May Is Cold This Year And

May is cold this year and

(I don't really know how to breathe

under the weight of)

every day progresses slowly, darkly 

into the darkness of night, night like a 

blanket like a blackout curtain, bag over

the head, 

trunk of 

the car 

the porch is blue. I sit on it 

smoking. I think

of Uncle Charlie some more.

I don’t know what he did all those crabbed winters

those springs and summers beneath thunder,

I have heard that

he fished the little creek, he read books

and read them again, he had a cat and a dog

our family somewhat blown around,

the fragile aspects of a little tree,

a little creek.

From the strip of oil spill coast we meandered

north, or east, or stayed put like dad-

dad came home covered in petrol 

in 1969 he says. 

He remembers the year it was 

1969 he says. He will remember this year 

too, it is 2015 and Plains All American

Pipeline 

has made a mistake again. 

Things break. Sometimes,

broken things even break things- 

candy shrapnel in the belly of 

a seagull. 

And there are two kinds of silence, perhaps

even more, I am familiar with the one

that arrives all dressed up

in organza and chatter, looking 

like something, sounding alive.

Another kind does not arrive,

it has just always been here,

and we have never noticed it, 

and still we do not notice it,

but soon we will notice it, 

and when we do it will buckle 

the tender of our knees,

we’ll all fall down. 

(I want to touch you the way

one can touch a tree can touch

a creek. I am not looking for anything 

that can be defined by taxonomy, 

unless it is creek. Unless it is light- 

from the family greater phenomena

of the genus things above us things beyond)

And sometimes I act tough, for I’m tough; sometimes

I act tender. I consider my maker, I consider

the fader. I consider consider.

I consider Plains All 

American bathing the round rocks with 

crude culminations. 

I know I’m not doing all I ought to be doing.

I’m working and writing and sleeping and writhing.

I’m searching and finding and discarding my findings.

I give it away like a rich man;

crumple beneath sun like a leech.

It’s hard to stay well when life is so vicious

in its joy and its tumbling doubts. Uncle Charlie 

went in with a rifle when they didn’t 

give him that job he interviewed for.

Though, I’ve heard he sat 

in hot tubs naked, good moments were had-

I walk on the wharf and my father tells me 

about fishing. In pictures they are 

tiny boys and fishing with jaunty caps 

frozen in time, like beautiful little blue fish, 

like beautiful tiny boys. 

I love them.  I’m messy;

do you understand time?

I do not. I live with my hands over my head. 

I live with my hands over my head because 

strange things fall from the sky sometimes.

Spiders in Australia. Frogs somewhere.

Petrol. Rain, 

or just time, fragmented seconds, 

descending, like some sort of 

scalding judgment, descending, 

and it all turns to steam before 

it hits the ground