bread I made

This peanutbutter spreads on the bread I made
differently than any other bread.
Homemade bread, you know, it's different.
It holds together differently, moves under a knife differently.
I started making bread in another life
when I was someone else
not as patient as I am, today.
I started making bread when I had no right
to make my hands be the strong, calm hands
that is needed for bread. For good bread.
It is getting better,
each clump of dough,
each warm dome of rising.
If there is a lesson, I am learning it
slowly
sometimes not even knowing what I'm doing, really.
Just going along
using what I find.

In our cold little apartment

The windows are heavy with frost,
translucent and gauzy in the daylight.
In our cold little apartment
the rooms glow like an igloo,
soft, white and still.
Heat seems intangible,
how the bill comes later
in the mail enveloped and bundled,
how turning the thermostat is a delayed reality.
We are bundled
in clothes and blankets and each other.
Our reality is now
is undelayed.
We keep warm in the light
of our soft white rooms.

poemasota

Where I am from
winter is something hard, like a stone.
A frozen thing remains a frozen thing.
Lakes steadily become ice: miniature glaciers
tipped on their backs gouging sockets
in the northern Minnesota woodlands.
I know a poem should be universal,
but I am writing
about Aitkin County, and further north
where the dark trickle of the Mississippi
begins its cold slither.
Where in winter, a snow comes to stay—
to stay as long as it wishes,
clumped furtively in forested June shadows
cold and alone and bluish in the light.

guitar at breakfast

It was only a few years ago
I couldnt do a blessed thing
with a guitar.
And this morning
I was singing and playing
in the kitchen,
the strings humming
filling breakfast with music.

I am at fault

We are on this ocean together.
Have been for some time.
I have seen my reflection
wavy sometimes
as a flock of underwater penguins.
and you,
you seemed at times like a lithe and sun-faded beauty
pushed up from the sea.

I can feel the shadow of sails
brush my back
softening the rub of the sun.
We have burnt together in this vastness.
The water has held the sky
through its alterations,
while we have been burnt to degrees.

At high noon we were on the water
faded and cooking in the salt.
A few gulls meandered and laced the sky
I watched them lose themselves in blue open

looking back, the current had spread arms;

between us
the water winks
your boat seems now so small
so light and corklike on the curve of the earth.
It looks as if I am at fault:
a rope lays coiled unused on deck

Unfocusing back into the depths of the sky sea
I pick out the dark points high above
the gulls losing themselves in blue open

she's here, late for work

She's here, late for work
heels clacking on the hardwood.
The radio is on.
Garbage truck is dieseling outside.
I am here, writing in the noise.
The tempest of this morning
is full and complete,
is the identity of today.

An envelope tucked full of my poetry waits
on the small table by the door.
I am sending them off—a tearing away from me
into the mangled claw of an editor.
Maybe a nice person. Maybe not.
Oh, sweet, chirping notes of my soul.


The garbage truck coughs away down the street
as she pulls out of the driveway.
I leave the radio on
to keep some essence of what just was.
The envelope looks too bulky for the postage I have put on it.
I'll take it to the post office,
see about getting it on its way.
Maybe put a FRAGILE sticker on it. Maybe not.

monday

This Monday morning she is home sick from work.
Everything seems different.
I don't know this house this way.
Monday.
Monday is me and these rooms,
my eyes on these windows
the dishes from the weekend
quietly waiting for me
huddled.

office chair

You would be beautiful
If you threw an office chair
out of a window

Your fierce silhouette
With raised arms

Just thinking about it,
I have seen what it means
for anger to be love

If I saw that office chair
with its legs overturned, wheels injuredly spinning
I think it would change my life.

Certainly it would be a moment
Where life feels like more than the way I've lived it.

After some time you would come down from the window
And I think we would probably do whatever we wanted

we would be beautiful people who are 'right'
and beautiful people who are 'wrong'
the way most people don't know they are.

we would seduce each other
with all of our potential
(everything can be sexy)

And the world would
be someplace we had never seen.

poemfast

*first night home after being gone for three seasons about six months ago



Last night there was some rain,
and I felt the first twang of loss,
already,
since moving.
The mountain rain is gone, for me.
The pattering, slow, heavy, dirty-cotton-sky-days.
I saw a fox in its den just weeks ago
during a rain like this
ornamentally folded behind the full tuft of its tail
spooky and quiet.
Romantic streetlamps are in tonight's mist
below me, three stories.
This balcony is dark and urban, seems so richly
and so perfectly set—
the kind with bricks and wood and a hammock.
A small table here in the corner
breezy and spattered wet in the amorous city-light-rain.
City life. City rain.
I like to see the tops of umbrellas
the wet shoes that swing out from under them
in the falling night.

poempourri

The newness of you is becoming
more
something like a prairie, now.
The bright open ocean of grass
new and ever reaching
becoming
more
the place for home
the place for roots.
I feel like we can remember, you and I, the shoulder high fields
of brushing stalks
tall grass shushing the world,
even though it has all been long gone
before we were delivered to earth.
Maybe someone held us and said:
This is the world.
It is tired and mean and worked-over,
but you are here to love
to be in love
to remember things you have never seen
to mingle and sway and be tall and open to the sky.

poemy

There is a small and beautiful fold in the world,
on a summer day under the Lyndale bridge
across Minnehaha Creek—
the sun globbing through the juicy maples.
We got cinnamon rolls and sunscreen
roped canoes to two best selling middle class 1990's Ford cars
and torpedoed into the lake at Hidden Beach.
Of course we got too much sun,
lost our phones in the water
peed our pants laughing. She was even late to work.
But I'm sure I have permanent lines around my smile
from just that one day.
And we got to gulp summer shandy from brown bottles
under the Lyndale bridge
with the sun globbing through juicy maples.