Had Mary and Joseph arrived at the north
town Marriott on Christmas Eve, they’d have found
20% occupancy, two empty presidential suites,
a dreary-eyed hotel manager fumbling
a fourth time through the Post.

In the adjacent restaurant, newlyweds spoon-feeding
each other apple pie. An elderly man and wife, unable to bear
their daughter’s “guestroom,” staring
blankly at a potted plant, waiting
for their appetizer. An airline pilot sipping
coffee and studying
window-shoppers out his window, clutching
his cell phone as if the hand of his daughter, who still hadn’t
called. An embarrassed mother and father simultaneously trying
to stop three young boys chasing
each other around a table, while giving
their order to the waiter.

Then, with the suddenness of a newborn
star in the sky, they’d have witnessed the voice
of the cook, alone in the kitchen. A tenor,
in Spanish, singing “Silent
Night,” silencing even the young boys, who at first
turn to stare at the thin white door,
then one-by-one hum along.
The parents, smiling, would feed
their children the English words, and soon
the waiter would accompany them nervously.
From the corner, the elderly couple, still
staring at the plant, would add bass and alto,
and then the newlyweds, even the pilot, would sing loudly,
so the sound sweeps
from the kitchen through the restaurant and to the lobby,
where the lone manager mouths
the final “peace.”

II.

Fifteen years and still she wakes
before dawn each Christmas looking
for him in the empty side of her bed—
only on Christmas. Most of the time
she has forgotten so much of him
that she’s scared that he was never
there at all, but this morning she reaches
for her eyeglasses, grabs a cane, and lifts
herself out of bed.

She stops at a mirror, in the moonlight, and thinks
“This frail, wrinkling body, what will he say?”
then gently pushes open the bathroom door and calls
him. He is not there. She turns,
grabs her shawl, lights a candle, and passes
into the living room, aglow
with a Christmas tree decorated by grandkids.
She approaches his stocking over
the fireplace. It is empty. She checks the kitchen,
floor creaking with each step,
grabs two glasses of milk and
sits at a wooden table, waiting,
as she once would while he snuck presents
in from the shed in the backyard.
But the only presents are those she placed there
weeks ago. He is not coming.

She returns to the bedroom,
looks at their wedding picture—
so young—
blows out the candle,
lays down beside his empty space
and watches his pillow.
She closes her eyes.
He is there.

III.

As children on Christmas morning
we would find the hallway between
our bedrooms and the living room barricaded
by an old, red rocking chair and an orange
armchair. This was, our parent’s explained, for our protection,
and though not absolutely impenetrable,
because we feared the presents might vanish
before our eyes, the five of us spent the first waking
half hour politely tapping on the wall
to our parent’s bedroom, wishing in hushed whispers
for the latest G.I. Joe or My Little Pony.
The next half hour we raised
our voices sneakily, playing with last year’s toys
one last time, hoping to accidentally wake
them. Then, the not-so-subtle banging.
It was time. But not yet, they would say, emerging
in clumsily worn red robes—our father had yet
to set up the video camera—this vintage 1979 electronic beast
that emerged once a year out of its dust-
covered box, so my father could spend half an hour remembering
how it worked. We jumped around
on the barricade peaking, groaning
each time my mother said, “Wait.”

At some point, we realized
that videos and cameras were meant
only for Christmas. That some future race
might stumble across archives of family video tapes,
thinking this was the culminating event
of humanity—lives strewn together over time
like lights on a tree; the between time—
simply wires connecting our Christmases.

Or maybe the between time never was.
We lived our lives day after day, coming into view
as we dashed single-file around the corner of the hallway,
stopping to marvel at cookie crumbs
on the coffee table, with accompanying Santa-signed note,
then falling cross-legged around the tree, waiting
first for our mother to hand us stockings
of chocolate, oranges, and candy canes,
then tearing apart the wrapping paper, hoping.

"Write me a poem,”
you ask, “that begins,
'Roses are red.'" And I can't tell
if you really want
a poem, or just to know
I love you.

So I assume you want
a love poem. But this
is where things get difficult.
There are two types of love
poems. First, the type I prefer
to write, that begins to speak
of love, but then becomes
distracted, self-aware,
changing direction mid-course
to speak to the whole
of humanity, summing the emotion
into a succinct phrase
that explains everything about life
and nothing about reality;
the type, in short, that is neither clever
nor a love poem.

Then there is the type, written
a billion times before, that speaks
of sunset across a golden beach,
or from a mountain top; of quiet
breeze-swept summer nights spent
whispering sweet nothings
and falling asleep beside a fire;
the type you deserve, and I am afraid
to write.

I tried to write
it before, this love poem
that is yours and only
yours (in spite of how may times
written by another), and cowered
before the proud fear
of generations of poets
laughing, jeering “is that all
you could come up with?”

Or perhaps cowering not before the fear
of mass anonymity, but a need
for my love to be greater
than that felt a billion times before;
so that when you reach
for my hand across a couch
and smile, it is not simply
something that has happened every day
since the dawn of time,
but that the universe is rolling
into one singular sphere
around us, and exploding
again, rebirthing itself
in your eyes.

Or perhaps cowering before the vision
of some future year; I, remembering
this poem, longing
to breathe your silk hair as it brushes past
my lips one last time.

How do I speak it--
this thing never said but exhaled
between every stutter of thought,
every silence of our riverside stroll
along the cool evening;
I, fumbling for the elegance
to build upon that which is only obvious,
that roses are red.

It is not a poem.

It is simply
I love you.

This is when it occurred to me that
your breath was not yours
at all, but the wind, cold and rhythmic
against my skin; a swaying
canopy of red leaves was the rising
and falling of your breasts
beneath your sweater.
The river was your voice. Tall
blades of yellow grass, your fingers
tickling my feet. Two fallen leaves,
your brown eyes squinting
in afternoon sunlight squeezed
between shadows of aspen branches.

I reached for earth, its smooth grains
parting between my fingers.
I grasped it, as if your hand, and felt
some warm pulse racing
against my palm. I couldn't tell
if it came from your heart or mine;
or if it were only the lonely
beat of eternity.

When the third one crashed into the artificial turf between the pitcher's mound and third base, it became pretty obvious to Josh Jenkins that it was raining pianos. Not any particular kind or brand-the first had been an old mahogany spinet piano, and the last two black baby grands-but they were definitely pianos, and they were definitely coming from the rather unexpected direction of up.

Those fans who had thought far enough ahead to bring umbrellas, broke them out. Those who hadn't looked up nervously, trying to gauge just how bad the storm would get. Every now and then one ran off screaming about the potentially discomforting side-effects of a gravity-accelerated piano colliding with someone. Beyond that, the most severe consequence of the pianos was that they were stopping the game.

"Ladies and gentleman," announced a feminine voice from the loudspeaker, "please remain in your seats. The weathermen assure us that this storm does not actually exist, or in the off-chance that it does, will be passing over us quickly."

At home plate, which Josh sat directly behind, a congregation of umpires and managers debated whether or not to close the roof. A very vocal stadium technician insisted that raincoats and umbrellas were enough, but the umpires generally agreed that the only real questions were how well the roof could stop a piano shower, and whether they might all be better off just declaring a rain-out and calling it a night. The visiting manager, whose team was coincidentally trailing six-nothing, argued in favor of the latter option.

Oddly enough, it was for just this sort of moment that Josh had been waiting. For five innings, he had been unable to speak an intelligible word to the red-haired woman in the yellow poncho to his right-a problem complicated by the fact that the woman was Josh's girlfriend of two weeks. But now he had the perfect line.

He smiled at her. It was very important that he smiled, thought Josh; nothing like a nice smile to say how cool he was with a few hours of awkward silence, or with having accidentally spilt a cup of coke on her in the first inning. Concerned that it might not be clear to her that he was smiling, he grimaced for a second to illustrate the difference. He did this, oscillating back and forth between smile and grimace for about ten seconds, until it was clear that she was more concerned with looking at the front half of a black baby grand piano, jutting out of the ground along the left field foul line, than with looking at him. He took a deep breath, smiled again, and spoke.

"Go figure. I spent $5,000 dollars on one of those last month. Now they're falling from the sky."

This was not entirely a lie. It was last year, not last month; and it was only $1000-all minor details that Josh would clarify in time.

Meanwhile, a studio piano crashed near the warning track in right center field. The impact flung splinters of wood and ivory keys over the wall and into the bullpen. Neither Josh nor the woman noticed.

"You," the woman started, continuing to stare towards the left field foul line, "have a piano?"

The problem with the woman's reply, thought Jack, was not the words themselves. Those were, in fact, exactly the words he had expected. What he had not anticipated, however, was the manner with which she said the words, being somewhat akin to the way a cocktail waitress might inquire into a patron's claim to have been Winston Churchill in a former life, and thus have a very reliable line of credit.

"Um, yeah," he stuttered, searching for the quickest way possible to return to the conversation he had so carefully mapped out in his mind.

"You… have… a… piano," the woman slowly stated, now staring directly at Josh. She rose and took one step back into the aisle.

A fifth piano-an old English upright model-fell directly on top of first base. A sound much like that of all 88 keys of a piano being struck at once-in fact, that that was exactly the sound-echoed throughout the stadium as snapped strings catapulted into the home team's dugout. The woman heard nothing of this as she pointed at Josh and began laughing.

"What?" asked Josh, over the mechanical click and low hum of the roof, which began to close.

"Like you know how to play the piano," she said between laughs. She looked up.

"But… but…"

The red-haired woman stopped laughing and took a step to her right. Almost immediately after she moved, a small electronic keyboard fell where she had been standing. She examined the scrambled circuits and gray plastic scattered all over the aisle and shrugged. Starting to laugh again, she began climbing the stairs. "Knows how to play a piano," she said. "That's good."

The roof stopped moving. A number of hands and mouths suddenly erupted into motion at home plate. Josh, naturally, sat oblivious to this. He was used to public humiliation and irrational rejection, but the woman's reaction flat-out flabbergasted him. He had just about convinced himself to go follow the woman and ask for an explanation, when a strong hand landed on his left shoulder.

"Tough luck, man," said a bearded head attached to the hand, "I've been there."

The woman was probably too far gone, thought Josh, as he yielded to the hand. As his eyes swept over to the man seated next to him, he caught a glimpse of someone dressed like Liberace running across center field to a concert piano. The piano had somehow landed intact, with its stool, a few seconds ago. The man began playing a song that sounded vaguely like "Piano Man."

The man to Josh's left, whose hand was still resting on his shoulder, nodded as if to offer consolation. His face-the part that wasn't covered by a beard-was red, and he was very obviously drunk. Thus, Josh was all the more surprised when he suddenly felt it necessary to explain himself.

"But I play the piano."

Two security guards rushed from the dugout towards the man dressed as Liberace. The man dressed as Liberace leapt from his stool and ran around the piano as the security guards chased him.

"Look, buddy," said the bearded man, slapping Josh on the back, "no need for that now, you're preaching to the choir here. Heh, heh. Who doesn't play the piano, wink wink, if you know what I mean."

Josh flung his head back, looked up, and rolled his eyes. He noticed the roof closing once again.

"Hey, don't be so down on yourself, it's still a good line. You'll get some girl in the sack with it."

"That was my girlfriend," explained Josh.

Liberace jumped on to the piano and then pile-drove one of the security guards. "Ouch," said the now-sullen bearded man in response to, well, Josh wasn't exactly sure. The two quietly watched the chase, which for a second involved dodging a couple of falling console pianos. The beer man ascended their aisle.

"Here, let me buy you a drink," offered the bearded man.

"I don't drink."

"Two beers," yelled the bearded man, handing the beer man a fiver.

Josh interjected, "No really, I don't drink."

"Oh," said the bearded as he took two beers and passed one to Josh.

Josh sighed, set it in his cup holder, and returned his attention to the field. The man dressed as Liberace had defeated the second security guard with a couple of karate kicks. The audience applauded as he resumed playing the piano. Josh was pretty sure he heard the beginning of "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik."

"Ladies and gentleman," said the announcer, "please do not applaud Liberace, it only encourages him."

Several of the players ran out on the field and began giving Liberace chase again. Meanwhile, a half-dozen more pianos, a xylophone, and a harpsichord had fallen to the field. So far, only the keyboard had fallen into the stands.

"So how do you suppose we score that last run?" the bearded man asked Josh as he tossed aside a very quickly emptied cup.

"What do you mean?" asked Josh.

"You know, when Kent's popup hit the piano and they couldn't find the ball until Kent had already crossed home? An inside-the-park homerun or an error? I'm thinking error."

"Er, I don't know," Josh said. He had been so concerned about figuring out something to say to his apparently now ex-girlfriend, that he actually hadn't even noticed.

"Hey," the bearded man exclaimed, pointing to the beer in Josh's cup-holder. "Can I have yours?"

Josh handed him the beer. He watched in fascination as the bearded man chugged the entire cup. The man wiped his beard and grinned.

"You know, I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner," the man declared after a little while of watching the chase sequence.

"What do you mean?" asked Josh, who was pretty sure he didn't want to know.

"The pianos. They've had centuries to evaporate and build up in the sky." The bearded man stuck his finger up in the air and swirled it as he said this. "All that tension building up, it was only a matter of time before it broke loose."

Josh studied the man's eyes, trying to determine if he was serious, or just drunk.

By now, the roof was entirely shut. Loud thumps could be heard occasionally against the dome roof, but the fans had generally settled down and put away their umbrellas. On the field, several players held down Liberace, who appeared to be singing a selection from "Phantom of the Opera."

Josh had entirely lost interest in it. He stood, said goodbye to the man, and walked to the exit. Only slightly surprised by the notable lack of pianos on the pavement, he strolled through the parking lot to his car. He was amazed by how many great responses to "You play the piano" he could suddenly think up.

As he approached his car, he thought he heard the stadium loudspeaker announce, "Ladies and Gentlemen, please refrain from petting the wooly mammoth."

Joshua Jensen considered himself a fairly organized man. His organizational skills had landed him rather rewarding job as the manager of human resources at a small software company. Rewarding in that he was able to cash in his stock options shortly before the bottom fell out. He was a man who knew where things belonged, like ___ (socks, there's definitely got to be a line about socks here).

As a corollary to this, Joshua was also a man who knew when things were missing. For example, when he walked into the living room of his townhouse that night and saw a patch of unusually clean, white, and fluffy carpet in the corner, he knew something was out of place.

"Ed," he called out.

"Yo, be there in a sec."

Joshua marveled at the outline of the clean carpet against the nice, stale, flat brown carpet that he had become accustomed to. It reminded him of his perpetual farmer's tan, which he had given up on the first summer after he had begun his new job, and which now, in the absence of a job, was consistently a very blistering red. He got a similar sensation as he traced a two by two meter region of white paint on his otherwise gray wall. Behind him, a man in a sombrero and a Mexican poncho, eating an ice cream cone, approached.

"So what was up with the mammoth, anyways?," this man asked. "The news report …."

"Forget the mammoth, Ed, where the hell is my piano?" Josh's eyes were riveted to the empty corner, so much so that he didn't even turn to see his roommate. The piano that wasn't there was an old, cherry-red studio piano, complete with a dozen or so authentic beer mug rings, all stained into it over its years as a centerpiece at a local gay bar. Josh insisted that its sketchy past gave Ginger-that was its name-more character, at which point Ed would point out that the same past had knocked three grand off the selling price. Well, that and the fact that no matter what you did, the high A note was always out of tune.

In case you doubt his sincerity, Josh wasn't lying when he said he could play the piano. Not well enough to do concerts or anything like that, but well enough to entertain on occasions. He had taken piano lessons for five years when he was growing up, and had replaced his electronic keyboard with the piano just last year.

His now apparently ex-girlfriend, meanwhile, had never seen the piano because she had simply never been in the townhouse. She had the awkward habit of always getting to the doorstep, stopping, and saying, "No, I don't think so." She had other interesting habits, too. Like never calling Josh, overeating at expensive restaurants, and insisting that Josh wear a cap and sunglasses when they were out in public. This behavior had gone on the entire month they had been dating, but Josh hadn't felt it was time yet to press the issue.

Behind him, Ed was in deep thought as he licked his cone. Suddenly, and Josh missed this because of his fixation on the missing piano, his eyes lit up with an "oh yeah, I almost forgot" expression.

"The Parks and Wildlife people took it this morning," he explained. "Had a hell of a time trying to get it out the door."

He then added, "Look, you didn't get a skin sample or something from the mammoth, 'cause I was thinking if we cloned it and…"

"The Parks and Wildlife people?"

"Yeah, you know, brown ranger outfits, charge you outrageous prices for camping in the Grand Canyon and killing bald eagles. Those guys."

The end result of the next few seconds, during which Josh turned sharply around to face his roommate, was the stare of death. Or, at least, supposing that stares could kill, this would have been such a stare.

"They had papers," Ed offered.

"Papers?"

"Yeah. Left them on the coffee table. Along with a bill. I was going to call you, but they said you could sign and fax them tomorrow."

Josh walked over to the coffee table.

"But, about this mammoth…," Ed resumed.

"Screw the mammoth; what the hell does the U.S. Department of Parks and Wildlife Management want with my piano? Huh, did you stop to think about that?"

"Well, I don't know necessarily if they were the U.S. Parks and Wildlife people," he stammered, "I mean, it…"

Ed was interrupted by the "Dukes of Hazard" theme song playing itself out on their doorbell. The roommates continued staring for a second, Ed being unsure of whether it was safe to move, and Josh trying to figure out how he and Ed had become roommates in the first place. After a second ring, Ed very quickly departed into the front room to answer it.

"Greetings, senorita, what can I do for you this evening," he said in a very lousy Spanish accent as he opened the door and bowed to the long-haired brunette on the other side.

The woman, who wore ___(a business suit?), giggled as she walked into the room. She removed her coat, which Ed took for her, and asked, "How you boys doing?"

"Hey, these are blank," they heard from the living room.

Ed pretended not to hear. "It's been a pretty casual day. Tuned my guitar. Shopped for mangos. Read a little Rilke."

"Ah yes, I hear a good number of smart people got their start with that reading thing."

"Ed! Why the hell are these blank?" Josh yelled again.

Ed, still holding the woman's coat, shrugged as if to say, "Sorry, I've gto to get this." He yelled out, "Yeah, I asked them about that while I was fetching the bruskies from the fridge…"

"You gave them my beer?"

Author's interjection: Hey there, how's the reading going? Oh, for twenty points, name the inconsistency I need to fix here.

Ed walked back into the living room.

"Hey, moving a piano works up a bit of a thirst, and anyways, they had a perfectly good explanation for that and…" He looked back into the front room. "Oh hey, Vanessa, where are my manners, c'mon in and have a seat."

"Thanks."

"And…," said Josh.

"And what?"

"The explanation?"

"Oh. You know, I wasn't really paying attention to it." Ed laughed somewhat nervously. "Whoops." He looked at Vanessa, who had taken a seat in an armchair next to, or rather no longer next to the missing piano. "Vanessa, can I get you a beer," he offered.

Vanessa nodded and turned to Josh, "Hey there, kiddo. Have a good day?"

Josh sighed, sat down, and was about to explain when from the kitchen Ed shouted, "So Josh, how big was the mammoth? Like half the distance between bases, or more like half the distance to the pitcher's mound?"

Josh threw his hands up in the air, stood up, and went into the back room.

Vanessa yelled after him, "You saw the mammoth?"

"Hello, police," Vanessa heard him say from the backroom. "Yes, I'd like to report a missing piano."

Ed returned from the kitchen with two cans of beer. "What's up with him?" Vanessa asked, as he handed her one.

Ed sat down and took a swig from his can. "You know," he said. "I'm not sure exactly. I think it's got something to do with Jolene walking out on him during the middle of the game tonight."

"Oh, that's sad," she said as she sipped her beer. "They were so good for each other." Vanessa grabbed a remote from the coffee table and turned on the news. Several clips of piano pieces sprawled out all over a baseball field flashed before their eyes.

From the other room, Josh, was shouting statements like "He said they were Parks and Wildlife people" and "I wasn't at home, you idiot" and "Look, what am I even paying taxes for."

"Jolene?" Vanessa continued. "Wasn't she the one who brought her cats to your New Year's Party?"

Ed paused for a second. "Don't think so. Don't even think I've met her."

"Well, better to have loved and lost…"

"Yes, it's much better that way."

"Anyways, speaking of the game…"

Josh slammed the phone down. He stormed back into the living room, but stopped when he saw the TV replay a clip of the wooly mammoth materialize from thin air at second base. Perhaps, it suddenly occurred to him, he had left the game a little too early.

Ed and Vanessa were no longer paying attention however, and were instead waiting for an explanation from Josh.

"Well," queried Vanessa.

Josh, somewhat tentatively as he was still watching the TV, said "Um, the guy said something like, 'look kid, if I had a dime for every missing piano story I've heard tonight, I'd have four dollars and sixty three cents,' and told me to contact the Parks and Wildlife people."

"That's just not normal," he added, as he watched the mammoth …

…

Author: So, the general direction of this is that Vanessa (who is a scientist of sorts) and Ed (a "scholar-bum") and a very reluctant Josh, who is obsessed by the loss of his piano, will embark on a quest to find out what's going on, and how this can profit them, and who really knows where this will lead them. Washington D.C., perhaps? Scuba-diving off the coast of Australia? Area 51? Montana? I'm not quite sure myself; but immediately, at least, I think they'll end up back at the stadium to look for evidence on the mammoth. And if you have any ideas on how this all might piece together, I'm all ears.

What she said
was, “God is everywhere. Behind
every fortune, every accident
is God.” She said this more quietly
than red wax slipping down the shaft of a candle,
than bubbles bursting the surface of pink
sparkling water, than this room,
voiceless in her wake.

Perhaps it wasn’t her fault, the fault
rather of a neighbor’s scoff
when she hoped, “God bless the President not
to be stupid and war against an innocent people,”
Perhaps had her neighbor not countered,
“God’s got nothing to do with it.”
she would have left it at that,
and even now we’d comfortably debate
the merits of silk;
of summer as opposed to the snow
now trickling down the window-tinted night.

Now, this room is weighted
with eyes—eyes rummaging through it
like a woman through her handbag,
having lost something; eyes
exchanging glances, inventing some new
language for conversation.

Translation is guesswork.
My date’s fidgeting stare—
does she wish, for once, I’d interject
with a comment about baseball, or is she
remembering last Tuesday, when devastated
by a runner-up trophy from a violin competition,
her best friend called, mourning the sudden
passing of her father?
The man four seats to my left, eyes
darting back and forth between the hostess
and his cup—has he simply been thirsty
too long, or is he contemplating his Geo Prizm’s
dead transmission on the side of some highway
a hundred miles away, where, he’s explained,
after three hours of no one stopping, stopped
a preacher and his wife, and their mechanic?
Even the hostess, my sister, so typically quick to steer
the table away from abhorred silence,
is busy burying her gaze in pools
of gravy in leftover mashed potatoes—
is it resignation, or secret confession of years
of teary nights alone, falling asleep on her knees
at her bedside?

Only the Indonesian student
can bring herself to motion, reaching
for the last roll in an intricate, hand-woven basket;
breaking it in two, spreading the butter.
She bites the first half carefully, crumbs
tip-toeing delicately across from her lips,
as if something were about to die,
about to give birth. We watch her,
silence giving way to the rattling
of some window in the wind,
not knowing the interpretation.

Pot roast, unattended for five hours
burns. The water evaporates, then comes the smoke,
blanketing your entire apartment with
a stench half-campfire, half-marijuana.
Soon your fire alarm will have the neighbors
trying to break down your door. When you
return with your date—a first date, mind you,
they will be waiting for you, complaining about fire codes.
You will unlock the door to a sea of gray.
You will open every window, turn on every fan,
and approach the pot. She will laugh,
explain that you lack dedication to your roast,
and wrap her arms around you, staring
at the charcoaled remains.

II

Pot roast, burnt for five hours,
does not go well with green beans,
no matter how much Worcester sauce you use.
Inevitably, you will find yourself eating ribs
at Chili’s. On the way home you will
stop at a movie, then a park,
and between the stars and midnight ice cream,
you will all but forget the smoke and smell,
so that when 3 A.M. arrives
and you again unlock your door,
you will be honestly surprised that your apartment
is an ashtray.

III

Apple cinnamon air-spray is the only way
to rid yourself of the smell of burnt pot roast.
She will discover this four nights later,
having spent the three previous nights
trying candles, incense, potpourri, and baking soda.
It takes effect slowly, and at first
it will smell like you’ve been smoking apple pie,
but everything eventually cancels out.
The canceling will occur as you cuddle
on the couch, your armed pinned between the
back of her cashmere sweater and a cushion.
You will be watching the Late Show, marveling
at the new fragrance, imagining that somewhere
apple-cinnamon atoms and burnt pot roast atoms
are conjugating, then casually fading
out of existence.

IV

Your first kiss will have nothing to do
with pot roast. It will be a cold March night
after a piano concert. You will have been planning
it all along, except for the surprise
torrential downpour. Out of concern
for a leather jacket, she and you
will run for the car.
She will trip on the sidewalk.
(Later, she will confess this was on purpose).
You will lift her up, decide what the hell,
and between frosted breaths embrace
for an hour outside the concert hall.

V

Pot roast, cooked for five hours to perfection,
the aroma singing as you open the door
and present the roses, will make you slip
and tell her you love her.
Not immediately, of course. In fact, you won’t
know how or why, but it will happen
late that night, on the edge of a dream.
In the morning, it will terrify you.
You will make an excuse about working early
and be out of there A.S.A.P.
You will dodge her calls for three days,
then decide it’s a perfect time to “find yourself”
on the open road. You will disappear
for two weeks, and at some point, she will
stop calling.

VI

Six month later, the smell of pot roast
unattended for five hours, burnt to ash,
intermingled with apple-cinnamon air spray,
will still be there. Not in anything obvious,
but in the accidental things—
when you fall asleep on the couch, your nose
pressed against a cushion;
an old blanket in the back of your closet,
brought out for the winter;
the window curtains brushing against your face
at night as you close them.

It was a large room, underground,
maybe the size of two football fields.
In the center, strategically close to the heating ducts,
we erected great mahogany tables with firm but cushioned chairs,
brought out the finest silverware and food we could find,
and sat all the surviving Westerners and leaders
and men of importance.

In rows of plastic chairs along the walls we sat
the Russians, the Thais, the Chinese, and so on,
and gave them boxes and boxes of stuffed-crust pizza.

With what room we had left, we set blankets and fit as many
Africans and South Americans as we could,
cross-legged, kneeling, leaning against each other,
gathered in circles around small fires with rice and beans.

After dinner, we got bored and started walking among them,
handing out leftover desserts,
laughing with them as they told jokes in broken English,
learning trite phrases in their thousand native languages,
every now and then snapping pictures.

We built a stage in front of the tables,
invited them to come sing and dance for us,
We leaned back in our chairs, patting our stomachs,
talking about the good old days.

Shortly before Santa Fe you decide
God is like a giant fossilized elephant
exposed on the shore of the Black Sea;
the vastness and position of its trunk cavity
convincing ancient Greek sailors they beheld
the skull not of an elephant, but of a Cyclops
with its single, all-seeing eye;
that they had navigated their way to the graveyard
of demi-gods.

All because they knew nothing of paleontology
or carbon-dating, you say.

This is as the pueblo rooftops
begin to spread across the high desert morning,
chill into the blue dawning feet
of the Sangre de Cristo mountains.
I am distracted by architecture,
the stepped brown adobe, the parched stucco
climbing out of the sand.
You are deconstructing Santa Fe building codes,
offended by ordinance-enforced adherence
to impractical tradition.

Mid-town, you are wondering aloud
about Adam’s belly-button;
how anyone could think man just sort of popped up
in a garden six thousand years ago.
Then there’s the whole Moses parting the Red Sea
thing; and by the museum at the northern edge of the city
you are questioning whether David was the invention
of second-century B.C. scholars—
King Arthur to the Jews.
You are so obsessed with floods and arks
you don’t even notice as highway 503
narrows to one lane and winds through Cundiyo,
wooden houses and cobblestone carved
like some European village
into the backside of a nameless mountain.

Nor do you notice how the desert
bakes us like bricks of adobe by the time
we arrive at the Puye Cliff Dwellings;
how, sculpted into the rockface, each dwelling
is connected by sanded wooden ladders
like memory, their shadows preserving
eight-hundred-year-old ghosts
of Anasazi women painting pottery shards
and tribal chiefs conferring
over berry-stained diagrams of stars and the sun.
Your only concern as we hike to the cliff
is not where did all the water go, but
what’s the big deal about Israel, anyhow?
Why not the Anasazi?

At some point, you say, we’ve got to admit
it’s all misunderstandings. God, religion—stories
upon an ever-shifting landscape.
This desert was once the bottom
of some pre-historic sea; these mountains
have risen and eroded so many times, it’s pointless
to talk about origin.
Three thousand years from now,
even these ruins will be gone,
and all we have known about them will change
a thousand times over.

Yes, I’ll give you this.

But do you really want to talk about stories?
Forget that other desert, David slaying
giants with a sling-shot, fleeing Saul
from Lebanon to Philistia.
What about the time when you were seven
and I was nine, both lost in Big Bend;
how we prayed and found our way to a ranger’s
station before dark? Or that night you asked
for a sign, how the roof of your bedroom collapsed
immediately after you stepped outside for a smoke?
Not too mention how, on the edge of suicide
after your boyfriend OD’d, you stepped into a cathedral
and five minutes later found "peace"
knowing he was in a better place.

These stories that you acknowledge
with a silent nod—three-thousand years from now,
no one will remember them. But now,
planted in the cracked soil, admiring the ruins,
you remember.

Most mornings, Theodore Stevens stared south for several hours, out the sliding-glass balcony door of his ninth-floor Austin apartment. He didn't have a set location from which to stare-he favored a padded stool at his mid-morning sun-lit wet bar, but he sometimes sat at the kitchen table, or turned around the black leather recliner in his living room, or just stood on his meticulously polished wooden floor. However, he did have a set routine. First, he studied the Colorado River, curving gently around the edge of downtown, occasionally confessing its eastward movement in ripples and small unidentifiable floating dots. Then, he searched through trees along its banks for joggers-blurred multi-colored shapes moving along the trail. He imagined each of them-college girls in sports bras and tight spandex listening to bright yellow headsets; shirtless men in too-short shorts, sweat glistening off their hairless chests; fat men in sweatpants and tank tops stopping every hundred yards for a sip of water; groups of mothers chatting between heavy breaths, children strapped to their backs. Next he counted cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic along Lakeshore Boulevard, pausing whenever he spotted activity among one of its dozens of quaint and over-priced restaurants. When this bored him, he scanned Zilker Park, hoping for an early morning soccer match. The players were like ants, racing so quickly along the green, too distant for Theodore to discern method to their madness. He would then move to the MoPac bridge, and from there to South Austin and Westlake-a horizon of endless cedar trees and house-spotted hills.

He especially liked this part of the routine, looking outwards into green anonymity. It seemed so close. He imagined that if he were to break out a bat and baseball, he could hit the ball over the river, into the hills. If it were a really good swing-one where he could feel his entire body shaking against the stiffness of the wood-he could knock it southwest past the hills, past the city, past the limestone cliffs of Marble Falls and the LBJ ranch, past the German markets and antique shops of Fredricksburg, and eventually past all of Texas; the Rio Grande, Mexico, all distant memories as it sailed out of the world and time and space.

Usually, he waited for his roommate to leave for work before beginning the ritual. Joseph was an obsessive man. He cared too much, to the point of intrusion. He wouldn't understand the ritual, the silence, the staring. It would worry him. He might start calling people. Last year, Joseph found Theodore passed out over several empty bottles. Theodore couldn't wake up, so Joseph called the paramedics, as well as Joseph's girlfriend and mother. This, over a little alcohol. How would react to the hours of staring?

Yet, this is exactly what Theodore found himself doing one morning, standing at his kitchen sink with a dirty bowl, pretending to listen to Joseph. Joseph was trying to make a point of some sort, trying to convince Theodore of something he did not want to be convinced. The argument was long and tedious. Joseph made it while sipping his coffee. His primary evidence came from a news article he was reading off the screen of a very black and plastic laptop.

"Marcus Elgin grew up surrounded by baseball," Joseph began. Theodore heard this, but the next few sentences were static. He caught another sentence, but then more static. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Joseph's voice was the static interrupting Theodore's concentration on the Austin landscape. The landscape was garbled and disconnected between each word. It was fragmented beauty, the shards of a just-dropped vase. It was worse than no landscape at all.

But better than listening to Joseph's argument. Better than acknowledging the argument for even a second.

Joseph appeared to be approaching the climax of his argument. His voice-his static-grew louder and more drawn out. "After Luis Gonzales' ninth-inning, series-clinching single," he read, "Marcus muttered a single sentence: 'It's about time.' Those were his first words in fifteen years."

Then there was silence-not even the noise of Joseph's infrequent sips from the lid of his coffee cup.

Theodore became aware of the weight of Joseph's eyes upon him. He didn't turn to see Joseph's face, but he imagined the slight incline of his eyes, the contrast of their white and green against his dark brown cheeks, lifted by a large and self-congratulatory grin. He wasn't going to let this go. Theodore sighed as he looked down to his white, flower-decorated dish. He wiped it with a half-damp rag, and set it carefully on the rack. He looked back at the skyline and muttered, "Well, it makes sense."

His smile widening, Joseph shook his head and returned his eyes to the morning-dimmed glare of the LCD screen. He continued, "After turning off the television and straightening his couch cushions, Marcus then walked outside and hung himself."

Theodore thought about this for a second. Suppressing a slight laugh, Theodore gave up on the landscape. He walked out of the kitchen and searched briefly for the date on a well-marked sports calendar on the dining room wall.

"Fifteen years," he said. "That goes back to what, Bill Buckner? I'll bet he was a Red Sox fan." He returned to the kitchen and opened the counter drawer. He rummaged through its contents, removing two medicine bottles.

Joseph, no longer grinning, looked up. "You know that's not my point."

"Okay, so what is your point?" Theodore said as he unscrewed one of the bottles and removed a small, orange pill. "I think an obsession with baseball is the last thing you have to worry about killing me."

"I'm just saying it's not healthy. I mean, how many games have you missed this season?"

Clutching the pill in his right fist, he looked up and pretended to count. In reality he was trying to devise a way out of the conversation. But there wasn't one. When Joseph got like this, he'd take the whole morning to make his point, if he needed to. Even if it meant calling a client and rescheduling an appointment in the middle of an argument. Theodore brought his left had to the rim of his burnt orange baseball cap, and swung it around to the back of his smooth and white bald head.

"Well, all the road games, of course."

"Uh-huh. And what about the home games?"

"I've got season tickets-have to get my money's worth."

"Dude. C'mon. Shouldn't you be doing something more important than sitting alone every night at some ballpark watching the Express suck it up?"

Theodore popped the pill into his mouth. Then, realizing he had no cup of water, he spit it back into his palm. "Like what?" he muttered, as he opened the cupboard door and browsed through the cups until he found his favorite-a white coffee mug that read Deustchenfest 1998.

"I don't know, man. Like figuring out the meaning of life or getting laid or, God forbid, drinking with your friends."

While Joseph said this, Theodore filled his mug with tap water. He turned his head to his roommate for the first time that morning. Joseph's red and yellow striped tie bounced with his white-sleeved arms in agitation as he spoke. When he finished, he sat tensely upright in his stool. Their eyes met and communicated more foreignness than understanding. This foreignness had become a frequent sensation over the last year. It wasn't just the foreignness with which one might greet a stranger on the street. It was as if their familiarity as friends had somehow become inverted; as if ten years of high school and college and life widened the gulf between them, making possible some new, unimaginable level of misunderstanding.

When water finally trickled down Theodore's right arm from the overflowing mug, both of them turned away. Theodore turned the faucet and set the mug down in the sink. He opened the other medicine bottle, pulled out another pill, and placed both pills in his mouth.

"Ted, man, it's your birthday. I'm just saying … just hang out with the gang tonight, okay; just for old time's sake."

Theodore raised his cup of water and drank.

"We miss you," Joseph added quietly.

Theodore walked out of the kitchen and towards his bedroom door. "Dude…," he started, as he opened the white-washed, heavyset door. Joseph had swung around on his stool and was now facing Theodore, or rather, Theodore's back. "It makes me happy. Just let it be."

"This is about Jessica, isn't it?" Joseph called as Theodore walked into the room and shut the door. "C'mon man. She probably won't even be there tonight."

Theodore threw himself headfirst on his bed. Of course she wouldn't be there. She had been avoiding him ever since the breakup. The very prospect of her being there-the idea that she should have been there, beside his side, laughing at every joke-was too much for Theodore. But no, thought Theodore, it wasn't about her. It was about… something else. Principles. Pride. Life, or something like it. No… it was about baseball.

"Theodore!"

The sound of Joseph slamming his laptop shut echoed into Theodore's room. Half a minute later, Joseph yelled, "Man, screw this," and shut the front door.

Theodore remained in his bedroom for the rest of the morning. Later that day, when he remembered his theory of accident rates along Lakeshore Boulevard on Tuesday mornings, he regretted the decision not to return to the living room.

Theodore spent that morning surfing various cancer sites and message boards on the Internet. He asked a few questions about the side effects of Toxol. He checked for new posts, and was somewhat surprised to find a note from cant_wait_to_come_back_as_a_cow, whom the frequent posters on the board had generally assumed was dead. Apparently, he had had an argument about payment with his Internet Service Provider, but that was all fixed now. Theodore also responded to the inquiry of a lady whose father had been diagnosed with a tumor similar to Theodore's. The response was a rather cold and matter-of-factly summary of Theodore's own experiences. Theodore knew what the lady wanted-a few words of comfort, maybe some vague assertion that it would be alright. Such was the accepted formula of posts on the message board, and Theodore tried this at the end of the message. It felt fake. He erased that part and clicked the post button.

When Theodore had first been diagnosed with a tumor, a doctor sat beside him, handed him a chart, and explained that there were four stages to his cancer. Theodore was in stage III-the tumor was well advanced locally, and had begun to spread to distant lymph nodes. He had a grade III Astrocytoma in the basal ganglia, leaving him peripherally blind in the left eye. The doctors were amazed it had gone so long undetected. They tried several surgeries, never able to remove it all. Chemotherapy slowed it, of course, but the ending was inevitable. He had, at most, a couple of years.

At some indeterminate point several months ago, Theodore progressed to stage IV-an inoperable glioblastoma that was invading his entire body. Theodore wondered about this moment of progression, whether he might be able to actually pinpoint the change within him. Had his subconscious been waiting upon it like an apple on a television screen on New Years Eve? With what festivity might his body have ushered in this new stage? Or had it been more like the end of a soccer match, his body down just one goal, laboring against the inevitable, not knowing which second would bring the referee's whistle?

Secretly, Theodore doubted the validity of this system of stages. They were as invisible to him as the cancer, something only doctors could reveal after hours of needles and strangely flavored juices and machines moving so slowly over him it seemed that it wasn't the machines moving at all, but time-time blasting radiation through him, bouncing rays off his bones and tissues, searching for what was inside of him. What did it matter what they found? All Theodore knew was how he felt, and as near as he could tell, that depended upon the day and how much medication he took and how long it had been since his last therapy session, not on some arbitrary and invisible system.

Still, Theodore had his theories. Not of medicine or physiology, but of his own psychology. Theodore counted his own four stages. The first, of course, was denial. It was the first stage of any problem-breakups, alcohol, the Yankees winning the World Series. Theodore had long ago decided that denial was a waste of time and that he would never indulge in it. In practice, though, his resolve failed. He told friends nothing of the cancer, only that he had shaved his head because he was tired of combing it, and that he occasionally took long vacations on his own. Not even his mother knew until she stumbled upon some papers at his apartment. He procrastinated doctor appointments and medicine for days, sometimes weeks. For the most part, he was able to live as if nothing had changed. The cancer was just some personal injury that annoyed him, but would pass, like a groin strain or a bad cut.

This changed when he suddenly collapsed of a stroke one January evening at a party. He was in a tuxedo, but wet and cold from a swimming pool. He had been wrestling with his girlfriend-his Jessica-and had pushed her in, but not before she got enough leverage on him to drag him in with her. Of course, he claimed as they climbed out, he had voluntary jumped because he didn't want her to be the only one who was wet. Then the headache suddenly hit, and a few seconds later, he was lying unconscious on the concrete surrounding the pool.

Besides forcing him to confess the tumor to his friends, this incident also had the effect of making Theodore aware of his own mortality. He entered a new stage of hopeful acceptance, and of faith in science and human knowledge. After all, he reasoned, it was simply a matter of taking responsibility for his health. It was something he always figured he'd have to do anyways-getting proper sleep, eating the right foods, exercising, and so on. It was during this time that he first began surfing the Internet for answers. He found out all about his tumor-the chances of survival (which at that point were still at least somewhat greater than zero), the different treatment options available, the research being done. He, and everyone around him, rarely thought about death, the general assumption being that it couldn't happen to him. The cure was just around the corner, in some clinical trial. The machines that killed the cancer were bound to get better. The systemic medicines were bound to get stronger and more discriminate in their effects. With all the science today-the mapping of the human genome, men on the moon, computers that could precisely calculate the beginning of the universe-surely a cure was inevitable.

As time went on, he graduated from this misguided hope. Maybe, he realized, they'd find a cure, but not in his days. He had been born too early. Science could not be his Messiah. So he turned to the real thing-religion. It was a surprisingly short stage, he admitted. Every day for a few weeks he attended mass at ___ on Third Street. But his own logic quickly got the better of him. Who was this God who spoke in strange and riddled ceremonies and texts? And if he really had anything better to offer, why didn't he do it now? It seemed too unbelievable that the same God that would kill him with cancer would offer him some vague and unseen throne in heaven.

This realization left him without anything to believe in-neither God, nor science. He was in a fourth stage-his current stage. He was somewhat relieved by his unbelief-no worrying about what the future had in store, about whether or not he would be saved. But with this loss of belief came paralysis. The future had abandoned him, just as he had abandoned it. His life was null and void. Theodore categorized himself in this stage half-jokingly, like Ginsberg claiming to love Time magazine. He rarely, if ever, let himself feel the severity of his condition, but became awkwardly aware of it in dark, midnight hours of honesty and self-examination. He quit his job at the Department of Public Safety (it was really just a matter of officially announcing it, as he rarely was able to come into work anyways). He bought an apartment in downtown Austin, failing to explain to his loan officer that he dying. He sat in it all day, staring out the window or watching television. He ventured outside only for food, baseball games, and doctor appointments.

Everything he did began and ended in the moment. When he read, it was either the news or a book short enough to finish in a day. He disliked news stories about politics or war, unless it announced that someone had definitively won. If a story about a crime indicated that the perpetrator had not yet been caught, he skipped it. He wanted nothing left unfinished. Even his interest in baseball was transient. The Round Rock Express was in the minor-leagues. Players changed every day. The team had no shot at the playoffs, and all any fan could ever hope for was a well-played three hours of baseball.

The most disturbing aspect of this stage, Theodore confessed in his rare moments of introspection, was that he felt few, if any, emotional attachments to human beings. He had no one to care about. He had lost his girlfriend. Whenever he ran into friends, they seemed honestly surprised-even somewhat embarrassed-to find him still alive. Of course, there was always Joseph or Theodore's mother. But Joseph was becoming more and more alienated by Theodore's self-imposed emotional distance. And Theodore's mother had put her entire life on hold, quitting her own job, calling three or four times a day with tidbits about cancer she had discovered in books or in conversation with friends and doctors. She lived in an eternal present that would end only with Theodore's life. Beyond that who knew what she would do? When Theodore asked, she just shrugged, as if to say Theodore need not worry about it, since it was in a future that would never happen.

So this was the mindset with which Theodore greeted every day. Theodore hated it, but it was all he knew.

Perhaps the only times Theodore showed any emotion was when he became annoyed at an event that revealed some small absurdity of life. For example, that afternoon he erupted-this is the verb he used, in reality few people would have known he was even slightly angry-at a man in the bar at Katz's. Theodore walked there several times a week whenever he didn't feel like making anything for lunch.

"And so this bloke," the man was saying, "he thinks this taxi driver's crazy 'cause he keeps going the wrong way. Only the taxi driver blows him off and keeps tellin' him 'no worries mate, it's the right direction,' see."

The middle-aged, plaid-wearing man, who fancied himself Australian because he had lived there for four years, had captured the attention of the entire the bar. It was the middle of July, with not much going on in the world of sports, rationalized Theodore, half-way through his first mug of beer. Or perhaps the other patrons-about ten of them, all men-were just seeing if he was the type of guy who, encouraged by laughter at the end of his stories, spontaneously announced that the next round was on him.

The man continued, "And this bloke's going ballistic until he realizes that the problem is his driver never turns right. It's always left, even if he has to go ten blocks out of the way to do it. Turns out the driver's petrified about right turns. They're in Australia, see, and its all backwards there."

"So what'd the guy do?" shouted someone.

The man paused for a second, as if he were trying to decide how the story should end. "Well, see, he didn't want to pay for all the extra mileage when the cab went out of its way to make those turns, so he just told the driver to stop and got out."

There were a few nods from the bar as he concluded, but even the story-teller seemed disappointed by the anticlimactic ending. He took a swig of his beer, and then his eyes suddenly brightened.

"And here's the killer," he announced. "As the cab pulled off, the driver goes and accidentally runs a light. And this car turning left plows right into him and he dies."

Chorus of "oh"s and "ouch"

"Ha! It just goes to show you."

Chorus of "yeps", "ain't that the truth"

This was about all that Theodore could take. It was his third or fourth such story of the afternoon (Theodore couldn't remember exactly), and all of them had the same exact moral: "It just goes to show."

"Shows you what?" Theodore asked, turning around in his bar stool to face the man. He dragged out the begnning of "what" and the "t" was sharp and accusatory, in a slightly lower tone.

The man looked down at his beer. "It just… um … you know, that's life and all."

Theodore continued to stare at the man, who seemed to squirm in his seat when he looked back up at Theodore. Theodore knew he was being overly cynical. He was "exploding." But he didn't care. The man was a rambling idiot, and he just wanted him to shut up.

"You know, mate," the man continued, "that's just the way it is and…"

The man stopped for a few seconds. Five of them, Theodore counted, as they continued to stare at each other. Then he sighed and raised his eyes to the exposed wooden support beams of restaurant ceiling.

"Ah, mate, you've had too much to drink already."

The bartender tapped Theodore on the shoulder, and he turned around. As he did so, the conversation resumed, somewhat quieter. The bartender's name was Andy and she had short, thick, curly hair. It was naturally jet black, but she usually died it. She had died it red a few weeks ago, so it was between colors. The strange thing about her hair, she had once explained to Theodore, was that in its current state, it was naturally curly. Everyone she knew was jealous because she spent basically no time grooming her hair. But when she grew it out long, it was straight and flat. In fact, she hadn't even realized her hair was curly until her freshman (and only) year of college, when girls in her dorm had all decided to cut their hair to symbolize liberation. Or something like that.

"So how are things today, Ted?" she asked, as she refilled his mug. Her hands shook slightly as she held the mug. Her hands were always shaking, especially when she was holding a sheet of paper or trying to eat a slice of pizza. Theodore never asked her about this because he was pretty sure it was because she had a crush on him. He had recently read an article about a medical condition that might cause the same behavior, and he wondered if maybe that was a more correct explanation, but he felt funny asking now after having known her so long.

"I've had better," he said. "What's up with this guy?"

"Beats me," she shrugged. "I don't pick them, I just get them drunk."

Andy smiled. She had great teeth. Theodore was pretty sure she'd sleep with him if he asked her out, but he didn't have the drive for it anymore. While thinking about this, he realized that they had somehow stumbled upon an awkward moment of silence, so he looked up at the TV. They were showing a video of a reporter standing outside Dell Diamond.

"Hey, turn it up, it's the Express report." Theodore said. "I want to see how bad Ramos' hamstring is."

Andy walked over to the TV, reached up, and turned a knob.

"Team officials aren't quite sure where it came from," said the reporter, clutching a microphone in his right hand, "but they suspect the involvement at least four or five people, at least one of them with high priority access."

They weren't talking about the Express or baseball at all. They were showing pictures of a tree in the middle of center field. Everyone had suddenly stopped talking, looking in amazement at the footage. It didn't look like the tree had been planted there at all. It seemed to grow naturally in the short, lush grass. Here and there a root grew out of the ground, only to curve back in after a few feet. It was a cedar tree. A tall one. Its trunk, about three feet above the ground, split into two almost perfectly perpendicular branches. From about six to fifteen feet above the ground, grew a pair of convincingly round and symmetric canopies. Theodore's first thought was that it looked like a perfect place to build a tree house. Well, the building of it wouldn't be that easy, especially if you had allergies, but it'd be the perfect place to have a tree house if you could get past the building part.

His second thought was that it looked familiar for some reason.

"Probably some prank…like the Aggies painting our field red," said one of the patrons.

"I don't know, man, looks like aliens to me," said another. The bar erupted in laughter, except for the man who had said it.

"Shut up," said Theodore.

"Actually," responded the reporter to a question Theodore missed in the laughter, "when word got out around 10:30 this morning, protestors immediately started gathering around the stadium, and the numbers have been growing rather surprisingly since then. So team officials want to think things over carefully before they take it out."

"Damn liberal tree-huggers," someone shouted.

"Todd, what's the story behind these protests?" asked the anchor woman.

"Hey, I think I went to High School with her," announced a patron.

"Hey, yeah, I remember her…didn't she work for the Chronicle or something?"

The camera returned to the reporter. "Well, Trudy, you may be too young to remember this, but a lot of people are wondering if this could be the famous Miracle Tree that was rumored to exist out in this area."

"C'mon, we don't have to listen to this crap," yelled someone.

Another patron got up and changed the channel. There was a woman reporting on the same story.

"No one was ever able to find this tree and stories pretty much abruptly ended around the mid-eighties, so no one put up much of a fuss when they tore the forest around Old Settler's Park to build this ballpark a few years ago."

Yes, thought Theodore, this was the tree. He took a ten-dollar bill from his wallet and placed it on the counter. He had to go see Jessica. Before anyone could say goodbye, he was out on the street.

Alright, so here's where the narrative breaks down. I've got a lot of notes that might help you see where I'm going. You don't have to read them all, but I'd be interested in knowing what you think. The first note explains about the tree, and I'll gradually be giving these details away as the story progresses. The second one gives a little bit of a plot outline. The rest of the stuff is just abbreviated dialogue and me trying to get into Theodore's mind. I imagine that the most of it will be in the final story, but probably not concentrated all in one dialogue or even one section.

Note 1 - Background on the tree (used to be intro, but I decided to reveal this slowly instead of all at once)

About half a mile north of FM 1325 in Round Rock, just a few blocks west of Old Settlers Park, there is, or was, a cedar tree. Actually, to be precise, there were several thousand cedar trees, almost every one of them good for nothing but allergies in the Spring, Summer, Fall, and occasionally Winter. However, this particular cedar tree-with a trunk that, at about three feet above the ground, split into two almost perfectly perpendicular branches, and from which, at about six to fifteen feet above the ground, grew a pair of convincingly round and symmetric canopies-had two famous qualities. First off, it was great for climbing. Secondly, it had a tendency to grant wishes.

Now before I lose my audience to concerns like "oh, great, a fairy-tale" or "I've lived in Austin for fifteen years and never heard of it" or "there's no way a Cedar tree could grow fifteen feet tall with a pair of climbable and convincingly symmetric canopies," let me take a second to acknowledge that I never actually saw the tree or witnessed the granting of one of these wishes. I'm just going on the stories I've been told. The details themselves are in fact, vague and inconsistent-here, you be the judge:

- " In early June of 1968, two men and their teenage sons were in the area hunting deer. Around mid-day they lunched for an hour near a tree much like the one I just described. While their sons climbed the tree, the men ranted about politics and about how "every damn problem this country has began when that [expletive] Kennedy came to office." One of the sons vaguely recalls his father wishing that he could meet the devil, because he'd "sure as hell" sell his soul to make sure that "no damn Kennedy ever be president again." Two days later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated.
- " In the Spring of 1977, an eight-year old boy wandered upsettedly into the woods after being told by his mother that they didn't have enough money for him to see the matinee showing of "Star Wars" with his friends. He found the afore-mentioned tree and made his way up into one of the highest branches on its east side. After an hour of thinking, he resolved that all of his problems could be solved if his father could somehow get a hold of a million dollars. When he returned home, his mother excitedly announced that his father had just been offered a million dollars by IBM to relinquish a patent he held on a certain type of transistor.
- " One cloudy night in the Fall of 1982, two college students on a date were driving just north of the area through some dirt back-roads. The young man swerved to miss a rabbit in the road, lost control of the car, and rammed into a tree. The girl claims to have awoken from a brief coma to find the young man unconscious, and losing a lot of blood from a severed arm. Unable to wake her date, she ran through the woods to find the main road. Fifteen minutes later, when she was absolutely lost, she saw a faint white glow in the distance, which she soon discovered came from a cedar tree. When she touched the tree, she was greeted by a small, as she calls it, leprechaun, who told her she could have any wish she wanted. A short time later she returned to the car, where a very confused but healthy young man recounted how he had just suddenly found himself walking outside of the car. The couple, coincidentally, never dated again.

There are hundreds of stories just like these.

Perhaps they are simply coincidences. I don't intend to debate the authenticity of the tree; in fact, were there enough evidence for its authenticity, you would have heard of it long before now. But the possibility of its power enticed enough open-minded people that it became, for several years, a frequent topic of conversation in the more occult and new age subcultures of the city. The Austin Chronicle, back when it really was an outlet for original thought, even ran features about it from time to time, always followed up by letters to the editor disputing various notions about the tree, such as you could only find it during the thirteenth full moon of the year, or that the tree was older even than the Treaty Oak.

As can be expected, the tree became a subject of worship for at least a handful of cults. Elaborate doctrines surfaced about the nature of the tree and the wishes, along with rituals you should perform should you ever run into the tree. In 1986, several of these groups organized an expedition to, once and for all, locate this tree and get to the bottom of the matter. Not that anyone was surprised when the expedition returned empty-handed. The most inconvenient thing about the tree, after all, was that no one knew exactly where it was. Yes, everyone knew the general location, but part of the tree's magic seemed to be that in every story, the individual stumbled upon it by accident, and was totally unable to find it again after they left.

That is, in almost every story-the ___ cult believed that it could consistently locate the tree as long as it was night, and as long as they were blind-folded and drunk. This was, of course, highly suspect. A journalist from the Chronicle once asked them to take her with them. After a six pack of beer she awoke the following morning in her own puke, next to two bearded and disturbingly naked men amidst a grove of very ordinary, single-trunk cedar trees; although to be fair to the cult, around her fifth beer she vaguely recalled one of the trees looking like it had three or four trunks.

Perhaps the frustration of not being able to locate the tree contributed to the fact that, towards the end of the eighties, talk of it abruptly died. Not only was no one interested in discussing it any more, but no one seemed to produce anymore wish-granted stories. Some theorize that the tree ran out of its magic. Who knows? And to be quite honest, it doesn't even matter, seeing as in 1997, with very little fanfare, the city bull-dozed every tree in the area-about ten acres worth.

Note 2 - Plot details

Joseph and Jessica have some history with the tree as teenagers. Joseph was in some sort of life-threatening accident in the forest. Jessica stumbles upon the tree, and wishes that Joseph will live. She says she's willing to give up anything, including the possibility of being with Joseph (i.e. marriage and whatever) if Joseph will live. He lives. Immediately after this, she deliberately stops seeing Joseph to keep her part of the promise. They are casual friends, but not as involved. Slowly, over the course of the next ten or twelve years, she lets herself fall in love with him again, and they begin to have a relationship. Shortly thereafter, he gets the tumor. She feels guilty that it's her fault for breaking her promise. When he proposes to her, she refuses and goes out of the way to avoid Theodore. of course, Theodore is aware of the fact that the tree "saved" his life, but he has no idea about this promise and Jessica is afraid to tell him. I'm not sure what exactly is going to happen next. I've already got Theodore's birthday party mapped out for that night, and a "fight" scene between Theodore and Jessica in an alley behind the bar. Beyond that, I don't know. I'm not even sure how long this will be. In the long run, they're both going to find some sort of faith in the tree. Theodore's going to decide to "sacrifice" something so that he can be with Jessica again, probably his own life. Jessica's going to "sacrifice" her own life. But it's going to be cut down before they can do anything. It will end with uncertainty. They'll be around the cut trunk of the tree in the outfield. I'm thinking that they won't explain any of this too each other, but we are going to be pretty sure that their relationship is restored and here to stay. Naturally, all of this will change as I figure out more of the story, but I hope not too much of it.

Note 3 - Sketch from next scene

"So the game's cancelled?" asked Joseph. He was sitting at his desk with several folio-sized sheets of paper. He was sketching something. A building of some sort.

"Yep," said Theodore.

The cubicle was small, with just barely enough room for a second chair. It was blue, and the walls were high enough that even if you stood you couldn't see anyone else.

"Are you…" started Joseph.

"Yeah, I'll come."

Joseph seemed pre-occupied with his drawing. Theodore couldn't tell whether he was really busy, or still upset about the morning.

"Look, Joe, I'm sorry. It's just …"

"It's okay, man. …

"So, what's Jessica got to do with all this, I don't get it."

Theodore wasn't quite sure what to say. He didn't know how Joseph would take this. Hell, he didn't even know how to take. It happened so long ago. "You know, Jessica," he said. "She was all over this stuff back in the day."

"Are you sure you want to see her. It's been so long."

"Doesn't matter. She'll probably be looking for me after hearing about this."

…

"Did you know I was reading the other day that in couples where a spouse has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer, that divorce is seventy-five percent more likely?" … "Except, it's usually the husband leaving a terminally ill wife. He just can't take the pain. It's ironic, isn't it."

…

Both look to the TV…pieces of newscast.

"Do you think it's crazy?"

"This tree stuff?"

Theodore nods.

"I don't know. They seem to think there's something."

Points to crowds of people on TV trying to get into the stadium.

… reported tells anecodote to give us more info on tree

Note 4 - Theodore explaining himself. Probably to be given at some point as confession to Jessica

"I was angry at people. They were all normal, and here was my brain, degenerating. My body, failing. An arm that won't move here. A leg that wakes up one morning in total pain that never stops. It's scary-cause it's all part of you. I used to think that the body and the mind or the soul was two separate things, but its all interrelated. I thought my body would gradually die, but at least I'd have my mind. But it's the same thing. I was angry that they were all living, and I was dying. And most of all, I hated my past. I pictured myself, two years ago, a totally different person. Without knowing it, I had reached my peak of being. But that person had died, quietly, unannounced. I had no idea who I was anymore-just someone fading out of existence, perhaps having never lived at all. But then I thought that it wasn't just me that was dying, it was everyone. It was like everyone had a tumor, their bodies degenerating the second they were born, their minds, fading in then out of existence, as if one trying to wake from an early morning dream, but not quite able to get out of bed, falling back asleep. My death sentence was at most two or three years away, while theirs was forty, sixty, maybe eighty years away, but it was no different than anyone else's. So I thought, the problem's not with my tumor. It wasn't like my tumor had suddenly rendered my life void and meaningless. It was that all life was void and meaningless. And suddenly I was relieved. It was all a big joke."

Note 5 - More Theodore explaining himself

"Sometimes I look back upon myself-feel myself as I used to be in those days. For a brief second, feel what it's like to have all those dreams again. It's like all the intervening years were just a dream, and I'm just waking up. I was going to …. It's funny, its like I just forgot about all that."

"That's what happens with cancer, though. What can you do?"

"No. That's what hurts the most. I can't blame it on the cancer. I forgot long before the cancer."

Note 6 - Theodore meeting Jessica, probably will change a little because first of all it's Jessica, not Elena. And second of all, it's not quite the right character for Theodore

The first time Theodore had met Elena, in the back corner of one of those quaint, antique coffee shops that litter downtown Austin, he was still in the Masters program for English at the University of Texas. He had strayed into the unusually quiet 3 AM morning absently, with a notebook and pen, in vain hope of starting a novel.

After a few long cups of coffee and ten crumpled pieces of paper, he was startled to discover long, curled strands of midnight-soaked hair swinging into his peripheral vision. The most startlingly thing about this was not the sudden and immediate proximity of the 5'6" woman to whom the strands belonged, but the manner with which her tight, black, sleeveless mini-skirt gently slid up her thigh as she sat down in the chair next to him. Likewise, he was not so much shocked by the fact that her cappuccino had somehow found a place next to his coffee, but by the way in which his eyes froze as they scanned upwards from the cappuccino and landed directly between her moderately-sized and well-advertised breasts. Without even getting to her amused crimson lips or coy green eyes, it was pretty obvious to Theodore that she was, in short, hot.

Partly on account of his rather embarrassing history of foolish behavior around "hot" women, and partly out of a stubborn resolve not to be distracted from his novel-writing agenda, he rather creatively decided to return his concentration to the blank sheet in front of him and simply not address the situation.

After waiting a few seconds, she slowly unwrinkled one of the crumpled sheets and, as if yesterday's abandoned newspaper, started reading. One by one she casually read the crumpled sheets-occasionally sipping her cappuccino; occasionally giggling aloud. In total confusion, Theodore picked up his pen and wrote pages upon pages of absolutely pointless dribble until, without any words, she stood up, removed a dollar from her wallet, placed it upon the table, kissed Theodore's right cheek and left. This, of course, drove Theodore absolutely insane.

After that first meeting, Theodore frequented the coffee shop. For about two weeks, they kept meeting there, entirely by coincidence at 3 AM. Elena-that was her name, which he finally caught the third time around. She was singing at some nightclub on Sixth Street for cash to put her through theater at the University of Texas. The next Marilyn Monroe, she called herself. He was "writing a novel." She was a great fan of literature, and, oh, did he like poetry? After an hour or so, they resolved that Williams was the greatest poet that ever lived. She liked his writing. He, of course, was honored. Did she like music? Of course; a ridiculous question. It only took them a couple of minutes to discover that Tori Amos was the best singer of all times. Coincidentally, he had two tickets to see her at the Lizard Lounge Friday. The rest, of course, should be pretty obvious.

Except that all of it was now in the past.

Now, Theodore found himself knocking on her door…asks for help researching the tree…what you have to do to get your wish to work

"If you like the weather," my taxi-driver explained,
"wait around five minutes." I told him thirty—
I cannot see the ocean from the Rocky Mountains,
and who knows when business will land me in Norfolk again.

But this is neither the time nor place
to find one’s soul. It is a time for umbrellas,
and I have only a courtesy copy of USA Today
to guard this beach from steel sheets of rain
striping the Chesapeake Bay to the north,
tip-toeing towards me along the Eastern shore.

I am resting on the edge, no,
razor blade of indecisions.

It’s not that I don’t know the secrets of the universe,
because I think I’m pretty clear on all the quarks
and gluons and things hopelessly smaller
than bleached grains of sand sticking
to my naked feet.
And I think I get that whole Big Bang,
being, what, at least a few thousand times louder
than the growl of thunder
one, two, three miles away.

It’s more that I have no vision.
Time is severed. Future and past
are this abrupt ocean shored up
against a decaying city run out of space;
so that even the simple questions
project to ambiguity:
Do I dare to stop for gas?
Shall I cover my head with crossed arms
as I run zig-zag from car to supermarket,
scattering conjured sniper-fire?

Or for that matter, am I safe
to sit on an algae-covered rock at low tide
and ask questions of a thunderstorm and the sea?

It’s not even a lack of vision that haunts
me; rather an overabundance
around me. How many people have stood
where I stand, beheld this sea, known
what to make of it? I am not alone
on this beach, but in the company
of a million silhouettes illuminated
in intensifying lightning flashes.
In the tide I hear their hushed voices
speaking in awe of the swarming waves.
To my left, there’s a Chesipean Indian
and her young child, admiring the end of the world;
a group of fisherman on the pier, smoking their tobacco.
To my right, a Confederate soldier
waiting upon a shipment of British ammunition;
a colonial American
looking out across the sea that delivered him
to a strange land, never to return.

But, wait, it is suddenly dark and there is no one,
and the sound I hear is only that of the whole
of history behind me, leaning in my ear,
speaking with a thousand foreign tongues.

Then, there is silence,
and I realize all along it has only been the ghost
of my grandfather, walking these shores,
watching these same waters that brought here him here,
a twenty-two year-old German in 1949
(for whatever reason, he’s never told,
or I’ve never asked),
from which he couldn’t get far enough away.

Now, he is forever exploring the edge of America
and the world.

This is how he explained the Atlantic to me:
"Schaut man weit genug hinaus, sieht man dann Gott."
I explained to him about Columbus, about
the curvature of the Earth, and space and time and Einstein,
and besides, even if things were flat, all you’d see is Europe.

“Nein,” he replied, in wonting contemplation
of a black-and-white photo-plastered wall.
"Dort ist Gott."

What would he think of his grandson,
who sees only an ever-deepening blue;
who even now, as infrequent drops freeze
his flesh, freckle the sand,
is forgetting the beach,
wondering where to eat,
how much cash he’ll need for the cab?

It was mid-September.

It was morning, and I slept.
You called,
announced that you loved me
that the world was exploding.
I dressed, went to work, watched CNN.

That evening, between desiccate clouds
we surveyed the sky for airplanes and a sunset;
the olive paint of a park bench peeling beneath us,
the serrate skyline of an inconsequential city consuming us.
I felt your pale neck, your silk hair, a spine
curve backwards around my outstretched arm,
and fit, as to a pillow.

You told me of the food at Windows on the World,
on the 107th floor;
how, out of curiosity, you browsed their website this afternoon,
made reservations for the 29th.
I didn’t know to laugh or say nothing,
so I asked if you knew anyone in New York.

“No,” you said, and closed your eyes.

I thought I saw the face of God in the clouds.
It surprised me. I hadn’t expected the hollow eyes,
the firmly shut mouth, the well-trimmed beard.
I was about to show you, but realized
it was actually a sandwich,
a bowling ball,
your silhouette,
fading into the blue.

“I am empty,” you said.
“Empty?”
“Empty, like a thousand dead seas.”
“You mean, empty like Windows on the World.”
“Yes… but not absent.”

“I have nothing,” you said.
“You have everything.”
“Yesterday. Today, I have nothing.”
“You have an apartment,” I said.
“So did they.”
“You have your health,” I said.
“So did they.”
“You have me.”

For two minutes, you said nothing.
I distracted myself with a pedestrian down the block,
setting her groceries on the sidewalk,
saluting a wind-swept flag in front of a post-office.
She sang. I strained to hear, but heard instead
only the wind,
the sporadic voice of a president on the radio,
the shutting of an open window.

Then, you turned to me.
I rested my two hands on the burgundy wool
of your shoulders, pulled you to me,
gave you all I had to offer.

It was nothing and everything—
an evening’s kiss.

at sunset: pupil-reflected sunshine,
teal-grained pools, ivory rings. These things are
fractals. Zoomed in upon a thousand times

my heart is your stare is a seagull climbing
salt-laked breeze methodically are sun
stroked dreams repeating chaos-quilted rhymes

in mountain shadows. Your hairs are divine
leaves of grass are half-read Whitman poems are
fractals. Zoomed in upon a thousand times

all things are fractals. All things repeat my
love, your gyred body’s lean against me.
All things repeat in chaos-quilted rhymes

as I’m forming them: you and I, snow-lined
peaks, red-bathed pine trees, this poem, moonrise, and
fractals. Zoomed in upon a thousand times
our souls repeat in chaos-quilted rhyme.

wrapped round the incense of middle air now breathed
through grief-scented sighs, now fled into still-born nights

that never even gasped. These people melt in aborted twilights:
strange-tongued crowds gathered purposelessly round the still-born night,

security guards shrugging at what they won’t see, a jaded-Buddha-
clasping mother kneeling in her daughter’s blood, a still-born in the night…

Is this my newspaper or do I witness from my seat as the 10:30 rolls, jerks,
violently escapes as though still-born into the night.

purpose. Either I’m watching solar eclipses
like an Aztec priest, turning absence into religion,
or I’m missing something. This poem’s cacophony
supposed to reveal something important—how apricots disturb
the universe; why women never display
interest in me beyond the second date; or revelation.

But I’m still wrestling the form. So, here’s your revelation:
As a young Mayan boy, I stared into solar eclipses,
was blinded by the burnt celestial display,
hesitated to tell the priests; you see, their religious
cants disturb me, much like Phillip Glass disturbs
me, weaving in and never out of cacophony.

(Does it surprise you to find cacophony
at the center of this poem?) Revelation
is the only solution for blindness. I let them disturb
me for thirty-nine months, until the next lunar eclipse.
The sun and moon are opposites. The religion
is simple. One blinds you from the world. One re-displays

it. Like the power switch on my LCD display.
One second, I’m lost in its blackness; the next, cacophony:
six words repeating in their own incessant religion.
From this I’m supposed to derive revelation?
I tried it once. Made some pick-up line about an eclipse.
Used the same six words over and over again. Disturbed

the hell out of chicks. But this, this really disturbed
me—when I met Ginsberg at a church. He put on a display
of how he wins women’s hearts. No eclipses.
Just random chit-chat. A few unplanned smiles. Cacophony
is the opiate of the masses, he said. Revelation
is that, and this alone. He won their hearts. His only religion,

that of disturbing form, constructing cacophony.
But this display was not enough, was like buying revelation
from eclipses. What I needed was religion.

but not remember who he is.
This is what I know. He
was cool. His mother loved
him despite the ghetto. East

Austin loved him despite his mom’s
disdain for “niggers.” His
older brother, a Dungeons and
Dragons nerd, loved him. His

father, a son of a bitch, left
before his eighth birthday
but must have loved him. I know this
because we loved him—eight

boys who grew through Sunday School
together, raised hands, sang hymns;
later, skipped Sunday School
together, snuck into the gym,

made mazes of dividers and
folding chairs, listened as
Ryun revealed hushed secrets
of twelve year old girls.

He taught us what we weren’t supposed
to, but needed to know,
like how to hold a cigarette
firm between the knuckles.

Not that we tried, but in case . . . . Or
how to kill rabbits. Once,
camping at Enchanted Rock, he
took a dozen flares, trapped

rabbits in small holes, stuck the flares
inside and lit. He howled
loudly as they exploded. We
congregated around

him nervously, noting how cool
he was. We became cool
because we knew his coolness. Sheryl,
the preacher’s daughter was cool

because she knew his lips. He let
us in on this conquest
at my fifteenth birthday party.
He told us how her breasts,

small, but mature, rubbed against his
chest as he held her. We
loved him for it. His conquest
was ours, as if we each

had kissed her. Then came the rumors
that Ryun had stolen
her virginity. The Bishop
met us one-on-one,

informed us Ryun had gone too
far, made sure that we "grew
not party to his sins." From here
on I hesitate to

know him. Over the next months I
saw him maybe once at
church, heard awed whispers of drugs,
stolen cars, even that

he killed a man. He was still cool;
could do forbidden things. We lived
through these rumors. But for five years I’ve
heard nothing, until this.

Between them, suddenly soprano
violins announce "the moment."
The audience knows I know.
Which grieves more: her rejection
or the inevitability of conclusion?

Before it began, we disbelieved its end
goes thus: Yellow streetlights
subdue dusk, flood night, count loss
like hour hands of denial. I retreat
down ill-lit sidewalks, hands in pockets,
face hidden in bowed languish. Roses
slip from tired hands to unknown curbs.
The audience’s trained chorus of "ohhh"
counterpoints escalated strings,
mocks the unoriginality of heartbreak,
gives way to silence.
Then, an immobile camera’s black fade—
my head raised finally to city-filtered night,
the only thing lonelier than love.

II
Your hair leaps from eye
to book to grass. Even
lilies kiss the breezed strands.

III
August, oil-painted
to sunburnt windows, worships,
then flees your laughter.

IV
Unheard words grieve your
absence from autumn night—less
gone wrong, less felt right.

V
Tchaikovsky exacts
silence, omits you, close
and alone beside me.

VI
Moons lonelier than
winter trace the blue constraint
of wish-shadowed lips.

Consider this excerpt:

Let us talk, then, you and I,
without the masks, without the lies.
Let us remove the half-closed window blinds
to see the sun as it is in full-blown day.
No more uncertain meanings,
no more uncertain clues,
no more secret truths
to hide between me and you.

I cringe with its every syllable,
the "no" colliding with "more" like
wind-swept skunk against five-buck cologne,
the hyphens of "half-closed" and "full-blown"
squinting like the eyes of misunderstood gods.

Lydia Minatoya, who claims,
"It doesn’t matter what you do in the past,
only what you do in the future,"
doesn’t persuade me.
There is something unforgivable about hours spent
extracting half-rhymes for “I” from
a pocket rhyming dictionary,
certain they would win a Pulitzer.

If I knew what to forgive, it’d be easier.
Is it the unremitting meter of lines five through eight,
derived from a David Bowie song
that lingers in my head after every reading?

Is it the girl I wrote this for, but never gave it to?
Or the first line’s unapologetic bootleg of Prufrock,
revealing not a love of Eliot,
but the poem’s incidental position as the
only reading assignment I completed in eleventh grade?

Is it the fact that having preserved it,
I can never take it back
and destroy its insufficiency?

Sometimes, I knew she was behind me,
observing my sporadic scribbles and occasional
eruptions of solid shape.
I drew her standing in guarded silence—
white paper, a stick figure, arms folded, no mouth.
There was an art to the scene,
an emotion that demanded preservation.
I think it was a mixture of love
and fear that her presence might destroy a universe.
As she did one morning,
asking why I was not ready for pre-school.
She held one of my sisters in each arm,
the youngest with a fuming diaper,
the other yanking her surrendered hair.
I told her I no longer needed school,
I was going to be an artist.
That was fine with her, and she
sent me to Kindergarten next September.

I no longer draw stick figures.
They’ve been running their course
of exponential decay since my mother replaced
crayons with a weekly exodus to the library.
My art is words—a house,
not six lines but five letters.
My family—eight names
meaning nothing except to us.

My art is the art of shortcuts.
My mother—an adjective, noun, and indefinite article.
A kind woman, a loving woman,
a still not-so-skinny woman.

A young woman who nearly tossed
me in a dumpster when I was a month old
and would not stop crying.
A visionary woman, who nursed my imagination
on her half-priced paperback Star Trek novels.
A tired woman, who typed my school assignments
while I snored through two a.m.
A sad woman, who asks
me on the phone what more
she can do for my seventeen year-old sister,
lounging in smoky Austin cafés,
wrestling poetry and agnosticism
with the same desperation
that once sucked my mother’s breast.

A mother who crafts art too complicated
for words.

The question—which?

The answer—none.

Now, if this had happened at a White House
press conference, or at the Super Bowl,
you’d find camera flashes, a dozen microphones,
seventy-five million viewers, Peter Jennings,
and a Nike commercial (during which God would pause
to sip a soon-to-be-popular brand of bottled water).
Within fifteen seconds all wars would end,
teachers would get paid what they’re worth,
ten thousand corrupt politicians would resign and join the Red Cross,
and the Red Sox would win the World Series.

But it happened in a New England forest—
an average spring day, partly cloudy,
highs in the mid-sixties.
On that same day, somewhere in Delhi,
a man smoked his last cigar before a British firing squad,
two thirteen year-old newlyweds met for the first time,
and Gandhi’s great-grandfather
meditated before a statue of Brahma.

It happened that God came down in a New England forest
right in front of a boy and a cliché of singing birds,
and in translucent white, with a straight face,
said, Go change the world.

It happened that the boy walked home,
said nothing to his parents,
and planted an acre of corn before dinner.

It happened on a lovely morning.

breath—
The dull, infrequent pulse of Austin hill country.
The flutter of your tangling hair in the earth’s exhale.
A quick mid-morning calm.
Mount Bonnel’s awed intake of your voice
escaping its graffiti cliffs
down the Colorado River.

voice—
The forest, turning its attention from the river to our exchange.
The ambition of a starved squirrel, half-materialized from its adjacent hollow.
Time’s hourglass carving up the burn of afternoon.
The messenger of my one-hundred rehearsed memories,
revising themselves in quest for laughter.

laugh—
The echo of four-hundred mockingbirds fraternizing with the treetops.
The confused sway of four-hundred pine trees against four p.m. rain clouds.
The chatter of four-hundred staggered raindrops
meeting four minutes of our apathetic skin.
The brush of four-hundred pine needles, as I roll into your embrace.

kiss—
The answer to a moment’s distraction—
the moment, your reading of Nabokov’s Butterflies;
the distraction, the non-correlation between your lips
and butterflies.
The Colorado River moving against our stillness.
The destruction of a thousand landscape paintings
as the day implodes in perfection’s black hole.
The conjunction of sun and earth so spectacular
that memory and wish die of silence.

whisper—
The slow stars of a hesitant horizon.
A violet horizon’s ten-thousand riverbats
awaking in an unknown world.
The apology of the indefinite moment
exposing at least one butterfly
I no longer remember.

It spoke
to me when I sat in the children’s section,
watching a Vietnamese woman watch her only daughter.
The daughter, with her sweatshirt blue school uniform,
wrinkled cotton sun-hat, and banana-blue backpack,
devoured picture books as her mother had freedom.
The mother consumed her daughter’s smile and strange tongue
as if they would redeem thirty dead years of Nhà Trang.
The library asked me why I never come at four a.m.,
when it needs another voice, when it needs memory.

I left in search of a book on Chinese chess.
I have been in love with Chinese chess since
I saw a congregation of middle-aged,
strand-bearded Chinese men squatting over
the lost brown shades of Cabramatta’s tiled plazas.
They shifted those sawdust wooden pieces
across red ink paper boards
with the certainty of theatre majors
reciting Shakespeare to strange women.
I saw Shakespeare for the first time
in their chessboard.

I found the book behind a 25 year old student from Hanoi.
He knelt under a table with his blue Bic pen.
The scroll beneath him spewed
Chinese characters a meter high
and tore them down again, towards reluctant
random scribbles. The library’s voice
vibrated through burgundy paint chip walls,
The student broke his oblivion, sighed,
handed me the book,
and returned his swollen eyes
to a blank sheet of English paper.

I turned the corner and arrived at the poetry section,
where specters of Chinese chess superstars floated
over ivory boards and pieces from Canton.
As I approached, they recited Li Bai in an accent I’ve never heard,
and faded into the sea-washed outline
of a bearded poet, who was either a future self,
or the student from Hanoi.
The voice died.
The poet looked to me, pale, close to death,
and begged,
"I have been silent for six years.
Is it time?"

[Pause for the drunks to laugh]

Seriously, folks. Poetry is best read
as stand-up comedy. Four-hundred years ago, yes,
there was something poetic to write about,
but now, you have two choices:
1) Write about the same things they thought beautiful.
2) Try to make a postmodern world seem beautiful.
In other words, a poet
is either a sleep therapist,
or a comic.

I am here to save the world through comedy.

What the world needs is the type of poem
written on the unused portions of bar napkins—
a phone number that you will never dial,
or a pickup line guaranteed for at least four slaps.
It needs the type of poetry that ambushes you
from behind an expired milk carton;
the type that introduces a Calculus-wielding
penguin just as your dream about a topless
grocery store in Portugal gets good;
the type so raw, you could throw
it in a stew and boil;
so real, that it is said once, and forgotten.

It needs the type of poem, that if written
for a class at Cornell, would solicit the deadpan,
"Well at least you didn’t allude to Eliot."
That would then, against the solemnity
of a classroom awed by the abuse poetry must suffer,
summon inquiries into the nature
of the red oil barrow,
or regarding at whom the drunks are truly laughing.
The type of poem that would then provoke
enough courage to yell, "You, they’re laughing at you!"
as you leap over the professor’s desk
on your flight out the window.

In other words,
the type of poetry that must never be written.

He asked me about my rhymes.
I was trying to make rhymes of
grown Australians
bending their chins up to the sky,
their eyes closed, their minds in heroin ecstasy,
as Asian men and women dodged the inconvenience
on their way to the station.
They did not rhyme.

We stared exhaustingly into each other’s clay eyes
as he faked a smile and said, in his best Australian,
"No worries, fairdinkum Romantics can find
heaps of inspirations
in this London bastard."

I smiled too, and watched him melt
swiftly into the cracked brick wall of my dream—
the entirely imagined Cabramatta—
a falsehood finding stability
only in young schoolchildren,
reading Keats,
dreaming reality.

In Sunday School, today,
I heard the most intriguing lesson:
"Thou shalt not kill."

Now, I'm a changed man.

II

Jerry Seinfeld on the payphone
says, "You can't hurry love."

"But," I ask,
"What if you just want to sleep with her, then run?"

"Oh," he quips, "so you’re a runner?"

I look at the script.
He's right.

III

I lured myself to sleep with the thought
that there was nothing new to say
under an orange sun, and that
Eliot had stolen the last good poem
left to write (which explains something
about my low wages).

But, waking to the buzz of a midnight fly,
I discovered at least one idea—
How An Urn Changed My Life.

IV

On the day I discovered I was not alone,
I walked into one of the two-hundred-and-fifty-six
pawn shops on Salt Lake's State Street,
thinking that this was where all those lost dreams went.

I asked, "Do you have any epiphanies?"
The shark studied me with an eye glass
and asked, "What for?"

I told him I was tired of never changing.
He cursed aloud.
The last epiphany had gone bad that morning.

V

Just when I thought the world would end tomorrow,
three five-year old girls started dancing to YMCA
on the sloped grass outfield bleachers
of a minor-league baseball park.

I tried to ignore them, while others, curious and unafraid,
joined in, their grins turning somersaults,
until all the girls in the right field bleachers
danced in front of me.

VI

Watching Out of Africa at 3 A.M.,
I am reminded of why I want nothing more
than a one-way ticket to the dark continent.

If the film is right,
nature remains a natural event—

not like the interruption of a WWF commercial,
from which I've learned that wrestlers come from outer space.

VII

Icicles preserved by the accident
of mid-May mountain shadows drip
over green-leaf-spotted frostbite soil.

The reborn oak from which they hang
is even now explaining to God that
the punishment for worshipping the seasons is too much.

VIII

When I sat next to you
on the train to Brisbane,
and asked if you had the time;
when you declined, but tossed aside
ruby sheets of once black hair,
as if to make your two jade eyes reply,
"But I do have poetry,"
I died and was reborn inside of you.

In the morning there was a note on my desk—white ink on black paper. It was
Tolkien’s handwriting, or so I guessed, as he was the only ghost in my room last night. The note yelled at me, "What have you done with my talent?" Surprised to hear the note speak, I decided it was probably not the best of mornings to be awake. I pulled the covers over my head.

In a time slot between dream and Austin City Limits, I passed again by Tolkien. He was purple this time. Come to think of it, everyone was purple. I wanted to say, "Hey, who are you to talk about talent when you’re purple," but held my tongue. Instead I argued that poetry was the only real talent. He turned a deeper purple and said, "So." I told him I was over him and he should go hang with Hobbits. He said, "I knew you couldn’t do it all along. Why don’t you run away and write a poem about it?"

What’s in your head,
she said,
in your head.
Zombie. Zombie. Zombie.

When the music stops,
I will send a rose, a photograph,
and this poem
to the woman I love.

But now, the chorus buries me.
I am thinking of Ireland
when I should be dreaming of her.
It is too much.
Where am I in the chorus?
I have been awake for thirty-six straight
hours. I am trying to be serious,
Mr. Ginsberg. I am trying to write poetry. Only,
hours are slipping on the sands
of a disintegrated Jane Austen novel;
are slipping into the persistent waste sad time,
stretching before and after, makes
of a botched memory;
are slipping into the afternoon shadows
of a corner office with a window-blind view,
where an invisible man
folding his arms across the mahogany
dares to tell me,
"There are more important things than a woman’s love."

"Like poetry," I offer, after a few hours
of disagreeing silence.
"No.
Like the course of your memory.
Like the ruins in your soul.
Like remembering who you are."

II

In 1994 I listened to the Cranberries
while Time magazine showed me a photo by Kevin Carter.
Smack-dab in the center lay a blur,
a black form, a half-formed shape,
forming, forming
into a malnourished child.
He was hugging, worshipping
an anonymous African desert.
You could say he was dying for it.
It was the most sadistic thing
I’d ever seen win a Pulitzer.
I turned the page.
Then it became the most exquisite memory
and I couldn’t leave it alone.
I returned to the photo
and saw the vulture.

What was there to say?
In Carter’s great photo the child, the vulture,
they dance and they dance,
but they don’t.
The vulture is anchored in time and place
by the haunt of Darwin’s justice.
The child has never heard of dancing,
never heard of language,
never heard my question,
"What is more important than a woman’s love?"

III

The invisible man on the other side
of the lemon-oiled mahogany
extracts 1994 from me
like a bee draining the nectar
of a forty-acre rose garden.
I say, "Is that what you wanted?
Is that all there is?"
Without even asking about my mother,
he hypnotizes me with a rose
on a fishing line. And all I can think of
is the saying I once heard, that
with the lights out, it’s less dangerous . . .

IV

Inside me there are 7,000 shouting voices,
and one that whispers
truth like the taste of next year’s wine.
I can tell you what it means to say—
I am a child of Africa,
a stoic vulture eye,
born and dead in the same Kodak moment.
I am beyond the waste sad Sigmund,
in his infinite wisdom and invisibility,
made of a corner office with a view.

In one hundred words or less, it says
I am not in this poem.

V

When I arise, again, and go back down into
time, when I am finally alone enough
to be serious about poetry, memory will fail me.
Yes, I will have written a poem, but at what cost?
Of the rose, the photograph, and the poem,
all that will remain is Africa, trapped
in the perpetual intellect of Time magazine—
nothing more than the essence of an unanswered question,
"What more is there, if not a woman’s love?"

VI

In time,
where I am dying Mr. Kurtz
and reincarnating as a French café,
like the checkerboard tablecloth of . . .
no, like the violin . . .
like the collective love song . . .
like the Sunday afternoon
of oblivion—
In time,
I meant to write a love poem.

The final meek embrace of memory that,
falling, alerts me to the sudden shadow
of time staring back through history’s mirror
upon our table (set for two), murders our love.

Falling alerts me to the sudden shadow,
the obscure outline of stories once told
at a table, set for two, where our love, murdered,
marks me with the lipsticks of fled midnights.

The obscure outline of stories once told,
like the moon’s crescent warmth sharing our first kiss,
marks me with the lipsticks of fled midnights
and, caressing my hair, whispers, then flees.

Like the moon’s crescent warmth sharing our first kiss,
this crisis—remembering you—promises,
and, caressing my hair, whispers, then flees
under the cover of death’s enraged clouds.

This crisis—remembering you—promises
enough to bring me here, to speak to you here,
under the cover of death’s enraged clouds
but not enough for love to conquer your ghost—

enough to bring me here, to speak to you here,
in the graveyard, when I am cold and unmoved,
but not enough to at last embrace your ghost—
your memory, outlasting, surviving

in the graveyard. When I’m cold and unmoved,
what I’m afraid of is not you, it is
your memory, outlasting, surviving
swift, abrupt arrival at the dead end.

her crying, and I am seven years old.
She cries, God works. I ask my father, Why?
My father is slow to narrate the lie,
a lie I uncover years later—not cold,

but loving deceit. He hesitates, leans
towards me, says, The baby must wait. I
nod, wait for next year. Years later, when something
clicks—my new brother did not miss his train

from God, will never come—I freeze in reflection—
them, leaving for the doctor; red on the bathroom floor.

There are
two things:

One. I look
for you once, thrice
in the congregation
and can't find you.
The preacher mumbles on about King David.
I look for you, but can’t
hypnotize myself by the waving of your hair
or the fire-ice oscillations of
your heart.

Two. I pour
an extra glass of champagne
under the candlelight, in case
you stop by, in case
you see the steak, salad, and dinner rolls,
in case
you sit down, beside me,
in the place I have set for you,
and kiss me,
then want a drink.

And after these, a moment,
when I am caught alone in the native hues
of a night-shaded living room,
burnt with the scent of resolution.
I shudder, then listen for
your voice, the indiscernible
words of a song, pleading
for me to find you.

Well, here I am,
and there ain't no love
in this December soup kitchen.
What there is
is me, ten busy saints,
a lack of soup,
soup pots spilling on the floor,
the chill of an open door,
accusations, and bread.

I am composing mock lyrics
around these themes,
to the carols of our three-part quartet,
when they command me to be the hero
and find more soup.

I storm out of the kitchen,
throw on a coat, gloves, scarf,
and meet, on the way out,
a man, on the way in,
with snow on his beard,
with red ears,
with a countenance that shouts homeless
like an "It's a Wonderful Life" cliché,
who smiles and tells me "Merry Christmas,"
and hands me a candy cane.

Three invisible arts converge here.
I’ve been told
the chess-piece character I am copying
is a horse. No one will say
what kind. I imagine
a black horse flying under
a quiet great wall of hoarfrost night,
delivering a scholar of the Tang Dynasty
to Changan, where Li Bai once wrote,
"And there are other earths and skies than these"—
words, decrypted words that rest
dangerously on the edge
of the language of an art
I understand only as it fades,
leaving characters,
the blending of a few strokes;
paint on a piece of round wood.

Across from me on a red bench laughs a
a newspaper, and the Chinese man behind it
with his hat, gray whiskers, and brown coat,
reads it, like I can not.
I stare at the characters like hieroglyphics,
wishing for a cereal box decoder ring,
losing myself in the forbidden world.
He sees. He knows. He calls
me over and smiles like Buddha.
It is a lost art, he confirms,
you must recover it—
first, you make the strokes, meld them together,
then you know the meaning;
you understand.
What is there to understand, I ask.
I cannot tell, he says,
folding up his news
lightly, as not to disturb his paper,
gently, as not to anger the language gods.

So I've tried to remember
you gave me candy when I was good,
when I raised my hand.
I've tried to remember
love is the answer to most of your questions,
you should love your neighbor
so your house won't fall.
I'm trying to remember
John 3:16, for God so loved ...
trying to remember
an ark, the number two, unicorns
trying to remember
a story, Samaritans are good people
remembering

you
found a credit card,
we were walking on a class field trip,
we voted you should buy candy with it,
you said
no, honesty is the best

and when I was at the toy store,
saw a dollar in my father's wallet,
needed a dollar for a pack of baseball cards,
when he was not looking,
when I did not buy a pack of baseball cards,
I remembered that
such is the meaning of history.

Trying to stomach vague emotion
we are instantly unsure of the moment
down by the creek,
in the tree-house,
so near to the source
where we first saw the nest,
and then the bird
and then the slingshot.

We walk in the silence of a sparrow
back to the moment.
My friend digs with his bare hands.
The dirt breaks easily.
"It is for the bird," he explains.

I climb to the nest to see the eggs.
They are not like the eggs
my mother buys in the supermarket.
They are small, dirty; not an easy, simple white.
"Do you think it was the mother?"
I ask. My friend
weighs the bird in his hands,
carefully plants it in the ground,
methodically sweeps the soil back over it,
before saying, "yes."

Remembering a story, I
build a raft out of twigs,
place the nest on my raft of twigs,
and watch it dissappear downstream,
before going home.

These things interrupt my interruptions.

In that other life, I prayed over you,
my only thoughts, salvation,
your suffering, my tears,
your frustration, my sleepless night,
your answer, my redemption.

The foreign words arrive from some grave.
You tell me you are baptized,
a husband, a wife,
you thank me for your eternity,
you ask the familiar questions -
"When I die, will you do my work for me?"
"Where has my child gone?"

Now, the cry emanates from the distance,
in the distance, in the memory, into the
now; it is you who tell me
who I am.

Two-thirty. Joe's red
Porsche painted dark with night.
A head, my head,
blurred in the wind.
85 mph down Metric,
damning stoplights, yelling
the sidewalk people nobody sees, yelling
the harmony of bass-riddled "smells like teen spirit,"
yelling the shadows of rage.

Three A.M. Echoes.
Conversations. MTV. Freedom.
Jumping the fence. Joining
them, spa soothing,
college girls, don't
guess we're lying about age.
Security guard. Who lives
here? I do. Prove it.
Heart-heavy knock on
a silent door. Tired woman.
Crack up before we can do it.
Run.

Three-thirty. Ancient
Hispanic lady waiting, waiting
not amused. We are
amused. Debating
steak and eggs versus hotcakes.
Feeling the invisible sun
evaporate our skin.
Watching the invisible summer
evaporate their skin.
Eating. Plotting to
escape without pay. Plotting
what comes next.
Got to do something next.
Running out the door
into Austin night.
Our night.

Was Austin the same for you?
Could you see me, alone
in the tired sophistication of
a quaint coffee shop,
painting the picture through the
web of poetry?
Did you, when you weren't denying
that you could fall in love with a computer,
imagine me in the image
of your God?

When we moved close enough,
when we first looked into our eyes,
void of recognition,
hung on a disillusioned rope,
lost for the words, for the image,
did you long for the loneliness,
the long summer evenings,
the sound of nobody's voice
on your laptop, sounding,
"you've got mail?"

Marinate the steak.
Let it sit. Fry until crisp.
Chop up lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers.
Fry the egg sunny-side up.
Pile shredded pork upon it.
Add rice -
your food pornography awaits the
plastic-wrapped disposable chopsticks.

The fish rotting in the sun-baked barrel
thinks not of nuoc mam,
thinks not of his juice keeping rice comfortably moist,
thinks not of his insides inside of you,
thinks not.

Like last evening,
I came over and ate your mother's rice,
squirmed in your father's eyes,
ate everything on my plate
(with a fork, after your brothers laughed),
and said cám on, patting my belly.
She wants you to marry me,
thinking to make you whole again.
He sees that I am white -
that settles things.
I would object, but
whenever I look up
he is still Vietnamese.

Items fifty-nine through sixty-eight
all differ in one word -
rice with tomato, cucumber, lettuce, egg, shredded pork,
and something dead.
Who would I offend more, if I didn't eat her -
the dead cow, the dead fish?
I think they think not about difference.

I slowed as I drove by your temple
this morning, trying to ignore
incense burning around the mandarins.
No one eats mandarins in restaurants.
I wonder if your ancestors aren't starving
for rice with nuoc mam,
but you say they're making mandarin casserole
for a mandarin potluck with my ancestors.
You're right, of course,
I see them all, reclined against a table,
wondering why your mother never taught you
to prepare com thit nuong,
so I could get around to asking you sooner.

Buddha told me it was
in my mind.
If you think hard enough,
in your mind,
you can leapfrog over the maze,
as long as you're facing east.

If you're confused, running through the streets
with your empty ghosts,
if you see enough to not see them clearly,
there is a place that is not a place
where they spend their welfare checks,
where it is too dark to care that
Buddha speaks his language
and Jesus speaks his language
and the congregation understands only
the ritual clatter of two dollar pieces on the floor.
The sermon you will hear is the silent sermon,
yelling deep into the darkness,
then dying, a whisper.

When you run into Jesus
on your way back to the station,
this is what you do:
say "Không biet nói Tieng Anh"
and if he says back "Tôi nói Tieng Viet"
mutter something about the maze
and run.

It does no good.
The earth has lost its time.
There is no time
for a cracked hourglass, searching for
fragments of fragments, the dispossessed
are too busy possessing, the lost
search for drug money.
Somewhere, somehow, someone
is remembering to forget a world of forgetting,
as Jesus begs for fish 'n chips,
and Buddha rests cross-legged
below a statue lion, smoking a pipe,
laughing randomly at a joke nobody sees.

My sister, she read my poetry
before I left and resurfaced.
I didn't understand.
She watches, too.

Turn it down on that "Waitress" song;
they're sleeping and wouldn't understand
what we've found channel-surfing,
talking silence around her quivering voice.

What can you say,
when you realize she's
grown into and out of you
at once, in Dreamtime.

The piano invents ivory chords
without sheet music, Tori's apron
flies, falling snowflakes, winter
cooling faster than I.

You were three dreams, or ten,
talking like Chinese old men around a chess board;
purple sunshine rambling on past dusk.
I heard the summer's wind
and you whispered, bla bla bla,
something important. I was not being important,
thinking of Chinese characters spilt quietly in an alley
with the yellow.

You were
resting stillness on my pillow,
breathing in, out -
the yellow illumination of night breath.
I was here, far away, where you and I
drift along the Atlantic,
searching for India.

You will embrace, tonight. I will
long for your lips and yellow moonless light.
You will whisper in my ear,
"let us escape to New Orleans
so that we may live alone in the yellow million faces."
I will hide in my kitchen and chocolate milk
until I am sure you are gone,
and I will sleep 2000 years.

Two poets meet in a bar
and the girl says hi,
and the guy says hi,
like an old joke,
and neither can read the frozen faces
because there are no pages,
and even so, who can be sure
who really meant what when they wrote
one lonely starlit night.

Commonality is, in turn, their curse
and when they brave a stare
into each other's hypnotic blue eyes,
they cower fiercely,
stealing their a thousand poems,
and then, they return to their
safe poetry anthologies and normal apartments
to suck out all the marrow of
leftover fried chicken bones.

Everyone's a poet.

Suppose, for instance, that such perfection awaits everyone
(the dream, ah, the dream of discovering life outside of TV dinners),
who is to say Cupid is this or fights against which creator -
the television producer, Karl Marx, gods warring over who sleeps with what mortal ...

We'll be demanding a refund before long.
Wait for the look on your face when the salesclerk
calls you by name, and for a brief second, it makes sense.
You're being set up by the practical jokester.

And you thought love was a serious matter?

What, with the background music and the language -
the passion! the sweetness
of falling in love so deep that life and death vanish.
You have no choice but to want to make your own story;
like the one in the good book, where he says,
"Enter not into temptation..."
'Cause then they'll pay attention and say,
"Wow, he's just like Mel Gibson in that one movie,
when he wore a kilt.
His life meant something."

But (and there must be a but
to save yourself from yourself) you think,
how tearfully inconvenient,
when IBM pays for weekly DVD rentals;
how impossible to stay hanging on your cross
and not cry mercy; and to live;
like refraining from slapping the snooze button
when the alarm clock's redeeming screech reminds,
"It is now 8 AM, Saturday morning,
and you have nothing scheduled today
except an appointment to change the world."

Parents and poor scholarly types marvel
as the speech connects the dots to JFK,
quoting the scripture of the Catholic martyr,
"Ask not what Oxford's book of quotations can do for you ..."
Quotes can be poetic, and poetry is
the only time mother saw grandpa cry -
mechanically soft drops collecting on his German chin -
when he watched the TV capture them
burying the man so hot,
even Marilyn Monroe wanted Jackie's piece of him.

(God knows what Marilyn Manson would want of him).
Words have the significance of
a tree branch tumbling from Brazilian rainforest canopy
on top of undiscovered exotic mushrooms.

Somewhere, in a young dot-painting of hats,
they have come closer to a more crucial overwhelming question.
At the tip of tomorrow's tongue
they obsess with forbidden words,
like Everest tourists in a random act of nature,
caught suddenly aware of mortality;
OD'd, in yesterday's hallucinations.

If I wanted to walk in a school like Bruce Willis;
if I were on some divine mission to rid the world
of young, ignorant jocks and niggers and Christians,
I'd wait 'till now, after Star Wars,
and I'd at least be so charitable as to
not go down in a gentle library.
I'd want to donate the implications of one final rage --
the uncomfortable comfort of television-addicted mothers,
no longer capable of remembering LBJ's war,
only Milosovech's audacity:
"How dare they try our sons,
prisoners of war!"

You'll awake one busy morning,
still on the edge of some great discovery,
and pull the blanket back over your head,
desperately trying to remember what made life worth dreaming;
but her face escapes into a random someone else
as the Muppets enter and start the Christmas carols,
and you're stuck in a testing center, translating vergessen,
wondering whatever happened to those playoff-bound Houston Oilers.

She'll return only on special occasions,
when the cloud cover never quite clears enough
to see Venus eclipse Mars;
or when you're staring at the second hand and The Atlantic
for three hours on Friday night at Barnes and Noble,
wondering where she hangs out nowadays;
or when you die, not in the arms of Marius,
but in the stretcher, where some guy in white
asks you to focus at his finger, and repeats and repeats,
"Can you remember your name?"

All you can do is cry and hope the flowers really grow.

The paralyzing movement of moonshine dress.
The delicious rapture of shared swift glances.
The dancing tears of denying eyes.
The quest, the song, the words, the longing.

The nervous strands of sandy stars.
The scentless aroma of uneasy breeze.
The warming touch of iced sea mist.
The night, the sea, the me, the alone.

You have long, midnight, spiraling hair;
skin so white you can hang with dwarves
and sing - oh, yeah; some sweet melody.
Tori Amos is your philosopher,
and we have China in common
as we first met at a sixth street New Year's party.

Not once, did I discover that your eyes are green,
but soon, I know your favorite dress is blue,
exotic enough to lure everyone into chasing you (the rabid dogs).

Jealousy would lead to fights and tears
and half-hearted break-ups and career moves to
what? New York? Only love and hate
could drive you away from Texas,
where you still insist Stevie Ray Vaughn roams like a bat
in Colorado River twilight, strumming his brother's guitar.

But it all, inevitably, comes into focus, when one night,
both of us returned to our makeshift roots,
satiation will fall up into cloudless skies
and I will remember the final culmination
of life brought meaning in you.
You, on past reflection, ah,
well, you may remember nothing, for all we care.
It will be of little relevance to this
present lived in the future
(which shall be forgotten as soon as you have forgotten it).
The only significance is me hiding
in your breath, floating into the stars -
the oblivion of tomorrow.

Ah, but your story begins and ends like this -
with what simply amounts to the casual tragedy
of me, awake, in the morning
sipping OJ and reading the sports section.

Remember
ghosts of bluegrass music
and vampire bats
are like you are like this poem is -
only imagination.

His face turns sugar-sticky as he attempts to lick the falling cream
and tell me, all at once, what Nintendo tricks he has learned
during my college Sabbath.
I, in trying to recall how I once thirsted for the mysteries
of hidden levels and game-pad combo's,
return once again to the intrigue
of the new chocolate-swirl flavor in my hand.
The emperor of ice cream could never prophecy so well as I
that exactly half way down the cone, the kid will announce
that he's full, at last, and ask to run off to reenact
the heroic rituals of the evening movie.

The view into the window distracts communion.
There are two of them, talking to the black man in shorts and a white tank top -
a man and a lady, in their Sunday best.
A business deal?
They're exchanging papers over coffee.
No, I like to imagine that they're J-dub's
persuading about faith and things.
The irony of it -
them, inside the chapel, oblivious to the deity behind it.
This is the one true peace, here, worshipping the fast-food gods,
quietly surrounded by night air and screaming kids,
wishing upon Sagittarius for love and wealth and those normal things,

I am investigating the McDonald's playground,
gone Protestant at some indiscernible moment
between mine and my brother's youth.
Oh, these twelve years. Blasphemous revelations
have decreed a new sacrament -
excommunicating the sacrilege of pebble-sanded grounds
and metal slides that burn and freeze like hell in weather.
No longer will wooden fortresses hold condemning jungle gyms
while youth dares to cross the sinful abyss.

The red pride of courage was the reward, then.
In this enlightened age, such journeys are risky temptations for youth;
so my brother partakes of brilliantly colored plastic -
red, yellow, green, blue.
Inside, there is rumored to lie a paradise of gadgets -
wheels, mechanical arms, rotating satellite dishes ...
Experience blinds us from the full scope
of swiftly unstable paradise.

Forget the gods of Adam's playscapes;
he will not recognize a difference.
Heaven is the bonding innocence of McDonald playgrounds
and 39-cent swirl cones -
twelve years has taught that
salvation needs be an insured certainty.

of color, like iMacs, so you won't frown
upon the boring journey. You'll ingest
much of that clear blue water, so don't miss
a glance at its turquoiseness. Other seas

are so polluted. Be glad that you drown
beside copulating strings of the best
white, spiked, happy coral to be found this
side of the gold sun, which so brilliantly

penetrates the ocean above - a crown
on this ever-growing salt-water tank. Suppressed
by it, let imagery relax you; then kiss
a passing shark before you are deceased.

Two! is the answer. But seriously, though,
I must profess, my dear professor,
of a certain modernism inherent to her voice,
though God knows what I mean in this.
Maybe I mean that tricky allusion to the clouds.
Oh, yes, surely you must see it too.
Angels and clouds - they are both white, and fly.
How clever to allude to the insignificant!

Honestly, though, I didn't notice clouds
at midnight or 1 or 2 A.M.
when I sat down and read the anthology ...
last night ...
for the first time.
Yeah, I know - one shouldn't cram for poetry,
but I spent most of class trying to date the girl next to me,
and poems are short and easy -
it's so tempting to shrug them off for tomorrow.

Let me tell you a secret, though.
Come closer and I'll tell you why
I know nothing of H.D. or Stevens or Gertrude Stein.
See - when I was reading last night,
I discovered how much I love Louis Bogan.
Her poetry penetrates on sight,
snaking out of the page and stoning me immobile.
My mind is still trapped there.

So you can see
how I fell in love with poetry last night,
and forgetting modernism,
I just couldn't cram for poetry.

Or some would just take,
take who they saw or could get.
You'd slay a dragon and instantly
she was yours - no questions asked -
she was yours.

But today you have to
read minds.
There is fear; there is caution.
She must be ...
And you must be ...
because you know,
you know the difference
between love and passion,
between the meaning and the trivial.

With friends like him
it is of little wonder that
tonight, I should make literal that phrase
as I convince,
no
remind myself
it is better to have love and lost ...

Actually,
for a rose,
fire is so much more entertaining and
meaningful
than my garbage disposal.

At most, the skin on my ankle
will grow purple-
the embarrasment of bruised pride,
as my curve ball returns
effeciently
spreading my body under a thin layer of mound dust.
And I, in agony, admit to myself that
my relief pitcher might actually
hold their lead to seven.

drives hands to uncover them, seeking the hidden
treasure of Cumorah, as if in new
gold-laced, yet-unbroken pages waits the
entire Dead Sea, where revelation ensues

naturally from the ancient. You understand
the sensation, having smelt fresh leather-
bound volumes before, the embroidered gold
marking your name with Wisdom. But all things weather

time. Wisdom freezes. Old pages are worn, colored -
altogether too comfortable. Climb
the new, where you find rebirth and God - like
returning to Chapman's Homer a second time.

When I can sit back, finally
with children and grandchildren
to talk of purpose,
to talk of truth,
to talk of years,
as a spectator of this quickly becoming
all too brief Great Circle-

I hope that I may inherit the very same
spotless, dignified, noble grace
with which you so confidently rock
that grand old rocking-chair.

it remains yet to satisfaction unanswered what substance he survived on then when his gardens subdued to winter when his paintbrush having watched so helplessly oh ever so reluctantly beauty abandon its needing presence as if the defiant but not impenetrable faith of Elie Wiesel when even the creative impending blindness of his cataracts could not offer Impressionism its crucial influence

perhaps he felt as I now do surrendering as yet another She leaves leaving empty the poet's love without a soul to write of a name to mutter every waking second or even so much as a face to worship imprinted in ballads of youthful romance all breaking even the Herculean strength of my desire to love

perhaps he entered as I now do into the torturous hollows of poet's purgatory left forever loving (ah see they cannot take that) but always wondering what how when and why forever wanting of the invisible impossible having only the satisfaction of paintings of yesterday's lilypads

she tosses she turns a quiet rest
far away the nearing quest
(and somewhere lovers kiss and hug)
but laughing tears I die in jest

yesterday hides and I shall ignore
how quickly slips its awkward horrors
as present rushes in future did save
loving for dying for wanting for so

her ashes they shed an autumn's sleep
laugh I will but tears I weep
and angel ought I but fool must win
the victor lost the unlikely meet

she shocks they awe intake her scene
beauty so near beauty they dream
the they in I the them in me
seeking for longing for reaching for flee

Coherency as warmth does rain
I think beyond I thought today
I wished the wind (so urgently cries
and pushes into so hard denies)

the seagulls sweep into the sand
so quickly from an ocean land
and sense forgets the lack of sea
I think beyond I thought my sleep

truth does lie while lies did stand
I write of nothing of nothing can
something will but nothing won't
as poem confirms the loss of both

the pen surrenders and ink will fly
beyond comes close to take my eyes
and rain will steal to share its pain
(the thought it thinks it knows no fame)

all and all the sun is done
the skin it warms as poem it comes
the thought is final ends do meet
the think looks back and was this me?

big, wet, round,
droplets

show proof of
fallen

teardrops from some
heaven.

Listening to the mockers who feast only to grow into a bigger fuel
for the never ending fire.

Let us sit around the fire and hope to warm ourselves from the cold,
Tell tales of what could have been and comfort ourselves with a blanket of hope,
Roasting on the phoenix fire our untouched chestnuts,
Watching little chickens cry that the sky is falling apart,
Feeling the rain all around, wanting to catch one final tear
but not finding a tear willing to fall as we cuddle up and hide from our fear
what could have been.

And hope that we can one day afford a heater that is not fire,
and roll the dice of happy fate.

Do you care, do you care?
Live men sleep in Dead Man's Lair,
Breaking the lens of their eyeglasses to see reality?
Tossing and turning in the beds they make, not of flowers, but of snakes;
rarely of roses and mostly of rocks, shivering in their encompassing blanket
what could have been.

Is it best we leave what could have been uncontemplated,
and weep for the tragedy that is?

We sit around the Christmas tree and anxiously tear apart
the wrapping paper, only to find boxes stuffed with nothing.