Sample Poems

Sample poems from Exchanging Lives (Backwaters Press, 2008)

"Elegy"
"Houseguest"
"Ceremony"

Sample poems from Olduvai Theory (Toad Hall Press, 2011)

"This Great Something"
"Creation Myth"
"Disclosure"

"This Great Something"
(first published in The Journal)

Long before September Oh-One and the History
Channel, before Hernan Cortés and Jerónimo de Aguilar,

the Maya profiteered a thousand years and more,
their purest children offered to the Maize God

before their millennium circled to its end and civilization
started over—more fiercely—again.  These ancestors

to present-day Maya of the Yucatan
rolled three stone gears into one giant pre-

Colombian Mesoamerican fusion du jour that predicted
this great something’s end.  Why give it a name?

In the beginning was the word: a non-Mayan, non-
Anglo precept preceded by the sex-whistles of birds

of paradise, howler monkeys, mambas, pre-speaking
bipeds with their rock jaws and low-slung

thumbs good for nothing but dangling like a cow’s
loose dewlap, bipeds whose first performative I!

ruined everything.  Before this, slow-moving giant sloth
herds and herds of mammoth of flat-toed steel drum feet

drowned-out by euphonic La Brea burble, black fire,
the atomic bomb a meteor

that drummed T-Rex into mute earth
like any young punk jazz trumpet should be drummed

by a maestro, occasionally, of the cosmos and its scales,
and this predated by coelacanth—that old guiro!—

trilobites, bacteria, sea gulps that dripped off Pangea
rising like a split pea on a seraphim’s spoon, the soup

this volcanically heated slop of evolutionary aromatics
—onions, chromosomes, bay—reduced to a concentrated

nothingness stirred once by the Big Bang stirred once
by another stirred previously by another we’ve written off

unlike we write our own, ours the only endlessly
climbing wave, not another too-low-to-be-heard

frequency freeform at a level that resists
definition other than bop, an eons-long, monotonous

beeeeeeeeeeee-bop.  Not even a dial tone.  Not a
if you’d like to make a call….And before this?  Beneath it?  Utter

moonshine jug and washboard band
noise, Top 40 Jew’s harp (that is

its proper name) singles we slap a spoon to when we hear it
with our Hadron-Colliding good ear

over the Good Book’s good thumping, that primordial beating
one more mystery to rock apart underground where all

great mysteries are buried and tabulated and well-reasoned:
The Kennedy Assassination.  The Vikings at Greenland.

The Twinkie Cream Procedure.  And—
is God mass or massive?  Immaterial?  Balanced?

Come here my darling, my moonbeam, my honeybunch.
These are questions to which you are the only answer

anyone’s arrived at after decades of doughnut-
dunking coffee-slugging number crunching.

See how this year’s robins litter the sidewalks like war-
time propaganda?  Hold me.  Everyone’s going to lose

this latent spring of excess comforters and cold-wind
afternoons.  The bud opens quietly, so it can close.

"Creation Myth"
(first appeared in Indiana Review)

The sidewalk will end in the belly of a girl.
A Chevrolet will stamp her abdomen

with stars, and we will watch her
wilt, motionless.  Today

rain comes.
Fills the streets with yellow

fish.  Smells from the market swim
down boulevards, gather on corners

with guitars and saxophones and fire
barrels wishing another day of rain.

Trees rejoice, limbs free
from overcoats, roots shaking

their chains.  People stop
to watch water turn to steam and rise

angelic from the sewers.  Tomorrow
beneath the city, the girl’s golden hair.

Her brain will bloom an apple tree.
Her belly will swell with bees.

"December 21, 2012"
(first appeared in Salt River Review, under the title "Protocol")

Wake.  Shower.  Drink coffee slowly.
Don’t finish until the cup is cool.  Savor it.
This won’t always be routine.

Some mornings, Gladys will taunt Frank through the screen door
and he will zoom around the room
like a police car chasing after its siren.

You might remember one morning as a kid
watching the neighbor’s cat get run over by a car
and how you couldn’t tell

if the noise was a Siamese or a Mercedes
fading into the past.  Birds, cars coming.  For most everyone
life went on as usual.




Sample Poems from Exchanging Lives (Backwaters Press, 2008)

"Elegy"
"Houseguest"
"Ceremony"

"Elegy"
(first appeared in 42opus)

I forgive you as I have forgiven many things,
lyrics for those dolorous blues we played, those women,

America’s loneliest state.
It’s been yesterday. . .since Cheyenne left me

on cocaine and acoustics, hopped up on jazz chords
I can’t finger anymore, slinking around my blue guitar

for rhythms my hands don’t realize. They fail
those bones that forge sound

inside the ear where my voice drowns, this dirge
dragging it down the way a cornfield drags crows

out of the wind to keep it light.
I should rise like a bubble in water and burst if I let it go.

Or float without effort
like a hawk whose gravity is made of sky.

But when I sing, I draw in wind, drain it through the belly
into the feet, which swell like levees about to burst.

You would know it, watching me walk, how I sing to you
with my mouth shut.

"Houseguest"
(first appeared in North American Review)

Something like love came
between us. Its black claws gripped butter in the butter dish
on the kitchen table, slowly sinking through.
I looked from it to her, and she
was just setting down her coffee behind the front page.
She ruffled her paper. Through the sliding glass door
sunlight barely lit the trees. Have you seen this?
I didn’t respond. Nothing happened. She took a knife
and sliced one edge of the butter
and the bird hobbled one tablespoon left
with a squawk. Fork in one hand
I feared what might happen next.
The crow pecked at its wing feathers.
It clacked its beak and winked its shiny eye.
Its foot dug deeper into the butter.
I ate some browns and in the silence scraped my teeth on the fork.
She crooked the paper. Do you have to do that?
I wanted to tell her
what I had to do, but by then she still hadn’t acknowledged the bird.
So we sat there, in that moment when the sun can’t decide
if it’s morning or not, and stared at each other.

"Ceremony"
(first appeared in The Briar Cliff Review)

If I were taking lives, I would take hands
first, parting the bones of the wrist with one
good snap, and they’d pop off
like spent hibiscus buds, the fingers
and the palms collapsed like paper cups
no mouth has touched in years. I would

palm each palm, opening the hand
little finger first, slowly,
as though talking down a fist.

And then I’d pry the thumb,
that fleshy horse, to stroke its velvet nose
so soft it’s silk, it’s air, a ghost touched and rising
from the sheet that binds it to the world

the way these lines traverse the hand
mapping heart and love and life and how
we will hold on to such promises

though they spin like leaves all around us
and dodge the grips of scientists and priests
who held them in their bibles,

and the blues man’s fingertips, cuticles
picked at by guitar strings, calluses hard
as the mechanic’s or the farmer’s
whose hands swell with years of milking,
of laying the fence that binds him to the land

and one to another, earth, sea, and sky.
I would hold up these hands and pray for rain.
I would hold them up like bowls and fonts,
like reservoirs the clouds have filled
for us to swim in, to lose, to find ourselves.
I would offer them like flowers for the living
and the dead, for the handful of earth between.