INCISION
The policemen found my friend face up
at the river’s edge, in the patterned dark
and light of passing clouds. Beyond that,
they found ashes from a fire and the outlines
of bodies, where men had lain down and slept.
Those men were his friends, not mine. They ate
and slept and shat together down river where
they knew no one went. When I picture them,
their wrinkles and their scars and open mouths
are all I can imagine. He was only sixteen.
At school, I was the one who cut apart
the fetal pig, cuts shallow and sketching
the organs with a pencil nub, while he wrote
his name as if he deserved the credit. That odor
of formaldehyde: it made him nauseous.
But maybe if I had him hold the knife and draw
the heart, maybe his body would have shaken
the way my fingers do now, when I picture his
body in the morning air, pierced by the light.
Maybe he could have moved with his family up north –
where his father is now a landscaper for a banker
on Long Island. On summer Sundays, his boss
tans his pale body by the pool, while he lays sod
and plants saplings, watering them with a hose,
stretching the roots downwards toward the dead.
PARISH
These days, I crank up the a/c in the Ranger
and I don’t patch the leak in the driver side tire.
Westerberg, Chilton, Springsteen: none of them
know the way this truck handles on unpaved roads.
None of them ever had to help their dying father
clean out his office in the middle of the summer.
You left the door open – not on purpose.
I flip through your collection of classical LP’s:
A lot of Beethoven, but other pre-romantics also –
Mozart, Schubert, Soler and Salieri – and I stare
at a poster of Yo-Yo Ma, smiling with his cello
angled upward between his tuxedoed legs.
I could never be a pastor because I don’t believe
in the importance of pooling water in your palms.
I could never baptize some poor wincing child;
I would not know what to say to them, because
I don’t know if I could ever convince myself
of the truth printed in the finger thin pages.
When you finally tune your cello, it answers
the quiet with open tones and vibrating strings.
I listen to the sounds resonate from within
the hollow body. And what the music hides,
in the absence of language, is your starvation:
a hunger sated only by the empty calories of art.
POWER PLAY
For Emma, heading North.
Before the punch-up in the scoring end,
when both players lost their sticks, silently
helicoptering across the ice as we watched;
Before the Caps knotted it up at 2 in the second,
and the trio of Letang, Maata, and Dumoulin,
penalty killers, lumbered over the ice, chasing
the puck as it turns end over end, the ice kicked up
from their skates hanging in the air like stardust;
Before the Pens had a 2-1 lead, but failed to score
on a 5 on 3, when the falling rain outside
Twain’s turned the streets into puddles of rust;
We witnessed a father throw a wiffle ball
at his son’s bat in the center of Decatur Square,
under darkening clouds. The ball went nowhere,
seeming to disappear into the child’s eyes, and so
we headed to Twain’s for the puck to drop.
My father used to say that I would know love when I saw it.
That morning I breathed in the air through wet cloth,
and while walking in the tumult of downtown Atlanta
the doors of the public toilet in Woodruff Park opened;
and what I saw from across the street was the glow
of a woman’s bare ass, sweatpants at her ankles.
She was standing, screaming something in response
to the men outside, who were telling her to get out,
to cover up. But she was in no rush to leave.
What I wished I saw then was a confirmation.
Some sign that reaffirmed the beauty of all things,
like the golden sheen of rust after rain.
Instead, I kept walking, thinking about the weather.
Letting the scene fade from my memory, I replaced
it with thoughts of the game tonight: the dim lighting
of the bar, the faces in the crowd, the blanched ice.
All these better spaces where we could belong.
