Everybody Knows
In childhood father said I was indelicate,
clumsy, straw bristles for digits and feet like oil drums.
About these things he was never wrong.
Yes, I’m a homewrecker.
That is, measure once, cut twice.
Patience left in the pocket of my other jeans.
But I persist, inserting crooked planks
in the gap-toothed decking, smearing caulk
on the surgical backsplash, twisting backwards
the marrettes of ceiling lamps to throw
some 60 flickering Watts into cobwebby corners
of a marriage. I’m trusted not to burn us down
and I don’t know why. On the ladder
as I curse in French I can’t believe
I’d risk us all before I’d call an electrician,
one who’d rob us blind for a job a chimp could do.
Me, whose greatest fear is burning alive.
So much that I’ve never used the sun
in a poem, leery of metaphors around
an H-bomb the source of all creation,
a thing which blinds us into silence
so that only lesser lights are speakable:
candles, coals in a wood stove, fridge bulbs.
Illumination that makes the things I can relate to.
Like a welder’s torch and rod,
fusing means toward an end in white hot lust.
Or the crackle of socks removed
in the dark: little blue gods deserting
dad’s drunken feet before the heft of his head
could topple him—the room as quiet
as a clearing once a blaze
has claimed a forest at the speed of gossip.
Fatal Flaws
I’m plummeting as we speak,
a cherub bucked from a thunderhead
before I fledged.
I won’t land at mother’s feet,
she who gave so much
that what remained cast no shadow.
I will splatter the shoes
of the man she married,
who built a house
on a pillow too small for joy.
From him I learned to treat the world
like a G.I.’s chocolate ration,
as last-ditch energy or currency for sex.
He taught me that if kindness
hugs a man beside his sons
it must be picking his pockets.
I was due to meet him
at the place where children say
of the quivering aspen,
Look dad!
That tree ate the wind and now it’s full!
but he was too busy
dying so slowly
it looked like natural causes.
I missed his end because hamartia
is not a flaw
but a missing of the mark.
I never heard his final words,
which were to wait
till he was gone
before I burned him,
before I cast him to the lake
and buried him in water.
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