Lunchbox Poems

So that’s life, then: things as they are?

—Wallace Stevens

Once there was music that could tear

your heart open and heal it

before you took another breath.

That was what art could do.

Kings and princes, bishops and popes

all knew this, as they knew

how to get what they wanted and keep

what they had. Mostly what happens

to people doesn’t happen by chance.

You spend your life in the mud,

you eat the same thin soup each night,

and then on Sunday a thousand angels

start to sing. The walls are ablaze

with suffering and forgiveness.

And you think this is what you’ll see

when you die. When you yearn,

this is what you yearn for. Or something

like it, the version you’ve been told

you can afford. They were smart to keep

belief and understanding at a distance,

go for the big effects, everything you get

when you’re through with this world,

the one you got stuck with—potatoes and soup,

the morning and the afternoon,

the afternoon and the evening,

things as they are.

Was it like lifting a veil

And was the grass treacherous, the green grass  

Did you think of your own mother  

Was it like a virus Did the software flicker  

And was this the beginning 

Was it like that  

Was there gas station food  

                              and was it a long trip

And is the sun there

             or drones 

             or punishment 

             or growth  

Was it a blackout  

      And did you still create me 

      And what was I like on the first day of my life  

Were we two from the start 

And was our time an entrance 

            or an ending  

Did we stand in the heated room Did we look at the painting  

Did the snow appear cold Were our feet red with it, with the wet snow  

And then what were our names Did you love me or did I misunderstand  

                             Is it terrible

Do you intend to come back  

Do you hear the world’s keening  

Will you stay the night

My mother is white bones in a weed field on her birthday. She who would be sixty has been sixteen years absent at celebrations. For sixteen years of minutes she has been what is missing. This is just to note the arrogance of days continuing to happen as if she were here.

Kneeling to carve back the grass encroaching

like cuticles on a fingernail, I noticed how close

her flat headstone was to the others around hers.

Watering the flowers at his wife’s grave,

an old man told me they’re placed above

the abdomens, not the heads, as you’d expect.

I think he meant to explain they were less crowded

underground than it appeared, but I didn’t follow.

I pictured a pair of rotten feet standing on my mother’s

head, her green feet standing on another’s head,

and so on in a horizontal grid, gaudy totem poles.

I wasn’t sure what part of her body I stood over,

but I stepped aside as if she could feel my weight,

like when I was a child and she’d lie on the carpet

and tell me to walk all over her back. I’d laugh

at the funny feeling underfoot, the squishy,

bony, fleshy ground I massaged by walking,

losing my wobbly balance turning around

after each short lap from shoulders to butt. Yet

standing off to the side of her grave felt wrong.

Every year, every visit, like the bashing of a gong.

“To write these days is to avoid telling people how

angry I am.”

—Daniel Nester

Behold the Rottweiler in its cage, behold homemade cornhusk

ornaments, behold the photo of a Jaymar miniature piano,

behold the galaxy of knees at noon, facing the maestro’s

fragrance. Behold, behold, I stand at the door and knock-

knock-knock

Answer the call, be real now, be here & calculate

cost vs. bennies, don’t be that person who waits

until the last chorus to join in. Makes you look careless.

Care less. Rejection is a state, like catalepsy, to move through.

Behold the scroll, the wretched bankroll, the double tongue

summoning his minions to court, calculate the chorus

and ford the spring, a small thing, mysterious as amaryllis—

a little water, a little sun. Behold my process of (pre)tending.

Sweetpea, the voice will always call, a murmur or hum,

a spring burbling or a dammed-up flood. Locally sourced,

unforced, double-spaced & tortured into shape. Copyright

the Year of Our Lord blank blankety-blank, Amen.

Behold the ample galaxy, a naked miracle through the blinds.

Clean your damn windows and the bulb will bloom.

Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.

Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.

Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels

so mute it’s almost in another year.

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out

the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.

It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue

recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn

some new constellations.

And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,

Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full

of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—

to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward

what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Look, we are not unspectacular things.

We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.

No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,

if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big

people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,

rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?

Come to my funeral dressed as you

would for an autumn walk in the woods.

Arrive on your schedule; I give you permission

to be late, even without good cause.

If my day arrives when you had other plans, please

proceed with them instead. Celebrate me

there–keep dancing. Tend your gardens. Live

well. Don’t stop. Think of me forever assigned

to a period, a place, a people. Remember me

in stories–not the first time we met, not the last,

a time in between. Our moment here is small.

I am too–a worldly thing among worldly things–

one part per seven billion. Make me smaller still.

Repurpose my body. Mix me with soil and seed,

compost for a sapling. Make my remains useful,

wondrous. Let me bloom and recede, grow

and decay, let me be lovely yet

temporal, like memories, like mahogany.

The knife my father kept in his car was gone 

by the time I got to his house—nothing

but proof of insurance and the gas tank

half-empty. I claimed a different knife I found 

in his desk because every boy should inherit

his father’s knife—I tell my son this

when he looks at the old black-handled 

blade I have hidden in the utility drawer

at our house. This morning he told me

how a black hole is born when a star dies,

life collapsing and leaving a blank space

that swallows the light, the comets,

the street, the station wagon—everything

extinguished, lost. Neither of us understands 

the science of gravity, but I know how it feels

to live without a knife: tear what you can 

with your hands, rip everything with your teeth,

and when the lights go out, feel nothing

and imagine someone else’s fingers

tracing the glint of your father’s knife,

its keen edge against their thumb.

When my son and I talk about courage,

he claims the dark is the only thing

he fears and I want to tell him, one day

the darkness will swallow everything

and someone who loves you will leave you

something bright to keep you safe.