SHE JUST CALLED AGAIN

“I called to ask you if you are still writing;
perhaps you’ve given up on earning money.
You waste your time on all this petty fighting,
composing one-line jokes that are not funny,
and dreaming of the life you could be living
if you got off your ass, put on your shoes,
and got down to the business of forgiving.
Give it a try. What have you got to lose?"
I didn’t take her call: ignored the ringing
and let my voicemail catch her latest nagging.
She’s left them since she left me, each one stinging;
these messages have filled my cell to sagging.
So now they’re spilling out onto the table,
like I’d be spilling, too, if I were able.

WHERE YOU ARE

Five or so hours from now
my uncle, seated next to his ex-wife of twenty-odd years, will almost ask me, in his way, just how long I intend to wait before I bring someone special to meet him.

Now
halfway between the farm and home, I am stuck in a small town’s annual traffic jam, behind a parade of teenage would-be kings and queens who wave and smile from their perches at the tops of back seats of convertibles, preening down main street in Colon, Michigan, at five miles per hour.

In eight months
I will blow straight through this town without stopping, and it will be spring, and I will be distracted, my heart so recently broken by a girl I can’t even imagine right

now
trapped at the back of a parade. I wait, and wonder how many times I’ve failed to look up at the right moment, boarded the wrong train, chosen the wrong school, driven past you but been looking at the wrong side of the road, away from you and toward loneliness.

In twenty-six or so hours
I will be driving too fast on a dark country road and run over a possum’s tail.

In four years and nine months
I will marry you, and we will be happy.

In five hours
I will meet the woman who broke my uncle’s heart. They will sit next to each other, and smile at me in a way that is beyond happiness, beyond sad knowingness of life, beyond the wisdom that comes with age; beyond my understanding. I will wonder which of them called the other first, to begin the reconciliation.

But here, and now
the parade does not abate, as if smiling is always the same thing as happiness. And today, it is. And here, in Colon, any of them could be king or queen; I'll be gone before they know, before the smiles of this moment give way to wisdom and time.

A MARXIST VILLANELLE

The greatest art is art that no one sees.
This art, whose mark on men of consequence
is small, exists in the basic mysteries

we keep inside ourselves. It flows with ease
from callused hands on sunburned continents,
this greatest art, this art that no one sees.

The supplest odes are written to the breeze
as blowers cast an eye toward coughing vents,
their verse devoured by noise, sweet mysteries

that vanish as composed. And in Belize,
the heir to Rembrandt's strong strokes paints a fence.
The greatest art is art that no one sees.

Alone, in fallow fields, on war-scarred knees,
a dancer reels with practiced eminence.
So many muse-touched hearts die mysteries.

Great art, it's true, adorns known histories,
and well-viewed artists gird our elegance.
But the greatest art is art that no one sees;
it’s fleeting, birthed in piecemeal mysteries.

PARADELLE OF A PLASTIC SURGEON

He believed in the sanctity of a face;
he believed in the sanctity of a face,
but not of a soul, so he slowly cut away the flesh;
but not of a soul, so he slowly cut away the flesh.
Slowly, in the face of a soul he cut away
he believed the flesh, but not so of a sanctity.

His own world was full to bursting;
his own world was full to bursting
with starry death symbols, to which the stars were blind;
with starry death symbols, to which the stars were blind.
The blind world was bursting with death,
full to his own symbols, to which were starry stars.

With a scalpel, he carved his initials;
with a scalpel, he carved his initials
into the cheekbone of a woman he once had loved;
into the cheekbone of a woman he once had loved.
He had into a woman with the scalpel of his initials;
he carved a once-loved cheekbone.

The slowly bursting cheekbone in the flesh
initials the stars. He carved not so full into a death
the symbols of a starry scalpel.
He loved a cut-away woman, which were his face,
of a soul he had once believed.
But to, of his own sanctity, he was blind.

THE MARK

We know, because we feel it in our own improving souls: redemption is possible. But who is truly redeemed, and who is only pretending? Good murderers and bad murderers look too much alike, and so we wait for the invention of telepathic machines, which could see into the minds of the seemingly repentant; wait, for the permanent tattoos we can etch upon the skins of those who are faking; wait, until we may build our prison for the branded few whose filthy souls stare us squarely in our faces, their shadows giving our light its stark brilliance; we will shine so brightly on the other side of the walls.

THE WRITER'S CHOICE

Be frugal with your words; let idle thoughts
stay idle, unexpressed until such time
as meaning grasps your mind, and snarls, and plots
in straight-lined lobes to give reason a rhyme.
Or, use your words in undeserving praise
of gooey, messy, doubtful thoughts. Lay low
the beast that means, and make your words a way
of saying things that you don’t really know.