THE SCULPTURE

Like a museum

piece on display,

I went round

and round it

not knowing

I was doing so.

I was simply

living like

I always do—and

talking

to the people

in my life. Their

speaking fashioned it

a form, gave it

shape, size, and heft, 
and put it

on a pedestal.

It took so many

to make it,

the lie.

WHEN DONE IS DONE

When paint

turns to taffy

and canvas

becomes kite,

when words

break like balsa

and fugues 

exfoliate,

star light 
comes down 

and silence
it does make

from the gleam

in a prodigy's eye.

Quivers the baton
on the stand

just having left 
the maestro's

porcelain-like 
hand.

THE MUSTACHE

Had he not sent her a photograph

it would never have existed.

It never would have become a part

of our family's lore.

The mustache, I mean.

Though the hair on his head

was as black as a raven

it came in red.

The mustache, I mean.

The photo showed my father

on board a cargo ship

as a young army lieutenant

on assignment in Thule, Greenland.

It was too damn cold to shave.

Which was why he had it in the first place.

The mustache, I mean.

For years before their marriage,

my mother’s father had had one

and she hated it.

His was red also.

Come to the wedding without it

or don’t come at all.

The mustache, she meant.

And so when my parents made arrangements

for their reunion twelve months into their marriage—

six of which were spent apart—

my mother told my father, 

I’ll be there to greet you

when your ship comes in

but it better be gone.

The mustache, she meant.

And so on that arctic day on the dock

while the military band was playing

she, the only woman there, saw him 

and began waving. He was so handsome 

in his uniform on the deck of the massive vessel

among his men, standing baby-faced,

broadly smiling, without it.

The mustache, I mean.

Its disappearance gave them, I believe, 

the covenant they’ve carried these sixty-five years.

Their marriage owes it everything.

The mustache, I mean.

LES MISÉRABLES

A morning train.

Hidden among

the throng, like stowaways,

is a cast of characters.

A stranger smuggled

them abroad.

Aloft, their lives

keep turning,

page after page

centuries later.

Which has me think

as I gaze at the binding

above me: we are all

passengers traveling

toward one kind of

transfiguration or another

authored by the hand

of chance and necessity,

ignorance and misery,

redemption and grace,

like a man toiling on a tome

once upon a time.

THE WELL

Take the hole you're in,

the deep, dark pit—

where the sun is

but a pin prick—

and turn it into

its opposite: a well

that you are now

looking down upon.

Let your gaze fall

toward the treasures

you pitched there

into the depths,

into the clean, clear water.

At bottom, resting, still

are your wishes

shimmering and shining

in the place

you once stood,

like stars signaling

in Morse code

this message: The darkness 
is what carries

our brilliance. So you must

carry the darkness.

But not as a burden, 
more like  

a newly minted penny 
in your pocket.

THE SCENE

     for my father on his 65^th wedding anniversary

We all have one.

A scene we revisit

The day my men and I,

nearly 300 of us in total, landed

in Thule, Greenland,

time and time again.

A story, a memory

after our six month assignment

of unloading a navy cargo vessel,

just forty miles shy of the North Pole,

we keep telling

because imbedded within it

who did I see on the dock

alongside the military band

the captain had ordered

is a message we desperately

need to hear:

to greet us but your mother.

The only woman on the dock.

All the way from California.

that we are loveable.

We tell it to anyone

I was literally and figuratively then

on top of the world. And more revered

than I had been the whole six months prior,

who will listen. Year

after year. And the older  

‘cause she was waving at me, her 

 husband, the commanding officer, a man 

barley twenty-one, and still newly wed.

we get, the more we tell it,

because we need to tell it.

INSTEAD

Once upon a time

a story ambled along

like an invalid,

dined like a castaway,

shat like a parakeet,

and labored like a leaf blower.

Somewhere at the center of it all

was a pipsqueak person,

captive to his own mangy creation.

Pay no attention

to the fabled construction, I say.

Listen, instead, for the beanstalk in the bean,

the goose inside the golden egg,

the hero in the ordeal.

Anything else would be like

rooting for the rival team

at a home game.