CLAUDE

instead of word, he predicated a language on color—

             cobalt for the law,

                           deep red for finance,

                                                                          ochre for earth.

                                                                          umber for home

in varying shades, depending on intensity.

                        a peony was the greatest living novelist.

                        a patient rubbed black ink where it hurt.

and the unsayable became easier to say:

we kept to ourselves behind a yellow door that meant             inhibition lives here.

                                                                                                               but so does joy.

UNDER THE TRACKS

it’s furious, freight, fearsome as an angel,

hauling iron ore by the hair like a man being punished.

i cross under the tracks daily

making wishes like my mother taught me.

is it true that i’ll neuter the wish by telling?

does it count if the train is caught impotent,

empty, unmoving?

that night the dark cars were frozen and tense,

straining like a man holding a weight at arm’s length.

i had a feeling that an angel could be anything

that brought relief, like rain, or a painkiller.

i prayed under him. i often do. he didn’t listen.

or maybe died of cold in the cargo hold before dawn.

nothing came to carry me. no whistle or horn.

i stayed un-annunciated. i was very far from home.

i walked on against the grain of stars.

MY MOTHER

raised us by herself “us” is fourfold i am the youngest

      & we are all just fine or near enough as makes no difference

“but did you grow up christian” we never went to church

      except for my brother, he went with his friend’s family,

sort of liked the habit i think, told me they saved him there,

      saved from something horrible as i understood it—HELL.

she never talked much about hell and certainly not sin.

“all forgiven,” he said, or something like it, i don’t remember now,

      it’s easy to say he said he felt clean but that’s me playing storyteller.

“well fuck,” i said, or something like it, “what about me?”

      if after death my brother had access to some better place—

i needed to get there.

      more than sin, it was untenable

that either of us go where the other could not.

so he saved me.

      saved in that church sense. whatever had happened to him

on sunday, what words he remembered, repeated unto me.

      that’s the story. how we both got saved.

my mother’s approach to faith was very much like this.