La dispute

The steam a crescendo
The radio emergency bulletins and
Everywhere wind

You took the train down to Terra Haute, Indiana
Visit family, your childhood home
Give your mother her grandkid and father a kiss
Put your luggage in your bedroom in the kitchen sit
With your husband still up in Hudsonville
Until the weekend when his shift ends at the furniture mill
Running water for the dishes and the coffee on the stove
Heard a warning from the corner on the radio
And the glass starts to rattle in the window frames

So you went underground
Took the staircase down
To the cellar full of hunting equipment
Held your baby in your arms
Read the labels on mason jars
Try not to think about your husband in Michigan

Stay calm
Keep the radio loud
Take care
Wind howls
Father piles blankets in the corner by the furnace
Mother lights candles
It’s a miracle the baby doesn’t cry

Back home doing yard work outside
Husband being stubborn under dark skies
Saw the fence by the neighbor’s shed split
Saw the kitchen windows start to bend in

So you went down to the back steps then to the basement
There were bookshelf plans on the workbench
And a flashlight shining bright all night try not to think about your son and your wife
And the lightning that scattered the night sky
And the wind bursts that tore up the power lines
At the workbench in the basement
Where you sat and tried to wait out the night
You called for three straight days
Still with your family back home
Up in Hudsonville the worst of the storms touched ground
And the phone lines were down
Turn the radio up
There’s a woman who got thrown from her car into a barbed wire fence
She was 6-months pregnant
Both her and the baby lived
You tried but the line or…

I remember those nights
I couldn’t get through to you when quiet storms came rattled the window panes
Couldn’t keep a thing the same way when the storm blew in and the furniture rearranged
I can see lightning there and a funnel cloud
And her mother said “I swear I saw lightning in your eyes
When that call got through to the other side.”

Stay calm
Keep the radio loud
Stay down
There are bridges over rivers
Sirens in the distant
Wind howls
Keep down
Then
After dinner do the dishes
Mother hums
Wires snap
Metal gets twisted
There’s the rattle of the window glass
Bending in
Take the children down
Terra Haute
Coffee
Thanksgiving
Stay calm
Keep down
At the workbench
Stay
And the coffeemaker hisses
Stay calm
Keep down
Turn the radio
There are
There are moments of collapse



2. First Reactions After Falling Through The Ice


I knew it was far too late to walk out on the lake then
Halfway to the middle thawed I wasn’t doing all that great

Had I cut my hair short?
Had I grown my beard out long?
Had I gone to school or…?

Why do all my plans fall through?

There’s a leak in the basement
Stupid permanent estrangement
Casement windows need glazing
Hinges and arms need be replaced

All the way at the edge I said I think
That we should head back
What if now the ice cracked?
Think I felt it bend

We took opposite steps
Tried to even the stress
Picked a safe direction but
You never know the way the ice thins

Half-asleep in dreams where
Ceilings start collapsing
Free fall through the roof beams
Get startled back awake
Before you hit the pavement
Floor of the foundation
Water in the basement
Bodies in the lake

Don’t panic I could hear you saying as I fell through
Blackness complete down waiting till my feet touched ground

At the bottom they finally did
First reaction was this is it
Next thought was just stay calm kick up
And save your phone

Because I wanted to tell you
Because I thought you should know

Because I thought it might scare you
To see me under the ice
Make you remember you cared for me
What would you do if I died?
Would you fly out for my funeral?
Get too drunk at my wake?
Would you make a scene then?
Climb in and try to resuscitate me?

I was on the ice and I was underwater
I was getting pulled out, I was in my wet clothes
Stumble on the walk back, someone stoked the fire at camp
I was by the flames trying to get my body warm
I was standing naked checking to see if my phone still worked

I will cut my hair short
Trust me, I will
I will let my beard go
Trust me, I will
I will never tempt fate
Not once, I swear
I will never trust ice
I will never trust a thing


3. Woman (In Mirror)


Where a bookshelf goes or a throw rug
How you shape any common space
And the language you make out of looks and names
All the motions of ordinary love
All the weight it can hold when you say one name
All the motions of ordinary love
They grow and change

All the motions of ordinary love 4X

In the bathroom off the kitchen
Leave the door ajar in a brand new dress
Let me watch put your make up on
Let me in give me holy privileges

There’s a dinner thing Thanksgiving
Dress up nice make a dish to bring
There are moments here only yours and mine
Tiny dots on an endless timeline

Tiny dots on an endless timeline 4X

In the mirror with your eyes wide
Trace outlines ask for wine
But you never look away when you do
Your eyes don’t move I never move mine from you

And I watch you your reversal
It’s an honest thing when there’s no one there
Some days they feel like dress rehearsals
Some days I watch and you don’t care

There’s a dinner Thanksgiving
Dress up nice make a dish to bring
There are moments here only yours and mine
Tiny dots on an endless timeline

Tiny dots on an endless timeline
Go on and on and on

All the motions of ordinary love

I know, I know

All the motions of ordinary love

I know, I know

A glance back
The small of yours
On the sink where I set your glass
A hand that rests there flat
A moment
Retracts
And the recognition
That you give
When you shift position
Move your hip
Slightly in
We say nothing then out loud and
That’s what feels the most profound

And I watched you in that apartment somewhere from across the room
But it’s all a haze I remember vaguely lights then staring there to you
It’s the slowest days by the bathroom that somehow never seem to go
Where I watched you put your make-up on
The smallest sounds leave the clearest echoes

All the motions of ordinary love 3X

All the motions of ordinary love
I know, I know

All the motions of ordinary love

All the motions of ordinary love
I know, I know

All the motions of ordinary love

All the motions of ordinary love
I know, I know

All the motions of ordinary love

All the motions of ordinary love
I know, I know

All the motions of ordinary love…


4. Scenes From Highways 1981-2009


I let the car drift some
Eye your uncomfortable pose in profile
The postures of long drives
That endless cycling of your numb and near sleeping parts

And you lean much harder than you need when the road curves
Swerve through traffic and the cracks in the ground
Every gesture you require of a drive like this night
When you fight now you just head out of town

I let the wheel go over center lines
Inside a place without time, a loop through history
Eye you in periphery now prone in the passenger seat
It’s a mystery the ways you can sleep

I want to leave here for where nobody goes
I want to breathe in the air of all those sprawling ancient spaces on earth
You said we’re so scared of alone and I knew what you meant
You want to go where it glows all those places where your watch doesn’t work

You were riding those nights on the highway always hiding out inside a songwriter’s dream there
Like a scene from a song, “Born to Run,” or maybe “Running on Empty”
Ones where they would leave

Certain nights when you’d fight you couldn’t stick around
So you’d head out of town
Just hit the highway and drive
Certain nights when you’d fight it was fine
But it shook you when the baby would cry

Why did you always turn around in the end?
To hear the shattering of glass on the door again?
So loud the baby couldn’t sleep anymore?
What didn’t you find that you were looking for?

Your mother called a hardware
Set you up an interview
An answer to an ad
The bosses’ daughter still remembers dinner where her father said
He wouldn’t stick his neck out for trouble again
But they did then
And those days you’d wake up and just decide you wouldn’t show
He’d show up at your door
Nights you’d skip town
He’d follow you out
Pretty soon you started falling for their daughter
And she fell for you

Drive roll every window down
Let the desert enter heavy and primitive in
Drift till rumble strips sound
Time moves so slow but I know that you meant what you said
You want to go where it’s frozen
All those places where the highways don’t reach

You want to go where it glows
Somewhere that time is irrelevant
You want to go where it glows
Somewhere the spaces are infinite

You want to go where it glows
Somewhere you don’t feel the hours pass by
You identified the flowers on the road
I rolled the windows down and shut off the radio

Did you ever think you’d end up here
All those late nights you spent driving alone?
You were riding to hide or you were looking for a brand new life
Did you ever think you’d find one back home?

Did you even think you’d get out alive?
Could you imagine then the love you now know?

I think history’s a system of roads and there’s nowhere it doesn’t go

I pulled over to the side and felt no time
Off the highway with the landscape aglow
Still not sure what we were trying to find
I only know we went home


5. For Mayor In Splitsville


Funny what you think of after a collapse
While lying in the dirt the first thing that comes back is never quite what you’d have guessed
And if you could have, you probably would’ve said you’d check if all your limbs were intact still and
then try to get out

We played house with the neighbors in their basement
Sister made me husband she was older so I did her bidding
I remember once their dad came in said, “You think this is bad?
You don’t know the half.” And he laughed.

It’s funny what things come back
The first things you see

How he sort of smiled like it’s only a joke but he was lying
There was something else inside of his eyes
All those secrets people tell to little children
Are warnings that they give them
Like, “Look, I’m unhappy. Please don’t make the same mistake as me.”

Why are those old worn out jokes on married life told at toasts at receptions still?
How does it never occur how often couples get burned and end uncertain in Splitsville?

Funny what you think of in the wreckage, lying there in the dirt and the dust and the glass
How you’re suddenly somewhere, in the desert, in the nighttime, and it’s getting close to Christmas
And then her and that movie voice she uses when she reads,
“Welcome to the Land of Enchantment” from a highway sign
And it’s late so you take the next exit

When that trip ended we came back the rent was due I was jobless
I guess in retrospect I should’ve sensed decay
Then that day, how you said, “I just don’t know” and I promised
We’d rearrange things to fix the mess I’d made here

But I guess in the end we just moved furniture around 3X

But I guess in the end it sort of feels like every day it’s harder to stay happy where you are
There are all these ways to look through the fence into your neighbor’s yard
Why even risk it? It’s safer to stay distant
When it’s so hard now to just be content
Because there’s always something else

Now I’m proposing my own toast, composing my own joke for those married men
Maybe I’m miserable, I’d rather run for mayor in Splitsville than suffer your jokes again


6. 35


Drivers out on the bridge
Slowing down as they go through a lane shift
Wires snap
Concrete gives
Metal twisting and
Everything tumbling

At the end of the work day
Stuck in traffic don’t feel when the road sways
Underneath
Concrete gives
Metal twisting and
Everything tumbling

To their partners and kids
Don’t suspect anything till the bridge splits
Wires snap
Concrete gives
Metal twisting and
Everything tumbling
Down

Where I sat I saw brake lights flash
And I pictured them: all the people, their faces in free fall, the water beneath
I pushed my palms against the table hard to see if it hurt
Were it glass would I have shattered it?
Could I battle every impulse to panic and then win
Swim out through the metal twisting upward like a sculpture
Or some terrible beast?

People trapped in their cars
Put both feet on the glass and then kick hard
Water pours in
Seatbelts twist
River flowing and
Everything going down

People under the water line
Workers sift through the wreckage of it find
Seatbelts stuck
Water fills up
River flowing and
Everything going downstream

On the dining room wall I watched it
Play in the reflection of the television
The reversal in the mirror hung I could see it all
How the dust clouds gather color as they billow out
Shades change shifting in the night
From the lights atop an ambulance
Like a firework’s flash then that otherworldly glow
In the smoke thrown in the aftermath blows
Almost frozen for a moment there
I could see it all

Every
Dust cloud
Shattered glass
Billow out
On the TV
Wires snap and the
Concrete gives
Metal twists up and onward
I can see it all
Every
Dust cloud
Shattered glass
Billow out
On the TV
Wires snap and the
Concrete gives in
Metal twists up and onward I watch
And I can see it all

All the wreckage
All the cars piled
In the river and
The rail yard
Metal twists
Wires snap
Concrete blocks split
Dangle from tie rods
And metal twists up
Wires sway
When a breeze blows
In the distant
Sirens glow
I can see it all
Where they look for survivors
Searchlights float
Change the color of smoke clouds
And shadows still fall
People under the water
People trapped in their cars kick and try to get out
People still with their seat belts on
Pets they had in the back and
Car seats

And I watch it on TV lying down here
On the floor in the dining room reversed in the mirror
Where I know I’m not dreaming now
But I know I’ve been sleeping
I just don’t know since when
I only know that it’s light outside
I only know that the rent is still late
When did they find out the concrete gave?
When did they learn that the wires snapped?


7. Stay Happy There


If I could play back every moment to you now
Spent lovesick and swollen on
Mornings mincing garlic on the counter by the sink
If I could hit the instant replay on only every good day
Would any of it catch you by surprise?

When you say, "something is missing now"
That's what came back to me
Normal mornings like that set the knife down and forget where I'd left it
Making breakfast
Put coffee on the stove then scour every counter for the knife

Don't be shy
Don't be kind
Somewhere snow collects and bends the boughs of pines

But doesn't it seem a bit wasteful to you
To throw away all of the time we spent perfecting our love in close quarters and confines?
Isn't it wasteful?
And I am terrified that it doesn't feel painful to me yet
Somewhere on top of the high rise there's a woman on the edge of a building at the ledge
And traffics backing up on 35

It's alright
I will fix whatever is not the sweetness in your eyes
Just sit down
Please
Sit down
Here
At the table and we'll talk
Somewhere televisions light up in the night

I know things weren't right
Maybe we were never cut out for the Midwest life
Maybe we'd have done much better on a coast
There are certain things I doubt we'll ever know

I know you were getting tired of my drinking
I guess I was never cut out for the coke scene
You were worried I would end up like your father and
Tired of the smoke and somewhere the wind blows

Somewhere a storm touches down north in Hudsonville

Somewhere the coffee starts to boil on the stove and
Somewhere the wind blows

Somewhere the river levels finally getting low

Somewhere I'm up past dawn till
Somewhere you live here still
Somewhere you're already gone

Somewhere a radio is playing in a living room
Says the city lacks the funds to fix the bridge

Somewhere the deer are overrun so they're introducing wolves back on the ridge

And from here in the kitchen
I can hear the neighbors in the alley hanging linens
And the men collect the trash bins in the street
You're speaking to me but I can't understand you
The coffee is burning and
All of the times that we spent
That road trip out west
Through desert for the rest stops the kitsch we both collect
That winter the whole weekend we huddled by the stove
The cabin I had rented
The unexpected snow
That visit for Christmas
On television binges
We'll see friends in Brooklyn
Drive south to Richmond
There's traffic on the bridge
A woman on the ledge
And everywhere the wind

EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING AT ONCE


8. The Child We Lost 1963


There were shadows in the bedroom
Where the light got thrown by the lamp on the nightstand
On your mother’s side, after midnight, still
You can see it all
You can see it all
And the closet in the corner
On the far back shelf with the keepsakes, she hid
That box there full of letters of regret
By the pictures of the kids

You get faint recollections of your mother’s sigh, countryside drive
And the landscape seen from the window of the backseat with some flowers in a basket

That afternoon after school you and your older sisters
Found your parents in the kitchen at the table
Father lifting off the lid of the box

And a hush fell over everything like a funeral prayer
A reverence, ancestral, heavy in the air

Though you didn’t understand what it meant
That they never said her name aloud around you
Even sitting at the table with her things they’d kept
You recall faintly cards, tiny clothes, and the smell of the paint in the upstairs bedroom
Until then you didn’t know that’s what the box had held

Your parents tiptoeing slowly around always speaking in code

No, they never said her name aloud around you
Only told you it was perfect where your sister went
And you didn’t understand why it hurt them so much then that she’d come and left so soon
Could only guess inside your head at what a “stillbirth” meant
Only knew that mother wept

You watched while father held her, said “Some things come but can’t stay here.”
You saw a brightness. Like a light through your eyes closed tight then she tumbled away.

From here, some place
To remain in the nighttime shadows she made
To be an absence in mom, a sadness hanging over her
Like some pentacostal flame, drifting on and off
She was “Sister,” only whispered.
Sometimes “Her” or
“The Child We Lost.”

You were visions
A vagueness, a faded image
You were visions

You were a flame lit that burned out twice as brightly as the rest of us did
When you left, you were light, then you tumbled away

There are shadows that fall still here at a certain angle
In the bedroom on the nightstand by your mother’s side
From the light left on there

There’s the box in the closet, all the things kept
And the landscape where she left
Flowers on the grave, marble where they etched that name
And mother cried the whole way home

But she never said it once out loud
On the way back home from where you thought they meant
When they said where sister went

After grandpa got hospice sick and he couldn’t fall sleep
They wheeled his stretcher bed beside her at night
And I saw the light

On the day that he died
By their bed in grandma’s eyes
While us grandkids said our goodbyes

She said “don’t cry”
Somewhere he holds her
Said a name I didn’t recognize
And the light with all the shadows combined


9. Woman (Reading)


You in the living room
You on a Tuesday afternoon
A breeze seen when the curtains move

You by the window with both feet up on the couch
Where you sit and you read and I watch you

From the office the sunlight frames your silhouette
I think of lighting fireworks, I think of pirouettes
I idly write down observations on the scene
Like do the blueprints name the rooms alone?
Do we name them on our own?
We hardly live in there

You with a book propped on your knees
A breeze seen in your coffee steam

I’m in the office thinking back to rules of poetry
It’s fourteen lines, the last two rhyme, what does pentameter mean?

You in the living room
Legs bent at forty-five degrees

I write AB AB, try to find your rhyme scheme
I look for objects on the desk with which to sculpt your image best
What would I name this could I paint it “Woman (reading)?” “Girl (at rest)?”

I remember it so well watching you shifting your weight, turning the page, I can see it all there
Inside a living room where only I live and never go in
A role in name alone

And I pause where I am for a second when I hear your name
Sometimes I think I see your face in improbable places
Do those moments replay for you?
When I’m suddenly there and then won’t go away
When you’re sitting in the living room reading for the afternoon
Do you put your book down look and try to find me there?

Sometimes I think of all the people who lived here before us
How the spaces in the memories you make change the room from just blueprints
To the place where you live

When you leave here
When you go from a home
You take all that you own but the memories echo

On hardwood floor in the living room
Tore the carpet the scratches below that we found
And the wine stain on the couch
We got drunk and decided we’d still try to move it around
And I can’t tell what the difference is between the ones that we made and the ones that we didn’t make
They all conjure images still
Where you sit and you read in the sunlight aware that I watch

And I live alone now
Save for the echoes

I live alone now
Save for the echoes


10. Extraordinary Dinner Party


Morning after snowstorm
Stand in the silence
Almost feel reborn all alone on the street
It’s a certain sort of stillness when the quiet surrounds you
The only sound your shovel on concrete

I remember those piles from the snow plows always seemed much bigger back when I was kid
Pushed all of the snow to the end of the driveway
I was the only person up in the neighborhood
Morning after snowstorm

I turned the ignition and I started my car
Morning after snowstorm
I scraped off my windshield with the edge of a credit card

I remember that drive into work
Still can hear the voice coming over the radio
Listen to our experts give the best tips for the next time you entertain dinner guests

I thought of the day in a tie in the kitchen I sat and I watched you put make-up on
Thought of the day in the basement when I played house
I felt ashamed that I’d stayed in my head in the same place for so long
Because I was afraid to change
But that’s not an excuse to stay

Morning after snowstorm
I climbed up on the snowbank and I stared at the neighborhood
Morning after snowstorm
I think I finally understood what they meant when they said there’s a calm after the storm

Saw my grandpa at his workbench building grandma’s bookshelf
Watched a woman walk her trash out to the street

Father alone on the highway
I heard the salt trucks and neighbors off to work
Saw my mother
Saw how history loops around all of these moments and then I saw you

In a dress there with your eyes open wide to put make-up on
Thought of the day in the basement that I played house
And I felt ashamed I’d ignored all the hands that extended before and around me
Because I was afraid to change
But that’s not an excuse to stay
It’s not an excuse


11. Objects In Space


Yesterday alone I laid everything out on the carpet
Books, kitchen things, objects with specific purpose or none
Arranged them sideways in a grid on the floor there unmoored
Out of context and then considered it
First the whole picture, then everything individually
Humming along at the deadest pace imaginable
One object then another and then the next
And I wondered what they meant there
If they meant anything still

Found notes
Camping supplies
A book you bought in the desert
“Identifying Wildflowers”
Pictures from vacations
From parties
Kitschy gifts we bought from rest stops
On that road trip out West
Objects
Everything itself
And then memory

All of it laid out there
From the dining room
The living room
The hallway and the basement and the kitchen
From that room we called the office
But never used
Even the bathroom
Everything laid out there on the floor on the carpet out of context

And I sat there for hours

Today I moved everything from the floor to the table in the dining room
Placed each thing carefully without reason or at least without one I understood or could describe
There on the table together and when I was done and stepped back I realized what I had made
Keepsakes Pictures Letters Ordinary objects all collected there

A memorial

And I thought of ones on highways or set by gravestones
All the things you see there but don’t understand but still bring a remembered thing back vividly
Invoke someone’s reality when there together in that place in that way out of context
And I knew I had to take it down before anybody else saw
Tomorrow I plan to put them all somewhere
Those things
In boxes
Side of the road
Attic maybe
All these things that push and pull me through history
To places I once was, places I might’ve gone, places I ended up going

Postcards
Ticket stubs from one thing or another
A personalized coffee mug neither your name nor mine
Phone cards and old phones
A page from an old calendar I bought once at a thrift store and insisted on hanging
That cycles of the moon print
Photos
Old boots of mine

Put them in boxes

And I sat there for hours
In the living room first
Then in the dining room
Moving things around
Picking things up and seeing where they took me
To what place in history
What moment on our timeline
Where we were, where I was, where I thought we’d end up
In this house or on the highway
Driving somewhere near Christmas
In the desert or anywhere else

And I put them in boxes