August 20, 2009

The Banjo and The Pony

As I remember, it was near Christmas

and my father let me choose.

One was a mammal, and I was just seven

so I chose the one with hooves.

But sometimes I heard that banjo unchosen

when I lay down in the dark

and I swear that the notes rang

like the hooves of my pony

as I rode him across our farm.

My pony he grew into a stallion

and he ran so fast it stung.

Fireflies died against my chest as we’d ride

and wind blasted hard through my lungs.

But where was the banjo I’d forsaken?

Where were the notes I’d never played?

Sometimes I’m sure we all are haunted

by the songs that got away.

October 28, 2008

Have You Ever Seen My Grandmother Dancing?

It is such a beautiful thing. She has called

the rhythm through her tired, blue shoes,

called it from the soil she has walked

for almost eighty years, called it all the way

back from her first date with my grandfather

sixty-one rivers ago, when they met at

at an Ohio jukebox joint and stood along

a freshly painted wall. A wall so pale with

promise that I can almost smell the sweet

weight of the zinc against the night.

It is almost as if they are leaning against

a wall of paper on which all of our lives

are about to be written. Then, she

puts her hand in his and entrusts her life

to his smile. And they dance through wars

and childbirth, through airplanes and

snowdrifts, through nights swarming

with ghosts and breakfasts of eggs

scrambled gold. Through surgeries and

sunsets. Through way back when to this.

And as they push away from that wall,

out into the wild calligraphy of life,

I say a prayer for them, though I’m not yet born,

I say a prayer because I will be born and

because her dance is my dance on the

road of blood and time. And long before

her dance is finished, I will read

what her feet danced to write.

October 11, 2008

 Today on the wild roads of Idaho, while a hurricane churned the Pacific Ocean, I drove through a bizarre winter blizzard, one of those unexpected and severe symptoms of global warming and the destruction of our heretofore predictable climate. Dakota and I left Boise on clear roads that rapidly grew fuzzy and crusted and slick. Snow fell in stadium-fulls, so thick that the windshield wipers grew chunky beards and the windshield silently shattered as we watched. A thin crack, a vein in the glass, made its ominous way from the driver’s side to the passenger side. Then it stopped. We were driving a Scion Xb on roads fit for a Landcruiser. But we were too far from Oregon to turn back, so we pushed on, even as the tires jerked us towards the edges of the road, even though we had to slow until the speedometer read 0. After a few hours of this, we came to a standstill behind an eighteen wheeler truck. Traffic clotted around us. We sat for an hour until a man walked past and told us that two semis had collided up ahead. Another hour passed and we inched along for about a mile. All the while, snow piled on the hood of the car and we kept the heat cranked high. Then we stopped again. This time a semi was stuck in front of us, it’s tires spinning and spitting, but not moving forward. No, not forward, but backward, straight at us, so I backed up and veered sideways and we missed being smashed only to end up behind another line of cars behind another stuck eighteen wheeler. No one had forseen the severity of this storm, so folks were getting stuck left and right. The woman behind us poured cat litter under her tires. The eighteen wheeler on our right had a single set of chains that it tried, to no avail, over and over again. Then, a madman in an Outback tried to drive on the snowbound shoulder and slid into the deep ditch of a median, his tires spinning in snow. A silver truck tried to pull him out, but instead, the truck got pulled in and both were stuck. Another hour passed slowly by. Then, at last, a trooper walked up into the mess. A few minutes later a plow and two huge towtrucks came and hooked up a massive rope, yes, rope to one of the eighteen wheelers and pulled it out. Likewise with all the other stuck trucks, semis, cars. We were never stuck, but since our tires were so low, we often felt snow scraping against the underside of the car and our tires frequently jerked and slipped and I had to veer and brake and stay alive. It was slow all the way into Utah. We trickled along on highways that looked more like pock-marked vanilla frosting on a cake of ice. It was a terrible drive. In Utah, when we hit rain and sleet, I sighed and relaxed and was relieved. The hotel shower, at eleven, felt like lava on my skin as I scrubbed the snow away, again and again. I also missed my first meeting with the former poet laureate Ted Kooser, since we had to take a southern route back east. No way could we win against the snows and fifty-mile-per-hour Wyoming wind. All the same, the day was poetry. Cold, dangerous & triumphant.