Turners I
I am a stranger and I live here.
could be
Newburgh, Orange, Bellows Falls,
all those silent sisters with their hair shorn,
and pustules and trolley tracks on their
brick red faces hung in prayer over
main street, frowning above the
prickly cheeks of empty lots...
Couldn’t be Chicago, New York
Couldn’t be picturesque, eccentric, lucky or rich
but still she glows Kodak in the evening,
the sky bouncing red from wall to wall and
Hopper in the morning geometry of windows:
depression green trim, closed shades with circlestring pulls.
At noon the striped chrysalis awnings of stores
have still not been violated and some wake up remorseful.
A light blinks by the bridge: yellow, red, go
shopping carts twist ankles in gutters
or hide along alleys
or clack in chrome herds on corners waiting to cross over
or wait for midnight grocery ranchers
or the first of the month
or just something grander than beer cans from here to there,
diapers at the dollar store, dirty laundry Fridays,
Saturday round-ups at the corner ( L and Third).
There, a windfall confetti lies on poverty:
scratch tickets shining gold, silver, red
through the storm drains
three cans of Reddi Whip, a flip flop,
a shoe, a sword , a spoon
garbage tarot under the Gravel Moon.
Turners II
Here nothing stops the nails from being sucked
slowly out of the wood.
Here, the tipped edge of a dream juts into the river,
a triple decker porch splinter sharp and dangerously leaning.
I have been here at least long
enough to know what repeats itself .
Three blond girls are
done with dolls. They ring
doorbells, know what to say.
Up and down the street barefoot on an old bike.
Their hair is long, and they eat whenever.
I told myself and I tell myself
read, stranger, read loudly through it!
Throw watermelon vowels and telephone pole T’s.
Walk through it and lay waste to it!
Let that tongue roll and crack among it like
a long grey summer sidewalk.
Give it words and names, stranger,
give it something worth stealing.
Be full of saying and loving it
the greasy stranded sadness of it
the menopausal freedom of it
the wabi sabi robbing of it
the howling rub-and-drubbing of it.
Three blond girls looking
for my neighbor’s husband.
Tell a lie about a dead battery,
a jump start, their mother’s car.
Learned their lines and headed on.
Stranger make a poem here stranger
live it up and
take it down
take it down:
town.
Turners III
I know them but I do not know their name
these weeds with yellow, purple mudras
on a thousand delicate arms.
Ownership here means tending lower, duller grasses
(go away stranger, and rent this instead)
In my back yard, coal clinkers, rib bones under
a skin of dirt. A tar paper doghouse filled with hornets.
Bucket after bucket, meal after meal,
nothing ever happened here but that it
loved itself repeating
loving itself.
I could
scream in the night
I could scream in the night
as if the factories would wake up
stomachs churning all that undigested history
tossing and turning their great heaving bodies along the river:
fatherless sons.
I could
scream in the night
I could scream in the night
as if our puny post industrial arms could go in there
and hammer that big metal back to its awful Jurassic,
could find out the color of dinosaurs from their bones.
O the big jangled job of it all runs along my spine as I sleep
kicking the lazy turbines around under the dark blanket
of the Connecticut.
Turners IV
It frightens me
although I have made my hillock chaos
before this life
although this is my life
although it is not.
Begin the love of it
never so perfect to live in, begin:
street howling with the rage of a boy with a pipe.
movie mad, they say about these kids, movie mad.
My quiet steps, too, the poem in my hand
Movie mad, madly moving along
not brave but yawning wide to its bricks and bitterness
high as a smokestack and stronger than
the dream of money still rolling along the river
but sleepy like a pregnant woman
glassy with doubling cells: the houses subdivide
I’ve seen them, odd chambers and endometrium
of paint crazed, flaking, lead too,
scraping, crazing me as it enters my mind
I’m just gobbling up the grand din,
never changing chances and I blink down town:
I travel through my heart to the part that beats the child,
flings the cat by the tail
walks away, doesn’t look
or won’t or can’t
drinks because or not
and willing lotteries and blame and
worn elastic, slapping slippers, sneakers with
a soul so thin -- the dollar store -- a walking town
plastic sacks and suckers, soda cans march up and down
the bank, the booze, the PO
me walking, poem in hand, quietly
heartstruckblind on central street
slatted shades, torn and staggering
criss cross themselves, rattling...
Everybody drinks, don’t they? beer cans
in a yard scratched thin, thin as a child’s shriek....
How is there anything left from that?
How can there be anything more than
that morning drink, the sleeping noon, the slower, redder
burn on into night,
seizures, seizures and delights.
Turners V
in among it all an odd beauty in the bones
the red brick, the gilded windowpanes of evening,
the always whispering water falling from the dam
the steeples rising up above the tin trimmed roofs
and the hot twinkly nights of summer booming off the brick...
And this is home,
And this is home.