Writing
Is a lot like
Riding a bicycle

Not because it's so easy
To get back up on

But because
Sometimes
You're
Flying along
And you go farther
Than you intended to go

And you have to
Turn around and take
Yourself home

And it's all uphill
And the wind is in
Your face

Biking on Bryn Mawr Avenue,
clear sky, afternoon sun,
I pull over to the curb
for the ambulance
hurtling my way.

But it turns on Clark,
and as I pass through
the intersection I see
the gapers gathered,
the body in the street,
face down, lying twisted
like a crash-test dummy.

I have to look.
But I can't look.
I make myself not look,
face forward into traffic,
lest I become the thing
I gaze upon.

Some poems come all in a burst,
Flaring in the brain nearly complete,
Nearly perfect.

Should the mind mistrust them,
These gifts, seek the flaw,
probe for holes?

Twist the knife in their bellies
Until they holler uncle,
Change their tune?

Or are they sparrows, breathing
Mysteries that can only fly again
If left untouched?

Old man walking an old dog

Not so very long ago would have been
Old man walking a young dog

Not so very long from now might it be
Old man walking a young dog again

Once upon a time might it have been
Young man walking a young dog

Oh to picture them walking together

Young man walking a young dog
Young man walking an old dog

But it would have been a different dog

But it would have been a different man

On my walk this morning
I encountered lost things
here and there:

A glove.
A key ring.
A hearing aid.
Me.

Today I read
about a man
who has spent
the past thirty
years writing
someone else's
biography.
And he's still
not finished.

Not to quibble
with anyone's
life's work, but
that's a lot of
years to spend
on somebody
else's life.
I'm not sure
I've even spent
that much time
on my own.

How does that
even happen?
A random turn,
a shiny detour,
and suddenly
you've walked
a hundred miles
in someone
else's shoes?
Too late to
turn back, the
only way out
is through?

No doubt my
own devotion
to invented lives
in invented times
and places
would look as
puzzling to him.
What, reality not
good enough?
Earth not room
enough for you?
I guess not.

Or maybe they're
really the same
thing, these
painstaking
recreations of
unknowable
worlds, fictions
based in fact
or vice versa--
cathedrals
never to be
completed in
our lifetimes,
which, with luck,
will still draw
tourists after
the architects
are dead.

Our first Fourteenth we went to Brooklyn's best
New restaurant. It seemed we walked for miles
Through freezing cold, but I knew by your smiles
I'd chosen well and you were well impressed.

Our third Fourteenth was filled with wedding plans.
I'm still not sure who popped the question first.
By Fourteenth number nine we were immersed
In thoughts of westward roads and moving vans.

Our tenth Fourteenth blew prudence to the sky
With fourteen courses served by silent staff.
Such frills on this Fourteenth? It is to laugh.
We're happy to stay home and order Thai.

My Valentine you've been, the count now stands,
Two times for every finger on your hands.

21

I'm still not sure quite how I managed it,
but I somehow talked my parents into giving me
the family van for two weeks that spring,
two long weeks that stretched into three.

It was my best friend Tim and me--
we'd been missionaries together in Idaho--
returning to the scene of the crime
visiting all the families we used to know.

No doubt I got the van because of that girl,
Miss Bonners Ferry, the lumberjack
who played classical piano, was a lifeguard too
and the whole reason I wanted to go back.

A nice girl for a change, good wife material,
instead of the tramps I usually chased.
Tim had his eye on her younger sister,
but those were long odds we faced.

A thousand miles I rebuffed his offers
to help drive. Insurance reasons, I'd say,
but really I didn't trust him at the wheel.
My father had treated me the same way.

Things were good in Bonners Ferry. We hiked,
climbed rocks. The girl let me hold her hand
one night, and we played duets at the piano.
Tim and I stayed longer than we'd planned.

Then one day he left his journal sitting out,
open to a page about what a jerk I was being,
always making him look bad. I asked the girl,
but she couldn't guess what he was seeing.

A thousand miles home is a long, long way
to drive when you don't know what to say.


28

I-80
Wyoming
night time
snowstorm
eastern slope
Continental Divide
15-foot U-Haul truck
  50 to 60 miles per hour
      girlfriend white-knuckled
           behind the big wheel
                swerving skidding
              on the downhill ice
           all our possessions
        rocking in back
      not quite
   overbalanced

I pump my
passenger brake
of course to no effect
snowflakes like hyperspatial
streaks in the headlight beams
    I gently suggest slowing down
            or even pulling over to let
                          me drive instead
                              but not gently
                                      enough

                              I'm an excellent
                            driver she insists
                      you should have seen
               that time I spun out in Texas
    and I didn't even run off the road

  but I grew up driving in snow
I tell her and you didn't
you have to slow
down

  it's the wrong thing
            to say and we
                            fishtail
                                            again

                                                                  one
                                            moment
                          of terror in the
          long, slow slide from
west coast to east coast

one harrowing strobe-lit frame
   from the superslow-motion
           accident that is

                    us


24

Wait, that's the one where
I lost my virginity.
Sorry, not this time.


23

Immediately after the tiny little Salt Lake City wedding,
I jumped in the Nova with Tim and his blushing bride—
not the sister. We raced straight to Evanston, Wyoming,
taking adjacent motel rooms. All night I had to imagine
what might be going on next door—which turned out
the next morning to have been nothing much. (We had
size issues, Tim whispered.) Their friend, a guy named
Bart or some stupid shit like that, met us in the parking
lot, having driven from who knows where for who knew
how long. I rode shotgun across Wyoming and sunny
Nebraska in Bart's Japanese pickup truck, all day long,
all the way to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where we staged a
second ceremony for the benefit of the bride's family.
Before the sun was up again, Bart had lit out west with
me groggy in the passenger seat, on our way back to
Utah. I could barely keep my eyes open, but late that
morning when I caught him nodding off, the adrenaline
jolted me like paddles to the chest. I begged him to let
me spell him behind the wheel. He denied having fallen
asleep, and when argument failed I resorted to Plan B.
I talked my way through that day like I've never talked
since, and never before—babbling, burbling, blabbering,
spinning stories like Scheherazade staving off death.
I even sang my heart out, and every time I saw those
eyes drift closed I cranked the volume. It occurred to
me, thinking of Tim and his impenetrable bride still in
Iowa, that this longest day of my life was my payback.
It's just a good thing that road was so damn straight.

The face is the biggest shock
after the name—
your name, almost.

The face you knew from childhood,
mischievous, wry, handsome,
now stony as battered granite,
the young features punched up
and pounded like wet clay
then fired hard in a thousand-degree kiln.

The face discovered with "burglary tools,
methamphetamine and more than 100 stolen items
belonging to more than 30 people."

The face leaps out from the article
from fifteen hundred miles away,
like a fugitive in a game of
hide-and-go-seek, flushed out
from the shadows of the chicken coop
when you'd forgotten you were even playing,
racing to make it home free.

What could you have done?
Returned more of his phone calls?
At some point you knew, somewhere
in those twenty years of rob arrest repeat,
you had to keep your distance.
He was your cousin. It wasn't like
he was your brother.

But you weren't there yet
at that first apartment
where you lived on your own,
when you locked your keys inside,
when that confident, capable face
you'd known from infancy said,
"I'll get in." And did.

And you thought that was so cool.

I am
a writer
a blogger
a podcaster
a programmer
a designer
an inventor
a collector
a cabinetmaker
a bowler
a moviegoer
a foodie
a traveler
a tinkerer
an atheist
a priest
a curmudgeon
a felon
a photographer
a chauffeur
a skeptic
a rube
a ruffian
a layabout
a lurker
a dilettante
a poseur
a pundit
a primate
an ancestor
an earthling
an alien
a canvas
a convenience
an improvisation
an illusion