With sky a tight-fitting cast-iron lid,
       humidity and temp ninety-eight, rain stalled
over the next county, I listen to Edith
       Piaf ’s “Non, je ne regrette rien,” her raunchy,
chutzpah-laden contralto almost
       convincing me she actually has no regrets,
though I sure do, have never eased
       the ache of leaving my baby boy with sitters
so I could keep on with grad school,
       how some nights I’d come home to a bundle
of shuddering sobs till I held him
       and nursed him, but now of course he’s grown,
a solid forty-one, and I’m proud as
       any proud mom can be, yet I can’t shake free
of those tangling webs, while I know
       the spleen isn’t what Baudelaire and his cronies
thought, rather a neighbor of the stomach
       churning out antibodies, blasting worn-out red
blood cells, not a seat of down-in
       the-mouthness and foul temper as the ancient
physicians believed, so maybe I’m just
       cleaning away forty-plus years of regret, because
I’d sure like to sing along with Piaf
       that I regret nothing, and, after all, I wasn’t as
bad as other mothers I’ve read about,
       even Martha Sharp, who during the SS Nazi
years left her own offspring for months
       at a time to rescue Jewish kids and bring them
to the U.S., saving them from Auschwitz
       and Treblinka, saintly to be sure, but I wouldn’t
blame her children for feeling some
       pretty sour spleen about a mom’s not being there
to hug them for winning archery medals
      at summer camp or battling measles or bronchitis,
so I turn again to Piaf with her feisty
      chanson “Milord,” in awe that, decades after
a girlhood in her grandmother’s brothel,
      this “Little Sparrow” is even now clearing my
gloom, the way currents of rain end
      a drought, the way milk lets down from a breast.

No emptiness around here: across the street

     a backhoe clanking, beeping, the next-door neighbor’s

seven dogs at it again, shrill yaps mingled

     with baritone yowlings, 747s thundering overhead, and

you’re upstairs in your study, too far for me

     to hear your voice, but later, tonight, you’ll come down

and speak in your gentle tenor, and all

     other sounds will fade—as far as Wang Wei’s mountain.

She’ll hold her hand out a window
on a June day, snatch a chubby fistful of air,
clutch it all night beneath her sheets. 

Out of a dream of flight she’ll emerge,
vast as a yard of clover, and fall like a comforter
over the neighborhood. Then she’ll shimmer

like a maple in the wind. You might catch a whiff
of pine-sweet air—that’s her hair—but she’ll never
let you look right at her. She’ll dart in your periphery,

quick as a dining room mouse. Dusk,
she’ll gobble her handful of breeze, and puff
upward in pieces, into the hot-pink west.

The Hello Kitty piñata’s head
swings from the pepper tree—
a sweet decapitation. Glitter
across the rental table & pink
paper flowers wilt in the succulents.
This is the stale beer & cigarettes
of seven-year-olds. “My fluffy puppy
is so soft” still means “my fluffy
puppy is so soft.” I’m seducing
my wife the way good men
of my generation do, by rinsing
blue & red sticky plates & taking out
heavy cake trash. I’m celebrating
their lack of cool. No fights
over girls or boys to save face,
just face paint, just little
leopards everywhere.

I would rather be trapped in an attic with rats than play Monopoly
all the afternoons it takes to lose the last of my money to the already 

superrich 1 percent grandchild, to line up cheap green houses
on my low-rent Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues in a futile attempt

to collect enough to survive the next round of rent on Boardwalk
or Park Place, to feel pitiful gratitude when I Receive for Services

twenty-five dollars. Everything will be gone, save the smallest
denominations, the Asian crayfish will overrun the native,

the autumn olive will proliferate, the tallest thing will grow taller,
will be layered with gold, will turn to gold, will harden its gold heart.

It will squander, jet, pocket, dole, win past wanting to win, dig
the mine shaft, the ore, eat up the hillside, the birds, the whales,

crack the foundations of houses, force the defaulters into the street.
Dice will land as they will, will cause the tiny car to bounce

happily from St. James Place to Indiana Avenue, a galaxy of gobble,
will enable the placement of flamboyant hotels on the coast

where waters wash with exquisite music shoreward, all of it owned
by the God who dwells inside the winning, who has not said

otherwise yet, who owns Free Parking and Jail, who owns the treeless
board, the classy neighborhoods as well as the ones with the rats

and smashed-out windows, the murderous scrawl of languages
on walls, the smiling God holding the center with top hat and cane,

as I at last step out on the dock with my coffee and say to myself
the lines where Keats rhymes “think” with “nothingness do sink.”

 No one lofts a loud out
             to the left field 

fencing with its ads
             for Meacham’s Auto

and McClintock Paints.
             There’s no bravado

at the plate at all.
             No southpaw deals

his slider for a strike
             no one appeals,

since no one lent
             the anthem her vibrato.

This afternoon the high,
             off-tune legato

in the stands was only
             wind on steel.

But even though the team’s
             due back in town

tomorrow evening,
             though a storm is spinning

this way now, and though
             the world’s beginning

to dissolve in dust purled
             off the mound,

a patience rallies
             as the dark spills down

another rapture
             into extra innings.

for Jordan Bantuelle, keeper of the urban farm

You have seen a bee face up close. The verbs fell away, the sky tore strips of wax paper. You heard the thrill of the bees, you felt the stings. Through the metal hexes of fence, your fingers caught. Sleeping, you hurtled in a Beethoven surge. The geometry of winter: an angle of dead bees. The secret honey in the cells of six. The smell of honey heals all wounds. White wax kisses them, seals. Still you hurt underneath. The stars really do have sharps. The sky black as bees’ eyes. You go on unforgiven. Hungry for honey, hungry for balm, hungry for wings.

hat tip to Mark Zanger

“Yogi Berra was a great bad ball hitter; even if he had to golf or tomahawk, he was clutch.” The balls I hit are all bad that’s why I hit them. That’s where anger turns into beauty. They say there are no bad dogs but they are mostly dog trainers in their pride. Pride and shame are two ends of the same bat. Shame makes every bad ball your fault. That’s where Yogi comes in, the best Yankee philosopher since Emerson, the Buddha squatting behind every batter. He observes the violence of the perfect pitch, the smack in the deep pocket of his fat glove. Thanks to Yogi there are no bad restaurants, no bad decisions, no bad balls. When you come to a fork in the road, take it. Maybe a scratch single, a dribbler to the left, a ball just out of reach of a diving glove, Yogi motoring to first. He came back as a huge gentle black dog who takes the bite out of every bark. Soon all the neighbor dogs are following Yogi to the restaurant no one goes to anymore.

Like any mother I lived for my children. Bone of my bones, gave them my body as house, gave them my house as home. I was fruitful. I multiplied. Nothing was ever my own and I called this sacrifice, devotion. What I called them became their names. Some grew and some did not. Some were angry and some were not. Some murdered, some tended the flocks, some built boats to escape the flood. Some built towers into the sky. Some became pillars of salt. I fed them by the sweat of my brow. Some needed more than I could give them, though I saved only thorns and thistles for myself. God was a voice in the sky with no tree to burn. God was a shower of burning sulfur, a snake winding through the dirt. If I had a moment to spare, I might have bent to hear what he was saying.

On the Outer Banks in the early 1900s, a migratory sand dune, several stories high, engulfed the small fishing village of Seagull. Two churches, the post office, thirty-five homes, and the one-room schoolhouse were consumed by the dune.

Teacher is building a shack of driftwood, building it on the far shore. We watch from the schoolhouse windows, taking turns with her old silver binoculars. She gathers all manner of driftwood into her apron and sometimes passes by the beach in front of the school but does not turn her face to us.

*

Born of driftwood endowed with breath we are—began that old story Teacher had to close her eyes to tell. She spreads the wood to dry and eats nothing and takes not a drink but smokes her pipe. Eyes dry as opals and the sand and wind drying her from the inside out—petrified, as Teacher would say. Sister says her bones are anyway filling with sand.

*

Where is the lighthouse keeper? The light is out. There had been no beating it to the boats, no crowded bridge. Sister says at the tip of this spit of an island a wave of sand has begun its slow roll down through the land, a tidal wave of sand swallowing the trees right up to the grapevines that hang from the top branches, swallowing the barns and the cows sleeping in them, their nostrils choked with sand—sand-killed, as Sister would say. A tidal wave of sand never crashing toward us and no stopping it as long as the hot wind does blow.

*

And so each night the ghost crabs swarm down the whole shore, we hear the claws and shells scuttling over each other, and do they bother Teacher? And moths beat like birds against the schoolhouse windows. Morning comes and Sister pulls the rope, the bell clangs above us but not to wake Teacher who is already neck high in her cocoon of driftwood and weaving more on.

*

Mosquitoes the only weather thick most mornings with the sun and we keep the windows closed. Clouds of mosquitoes like ghosts work our little patch of garden. They never bothered with Teacher on our old walks by the marsh passage—her being made of smoke but smokeless—she is, then winking, walking backward to face the line of us through the water grasses though our legs be already welted with bites.

*

We were waiting for Teacher to harvest the school-yard garden. We all sunk the seeds in the spring and now so long without rain the melons rot on the vines, sunken, sucked looking. GOOD FOLKS IS SCARCE TAKE CARE OF ME—the sign we painted in the middle of the garden hanging by one nail.

*

The buoys gong in the rainless sun-blown squalls. Our books are brittle and everything is so dry. The map of this island curls on the wall. And turning to tinder the pictures of the flora—bald cypress, sweet pepperbush, yaupon, cordgrass, switchgrass, blue-eyed grass.

*

Teacher will lay us all down one by one limp like just-hatched birds in her nest of driftwood but I don’t tell Sister.

*

Sister spends her days drawing the growing sand wave on the chalkboard. She says it is now entering the island’s graveyard the laurel all withered. And the graves being but sand-filled will be gathered up, the coffin tops will dry and crack and pop their nails. Where once was only the shade of oaks and cedars.

*

At night the slowest breaking of glass, ever closer, pane by pane the wave swallows the homesteads. Our ears are licked by the heat. The ocean grows smaller and farther from us. Teacher must walk farther each day down to the wrack line.

*

The windows of the schoolhouse grow cloudy with moth ash. We wait. We have shed all manner of clothing. We grow light, waterless in the slow trough of the sand wave. Bleached as bone, Sister says. Bones light as kites.

*

It towers at the edge of the school yard, the tall pines crack. No stopping it as long as the hot wind does blow. Burning, but smokeless, smokeless. We can hardly hear the surf, so far has the ocean left us. Teacher will row to us from across the sand in her boat of driftwood. She will gather us in her apron and lay us down curled inside the hull. The sea far away now, emptying itself wave by wave of this white wood.

Let us praise the ghost gardens
of Gary, Detroit, Toledo—abandoned

lots where perennials wake
in competent dirt and frame the absence

of a house. You can hear
the sound of wind, which isn’t

wind at all, but leaves touching.
Wind itself can’t speak. It needs another

to chime against, knock around.
Again and again the wind finds its tongue,

but its tongue lives outside
of its rusted mouth. Forget the wind.

Let us instead praise meadow and ruin,
weeds and wildflowers seeding

years later. Let us praise the girl
who lives in what they call

a transitional neighborhood—
another way of saying not dead?

Or risen from it? Before running
full speed through the sprinkler’s arc,

she tells her mother, who kneels
in the garden: Pretend I’m racing

someone else. Pretend I’m winning.

Just look—nothing but sincerity 
as far as the eye can see—
the way the changed leaves,

flapping their yellow underbellies
in the wind, glitter. The tree
looks sequined wherever

the sun touches. Does anyone
not see it? Driving by a field
of spray-painted sheep, I think

the world is not all changed.
The air still ruffles wool
the way a mother’s hand

busies itself lovingly in the hair
of her small boy. The sun
lifts itself up, grows heavy

treading there, then lets itself
off the hook. Just look at it
leaving—the sky a tigereye

banded five kinds of gold
and bronze—and the sequin tree
shaking its spangles like a girl

on the high school drill team,
nothing but sincerity. It glitters
whether we’re looking or not.

The starlings choose one piece of sky above the river

      and pour themselves in. Like a thousand arrows 

              pointing in unison one way, then another. That bit of blue

      doesn’t belong to them, and they don’t belong to the sky,

or to the earth. Isn’t that what you’ve been taught—nothing is ours?

      Haven’t you learned to keep the loosest possible hold?

              The small portion of sky boils with birds.

       Near the river’s edge, one birch has a knot so much

like an eye, you think it sees you. But of course it doesn’t.

Old friend,
are we there yet? 

You sat with me once,
outside a dirty burger joint,
a hard light at the windows.

It was just about
the ass crack of the afternoon,

mountains in the distance,

& I’d played a trick on you,
or you’d played a trick on me,

& the highway
was a home to comings & goings,
nothing to do with us.

We had hours yet to drive.

Old friend,
how long should we sit here,
breathing dust & gasoline,

watching clouds gut themselves
on the pines?