Still, tiger, there’s no reason

not to tie your wife up

if that’s what she’s been dreaming about

in traffic. No reason not to

go out and eat twenty doughnuts

if that’s what you want instead of granola

because, whether you like it or not,

it’s a skeleton you’re wearing

under those Italian jeans. For my part

I’m going to watch hours of television

wearing nothing but a pair of running shoes.

I’m going to walk out

into the yard and begin courting

the rosebushes. I’m not going to

let a little thing like the world stand in my way.

Why should I? I understand it

as much as I understand penguins

and I still go to the zoo. I still watch them

swimming underwater.

It’s like watching really beautiful gods

moving within a universe

that other, taller gods built for them

out of compassion and ingenuity.

It would be easy to sit at the bar smoking,

drinking, ruminating about the why of penguins,

pulling our hair out, crying into our gin

about how the penguins have forsaken us,

how nature is having another party

and we’re not invited.

I like the world in all its incredible forms.

When I’ve had the shit beat out of me, my friends

who have died their violent and accidental

deaths, falling from windows, swerving

into the lights of traffic, my suffering,

my unearned joy, my hand reaching up

through the yards of fabric that made your dress,

the midnight movies, all the kids huffing

all the paint thinners, the comedy

if the poor and the ruthlessness

of the rich, how we’re too hungry to fight,

too crushed by debt and the psycho

promise of there’s-always-tomorrow,

of rent-to-own, the smell

of carrots, the smell of gasoline, the mysteries

of bread and wine, the sky

in Montana with Laura beneath it,

the sky in Portland when my brother was buried

in his little tin of ash, the happiness

of love and the pity of sex, the bathroom stalls,

the fruit markets, Rob proposing on one knee

wearing a panda costume, sweating inside

the fake fur, his bride in love,

the quarterback’s son

paralyzed from the neck down

and then gone, the fear and fetish

of genitals, the way

we beat ourselves into our suits and high heels.

I see how we are with each other.

I see how we act. It’s not the world

with its ten-zillion things we should be grasping.

but the sincerity of penguins, the mess we made of the roses.

Your breasts were two drunken parents

coaching little league practice

but smaller, I remember, than the disappointment

parents wrap around children

and now they have been replaced by others.

Some were like exposed negatives,

two copies of a Maria Callas biography,

a pair of Dutch clogs,

two pieces of chocolate cake

that left me thirsty for two glasses of milk,

pierced, tattooed, each different,

even from each other;

one always seeming a little brighter,

a little larger or smaller

at midday or midnight, while it rained

or began to snow, sticking to the sidewalk.

I remember my friend’s wife

the night I lifted her shirt

over her shoulders

in the tiny upstairs bathroom

while he argued about Eliot

and the Jews with the woman

I would eventually drive home.

Honor will only carry you so far

before it drops you on your ass.

You can’t run from it

but you can get close, standing out in the cold,

lighting your little cigar, talking

a woman’s ear off. Making her feel

lonelier with every story you tell.

I have learned to conquer loneliness

the way television conquers loneliness.

The woman in the car commercial, bending

over the hood, her breasts telling me

this is the car for you, handsome.

You have to believe in it

if you want to survive. You have to

let the old lies into bed and make them sing for you.

And it’s the same thing when I dream

about your breasts and a floating riding crop.

I have to remember how wonderful it feels, pulling

my hands out of my pockets, moving

them slowly between someone’s spine

and yellow t-shirt, happy to unhook the small clasp

without the fingerprint of love,

without the familiar sound of our neighbors fighting

and all the effortless moaning that went with you.

In Vermont there are maple trees and bears and log cabins

and a university or two

where people are learning about right angles

and the philosophy of Kant.

It’s also the magisterial home of the moon

which seems to cut and lilt

through every branch and over every peak. I sat below it

on the steps of an old church

converted into a lecture hall, no longer

the house of God, no longer the property of souls

who prayed and sang and felt bad

about all the bad things they had done.

It was night time. It was no longer a church.

Emily opened her beer with a Bic lighter. Sitting there

I could hear the river

and it made me feel important. More important, I imagine,

than Emily felt when she finally finessed

the right amount of pressure

between the cap of the beer and the chewed-up

end of the lighter, popping the cap

into her lap, the river, moving in its one direction,

made me feel as if I was living

the same way, with the same purpose, and by proxy

had the same power, the same

hydro-ecstatic-willingness not to be exhausted

by my own body. The river ran near my room

and I listened to it every night.

I kept my windows open. I kept my shoes lined against the wall.

When I’m drinking beer I like to stare into the fire

a friend has built out of kindling and dry logs, some news

paper helping it burn, looking blankly forward

at the flames, my face looking absolutely surprised

as if someone I never imagined

were to pull their jeans off

and I am slipping my hands through them,

helping them over the ankles.

I helped Emily’s over her ankles

the night she opened her beer with a Bic lighter

because I liked her, and I liked the part about her knees

and the part about her wrists.

I liked the line about her breasts, the humming

her nipples made

and the double entendre in her mouth.

I liked the well-written starlight when she blinked

and the page-turning

oh-hell-yes, when she breathed.

I liked the one about her ass and the one about her neck.

My favorite might have been her shoulders,

her skin glowing

like some deep tenderness that had surfaced for a moment.

Tenderness and beer go well together.

In fact, just last weekend, Delmore Schwartz, who is dead,

was telling me, My tendency

is tenderness, he was saying, I’m naturally affectionate.

If he wanted to he could have

opened a beer with his teeth,

sitting in Vermont, the Green Mountains rising up

behind him like this immense dream

I am having about the largesse of life, sitting

on the steps of a church-gone-lecture hall

with Emily and a six-pack of beer.

I am betting all of it tonight,

whatever that may be,

on the locust and the amber

bugs I can’t even name

but love the way we love children

with a cache of forgiveness

and humor, stumbling

through the playground in yellow

rainboots and Band-Aids.

I am putting down my chips

for the starling

because she sang me out of my hangover

and I am letting my dice roll

on the mole

who wore glasses in my childhood

and wrapped himself up

in a blanket, near the fire he made,

in the tiny house

beneath the roots of an evergreen.

I am betting my winnings

on a friend I was unfaithful to.

I am leaving the blue ribbons

of my dishonesty

around the doorknobs of women

who would have been better off

without the impersonations

of famous operas

I played out on single, full, and queen

sized beds. I want this lucky

number to hit

so I can look the palm tree in his shaggy face.

I am willing to break the bank

for the geese, walking along the river’s edge

like thugs in white overalls,

I am willing to spend my final dollar

on a twenty to one

that the Golden Retriever I saw last night

will win by a nose, just enough

to walk awhile with redemption.

Some mud on my shoes, a little blood on my clothes.

There’s an artist that lives nearby

whose life, she says, is her art.

And to that unbearably self-conscious

bon mot she is willing to have love affairs with anyone

willing, themselves, to be a living, breathing,

piece of art. Love letters or telephone calls. I suppose

you could do anything, drive her out

of town and take her in the backseat, her left foot

raised high and pressing

against the window, her right foot shuffling on the floorboard.

You could also watch her make art

by herself on a bed

in some hotel. Sitting there in the dark

like you were in some strange theater of the avant-garde.

I’m thinking about that guy in New York

who stood on stage in an old meat packing warehouse,

the audience full of the very young

and painful, waiting for this “happening” to happen,

when the artist, standing

beneath a single light bulb, pulls out a gun and shoots himself

in the foot. Well, Ralph Stanley says,

cheer up my brother, live in the sunshine, we’ll understand

it all by and by. And by and by

we do. Sometimes love gets commissioned

and sometimes art shoots itself in the foot. At least it’s art.

At least it’s not some grassy knoll bullshit

or some teenager walking into the cafeteria with a sawed-off

and an overcoat. Cheer up

my brothers, our Master is sleeping it off in heaven.

He is waiting for his children, his tired,

his poor, his huddled masses. He’s looking

for an artist he likes. I like Victor Maldonado. I like his painting

of the boy in a dunce hat reading to a circus bear.

Victor’s from Mexico. He paints

drop-top cadillacs, police dogs, the legs of little girls, and helicopters.

Everybody loves his canvas

of Coca-Cola and McDonald’s french fries. Hey

remember when they were freedom fries?

Wasn’t that a minute ago? Wasn’t that, for Christ’s sake,

a little indignant?

And speaking of Christ,

we have Christ in a jar of urine, the artist of which

was not dragged into a van, his teeth

kicked out, his body left hanging from a streetlight. We can

make anything we want. It’s awesome.

Like Justin Richel’s painting of George Washington,

lying on his death bed,

an arch of blood, a spout bending over one slave and into the bowl

of another. He paints our forefathers

in beehive wigs with actual bees coming out.

Whole wigs made out of cakes

and pies. He’s a good artist. He’s skinny and worked

for his father mixing cement, putting in drywall,

then going home and making

little portraits of Paul Revere, Thomas Jefferson,

Thomas Paine, you name it.

Little portraits with moving parts like eyes and tongues. Jefferson’s

tongue moving in and out, some woman,

some slave on his mind,

making it burn and shuck and jive. In the dining hall

of the artists’ residency, an artist

places a sign on each of the tables that reads

“Niggers Only.” Everyone sits down and blushes,

gets pissed off and self-referential,

saying I didn’t do this. This isn’t

my work. That’s art

slapping the baby and making it cry.

I’d like to do something with sticks. Maybe make them

into a house or something. Maybe have you bend me over

your knee and beat me. We could

call it “I Never Had a Father”

and people would get to thinking about it.

You could dress up

in a powdered wig with top hat, white gloves, white paint

smeared over your face,

a dinner jacket with tails. The whole bit.

While I beg and beg

and call you boss, my little superpower.

Which makes the elegy I wrote for him seem a little distasteful.

Let me tell you, just because you see someone in a black

and white photograph doesn’t mean he’s dead.

Even if you find the photograph in an old-looking

box inside your grandmother’s closet,

the person in it standing against an old Ford

with a goat walking past and a farm in the distance,

he may still be alive, in a nursing home being fed

by a large Kentuckian named Tony, but alive

all the same. And it’s the same with people

much older than you. Just because

they were buying cups of coffee

for a nickel and listening to Sarah Vaughn live

at the Blue Note, they’re not always sleeping

through their hangovers under a quiet blade of grass

in God’s Acre. When I bought the Chick Corea album

and saw him in the silvery sheen of the cover art,

smoking an unfiltered cigarette, the smoke rising

over his face like the hem of a silk dress,

I didn’t even blink. He was dead. And I? I was sad,

listening to his fingers, his poor dead fingers, flying

like ghosts over IT DON’T MEAN A THING

IF IT AIN’T GOT THAT SWING, and thinking

this man’s a genius! playing Ellington like a bartender

plays a Singapore Sling, all that maraschino cherry

sweetness, a little clink of ice, and his voice

doing a kind of mumble-moan

over the keys like a man who has been raised

from the dead, looking at a woman’s knees

after years in the dirt, singing yeaahh!

yeaahh! this is what I’m talking about, yeaahh! this good, sweet life!

Because Laura was driving I was free

to take pictures of the cows who looked so close

then I pushed down my index finger, making the camera

click. Those slow giants, I thought

they’d come out glossy and huge like the tasteless

strawberries people grow in California,

but they didn’t, they came out small like the wild ones

in Oregon, in someone’s backyard

next to the tomato and rosemary.

This was along the coast, the cows with their souls

mooing away in their hearts

like the wind in old westerns

you might have seen when you were young and it forever shook

you to tears or made you love

someone you’d never known. Those big-hearted cows,

black and white gods chewing the grass

of America, making milk or making meat

I don’t know which, but making something there

on the hillside. I was looking out

toward the ocean where the whales were hiding, orbiting

along some aquatic jet-stream like dark planets,

and I was looking into the rear-view mirror as well,

where Laura’s eyes were looking at me, both of us

so close to the cows and the sea

at the same time, reminding me

of an India I read about

where kindness is called Ahimsa

thought it could be something else, something like a red balloon

or an open hand. I often take pictures of people or animals

so when they’re gone I can remind myself

that they’re real, that I have proven the unprovable fact

that not only do I have a heart

but it grows like a sentimental chrysanthemum

my parents planted in the seventies

while their friends were flying helicopters over what was left

of Saigon. I don’t know why

I miss the cows so deeply, why

when I look at the picture and they appear so small

I want to cry. Loss is a funny thing to feel

when you never knew the thing you miss. But I suppose

I loved the cows, my irrational heart

blowing open the doors of the schmaltzy saloon

where my feelings stay up late

drinking scotch, listening to old punk records,

which aren’t even old

in the fossil-universe-space-station we live in.

Maybe it was Laura making everything

sublime with her red hair doing crazy things, the window

rolled down, the salt in the air.

The night before we had driven down a little road

with the stars and the fences

and I knew I was living my life

there in the car, looking out

but not knowing if it was the ocean or the hills.

Sometimes, when you’re driving in the dark,

you can be anywhere, you can turn

the headlights off and bend toward hope and happiness and the good

stuff about death. Death! My favorite kind

of fear. I think about it whenever I fly

and whenever something good happens I give it a little kiss.

If I were more like the cows

it wouldn’t matter. But it’s good to be human and have

a little fear tucked away in some corner of my body,

in the orange bathtub at the B&B

where I had death hiding in my left hand,

where I brought the washcloth up

and felt the water running down her shoulders,

burning a candle in the room

and Laura on or out of her clothes.

I had never thought about the life

expectancy of cows or how they would make me feel

Elysian, that they would mean so much,

that I would even suffer

because of my great feelings for them or that I would dream about Laura

the night I came home, and in it

she would be sitting near me in a theater where we had gone to see

a movie about Sweden we both lived in different ways.

I have spent many hours, sitting

on the toilet, reading books by incredible people

like Mark Twain and Truman

Capote, books about strangers coming to town

and books about a boy, packing

up his belongings into a knapsack,

hopping a train, and eventually becoming a stranger himself.

I have read newspapers

and not just the comics but the metro section

with all its gore and local scandal

like the DNA of the city spinning into long columns.

I have finished whole magazines

where you can barely see the clothes for all the curving bodies.

I have been on my knees

with the stomach flu, staring into the toilet

like some people will drive to the ocean and stare at the sea.

My toilet was manufactured

by a company called American Standard and I have thrown up

more than once, looking at the blue stamp above

the lid and thinking

no one will believe me:

the American Standard taking whatever

you give it, flushing, then filling back up with water.

Standing beside the toilet

I have talked friends down

from bad acid trips, and once,

while flossing my teeth, experienced

a deep sorrow lost forever in the mirror.

All in a bathroom! And that’s not all.

There’s a woman standing inside the bathroom

against the door, which is unlocked,

and I am standing against her

and the party outside is standing against the walls of the house

and she is engaged to a nice man

from Colorado and I am lifting up her dress

with my teeth. No one gets her like the dress gets her

and that is why men want to pull it off.

It’s jealousy. It’s moving in on the conversation she’s been having

with the fabric all night

and that conversation, the one you are

not a part of, is getting hot and heavy

so now there are half-moons of sweat appearing

beneath each breast and maybe

that is why you end up in the bathroom

next to a toilet with a candle on top,

a handful of her hair,

and her head reaching back

toward two shoulder blades that have been scratched by her fiance

the night they fought about whatever it is

people fight about so that later they can throw each other around

without their clothes on. I have her underwear off now

and now she is sort of half-sitting on the edge of the sink

and I’m reaching for the door

because when she pulls me out of my jeans

I decide to lock it. I hear it click

and then I hear someone knocking, yelling

hurry up! but I don’t want to hurry up

so I start thinking about the time

I almost went to Africa

and how I imagined Ethiopia

was going to be, and how the people there

were probably the kindest people on earth.

Sometimes they
go outside, maybe

move a rosebush
to the back yard or

clean a window.
Usually they

simply stand,
under a maple

or in a snowfall.
And this is often

when they see
a nuthatch on its

dizzy route down
a trunk, or

the quick flick
of a chickadee

across the yard
and onto a branch.

They don’t do
much. That’s for

others. They know
how to take things

for granted, know
what to miss.

Every morning
they make breakfast.

And when the sun
sets, they let it go.

-Jack Ridl

My friend, a Buddhist, tells me

that life is constantly changing

and that my struggle against it

is the cause of my suffering. That and wanting

what I do not have, being less than excited about what I do,

and the shaky delusions

of an invented reality in which I probably live

most of my days. She’s right.

Life changes. The sacred becomes, after many years, secular

and then turns back around as if it has forgotten its keys,

becoming sacred all over again.

It’s like Florida when it was wild and native,

eventually cut down, agglomerated

with turkey-skinned, sun-burned Europeans.

Tropical diseases running willy-nilly through everyone’s veins

until, once upon a time, Mr. Walt Disney

of Mr. Walt Disney’s children built their castles

and tea-cup rides, making a trip to Florida almost as sacramental

as it was commercial. I’m the same way,

depending on who’s loving me

or hating me, taking my letters and burning them,

ripping them up, throwing them in the air

above a bed we might have shared

while a friend cheers her on, yelling that’s right - you go girl!

And it is right, necessary even, fuck- if I was there

listening to the Indigo Girls and drinking Chardonnay

I’d rip my letters up too. As for the invented reality

I live in, my friend is also correct. I am so much bigger

than in real life. I’ve played lead guitar

for famous bands, I’ve played lead roles

in famous movies, I’ve been in outer space and I’ve been a pig

farmer with a beautiful wife from Ireland.

But those, perhaps, are not delusions as much as they dreams.

Not so much Florida without Disney World,

its five-dollar soft drinks and coked-out Donald Ducks

posing with five hundred sticky kids

but Florida with Seminole Indians and Sun Dances.

As far as delusions go

it must be the ones I have about kindness,

that I am never mean or have never wanted to disgrace

your wife in the coat room of a community theater.

Or that I would always give up my seat

on the bus for the elderly woman who grumbles

about how much she hates Mexicans,

that I move so that others can be more free,

that my body is a temple,

a kind of Taj Mahal or Mall of America,

where people come to pray

and spend money, where I put the wholesome

offerings of high fructose corn syrup

and carcinogens onto the altars of the lung and liver,

that I never wanted what my cousins have, their completeness

and money. Their beauty. Things like that.

Small things. Big things.

This must be why my Buddhist friend is concerned,

as she smokes her American Spirit

cigarettes. Which is not to say she’s a hypocrite

or delusional

or is in any way linked to the suffering

of Native Americans,

though it might be some peculiar destiny

that one people would be dying of alcoholism

while the other succumbs to lung cancer, what it is,

as the blue smoke exhales from her small chest

which is covered, this evening, in a creamy silk top

with spaghetti straps, what it is is that we are not temples,

our bodies, no matter how many worms

work all night to make a sexy, creamy silk top

with spaghetti straps, a kind of industrial workmanship

outdone, by the way,

only through the greater exertion

of the twelve-year-old Taiwanese

who put the damn things together. No, our bodies are chemical,

organic bed and breakfasts, where we stay out too late on the beaches

of our desires and in the morning over a plate of scrambled eggs

and a hot cup of caffeine-enriched coffee,

we come running into the Shangri-la that is sober advice.

Or we meet in a bar like this one with our sacred prayer beads

in one hand and the now secular tobacco

in the other, inhaling it,

and then letting it exhale slowly like the long breath

those first men and women from Cheap End must have taken

when they walked off the plank of their Dickensian ships

and onto the sands of the untouched, divine, and humid Floridian coast.