The north wind is a hand
it pushes at the Great Lakes freighter
moving along the horizon
The freighter pushes back
its bridge and forecastle all that can be seen
from the beach where the hand
pushes waves up the sand
washing away the castles the children built
Gulls stretch their arms and stand aloft
the breeze is stiff, they contemplate breakfast
the sun rises so far away
it makes distance meaningless.
The Great Lakes freighter slowly moves north.
The lake is never still.
It can calm to the point where
it’s glassy over the shallows, and the waves
barely ripple onto the beach, their sloshing
easily inaudible when an airliner
flies over on its approach to O’Hare.
The sky is overcast, the clouds a low, quiet jumble
in blue and gray and even white. The elevated train
clacks by a few blocks back of the lake.
The finches are fat and hop about the beach.
Down the breakwater, a man in a bright orange
jacket faces the lake and speaks with some fierceness.
He may be rehearsing or he may be having a breakdown
or he may have already had it and be hopelessly lost.
Another jet flies over, another train passes by,
three more finches land on the beach.
We hit the beach under heavy fire.
The first wave reached the seawall
and they were all killed. Their bodies
fell back on the second wave, and the following waves,
and all the soldiers in all the waves
were shot down. They fell back on those of us behind
so fast, we were being buried in corpses.
We couldn’t breathe, we couldn’t move.
The people near the station have a game
they play it when the day is light
the sun high and sky clear.
The train is coming and the players—
not all the people play—the players
gather by the tracks. The object
of the game has to do with
the train hitting the players.
It’s simple and it’s complicated.
If you get hit and killed, horribly mangled,
you win, but obviously don’t get to play again,
so you’re not a big winner. If you get
hit and injured and survive—for instance,
your arm is broken in three or more
places—you are a lesser winner.
The lowest winners are the players
who jump off the tracks in time and only
get sprayed and spattered with blood. The biggest winners
are the ones—and there’s never more
than one or two per train—who jump
up from the tracks onto the station platform
and are drenched with the blood of those slain
and who turn and look at the spectators
and have phony looks of surprise on their
faces, their eyes wide open and blood
running down and half-smiles playing.
We spectators gather in the cool darkness
at the back of the station and we look out
at the platform while we smoke illicit
cigarettes. I, for one—and I tell the others this—
have had enough of bloody trains and body parts.
The noon train pulls into the station and stops
just beyond the platform. Behind it, the biggest
winner stands on the platform and pretends
to be surprised.
We are all sinners, craving a forgiveness
we know we don’t deserve.
We are all exiles, forever expelled
from our homeland—it was only ever a dream.
We are all vagrants on the hot, dusty road,
telling lies to the border guards.
We are God’s children,
orphans in bloody rags.
Most of the people who get shot in Chicago
don’t die of their gunshot wounds.
Gunshot wounds are always painful,
usually almost immediately.
Incoming rounds puncture skin, tear into muscle,
rupture organs and even break bones.
They can blind, deafen, maim, disfigure, cripple for life.
As many as a dozen people
may be shot in Chicago on any given day.
Telephone pole in the alley sports a poster–
rats have been sighted nearby. Poison
has been buried. Keep your pets away.
Keep your children away. No digging!
In an emergency, call for help and pray.
The old woman of the shoreline
sits in her wheelchair in the sand.
I am leaving soon, she says.
I am leaving in two or three days.
I’ll not be back.
We’re having a party, she tells the young man of her dreams.
Everyone will be there, you must be there.
I can’t come, he says. He kneels in the sand at her feet,
touches her leg, wonders if she can feel his touch.
I have a previous engagement, he says.
Her eyes are blue, though it’s said by some they once were brown.
She takes his hand. He whispers to her.
The maidens of the lake are at work.
The sun rises behind them,
the sky clear of all but blue and gulls.
The maidens ceaselessly dump tub after tub
of lake water on the beach.
The water is green where they work,
the sun shining through it as it pours out
onto the pebbles and the sand.
Farther out, the water is blue.
The maidens rinse the beach.
People keep warning me about the winters up here.
Oh, the winters…, they say.
Just wait till the winter.
My wife, I asked her (she’s from here),
What is it with the winters?
You people make human sacrifices to the ice gods?
Just you wait, she said.
Just you wait, desert rat–
your tail’s going to snap right off.
The smell from the fire escape today is root beer.
Broken glass litters the sidewalks atop the breakwater.
In one direction the lake goes on forever.
The screaming woman is quiet now, she sleeps.
The morning sun shines on her blinded bedroom window, she sleeps.
In her sleep she never screams, though she moans and begs.
She never tells her dreams.
People in Chicago are not full of shit.
In New York they’re full of authentic shit
real, hardened, know-your-shit shit.
In the Southwest they’re full of blustery shit
gassy, hot, noisy shit.
In Chicago, no, it’s strictly business. No shit.
No time or point for it.
I am in Chicago but I’m still full of shit.
I’m not a very nice person.
As a person I am not very nice.
The diary I kept while I was in my teens
shows me a person I don’t know
and don’t want to know
and he was the source of me.
He was a little shit.
A petty thief
a braggart
molester of girls
he called it love.
He was never thrashed
within an inch of his life.
That woman screams.
Behind this window
that woman screams.
This window opens over the alley back of the building.
It opens and that woman screams.
She goes to the lake and listens to the lake.
No one hears her scream at the lake.
Reality is looking for a job.
The money won’t last.
This idyll won’t last.
The northeast breeze rolls the waves onto the beach.
Where the sun reflects from the water, I cannot look.
Gulls cry.
What fresh heaven is this?
The green flag means the lifeguard is on duty.
The lifeguard sits in a rowboat a few yards off the beach. She wears sunglasses and watches the children splashing in the shallows.
She steadies the rowboat with its oars. It is work. She is young and thin and very tanned.
Children hold hands along the beach. They stand in a line and jump over the crests of small waves coming in.
On a bench in the park just above the beach, a boy writes in a notebook.
I am new here.
I am new here.
This week I’m posting copies of the poems I had published in the first decade of the Third Millennium (by the reckoning of the Christian Church and the Western post-industrial democracies). These poems were all written between about 1998 and 2005.
This is pretty much the end of my previously published work, which I’ve been posting to this site since March of this year. I have a poem, “love poem,” in the Lyrotica anthology published by Vagabondage Press, but that came out just a few months ago so it falls outside of the date range of the batch of poems I posted today. And I have a story, “Lawn,” which should be coming out in Thema magazine’s “One Thing Done Superbly” issue any day now, if it hasn’t already. I’ll probably post that to this site next year.
Next week I’ll probably begin daily postings of a longer work, High Street, which is a book-length manuscript that confused people such as myself might characterize as creative nonfiction. So much for the probabilities and the confusion, then (I could be a derivatives trader).
In November of 1975 I was 17 years old and began writing poetry. The following year I had four of my poems published in two very obscure magazines. In 1978 I had another published in another very obscure magazine. It was another ten years before I had another poem published, again in an obscure magazine, this one in the United Kingdom. And in 1990 I had another poem published: magazine again obscure.
Those seven poems are the previously published works I’m posting this week. They were all written before I was twenty years old. Nearly everything else I wrote in those early scribbling days when the Vietnam War was still freshly lost and the nation was anesthesizing itself with drugs, sex, rock-and-roll and King Disco, has long since been thrown away and good riddance to it. I would hate to think someone would have to wade through that garbage to sort it out after I die.
The Weekly Alibi is an alternative newspaper published in Albuquerque, New Mexico. From 1996 to 2000, it published a baker’s dozen of my poems in its annual Valentine’s Day poetry contest. It also published one of my haiku in its 2000 haiku contest. This week I’m posting those poems here on my blog. I’m not all that wild about them–in fact, some of them are at least a little embarrassing–but I’m not going to try to hide them.
Next week I’ll probably post my earliest published poetry, the stuff from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. There’s not as much of that, and there’s probably not any that may be as embarrassing as “Capitano’s Romance” or “Personals: I Saw U” or “Invitation to the Ball,” the last two of which were winners in the Alibi contests’ “Why I’m a Pathetic, Dateless Loser” category.
“The Usual Story” is another of the stories I initially wrote about a dozen years ago and which was published early this year in Mad Hatters’ Review. It’s the last previously-published story I have in my inventory. Next week I’ll have to post something else. Probably poetry. There was a call some weeks back from one of my three readers for some poetry.
I’ll probably post all my previously-published poetry over a three-week period. Unless I chicken out. Some of it’s pretty embarrassing. No sense hiding, though. I thought it was good enough to submit in the first place, and it got published. Not in American Poetry Review or Poetry or The New Yorker or anything like that. I should be so lucky. It all showed up in little mags, some of which have long since passed away.
Words don’t often fail me. More often, I fail them. This week, I’m posting to this site a work of poetry I wrote six years ago, called The Book of Lamentations. I had previously published it to my Yahoo website in 2006, where I took it down after a week or two, and to my Joomla site last year, where I took it down after one day. It is a work which causes me discomfort. It will not leave me alone.
My background is military. I am an American. It is not my intention to make this website into an overtly political or topical site, but there were aspects of the American government’s invasion and occupation of Iraq which I found appalling. When George W. Bush and Richard Cheney were re-elected in 2004, I was moved to write what I thought would be a three- or four-page poem about the American servicemen and servicewomen, volunteers all, who were giving their lives in the conflict. I thought it would take, at most, a few weeks to write. It ended up taking nine months and going on for scores of pages. I stopped when I didn’t know what else to do.