My Barefoot Rank. David Craig
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don’t know where they are going,
but that is their charm.
Clouds are much the same, older.
They sniff the ground like the beasts, tribes.
But rocks! Now they know how to wait!
They settle in the valleys for the long siege,
perch upon ridges, look-outs; they will wait until
only they matter again—things as they should be:
time, that brigand, a passing, futile thing.
Men are like beetles, busying themselves,
fussing, losing all their heat, energy on things
that do not matter, cities that rise like comic hats.
They would do better to bide, to learn
the slow value of the simple phrase, a step
on the mountain. If they could fathom that,
their lives would be changed; they would live
with God, whose voice gives rise
to mottled sunsets, to rifts in oceans, waves.
Those shakings are food for rill and mountain.
They fashion the cold’s flakes here—
the whole universe, a vowel half uttered.
The notes on my wife’s piano pages
are tiny door stops, mice prints
down a dark hall. I do not live in that house;
no one ever has. Beethoven sits on a plush,
dusty chair, lampshade over his illumined head—
the only bulb under a high ceiling,
distressed molding.
A wolf moon shines on a staircase,
but you cannot live there either.
This is what you must keep: the truth of how little
you are, or, better, of how little there is of you.
(Who would miss that when the time comes?)
And all the measureable world?
Something for science.
Your children, as well: how vain to expect
some stepping off point, where they will find fertile
earth, a perfect mate, though in their noons
it will seem so.
We work in the presence of a God we cannot see—
a night. You can lift your little sailboat,
sail it against a window, the snow outside.
Whatever you can add, I don’t want it.
There’s nothing else here—too much to take away.
Jesuit high get-together
They’d always seemed to glide
through the good: one an Arch-Bishop!
How have you done this, I want to ask:
prodigals who knew better—never bothering
with what was beyond them?
They’d seemed like shiny Pennies from Sky King,
listened to a different channel.
Do their children walk on greener turf, I wonder?
Do their wives, Donna Reeds, still smile bashfully
when they get home in the evenings?
And what would it be like to rouse myself
under that sun, to eat every vegetable on my plate?
Bad life choices are what separate us—
though there is more. My father
walks in me; my mother, too,
eastern European children on noisy streets
generations ago, where no one
could pronounce your name.
They were loud, finding games,
behaving only as well as they had to—
to the envy of no one.
What did we lose when we left them there
on those shores? Whose shoes did we learn to tie?
Though I can’t speak for my brothers,
I feel like it’s better to eat foods I cannot name
than it is to wave a flag in the country of money.
We’d stopped at an alligator farm
on our honeymoon; and the Everglades,
people circling its eyelid, sunning asphalt.
For me that would be like inviting
arrogant students back into my classroom.
Yes, they have a right to exist—
but not here.
My daughter and I did manage some fun:
the in-laws mobile home community pool,
though we couldn’t jump in—pace-makers!
And Haslam’s city, a huge bookstore
in St. Pete’s, where you could actually handle
new books, turn the clean pages, enjoy
the thick vellum, shiny print. You could
gather a stack, return a few—like in older days.
But I keep coming back to those alligators:
hundreds of hatchlings, one on top of the other
in hungry cages, some finding dogs
or two year olds by now.
They are signs of a sort: welcome to Florida.
We don’t have much sense, but our newscasters
are pleasant, and our southern-most
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