Detritus

      Wouldn’t it make more sense to climb
the stairs to bed and slip unwashed
      to death or sleep,
                  than to stand here,

      magnified in the glare of my night glass,
reaming out my gums, teeth, pores, and toenails,
      wide awake and in despair over
                  my own vanity?

      As I pat on blue scrub cream and exfoliate,
the ghost of Ivan Ilyich appears,
      all sunken cheeks and waxen brow,  
                  reproaching me.

      Still I scrape, clip, cut, and with sharp thread,
dredge the sludge out of the pouches
      between gums and teeth.
                  Revolting,

      this “good grooming,” this smell in the drain
of myself, flesh and dross,
      false blue slurry. Forego, forego,  
                  he warns.

Refusing Sweet Bread

Maven of domesticity, perfect
knife

mincing nuts into the butter,
cross-hatching

the loaf,
I see you by the stainless steel appliance

on Easter, kneading
sweet bread, knotting

braids around
snow-white eggs

boiled hard in the shell.
My mother died young. You moved right in,

well-equipped,
officious as a bowel.

You anoint yourself matriarch. Love,
your appliance—your zester and blade.

You bake; I smell burning hair.
When you scooch your pan of sweets

across the gleaming counter toward me,
your egg-blue eyes are the headquarters of cold.

Pigs Don’t Sweat

Evenings my father came home satisfied
and leaned against the refrigerator
with a can of Schlitz, took his first cold sip
then told me about his day, sweating like a pig.

Maybe he’d tell me how he’d winched
one-hundred pound cable to the top of
the telephone pole, then lay prone across
bare wires, jolts piercing his sweat-soaked shirt.

I’d press him to let me flip the tab on
a second cold one, just so I could watch him
crumple the golden empty with one hand
and hear again how he’d sweated like a pig.

In remembering my childhood,
one thing sticks out: Love trumps the truth.

A Poet Haggles

Oh God, I’ve already written enough about snow,
made you fall from every cloud,
filling cups,
cannisters, thimbles,
centuries.

I’ve disguised you as mountains:
abetting humans in their fitness training.
I’ve given you humans:
lifting dark things from your white crevass,

cramponed to your frozen waterfalls;
I’ve hung from an ax
polar-fleeced women, men in North Face.
I’ve given you names, and keepers
of names.

I’ve dressed you in seal-skin vestments.
I’ve made you the dark thing and the light.
I’ve given you albic flanks and honoraria,
ignited a blackbird or two, a thousand tree lines
burning gold.

I’ve given you brotherly love and cairns.
I’ve made you the dark thing and the light.
You asked for, and got,
immanence.

But you didn’t write back
until I let up
salting you from every cloud,
climbing rooftops and mountains,
calling your name.
Exhausted,

I flung open the gate and invited you to play
in the garden
children fall backwards into,
making angels.

And now that you’re here,
what do I want from you but
transcendence?