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HOW I GOT MY BRAIN TUMOR

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I was working at M&L Motor Supply
on University Avenue across from Wards,
making $108 a week as an order filler guy
while attending college part time. It was 1969.

My job was to take phoned in orders,
push a cart through the warehouse,
locate the parts that were in stock, box them
for shipment, and backorder the rest.

This particular day I was standing on a step stool
poking at the box-end of a Mopar combo
tailpipe and muffler for a '64 Plymouth Fury
when the pipe began sliding down toward me.

The box was eight foot long, contained 46 lbs.
of hardened steel. It was falling now, falling
from the stacks, sailing down to me like a bride,
and it struck me on the left side of my forehead.

The blow alone would have knocked me out,
a baseball bat could not have hit harder
but first it sent the ladder teetering, back, back
until I fell backward and crashed to the floor.

When I came to I was changed. I struggled to stand.
My fingers tingled. I felt an egg, a protruding bud
from my brow. I looked in the mirror in the dirty
warehouse toilet and washed away the blood.

And I remembered. I had a final exam at one o'clock
in my class on prosody in the Humanities Building
at the University. I had completely forgot.
The Borg Warner clock over the carburetor kits said 1:25.

Snow was falling and wind was blowing,
I staggered out to the street in T-shirt, tie-dyed
but I did not feel cold. A 16-A bus was just approaching
from Hamline Avenue, and I boarded, wild-eyed.

Where's your money? The driver asked. Eighty five cents!
I looked at him like Long John Silver under the egg
and said You have to get me to the University!
and took a seat halfway to the back.

The passengers were coming home from morning shift.
One man wore a hat that said Gopher Gears,
And the same word on his jacket and thermos.
The phrase has stuck with me over the years.

I sat quiet but in my mind I was standing and telling them
Do not be afraid my brothers and sisters,
I will make the journey from St. Paul to Minneapolis,
I will do business there with TAs and professors,

I will be valorous in my actions and acquit myself
in a way you will be proud of. The assembly
and forklift people will not be ashamed this day
of one of their own climbing the heights of classical poetry.

I stepped off the bus at the University quad,
made my way to Ford Hall Room 108, burst
through the door, and every eye looked up
at the egghead from the Midway in the torn T shirt.

I grabbed a blue book from the stack and read the question:
Analyze Housman's "Eight O'Clock" and explain
how poetic form helps further the poet's message.
Ordinarily I might have struggled in vain

with this assignment but I had been struck
by a muffler from the gods, and I had insights
I had never had before, when the pipe hit me full
it poured into me a galaxy of lights.

I knew this poem by heart somehow. I had knelt
on its floor and drunk its dark waters.
I scanned the poem in fifteen seconds and
began to write in the book, in big black letters.

"Each sprinkle of the clock tower bell
brings the condemned man closer to his time.
Each stanza of the poem is his knell,
each line a stair to, trembling, climb."

I stood and threw the blue book on the desk,
the astonished professor shrank as I left the hall
and the graduate students on scholarship
whispered about the mysterious boy from St. Paul.

I would get an A, of course, but that was not
the point, I was transformed, beyond dreams.
I stood on the walkover bridge and gazed out over
the brilliant white cloud of toilet paper plant steam.

Gods and goddesses choose us mortals not
by our bloodlines or superior mothering
but because a magnet pulls metal down from the sky
that tempers and makes us fit vessels for suffering.

University Avenue begins at the Capitol
and peters out only God knows where, in Blaine.
But I am with you to the fullness of all time,
and in my bones and skull I know your pain.

Signs


Every hundred yards in the Wisconsin woods
there are signs posted saying
No Hunting and No Trespassing.
People leave their cabins when the weather gets cold,
and do not want to return to a shot-through window
or knocked over pumphouse.
And a good sign, suggesting violators will be prosecuted
seems to keep most people away, except for
some hunters who need everything spelled out.
You can tell a salesman made his rounds some time ago
because the dayglo veneer has peeled away from every sign
leaving three dry leaves of plywood sheeting.
So that every hundred yards is a tree
with a perfectly blank sign on it.
The gray of the bark crisscrosses the knots
and whorls of the plywood,
gray from the rain and north woods wind,
a wordless advertisement to wilderness,
a message the animals read as well as you
saying this is this, and here is more,
and a few steps further into the pines, still more.

The Dance of the Dog


The knees bend like spurs
Spun round from the
Rattling steps, shake off
The wood-stove fever
Stored from the
Floorboards through the
Night, race past the pump
To the edge of the
Cleanshorn field where
Only the day before an
Army of corn held sway.
Now on tiptoe, now
Trotting gingerly row to
Row, the pink tongue
Flagging, the keen eye
Swerves to the suggestion
Of movement, surveys the
Swath of harvest slack-
Jawed. The creatures of
The plain are dazed in a
Changed world, but he who
Sleeps on a burlap sack
Where the cinders spit is
Proud to the tooth: I am
I, he thinks, dog, and
This is my country, and
This the might of my
Accomplices.

The Brood


I don't want to share anything with you,
I want to be alone late at night,
I want to drink until I'm dry,
I want to make secret journeys down the dank streets
where married men don't venture,
I want rooms of clinking crystal
and appreciative smiles,
jokes tumbling from my lips
like silvery grunions
slapping in moonlight.
I don't want to help carry groceries in from the car,
groceries I will never eat,
go for endless walks that take us nowhere,
rub your back when mine is killing me,
I want sleep forever under sparkling snows
and dream of ballgames and girlfriends
and the years of goodtimes before
this dagger snaked its way into my breast,
I am afraid of waters and doctors
and the look on your face
when you are in trouble.
I want to undo everything, erase my assent,
irradiate my sperm, run off
to a nation that is beaches only,
that welcomes heels and celebrates
desertion and whose official flower
is the beget-me-not.

And yet,
to be father
of this melon thing in you
with all its sweet red stuff, and seeds and rind,
is a grand endeavor, and I see plainly in your eyes
that this is your wish and because I am your slave by heart
I accept the full penalty, let them come, let them swarm on me
like ticks, I will bounce them and change them
and wipe them clean as if they were my own
and all the while knowing where once there was life
is now only children, and the windblown fluff
that was once my hide is all that remains
of a boy who loved
to play.

Applause for Crow


I believe you are the blackest bird I ever saw,
blacker than blackbird or raven, grackle or daw.
Your wingspread blacker than onyx without flaw,
Lacquered jacket black as a chaw
of tar or ink or the mountain blueberries in your craw.
Your eye so keen there ought to be a law,
Diving down and snatching every stray gewgaw
Clutch of diamond, gum wrapper or straw,
snatched quicker than a talon or a monkey's hairy paw,
spurs remorseless as a mongoose claw.
Mightier in legend than the donkey's jaw,
from the ice of January to April's dreary thaw,
from summer's roasted pastures to autumn's hem and haw.
Your disdain for the usual forest foofraw,
your pitlilessness for ducks carried off in a wet dog's maw,
and tendency to repeat yourself are transwoodland topics of awe.
Over and over every morning, the first breath I draw
that voice like tearing paper, only still more raw,
the hard spank of morning cries caw.

Poems I Meant to Write


I meant to write about the little tasks,
about tying the shoes and fitting the fingers into gloves,
I saw my big hands negotiating the laces and trying
sleeve after sleeve over finger and thumb.
I could have had made cement with the sand I dumped out
of the sneakers, enough for a driveway, enough
for a fortress and bridge.

I could have written about the look on their faces
when they saw us not as the oafs who yelled
and sighed and lived stupidly above eye level,
but shining gods, omnipotent and worthy of their love.
How when they cried in your arms they were praying to you
to make it better, to lift the pain up out from their lives,
and away from them, and you could.

I could have written about the tiredness of the house,
the exhaustion of the tabletops, crusted with crud,
sponged pointlessly after meals, the flakes and globs
that fill the cracks in the woodwork. or the handles
on the stroller that were not long enough,
so you walked in a crouch, and the white plastic wheels
that turned sideways on a whim or a pebble
and skidded like best intentions to a halt.

I could have remembered their bodies between us in bed
when they were just babies, the smell of them there,
the cramped caution of the dark, the wet exhalation
from their noses, the kick of them against blanket,
that wakes you and momentarily annoys you,
then draws you even closer.

Why did they finally leave our bed, our big pink comforter
and the warmth of the family, for beds of their own?
There was space for us all, and another night
would have cost them nothing, but they went.

I could have described the last night they woke up frightened
and sauntered in barefoot and climbed in between us.
They slept again immediately, and we tried, too.
But I know you were thinking, off on your side,
that this is the moment, and this was our life,
and the white skin of our children dove and fell
again beside us, in the bright sun setting, out to sea.

My Hands


Our daughter came sheathed in sweetest jelly,
born in the bedroom of our apartment.
I caught her slipping into the world
with these hands that were never so sure before.
She was purple like my sick sister had been,
and she shivered, and I lifted her to me, cradling her head,
with the stereo playing Gustav Holtz' Saturn,
while the midwife wrapped a blanket around her
and she looked up at me calmly as if she had not just completed
the most tortuous journey she would ever take,
and she spoke to me, as if she recognized me ... ahh ...

My son was born hard and fast in a hospital in the city.
His neck got tangled in his mother's cord,
and he tumbled out lifeless, so shapeless these hands
could not hold him. He was a thing, my son was a thing
I was sure was dead, and while the rescue team worked on him
I backed into the toilet and scraped at the cold wax
on my fingers and trembled. I waited by the isolette
doing nothing useful but manning the post.
Fathers can't heal, they can't even protect
when the dangers embed themselves in the body.
I stood there all day. It would be weeks before
we knew your limbs would work, the day your transparent hand
found my finger and squeezed.

When You Are Pope


When you are pope you cannot be like other men.
You cannot be seen disappearing into limos
outside casinos or polishing off a beer at a corner tavern,
the old men snorting at your caftan and cap.
You cannot affect a commanding air,
pulling at your cincture and laughing like a man,
you must be humble all the day,
you must be unworthy to loosen the bootstraps of the world,
even if you are not feeling humble,
or humble has become tiresome as a singsong prayer.
Everyone is your boss because everyone knows you
and expects certain behavior.
No spitting, no grumpiness, no annoyance with fools
for if you show any signs of being human
they will not let you be pope any more
and you will wind up on a bridge somewhere
selling windup toys or grilled kebabs and
people will come up to you squinting
saying I know you.
You must always be for life and always be for peace
and never concede the fact that everybody dies and the world
is ripe with people who could benefit richly
from a ferocious beating and everyone knows it
but you are not allowed to say it.
People go one and on about this saint and that saint
and you can say nothing though you know all the evidence
in all their files, who was too fond of the muscatel,
who wrote letters of an unholy nature,
who masturbated with the lilies of the field, and who,
when the dog the body was disinterred and the coffin cracked
the look on their face was a maniac grin, frozen that way
for eternity.
It is hard to keep up with friends.
It is just not the same once you are pope.
They are so fond of you now, fonder than they ever were of you before
and nothing you say gets through to them,
they won't let you be honest any more.
There are times you want to burst out crying and tell them everything
what a crock the Vatican is and what assholes the cardinals all are
and what you would give just to sit and play cards and sip gin
like you used to years ago before people stopped listening.
When you are pope you understand your career
has probably peaked,
there will probably not be many achievements after this,
it will be unusual even to catch a fish
on a Saturday in an aluminum boat, the little waves banging against
the prow, and haul it flipping
into your net. You will look over your shoulder
and the lake will be full of other boats,
and film crews and helicopters, and people will say it's not a fish,
it's an allegory, you have to think about this on a very complex level,
nothing is simple any more.
When you are pope it is sadder than you imagined.
The devout and the suffering look to you as if you had the answers
for their madness, for the cough that has been getting worse,
for the world in arms, and the torture of the faithful over slow flames,
and you would do anything to take away the pain
but what can you do, you are only a pope.
Your faith that never let you down before
is suspect, you haven't heard from God in years,
he is like some clever zephyr that blows into town and blows out again,
now you see him, then for thousands of years you don't,
and if gets to be too much and you start to doubt it's your fault,
where's your faith you sad son of a bitch, I was just waiting
for this moment, I knew you would disappoint me.
And now the light pours in at Castle Gandolfo, and you awaken late
and your kidneys ache and you wonder how long
you can carry the cross for the rest of the world,
and you think of a girl you knew in school,
and you wonder what became of her,
if she got old and fat and lost that look that lifted you up off your feet
all those years ago or she is still who she was then,
a lifetime later, and all this time she could have been your friend,
and you turn in the bedsheets, holding your side,
you feel as if a spear that fetched water from you,
and it is seeping away like raindrops from the body,
shiny as silver, famous as dust.

The Business of Bees


When prices are normal
And weather cold, bees clump
In a knot, suck sugar
And hum to stay warm.

But when sugar is high
It's cheaper to dump them
Out of their drawers and buy
A new queen come the spring.

This year the bees are
Tumbling, hear: sugar
Is dear, the snow lies
Buzzing on the ground.

In the Night


My little girl awoke in the night
quaking with fright,
and I held her and explained
that the monsters were gone,
they were never there at all,
and the look she gave me was, I recall,
almost one of pity, as if I
were the doomed one, mine
the swift tumble coming soon.
I rocked her to sleep in her room
and thought of every plane
I imagined going down,
every siren shearing the dark
were heading toward my part
of town, my god, and all I
have is a child to protect me.

Last Year's Xmas Dance


Norwegian farmers in hospitals, islands
Of plastic tubes and fluttering eyelids
Struggle to do what they will not do,
Arise and return to their fields.

Ivor Thorsen of Glendive, Montana,
Disintegrating nerves flown in, is awed
By his speechlessness,
Dreams he is laughing in Glendive, Montana.

But the strings inside are all undone,
Incomprehensible to a scarecrow
Who has walked ten thousand
Furrowed
Crumbled miles.

Mary, Anna, is it really Christmas Day?
And is it really clumsy me slipping here
With farmer feet on the Legion floor?
Oh look at me Mother I'm dancing.

Overdraft Notice


The blue wind that blows through the soul
blows cold, it scatters leaves and opens envelopes
with your name hovering in the cellulose window.
You know in an instant the news will be painful.
You cry my god and fall to your knees.
Sometimes you go long weeks without opening them,
sometimes you hide them under phonebooks
because if no one else sees them they maybe never came.

Other people's lives seem unhaunted, they write
the amount of each check and subtract it from the balance,
it is a wholly unsatisfactory way. And yet
they don't get these things all the time,
whereas you don't go six months without one, and if
you get one on a Monday chances are good
you will get another Tuesday, and even if
you go to them and thrust fistfuls of loose cash
in their hands and pockets and say please, please
take my money, and they look at you
the way people look at an unclean child,
You will get another notice Thursday.

Each one costs $20 but you don't mind, you are glad
the bank is getting something for its trouble
and for putting up with you, you who were never meant
to carry money around or write checks
when something wonderful catches your eye.
These thin slips of paper with the blue circles
that identify your sin and decide your punishment
are your tribunal in this life. You bow to their power
and file them away in the secret shrine of pain,
and scurry away to places of pleasure,
bouncing end over end.

Revolving Door


The railroad pensioner
Stepped tentatively
Into the glass cylinder.

The girl slowed down.
The two tiptoed around
One another, palms high.

He smiled at his partner,
And she, who had never before
Walked the cotillion,

Out with the old, dancing
In with the new, did
Likewise.

Gise Pedersen Sets me Straight on a Matter of Natural History


No, you've got this part all wrong,"
Says Gise, swatting a poem about birds
With the back of one hand.

You have whippoorwills sobbing in the limbs
Of poplars, but whippoorwills don't perch
In poplars, whippoorwills don't perch anywhere,

Because their legs are just tiny twigs,
They are gone into atrophy, no muscle left,
So all they can do is plop themselves

Flat on the ground and make the best of it
There on their haunches. And furthermore,
What is this sobbing business? It's poetic

But hardly accurate. Their cry is more
Like a cheer, it is a call my son Peter,
Before he died, liked to imitate

On his walks home from school.
Many times, late summer nights in our cabin,
Hendrik and I would be feeling morose,

Only to hear out there in the darkness
The cry of a creature pressed close
And shouting from the cold of this earth

To all who might hear him:
VIP-poor-VEE!"

The Life of Glass


The bits of clear and amber glass
and metal collar in the street
say something jarring happened here.

If you live in the city long enough
you see the life of broken glass,
beginning as a puddle
on an abandoned parking space
where a pipe caved in a driver's window.
And each car driving over the puddle
spreads it apart like crackling dough
until only a few bright nuggets
catch the glint of streetlamp light.

In an empty parking lot on Sunday morning
you can see where the latest window
was smashed, and here, and there,
the fading remains of those broken earlier,
like crystal snow on unmarked graves.

And when you pull up to an intersection after
the players in an accident have headed
for the wings, you see the glass and think
of the jolt that lingers in the air,
the black tires grumble forward,
holding their breath.

Baby Danger


The night the baby was born,
And the midwife left,
And our friends finished off the champagne,
We wrapped it twitching in a white cloth
And set it between our bodies in the bed.

Sleeping rigid as steel bars,
Terrified we'd roll upon the being
And smother the life,
And dreamed of it sliding to its death
Under dark waters,
Dreamed it fell from countertops,
Chairs, cracked like eggs on the baked varnish
Of the world.

We dreamed of leaving it exposed
And found it blue and chapped upon snow,
Or turning one moment and looking back
To the crib rocking emptily, emptily,
All of our reasons
Suddenly missing.

There was a decade of our lives or more
When we could lie down upon cold tracks
And drink and nod off
And not worry about morning.

Now everything is heat,
And distant thunder.
The moon puts its shoulder to the shade,
Peering in like the dumbstruck
Passenger on
Two frightened adults
And a small sleeping girl.

The Sugar Trap


To keep yellowjackets from our tentsite
I filled a pop bottle half-full
with sugar water and strawberry jelly.
As the day grew warmer the bees would alight on the rim
and one after another descend
to sample the pink nectar.
By day's end there were over forty bees in the bottle,
most of them drowned with a few still
clambering over their fellows to climb out.
But the walls are too steep
and their wings too wet
and the water is too sweet
to avoid very long.
First they fly down, and spin inside the bottle,
delighted with their find,
enough sugar to feed their community for a month.
The sight of their comrades floating face-down
does not seem to be a major minus to them.
It is only when they set that first foot
in the water that they suspect,
and the struggle to rise up somehow is on.
It is impossible, they fall back
into the sticky syrup, their wings now covered.
Furious, the start twitching their abdomens.
This must be someone else's fault,
they seem to be saying,
I never sought sugar for my own personal use,
it was always for the hive.
But community mindedness has fled
and in their wretchedness
they sting their comrades the dead and the dying,
spasmodic, undulating, thrusting in the pool
and this can go on for hours, and more.
I did not see any bee trying to warn off any other bee
either by gesture or sound,
even though the arrival of the newcomer
spells sting after sting.
It is as if in their misery they call out to come join them.
It is good to share this meal my brothers
it is good to drink the common cup,
so cold, so sweet,
this wine.

The Dogs of Madison Square


The leaves blow across the old park, the hickory and ginkgo,
linden and oak, next to the monument of eternal light,
for the fallen soldiers of the first world war, and beside that,
a sign on a tree saying, caution, a rat poison called Mak1
has been placed in this area;
its antidote, if you are resourceful about these things,
is Vitamin K-1, you probably have some in your house,
if you can get there in time.
But the dogs roaming the sixteenth of an acre
of fenced-in grass by the Flatiron Building can't read.
A big-chested pointer, a doberman
and an old teat-dragging labrador, plus a Scottie,
cocker spaniel, and some kind of greyhound all gather about
as she defecates, and it is entirely fascinating
to these dogs about town. She bows, cowed
by their attention as she squeezes it out
and they are delighted with the whole business
and beat their tails against themselves, no,
their eyes never really seem to lock onto one another,
because their joy is somehow outside what they are,
it is in the rich aromas in the air, the unleashed freedom
they feel behind their heads, and their damp maws
open wide like smiles.

Columbus Circle


It is two in the morning, and the sound of air hammers
and chainsaws from a night construction crew
brings me out of bed. The view from my hotel window
doesn't quite include Lincoln Center,
kitty corner, though the hotel celebrates its tradition
of putting up musicians and singers and actors overnight.
What I do see is a triangular patch of grass,
and a statute of Dante, his laurels blending
with the dead leaves of November.
He gazes out on 63rd Street and Broadway, humorlessly,
like a man who knows his way around infernos.
Besides the immortal poet is a bus stand advertising Eternity
by Calvin Klein. It is late, and the traffic has begun
to die down. Down the sidewalk comes a man who is drunk.
Each step is an essay and not all are successes.
He is like a mime climbing an imaginary rope,
a phantom walking through new falling snow,
that melts on the shoulders of statues of poets,
and I, too excited to sleep in my hotel bed, know exactly
how he feels.

 

A Minnesotan in New York


When I landed at LaGuardia
it was seventy degrees,
all I needed was a thin jacket.
For three days I walked the streets
leery of beggars who seemed
to know something, and shadowy
figures lurking in doorways.
But when the temperature began
to fall and the canyon gusts blew
plastic sacks like ghostly luggage,
I came into my own.
I am more used to winter than them,
it is my natural element, walking into
the city wind, swinging
my computer case at my side.
All along Sixth Avenue the muggers
and murderers part, melted
from their purpose by sled dog eyes,
urgent and cheerful on a cold,
cold night.

BROWSERS



He flipped through the magazines
in the periodical room.

The Cadillac, he thought to
himself, is definitely the
Rolls-Royce of automobiles.

She sauntered through the stacks,
fingers dusting the tops of rows.
The things I don't know,
she pondered, could fill a book.

They stood in line at the
check-out desk,
shifting their weight
like two ships passing in broad
daylight.

The Iliad



A cavern blasted amid high-standing corn
like the swath of a broadsword
in the prayer-chamber of the house of virgins --
trampled stalks and the crushed green ear,
braid-bearded against the ground, listening
long after the final blow is hurled.

Phantom forces have met on the night-cloaked
food-strewn fields and in their fierce combat
shed blood and laid vegetables to waste.
Their waters turned clay vermilion, their dew
that skidded and sprayed through the night
now glitters in the rosy-fingered dawn.

What German shepherd made watchman by war
and named Ajax after a foaming cleanser
now perks his ears at the scent of raccoon
on potato patrol in his quadrant of corn
and unassisted pads the township road
and accosts the raiding masked intruder?

The din of crash and gnashing fills the plain,
the tears of Ceres and countless nymphs of grain
spatter the sides and gnawed limbs of warriors,
even the light in gin-soaked Yeoman Magruder's
bedroom down by Turtle Lake flicks on
as neighors near and far attend the clash.

By sun-up only the star-shaped wake remains,
and the trail of scarlet collecting in furrows,
leading through the dazed and shivering maize
to the banks of Jacks Creek's moaning curl,
where face-down in mud and open-bellied
the slack-jaw bandit sips his fill of death.

Back on Farmer Fagan's wooden porch
stout-hearted Ajax hints and whines,
split-cheeked and eyeless, ruffed collar
drips red and the faithful shepherd bleats
and nudges the screen, honored to share
good news in what moments of glory remain.

OLD STONE ENTERS INTO HEAVEN
The Master Calls Him to His Reward


Old Stone was a mean man, whole
Town of Kinbrae knew that for
Entertainment he used to take pot
Shots at his dog, a good old girl
Deserving better. One day Stone was
Said to have got bad news from
Montevideo, folks saw him stride
Past the post master's kicking dust,
Spitting on the side walk and
Cussing out the Goose Town Savings &
Loan. Mr. Miller said he purchased
A package of Illinois whiskey and
That was what they found later on, a
Broken bottle by the pump house well
That'd just gone dry. Must have
Hauled his rifle down where it hung
By the stove and stomped out to the
Yard with a box of fresh shells,
Loaded and reloaded, pumped lead
Into the milk shed wall and cackled
And gnashed his nasty teeth. His
Yellow tears skittered down his dry
Cheeks as the dark deed formed in
His mind, the notion occurring to
Complete the thing for once and for
All, and he whistled Betty to heel
At his feet. And she sidled,
Shivering, up and imploringly searched
For the better nature behind his red
Eyes as he pulled two sticks of
Dynamite from a tool bin and tied
Them to the poor bitch's tail, lit
The long fuse, smacked her hind end
And sat down on the hole and watched
Through the open out house door as
The dog took off yelping straight
Through the kitchen doorway and dove
Under the master's brass post bed
With the eider down comforter pulled
Down in after her. No no no no,
Cried Stone, and he screamed with
All his saw toothed might with the
Indignation of a man so wronged by
Creation perverted by willful beasts
Like a dog so dumb she couldn't even
Get blown up right, and he screeched
Her name and called her forth and
Condemned her disloyalty as the
Least best friend a most cursed man
Might have, a churlish cur who
Fought his dominion from the day she
Was whelped, who missed regular naps
Thinking up ways to undo him, him,
Him who now wailed like a ghost to
Get out, get out, get out, get out
Of my pine board, tar paper, china
Platter house God damn your four
Legged soul. And Betty, hearing his
Break down with out and imagining
Herself the object of some grand
Reprieve at the hands of this
Passionate and lovable if you really
Undertook to know him but until then
Deeply misunderstood failure of a
Man and imagining moreover her life
Long ordeal at those knotted hands
To be miraculously over and herself
Forgiven of the loathsome crime of
Having been his, dashed happily down
The rock porch steps and full tilt
And with her master's heartfelt
Cries of No no no no no echoing
Across the wooded glade leapt gladly
Into his awe crossed arms and the
Two best friends saw eye to eye,
Each bade goodbye, and left Kinbrae
Forever.

Remainders


Copies of my poems went on sale at Odegard Books,
The precise word is remaindered,
Marked down from three ninety five to just the ninety five,
And it hit me that this gambit by the bookstore
Was just what people had been waiting for.

Sure, you expect people to hold back,
Especially at today's prices. Three ninety five is
A piece of change, no doubt about it,
And there must be people who thumb the book
And pat it with one hand as if weighing the
Poems against the expense, the expense against
The poems, take one step toward the cashier
And then fail in their purpose, put the book back
In the rack, and pick up a copy of American Poetry Review,
Beautiful things wonderfully said,
For under three dollars, a wonderful buy, instead.

But who could balk at ninety five cents,
Why, that's less than a dollar with a nickel left over,
You could buy the poems and have enough to
Handle the sales tax, nineteen for the poet and
One for the State of Minnesota and its beautiful
Forests and waterfowl.

[Actually, all nineteen don't go to the poet. I was
Promised a ten percent royalty, which meant forty cents
On the full price, and the fine print here says
When a book goes remainder there isn't really
Any royalty at all, but I don't care, I didn't
Write them for the forty cents, you see,
I wrote them for this feeling I'm having right now
Of breaking through, of getting out,
Of seeing the birds I'd stored in the box
Fly out of it, white wings fair
clapping the morning air.]

Ninety five cents for thirty five poems,
That's less than three pennies apiece. Here's one
About some weeds growing in sidewalk cracks,
So what, it's only six lines long but at three cents
Who's going to complain? Here's another,
A beautiful lyric, a love poem connecting
To the Italian futurist movement of the nineteen-teens,
It was published in a number of respected magazines,
For less than three cents you won't need a vacation tour
This year, just read the words and feel their awful power.

Or the final poem, I call it "The Light," which was all
My life in sonnet length, how there were things
I thought I always wanted, but when I got them they were
Different, or I was unable to recognize them -- such pathos
As would melt the stony heart, and I lay it all down
For you, vulnerable, small, the shattered clown,

The paper trembles with the grief of truth,
Because here it is, softcover renascence,
And all it costs is three lousy cents.
My ear to the ground I can detect the build
Of momentum, people swearing off bad habits forever,
People afraid to look one another in the eye
Now looking and seeing the pain and love that had been there
All along, now reaching out, fingertips touching,
The sting of tears collecting in the corners
Of millions and thousands, the soft collapse
Of a hundred brittle barriers of reason and attitude
Finally available, the incandescent word
At prices the masses can afford.

Let us go now, you and I, to Odegards.
For life has many sales but few true bargains.
Let us take the silver coins and hand them to the person
And remember to ask for the receipt, if you're a poet
Your whole life is deductible.
Oh daughters of Homer gather round his knees
And hear him sing his saltstrong songs.
There are myriad of you there,
A speckled galaxy of brave little lights,
Fresh washed garments tucked under your knees,
Eager for instruction and keen for meaning,
He cannot see you but he hears you breathing.

Haircut


When my stepdad was dying of a brain tumor,
we hired a barber named Dave to come round every week.
Dick didn't have a hair on his head,
after chemo, not one -- but he liked talking to Dave,
who also sold insurance and awnings.
Dave would pretend to cut hair
for half an hour or more, chatting about
the kids today, or an open lot
where a supermarket might go.
And Dick would nod, or grunt --
he had no words left in him -- with half open eyes.
I think he was pleased to be served,
to be the man, that ghost hair was still coming
out of him, unstoppable, wild.
When Dave was done he carefully brushed the excess off,
shook the cloth off on the porch,
let nothing ride away on air.

Old Saw


Out walking with Red, we came upon
an ancient cottonwood tree, standing like
a giant fork in the forest.
so that the original cottonwood stood straight
Into that fork another tree had fallen,
while the dead fallen tree leaned into its crux,
and every breeze made the live tree groan
as the dead trunk rubbed against it,
it was the sound of a balloon roughly handled,
or metal failing underwater,
like a natural cello's lowest string
rubbed raw of its rosin.

Eventually the dead tree had worked a groove
in the crotch of the live one,
and with the passage of time was wearing its way
downward, splitting it down the middle.
One main arm of the live tree had died,
and owls and birds and other things
had made their apartments in the soft dry flesh.

Rachel and I stared up at this natural saw
and we took one another's hands instinctively
as if to assure ourselves
that the rubbing of one life against another life
was a warming thing always.

Love comes into our life, then life moves on.
What is left when love remains
sawing slowly on our limbs?

Hamsters


Several times I have opened an eye at night
certain someone was moving in the house,
but it was only the chrome wheel turning

Or we would be making love and hear the sound
of metal on metal from the children's room --
the ball in the drip bottle pushed and released.

The crunch of seed between pointed pearls,
the scurry and blink of prisoners.
In the cane, in the damp, in the moldy dark, they spin.

The Dream of the Thirteenth Beatle


I dreamed they invited me to join them
and though I played no instrument and sang only a little
and my hair wasn't right, they sensed I was one of them
and let me belong. They seemed to enjoy
being in Pennsylvania and strode my front porch
in their Cuban black heels, and I did my best to fit in.
There were never misgivings or resentment
that I was studying Latin or that I was American
or that I stood about stiffly during concerts,
banging a tambourine against my hip.
Last night I dreamt I was in LA, and a mutual friend
said George was anxious to see me.
We drove along the beach till we came
to his wife's beauty salon, and I was led in.
A busy, happy woman with cropped curls
gestured behind her and laughed.
This was where all the money went, she said.
I shook hands with the retinue.
Some of the members of the old band were still there,
including the saxophonist with the scars on his nose
whose name I could never remember.
I met George's son, whom I had never met before,
he was almost grown, and resembled his mother,
handsome and composed. I was taken aback by him,
and couldn't think of anything to say.
They wheeled out an exquisite cake that said
"Welcome back Mike," with a picture of us five lads,
one without an instrument, with butter cream dahlias
and frosting cherries, created by some impressive celebrity baker.
And when George arrived everyone crowded around him,
but after touching his son's face he came straight to me
and hugged me and we rocked happily for a moment, reunited,
and I remembered the good times on tour, and how
they always dropped me off again at the gray house on the little hill,
and I would sneak inside to bed.
I could see the lines in George's eyes,
and his hair had thinned but the grin was still stupendous,
and he peppered me with questions about my family
and my life and rebuked me for not bringing a photo with me.
During the meal, seeing the love they all had, I felt tears
come to my eyes, and I burst out and told them
I didn't deserve them as friends, they were so genuine and kind,
and I was sorry I had not stayed in touch,
and I was so sorry about John, and I was sorry
I had gotten old and fat and become a business writer
and lost the music, and someone patted my back while I sobbed.
And in his thick scows George quietly said none of that mattered,
I had gotten away but we were together again,
and we would always be mates, and this day was for us
to remember and to share. And they all lifted their glasses
of soda water and lime. When the alarm sounded
I went to my daughter's room. She lay there
sleeping with her finger in a closed paperback.
I kissed her several times on her smooth forehead.
She emerged from her sleeping bag like a rose in bloom
and told me my hands were cold, and smiled her lovely smile.
We could hear the diesel idle of the garbage truck in the alley
outside and the birds in the maple tree sang.

The Curtis Hotel


We had had a fight in October, 1969,
my California family and me,
and I grabbed a a shirt and my checkbook
with a few dollars in it from delivering
Fuller Brush for my dad that fall,
and hitchhiked to LAX, wrote out a check
and flew the red-eye into St. Paul.
And the limo driver listened to my tale
and dropped me off at the Curtis Hotel
where I shivered in my shirt by the revolving door
and waited by the ashtray stand for a friend
to come get me, while the first snow fell.

He finally came and took me home,
and told me I was on my own.
I got a job in a parts warehouse
and went to night school and did pretty well
and I got a good job, with a desk and a door,
and there met Rachel, after a while.
I used to take her Sunday mornings
to the brunches at the old hotel,
and feast on omelet and melon balls,
bouquets of roses and asphodel,
and the waiter kept our glasses full
of cheap champagne, and I would peel
a twenty from a roll of bills,
which I never begrudged at the Curtis Hotel.

We lost that job, but married anyhow.
We pledged our troth in a city park
and danced all day in a friend's front room,
but when it was time for the honeymoon,
we checked into the Curtis Hotel,
the only room we could afford,
a single window overlooking the mall,
but we slept in, switched off the bell,
our only night in the Curtis Hotel.

Years later, my dad, no longer selling
door to door, had some interesting news to tell:
"Your mom and I were not doing so well,
we thought a trip together might be swell.
That's what's we have been meaning to tell
you: you were conceived in the Curtis Hotel."

I have this memory of when I was a child,
standing with my grandfather on the opposite shore
of the Mississippi in LaCrosse, and he pointed and said
Minnesota is just over there, and I repeated the word
and lingered on its power, and made a vow
to cross that river one day. So when the plane landed
years later and I stepped into the Curtis Hotel
I knew this was the place I would dwell.

When I saw it demolished on TV,
the cameras caught at the final moment
a window on the fourteenth floor slide up,
then shatter, as the building buckled
with the weight of the beds and bathtubs
of all those years, its bricks all shrugged
and its shoulders collapsed and went to hell.

And the people building the convention hall
on that site explained that no one was in Room 1410,
the crew had checked out every floor.
No homeless man could hide in a closet,
sure today was not the final day
(today is never the final day).
The opening window had no meaning,
it was no ancient honeymooner hollering No,
it was just an effect that a dying building feels.

The hum of death vibrating every sill,
so it throws up a window to let out a howl
and shout out the secrets of the Curtis Hotel,
and all the souls who sheltered there,
who slept, and wept, and shivered, and sighed,
and laughed, and loaded up their plates,
crawled into bed, and rose, and ate,
and tipped the doorman at the gate,
and drove away with no thought of farewell
to the spirits who stayed in the Curtis Hotel.






Michael Finley

Copyright (c) 1997 by Michael Finley; all rights reserved.


1841 Dayton Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55104-6013
ph 612-644-4540
fax 612-644-5226 fax
www: http://mfinley.com/
email: mfinley@mfinley.com











color=#CCCCCC>
Some of these poems have been published.
Minnesota Monthly: "Signs" and "Hamsters"
North Coast Review: "The Sugar Trap" and "A Minnesotan in New York"
and "Haircut" have been accepted somewhere -- haven't seen copies yet. "Gise Pedersen" was published in Carolina Quarterly
and The Pushcart Prize X
Several of these poems have also appeared in private editions circulated by the author.


Copyright © 1997 by Michael Finley; all rights reserved.



Michael Finley is author of several chapbooks and books:

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