Category Archives: Poetry

Writing with Invisible Ink

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Now that I have seen the diamondback rattler in the domain of children I see him again everywhere–the darkness notched between sidings and foundations, lassoed water hoses resting in the sun, tree branches in the grass, all become the skin and flesh and memory of the foolish man who held just the severed head of his deadly foe too close to human skin.

We keep the most dangerous pets coiled in emptied potato salad containers, hastily labeled with words too awful to write down in anything but

Invisible ink.

Ghost Child

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To be clear you are all grown up now and living somewhere as I try yet again to excise what you have done to us all from pictures of beautiful children.

You were

You are a dangerous male child

But what you will be

Is mountains told to throw themselves

Into the Sea.

Mark 11:22-23 NIV

[22] “Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. [23] “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them.

Apophenia

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I pull the elephant ears out of the water, one and then a handful and then none for awhile, risking dead fish and live snakes to find you. At dinner the little boy asks what miscarriage is and my answer is accurate but brief because why tell a little boy about lost siblings and the trees grown in their place or the way that forgetting is not better than carrying this

This memory of you dark, indelible angel, in the midst of all I hold dear.

Beanie Weather

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The young fella folding library mailers eyes the old ladies as they cross the light-filled atrium. They are an exclamation point and a question mark traveling at processional speeds, arms entwined for mutual ballast. I take my own child’s arm, tell her that if we play our cards right one day they will be us, we will be them…while the young fella wears a reddish “cadet” tee and a off-grey beanie in the late days of May in the heart of Texas–bit warm for beanies, she says.

Better to catch the eye of all the pretty girls, I tell her on the way home.

Traveling Fast on a Spinning Planet

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So young to be caught in a prisoner’s dilemma they give me vaguely concocted descriptions of a car we all know is fiction to cover for what we all know is true.

Take note of how young they are, intrinsically lovable despite their wanton ways. Can I will them to safety, to slow down for all of us–still alive, for now

Give the young bullet-fast toys; hope they survive

Hope we all survive while the 911 dispatcher asks–“yes, but what is your emergency ?”

Wanna quote Flannery O’–the life you save may be your own.

The Common Era

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We name the fox Kristofferson after the character in the Wes Anderson movie. He sticks to the shadows but when he emerges you know it is him–not a cat or stray dog, too vulpine to be anything else and we are worried because the kittens are in the woods somewhere while their mother is out.

What can I do?

Leave the children in the running car? Leave the headlights on? Turn on the flashlight? Stomp through the tall grass into no-man’s-land? Keeping eye contact with him all the while? As if I could just scare him off from where the young ones are?

…pray they survive the night.

Handing You a Story

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I have puzzled all day about the story I would give you. About a boy much like you–great jump, irrepressible hair, a first-class legal mind, puffin in spirit.

You and I worry about things:

Sharks in the water

Big waves

The occasional brain tumor

But my words do not begin to be enough

how to tell you

You-always-you

My beautiful child

To Govern the Night

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The moon recites the prayer with me, tethered to a God who never sleeps Our Father, who art in heaven…where does the slivery-thin-orange moon go when it passes below the shoulder of the hill? To all the other insomniacs…hallowed be thy name…indeed You hear me, Maker of that smoke wisp moon, Maker of the metonymy of darkness, a body can rob a body of light until You are here …Thy kingdom come…thy will be done…among the sleepless…on earth as it is in heaven.

A House for Us

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Deep porch for rocking. Wrap around so that the boy with the ol’ stick horse can barrel around each corner. A telephone nook even though we both know nobody calls anymore. And the unwieldy kitchen in the heart of it all-ghost-kitchen attempting to take natural light from the living and sun rooms respectively while even the closets have seen things, terrible things

As if an old house could ever just stand by and

say nothing at all.