Red Hook

Greenwood Cemetery

In the Backyard

Up in the trees
the birds talk to each other
all day long.

****

The airplane roaring overhead:
What bird does the Sparrow
think is singing?

****

Birds chase their hearts
through the sky.

The man's heart paces
back and forth
through the cage of his ribs.

A Laughter

I digress. A laughter. Your laughter
unlike any other.
Let’s go on a lovely digression together.

When I see a sentence I like
and when I see a beautiful girl
it’s the same thing.

Your beauty is the best lie there is.

And when you call, you activate the beat
of my heart. Every text is a little defibrillator.



I have no idea what they mean
but they mean everything to me:
The indecipherable smile and eyes you have.
I fall into them
I fall into them
and am never caught.

Closed Circuit Reruns

Each trying to think of something
to say to the other,
the camera stares at
the television
repeating
the sight of itself
in empty shrinking
screens vanishing
into a distance
that is
not even
flat.

Fragment (from a Spring a few years back)

I want to see how long
her hair has grown.

When I kissed her
she grabbed her face
and went, "Shit. Fuck. Shit."

The flowers she gave me
are in an empty wine bottle
still dead and beautiful.

Short Film

FADE IN:
EXT. HEAVEN - DAY.

GOD, white, flowing, hungover as fuck, rolls out of bed. He gets up and pisses over the edge of a cloud. He farts.

EXT. EARTH - DAY.

Thunder. Rain.

A MAN curses up at the sky and pulls out an umbrella.

FADE OUT.

Watching a Movie In Bed In New York

Watching a movie in bed in New York,
I think I recognize the green soy fields of Ohio.
My eyes, trained one year
in the angular
graphite of street and skyscraper,
are struck by the wild green.

I look past the faces of the farmers,
the deep wells of fear in their eyes,
wanting only to see the grass and oak,
the green I can hardly believe,
the smooth yellow fields,
the occasional patches of shady trees,
the long gray roads and heavy blue skies.

I want to lie down in those fields,
I want to drive those gray roads.
The wide green seems a good bed
but there the garter snake lies.

Route 33

Route 33 is the most beautiful road.
It used to go to my girlfriend's house.
In the winter, when the Scioto was frozen,
driving alongside
the wide, white river
to the soft light coming
through the windshield
there was a Heaven above
and below.
There was a Heaven
in all directions.

Sad Ohio Stars

Sad Ohio stars smudged across the windshield,
frozen tracks caught in the snow.
Silence of purple winter nights
looked at through drowsy headlights
struggling to keep awake.

We turned into adults
in drunken nights lost on High St.
to the tune of the garbage flowers
sprung from guitar strings,
rising with the foam of PBR cans
in warm bars full of song.
The girls pointed cameras at each other and clicked
as smoke ascended from the ends of their forked fingers
and the bands sang for nights
when small glories were won
in each other's arms.
Bringing the bars to a close,
we trekked home across the grimy snow,
unfucked, lugging six packs
with arms empty of women.

One night, we watched from the bed
of my brother’s pick up as the fire of stars
leapt across the sky,
out of nowhere
back into nowhere,
too timid even to wish on them.
I was trying to figure out
what the Greeks were up to,
conjuring brawny Gods from
three puny dots connected by a line
drawn with a finger in a child’s eyes.

The stars meant nothing to me,
all of them.
I did not know who they were.
We were lost to each other’s stares
a hundred roads ago.

In Central Ohio it’s the garbage that’s beautiful.
The empty cardboard beer cases
turning into crowns, the hardwood floors
stuck to your shoes on Sunday morning.
Shit makes the flowers grow
from this landscape of boredom,
where the cows stand in one place all their lives,
and the corn waits obediently between strip malls
and wonderful green mountains beyond the gray sunset
rubbed out like a mistake with a Staedtler eraser.

The casket skies of old Ohio,
one year from me,
moving, changing, shifting,
falling harder into the gray.

My family came over the hills of Chillicothe,
out of the huge mists of Nogytuck and Pity-me,
the gunsmoke of Israel Putnam and a crooked fork
thrown to the bottom of the Scioto River.
We had reasons to be lonely.
We had reasons to leave home.
We had nothing and no one
but each other,
the same people we'd always had.

Traveling,
I will always be digging
at my heart in Ohio's
frozen dirt.

Go have a youth, I remind myself,
but I never really knew how
to be young and
the saddest city is the one
you grow up in,
the one
you never get out of.