the girl in the sand

can I work through the ancient language
be an interpreter of a lost heart?
can I see those images of the lathe turning
in the dark, revising the serried
outlines of the girl disinterred, fictive
illicit, burnt into the conscience? was
it really my work, my stark dreaming
of the menarchal child destroyed by
someone's confined understanding
in the daily day of here and then?

so I felt responsible
only for thinking it possible
and then it came true and truer
all around me the same story
repeated its details different and
varied yet the girl I met the
girl next door it happened to her
her crippled father wrecking her
very flesh not a murder
but too close to dissolution

we all struggle back from this loss
it is a version not of defeat but of
mourning
she mourned those days gone now
she mourned a different way of
loving her dad
she mourned all this yet I came along
with my story of the dead girl and
nothing was healed nothing really
changed perhaps the face of the
source of loss has been varied
varied and treated to his own loss
everything loss these many years the
girls the women the female being
murdered in nearly every part
of these thousands of days

I am savaged with self knowledge
trusting only to the attempt to live truthfully
the mourning continues doves leaving
the scene are you still out there
Miranda, the girl in the sand?

the path home

small privacy in a late May evening
at an Exxon station somewhere near Roanoke
an unhappy infant cries
I wait for Sandra and her lover
the florescent lights glare; the people buy co-cola
and leave me on the curb
counting minutes like jackstraws
scattered in god's chaotic way

seven hundred miles distant
Illinois breathes on
serendipitous in her over planning
there are stories there
stories high as the sears' tower
stories as long as the Illinois Central
stories sad or tough
or mugged by their inconsistencies

its a velvet night, just chill now
maybe warming—I cannot tell
I have just arrived from another starved winter
the chaldean girl sits like a stone sparrow
in disquiet—a boyish blonde absorbing
my losses with no seeming loss, herself

I live with another old friend
in only some discomfort
the object is: to make a life
to tell no lies
to hurt only carefully
so the dissolution is slow
although certain

this is the path home

Written in the spring of 1980 when I went to Virginia with Ross Hulvey to attend Gary Adkin's wedding. I ended up staying with Sandy Riseman because Ross could get a room in the dorm, being a Hollin's grad, but I couldn't. I thought at the time that he and Gary could've asked Richard to find a place to put me, but they didn't. I turned out to be just another accoutrement to their lives. I understand now that Ross was afraid I would charm the ladies at Hollins. I honestly had no recognition that people felt that way about me until Becky Bradway left me in 1993, telling me that I dominated things and she thought she should be the one dominating things. I just wasn't aware of that, surrounded, as I thought I was, by deft and interesting people. Well, Ross was a shy doofus, that is true. But Gary Adkins seemed to play the charming card quite well. Now I often hang with Dan Keding, and he is even more the center of attention than I am. A fair thing, I think.

In any case the chaldean girl in this is once again that blonde honey from Springfield's dark catholic side, Alison Clare Gaughan. She was laughing at me, those days, from the deck of the destruction of my weird love affair with the too young blonde.

If there is a lesson here, it is that you need to pay close attention to the details. I have been checking the numbers on this blog for the last two months and it is certainly an educational experience for me to note that I am the only person who comes here, at least for the last couple of weeks. I average one person a day. Of course, I come every day. There is a lesson here people. No one is interested in this poetry. Nonetheless, I keep putting it out there. Perhaps, sometime after I am gone, somebody will stumbled across this stuff and find something useful enough to keep in it. I hope this is so, but I don't expect it. But I leave my children, with at least fond memories of their father. Well, maybe not so much Joel. Hard to say from this end.

Strange Sins, Two

In the eye of this storm
the hours are divided into sins
of commission and sins
of ommission. That these are standard
percentages in life's gamble is
barely noted, and never really
understood. Someone won't tell me
what is the beginning and what
is the end.
My energy runs out,
like blood from a cut artery
but it boils away
in this nuclear heat
becoming a dense atmosphere,
so very hard for me
to breathe.

Written during the time I was writing the reincarnation-incest novel, Strange Sins. The title is from Raymond Chandler, "her eyes were like strange sins". The idea of lying by leaving data out had really never occurred to me before this. It is ironic that I eventually married and lived with a grandmaster of this technique, my ex who used to write fiction, but now writes something that reads like fiction but is supposed to not be fiction. See what I mean? Perhaps it is an art, then.