When I was a child, I once worried
a hole through the center of
a bar of Coast deodorant soap —
the family bar that we all shared
in the blue upstairs bathroom of
our house in Thief River Falls (in
family lore, “the Thief River house”).
I don’t know what I was thinking,
how it is I believed that no one
would see, or would not immediately
know that this was not an accident,
just something that happened in
an old house, a blue bathroom, a
blue tub — to a bar of soap,
streaked blue and white, with
that smell that drove me on,
with my fingernail, because
I couldn’t eat it and had to
consume it in some other way.

I’m happy now that I know
where things really stand
with crows flying into windows
or a certain scud of snow
that hits the fence as if
flung there by the handful
like rice at a wedding before
everyone believed that rice
makes birds explode. Which
it doesn’t. I have to tell you
that it doesn’t. I can’t ever
know a thing that you don’t
know — I can’t ever know that
you’re wrong — and just keep it
to myself. Certain handfuls
of snow, I must fling against
certain fences. Certain crows
can’t just live in my brain,
happy to rest with head under
undamaged, unbroken wing.

I don’t think weasels are real;
otherwise, how come I’ve never seen one?
Do they all work in casinos?
I’ve never been to one of those, either.
If they do, I bet they stack the deck
against humans, so the house — the
weasel house — always wins.
It always does. It always does.

Every Tuesday in the makeshift dance studio
on an upper floor of a local church, whether
she wants to or not, and mostly (I suspect,
I know) she does not. Every Tuesday, she
summons enough coordination to follow
along — more or less — as I hear,
through the door, Alicia Keys’s voice
reaching some level of transcendence,
a fever pitch of effort or emotion.
I’ve never heard the song, fully.
I catch a word or two here and there,
just as I catch a glimpse or two
here and there of my daughter as she
approximates, roughly, the steps of
the choreographed dance, the movements
of the other dancers. I hope that
someday, she will remember this as
an important algebra that she needed
to work out between her quick brain
and a body that is often recalcitrant.
Whatever the song is about, I hope she
will take from it something she needs,
even if she can’t fully understand it
now — the lyrics, and why it is that
I keep bringing her here to Jazz I/II.

Turn the hem around
your hand and
smell the smell of
sick-day comfort;
you are on the couch
once more, in gray
half-light where
somehow, your mother
is still alive,
has brought you
the threadbare yellow
blanket with orange
roses. Her name
has roses. Her hand
is soft as roses.
Her hand is the
satin that covers
the edge of the
blanket. It’s come
loose at one corner,
the stitching — if
you could crawl in,
between satin and
blanket, you’d be
in your mother’s
hand. You’d be
all right, then.

Can we
get together
again?

Can we
take up two tables
and laugh?

Can we
forget everything
but this?

We’ve been over this before,
how none of this is a game
and it’s time to get serious.
Put down the arts of war,
pick up an adze or a plow,
start building the future.
Building by chipping away.
Building by tearing into.
Adding by subtracting —
no, this is not a game.

It had to happen this way, that you
would become beautiful, finally do
something about your eyebrows or
the hair on your upper lip. Eventually,
you learn these things — the ways
in which you’re all wrong, and that
it’s easier to fix yourself than to
try to fix the world, make the world
more kind, open its eyes to anything it
does not already see. Who wore it
best? You did — or you hope to,
someday, when you’re living a
tabloid life, free from tabloid
judgment. Only sunny honeymoons
for you — only toned abs, lean legs,
millions of white teeth in Aruba,
Ibiza, or anywhere else you’ll go
to be measured, judged, found to be
(at last) in substantial compliance
with the only law that matters.

Do it again, that slick habit of mind,
the repetitive motion that gives your brain
a syndrome in carpal tunnels it doesn’t have.
Do it again, these thoughts and these actions,
this way of being. Kick this can down the rut
of the rivering sidewalk, the seam between
two hemispheres that slide together like
tectonic plates in your head, that bump
against each other like a thousand small
earthquakes you can halfway feel. Do it
again, knowing that one day, it might be
like Pangea, your mind — the two halves
drifting apart, forming new continents
so one thought, one impulse can’t even
wave at another, can’t even remember
your name, why it seemed so important.

Every goddamned day, it’s the same thing:
some blowhard who looks like Josef Stalin
sitting there, trying to tell me what to do.
Meanwhile, my fingers are turning orange
and I’m smudging up my old issues of Cosmo,
which I always donate to the prison library
once I’m done. I figure those prisoners
should be happy to get any magazines at all,
and the cheese dust won’t disrupt their view
of all that self-tanned cleavage. But what
do I know? Maybe there’s something wrong
if this is how I spend my freedom — sitting
at my kitchen table, watching TV, watching
the sky turn from dishwater to oil, sometimes
back to dishwater again, two or three times.