Tornado Crossing

They've followed me for years, the torqued
and humid pressures, the masses
of wrangling air. August afternoons
I found myself with a good pitching arm
and a first crop of acne, a boy among boys,

until they came, draining out of the wet
green belly of the sky. By the time
the sirens sounded, the air was full
of white lime and shredded yellow jerseys,
and I was weightless, whirling over the houses
of my fathers. It's been like this ever since:

lovers have lost me in the air, and great poems,
whole treatises of reason, have been ripped
from my hands to rain out over, I don't know,
Kansas, maybe. More than once
I've found myself turning to say something
beautiful, then suddenly looking far down

at someone waving a bewildered goodbye.
This is how I've moved through all my lives,
whipped up and torn apart, rained down
and remade, different clothes, new skin.
Only my voice has remained the same.
Sometimes I'd go to sleep and wake up

in a different timezone, on a rooftop
in North Dakota, Wisconsin, Nebraska,
anywhere a tornado has ever been. I ran
for days and years, deep into deserts
and forests, into places where, by virtue

of physics, tornadoes should not exist.
For awhile in California I was whirlwind-free,
and that life of helpless flight became
a running joke. By my front door

I posted a sign that read, "Tornado Crossing,"
in thick black letters. My neighbors laughed,
their perfect faces crinkling like plastic wrap.
The sign was levity and wit until the green sky,
the sirens, the perfect identical houses aloft

like stucco zeppelins, their windows popping
like balloons. And I woke to this life,
a displaced citizen, alone in a lonely city.
So far the weather is beautiful, all sun
and careless breezes, though lately I wake

with my ears popping and my tears staining
the ceiling. And just yesterday, down the street,
it rained baseballs. You should have seen it.
The damage was immense.


Elegy for the Second Person

Even now, there are angels
pacing the roof.
You can hear the shingles crack
with each luminous step
and the sheathing creak
with feathery weight. You listen
as they walk above the rafters
then pause at the gutter, perched
like folded birds.

Already the house is darkening
with your absence. The brass handles
on the front door brown in silence.
The lemon balm along the walk is learning
to go on without you, and the ivy
continues undoing the mortar,
tearing at the stones. Your breath is cold,

and the skin you were never comfortable in
blues and loosens, opening like a curtain.
In your hands is the key to the house,
and you find yourself rubbing it nervously.
You roll it between your thumb and fingers
and listen for wings. You pace beneath
the footsteps, you turn the key over and over,
you slip into dusk and become the dusk.
And the key becomes the last of what you love:
you open your hands, and there in feathered,
intractable dark, if only for a moment,
it shines.


Speech Therapy: Week Two

in my loneliness, i pressed the muzzle
of a Remington shotgun tight
against my chin, whispered
an Ave Maria, and pulled the trigger.
A wadcutter slug spit from its casing,
rode a mushroom of gas along
the unrifled barrel, met the soft place
just inside my teeth, and plowed through
to the once-white ceiling.
i think of it now as being

something like a powerful sneeze.
i woke to the dull medicinal white
of the hospital, my face packed
like a canker sore. A portion
of the tongue, the hard palate,
cartilage and bone of the nose,
turned to a red-brown mist.
The sinuses blocked and scrambled,

the resonating bones crazed
with vein-like cracks. One ear
blown, numbness in the upper lip,
eyes rolling like loose bearings
in my bored-open head.
i couldn't pronounce my name,
Paul, polluted by the palatal L.
i couldn't pronounce my brother's
name, Thomas, crowned by that T

i so often enunciated in exasperation,
the strange cluck i made that meant
i was angry to be my brother's keeper.
i have to press the stump of my tongue
between my molars to make a choking rasp
that sounds more like a seizure
than a name, but Thomas

in his kindness always responds.
My mother won't settle for seeing me
alive. She comes into my room weeping
and whispering, pray with me. So i do
the best that i can. i still have
the Ave Maria, but the English Hail Mary
defies me. Explanation defies me --

to say i was lonely or even
the obvious i blew my face off
requires sounds my cleft voice
can no longer produce. Michael,
my therapist, shows me new ways
to make liquid sounds, but this
stubborn apparatus -- tongue, lips,

glottis and breath -- falters
into its old ways, manipulating
phantom bits that were atomized
in my bedroom's nagging half-light.
Repeat he says. Again, repeat.
Peggy came yesterday with flowers
and the gift of a manual typewriter,

a heavy black box that that fills
my lap as a reassuring weight.
i marvel at its delicate mechanics,
the keys levered against
the complex matrix of characters,
the hammers swinging forward
and impacting the ribbon to produce

perfect, pronounceable words.
it took me a while to realize
that the upper case i didn't work.
Last night i dreamt i pressed a key
and the whole machine flew apart,
exploding into a black and silver
halo and raining down on the once-white
sheets. i gathered up the shards
of alphabet and casing, and with what
i could recover, i rebuilt my voice.
i woke trying to weep, remembering
that once i felt i could never

be whole, that i had missed some
human lesson, and had no place among
the people. Now i touch my face
and find myself permanently wounded,
blown open by something as trivial
as grief, and the one thing
that can save me -- my voice, guttural,

crippled -- shines through the keys
of a Remington typewriter.
The one thing that can save me
is reined and driven by my mother,
who speaks in time with me and completes
the words i can only begin. Soon,

Michael promises me, i will be able
to speak alone and clearly, and i
will have much to say. For now, i have
only prayer and rote, and the exercise
i repeat, again and slowly repeat:
love, that moves the sun and other stars,
intractable love, my one bright gift.


Compline

You return without the weight of coins,
pockets packed with soot and broken keys.
The city is a web of empty lots, a pasture
for backhoes and gutted cars, and you return
without the weight of family, over-dressed
in the sad tweed of debt. Down the pitted street,
across the littered schoolyard, over
the vine-warped fence, the house
you know and refuse to remember
looms in rampant wisteria, smoke-damaged,
winnowed by volleys of kudzu and rain.
Walk up the wet rot steps, lightly maneuver
the buckling porch, lightly cross the threshold
and enter the roofless dark, this hunching place
that once was the palace of your fathers.

The table where you learned the alphabet
is an upturned pile of screws and kindling,
one pine leg pointing toward the sky. The walls
of the nursery are little more than mulch,
and the room where your father once curled up
weeping for his knees, the secret room
of pistols and bourbon, is gone. Tiptoe
farther in, step over crumbled under-roofing,
dig through the floor and find the hatch
for the cellar, the room you weren't allowed in,
the only room you've never seen. Down there,

beneath the ruptured bowl of the kitchen floor,
cans of beets are ready to burst their seams.
Down there are the bones of your fathers,
the bones of tape knives and margin trowels;
down there, batteries bleeding acid, bolts
without threads, coils without torque, and you enter
because you've never seen these things, because
you've lived so long without the weight of work.
You climb down what steps remain, you hop lightly
onto the dirt, and you find yourself

staring at a man in the speechless dark.
It's your father, tired-eyed, smelling of bourbon
and aftershave. Why are you down here,
he asks, and before you can speak,
he takes you by the neck and whispers in your ear.
He doesn't say "get out" or "remember me."
His breath on your face is cold and soft.
Look around you, son, he says. This is all you get.
This is your life. You only get one.
And you don't even get to keep it.