To Topple a White Oak in a Post-War Suburb

Under the spreading acorn tree sits a two-bedroom ranch

bought, new as the G.I.Bill, by a Pacific Theatre veteran.

This oak thrust skyward through seasons of apical dominance,

fathered during the century before last

by a seed sprouted in spite of a squirrel’s intentions, or

planted by wind and rain to join a grove of hardwoods.

The woodlot, one of many scattered among acres of cornfields and

hay that checkerboarded the township, then annexed to the city

in the Baby Boom expansion as the echo of bulldozers and hammers

birthed neighborhoods and schools when Eisenhower entered the White House.

A white oak can put up with a lot:

lightning strikes, wind storms, ice and drought.

But a fungus, oak wilt, clogs a tree’s respiration, dehydrates

the mechanics that propel nutrients through its veins.

Leaves wither, fall, never to be replaced.

If a tree were a room, the elephant present would be gravity.

Like Frost’s wall, something there is wants it down.

Wind can collapse a tree’s crown to its roots in a moment.

Should we read a timber obituary, it may inform us  

how long the deceased stood upright, limbs naked as November.

Years, or perhaps at the homeowner’s whim.

In consideration of esthetics and liability, a tree service is called.

Sinewy youth arrive with lightweight Stihl chainsaws and climbing spikes.

Burly woodsmen, bearded bellies, truck to the site hauling

Husqvarna saws, 36-inch bars to crosscut heavy trunks four-feet thick.

As the deconstruction begins they plot the physics by trigonometry.

Archimedes, the ancient Greek engineer, claimed with a fulcrum and

lever of adequate length he would move the earth. Our lumberjacks set a

treetop notch as a fulcrum, with rope as lever, lower tied off branch and

bough to the ground.

In a day’s work a stump, cords of firewood and

the ghost of an oak centenarian remain.

The teacher orders a prompt,

a device to ignite our creative neurons. This kindly intention might suggest the use of a birthday, a favorite dessert, a first car among your inventory of mundanities.

I envision sprinters at a high school track meet, abreast along a chalk line across the width of cinder lanes. The boys adjust their spiked Nikes against the starting blocks, their prompts. They await the report of the official’s starting pistol.

Anticipation may escape confinement. What rhymes with “false start?”

But our problem is this self-imposed blockage to resume writing, not the trigger to detonate our explosion forward, 100 meters of power in balance. That destination is evident.

Among the artists there’s rebellion in the hills, beyond the jurisdiction of fiction workshops, a resistance to the prompt as warmup, as a lever that unleashes a barrage of imagery.

We distill our own metaphor in these parts. Imagination Without Taxation!

The mules we employ as sentries bray at the approach of critics. Have you seen how a guinea hen greets an intruder? The howl of carnage that upends sonnets.

But let’s prompt anyway, aggressively. Saddle up, we’re marching through Georgia.

I introduce “goat” in my first line. The reader’s optic apparatus ferries the text to interacting cortexes in the hemisphere and lobes and presents a visual goat within milliseconds. I continue to take charge, or more accurately, the reader serves at the pleasure of the poem.

The poem is the prompt.

I may modify “goat” with “one-horned,” with which the brain continues to rapid-file such labeling. What if one reader responds with their reception as “unicorn?” Fair. The poem begins metamorphosis. And if I add “red lips” to convey this hoofed, uni-horned livestock some reader some time will conjure “lipstick” or perhaps extend this trail of images with “Revlon.”

But I didn’t do that. I stopped after planting a goat, sans horn, with red lips on the page. Maybe the goat had raided the farmer’s red berry patch without hiding the evidence of his crime.

This cascade of interpretation has activated and remains perpetual. Infinite meanings exceed half-lives. The poem has this potential, fresh from its genesis as text or sound. It maintains this power as long as it has a reader.

Sam Drums Heart of Darkness

Sam drums regretless the cadence of his reports mimic “Ira Glass”

on the set of “Apocalypse Now” as the crew guides upriver a gibbous

moon waxes in and out smoke suspects blood coyotes

smell hideous drag cooling carcass rage howls across a

backyard under hickory and ash and jaws and gnaws grip with

copperhead resolve “This American Life” maintains pace and presence

the stream ascends a drum tattoo toward

”Part 3:” Marlon Brando loses his head

Packard Drive

We are here because our ancestors believed in us.

A house, too, has ancestors; bricks the mason gripped and mortared for these walls to rise two-and-a-half stories. The carpenter’s callused hands and blueprints coded the double helix that plumbed the framing true three floors high.

The old Irishman’s family wasn’t the first to live here as the bootlegger’s round barrel bottoms
imprinted into the pinewood flooring attest. Then the house became home for the boy’s mom,
her mom, his great-grandmother and the old Irishman.

I want to tell you, this wasn’t a dream!

The boy remembers the transformation he felt upon the sight of a mid-century Studebaker
coupe rolling without a sound down a sidewalk of post-war Akron. The old Irishman saw it first,
first noted the bullet nose ornament, “That’s a Studebaker” he said as he steered the youthful
hand toward the safety of the front door, the entrance to the house used only by the postman
as he unloaded his daily route to the mailboxes near Buchtel High School. This front door was an ornament, too. It featured the street address, 1036, in stained glass prisms that magically
projected spectrums of light from the morning sun onto the porch floor inside.

On summer nights the boy sat with the Irishman, on a wicker couch, attentively tuned to the
AM static broadcast on the Emerson radio in a brown bakelite housing. When the Indians played on the road, St. Louis or Chicago, games wouldn’t end until after sundown in northeast Ohio, so the boy was permitted to stay up. At night the porch was dark but for the magic shining of filaments in vacuum tubes, the sorcery of heated electrons invoking the sound of radio play-by-play. Darkness, but for the glow of tobacco embers signaling from the Irishman’s pipe.

For this house, the portal to and from the world was the screen door on the back porch.
Deliveries of bread and milk and daily newspapers entered up thick oak steps through the
wood-framed gate that stretched wire mesh across the hinged scrim that slammed shut by the
physics of a steel-coiled spring. This ventilated the kitchen inside and served as line of defense against the flights of summer flies and mosquitos. But as daylight shortened and air chilled by the alchemy of the seasons the door remained fixed. No storm door replaced the screen even in winter.

The Irishman came up in a tradition of time before time when the veil between us and the dead
was its thinnest, the first of November.

On this night dinner was served in the kitchen by the open door no matter how chilly. Places set on the table for the departed as we served their dumb supper. They no longer speak so children are told from where they have come, from the souls through Samhain’s screen door.

Gary and Jack

Gary saw seven dogs seated around the card table, he listened to “The Weight” as we wait for the collie to match, raise, or fold. Lady and the girls drink sherry in the kitchen and whisper to the yams. Jack preaches to squirrels that stand on the fence.

“I visited Quezon City, and I lived in Seoul, but I never seen bulldogs dance.”

He steps out to the back yard, the sky, dark grey with urban edges, lights the shadows. Silence shoves him like fans leave a stadium after a loss. He squints at the deafness, stares toward a stack of rocks. The stones remind him of snappers that sunbathe on logs stuck in riverbank mud, loud silhouettes of secrets the size of nightmares. The fish skulls stare east.

Gary hikes bare sidewalks for coffee. He notes the boy who waves from a third floor window every morning. Crippled by polio, he rereads comic books from 1954. A widow serves him tea, one sugar cube. Snow flakes sparsely. Snow flakes suspend. Chilly, not cold. Jack exits a café, sits with his coffee on a bench in front of the shop. Across the street, a public square features a circle around a fountain under a statue of a dead man that stares west toward the frontier of nightness. Settling snow on the bronze face reminds Jack of the carnival, leftover cotton candy. He drops the styrofoam, coffee falls, shatters in shards of black slush, sharp caffeine crystals stain the pavement. Gary interrupts,

“I remember the quicksand by the tracks, the hobo who drowned, the paperboys’ parade to the closed truck-stop, sledding under pines before bedtime, donkey basketball, sawdust celebrities.”

Jack recalls the milk that stales daily in the cafeteria, pledges allegiance to the spelling bee. Gary passes two cows in a pasture to prime the pump with poison ivy. Muskrats seep out of the watercress, salamanders tidy the spring while the raspberry thief watches the tennis court cave-in. Raccoons lock the dogs inside the gate.

November’s Texture: My Mother’s Ancient Face

The wale of a corduroy calendar hikes along herringboned pavement, hears unshaven whiskers scratch toddler’s fingerprints, watches soles

scuffle over street pavers as Hopper’s tender light sprays warmth on russet brick walls at dawn.

A west wind cracks that last scarlet leaf from a noisy maple branch. These heavy north clouds, purple layers of slate, slide over sheared hay fields, cut

stubbles awaiting snow. By the fence, the shed skin of a corn snake catches on barbed wire. Expired paint dries, chips peel from splintered barn

boards. Seven buzzards spread on six limbs of wind-scratched sycamore, the weathered breath quakes the bark like my mother’s ancient face.

November hums the oak coda, the hymn of acorns, the dance of Beaver Moon rising. But the leaf sins, separates from the twig and falls, only

to become whole with earth.

title less

I fear when I write in the first person you might misunderstand will

you read my revelations as a confession can my tales really be

fiction isn’t creative prose really ventriloquism with a dictionary on

the surface of your comprehension I compose with gibbous

apprehension the probability of your judgement increases inductively

what do I risk when I describe my stumble into the basement of

an abandoned synagogue on East Houston Street was I there to cop

a rush from a glassine parcel isn’t the point to write what we know

to know the suburban refugees who huddle in a shooting gallery as

truckloads of produce deliveries groan out of the Holland Tunnel

creep by these decaying walls I changed direction with the appearance

of a blonde Irish lass in sleeveless denim with a shoulder tattoo to match

the blue of her smile I studied the encouragement of a West Indies shaman

at a street fair on the Hoboken shore she pointed across the Hudson to

World Trade horizons under a full city moonrise I tell you I was Billy Einhorn

back from the coast in House of Blue Leaves I wept as I felt the actor

who was Artie break the fourth wall often a gamble to break character with

a kiss

Anthrocite Stockings in White Sneakers

Gary suspends… the aria in his ear buds blind him as the bicycle trips over its rusty chain.

The street cradles his wrecked wrist with a splintered chorus of torn denim on scraped bricks.

Marbles scatter among bent spokes, unknown to Jack, who walks twice to the moon,

one day going, another day back.

He paused to remember his wall of grandmothers, he vowed to fry chicken.

The convenient shelves were barren of lard.

An egg poured over cracked flooring, the trace of gasoline whispered in line.

What ever became of journalism? It’s a half-mile to the next day.

Always noise, but without rhymes that avoid speed dial, spam alerts for each desk planner.

Gary’s gratitude for skin withers while Jack shaves each book.

They signal for take-out beyond a dormant horizon.

Gary wrote his will with transistors, he evicts his birthday, he converts to General Electric.

Jack collects mandolins while rock climbing. Crows spill seeds on a deer skull.

The crocodile upended his cabana on the turnpike to the surf.

The Invasive “Sweet Autumn”

The Invasive “Sweet Autumn”

Gravity rips down this last Rose of Sharon, pink as Mary Kay’s Cadillac kissed by Chernobyl’s

iridescent brother. The flower withers onto dry grass, petals torn toward arid ferment,

they crumble in the deliberate pace of a drought. Ash trees overhead host the emerald borers

gathering on leaves to mate and copulate, deposit eggs in daycare under the bark.

Jenny grows clematis on her side of our shared backyard fence, the invasive

“Sweet Autumn.” The border between the United States and Canada is 5,525 miles in length,

including the demarcation that separates Alaska from the Yukon and British Columbia. This boundary

lies within four of the five Great Lakes, where opportunists smuggled thousands of crates of bottled

whiskey across our frontier during Prohibition. White cross-shaped flowers cover vines still lush as

chlorophyl in the shrinking hours of daylight. White clematis crosses descend our shared barricade

in the shade of ash saplings. Pale, dry crucifixes creep like knights of the holy First Crusade to retreat from

Saladin’s caliphate. The shields of white crosses, of white kings, of the Vatican, not friends with the

children of Abraham, the tribes of Judah, the fanboys of Moses. Ours is a household that lights the menorah,

spins the dreidel, peels foil off chocolate currency as the drying white crosses meld with the last Rose of Sharon.

Things of William Carlos Williams

Things of William Carlos Williams

Calliope and Erata disagree on the birth of a poem, the moment when a pre-lingual fetus first breathes

in the light of post-creation. Plato, reading up on ideals, was truant from the cave

that day Socrates hosted an open mic and all Plato contributed was to slam the window shut

after the teenage Orpheus snuck into the cave after hours and pissed on the fire.

Friends arrive, Eurydice among them, holding hands with Eve. Orpheus smiles, wine flows, music ensues

as he plays colorfully with ascending and descending tetrachords with his lyre. His songs flow across

the spectrum of feelings from the cruel pain of self abuse to the agony of fratricide and murder and finally

to ecstasy and rapture. He invents the chromatic color wheel of hues to correspond with the twelve moods of the scale.

The party attracts a serpent, followed by Adam, who shoulders an oinochoe, a jug of fresh-squeezed cider

from the orchard in the garden. As he passed the apple juice Adam lets the snake drink first.

A poem is never finished; it matures, perhaps, but always eludes completion.

When the young Werner Heisenberg struggled in his studies as a poet he discovered that

a poem may never rest in a singular location so readers may mark an accurate measure of its velocity, hence…

the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Poetics. At that point in his career he abandoned metaphor and turned to theoretical physics.

But Plato wasn’t the poet that Dr. Williams came to be. “No ideas but in things,” indeed! An innate ideal of

a red wheel barrow is useless for hauling delicious plums from the ice box,

“so sweet, so cold.”