Sleekit Cowrin’

When a caught mouse lay dead, for a week,
and stuck to the floor, I started setting
the traps on a few of my ex's and my old
floral salad plates. Late
one night, when I see one has sprung, I put it on the
porch, to take it to the woods in the morning, but by
morning I forget, and by noon—and by after-
noon the Blue Willow's like a charnal roof
in Persia where the bodies of the dead were put for the
scholar vultures to pick the text
of matter and the text of spirit apart.
The mouse has become a furry barrow
burrowed into by a beetle striped
in stripes of hot and stripes of cold
coal—head-first, it eats its way in
to the heart sweeter than dirt, to the mouse-bowels
saltier, beeswax and soap
stopped in the small intestinal channels.
And bugs little as seeds are seething
all over the hair, as if the rodent
were food rejoicing. And the Nicrophorous
cuts and thrusts, it rocks and rolls
its tomentose muzzle, and its wide shoulders,
in. And I know, I know, I should put
my dead marriage out on the porch
in the sun, and let who can, come
and nourish of it—change it, carry it
back to what it was assembled from,
back to the source of the light whereby it shone.

Love of Lines: Notes for an Apprentice Shingler

The injuries are small ones,
the blade slips from the cedar
slat to the kneeling knee,
or the plane slides
off the shingle's edge
and shaves the thumb knuckle.
Splinters are surprisingly
rare, but when the hands
are cold, the hammer glances
the galvanized nail
and slams the horny one,
pinching and blistering
the pellicle. This
is the worst.

What we labor over,
a swayback beach house,
rests on a rheumatic wharf,
our task to pluck
the worn wood scales,
add new bridgework, a shield
of George Washington teeth,
clamped against adversity.
We begin with the shingle iron
slipping it along the virgin
backside of loose dentures,
and pull so shakes fly off
in our faces, crack and splinter,
the sharp dry notes narrating
fifteen-plus years of weather.
Like dog years, this is ancient
beyond thinning and brittleness.
Where we find rot, we chisel out
the grainy porridge and fill
the gap with new pine,
thick wedges for warmth.

Wood chips in our eyes
make us cry a little,
but mostly we keep right on
through the small disasters
to batten down before nightfall,
our eye on the suture—
horizon stitching low
grey sky to our dark Atlantic.
Tar paper (or a new slick
synthetic stock that doesn't rip
and bears a name too New Age
for song) is whack-stapled
to weary ship-salvage boards,
top layer always over bottom
to keep rain water from seeping
back to wood. Then the sweet
new cedar shields we extract
from fresh bundles and fit,
side flush to side
and hammer in twice, milk
oozing from flat four-penny
heads, the soft white fur
of mold, like premature infant
fuzz, rising from wet wood
into the crisp autumn
turn of air.

Chalk lines are best
when workers hold each end,
one reaching to the center
to snap, the blue powder
mapping a million points
along a line so straight
the day's doubts are deleted
in its sure direction.
But a course of shingles
followed by another and another
parading up the house—these
hands saluting, soles of tree,
puerile soldiers sweet
as puberty, pressed side to side
so no one stands taller,
though some are fatter,
"hippos," and some are "weasel"-
thin, their bodies set
like brickwork so no two seams
meet—all the bathos of the week
is buried here. Lines
link lines to what we love
in these long hours, the wood
wine of it, the weighted plunge
and smack of hammer and nail,
the hard grip, hammer handle
to palm, the knock knock knock
answering back from neighboring
houses and street, wood and nail
and wood, even the smeared blood
marking the rough facade.
We swing and drum the day.

*

And when we finish, the lines,
stacks of horizons, paths to
an exacting place, meeting at trim
and window, foundation and roof,
are what we've made. Lines
where cold, rain, wind,
sleet, sun and snow end. Lines
we step across the street
to judge, and when they're fine
they're fine, and when they fail
they haunt. Order is easy to
plan for, hard to achieve. This
is what houses are about—
planes that meet along degrees
we trust. Lines that say,
The weather is up to you.

We unfasten our nail aprons
as the sun sends its light
into China's day. Toss
into the toolbox tape measure,
plane and knife,
hammer, chalkline and coping
saw, and head home to husband
or girlfriend or dog, or house—
house, bless it, though it
doesn't save us from ourselves.
And when we sleep, it is
the sleep of lines well made,
or lines that are not well,
marginally mis-measured,
but in our dreams slanting
earthward or rising toward
some inevitable convergence,
the confusion of infinite touch,
and so we return like some
floating angel to the house
and remove by glance alone,
five fresh courses
to correct our quarter-inch mistake.

When we wake, the error
dissolves into morning,
compulsion keeling into
the undefined plane of day
and its incorrigible knots.
In a year the high wheat
of the wood will fade to blue-grey,
the seams will open a crack,
for the wood has dried and shrunk.
The smell, once fecund as forests,
will be salted, and somewhere else
staging assembled, a house
stripped, a dog amused
at what trouble humans go to,
dangling their booted feet
at the face of a house
as the hammers hound the quiet
of day, as the afternoon arcs
around our deep imperfections,
and we measure with expectation
another course, another line.

Coaching Pitchers


I. Little League

When my only pitcher went wild
against the league's worst team,
I knew we had a cushion, hell, ten runs
at least. Time for a life-lesson. Like Zeus I towered
over him on the mound and poured the positive
into his anguished eyes. Said I wasn't taking him out
no matter what. And he walked the runs
in and in and in. Before the second inning
I should have known nothing would help him
but another sunrise.

I was raised to believe will
could do anything, lift you out of any kind of slump.
The short kid got shorter as the long day waned,
his eleven year old brow crawling with wrinkles.
I was Lear, now, had given my word,
and even my smart-ass centerfielder knew
not to come between the dragon and his wrath.
Trapped in my sovereignty,

I turned to stone
as the runs added up and we lost 29-27 and
the lesson sank in like a dull blade
just above my top vertebra, the one known
as the Atlas.


II. Pony League

When my only pitcher lumbered off the mound
at the perfect bunt and threw late to first,
I saw the other coach's eyes light up.
Next bunt, also perfect, also beat out,
bases loaded.

I moved Molasses at third
into concussion range, and still they bunted
straight at the mound past Molasses and later
past my stumbly first baseman, too,
and the runs poured in.

This one, I said, is Fate,
not my incompetence. How can anyone be that slow?
I can see him even now waddling toward the puffball
lolling in the grass, too late, oh my God, again,
too late.


III. Junior Varsity

The leadoff man for the team I'd never heard of
drilled a triple to right center, as did the next guy up.
What are the odds against two pitches and two triples
in the top of the first? Number three lined a mere single,
the cleanup, a double. Where do you get sixteen-year-old bats
like these? I stared at my new black shoes and then at
the tight face of my former shortstop in his mound debut,
only guy on the team who could really play. What have I done
to him. His shoulders sag already, but he wings another strike
and—Hallelujah!—it's dribbled to second where it holograms through Collier's glove
and rolls into right field. Throw to second's
fifteen feet off the ground and nobody's backing up.
Next guy homers. We had no slaughter rule back then,
and I'd die before calling it off. I walked back and forth
to the bench, passing their perfectly uniformed coach
who never tried to catch my eye. His guys were classy,
never jeered, never even smirked. They pitched, they fielded,
they jogged in fast after each inning. They circled my star
dispassionately, their eyes blank as Greek statues'.
Another case of pure bad luck. True, pitchers, quarterbacks,
field goal kickers—I never liked them. Too much relish
on those hotdogs. Maybe Fate, too, is an old lineman,
aching all over even in his youth, and maybe, between us,
we were trying to teach poor Bobby Levinson
how to suffer, how to lose.

Double

Three and a half decades now, and my heart still tightens
because I'm trotting giddy toward checkout
in the Old Gothic Gym, my precious punchcards
fanned like a royal flush—
Ryle, Russell,
Beckett, Kant, Fielding—when they vanish

up into a huge fist stared at by Coach Dole, autocrat
of linebackers and foghorn stupid. How long does it take
to read "PhiILang," "Epistemol," "BritNov,"
"ContemDram," "Aesthetics," and the others?

When his eyelids droop, something with sharp fins
banks in my stomach. My face burns. "Smitty,"
he fogs down at one of the cards, "Can't take this class.
Be late to practice on Wednesdays."
A ceiling fan
helicopters his head like Vulcan's halo.

My entire aching life holds its stinking breath.
"That's the Senior Seminar in my major," I say.
He pushes those big, empty eyes at me.
"Change your major," he says. "Major in sociology

like Dimmski and Dollard." In this memory I reach up
in silence like Augustine stealing a pear from paganism;
I pluck my cards from the fat fist; I wade through
the heat to the long table near the door.
I have bled,
benchpressed, blindsided, wildcatted, wedgebusted,

whacked, crunched, crashed, crapped in my pants at
practice, pissed in fourth quarter huddles, piled on and
been piled up, been All-American stomped and gouged.
I have farted in my own face. I have bounced my brain

against my own skull, have squatted, squashed, broke-down,
bearcrawled, duckwalked, slashed, swooped, and by God
levitated, I have trapped, kicked out, blitzed, and firestormed.
I have forearmed ferocious forever,
eternally bang-up
butted, have split giant triple teams, lips, chins, supraorbital

ridges, sprinted and wheezed and puked and
puked and sweated and puked for ten fall seasons, year-round training,
seven hellish, heroic springs. Though you zombie the zone
of the well-rung bell, though they stitch you all over

like Shelley's Monster, though you break the breakable,
sprain the sprainable, dislocate the dislocatable, it is best
to keep your swollen mouth shut and play the hand Mars
and Minerva have dealt you. None of the coaches ever spoke
again of my education. In 1970 I came fifteen minutes late

to practice one day a week and slipped on down
the linemen list. But, I told myself, I've still got
Philosophy and British Literature.
I thought
my double major was my secret, my ace in the hole.

To His Mother, Whose Name Was Maria

Invoked every sundown, it's you, painted on clouds
rouging our treasured plain and all who walk it,
with leaf-fresh kids and women damp from traveling,
city-bound, in the radiance of a just-stopped shower;
it's you, mother eternally young, courtesy of death's
plucking hand, rose at the fragrant point of unpetaling,
you who are the alpha of every neurosis, every torturing anxiety,
and for this I give you gratitude for time past, time present, time future.

Poverty

la cólera de pobre
tiene dos rios contra muchos mares.
— César Vallejo

Vallejo wrote that with God we are all orphans.
I send $22 a month to a kid in Ecuador
so starvation keeps moving on its bony burro
past his door—no cars, computers,
basketball shoes—not a bottle cap
of hope for the life ahead . . . just enough
to keep hunger shuffling by in a low cloud
of flies. It's the least I can do,
and so I do it.
I have followed the dry length
of Mission Creek to the sea and forgotten to pray
for the creosote, the blue salvia, let alone
for pork bellies, soy bean futures.
Listen.
There are 900 thousand Avon Ladies in Brazil.
Billions are spent each year on beauty products
world-wide—28 billion on hair care, 14 on skin
conditioners, despite children digging on the dumps,
selling their kidneys, anything that is briefly theirs.
9 billion a month for war in Iraq, a chicken bone
for foreign aid.
I am the prince of small potatoes,
I deny them nothing who come to me beseeching
the crusts I have to give. I have no grounds for complaint,
though deep down, where it's anyone's guess,
I covet everything that goes along with the illustrious—
creased pants as I stroll down the glittering boulevard,
a little aperitif beneath Italian pines. But who cares
what I wear, or drink? The rain? No, the rain is something
we share—it devours the beginning and the end.
The old stars tumble out of their bleak rooms like dice—
Box Cars, Snake Eyes, And-The-Horse-You-Rode-In-On . . .
not one metaphorical bread crumb in tow.
Not a single Saludo! from the patronizers
of the working class—Pharaoh Oil, Congress,
or The Commissioner of Baseball—all who will eventually
take the same trolley car to hell, or a slag heap
on the outskirts of Cleveland.
I have an ATM card,
AAA Plus card. I can get cash from machines, be towed
20 miles to a service station. Where do I get off penciling in
disillusionment? My bones are as worthless as the next guy's
against the stars, against the time it takes light to expend
its currency across the cosmic vault. I have what everyone has—
the over-drawn statement of the air, my blood newly rich
with oxygen before the inescapable proscenium of the dark,
my breath going out equally with any atom of weariness
or joy, each one of which is closer to God than I.

Remedial Weeding

You don't need to know its name
to know it is a weed; if it
has taken hold between two
paving bricks, if its thin root
or complex undermop is wedged
where the concrete riser joins the concrete step,
then assuredly it is.
It is redundant, stubborn work,
to which you squat or kneel or bend,
moving lowly in one manner
or another over the entire area
to be covered so that, naturally,
afterwards, you'll ache.

And yet, what better use
could you have put these to:
one yellow-handled tool
and two tightening circles of thought?
For those times when the heart, still
resonant and stunned,
is dominant,
this is the kind of work you want,
mindless work, where it is best to look
no more than one weed ahead,
and where the iron inability to set a course
drills the focus downwards
with single-mindedness and depth.

Some Feel Rain

Some feel rain. Some feel the beetle startle
in its ghost-part when the bark
slips. Some feel musk. Asleep against
each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there.
When it falls apart, some feel the moondark air
drop its motes to the patch-thick slopes of
snow. Tiny blinkings of ice from the oak,
a boot-beat that comes and goes, the line of prayer
you can follow from the dusking wind to the snowy owl
it carries. Some feel sunlight
well up in blood-vessels below the skin
and wish there had been less to lose.
Knowing how it could have been, pale maples
drowsing like a second sleep above our temperaments.
Do I imagine there is any place so safe it can't be
snapped? Some feel the rivers shift,
blue veins through soil, as if the smokestacks were a long
dream of exhalation. The lynx lets its paws
skim the ground in snow and showers.
The wildflowers scatter in warm tints until
the second they are plucked. You can wait
to scrape the ankle-burrs, you can wait until Mercury
the early star underdraws the night and its blackest
districts. And wonder. Why others feel
through coal-thick night that deeply colored garnet
star. Why sparring and pins are all you have.
Why the earth cannot make its way towards you.

Once

A girl ate ices
in the red summer. Bees
buzzed among the hydrangea,

heavy as plums.
Summer widened
its lens.

You would not believe
how happy she was;
her mother pulled her

through the pool till her hair
went soft. Below,
cracks spread in the vinyl

where her mother's long legs
scissored; above, wet faces
in the sun smiled . . .

The home, adrift in sun,
was square and clean
with wine and apple pie;

at dusk, lamps were lit,
Vs of geese swept past,
fresh sheets shivered

on the laundry line,
and as the nights grew crisp
our souls unfolded.

Then winter arrived.
The parents bent over the daughter
tucked in her bed . . . .

Creaking under the cold,
the old black walnut's roots
spread beneath the snow.

When spring came, the home
had tilted into the tree's
long, cool shadow. Nothing

was the same again.

The Sand-Castle

Care in destruction is a form of self-deception

and fury is blind
or even the precision destruction
of a sand castle

there is no such thing as
a precision bomb

the formal finitude of made things overcomes
our respect for what we have made

often that our desire to destroy is
The dark side of the news he brought.

Unwilling or unable to be
the curator
of his creation, the boy swiftly

returned it to its elements,
that is, to
its pure potential

ready to be used again
they were
were internalized

used in making the castle
Once the skills

or, better, learning
was a mode of memorization,
as if what he had been practicing

returning the power of the form back to
himself, the boy seemed
to be,

and using all his physical
might to do so,
By destroying the mere thing

acquire an interiority in being
a memory alone, but could not
realize an interior

Did this object that implied,
one he felt could be replaced

easily? Was his castle
a work of craft

rather than art, we cannot
give value to our making,

always present as the potential
for unmaking, or at least

we have to making, for
without the freedom of reversibility

enacted in unmaking,
we have to making,

that boy has represented
for me a certain relation
Since then

and he skipped off to wherever he was going next
he grinned (to himself, to me, I couldn't tell)

But the boy was delighted
"the lone and level sands stretch far away"

"Ozymandias," I thought of the end
of Shelley's
"come to grief," as we say, Startled,

feeling that something beautiful had
then not distinguishable at all,

barely distinguishable from the sand
surrounding them as the castle's sandy walls and towers

his arms and legs flailing like a gritty

whirligig, he kicked with all his might,

Reaching it

turned again, and raced back to his castle,

stopped, ran back a few yards, turned,

smacked his hands together,

then he stood

and still the boy worked on,
smaller children began to whine for their supper,

boney driftwood into emptied buckets
and spilled the day's find of shells and

Sunbathers shook out their towels.
darker than the sky,
streaked the horizon,

then darker blue
Meanwhile strips of red, orange

tomorrow there it would be
or a patrolling jeep wheeled over it, or a pair

of lovers stumbled across it, and unless
in the dark a drunk,

his castle would be safe,
even as the tide came in—

He had chosen his site carefully
as well—revisions made with

the tips of his fingers, the point of minor
additions and deletions
were thrown aside,

for his work had reached
His blunter instruments, shovels and buckets,

where the windows would be
indentations carved

by a spoon's edge to show,
turrets, moats, interior walls,

who was building an elaborate sand castle,
maybe eight, maybe nine
years old, I could catch sight of a boy, beyond

the periphery of its oblong shadow,
I was reading under a beach umbrella and

but one late summer afternoon
which coast, or which sea,

I don't remember where.

Domestic

I've spent the gas money on golf,
tossed chicken skin at the dogs,
and in one sitting,
eaten a box of Cheez-Its.
My wife is visiting her mother, and I'm staying
up until 4:00 a.m. and waking at noon.
I've called up Enrico's Bistro
for hot wings and beer,
thrown pizza boxes like Frisbees
across the family room,
and clogged the drain
because peeling a potato
over the sink is easier
than over the trash.
Tonight, I can't get off the couch,
so I'm watching a film
by Charlotte Zwerin
on Thelonious Monk.
In this black and white footage,
his wife Nellie is frantically
walking around the bed
to give him a belt because
he's taking too long to put on his socks.
Then the camera cuts
to Thelonious shining, dressed,
and buttoning his blazer
as Nellie slips him into his trench coat.
Thelonious at the piano, "I Should Care"
plays in the background
at an airport where they sit,
and he eats an apple, and Nellie waits
to wipe his chin with a tissue.
I've been roaming the house
alone all week, and suddenly,
I don't mind ten shampoo bottles
crowding the bathtub,
none of them empty,
laundry baskets sprouting flip-flops,
or junk drawers stuffed
with overpriced deodorant and make-up.
I might even be okay
with being dragged to the Dollar Tree
where my wife will take
fifteen minutes to pick out an air freshener.
Before she gets back tomorrow,
since the refrigerator is empty,
I'll leave a note on the door
for her to meet me at La Boulangerie,
that fancy French café she loves,
where I'll wait in the patio
until she appears, the hem of her dress
fluttering in the shadows beneath the eaves,
our table set with coffee,
open-faced mushroom sandwiches,
and strawberry tarts that remind me
of the tulips she grows
in the garden.

The End

One gray animal walked to the edge of morning.
The moon was behind it and the road
wound north, an infinite hill.
And as there was simply no
reason to proceed
with the project it had set out on
days before, it sat down.

Eyes
are all I see of its gray face
staring into the morning
chilled past all desire
having at last come to the end.

The Afterlife

Oh shabti allotted to me, if I be summoned or if I be detailed to
do any work which has to be done in the realm of the dead ... you
shall detail yourself for me on every occasion of making arable
the fields, of flooding the banks or conveying sand from east to
west; 'Here am I,' you shall say.
—The Book of the Dead

I.

They're looking a little parched
after millennia standing side
by side in the crypt, but the limestone
Egyptian couple, inseparable
on their slab, emerge from it as noble
and grand as you could ask of people
thirteen inches tall.

The pleasant, droopy-breasted wife
smiles hospitably in her gown
(the V-necked sheath "a style popular
for the entire 3,000-year
pharaonic period").
Her skin is painted paler than his:
a lady kept out of the sun.
Bare-chested in his A-line kilt,
her husband puts his spatulate
best foot forward, so as to stride
into a new life.

Not mummies; more like dummies.
Not idols, yet not merely dolls.
Stocky synecdoches
of the ruling class, they survey
an entourage of figurines
at work providing necessaries
for long days under the reigns
of dynasties still unborn.

To serenade them, here's a harpist.
A dwarf even in life—
a mascot to amuse the court
whose music must not be cut short.
A potter modeling vessels that seem,
like him, already fired in a kiln.
Six silos of wheat,
imaginary granaries.
A woman of stone grinding grain,
as she would have, on a quern of stone.
A woman winnowing grain in a pan.
Another on her knees, kneading.
A brewer mashing a vat of beer,
a butcher slitting the throat
of a heifer for the hereafter.


2.

What had it felt like, a credence
in the afterlife of art?
To die, as the departed did,
comforted by the guaranteed
incarnation of a statuette;
to feed then on that slaughtered meat?

To take a leap from the stock-still
tyranny of the literal?
To see the miniature, the fiction
as a grow-in-the-dark depiction
of the soon-to-be actual?


3.

Aboveground, thought was evolving.
So many lords and ladies died;
not everyone could be supplied
with a finely sculpted retinue
of laborers to keep them living.

And how were the high ones to keep
so many minions at their task?
The overseer with his whip
became a smiling, bland convention:
one foreman for every ten or so
farmers with a hoe.

It wasn't only math.
Something unforeseen
transforming transfiguration—
a canny, efficient faith
that less detail might well stand in
for the stand-in;
a simplicity of encryption.

Hundreds and hundreds of years passed.
Alabaster, faience, wood,
the scale of the factotum-totems
dwindled as numbers multiplied;
jostled in the mass graves
of toy-box coffins, they were transported
by a procession of living slaves
a little distance, and slipped
into their niches in the crypt
for the shelf-life of eternity.

Thumb-sized effigies wrapped
in bandages of holy script,
the hieroglyphed Book of the Dead.

Words. The nominal vow to work,
not the enactment of work.
The shabti held one stylized tool,
barely identifiable—
and were serene as Christian saints
with their hatchets and wheels, the instruments
of a recurring martyrdom.
In time they grew more mummiform,
cross-armed at the chest
or armless. Finally, curiously, at rest—

like zeroes who were something
in being nothing,
place-markers of their own
as much as of the master's soul.


4.

And on the wall of a vault,
an artist has drawn himself—
or a cunning substitute—
at work, shaping a life-sized shabti
designed to be his twin:
a goateed dandy that our mute,
vainglorious ventriloquist settles on one knee.

Profile to profile, they stare
into the mannered mirror
of the other.

In whatever kingdom this was
(by now, the blink
of one kohl-lined, almond eye),
what did people think was the lifespan
of the stunt man who betokens man?
The shabti sent to make shabti?

But the question too has shrunken,
eroded to vocabulary—
one fine old potsherd of a word
to be carried from the museum
like any other item
in the museum shop:
a replica necklace, a postcard.

The visitor is illiterate.
What did that stone scroll say,
meant to convert someday
to the thing it represents, papyrus?
Even the scribes couldn't read.
Something about the god Osiris
who came back from the dead.

She must be going.
Feels for the gloves in her pockets,
empty hands for her hands.

Opens a door to Chicago,
where a fine dust is ticking
coldly onto everything;
where she is still alive, and it's snowing.