things that stanley plumly said on april 28th, 2009, between the hours of 8 and 9 in the evening.

he said, tell a story.
give the context, and make the poem
breathe a little heavier for it.
he said, i am from pickwa ohio
and people there die,
and i said, i know they do.
(people from ohio
die young and old but always tragically,
though never from a drive-by
or an airplane crash.
people from ohio
all grew up in one-room schoolhouses
and took mandatory naps
and dreamt of being one of the ones
who does not survive their 45th year
of being a farmer
to an ungrateful leached dry corn field.)
stanley plumly said, this
is the way to get out of anything:
dance.
and i'm dancing my way to my car that night
and i'm thinking:
people from ohio are all the same,
all grew up in the shadow of insane asylums
and rivers that lit on fire in the 1960s,
people from ohio are born
with death in the vein of their left ankle
and by the time they hit puberty
death has perused all the other parts of the body
and chosen the heart as a home--
people from ohio
all recognize the value of a dollar,
waste not want not, are full of other
colloquialisms about money that have no worth.
i know these things because i am from ohio,
because death has lived in my heart
since i was 13 and i had lesbians as next door neighbors
and the kid who sat across from me in social studies
found a rope of the right length
and hung himself from an incredibly stable cieling fan,
i am from ohio in the same way
calves are from cows.
and i have seen a lot of cows.

all the songs are saying
we can put our cares in shopping carts
and take each others' hands
and run run run (they'll never catch up)--
and there are no consequences, and
you and i will last for-ev-er, love.
and all the newscasters predict
our early deaths, while we
run rampant and defy reality--
we leap in front of cars, we drive
each other off of cliffs, we
reach for unbidden territories.
and this starlight, this moon
streaming down from years away
(it is really all old light)
touches us now, reaches down and drags
your hand from mine, love,
and places it against my shaking ribs.
in the morning i'll rethink this,
and regret will make me old;
but tonight i'll live the lyrics,
and abandon everything for a chance
to jump over the moon holding hands with you.

antiquated

ancient wood is warm, remembers
years of sunlight through open
windows, rays dancing with the
little dust motes. a waltz of time,
waiting for the window to close
or sundown. ancient metal bends,
acquieses to the will of the hands
that clasp its edges and demand
a different shape. the fingerprints
are left in mud, in dirt, all
around the edges of the coin that
is dropped again, cursed, for
valueless stature. ancient gods
lie bleeding now, first dormant
then disrespected. thor's hammer
fell to earth on april 18, 1906:
freyr's bounty was extinguished
on july 5, 1996. but jesus christ
rose from the dead for our sins,
and paper money works just fine
for us, and we like the lines of
steel table legs and glass countertops
better than the warmth of wood.

in siberia, the nights are so cold
that even microorganisms can't
find shelter. the moon reflects
off endless miles of snow, and ice,
so that the whole country seems
one long mirror. and crawling around
on the surface of the glass
are little men in layered fur and
distinct wool, heavy with their
women and children and vodka;
sometimes their feet sink so
deeply into the mirror that
they leave footprints on the
silver lining. so that when
stellar freyja descends from her
glowing lunar resort, to pick up
her mirror and be reflected
in this modern era--
her face is pockmarked, scarred,
acned with little men's footprints
who have breathed her crystal ozone
and clawed her perfect glass.

white stone leaning on a black stone

on this day in history, i am already dead.
the ancient idea that i hate has risen,
poseidon-like, over my head and swallowed all my
wind-raged tangles of hair. the power that i had!
when i sang, the argonauts sank their ship.

the entrance to an idea as old as time,
the spartan slave who makes the bed
that the athenian citizen has to lie in.

oh, all the things i could have been:
i am old, i am old, i am old, and my skin
grows grey with every passing midnight.
(what is it to mourn your own youth?)
i am a seeking, sighing daughter of the earth.
when i sang, odysseus tore his flesh for me.

also known as a tuesday, a day in april that
does nothing, says nothing, is nothing.
your hand on mine, what does it signify?
we cross borders every day, you and i,
and it is in these crossings that i learned to love you;
i wonder where our feet will go tomorrow.

the rocks we kick across the neighborhood sidewalk,
the pebbles we flick between imaginary goalposts,
the stones falling out of our pockets after we roll on the beach:
underfoot and in between our toes and
rough against the grain of our skins,

i do not like the colors of the rocks
because they do not mix.

maybe after years of pressure from the earth,
maybe after eons of hot hot heat,
maybe after they threaten my inheritance
(which isn't financial at all)
maybe after i produce a gorgeous brown little boy
and name him after his father,
maybe after all the civilizations fall
one by one, like repentant children with evaporating dreams--

and this tuesday, this sunday, this sundown,
these are my witnesses. these, and the words of my son
who is not yet born, and my solitude, and this rain,
and the roads we kick our pebbles down.

inheritance

silent, still, she lounges and waits to write,
waiting for the inspiration that rarely comes.
heavy, heady rain that falls drips slowly down
the panes, emptying the clouds of dark
ideas. the muses and other cloudy notions sink and fall
through her mind, grazing past slow thoughts.

she lies heavy with cares and thoughts,
too absorbed to let the dark ink write.
she dreams of spring, of summer, though fall
has been late in returning. moonlight comes
slinking through the rain, a vibrancy on the dark
streets that shine as she looks down.

she sighs, tosses the pen, turns upside-down
to greet her own pathos. slowly her thoughts
turn inward, and she revels in her own dark
imaginings. reclaiming paper, the words write
themselves as Calliope circles down. She comes
lazily, wings splayed as though she fears a fall.

eight other figures follow the first, a slow fall
through the heavens. silvery wings that slow down
as they near the tired earth, and now comes
rhyme and verse. pathos wiped clean, her thoughts
now dwell on the ancient and the surest way to write
Calliope's lit intentions, then shrouded in dark.

as greek poets declared, so it shall be; the dark
plot twists that rend a hero apart, the shuddering fall
of achilles or oedipus. characters that write
themselves with ultimate faith in each other sink down
into the mire; each passes through her thoughts
then back into the literary abyss from which they have come.

the elegy halts, remembers, restarts. so the Muses have come
and now will go, their ancient deed unfinished. the dark
covers their gleaming ascent, though her thoughts
dwell still on the sudden inspiration. she lets the pen fall
at the last period, puts the plot and characters down
and loses the potent high that forces her to write.

unrequited love for the word, she reaches the fall
as any hero, and finds no love for her Mothers there. the dark
call of a bird catches her, and she forgets how to write.

this form that gives itself to lists, i find
release in asking more of lines that twist
and cannot rhyme. in fights, in tears, in time
(the list here means i can't forgive, the list
here means i'm stuck) you'll see how hard i tried
to give you what you needed. slow and cross
the frown will sneak towards eyes you meant to hide.
so what is this, then; can we call it lost?
or sadder still, a deeper sigh: the dream
you left in bigger hands, and several years
have passed from then to now. you burn, you crave
for higher heights and clearer skies, you scream
for simple death; but neither time nor tears
can bring you peace, except for in decay.

somewhere beneath the newscasters' glow
and outside the light that economists cast
somewhere, some place that has always been dark
continues rotating in darkness.
somewhere in shadows, bent backs uncurl
from long days in charity shoes;
somewhere large families scrape to feed every mouth
and lie down to sleep in the darkness.
somewhere beneath social glimmering talk
of Fannie and Freddie and Greenspan and Locke
somewhere an idyll unfolds in young minds
of the wealth and the warmth in the light.