Tell me where Jimmy Hoffa is.
Long as I can remember,
He’s been buried in my psyche.
Long as I can recall,
He’s been hidden in my memory.
American, I don’t recognize you.
All your money belongs to the rich,
And decent folk are a thing of the past.
Is Jimmy Hoffa in the air or the earth?
Was he incinerated,
Scattered everywhere and nowhere
Both at once and neither?
Perhaps at the bottom of a lake?
Crushed in some wrecking yard?
All the stories are true.
All the stories are false.
All the people talking are liars.
All the liars are telling the truth.

My cousin Joe was a simple man,
But he was also a man of the earth,
Which meant he was deeper than most.
In the final weeks of my father’s agonizing death
From stomach cancer, Joe came to visit
To say his last goodbyes.
My father, after yet another seizure,
Was sleeping somewhere near his death.

How many seizures can you bear
Before you reach for those Dilaudids
Prescribed to your father,
To numb your own pain?
How many episodes can you endure
Before you wish for death to take him—
How many words can you cling to,
Before they all sound false.

Outside, Joe sat beside me,
Sensing I had reached my emotional end,
He said nothing at first,
But the silence felt like an answer.
Then, quietly, he spoke
About how he grows his potatoes
And why he has such a big yield.
How deep he dug his holes,
How he covered the root potatoes
In loose sand, not soil,
Giving them space to grow,
Waiting for the flowers to bloom and fall.
I clung to every word
Like it was some holy truth,
And in that quiet moment,
He placed his hand on my shoulder
And said, “Come on, let’s go back inside.”

At the grassy margins of the marsh,
The reflections held the child’s gaze.
He opened his eyes,
To the vastness of the marsh,
And the watershed beyond it.
As sunset touched the distant trees,
His father said, “Anything could bite.”
The water deepened to purple and green,
And stillness held a thousand reflections
In which the child was almost lost.
With reeds swaying in every direction,
The marsh began to seethe with sound.
Before nightfall, his father warned,
It would soon be time to wrap it up,
Watching his son with a smile,
As the child cast his line
Into the unknown, for the first time.

Digging to uncover rats at the farm,
We found a machete buried in the soil.
“Hey,” our grandfather said,
“Where did you find that, I lost it years ago.”
It came out of the earth with a swing,
The edge cutting the air
As though, insulted,
It would strike out at the sun for being lost.

When I found my mother dead
I stepped outside to steady myself.
It was a summer at its zenith.
The night was now alive.
That’s when I saw a leopard slug
Climbing up the garage wall.
It was like I was suffering
A bad acid trip, all loss and no escape.
My eyes wide, taking in the world
Like it was some new form of reality.
I could see the slug’s
Slowly undulating body.
I could see it looking in the dark.
Nothing else seemed real,
Until cars of family and friends
Pulled into the driveway.
It was almost two in the morning.
We all went inside
To say goodbye to mom.
The next time I went out
I could see only the trail
But the slug was gone.

for my dad

The months of change do me no good at all.
In March and November, my anxiety spikes,
Under heavy, shifting pressure.
Not fear, but something primal–
Angst in my gut, like a bad meal.
At my age, a body knows the poetry–
A language older than the mind.
March wears winter like a mask;
It breathes winter’s remnants
And chokes out plastics and debris.
Only when I’m embedded in summer
Can I bear fruit from the soil of my mind,
Enjoy the long days of light,
And wear my old hat into heaven.

Almost a violet pearl between branches—
Radiant in an indigo sky–
Like a Taaffeite gemstone, rare in its brief glow,
A gift to the earth, while it lasts,
As Bizet’s aria Je crois entendre encore
Kisses the cool night air,
Before dissolving into dawn.

Sparrows pierce me like arrows.
Who knew robins had no bottoms?
A murder of crows, frightening prose.
A hawk, a magnificent shock.
Do vultures feed on culture’s corpse?
Are kestrels kin to petrels?
Have the pigeons been agreed upon?
Could plovers ever run us over?
Flocks of blue jays are on the way.
Cardinals and carnivals? Think about it.
A wood thrush in a frosty hush.
Swallows, those Apollos, don’t care.
Phoebes have the heebie-jeebies.
Owls and their lovely vowels.
Cormorants and conglomerates.
Egrets sending their regrets.
Today, only the border crossings
Of Canada geese—give me any peace.

Car chimes was what Len called
All the bottles Joe would gather,
Drinking in the back seat on road trips,
Passenger to his own joyful reeling.

Joe couldn’t go without drinking,
It was the poetry in his blood.
Len and I would do the driving
With Joe happily reciting W.H. Davies:

“No man to pluck my sleeve and say—
I want thy labour for this day;
No man to keep me out of sight,
When that dear Sun is shining bright.”

And when he’d recite those poems
The bottles would begin to chime
In rhythm to his tapping feet,
Music to our ears, laughter to our tears.

At death the brain must flood with DMT
For one to see fluorescent waterfalls
And feel warmth and love
After rising out of a world of hate
Now breathless you breathe with ease
Now flat-lined you surge with love
Now brain-dead you see all
Why didn’t you understand before
Why did it take your death to come alive
To see the light through the door
To see fluorescent waterfalls appear
To see Jesus and your grandfather
And to feel drawn to so much love
That to return the soul recoils
You ask to stay but are told to return
To serve some penance in our hell
Where the righteous fade and the vile rise