the frozen lake
to hear the ice recite the Iliad.
Not Hog Hill where Massey Energy
dumped cinder, the gray waste
between breaths, poisoned trees
black like charred bones,
where we burned cars while girls
wrote our death dates on our palms
with their tongues—even now,
rain choking the throats of smokestacks,
the river a vein of rust and trash.
Have you ever seen so many cold faces
slapped in the afternoon?
So many voices screaming— Wake up.
This is beyond desire.
This is looking through a hole
in the wall around heaven.
How do you forget that—
a world without ruin,
a world that can’t be taken?
Where once was faith,
there are sirens: red lights spinning
door to door, a record twenty-four
in one day, all the bodies
at the morgue filled with light.
Who can stand another night
stealing fistfuls of pills
from our cancer-sick neighbors?
Of the railcars crying,
the timber trucks hauling away
the history of a million birds?
Pitiful? Maybe. But oblivion is all we have.
And if we want to chop it down
or dig it up or send it screaming
into our hearts—it’s only now
that our survival is an issue.
Pin oaks arm wrestle over the house
as barrel fires spark like stars in the valley.
Day closes its jaws.
I can hear my brother explaining
how when Jonah woke inside the whale,
he didn’t know where he was.
I’m not saying this ends with a leviathan,
but I’m not saying it doesn’t.
Here it comes, rising through the floor,
the voice that tells me I’m tired
of the world, that pulls me down
to its pale kingdom. Should
someone find me, they’ll scream
stay with me as they fish
my tongue from my throat.
Should I wake, they’ll ask me
if I can tell them where I am.
ICARUS IN OXYANA
Talk to yourself. Console.
Invoke an image of progress,
failed. Two Vs of geese colliding.
An X, exploding. Pretend
not to worry about your father,
or that he no longer worries for you. Something
about angels, levitation, waking up
with a belt around your arm,
some blood. Tell yourself to listen,
something about your mother,
how she’s the best part of you.
A memory of childhood
equated to a bomb. It worries you.
Which worries you. Think again
about the geese. You have migrated through today
through sleep. Someone on the porch
who’s lost both his arms
chain-smokes. Something about angels.
Or geese. Or wings. He warns you
about flying too high. Then helps.
Something about chances, not knowing
it was your second till your third
never shows. Summer air. People
blowing up things and celebrating.
Something about pain
as a private choir moving through you.
A movement. A movement. A movement
helps you up. To the porch. To the armless full
of smoke. Where do you want to go?
Nowhere? We have just enough
to get there. And then some.
And then, something. The geese
piercing the sky. They rise, and then, they rise.
HALFWAY HOUSE DIARY
Somewhere at the bottom of the world a whale sings to itself,
running through its temple of otherlight and salt.
I have decided water has a god and its name is gravity.
When it’s my turn to fix the gutters, I call myself
Master
