Eviction Notice

Eviction Notice

They skit it and flit it and in it

it's all dust: of plaster

of a bedroom fire

of coughs the walls catch:

dry coughs of resignation

wet coughs phlegm

I’d thought to wash

when the fever went through

like routine

paperwork.

Not the bats--they’ll hang

until May and babies

but the squirrels, all

winter I feel their grip

on the beams, hear

their fear? elation? rush up

the partition walls

and then back down again

a dry rain.

The only thing keeping

me from seeing them out

right is paper, a wooden frame,

a failing bit

of plaster.

They know me

the way I know them:

by our tramp through

the air

a solid shoe

that cough

an occasional pause.

We are the both of us

too busy to say so much

as a hey--great humid February

we’re having.  Hearing me they freeze.

They wait

while I wait.

It’s been a mild month.  It’ll be a thousand

and a little more the guy said

 to pin the eviction

on them.  The guy also said they’ll go out some

one way door.  They’ll make noise

about it (I won’t be home

to watch them go--what

compassionate landlord

stands at the edge

of the road and watches them all

march off slumped under their

now where do we go?  Only

opening the walls

years later to see the little closets

will tell us what we’ve all lost:

the small spaces between the joists and beams

they got to in a storm

when between the shingles a brief

jag of light.  Only imagine them there,

quiet like me,

eyes open in the dark

waiting for it all

to pass over.

phases

phases

Now I have to check

because think I’m wrong

about the whereabouts
of the moon,

how maybe it wasn't her
light spread out

over your face after all
or how she hadn't given out

against the grey

clapboard of the neighbor’s

foreclosed house

in a windy night

of twigs and branches that make

like they’re a movie

that shake and tremble and I think

 maybe I’ve come in

at the wrong time,

haven’t earned the scene

you know?

How the ones who sat down

early even before

the opening credits and walked

their jaw muscles through

every beat

every tripped wire

every fist of hair

or cheek

and they’re sad

in all the right spots

delighted in all

the right spots

pissing shit this is mad

in all the right palces

but they’re expecting

it they’re paused

on the knob

of the girl’s belly

before she gives birth

and I’m the only one

not crying when the baby's

too blue

too grey

too mute

and I’m not the one limping

home with the bloody lip

black eye moral

of the story

when the guy cleans up his son

and lays her on the girl

just then giving up

her placenta.  It’s all

from those limbs, that cast

on the black night

that I saw it,

that movie

and only then at a glance

not enough my day’s gonna change

thinking these things.

But then,

there’s this block

of letters

and they make it

through

to the finish

maybe without shoes

maybe without anything

like shirts or pants

maybe just because

I thought I saw

the moon on your face

and it wasn’t that at all

it was something else

something raw
but soft, something fingers
ease into
knowing water
knowing light
knowing,
even afraid
in the dark,
me.

Salt

Salt: When What Comes Due Comes Through

Maybe that’s where they saw the light

though they won’t admit it’s sacrilegious

and they won’t wash it all off

either, the glow or dried brillo

of it, the all the long day of cutting

the swim cutting the rudder cutting

inside the murmuration  of

the small fish though who among

them have ever seen it maybe one

noticed it in birds, how while it never

took out the sky or took out the sun

completely, the hem of it dropped

and the neatness of it all, the precision,

shifted gears and all at once

the swallows were off east

south east and quick as it could please

a sweep over the low-fog/low water

cove and husband’s boat’s moored

on bottom  though give it six hours

and it’ll float and he’ll slip the slough

of flotsam and move out through.

And too he may not, he’s got other things

on his mind than the greensilver light

right under his bow and his knuckles

while white with salt are a thick fist

full of the awful thought of the unrepaired

net letting finally go, the weir pole

going over, only one, into the bowl

of a decent moon’s catch.  He thinks

about anything but luck.  He watches

the water.  Behind him his woman on shore

at home is in no state of mind

but wait, but go blind looking at coal

and no light but in sound.  But in

the whistle.  But in the flavor of salt

as she bites down on the soft flesh

of her cheek.  Salt, she thinks, in this light,

is wet and oily.  Is on my tongue. 

It is red and pricked with tissue.  Like the boat

deck, the caulked but leaky bow, how crazy

sanity’s the only thing that floats the seiner,

how salt’s the only thing dissolving

as if it were brine like Galilei in the Bible

like what God walks on, back to the shore.

falling off: another fidelity

falling off: another fidelity

I think it does arrive finally

though maybe with a white hide

of dried sweat and tired

from the long ride.

Don’t tell me you don’t know

who or what even though all

your  while your shoulders are south

of you and even leaning not east

Jesus you started east, no we see

don’t we (the we being the fingers

we have left to dip into the pink

throats, bellows, no, true

and this haul of the coming in

breath is how it’s all squeezed

all we seek into one fucked up

moment yes after all these

years framing houses we never

will in every feathered cliché never

will live in.  Brand new

and sawdust and walls and rocks

strewn for the only reason of clutching

them up to the chest and walking

them down to the rip-rap and all

the water coming on fast

then pulling back at the pajamas

the dead were told to wear

if they ever found their way here

in the dark with their whole clean

life bound up like sacrifice

and twitching  pigeon twitches I mean

she’s gone all this time clean

as cooked and cheese-cloth sieved

peace, she’s her whole life a belief

sweet as that baby tooth of an adductor

 muscle you know the one that opens

the bivalve and exposes that one 

testicle of a belly and the plan

before today was never take it, ever,

in the palm of her hand never take

it up and pull back the cuff

stuck to the neck never let it

be anything but bulge ugly so what

is it that changes what does she

have to, after those bellows

open, think about to begin

closing down to ease her whole self

on to it and begin rising but not

until she’s up to the hilt

not until she feels her hips

what is he said once, before

he died, parenthesis, yes, that’s it

parenthesis, her pelvis a pair

 of wings and she wonders

what’s made first: the backbone of a vow

 going straight

through or the blot of salt caught

on the tip, and the going one way

the world has to lean for it to be

the blood or the other, to calcium

and what when the house

comes down around her Achilles

will she give up to repent

it all.  What after all this time

it’s taken to come calling, arrives?

girl

girl

I never came on to you like I knew it was wrong

and all these years later our time together

is sweet tea in a peat-bog steep, that neat mahogany

beneath your lower lip and rooting

your teeth, a shade

I’d sometimes see, depending

on the light when you came near me,
on that cross, on the throat

of God hanging in plaster or cast brass

how the small valley or grotto or hollow scrape

fox hole would in the low glow of the sacristy

grow even more dim, slow to only enough
shame to touch

with whatever glove or thumb I’d muster

just God and me and that, what’s it called above

the clavicle? the jugular’s notch? and I come

to remember then I was young and suffocating
under my sister’s pillow game I’d reach up and touch

that spot and the panic and my thrumbing
blood would, wave on wave, sluice in through
and beyond my jaw and it was later

in the wax and liquid light I’d glide inside

the slight of salt that sexy slide down the neck

between the breasts and you know the rest...

I never came on any road like I knew it

was wrong but on some notches I was parting

the fog to get to the bottom, moving through
and getting by on the weight of  every
33 feet and change in atmosphere

like I were all the wet spiders

webs like I wasdying but taking my time

about it, like bogs, like the water in pitcher plants, cheeks

of petals closing over the little throat oh! Oh! no! No! Not
Yet
Not
Yet
Yes
OH!

insomnia

insomnia

130’s early but tick tick it

is tick tick the low glow

over the power

strip and soon

an hour’s gone

by

and something’s

moved though moving

to see what’s

moved

rolling over or into

what choice

is there awake

like this habit

awake

in the way

oil is

awake

olive oil maybe

a stasis

ripe for a while

before going

around the bend rancid

shit end

of the stick rancid

isn’t always handed

off and when it’s not

when

the electricity

rises to the teeth and jaw

if its felt there

and in the tongue

I’m under a spell

and I come

alive

fire alive

thick wick alive

wind in the window alive

hiss lips slick alive

wax drying hot

then cracking

think thin and skinny

think thin skinny

it couldn’t be

because it’ February

but it took me

by surprise anyway

how when I drove by

the quiet river the ripples

up on the over-night ice

were like little flies

who I’d seen in summer-

time beside the wet clay bank

where the kids’ footprints

were, just the prints

not them, they’d moved

up river with their fishing

they’d like more

than bites I suppose

and promises

as the line went tight

bobber out completely

of sight and a long time

the way a diver might

at just the right light of honesty

and tighten his lips in petition
when the tank's out

when he’s sucking back

nothing and the surface’s just

above his hairline

though he can’t know

the way that glow

of red goes slow around his eyes

and he sees God not

for the first time but this time

its different tis come up

the way bubbles do

and the way they rest before their popped

selves are nothing

even though they live

on his goggles

on surfaces like grease

spots

like feet coming on again

in the mud

but it’s that trick of the light

it’s the river rising some

the kids are gone

fishing up river or really

it’s still just February

and January’s thaw

is coming undone

and I’m just driving

by and it’s ice

thin as a cornea and spreading

just as much light as to lie

and wait.

shot

shot

Truth is once you step off it don’t own you no more  it don’t
touch none of your exposed ankle bone or tongue the wet cough

of a groan the motor in your throat chokes over the low water

your boat of skin as old sleep slow as old dream after the screech

of breaks and the weight of Keflex drops you in the branches hands

  of medics open you right there in the mud of it all and shuck you

like scallops like they’re  lifting and sifting for pearls imperfect

through the bellies of clams beards of mussels battlefield gut shot

and truth is after the shock’s thrummed out after you step off you

  don’t own you and don’t owe it whatever it is nothing you can skip

bounce unzip your skin swim

only no one knows when a mild wind blows then goes dead cold

only no one knows

when a mild wind blows then goes dead cold

mercury,

you slide up and down

your glass pole the way

expert legs, a knee

on each side, do, and if I were

the kind of eye to look

I’d see, maybe, the pinch

and grip, the way a lady

knows how to read a crowd

of randy men and still keep

her own how she seduces

each lap in the room

and they all even the barkeep

grope and roll while

that pole glows then froze

and becomes them becomes

the bum in the gutter

at the second table

or the mayor in the black

suit or any number of truck

drivers and cops all of them

eyes in the sky right up

to midnight and a ride

home and its red enough

in the small glass ball

a pool of you
liquid silver right?

Silver.  Some blue.  The Almighty

reading the room and men

going out in to or right up out

of flues and three am

open as slipped buckles

and buttons

and nothing going down

but cold.

pact

Pact

I believe there is a voice with no skin on it in all of us.          

                                                                       Stephen Berg

                                                                       Notes on “Nothing in the Word/Aztec Songs”

it’s the only way to shout to the wind I suppose

or at it when the last of every thing of you I could ever

touch is taken back and the only other pair

of eyes living in the room just stare and stare

and give way like two feet unprepared

for ice, how one heel’s the first to slip

and its comic really it always gets some

kind of laugh how whoop! it’s not up in the air

really so much as a brief lead, of a dance

partner who dips and betrays the commitment

and steps back to watch his whole damn lie

Jesus what sort of man is that to abandon

I mid-dip and then...isn’t that all about power

how happy happy we come along and then

it’s all dashed like brains off the cliffs in

Mauthausen the way to carry stones up those one

hundred and eighty three steps against

the brittle bones and then slip or be forced to...

Maybe that’s not what I’m getting at watching

you die I mean to say while it’s all going down

there’s some compact made with the air

because we weren’t born birds we have

to crash the wind takes a piece of us for itself

a cut say a lender’s fee and maybe

falling like that--accident or not--is sanity

in a bassinet is new to the moon as brief

as the keep because something’s bound

to weight us down something’s bound to

break us through and maybe that shard

of bone broke on the stone is the dust 

offered up and that random wind we scream

into after we’re taken down like hay

before the blade is our way of saying

There is no God there is a God there is no

god there is and it stays like that it stays

a bit of it anyway until we stand again

and mark a path with crosses and make

a pact with salt with backbone with ridicule

with innocence with the eyes of the living

and the dead looking out at the same

fucking thing and whispering to each, all four

of them, and the keeper’s keys jingle at the hip

after the door’s closed and locked and she

walks, or being dead, floats, just above the stone

pavements, away.

stain

 stain

maybe scraping scraping

scraping at the stain will fainten

fainten faint faint fainten it some

under the thumb some under

the lip the wet underside always meet

meet meeting the teeth till seduced

away till mug on mug its up

then whatever’s in

the mouth

whatever’s

loved and that stain

that absolute proof

of some yesterday

no scrape alone no

faint faint when

pulled away

when

thumb rubbed

look:

it

glows

On Any Given Day

On Any Given Day

On any given day there’s a kid listening to eighteen

and a hundred  things at once and maybe the least

is “Tell me in your own words how you relate

to John Proctor’s reluctance to go to Salem after

he confesses to his wife that he’s seen Abigail alone

on the edge of her accusations."

On any given day the boy in the front row in the heavy

coat and hood drawn low slopes to his note-

book so low so close he thinks he can disappear

in the cipher of right obtuse acute angles so he can

kindle his day on day wish to be anonymous to plot

the day’s equation neat and obvious as x and y demand

On any given day the last diaper in the house is used

covering the rashy ass of a sleepless eight month

and the floor’s cold and the laundry’s dry enough

but spit-up old and no one’s rubbing quarters together

except they got almost enough to get stoned and who

knows or gives a shit when the battle of Gettysburg was

On any given day making it to school is as miraculous

as it gets and at least there’s time between classes

to sneak into the bathroom and throw up the six

corn flakes and on this day it’s mostly spit and thick

sick with a bit of blood and isn’t it Food Science next

block and how many times has the nurse seen me this week?

On any given day she hides her missed period behind her

coat just like he hid her "no!" behind her throat behind

her friend’s parents wet bar and stuffed her anyway so

hard so fast so almost never happening its easy to deny and

that’s what he does and he snapchats her cheap bare ass

and now she knows really knows Hassan in the Kite Runner

On any given day mom won’t wake up when she shakes her

it was the same when she was eight and she was split eye

to nose going down in the bathroom the cool hard cast

iron enamel opening her face the way a zipper opens a pair

of jeans or a coat or a favorite pair of boots to wear to school

On any given day the bulge is made of a High Point 995

and it’s lunch time and by Jesus God those fuckers gonna pay

I’m done listening to their teeth squeeze out “free

faggot ass” in the locker room after gym class I’m done

eating the pizza they shove in my face after they spit

after they blow their nose after they piss on it.

On any given day his leg aches where the amputation

right at the knee and the meds they give and the speed

of the pain caves him and he rolls and crashes and rolls

and crashes the bone it’s gone but it’s not and when it’s all

settled up through to the pelvis maybe he’ll walk again but

yeah so five bucks five bucks I'll sell this pill to you...

On any given day the pocket vibrates and it takes a drone

pilot in Arizona a millisecond to correct the drift but a slow brb

to collide head on and trauma man you don’t know trauma

until you’ve but no that didn’t happen to me that didn’t happen

it couldn’t have you seen the other car the baby seat handle

a hundred feet away, the baby...

fumble

fumble

maybe is maybe but maybe

it’s the snow I need

to scoop out and cup

in my bare palm to keep me

from drifting out

as though this great freeze

of a blond sometimes white

sometimes green field

were (at the bottom

of the hill still yet to climb)

a wave wall I’ve dipped my blouse open

to, and the only foam to loose itself

to my left breast hung low over

the gunwale is a frayed camisole

a bubble of winded water gone

to ice lucky to lodge in the pocket

of this bank untucked like a loose

shirttail whose tips a night ago

were loose as that bubble

free as that and as random

the naked linen the dangling

from two strings button

whose two free eyes free of thread

free of cloth said nothing blessed

nothing their mouth of awe

couldn’t say having

to slide into the only

hole they’re told

only to be denied

the slide

one thumb  at a time

On the Moment Just As Catastrophe... and then Long After

February 17^th:  On the Moment Just As Catastrophe...and then Long After

Where I a Prisoner chain'd, scarce freely draw
The air imprison'd also, close and damp,
Unwholsom draught: but here I feel amends,
The breath of Heav'n fresh-blowing, pure and sweet

                                                                                                John Milton

                                                                                                Samson Agonisties

I was thinking about Samson

before he woke up that last time

he had all his hair, when after his

night of her all over him with her scissors

                                                a story I know says

                                                he was shaved

                                                by men but I like to think

                                                he’s so strong

                                                drunk she takes the lead

                                                and holds his slick living

                                                hair in her hand the way

                                                she’s always held him

                                                and it shines in the olive oil

                                                light and is so

                                                unremarkable she is almost

                                                through the lock before

                                                she feels the spirit rush out

                                                like a naked girl at the river

                                                when the lightning strikes

                                                nearby.  But when she’s holding

                                                the cut off hair almost

                                                right away she begins

                                                sleeping with him

                                                and they’re both done in

               

when he wakes up all skin

and no other trace of him (maybe

the basket of his hair is sold

up river) and he is still

all muscle stuffed in the narrow

end of his dream and he reaches

for her and she Philistine

beneath the lions mane is the same

as the night before, she is honey,

is jawbone, is dust and blood

on her thighs and he tries, oh but

he tries reaching for her

and it’s like waking up after too much

surgery, after the exploration

didn’t go well and the wound is sewn

and the wind is still blowing

under the bone of memory

and she’s smiling she’s asleep

she’s tight with herself and her lion.

She’s still got a fist of his hair

and maybe that’s his blind moment

seeing: he can’t not notice now

and slumps down all at once, a sack

of cut and dried cedar.

He is losing himself he is losing his beloved

God he’s nothing yet of nothing what

he will be:

                                branded blind bare

                                at the mill wheel

                                siring sons in his cell

                                the god like drops of his mercury

                                at his feet elusive

                                as the shock trauma

                                but waking up in the follicle,

                                underneath it all,

                                prickling. 

how getting here becomes

how getting here becomes

the day that plays you, a lute,

a zither brief between the legs

or the fingers, pulled clouds

raked through

all the way like after a drunk

or a good spurt of luck like

how a woman pulls a comb

through her hair

and can’t help but stop

to wonder how did it

get to there how did it,

you, moon through the window

months and months

absent and this

chance glance this sitting

hard and heavy here

halfway through winter

with the worst slung low

out of state and maybe

maybe if the wind’s right,

arriving by nightfall or next week

if Manitoba if Atlanta if Akron

meet up for a threesome

or in the least an agreement

before leaving no name

at the desk and no hope

of ever coming back

but the play of it all the way

good random sex gets its own room

and its own way and leaves

you, moon,

a shift on the motel floor, a drip

in the bathroom sink trap

not yet pulled down the throat

of the gassy blow-back

just sitting maybe to dry there

in the brown iron of a thousand days

just like this

one.

a brief relief

a brief relief

while you quiet down from a rough

round of drinks, while the ring-stain

on the table you sit at is rubbed

and rubbed and comes to nothing

a dog in the alley is losing his teeth

in the neck of a street mate

and it will take months for the soup

to cool in her after she’s licked each

wound clean of vein and sheath.

Some coincidence a Hard Day’s Night

is the song you thumb that circle to

while they growl, locked, and soon

you excuse and you fall

on the wall and slip into the divot

where all the world’s worries

and jazz wind up, briefly, and then

a passive moon pulls it all

to the sea the sea the shining shiny sea.

On Innocence

February 15^th:  On Innocence 

I wish I could take you

with the appetite of a child who has never sinned.

                                                               

                                                Bread

                                                Stephen Berg

it’s not that purity is overrated so much

as it is misunderstood, so much

as it is thumbed through a skein

of pain and longing and sought

in the dark of that longing--the way praying

hands fish inside the mobius dark

of yarn to try to find the tip

of the other beginning

how the fingers pinch and pull and do not

could never know what they’re feeling

for and even if it’s not a grope

even if it is the very thread of respect

it’s a five digit tangle of lost ways.

Think about it: the purity of snow, falling and fallen

                the purity of a baby, human or otherwise

                the purity of a river’s beginning, if you can find it

                the purity of first time lips on first time lips

                the purity of giving (and what a word because giving is giving away) birth

                the purity of an apple blossom, or was it a fig?

                the purity of that first morning with, and then without

                the purity of a bruise blue enough to be the sea and it is the sea

                                beneath the purity of the skin whatever color it is

                The purity of the first sin that drips its liquid on a nipple

                                of a girl’s first blood

                                of her second

Listen:                   all of it is souped in the chaos of pain

                                and if it at all lies quiet while it’s held or beheld

                                while it’s soothed and soothed into a wound

                                while the honey of it is spun out of the comb to drip

                                                down the spigot of a lover’s tongue

                                               

                                don’t tell me it doesn’t hurt.  It does hurt.  More

                                than any other hurt there is.  If you don’t

                                feel it you’re either lying or it’s not pure.  And then: 

                                if you’ve opened a vein for it let me

                                kiss your pure wound.  Let me, woman, give you

                                this fruit.