Untitled [Iowa field, three crosses]

1.

Iowa field, three crosses: you almost can’t see them
against the snow.

I told myself I’d speak freely here.

In this poem, I’d speak freely.

2.

No—it was summer. I’d gone out
to an industrial lot to see if I could find
a giant wire spool
to flip on its side, use as a table in the yard. No luck:

but on a longer way home, three crosses.
A bird for each. My phone
made a little animation afterwards out of the pictures

I took: birds, no birds.

3.

There is no special meaning
in any of this, I tell myself, and you, now.
No meaning
to the iridescent ribbons knotted

to stakes, to the letterforms
in the wood, to the night when four teenagers

broadsided a pickup with the right of way.
None of it.

Nothing special—I heard it first
in a Zen parable, then in the snowplow burying cars
against the curb; late, as usual.

4.

Speaking freely, I wouldn’t have had the guts.

I’d dreamed of driving
to the love-handle hills south of Solon—
named for the Athenian legislator, the town’s football team
were those very Spartans the Athenians warred against—
dreamed of driving there, getting out of my car,
taking off my clothes, lying 
on my back
in the snow. At first

it would hurt (no meaning, nothing
special); I’d regret what I’d know
I couldn’t stop doing; then I’d take the regret off, like an undershirt, set it aside.

Someone’s headlights would sweep by.
Finger in the back of an old drawer.

5.

True, also,

that I’ve survived nothing. True as the splatter of red
and green on the floor of the city gym
on disco skate night.

Long before the event ends,
the employees take down the copier-paper signs
with MLK quotations they’d taped to the walls, for MLK Day.
Had anyone seen them

and would they be recycled? Speaking freely, now, is anyone

listening; am I? And if I said something about a fire,
the one hypothermics feel at the end, which it would be wrong
to call a delusion—?

6.

The freezing rain dressed each branch
in a sleeve of ice; each branch had its own
coffin of the sort the rich of one century
favored, if they were of a certain disposition:
coffins with glass windows, so the living
could see the rouged moons of the cheeks,
so the dead could see the signal fires Christ
or Christ’s army would set to let them know
it was time to get up. Now, when a car, sloshing
through winter muck and over the slight crest
of the street, shone its light through the trees,
that light was made to violate the usual laws, not
bouncing and diffracting freely off the
wounded, matte surface of living wood in
April, in May, in September, but perambulating
in a pilgrim’s circuit each twig’s perimeter,
tracing with knifelike steadiness the clear husks,
the bell jars slipped around the bark,
so that, if a pair of mammalian eyes happened
to catch this catching of light by the fallen world,
each branch would be seen in outline, before the current
of white, like a sparkler on the Fourth, forgot
its path, or the hand that guided it forgot,
though there were no hands there, and one was left
after the fact with what light there was before,
which was none, or so little it might as well have been.

7.

By the time I’d gotten the photo
I’d almost given myself frostbite, my right hand
bee-sting red, numb, then (back

in the glove) furious.

To punish myself, I could lose a hand.
Could wear forever these glasses
frosted with breath that make every stoplight a supernova.

Ring inside ring inside ring. And at the center?

8.

I was trying to talk to her over the DJ’s throb, loping
and trying not to fall.

I’d already ripped my pants
and couldn’t afford a concussion. I’d seen,

I said, too many comments
on news articles where my fellow citizens
said they wished they could shoot me

in another war that we’d have, in virtue
of the meaning of words, to call civil.

I see, she said. If she heard me. I thought again
about the photo I’d wanted to take
since I saw it on the drive there.

9.

And if someone, someone who had business
being there, thought an orange car in a soybean field

conspicuous, it being a night in January,
the field a slab of alabaster, of white marble, of bleached quartz,

and came nearer with the thin limbs of their headlights,
then with their arms, their body with its head, the head

with its eyes, and saw me, prone—what then?

10.

Streetlight over a tree of ice.
Silver crescents nested in shockwaves, scratched
glass against the charcoal dark.

You could make a print of that shot so black
no one would be able to say what it was.
Photograph from the throat of a well. Cobwebs.
Someone’s cursive; an angel opening its one good eye.

A vessel in spacetime. A body in a field, aglow.

Something you know you know the name for
when it sees you.

The Swerve

Explanations fell rain-like & so were worthless:
oil on the windshields, juniper in the gutters,
each molding itself to any thing
that permitted & for lack of speech
all things did. Then into the aquarian storm
we banished our baskets since
what we wanted now fit in the eye.
Would you believe this happened last year,
here, in this town, before the legless watchtower
of this porch, in the voltage
before Sunday’s sun and the hectoring bells?
I scoured myself in it. I hewed a pillar of air
to set your spine: you’d gone out
& the flies in while the plenum shrugged
& groaned, wreathed its arms around
its knees & thought. Slivers of solids
conspiring at a regular rate, snow
of principles wrongly called fury. Then
a truck gashed down the street & thru understanding;
the glacial lens thawed; we began to twist,
to describe to one another the contents of jars
each kept veiled, forming sacred pictures
that held the state together & were nothing alike.