I Got No Zen

Cancer is a Water Sign, Cancer is a Flame

Her body hot as a woodstove
resting in the crook of my arms.
Flesh consuming itself
in a feeding frenzy well beyond fever,
burning hard to stay alive.
This scorching blackens only the survivors.
Crackling sounds as their skins
crinkle into new wrinkles of age.
Ashen faces and clothes of mourning
follow the morning after
the consummation of consumption, and cremation.
Later, they will speak of carrying the embers,
of the torch of memory.
But the fire speaks in its own tongue,
a stunning glossolalia encompassing
the destruction of all,
and there is no shush
to quench its thirst for speech once begun,
only hope that in the space it clears by conflagration
some gesture or gestation may occur
and come full term to birth.

Glacial Times

Torch lake lays down deep & cold,
long & wide where the glaciers left her.
I am of this country
this here land we stand on.
For six generations my people
have walked here, and the ashes
of my ancestors suffuse these waters
mingled among the sunken ravines
conjoined in the currents.
Their love as deep as the body of this water.

The fossil forms of the first water-dwellers
have been the inception of my incisors,
their calcified shells encased
in the stony floor of this lake
that feeds our wells.
My bones are built of their ancient homes
as my ancestral ground has shaped
my musculature and form
and as I have worked
a gradual shaping of the land.

In the Time Before Birthing

It was a time of breaking.
The apartment had four rooms,
chambered like a heart.
In living there, our lives became
sectioned & defined
in reefs & shoals of secret.
Congruencies simply cast.
Desires revealed & made clear
as a slice of the saw unveils
the structure of a nautilus.

It was the dwelling of a woman
given to the waves, Dawnelle.
The landing between journey & voyage --
rest from gutting fish on factory ships
in arctic seas of ice.
She was well acquainted with rough weather,
the gales that shove ships forward
in cascades of killing water,
knew the squalls & tempests of the gut
engendered in the meeting
of hot & cold fronts of emotion.

Wrapped in the claustrophobia of land
the four of us sparred & parried in pairs,
the northwestern winter unable to surpass
the black ice of our glares,
nor the wind our keening furies.
One bed shared among four lovers
rang to the sounds of our dissolution
as we clung each to the other for support.
When the stay snapped under our tension
the echoes took a year subsiding.

Chopping Heads with the Missionaries

I was blowing harp for change
when the Amplified Korean Church shows up
toting mics and bibles, and gets down to business
shaking people down for their souls.
They were wailing loud for their saviour
and I figured I might as well pack it on in.
None of us street players ever made any money
when those guys were around.
Yellowhawk came along just then
and we went down the street for coffee.

Heading home later, they're still at it.
I was pissed off.
Thanks to them and their PA system,
I’d be eating spare that night.
As we pass, a guy in a cheap grey suit,
jumping and sweating like Jerry Lee Lewis,
leaps out in front of Yellowhawk and yells
"Do you believe Jesus was the son of God?"
"Get out of my way," I say and start to go.
"Sure," Yellowhawk says.
"Oh, so you’re a christian!" the Korean beams,
Yellowhawk shrugs and smiles, "No."
"Well, do you believe that Jesus died for your sins?"
"Yeah," says Yellowhawk.
"So, you’re a Christian!"
Yellowhawk smiles again and says no.
"Do you love God and Jesus, his son?"
"Yeah," says Yellowhawk.
"So, you see, you are a Christian!"
"Nope." repeats Yellowhawk, happily shaking his head.
I kick back and roll a smoke, wondering
what Yellowhawk's got up his sleeve. 
I make sure to stand upwind of the christian,
who looks like a non-smoker. He's losing his cool,
desperate now not just to snag another soul,
but to somehow pigeonhole my recalcitrant companion.
Yellowhawk just keeps cool, nodding and agreeing
with everything the guy says
except when he brands him a Christian.
Finally, the Korean says, "Well, you and I
both believe these same things, right?"
"Right." says Yellowhawk.
"So, why do you tell me you’re not a Christian?"
"I’m Native American."
"So?  I’m Korean and I’m a Christian.
What’s the difference between a Korean
and a Native American that
I’m a Christian and you’re not?"
Yellowhawk smiles and points
at the ground, and quietly says
"You’re standing on it."

Building By Your Lonesome

Leroy Kessinger never showed me nothing
but kindness and the best of intentions.
Which is sort of too bad,
since by my most conservative reckoning
he owes me about three grand.
He was just an old Kentucky
horsetrading kind of coot,
come up out of the south with a bluegrass band
that couldn’t stand the cold and split.
Since then, he claims, he’s been a millionaire
three times and lost it all.
But I never knew him during the flush times,
just the times when he was flushing it all away.
Bearded and grizzled, graying but spry enough
to jump away from any work that might involve him,
more bent in business than in the back,
he always did things backwards, the hard way.

I met him in Mrs Pete’s diner.
I was rolling a smoke when he walks in,
says, “that’s doing it the hard way.”
I replied “that’s doing it the poor way.”
I hadn’t yet been disabused
of romantic notions of poverty and pride.
That’s what Leroy was for, I guess.

Working dawn to dusk daily,
driving back ways and ridge roads to work,
sun in my eyes both ways,
and beating down on my back all day.
The first week, one of Leroy’s pals died of sunstroke,
just after offering to hire me away.
Leroy insisted the best way to keep cool
was to drink hot coffee which he carried
by the gallon in three thermos.
It sounded as likely as the time Johnny
told me to put Durkee Red Hot on a burn,
but the Red Hot trick actually worked.

When I wasn’t working, eating or sleeping
I spent my time making and singing blues:
“Crawl under this trailer & dig me some holes.
Here’s a spoon 'cause the shovel won’t fit.
Dig ‘em good & deep despite all the stones.
We gotta lay the foundation right where it sits.
So what if it’s raining & 40 degrees
stay underneath, you’ll keep dry.
Get down on your knees & work to keep warm,
why, it’s almost like being inside.”

Walking on rotten boards
nailed to shaky rafters
nailed to, occasionally, nothing at all.
Or, darting under a many ton backhoe
to pull windows and the wide white pine boards
milled prior to the Chicago fire.
I learned to listen for the creak
of a plank’s last straw,
all lines lying out of kilter.
Walking the beams & rafters like tightropes,
I made Leroy nervous climbing up buildings
as we put 'em up or took 'em down.
I didn’t trust ladders and wouldn't use safety ropes either—
afraid the dead weight or a snag would throw me.

Before Bill quit, he & I got quite a routine down
of standing on the top sill at opposite corners
tossing hammers back & forth,
twirling 'em like sixguns ‘side our hips,
catching 'em, ready to strike.
We finished Bill's last day standing in a pasture
throwing his stiletto as high as we could
& fishing it out of the air,
safe as anything else we did.

When Bill left it was left to me
to build a barn basically by myself.
Now and then, when his welfare check ran dry
Leroy’s worthless cousin, Clarence,
would show up long enough
to steal any tools he hadn’t broken.

Leroy had a way of attracting and just missing
disasters, like you wouldn’t believe.
One week we came up over a hill
just after a truck crashed into a runaway racehorse
traffic was halted for an hour and a half
as they hauled the carcass to the side
and towed the truck away.
Then there was a head-on collision on Ellsworth’s main drag
when two married couples saw each
cheating with the other’s spouse.
Worse, both cars belonged to one husband.
The week after that, we narrowly missed
being torpedoed when a geriatric pair
whose accelerator stuck, backed from their drive
through the wall of a local watering hole.
About then, Leroy took out an insurance policy
on each of us, which was, of course, worthless
though it almost got him around to paying us,
just so we’d be able to shoulder our share of the bill.

I was more practical than that—
I wore an old Kentucky ranger’s hat
that had been shot through the top
some hundred years ago.
I figured it would ward away disaster
as well as anything, and, if not,
it kept the sun off my head in the meantime.

My last day, I was standing on the sill
watching a gunslinger storm roll over town.
It came outta nowhere with one thing in mind,
lightning like a tongue lookin' for a bad tooth
underbelly black as hell.
Leroy yelled at me to get my ass down,
but there was no question that storm knew
who it wanted, where to find them
and what to do with them after.
Which, I read in the next day’s paper,
was exactly what it did.
That was the last death
I got close to with Leroy.
I saw it coming and walked away from it
taking nothing but my hat and my favorite hammer.
I only wondered what kind of mojo
Leroy used to keep the lightning off him.

Agnes, Of Course

Morning sun magnifies in her
bright white hair and sharp blue eyes.
She waits to make sure
the waitress has passed,
leans close, winks
and whispers loudly
from behind a cupped,
cracked hand,
"Will you buy me some toast?
I like it!"

"I’m Agnes,
Agnes D’Accord! That's French
for Agnes Of Course!
Is that a good book you're reading?
I used to teach speed reading.
I’ll teach you if you buy me some toast.

"You don’t read everything
at the same speed,
Newspapers you read very fast.
Magazines, you want to take a little more time with
and books, especially good books,
you want to read slowly.

"Are you a student? I was a student.
When I got out of school, I thought, well
I don’t want to work!
So I went to the heart of the continent
to study the weather.
You know where the heart
of the continent is, don’t you?
Indy!  Indianapolis!"

Grave Reservations

"Hear they closed the casino tonight,
up to the reservation?
Guess they got a bomb threat."

"First I ever heard of that.
Who the hell would blow up a casino?"

"If they was real gambers, figure they would’a stayed open.
Shows you how the house hedges their bets."

"Oh, the gamblers, I think, would’ve stayed.
But they was state and local boys out by the score—
made ‘em leave their coats on the hooks by the door
and all file into the snow.
Should'a seen 'em grabbing for the chips!
Lucky it’s only just freezing tonight.
Heaters in their cars, but they all wanna
stand around outside, waiting for the fireworks."

"You was there—you win anything?"

"Not much.  Not enough.  Not near as much as we spent.
Don’t come out to much anyhow, split two, three ways…
Anything’s better than nothing, I guess,
but you never come out ahead."

“Me, I never bet nothing but my life.”

One Place I Used To Live

When the diner slows
in the middle of the night
she does her sidework at the counter.
Some people are almost born with a history
and some just have a lot of stories, early.
Some people don't have to go around the block
to get wise—an uncle, a cousin, or a father
teaches them everything they need to know
right at home.
She takes notes, stays up on things.
She's got a lot to say.
Mostly, though, she tells it to a bottle
she keeps filled at home,
and in the morning
she forgets as best she can.
She may never write her stories
or the ones she hears in here.
But she does what she can stand
and she always carries an extra pen
for the poets who come through this place,
invariably utensiless.

Day Now Begins

Not a clock in the house
that’ll keep accurate time.
    The Timex alarm my uncle gave me
for sleeping late & missing school
will stop with no warning &
the arm that should set the ringer
bears no relation to when it actually
goes off.
    Another alarm
we stole behind the Sally Ann
has to be dropped on the floor
to produce a ticking sound —
Then this morning
Holly’s watch wigged out
& I wound up an hour early to meet Amy.
    So I played with instruments in the guitar store
read poetry, smoked, drank coffee.
Ah!  Here she comes!
Day now begins.

Solstice Postcard

Johnny wrote a letter
     sent it on a postcard
    with a picture of an echo on the front.

He said,
    My drum is a horse
       It'll eat you in your sleep
        if you ain't careful to treat it right.
    Curry & pet it regular
         let it graze in the greenest fields
                Ride long & hard for the love of the wind
            whistling past your ears.

I said

    Every horse is a drum.
        You can hear it in their footfall
            4 beats to a measure,
            measuring out the wind.

    Every horse is a sacred drum.
        Skin stretched taught unbreaking
        over bellies so big they can hold
                        the birdsong
            of every morning ride.

    The wildest dances of the world
       are danced to the beat of hooves
        any sacred drum or horse
                   is safe in the hands of fools.