October Flowers

He cans eighteen pints of tomatoes.

            She swings her legs to the floor.

He hangs vines in the back room to ripen.

            Her head swims with the dream of cow lilies.

His garden fills with the fermentation of rotting vegetables.

            She says, “I am worried,” but means, “death is near.”

He feels no comfort in red pots stewing, steam collecting on eyelashes.

            She is worried; she bows to young women on the street.

He opens his chest to allow moths their escape.

            She enters without knocking, cooks a stew of petals.

He cuts off his toes to add to the tomatoes.

She pushes him to the floor; her hands bloom in his chest.

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Digression on Fatherhood

"All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one—"
G. M. Hopkins

The neighbor boy found the gun
when out front to kick his blue ball.

The same evening, I sit on the porch
steps with my son, my wife cutting
our hair, the human fur of us falling.

A man down the street shot someone
in the face trying to burglarize the church
(the wall, the window have the holes)

whose bells rang as I crouched and crawled
in dirt, in dark, under the home. Flashing

his flashlight, my boy tried to guide me
as I plugged the drafty places of this old house.
Showered, tired, scrubbed pink, we sit

below scissor’s snip, the mother sculpting
us into familiar forms. I feel the binding:

the they, the I, the we. A day with a three-
year-old is a day’s work, and now no mouse
can steal our seeds. Light grows less, that

is the returning line as I scrub foundation
dust from my face. The police talk retaliation,

or of the curd of chaos, in their serious tones.
In the myth of this city, one drops a weapon,
and we sleep, working the dark we sleep upon.

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John Brown’s Hanging

He is not afraid of what he might become:
hands bound, legs firm; he will stand here
above the open field while military mobs

order and re-order themselves, confused
by their own numbers and the exponential
space they are free to organize and march

within. In the dream the anti-Christ and Christ
hang side-by-side. They swing as if they have
somewhere to go. They hold hands. Fraternal

twins found in each other, again. John Brown
rejects my dream in afternoon light. I sit outside
his cell sketching his portrait from the neck up

as he writes, and prays audibly in inexplicable
tongues. His body slouched by wound, resolute
by training. My day is spilled coffee and no clear

campaign. “I cannot trust myself,” I say to him.
“Trust only yourself,” he says, “keep your gunpowder
dry; take more care to end life well than to live long.

Go in peace. Go in pursuit. Go in wickedness.”
I draw his beard with wild scratches.

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Ahab Epistles

I.

What I don’t know will consume me.
I’d like you and me to discuss astronomy.
But science will not save me
as I stab and spit at this world.
Yesterday, I stood by the sea
on a bluff supporting a gun battery.
You would have liked all the history.
Here boys sighted their whales, their world.
I turned away to watch a pack of gulls
clustering in a kinetic white mass,
squawking and diving into the ball
of herring below the surface.

II.

Nothing is humorous about the sea.
It does not care what I smell like.
Does not believe in God. It is easy
to have faith in the sea. Only fog
can take it from me, but such veils
are easy to spot. The sea will not
laugh with me and so I do not laugh.
I want respect (do not laugh!).
I take the sea seriously so it will
do the same for me. Wait, I almost
forgot the estuary—it is like food
or a good friend to the sea. I want
you to understand I have died by
the sea, again and again, it is no joke,
death by the sea is always cold.

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