Don’t Take Me Alive

Nor’easter

In July, the beach thought it knew
everything, interviewing the ocean, never
giving it a chance to speak.  I saw this

happen once on stage, the author
surrendering to the moderator’s relentless ego,
becoming audience instead of trying

to compete. But February soon sluiced
the dunes we’d danced to keep our feet
from burning, made it a runnel of frozen

foam, uprooted heather, disgorged
seaweed, a dead merganser pinwheeled
in a sheaf of rushes, busted slats

of lobster traps—the usual suspects
curated like a thesis on the empty
parking lot.  Puddles, misplaced

sand and wrack—the rhetoric of after-
math, of something moving on
to the next project.  The storm incapable

of wondering if we’d ever been
interested in anything it had to say.
The gulls already descended to bash

the mollusks’ foreheads, demand the simple
answers of viscera, wings behind
their backs like professors leaving lecterns

to do some serious thinking.

21st Century Pastoral with Draft Horse and Quarterpipe

Gone the backboard, the squeaking trampoline,
the pit, spikes ringing answers to rusty
shoes. The barn’s buttress rattles—a rearing
plywood wave, helmeted thrasher stalled
on the lip to pivot and nosedive its face.
                                                                And, muzzle
down, tearing at paddock weeds, the retired
Log-Dragger, old Plough-Puller,
Furrow-Carver with a swinging dick.

I salute him on my twenty-mile loop,
lift a hand from handlebars and he the grandeur
of his grazing head as if to say, with zero
impulse to flick those enviable bangs, “America!
All those centuries spinning your wheels, still
playing with yourselves, getting nowhere!”

Downsizing

Before she sells her house,
moves to a small apartment,
my mother must evict
the raccoon from her attic.
She’s a frazzled bale
of nerves: shingles, blood
pressure, tears, real
estate and estate lawyers,
arguments among her kids
all avalanching to this
territorial male who chewed
the vent’s louvers to squat
in her rafters sixteen years
after my father’s death.
The pest control guy
constructs a cage around
the splintered orifice.  “Ugly,”
she says, considering buyers,
pointing up at the Giacometti
lobster trap fastened
to her home in reverse, inside
out: the animal exits,
can’t return.  We watch
his antics the next day:
apoplectic acrobat upside
down, gripping the peak
with hind paws like a trapeze
and gnawing at the complicated
seven hundred dollar
assemblage of wire, desperate
for a way back in.

The Tattoo

your daughter gets on the inside
of her wrist before she moves
to California is a circle encircled
by dots, a doodle you construe
as turtle or gestural solar
system that evening she peels
her sleeve.  “Our family,” she
corrects.  “At dinner.”  Her siblings
and you arrayed at the table.
Neither the name of some
defunct crush, nor crude
swastika’s dado, nor skull
engulfed in conflagrations
of cobras, nor any foreseeable
hieroglyphs of regret. How 
to admonish this blemish no
bigger than a pence, 
this emblem of embrace, appeal
to, please, be excused?

Don’t Take Me Alive

–for B.K.

Forty years later, my listening loops
on Steely Dan’s Royal Scam: ghost
of the ding where my roommate’s record skipped,
Carlton’s guitar caught mid-trill
at the end of an interlude. Even now,
in this uncorrupted digital clone, I can’t
extract my tires from that ditch. The needle
snagged every time we played it. You
had to stop what you were doing, stomp
the floor, walk across the room to make it
right, help the music get over itself,
whatever casual violence you’d wrought
(spill or scratch?) now part of the song