Holding On
No one wants to go
there’s never
a right time
A single leaf
alone
holds on
Friends sons
daughters parents
disappear
discover what
forever means
A single leaf
holds on
alone
A quiet embrace
a midnight kiss
a robin’s chirp
a young boy’s giggle
A single leaf
torpid
alone
A breeze caresses
a summer face
freedom blows across
a barren dome
of sky
A single leaf
holds on
stubborn to its stem
Gentle gesture
of hand in hand
wrinkled
withered
turned to ash
A single leaf
holds on
blanched
trembling
Moments of mercy and misery
a cardiac monitor sings
an unvarying song
that never resolves
A single leaf
alone
holds on
lets go
begins its silent flight
towards the soft landing
that is
no landing
at all
Ruth
There were no flashing lights,
no guard rail or ringing bells,
only the cruel sun mocking
the blue sky and the dissonant
clang of tires over a cattle guard—
tires that crushed granite-pocked
earth along the two-track. This
was rural Wyoming in the 70s.
Ruth left their ranch near Bufford
and waited in her car while a train
blocked her way. Some galoot
from Laramie in a rusted-out pickup
behind her laid hard on his horn.
Couldn’t he see the train, she must
have thought. Rushed by the young
jerk, Ruth gunned her caddy as soon
as the train passed. She didn’t see
the other train barreling down the
second set of tracks. The engine
cut her in half. Joe, her son and my
best childhood friend, was summoned
from their ranch house. There’s been
an accident, someone told him. When
he got to the railroad crossing he stood
in wind that sliced through late fall—
cold, sharp, sere—wind that slapped
him into a savage world
of severed hope.
The Eyes of Texas
Sun invaded my half-sister’s living room
like unwanted enlightenment. She sits
in an overstuffed holding her Pekinese
telling me what an asshole my father had
been when he abandoned her and her mother
eighty-nine years ago. I sit across from her
in a room with seventeen relatives I never
knew I had (compliments of my father’s errant
youth). My half-sister’s grandson politely asks
if he can play with her BB gun. The gun case is
the centerpiece of my half-sister’s living room.
She nods and I take it that this is something
the boy looks forward to when he visits his grandma.
After an afternoon of shooting in her backyard,
this Lubbock boy announces that he killed one
squirrel and blinded another. My newfound
relatives either smile with admiration or ignore him.
I’m in Texas where cruelty is served-up
on the nightly news while my half-sister, dressed
in her Hobby Lobby t-shirt, eats barbecue from
Chick-Fil-A. I’m in Texas where what it means to
be a man is measured by how much booze one can
drink and still shoot straight, where the wildly
popular governor delights in sending unsuspecting
immigrants to cities in the north that can’t provide
for them and orders razor wire to shred their hopes
of finding a place to give their children a future.
No wonder my great-nephew loves to kill and maim.
At fifteen, he’s growing into manhood. He decides,
like a god, what will live and what will die,
what will see and what goes blind.
The eyes of Texas are upon him.
Wine and Roaches
With apologies to Ernest Dowson
The first of the month our ships came in:
Thirty bucks from my mother, whatever
Bill could squeeze out of his father, a paltry
sum from the State Department
for our Somali roommate, Omar.
Student-rich, we opened our doors to friends
from the University and anyone else who’d
heard there was a party on Twelfth Street.
This was the sixties—free love, free sex,
and free dope if you could score it.
We kept our hash in Omar’s hair—
a real afro since he was a real African.
Jugs of hearty burgundy, blotters of acid, reams
of rolled joints, Crosby Stills Nash and Young,
bongs, the Beatles, the Stones, Ginger Baker,
Eric Clapton—the Cream of our rockin’ crop.
As the night wore on, our basement apartment
took on the sheen of a fumarole, so dense were
the clouds of cigarette smoke mixed with lofty
vapors of grass and hash. At its crescendo
someone I didn’t know, had never seen, asked
if he could borrow my ‘65 Mustang. I handed
him the keys and passed out. What a miracle
when he brought my car back two days later!
They were not long, those days of wine
and roaches. After the cleanup (who needed
ashtrays when the floor was so broad and
inviting?), we realized that we were broke,
penniless, poverty-stricken. Still, we dined
like kings: spaghetti and ketchup during
the week, canned tuna, and Fritos on the weekends.
We got back to the garden. We were golden.
Unfinished
As a young man I finished every book I began,
which got me through some heady stuff:
Plato’s Republic, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,
Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
How many times I thought,
I can’t go on; I’ve had enough.
I’ve got to put this book away.
Youthful idealism kept me going.
Now, at 73, where every breath is a blessing,
every sunrise a gift of light, and time a tyrant
who may run out at the drop of a blood pressure,
I get a few hundred pages in and assess:
Is this book worth a chunk of my life?
I completed Ulysses, but wanted those precious
hours back.
As for Don Quixote, let’s just say that I don’t suffer
fools past page 200.
Throughout Swann’s Way, I fought off self-destructive
impulses (revolver or rat poison?) until I left
the cork-lined room, Marzipan, and the other
six volumes to the murky shadows
of someone else’s dusty library.
And with Vanity Fair—just how many mean girls
and boys did Thackery think I’d put up with?
Abandoning these great works of literature amounts
to sticking out my tongue at the brandy drinking,
cigar smoking, pooh-bahs who feel compelled
to tell me what I should enjoy.
Hey, did you hear that the new Michael Connelly
thriller is out? Harry Bosch is still hunting down
the bad guys and living up to his motto: either
everybody counts, or nobody counts.
Benediction
Thank you for the goddam birds singing.
Thomas Lux
Thanks for any novel in which snow or tea
or preferably both, play at least a minor role.
Thanks for late afternoon light in Pittsburgh—how
it shadow-calms our journey toward night.
Thanks for the cosmos that celebrates chaos in the
Northern Michigan winter sky—the ringed moon
and heavenly blur of the Milky Way.
Thank you for the chirpy voices of Gus and Grayson,
my neighbor’s kids, as they kick ball and yell at each
other: You pushed me, That’s a foul—ancient melodies
of brotherly love/hate that fills my heart with hope.
Thanks for a chicken, rubbed with salt, pepper,
lemon, olive oil, thyme and butter and roasted
to a blessed brown, hot out of the oven. Thanks also
for its fragrance that causes tongues to lick happy lips.
Thanks to Jack Ridl who teaches me, on his YouTube
broadcasts, to sanctify the quotidian and slurp
my tea with unabashed abandon.
Thanks to Otis, our neighbor’s dog, who hates
to go outside and gets revenge by rolling happily
in his own shit for half an hour.
Thank you for the quiet gleam on wet Hawthorn
needles when the sun comes out after days of rain.
Thanks for the friendship of the many poets who inspire
me, who make every day a benediction in stanzas and lines.
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