Mis en scene

1.

Only bits of time now
flecks--
[to find fullness
is banished, counted out.]

What wandering odor of death
could [be] sweep[ing] us forward
so fast we count to[. . .]

Only bits, flecks,
only tired light.

But there [is and] can be
crude awakenings in such scenes,

if only to trace [everyday]
some kind of [now] pulled down voice.

2.

Current conditions combine to deepen,
and in bursts.

They sit down, catch up, begin to talk about cancer.
Someone's aunt comes in, sits.
The conversation turns, grudgingly, to
pumpkin soup, cousins, they ask early
for the tab, ask early how we ever
end up just here,
just where we are.

3.

Still some things
cling
to a fullness
they hammer
a dawn
to their sleeves, drag
it to work
and bed
the trouble
like poetry
for God
is not where
to begin
but to end
where to end

4.

2% broken
open and noiseless.
6 piles of vomit,
seemingly unrelated.
They spit up the flames
they once swallowed.
1 taken with song.
3 asking for something:
directions, to please watch a cart.
I tell them I am lost,
too, I am on someone else's
time. This makes no one happy,
but when has honesty
ever been as much use
as approximation? I kick
a pile of glass outside an Irish
bar a hairpin turn from
the Westside Highway.
A few hours earlier
4, at least, pounded each other
with their fists.
I once heard honest description
was a form of the Good,
was moral and all of that.
Having earned the right
to be trusted, the man who said
that cited Thoreau's vision, latticed
on its thick, study prose.
In 8 or 9 hours
someone else's drinking
will begin to add up.
The man who just
brushed against my life
really wanted me to know
that Fairway there
is a terrible place
to shop. I asked
"have you ever tried
their whitefish," becoming
an example in a story
he will tell in the dark.

5.

We go on, the family turns
and grows and we learn to say
"we are blessed."

Although someone, somewhere is older,
we name the wandering light
and surrender.

What happened was that he broke off.
I could feel him tensing rhythmically
as the crowds passed.

I couldn't afford nameless violence
or even the kind that has a name.
When they snapped my photo
I could never write victim.

Only a mistake-mishapen love
that grows a meaner wilder.

We gain on pushing them out.
The world only drags in
on my shoes
which I quickly retire.

6.

My old friend works for murderers and drunks now.
My other friend sells enemas to China.
I have an old friend who sends me postcards
from mountaintops in Tibet, he is only
a traveller now. I have a friend who
mainly does yoga. He is better than me.
My other old friend is a Captain in the Army.
Some government type once asked me
if I had any reason to believe that someone else
could blackmail him, any dirt whatsoever,
and I said no and meant it.
I have a friend who, whenever he gets drunk,
talks about quitting his bank job and working
for the discovery channel and I try to coach him
to maybe combine his business background
with a career in science or television, but that's
not really what he wants to hear.
I have a friend who, if such a thing existed,
would be called an animal saint.
Three of these friends have had
serious breakdown, they scared me so much, and
we never find ways to talk about it.

7.

This engine balks because the wife is beautiful.

That fish, reaching his teenage years, refuses
to swim properly and is eaten.

The stubborn will of the earth is hardly noted.

"If you're going to be a scientist, you'll need these,"
she said.

Surfers dream on their bellies, on a board between
two slipstreams. Believe me,
approximately.

Students dream in their seats, a lesson blurring by
like a bad film that is sometimes funny.

My friend writes, "tell H. to dream big,"
and I think that is the nicest thing anyone
has ever wished for him, but then I think
of Don Quixote and three breakdowns,
the difficult life of the dreamer.

Success is ruby red to the grapefruit
growers, green to bankers, and colorless
to me. But my wife is beautiful and kind,
and I understand what children become
and the earth, and I have the safety glasses
she gave me when she took my whim
seriously, and I know both surfers and
students, and somewhere, someone
is cradling my son in fine thoughts

and all of this has to mean something.

8.

Landing here a man with four
purposes
and ways. If he heads out
for light and fortune
or light fortune
or long ways. . . . He has four,
five purposes, six. He trembles
a little, remembers reading
something serious about the man who
splits himself
into too many men.
It was pitched as sin, this splitting.

He does not want goodness to be
a mere conceit he pays a brief homage to
on his way somewhere else.

Why the perpetuation of selves, this
circus act of juggling
on a highwire . . . is he simply trying
to impress the bearded lady or the man
with the tiniest head?

9.

Then, what we cling to
clings to us
just as much.

The tiny gods hardwire their upkeep into creation.

What is the great theme--
or will you simply be
counted off?

Will your body serve another's
story, the one
all the lined up bodies
tell? Who will judge
such events,
such tiny calibrations:
the turning towards, the turning away,
prayer that straightens the spine, prayer that . . .

Wanting to make a grace
of tiny, unkempt things

so that my desire grows
small as a keyhole,
not large as a cage,

I will cover the miles today,
and the miles will cover me up,

and when I come home and
play with my son and cook
and worry and forget and
turn out the last light,
I will put my hand
on the small of my wife's back
and know the joy of luck and limit--
as a near wall sends me back with speed.