The Sea

The sea rocks to and fro rocking herself
In her own seasick-green arms 
Like a girl feeling sorry for herself
Walking home alone from the party
But the sea doesn’t care for poetry
But she loves poets poets whose mouths open
Like the mouths of baby robins
To fill the plastic grocery bags of their lungs
Poor Shelley on his yacht with Ray Bans on
Took that last big blue breath as if for all of us
A copy of Keats’s Endymion in his breast pocket
Keats who told him in a letter
He better fill every rift with ore
If he wanted to be a poet and he wanted to be
His friends burned his body on the beach
Weeping but already thinking of dinner
Somewhere above them in the town
And the glass of claret they’d raise to his memory
But hurt by this his splendid heart refused to burn
What even is there left to say about Shelley
Sick of the narcissism of elegies
What even is there left to say about the sea
But it’s so irresistible literally
I could walk in now and drown myself
But for the little dog I’ve brought here with me
Desperate for me to throw his ball
He would follow me in not to save me
But for the comfort of my company
And then there’d be no one to not remember me
And anyway I’m happy here
At the edge of it all as far from Washington
As I can be and still be in America
Not counting Alaska or Hawaii 
But you know what I mean
Picking up dead hermit crabs
Who died in their shells like monks 
Found dead in their cells with smiles in their beards
Pocketing rocks I’ll toss away 
Before leaving and always the seething 
Surge and sigh backwards into herself 
She being her own source and origin
And somewhere the moon 
With her oarsman’s arms
And the tide tugging at my wife’s womb
Back and forth and back and forth forever
What did Whitman call it 
The procreant urge of the world
Kerouac cracked up trying to translate it
This untranslatable tongue
It won’t come over into English
It’s pure gibberish
Nothing to understand but that it’s a hell
Of a lot of water
That seems to stretch on forever but can’t possibly
Since it ends here at my feet
But better to consider it infinite 
Like how a boy born inland imagines 
The sea to be
The cargo ships bound for China
Swaying on their long stalks
The birds bellying above the waves
Rhyming with their peaks and troughs
The reefs petrified pale
Like they’ve seen something terrifying
And they have and it was us
The plastic six-pack rings strangling
The sea turtle who was only trying to get to shore
To lay her eggs on the overheated sand 
And the overfishing I think about before 
Saying that my salmon is a bit overdone 
One could say so much more one could say 
Dumb stuff like the foam is the frilly lace
A girl in another century wears
To a dinner with a suitor she despises
And knows she’ll have to marry
Or that the crash of the waves is the laughter 
Of bureaucrats in a theater 
In the midst of a war they ordered
Like their steak bloody rare
Good and bad metaphors even the good bad
The sea like this and that and this
Fume and froth and hiss
Milling her shells into sand like a man
Grinding his teeth in his sleep
But everyone knows she's a woman 
Whose adult son never calls
In McCarthy’s The Road the boy and his father
Fended off death in order to see this
Piss-colored this insistent sea
Which is acting like it wants to 
Climb the bluffs and get into our politics 
Our relationships our pants
Or it doesn’t want that at all which is why
It’s always pulling back like a girl
Who doesn’t want to kiss her uncle
Or a boy does after putting his lips
To his lips in the foggy mirror
If I could make it stop for just one second I would
If I could raise this driftwood stick
Like a conductor’s trembling baton
And make the whole symphony of salt pause
But I can’t so instead 
I throw the ball

Live Oaks

Compassionate the way the sneering whine 
Of the neighbor’s weed whacker dies away, 
As if so that I can hear the wind creak
In the antique furniture of the trees.
These nearest the house are coast live oaks,
Called that because they never lose their leaves.
But hanging a hammock, the first one I tried
Drilling into for an anchor was rotten.
Water gushed out of it like they say it did
Out of Christ’s pierced side. I apologized
Like when you walk in on someone crying
And found two others willing to hold me,
Swaying whenever the wind sways through them,
Looking up at leaves that will never fall.
Even the dead one gets to wear hers still
Like a woman buried in the green dress she loved.

Hawks

I remember, on the farm I grew up
On, watching them wheeling over the shorn
Fields after haying, hunting the mice
The mowing exposed, their damp green world,
Which they must have taken for granted just
As we take ours for granted, having been
Thinned into windrows. I hated the hawks,
Their boring hunger that I told myself
Was so different from my own, hated the way
They rose so leisurely with their warm kills.
I wasn’t old enough to see beauty
In this random and thus fair act of rapture.
I didn’t consider the ones who were taken
Might be the chosen and those who weren’t
Might have been envious of their brethren
Who must have seemed to them to have put on
Their small gray shoulders great red wings.

The Undertow

On our way to the sea we boys were told
Watch out for the undertoe. That’s how 
I heard it, anyway. Even inland,  
Standing on the cool tile floor of the house
In Florida my grandparents owned (true
To the stereotype of the snowbird Jews
Who fled cold Ohio every winter),
I could feel it slipping under my feet.
This before the financial crisis of oh eight,
Which took everything, forcing them to settle 
For the upper-middle class fate 
Of a long-term rental. And under it all,
The undertoe, which I didn’t know then
Is spelled undertow. We were told again, 
Just as it was coming into our hearing, 
To beware of it, beware being
A faster way of saying be aware.
“It will take you before you know it,”
They said, and they meant it literally. 
Before you know you’re being taken 
You’re being taken. Not something you can
Really watch out for, is it, more feel 
As a slight instability underfoot, 
Or, more specifically, under toe, the very
Faintest feathery trickling tickle 
Of a loss so gradual you don’t notice 
It before you’re being swept out in its arms, 
A sudden vanishing of everything
You thought you were so safely standing on.
They didn’t tell us all this, of course,
But this was what they meant, our grandparents
Who, decades later, would die within 
Two weeks of one another, my grandmother’s 
Death the undertow that took him, though
He was expecting it, maybe even asking it to.
A few of us who went to her funeral 
Didn’t even go to his, as if 
We’d watched them being buried together. 
One winter it did take one of us, 
The undertow, that is, the youngest, as is
Always the case in the stories, which proved
Everything they’d been telling us was true, 
Though to be fair it wasn’t my brother’s fault.
Alone with us, our grandfather was the one
Who was supposed to be watching for it,
And this before phones, even, probably
He was distracted by the dumb beauty 
(dumb as in silent) of the light on the water,
Not even sunset yet, just the flinty
Late afternoon sun, thinking how all that
He had worked so hard for he had
And had need of nothing more, which is when
Of course you lose it all, all here being 
Your daughter’s third son, and find yourself
Running into the ocean in khakis 
And a striped polo shirt and screaming
Grab him up out of the waves, the boy the sea
Was trying to take, and come walking
Up the steep beach sobbing, choking on joy,
The undertow nibbling at your feet. 

The Hawk

Down the glass tunnel the binoculars make
The hawk flies straight at me, fierce face
Of a warrior in an old story,
His beak like a tool for cutting wire,
His eyes surprisingly mean, like he's mad
I’ve brought him closer than he meant to come.
I’m holding my gaze like I’m holding fire
And the hawk is coming, huger, closer,
So close I’m sure I’ll feel the wind of his wings.
But of course I’m the first to blink. Dropping
The binoculars, I shove him away
And now see him as I normally would, 
Wheeling high overhead, disinterested, 
The way another’s death soars over you
On its way to them. But it’s too late now.
I can’t unsee how I saw him see me. 

Boat Abandoned Far Inland

I find her flipped over in a field
Her mast has snapped, her paint has peeled
A boat abandoned far inland

The sea is calling her to come
Back to where she came here from
This boat abandoned far inland

But she’s too far to hear its voice
So she has no other choice
Than to be a boat abandoned far inland

Someone must have towed her here
To rot without the ocean near
This boat abandoned far inland

But her hull remembers salt and sand
Her tiller remembers the helmsman’s hand
This boat abandoned far inland

She should have been given a better death
Her sails raised and filled with breath
This boat abandoned far inland

May the rising waters continue to rise
And take her wholly by surprise
This boat abandoned far inland

Then it will be as if she had never been
What she was back then
A boat abandoned far inland

Visiting Horses

Before I was caught thrashing in the internet, 
I used to walk out to the barn at night to visit horses.
There were several over the years, they were all the same.
I would cross the dark yard, over grass or snow, 
Over the shadows of trees thrown by the moon.
I would swing up over the bar gate like I was in the rodeo,
The pigeons cooing like the poor boiling water.
I took a good minute for my eyes to adjust.
At first it was just the silhouettes of derelict equipment,
The feed wagon with its chute wired up like a boxer's jaw,
The dinosauric auger with its brontosaurus neck,
All long ago broken down for parts across the Midwest
Like the debris field of a space disaster.
Finally I could see the woodcut of her body in the dark.
She was trying to understand what I was doing there.
So rare for her to be visited at such a late hour.
Hard for her to get even her huge head around that.
It always ended in her coming walking towards me
To see what it was I wanted. I wanted only to feel
The warm puffs of breath from her nostrils 
Like checking the heat coming off a radiator,
To tug on the tough rubbery skin of her chin, 
Then feed her a handful of oats for her trouble.
Now, nights, I reach for my blacked out phone,
Touch it awake, fill both my eyes full of its light. 
There are no horses in my life anymore, fewer stars.
But I can remember those nights I came back
From visiting her, slipping quietly back into the house
In which everyone I loved was asleep
And lay in bed thinking of her standing out 
There in the dark, probably wondering what 
The hell that had all been about.

Moving Walkway

Always the choice whether to get
Where we’re going before
We would have gotten there anyway
Had we not chosen to get there faster

No matter what choice we make
A doppelgänger will appear 
Ahead of or behind us
Who we’ll always have to follow

Or always be followed by
One of infinite instances 
When lives split off from our life
Like we’re a branch a boy

Is sitting whittling into an arrow
And this isn’t a bad thing
The more shavings there are
The more arrow

Man Juggling Knives: Mexico City

Into stopped traffic he stepped.
Had it not been stopped, 
He would have stopped it. 
Two in one hand, one in the other,
The juggler’s mudra,
Though I didn’t know at first that
They were knives. 
We leaned, my wife and I,
Towards each other in order to see
Between the front seats
What he would do,
Our Uber driver watching too.
As he began throwing them so high
We only saw him catch them,
I thought, I could do that.
And I can, juggle that way,
That is: golf balls, river stones, oranges.
But when he caught them all at once
With a theatrical clatter
And glared at us through the windshield,
I knew they were knives.
He whetted the two with the one,
The blades sharpening each other
The way two unique minds can.
Then he started juggling again,
Eyes up, watching the highest one spin,
Though it was only the one whispering
Its handle into his palm 
That could have cut him.
Every so often he'd catch them
And clang them together
To prove their danger,
Knowing the more we knew
The risk, the more we'd give.
Meanwhile the light behind him
Had started blinking red
The way the lights do in Mexico City.
I could feel him feeling that
It was about to change.
Before it could,
He caught them all, with finality
This time, and then, 
With all three in one hand,
Began begging the cars,
Beginning with ours,
To pay him for what
We couldn’t not have watched,
Like St. Francis’s brother,
Who took up juggling after
Praying for the stigmata in vain.

Our Way

Life doesn’t always go our way.
There are so many other ways it can go.
When it is going our way, we think
Of course it’s going our way.
Our way is the way it should be going.

Then, before we know it,
Life is no longer at our side.
It must have taken another way,
A way we didn’t take because it wasn’t ours.
It’s going someone else’s way now.

We hate this someone else
Whose way life is going the way
We hate the new partner of an old lover.
And it is always when life isn’t going our way
That night lets go of the sky and falls.

Trouble is life had the lantern and the map.
Though we have the road to guide us, 
We’re not so sure now that our way
Is the way we should be going.
Without life, we're lost.

But life always appears out of the dark.
Apparently it changed its mind
And decided to go our way after all. 
So we walk arm in arm with life again, which is nice, 
Though we never seem to get where we’re going.

Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger Meet in Hell

	— For Dave Wright, who said he just wanted to outlive Dick Cheney

At first it was alright. No hotter
Than the hottest day in Houston
When he would walk between cars
On his way into Halliburton,
The sun glancing off the windshields
Like a blow that misses but still kills.
He saw some who’d been burnt badly
Like pictures of children he’d been shown
So he could say, if asked at a hearing
Had he seen the pictures of the children, 
He’d seen the pictures of the children 
Without perjurying himself. 
They were like those wounded who,
Coming back from the front lines,
Turn the faces of the crisp reinforcements
Pale as they approach the battle.
But the burned seemed busy
With something that didn’t involve him.
Indeed, no one paid him any attention,
Until he spotted Kissinger in the garden,
Sitting in a charred wicker chair.
“Hi-ya Dick,” he called out,
Waving his arms extravagantly.
“Welcome to Hell. Oh but it’s not so bad. 
Best tan I’ve ever had,” he said,
Admiring his forearms. 
“Food’s atrocious, of course,
Always overcooked 
No matter how rare you order it.
But what I really miss 
Is a good martini. Good luck
Finding any ice. But you get used to it.”
“Is this as hot as it gets?” 
He asked hopefully.
“Not even close,” Henry said.
“This is just the outer ring.
But it should be awhile for you yet.
Here, let me see what number you are.”
He handed over a scrap of paper
Small as the fortune in a fortune cookie.
“Oh yes. You’ve got plenty of time.
Just enjoy. There’s a pool over there
That’s nice to sit by. The water boils 
Away but they fill it every few days.
I left some magazines over there 
If you feel like reading. You know, Dick,
Movie stars used to really know how to live,
Unlike now.” For the first time,
He heard faint screams. Maybe the wind
Had changed, or maybe he had heat stroke
And was imagining things. 
“How long before they take you, Henry?” 
He said in his signature snarl.
He hadn’t lost his voice in death.
“Could be any minute now. 
But it was good seeing you, Dick.
Say, before it’s too late, there’s a question
I always meant to ask you.
Now might be my last chance.”
“Go ahead.” “Who was more evil,
You or me.” “I don’t think I was evil at all. 
I tried to make the world a better place.”
“Same here. Communism, terrorism.
Those are the real evils. 
They made a mistake.
We should be in heaven,
Lounging around on clouds,
Not down here getting barbecued.
Well, speak of the devil.”
He turned around to see two demons
Approaching with tridents,
Their tails sparking behind them
Like live wires. “Take it easy, Dick,”
Henry said as they took him away
Without a struggle.
At first, he was at a loss as to what to do.
He decided to go find the pool.
The chaise lounges were burned 
Down to their frames, and only the poles
Of the umbrellas remained. 
The water in the pool was set at a low boil.
On a table was an issue of Silver Screen
From 1954, the smiling face
Of Rita Hayworth nibbled away by flame.
Reading whatever text was left,
He began to relax a little.
Like Henry had said, it would be awhile.
Might as well enjoy himself in the meantime.
And before long it was easy
To tell himself that
The screams were the laughter of children.

The Tick

I watch the tick climb my pants leg. So serious. His tiny legs work both independently of one another and together, like a crew of rowers. He wants my blood, can smell it through my jeans. Can you imagine how blood must smell to a tick? Good enough to draw him out of the grass where he has been waiting for me all his life. Surely, he thinks, there is a gap here, a chink in this denim armor. He dreams of dark, moist places where he can latch himself, secure as a padlock. Then he will drink and drink, like a man in a dark bar on a bright day in a town he's just passing through. But no bartender, it’s all for him, and all for free. He can’t know I’ve seen him. He doesn’t know what seeing is. He only knows my blood and his hunger and his need to fill one with the other. I let him climb. These are his last flat seconds alive. I pick him off and split his body — tiny enough to fit inside a watermelon seed — between my nails, then blow the mess off my thumb. Later, in the shower, I will search my body for his body, and, not finding him, feel inexplicably lonely.

The Sound of Rain

Into the new quiet came the sound of rain.
The sound of rain has green eyes
Like a girl alone at a museum on a weekday,
An art student practicing with the masters,
She sometimes has to wait
Until someone has seen enough,
Her pencil hovering over her sketchpad
Like a stylus over an album
Still spinning,
And walks away.

Heaven

There there will be no more winter in our lives.
Summer will spring back to spring and spring
Click over to summer again.
And there will be no more night in our lives.
The sun will shine all the time,
We’ll have no need for lamps or candles. 
But wait, wait a minute, I don’t know that
I want to go to Heaven.
Seems sad to be where
There is no snow, are no stars.
I’d rather still do good but stay down here
In an old farmhouse on a winter night,
Lighting a few candles,
Blowing into my hands.

Evenings Falling

I remember summer 
Evenings falling.
I would find them in the fields.
They had fallen a long time from high up,
But the clover broke their fall.

Not long after, on the heels
Of evening falling, 
Night would fall, too,
But I never found one of those.
By then it was too dark to see.

Falling is a good thing to do
If you’re an evening or a night, 
Some snow or silence or a shadow.

But if you’re a bomb, 
Or standing on a bridge at dawn,
Or a civilization,
Try not to fall 
If you can help it.

If you can’t,
Fall in a field.

Lovers Point

A place
as well
as what
lovers do
when they
stand there

Winged Wounds

This pair of cardinals in spring woods
Are two winged wounds.
Whose body did they take flight from,
I wonder. 
From the kid shot twice
In the back as he was walking away
From the fight he won,
They say. 
They didn’t want to be in his back
In the coffin forever, they wanted
To be in the trees, singing.
They wanted to be birds.

Dizzying thinking of the world sometimes.

Every fleck of glitter on the skin

Of a girl on Haight and acid

In 1968, the skin side

Of each fleck too. Her parents in New

Hampshire worrying about her,

The unique psychedelic swirl

On each soap bubble in her mother’s sink

While her father was opening the Wall

Street Journal to distract himself,

Every letter typed differently due

To the infinitely varying texture

Of the paper itself, which brings to mind

Ancient gnostic scrolls yet to be found

Under sand in the Syrian desert,

Each grain different from every other,

And the monk who wrote it, the black hairs

Stippling his shaven head in a way

No hairs have ever stippled a head,

Bent over a candle the flame of which

Took torquing forms no other flame

Has ever taken, throwing light like

No other flame has ever thrown,

Particular as the light that glittered

Off a fleck of glitter on her lower lip

As she danced to the Dead, who were still

Alive then, the complexity of the grass

Under her bare feet, Garcia playing

A lick he could never replicate if

He tried, but why would he try?

A gunshot and then another,

Like making sure they’re dead.

The boy who started falsely

Was winning for a moment

While the others knelt frozen

In their blocks like horses

Gone still in the starting stalls.

But you get a second shot here.

He’s lining up again.

He’ll start a little slower

This time and the starter

Will only have to fire once,

Like a killer who knows

There’s no use wasting the other.

I haven’t been posting too many poems lately - been focused on some fiction (that lesser art) - so I thought I’d share a link to a discussion I had with Evan Carlson and Darren Stephens on their excellent poetry podcast, The Poetic Turn.

https://www.thepoeticturn.com/austin-smith-the-poetry-of-place/

I hope you’re all doing well. Thank you for subscribing. More poems soon,

Austin