Four Poems

Family Resemblances

I wear this shirt two days in a row and then I sleep in it
Despite everything my friends say
You and I feel we share an opinion
Even if your mother doesn’t care
That you hate lies and love dinners

We are yet to come across the woman
With a purple hat and a few spikes on top
You can see I enjoy the dirt in my kitchen
As much as I enjoy the free play
Between the cat the oysters and the dead ray

Closer to us than the foreground
I didn’t know I knew then
Nothing was pregnant but the yellow patch
But ever since I’ve seen yellow at the avenue
That scene was passing through
Me like an envelope

Now that you have a studio
You can paint all day and call me up
But I’ve been drawing my bedroom for weeks
Three weeks and 45 hours
Of Barbara talking
I never told her to stop

The Divers

Everything she said about other people was true
But everything she said about herself was wrong
Sun angled down in the law of literate talk
Dispersed by dogs. Between sleep and more sleep
What of literacy remained
Made of this grass an intentional state
Fog dispersed by sun and the sun dispersed by open water
Which teaches children to enjoy learning
Forever ago how to read. The dirt arranges mistakes
A small tower no one could climb
Except one aunt with experience
Divorced from the family and avoiding stairs.
Pink makes a fool of the reader
Who hasn’t learned how to dive
But meets an instructor in temperate gardens
Forgotten by years and leaves, dusty leaves.
Three of us circle the temperate center
Talking about fish underwater, a tent
That warms air almost without thinking.

Diving into water prompts each question
Pain embarrasses itself
By its own complaint, all among yurts.
Sheep surround yurts while sheep make a fool
Of vacation. You can carry your heavy tank into the room
You rent from a hotel
Experience making some of us into bad aunts
Who envy the husbands of mature women
Warm and uneven
Bread rises without being called stupid
Its growth denies passion
Even if passion relies on its growth.
Growth makes passion into more than bread
For future memories, an already embarrassed
Anticipation of the future in the past.
Passion prevents travel out of this pasture
The sky renews its vows to Spain

I don’t have a theory of the past
But I have one of the future
Like your skill for coming up with business ideas
How to make a movie with a small budget
By taking your infant child to auditions
Their sunglasses obscure the stage before speech.

As slow as the process that organizes crime
I tend to look back in a forward motion
The same way an alphabet renews its own order
A game of telephone regrets the chain
Ever prior to organized lines

Green paintings forgive green
For direct sunlight, company joins me
A line of friends and no one hiding in shades
Heaven seems to float
Just above disarrayed clouds

Olive trees expend themselves and make money
From the landscaping on this private road
Stepmothers and stepfathers enjoy secrecy like this
The woman learning how to dive, how to use diving tools
She seems to be prepared for giving birth
Serene states, a lady with a silver ball
Or a dangling necklace, they arrive easily at the coastline
Where we might be released to slow decline
The rock angles down and carved by the century
Manages my vision, makes me see less

As soon as we make it to the Hebrides
The fog rolls in, terrifying the sheep
And dispersing all reason
Language manages our surrender to hazards
If I were to envy anyone’s mistakes
I could manage distemper and again find it funny
In language that only one person has shown
The leaden weight that ruins my life

Siberia

Good wood makes good skis
Getting around is sheer pleasure
A few coins at any price, up until the thaw
We all agree that greed is the worst quality
Which my friends and I despise
It’s only a few days into October
But that man is already arming traps
I can tell you, yes
Centuries have passed and it is April
For nearly four weeks, and no radio

Family Romance

a way to feel movement in the afternoon
you can try this at home while you’re doing your dishes
a toe in a sock points us back to the wall
like the harbor that sent cold air onto my path
it described an accumulation of wooden boats

chapel benches round out the afternoon
throughout the southern Berkshires, on a road he said
he had never taken made me sick. Colorful messages
were hilarious gifts for friends
notebooks passed by the windowpane
its composition up to the present
made a future for the notebook
inventing its own author and the memory
of harboring several childhoods

the sleeping figure with a downturned mouth
seems adolescent and fully grown
her nickname abbreviates an ugly word
we blame on sounding like dinner
but we waited all day for dinners
when the dinners were good

I thought the duration of human lives
stacked up in a row and you could go back a century
quite quickly if you only remembered
a few lives would send you back to Rome

Antarctic growth follows a similar pattern
icebergs send out dreams of love and return
as the iceberg misses the rock it can’t become
I ate dinner for years with one family
those dinners that lasted thirteen years
I’d find a chunk of butter inside the rice
I’d find a way to stay until dessert

parents they keep you awake at dinner
you can’t make a bed of the table
since the table refuses sleep
until dinner made a table of me
I wasn’t a mess at the table
food disintegrated there
asleep in a bowl
like a fish you watch but cannot control.

wake up now and think of
breakfast maintaining breakfast
breakfast is ballet when ballet takes information
from the walls for its ideas
even if we blame the wall, we can’t blame ballet
for hating our mothers or thinking they’re ugly
until we discover beauty in that face
we may never recover ideas for dinner
dinners abandoned in the ditch, half of a sandwich
from the fridge with a personality
when it makes in the night sudden sounds