Selection From "Six Trips in Two Directions"
67
all eyes on the hammer but mine on the hummingbird hovering
behind my father’s head gone at the first blow
praise be to summary for telling us what we missed
when moving too fast to notice we colonized time
with a blessing as fitting as a curse i once watched a rope
follow a pail down a well as innocently as the word itself slips
in the home of a hanged man
68
if summer had a mother she’d weep over it
so bitterly it searches for the taste of its own mouth
if she answered the prayers of dogs it would rain bones
and bite size hands if she were god itself
and gave such strong evidence her son would still leave
and still return a different man with the faintest memory of her
and the same old prayers
69
to say this pilgrimage home has been hard offends
as much as to say it was easy to find home
stoned and unsober in a blackout in ann arbor
if the local deity answered your most burning question
you’d certainly stand there knowing and then what, then where
like a flower that bears no fruit the knife in the pilgrim’s hand
can only find her own heart
70
jo you are the most
human human to me
means humanity expands from contemplation of you
to say who we are if our identity is our center of gravity
is to say where we are or where we have been
but what if we misheard fate you say, for example
the geographic center of the united states of america
is lebanon, kansas
71
what does it mean to say what to mean and what
to question what itself into infinite if
before we return jo finds the name of a female ancestor
in a rural ohio library i’m having a breakdown in the corner
quietly of course my own search has broken me
and now the world whispers its name into the cracks
i am is just that
72
outside the white sky of noon it’s four in the morning inside
trying to sleep off the heat jet lag, lost luggage, and the chorus
of first world voices chanting we don’t care, we really don’t
careful what you care about first thing back i paid
the rooftop squatter for watching our cats and asked
for a pizza when he’s got time done drinkin forties for another year
start being apart and a part
73
here at the end of the last journey i need to make in lebanon
i sit on the edge of the single bed in a one room mountain house
made of dirt stone and timbers i stare out the window at what
gibran would see in the morning how long do you think you’ll stay
saint saba's light says winter’s rain is always near
enough to wake so sweet a grape
from such dry soil
74
the kitten is a cat now lean and serious
and fall is coming round again to remind me how we got here
tolerance is not enough if you can take it, love it
cause being is something so small we pass without noticing it
one day i could only say yes, i’ve been here
not what it was to have been but what it was to have been here
between a mountain and a sea
