traded rumors
Over the 6th grade deskscape.

Some years later we laughed,
At first,
As we picked bits of their epitaph
From in between boulders:
Unbroken women’s glasses,
A dollar bill, a romance novel,
Engine parts of all sorts, even a baby stroller;
A coffee mug half buried in scree,
And a license plate from the
Forget-Me-Not state.

Heartland

2007-11-07T16:03:00.000-08:00

Disassembling itself, Omaha might find
A twelve year-old named Bettina
Thinking to her-self how she’s never met another Bettina
And probably never will.

She blames her parents for such a disaster,
And watches the windows, as thieves, steal
Sunlight from a mid-December afternoon:
Spindrift, hoarfrost, whiteout,
And the brightest glow of white.

Across the street, in the empty lot,
Behind the power station and the pile of broken concrete,
A hopeful murder scene waits impatiently for a murder.

It will wait for years,

Maybe forever.

In the kitchen,
A tangled mess of domestication
Variously called Mom, or Ester, or Honey,
Bakes chicken potpies in an oven
Painted the color of 1954,
While the bitter tapestry of white washed plaster,
Stained yellow from dull conversation,
Chimes in with silence.

With Seventeen Magazine unfurled on her lap,
Bettina sighs and fills the living room with desire-
All vacant lots and all children named Bettina
Dream the same dreams.

She stands and makes for the radio dial.
The geriatric machine recounts a geriatric tale
From the next town over,
And even Bettina knows
All endings sound the same.

This poem first appeared in F News Magazine's "Ink" publication, and is reprinted here by permission.

Batavia Road

2007-11-05T18:55:00.000-08:00

The Scene:
Pudgy women stare out
From noontime knitting parties,
Khaki-shirt-tucked-in elderly men in their 30s
Glare through well-washed corner café windows,
Fourth-inning baseball scores hang as sleepy slogans
In the air-conditioned air, and Halloween cardboard cut-outs
Garland September’s front yards.

We caught the commuter train from Chicago.

Our depravities hang like medals on our chests
But theirs creep slowly in the night,
Down pedicured alleys and manicured back yards,
Seeping hand in hand with that silver crack of light
Pouring from second-story bedroom windows.

The Act:
Leave our mirrored tall buildings behind,
Measuring position accurately would disturb momentum and vice-versa
Watch the last stalks of autumn corn wave a slow welcome
The uncertainty also exists in the particle itself, even before the measurement is made
And circumnavigate the glowing cemetery district of northern Illinois.

Drug store dramas and strip mall congregations primp the main drag,
The amplitude for some event is given by adding together all the histories which include that event
Stop light serenades harmonize with the well-tuned hum of Lincoln Town Cars;
Actual experimental results refute the principle of locality
Lean near and whisper in my ear: ‘we’re getting close.’
Consciousness causes collapse

May 1st, 2007.

2007-11-04T20:11:00.000-08:00

At museum-goer pace
We moved through
These quick early years.
‘Ebb and flow’
Whispers the passage of time.
‘Ebb and flow’
She repeats, over and over,
Non compos mentos.
Although regret roars persistent,
Like some mighty perpetual
Motion machine,
Leaving me nearly deaf.

Come close, dear,
And let us both place our ears
Against the clock.
Make me believe again,
Over the grinding machine cogs,
That I can hear more than just
A whispered ‘ebb’ followed by
Nothing.

Last night dreaming of a train derailment,
Rolling, tumbling, I woke,
Rolling, tumbling, I turned towards your closed face,
And saw an eerie reflection.

Each freight car slid slowly off the tracks
Before unearthly physics whipped the whole mass
Upwards like a rearing beast.

Come close, dear,
And let us both place our ears
Against the clock,

Because I do not believe in dreams.
Though I saw clearly before waking
How each of the freight cars
Held twelve passengers,
And through the smoldering mess
I watched June stumble towards me,
Whispering faintly.

The Watch

2007-11-04T19:09:00.000-08:00

The hands of time stood still
Long before those shots fired at Sarajevo.
Bound by soggy Italian leather,
Those salty steel springs and cogs,
Lost somewhere between love
And match point;
With a curled, blanched photo of Sophie
Tucked inside.

A glittering, a glare,
Under a blast of black-and-white sun,
A misguided passion lay bare
In the Viennese countryside;
His secret unraveled there,
Before the eyes of an empire.

The emperor placed an embargo
On their togetherness.
They were not to be seen as a pair
In the public places.

The tired Russian Tsar,
The eager German,
And the gentle Pope Leo,
All cosigned on his promise of love,
But,
Years later:

Sophie!
Sophie, he cried, expunging her full name from the record:
Sophie Maria Josephine Albina Chotek, Countess of Chotkova and Wognin.
Sophie, dearest Sophie!
But his red enameled words
Arrived at breathless lips too late,
All dripping with his-and-hers flavored lifeblood.

They died together, the whole world watching.

The hands of time though
Had rusted years earlier,
Giving way to oxidized passion
And mineralized desire.
They should bind history books
With such permanent chemistry.

Be-medaled men
In dull grey and proud green suits
Had warned the duchess,
But she stayed with him, with Him,
And this is how they went to see
The wounded loyalists
One final time.