I like to photograph old signs when I drive along the Emerald Coast. “Florida Hotel: American Owned” and “Rachel’s Restaurant” I dreamed a beautiful poem up by the sea but forgot it by morning; Make America Great Again vs Occupy Wall Street. We talked about extreme weather and the stock market in the Gulf, the water fluctuating around the sun and pelicans, text message alerts for tornados and when I got home I googled sinkholes and clicked on the interactive map—14 by 12 foot, 8 by 6, 1 by 1, and read the warning signs, maybe the doors to your house don’t close, maybe there are cracks in the walls, maybe there are depressions in your lawn, now imagine a bed and furniture instantly falling into the lawmaker’s hand holding up a piece of limestone talking about an amendment which will outlaw fracking in Florida forever “I’ve changed positions,” she says, “Look at this limestone. It’s fragile. It’s porous” and wishing I remembered my dream of the sea by the sea, the dream enclosed in the bulb of the sun, my body covered by seawater, “It was almost like there were colored rings around the sun” your dad, the archaeologist, said and driving home, the eye-level pelicans and their prehistoric flight, seemed calm, the bridge both flowing into and forged by the metallic clouds — Philomel, lost cause, not quite, operatic as doves the oatmeal is cooking this morning and it will be a long hurricane season from June to October, that season of hell as we approach an apocalypse, as showers fill the heart unable to process what is happening. Alone in your cabin, the outside world has a tongue, has words, scrolled and scrawled along the ridges of the bleak sky. Oh Philomel, I have no pictures to post, no landscapes to paint, my song is sung in vain, and it is composed of rubble. Fear not, Philomel. Now the oatmeal burns inside its weeping pot and revenge is its own constellation of anguish, its own pattern of swallows moving across the luxuriant atmosphere. Personal history? What can we really make of it after so many years? The metal bends, the apartment saturated with ash. — Our masters shift; this is the definition of domination Still, Esmerelda, if you would like to take a dip in the filthy lake, I’m game and if you still have the impulse to be mesmerized by love, I’m down for that too I can even transform into a nude before your very eyes I promise I can become just like a painting of paradise from the olden days We could do this for a little while before we have to go back to work again inside the impenetrable flesh factory where the meat screams even though it is already dead I’ve never known why this is Why does it scream night and day? Maybe because it has no identity Esmerelda, they want our blood because they must know how sunny it is how, long ago, we fed the horses and wept and sang by the fireplace; they must know that we had such intense passions, that we thought the grasshoppers eating the yellow fields were beautiful and we looked at both the creatures and the fields with a kind of awe Our masters did not like this and our passions had to be held down by a corresponding cruelty the formal laws of the state O the networks of subjection are infinite —Read of an ICE raid: men, women and children sent to a detention center in Crawfordville, Florida Turn the page Bought erasers, pencils and summer workbooks for my children This is a cell All living things are made of cells This is the earth The earth is always changing If lyric poetry is cruel, I am forlorn at the loss of our wilderness There really is an “anti-parks” congressional caucus whose aim is to shovel the plants and rocks and trees into black plastic bags and throw those bags into the sea It is important to stay safe in Science How do we stay safe? Follow the rules and use the right tools The goddesses of Sunday welcome you We bring you this bowl of peaches and serve you with our porcelain fingers Here is a napkin Here is a knife Your wife and children are welcome too— Glandular fever punctuated by tropical storm Cindy which was a dud; many weeks of rain, the lymph nodes swollen, many weeks of wind while my children play inside the supernova-like sinkhole, Green tea and raw honey even though bees struggle for survival, Alex searching for climate-controlled storage spaces, I yelled at everyone, the black diamond and rattlesnake rattle fell upon me, I could tell you were trying to communicate, I suspected it was your fault, seizure like substance of air turned to current, maybe I blamed you for my illness, I knew you were the one taking me down through this amber realm, this dream space, fragile, filled with neurons, jammed with signals signals from the dead, then the realm spilled into the black hole of the summer solstice and out of the storm; O Angel, you were born.
Category: Poetry
the crossing
we are building a viaduct
because we decided
this time,
we will not travel
underground, live in the great dismal,
drag our bodies through the marsh,
hide in the cattails.
in the plain view of daylight
above the gorge,
as high as millau in france,
our railway.
once we perfect the art of brick making,
you can decide how many are needed.
that woman over there, maybe she can
decide how many tons
our spillway can hold.
this old one with the braids
like a hive,
i hope she’ll teach us about
about steel.
she knows how to reduce
sulfur from iron to keep it strong.
look at her hands.
look at her crafted shoulders,
but do not touch unless you
are invited.
darlings, there is a job
for us too.
ours might be the gathering kind.
talkers sing like brave birds.
poets plow the top soil
dancers paint with perennials.
we will call all hands.
hurting hands are beautiful.
photographers shoot
for our annual day of remembrance.
we can alternate hosts. I’ll sign up for that.
we have all agreed, no borders. no borders. no borders.
Sister/Brother Poems
My Sister Sings Reba at Forty-Three
for Shawna
To worship the earth, we barefoot down
to the water because we have never been
clean, and for this dirty mercy, my sister
kneels in her wet suit to the smell of surf
wax at 7 AM, kneels to the car key stashed
in the wheel well and the first open eye
full of ocean, and yes, Lord, no way around it,
my sister, today, will accept a broken nose full
of the granite reef handed down to her
by the gods of the southwest swell. By blood,
by green, by mud, by tide, my sister will be
held under by the world, but because she swans
back to the surface punched out of breath
but having survived, my sister kneels
to pray in the key of steel guitar and sunshine
to the ripped-down posters of old rodeos,
to the wet way of hay on a boot heel, to the tush-
push and the electric slide and the wide
mouthful of wild she finds while surfing
the hot highway home in the back of a golden
Ford F-150. My sister survives, and you could call
my sister the breeze these many July mornings,
but my sister does not soar like a sky on nights
when beneath the weight of the pistol
in her waist she serves with a police badge of shine
across San Francisco, for my sister must know
how a kid’s face caves in on the Fourth of July
after a firework has flown half-way through it,
and my sister must kneel to find a dead father
in the street on the double-yellow line,
to find a runaway daughter, to survive
a man standing in a creek at midnight, firing
a rifle at God. My sister knows the trauma
as water, the song as rugged, the body as sinking,
so, Lord, thank you for saving my sister who sings
with what it means to be the bull and the rider
and the war paint melting down the face of a rodeo
clown, what it means to chase a smile around
a filthy ring, yes, Lord, to chase the next wave,
or the next dance of tight asses in Wrangler pants,
or a next of kin, or the last long finishing note
of the evening before loading up the truck
with loneliness and heading home because, finally,
Lord, in the filthy bar, here we are, and, finally,
Lord, here before us rises my sister like an ocean
beside the microphone while muddy lights crumble
down dirty upon the black cowboy hats of the country
band, and by brown bottles of California mud, here, the filthy
chords are about to start, and my sister saunters up
in the armor of a leather jacket, of purple lipstick, of steel teeth,
of burgundy boots, and you who are listening should hold
your breath because my sister’s got a tattoo
of a bull on the wave of her back, and she’s going
to buck you off, and she’s going to elbow you down
deep because my sister knows how long to hold you under,
and how to save you, and how to kill you, and how to tell you
someone you love is dead, someone you love is still alive.
My Heart Is a Time Machine
Another brother’s funeral has ended,
and I must take my body back
to May of 1999
to stop the sunshine,
must begin again in our hotel room
with the girl
too drunk on Wild Turkey
to stand, the girl
hoisting a full keg
of Keystone Light
up onto her shoulder,
the girl grenading the keg
through the coffee table,
the girl leaping up onto the bed,
the girl taking three fan blades
to the face
that send her somersaulting all the way
through our hotel window
and onto the sidewalk outside.
I’ll forgive you for laughing
as my friend, Devon,
and I
and the whole room are now
because my friend, Devon, and I
are twenty-five
and high
on the same pills
which will in seven months
in a different hotel room
in a different town
whisper him into a permanent sleep.
Now that we are here,
I promise to tell you the truth—
on this night
in May of 1999,
you cannot tell anyone in this room
in these bands
with these ukuleles in their arms
and these floating festival feelings they have
put into their mouths
to stop. You can never tell anyone
to stop
anything, friends, so you must forgive us,
forgive them, forgive the drunk girl
who stumbles back into the room
and waterfalls down
another slug of Wild Turkey,
the drunk girl who only wants the drummer
to love her, and you must forgive
the drummer who never will,
forgive Devon and me
so deep into a conversation about Roger Waters
we don’t notice the anger
the drunk girl gathers in her elbow
which becomes the shining purple mountain
over the drummer’s eye,
forgive us for not noticing
when their story ghosts like a landscape painting
silently into the background
of darkness
inching toward light.
Forgive us for not laughing anymore
because is this hello or goodbye,
because it is almost morning, and I’m still
uncertain, because what do Devon and I look like,
now, leaving the broken window behind?
Dawn seems to have eased out of us
something as tender
as a full head of long hair,
and I believe we are whispering
about the opening guitar solo
of the Wish You Were Here album, now,
or the album is playing
somewhere, now, and we are
sneaking so quietly
through the courtyard, Devon
and I, as the soundmen
breaking down the festival stage
wind up their cables
like kind fathers
tying their daughters’ shoes,
as the drunk girl snores
on the drummer’s lap in a pool chair,
and Devon walks in front of me
with the almost finished bottle
of Wild Turkey in one hand
we are passing between us.
There is a joint for the both of us I am licking,
and when we round the corner and stare straight
into the Pink Floyd sunrise,
forgive me, friends,
there is always an instant
every time I am telling this story
when I get here
that I want to be the one disappeared
by light who never was
because no one wants to be what’s left over,
and what’s left of this morning?
Hello or goodbye?
I seem to be saying both,
we are almost finished, and forgive me
again for going back so often, my friends,
but I need you to squeeze inside
my blood and help me remember this
final sunrise in which Devon
is taking off his shirt
and letting down the blonde rainforest
of his hair and dancing
to the music that is only in his head,
and one-by-one the waking people
are coming into the field to join him,
a flock of musician women and men
dancing barefoot circles in the dirt
to “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”
playing only in my friend’s head,
and my friend Devon is spinning around
silently in the center of all of us,
playing the bottle of Wild Turkey
like a saxophone,
like a last photograph,
like a parting metaphor,
like a sentimental machine
which is in very few moments
of monumental pressure
strong enough
to stop time.
Please also see our review of Sommers’ first book, The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire. Continue reading “Sister/Brother Poems”
