The Law of the Unforeseen Read online

  Long shadows glide blade-like

  across the snow, sheering tufts of tan grass

  in a cutting too slow for the eye,

  too quick for the mind. Shadows vanish.

  The blue deepens. A scatter of leaves

  skitters like paper coins—a coinage no one

  will possess. A solitary thrush feeds on the last

  frozen chokecherries. No sound other than

  the river hushing, muted by a line of cottonwoods.

  No moon. No stars, though the first several

  will soon appear above the peak of Walker’s barn.

  In the time it takes me to wade the drifts,

  lift, duck under and replace a loose fence rail,

  slog my way in the dark to a looming form,

  a thousand stars will have awakened, sending

  just enough light to print on the snow

  the spidery lacework of an apple tree.

  FACEBOOK

  Thanks, my peeps, for your concern. I’m still in shock.

  Just now watered the tomatoes. BTW,

  Paris was magnifique this spring. A walk

  along the Seine can really make your day.

  It made mine, en tout cas. And Musée d’Orsay!

  Wow! You gotta see L’Origin du Monde.

  That was then, this is now. Good to be back,

  though it’s lonely here. Has anyone owned

  a Smart Car? Shit. Disc is full on my Mac.

  Ideas? Tech support has a worthless FAQ.

  Doing my best to deal with emptiness.

  At least there’s you. And there’s Funny or Die.

  And my irises, my purple tongues of sadness.

  They sing today. Without them, I’d want to cry.

  NEIGHBORHOOD CROWS

  In lazy flight this afternoon, they resemble

  scraps of crepe blown aloft above the sunlit

  crowns of firs. They’re my aloof neighbors.

  All their guttural utterances are black, cynical,

  feathered with irony. The point is, they mutter,

  there’s no point. They clean up our messes.

  In the corner of a field they hop to a scrap

  of burger still in its silver wrapper.

  Tolerant as Lao Tzu, plain as nickels, they gather

  on wires in squads of nine. Earning a living,

  they know, depends on luck, a canny eye

  and magic, which explains their sorcerer’s robes,

  glossy as lacquered shadows at twilight.

  Like the universe, they do not judge.

  They have no comment on the divorce rate

  or the attendance of gangsters at church.

  Instead, they’re the lamplighters of old, lighting stars

  to signal day’s end as they pass over power lines.

  Imponderable, ordinary, like night itself,

  they spread their wings to shelter their young,

  invite their friends to dinner in a ditch

  or near an upturned garbage can. When threatened

  by a hawk they call in reinforcements to harry

  the intruder, distracting hunter away from the hunted.

  At dawn they reappear, routine as soot

  but wiser. For crows are learned monks

  in vacant lots, beggars who take the vow

  of poverty and then take over the city.

  Crows have nothing to teach, nothing to sell.

  They joke, cajole, bicker and tend

  to their families. They are Zen masters

  of the art of blending in, always making the best

  of a bad situation, as poets do who know

  it’s hopeless but go on anyway with their crow visions

  and dark pronouncements, feigning nonchalance

  when we fail to understand their off-the-cuff

  commentaries, those suggestions they offer in order

  to survive the coming apocalypse. If we paid attention,

  we might even learn something—not merely

  how to face the day when the comet strikes or the missiles

  rise from their silos, but how to live in the now,

  how to start anew, how to be better than we’ve been

  and, despite the madness of our time,

  how to get along with our neighbors, how to thrive.

  WASHING OUR BACKS

  We’d stand under the shower in that shabby rental

  we made livable, somehow, despite the broken water heater.

  Scalding needles or ice pellets—you never knew

  what might rain down from the dangling fixture,

  crusted with Depression-era rust. You preferred

  a coarse cloth, usually blue. I liked threadbare,

  soap-scum gray. We’d press together, breast-to-breast,

  right arms clapped around the other’s back to scrub,

  you requesting firm. Give it elbow grease, you’d say.

  I favored long light strokes. We’d embrace as if to fuse

  into one person, our eel-slick skin sex-enlivened,

  aware of itself, touched as if for the first time, braced

  for that moment we might cry out from a gush, ice or fire.

  We’d slow-dance without moving much in the space allotted,

  the tub floor slippery as butter. All we could hold onto

  was each other. It’s a miracle we never fell. Once, you gripped

  my wrists hard enough to leave welts. Next day, a student

  came up before class. Brawling again, I see, she smiled.

  And we brawl still, in the shower, more gently now.

  We still wash each other into lathers of pleasure,

  shoulder blades first—those incipient wings

  that keep us grounded—then down the spine, back up,

  hips to ribs to underarms, me giving it elbow grease

  with your coarse cloth, you swabbing me

  with my tattered filament. All the while our free hands

  roam freely through the countryside of our bodies,

  remembering favorite routes, those hills and dales

  our hands love to find. And then, oh, then, we kiss.

  Five: Airborne

  And so a couple

  Of years ago,

  The old poets died

  Young.

  And now the young,

  Scarlet on their wings, fly away

  Over the marshes.

  ~James Wright, from “An Elegy for the Poet Morgan Blum,” from Above the River: The Complete Poems of James Wright

  SWING

  It’s that sensation of plunge and rise,

  of growing heavy and light and heavy

  and light, of forward-leaning and backward-leaning,

  legs tucked, legs thrust out,

  the one-second release from gravity,

  toes pointed at clouds, neck craned,

  head groundward back-tipped,

  hair swept to and fro, brushing the dust,

  the iron links cold and shrill,

  silent at the arc ends, unburdened

  for the periodic instances, then whining

  with your weight for a full hour,

  the tool shed falling as you rise,

  rising as you fall, then from the head-low-

  legs-high view, the derelict green house

  inverted, half its windows broken—

  a Titanic made of ice—that sensation,

  the peaks and valleys of dizziness

  flooding you, draining from you

  with each pump and lunge until

  that moment when, having pulled

  and pulled to lift yourself beyond

  yourself, straining, almost parallel

  to the wincing crossbeam, you shift your grip

  on the chains, readying for launch

  at maximum forward upward speed,

  whereupon you jettison into the dusk

  of your ninth September, lofted into a brief

>   parabola over a coil of green garden hose,

  a wheelbarrow full of rainwater,

  and an upturned rake, its teeth bared,

  entirely ready to puncture your life—

  and with arms flailing, once in every five

  or six leaps, you land feet first into the cool

  end of summer. The jolt when you hit

  the ground, upright in victory or sprawled

  on the beaten grass, inhaling its green musk,

  feeling grit and sweat on your neck—

  that sensation is why you adjust the rake

  a little farther out, edged closer

  to the furrow your impacts have dug,

  to see precisely how far you can fly, to learn

  by how much or how little you’re able

  to clear that row of rust red teeth.

  MEADOWLARK

  He’s out there, somewhere, a quarter mile off,

  hidden in the crown of that lightning-struck pine.

  At this distance, maybe he’s not there, maybe his voice

  is there, careening across Rocky Flats, indigoed

  with camas and larkspur—wild with shooting star.

  His phrases carry from his pine to here,

  the ground patched with monk’s hood, cowled

  like its name, among lichen-ladened scree.

  She I love prowls the near-treeless meadow,

  pausing to listen, binoculars aimed,

  scanning for bluebirds in the wind-combed grass.

  That’s when the long, twisted, complicated notes

  come tumbling in a trick of acoustics to fill the expanse.

  The pine hunches, blasted one night a hundred years ago,

  arthritic now, a misshapen thing persevering

  alone with the flowers, stones, wind, droppings

  of deer and elk who have heard the same arias

  sail out from deep within the green. I tell myself

  it’s music. It is not music, not in the mind

  of a meadowlark. Still, it’s a wondrous sound

  nevertheless, a little delirious, the complex notes

  alarming in their urgency: I’m alive, you fools!

  All that matters are the sun-fringed clouds.

  Wake up! All that matters are the sun-fringed clouds.

  She I love scans the lightning-struck pine.

  Who’s his audience? There it is: the mystery

  of poetry. Other meadowlarks, of course. Of course

  the stones, the flowers, droppings of deer and elk.

  Maybe the lightning-struck pine he’s in, maybe

  she I love, blue-parka-ed, her ears cupped to hear.

  BAT IN DAYLIGHT

  So balletic are his leaps and swoops,

  his gray-brown 4-inch wings so agile

  he seems an angel, a leaf

  fallen from an aspen, slightly daft

  as if attached to clear fishing line

  tied to a girl’s finger. He traces

  filigrees above the pump house,

  near my heap of pine rounds

  split for winter. Why he’s here

  in early September I have no idea—

  a nocturnal insomniac, I gather,

  like me, out hunting, drawn perhaps

  by the scent of pine pitch or, more likely,

  flying ants I’ve seen rising from beneath

  a stump. Easy prey. Such deft moves.

  An ant’s wings flutter down like tiny

  transparent oars, lighting on a round

  my ax is buried in. Off he veers.

  The mystery of his appearance remains,

  like the mystery of night and day,

  or bat aerobatics, or the human roundness

  of the hill across the river,

  river shimmer, river clatter, muted now in fall,

  chitter of a kingfisher cruising

  upstream and down. Or the mystery

  of dusk, when bats usually waken,

  peel off from spaces in the roof shakes,

  then zigzag above the cottonwoods,

  writing calligraphy in the deepening blue,

  writing their lives all night—

  but for the one who may emerge at dawn

  while others return to their shake beds,

  squeaking and scratching.

  He’s the oddball, the contrarian,

  the one who works the day shift,

  who must do things his way, even if

  it means he’s out alone, curious to see

  (though half-blind) river glitter

  or what trees look like, the daytime moon

  or wonder if he should be afraid

  of the large creature below,

  grunting and sweating, affixed

  to the earth, staring up at him.

  THE UNFOCUSED EYES OF DRONES

  They’re dream wrens in the clear lake of day,

  like toys, a slightly larger replica

  of those model planes men play with

  at the park on weekends to escape the house.

  One of them, Chuck, lives near me.

  I see him summer afternoons, alone

  on the baseball diamond’s pitcher’s mound.

  He flies a delicate Sopwith Camel biplane,

  then a screaming Spitfire that frightens a park dog.

  He barrel-rolls his planes, gliding on some

  unnamed emotion wired to his remote control.

  You could say Chuck, the operator,

  is well-rounded in his “Beer Beats Sex” tee shirt.

  He’s got Santa’s beard and Trotsky’s glasses.

  He wouldn’t harm a soul, though he lives

  in a country that harms souls every day.

  He may well know drones have been taught to think,

  to beam down and detect human auras.

  When its blue brain glows red, darts fly out,

  quieter than starlight aimed at desert flowers.

  The operator sits in a quiet room

  playing the controls somewhere deep inside

  the American Heartland—Ohio,

  say, or Nebraska. He does not ask

  who the girl in the red headscarf might be,

  seen moving across his monitor

  in what appears to be a courtyard filled

  with trees, most likely lemon. She waters

  a bed of eggplants with a plastic bottle

  that could in his mind be a bomb

  she plans to plant by the nearby roadside.

  Crickets fill the air with their raspy chorus.

  The operator can’t hear them, nor does he

  know her scarf is red. He sees only

  the flash of light on his screen, sees

  an opened rose made of pieces of the girl’s house:

  brick, rock, glass, iron, paper, threads

  from her headscarf, seen on the screen

  in various tones of gray and sepia,

  a roiling miasma seeping outward

  from the courtyard. When the last

  chunk of mortar has fallen, the last

  of the seared leaves flutters down,

  the mist of lemons hovers in the air.

  WHITMAN READING BY MOONLIGHT

  Walt Whitman pads around on the lawn

  in bathrobe and slippers. Moonlight

  silvers the lilac tree by the dooryard,

  the flowers long gone from lavender to rust.

  He opens his notebook to read a recent draft,

  the title appearing as—he can’t make it out—

  “Growing Broken Berry,” it looks like.

  Back in bed he sees himself forlorn,

  alone on the stern, riding the Brooklyn Ferry,

  his shirt collar turned up, his fingers

  clutching the brim of his straw hat.

  He opens his notebook and reads aloud

  by moonlight a draft, its working title:

  “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” In bed,
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br />   staring at the black screen of the ceiling,

  he watches himself tear out one page

  from the notebook, then another.

  When he releases them, they rise like gulls

  aloft on the back draft, awhirl in a billow

  of coal smoke and steam. Pages flutter

  ungainly, as if wounded, alighting

  on the wake’s white fire where they swim,

  swirl, flatten and disappear

  into the black waters of the Hudson.

  AIRBORNE

  What comes back are two seconds

  of weightlessness. That and a dirt road,

  purple foxglove in a ditch,

  the crunch of gravel under the red

  tractor’s great black wheels.

  There’s the grind and smoke

  of a belabored engine downshifted

  against the steep down-grade

  toward a cave of cedars erasing

  all but quilt scraps of sunlight.

  There’s me propped on his lap,

  full of the smell of him—Old Spice,

  pipe tobacco breast-pocketed

  in his overalls, pipe and pouch

  pressed against my back, his fat hands

  on the steering wheel, my small hands

  tight on it, alive with vibration

  this fall morning now startled

  by the gunfire of backfire, startled

  again by silence, again by lurch,

  release, by sudden speed, his quiet “Hold on,”

  our trailer of firewood careening,

  whipped side to side, chunks lofted,

  his foot stomped on the useless brake.

  There are the two beautiful seconds

  where I’m lifted free from the weight

  of my childhood, of the fables I’d made,

  lifted, flung from the jackknifed

  tractor about to roll, struck in the back

  by some hard thing, he leaping after me,

  my face pushed in the muck of the ditch

  where I flop entirely awake

  to the tops of trees, bits of blue,

  aware that there’s no end to it,

  there’s an end to it. I’m not able

  to breathe or cry or feel

  thorns of blackberry in my cheek,

  the sting of nettles in this,