Poems for Persons of Interest

To a Sycamore Of course, there have been times my ripples bridle Against the grip of your strong patchbark roots, Times when the litter of your rusty leaves Stymies my rush and muffles my recital Of imitation birdsong. But, in turn, You brace the bed where my curved current weaves Around you. From your rootedness, I learn To flow in channeled force by sweetspire shoots. Reach up above me with your whispering limbs. Splinter the sunlight into shafts that flash Brilliantly off my eddies when I laugh. With your night branches, cut the moon in half And drop it in my dark pool. Where it swims Unanchored, you can hear a cool, soft splash.

the deer blind i am doing my best to not become  the deer blind i learned to hate myself in.  dawn has a way of illuminating  the ugly violence of a man.  i am forever trapped in the carvings  of our names in the blind’s wood siding. the cycle ends and repeats again:  the waiting,  the cradle of an eye in the scope,  the finger twitching against the trigger,  the lifeblood staining the missouri clay,  the anguished sobs of a mother. i am at the mercy of your sights even when death doesn’t wink  in my direction.  my fingers hook into your belt loop.  the hook of me in the eye of you. a hook in an eye.  a bullet piercing a buck's eye.  being tethered to you  is the only way i know  the barrel won’t come to take me.  one of these days, you say  as your free hand finds my hook,  i’ll mount your head like a trophy on my wall. i love you so m...

Kyoto, 2019 Cicada din that August weighted trees along Imadegawa Street like fruit too thick for branches. Walking to the train we hunched beneath the screaming canopy as sidewalk cyclists ripped among us mute and morning traffic swelled the silent lanes, pressed past as if through water. Sighted sound unraveled at the Kamo Bridge: again the engines and sometimes a bell. The brute rail cavern roar when we got underground                         soothed like rain.

Pantoum of the Money Changers It startled us to think He’d die for you. Forever disproportionate and strange— He showed us righteous anger, it is true, But on His part it was a poor exchange.   Forever disproportionate and strange— We couldn’t tell if He was rich or poor, But on His part it was a poor exchange: He asked for nothing and we owed Him more.   We couldn’t tell if He was rich or poor. We couldn’t understand Him: too sublime. He asked for nothing and we owed Him more. We still remember Him from time to time.   We couldn’t understand Him: too sublime. He had to pay the bill when it was due. We still remember Him from time to time. It startled us to think He’d die for you. 

Robin Hood (#1) Sing, Mary, our lady of lilies and lays, of Robin whose arrows sang clean from Norse neck to Norse neck, who beat his plow to a blood-tinged blade and with it splintered spines and severed souls until he laid it to its rest, sunk deep in English dirt. So sing, lady who wept beneath the three rude trees.   Now among the vast-trunked Wessex trees, laying in leaves and shielded with shade, Robin waits, his mind stained with vengeance, and the dirt beneath him damp with the blood of slaughtered Norse and Englishmen alike—Alfred’s men’s unshriven souls mottled with the icy Danes who lived by their blades   and died. The Norse serpent ships cut like blades through the whale road. Their axes cut the English trees like a scythe through water. They hoarded Christian souls— souls and altar dressings were their loot, and Robin’s  kinsmen, hall, and hope all fell to ash beneath the Norse raiders’ greed. Robin returned from hunting, but dirt   was all they left, s...