When I Grow Up

from a prompt at the iAnthology written by Amy VanZanten

Don, my godfather sips an old-fashioned and asks,
what do you want to be when you grow up?
We are on the front steps at Clyde Avenue.
He lives upstairs, we live down, he owns the place.
This is more than an idle question. I can tell.

Don is an engineer, he loves hockey.
I'm three, it is 1971, and I want my crane untangled.
It's a Tonka truck, yellow, black, with a string
that runs on pulleys and works the crane.
It tangles every day of my life. Without fail.
Just from my playing with it, from my being.

Don comes home each afternoon, mixes a drink,
retires to the front steps in good weather,
and untangles the crane while he talks with me.

What do I want to be? That's easy.
I want to be great, I want to be special,
I want to be the things I imagine I already am.
And I want to be able to untangle this crane
or somehow keep it from tangling in the first place.

Don nods at my silence as though he's heard.
It's nice, he says, to sit out here in the sunshine.
A dog walks by on a mission, oblivious to our moment.
It's good, Don tells me, to have someone to talk to
and something that you can do to help.

Don has been dead now three years and
long before he died I stopped seeing him.
I still have that Tonka crane
and though I can untangle the string
I don't yet know what it is I want to be
or how to accept what others are trying to do.

Not Cakes, But Cookies

In the dream, is how these things are supposed to begin. Then the nonsense, the mystery that follows makes at least dream sense. But this happened. I went to the millionaire's house. I apologized for my informal dress. I hadn't expected a formal dinner party. I was only there to sell him a Nissan truck. I'm so sorry. Forget it, the millionaire said. He sat on a pull-out bed without a couch. This was in the kitchen. He was very tan. Freckled. He had moles on his head that worried me. He stroked his face. I need a shave, he said. He did need one. But he didn't move away from the newspaper he was reading. Look here, he said. He wasn't talking to me. Says here that a young man should make cakes at Disney World. He laughed. As did my brother-in-law who was standing next to where the millionaire sat. Cakes! said the millionaire. He laughed. Big and loud. Everyone laughed along with him. My brother-in-law. The owner of the truck dealership. The millionaire. Three young women in French-maid outfits. The pull-out bed laughed. And suddenly I understood what was funny. Not cakes, but cookies. And with that I awoke.

On the Desert Island

I bring Brad Mehldau's Live in Tokyo,
David Shumate's two books of prose poems,
the yellow Rothko from the Menil in Houston,
a bottle of ink, fountain pen, and notebooks.

I write every day about a girl at Starbucks
sipping iced coffee through a straw,
looking out the window for a man
who, alone on a desert island, is dying of thirst.

Ice

At the end of the day
it is still too cold,
the ice has formed and
will thicken over the world
through this December night.

So this is a poem about endings
and things that continue,
about painful cold
that hardens and cracks,
and the very end of the year.

I'm as obvious as the sky,
self-centered as the moon,
spinning like this planet,
circling some sun,
wondering how it will all end.

At the end of the day
In a poem about endings
that's as obvious as the sky
I type one last line and then
there's nothing to do but sleep.

Five Minutes to Three in the Morning

At five minutes to three in the morning,
when morning still looks and feels like night
just the way December thirteenth feels like winter
even though the calendar tells us it is autumn,
I come down the stairs to question things.

First, why is it so cold in this house? An easy one,
the storms have not been lowered on the windows
and the wind is blowing through the old panes.
Then, hoping it would be as easy as the first,
I ask why my body no longer does what it should.

It is my body that has driven me out of bed
and downstairs to boil water for tea and pace
the kitchen to the den until it is ready.
I ache from the inside for reasons I do and don't
understand, from things I know and do not know.

Winter blows through even after I close the storms.
My stomach still aches after I drink the tea.
The morning still looks like the dark of night,
when younger spirits sleep so soundly we almost believe
that they will never feel the touch of time.

Lunar Poetics

The secret poets write in darkness,
alone at computers, never on paper.
Their words are vapors that disappear
almost before they have been typed.

The secret poets send directly
to the secret lovers of poetry,
those who feel the words wash over
like oceans pulled insistently by the moon.

The secret lovers cannot sleep,
the moon is too bright and they
refuse to resist its tidal pull,
their faces turned forever upward.

The secret lovers see the crescent
through vapors of rhythm and voice.
It tells them that love is forever new
and that they are forever beautiful.

The secret poets inhale the night
and exhale vaporous words of love
staring up at the moon and wondering
how it is that they see their own faces

staring back down through the mist
withholding from them some wondrous secret.

The Wind Tonight

The wind tonight shakes the house
It lifts up the roof and reaches inside
arranging each of us and the furniture
for the game it has come here to play.
It puts the children in their beds,
the mother on the couch with a snack,
the father at a desk with a pen and drink.

The wind turns the lights out and
makes a moon hang over the house
above the tree that it shakes
across the shingles and night sky.
It imagines snow, sleet, and rain,
a storm that it has felt brewing,
which is about to fall down on the house.

The wind yawns and coughs,
it sneezes and, without knowing why,
the wind begins to cry, great heaving sobs
that shake the wind as it shakes the house.
It pushes through the wall, crushes a door,
throws the children from their beds,
the wife from her couch, but leaves the husband

alone at the desk writing up a storm.

Composing a Love Poem

I thought, why not compose
A love poem of sorts to you
My dear, dear girl, while
I wait for the doctor to come
Check the binding of my wound.

In days of old I would have
Taken a quill and parchment
Near the candle in my garret
And perhaps sipped tea while
Chewing hard, dark bread.

But today I sit in the exam room
Of a clinic tapping on an iPhone
Listening to Muzak under
Fluorescent light. I've had pizza
And coffee and I'm far from home.

I wonder what you are doing
Then remember that you are
Doing the things you must
And that your shoulders ache
Because you carry so very much.

Were I in the garret, then you
Would likely have just come
From the barn where the animals
Demanded your attention and now
There is butter to churn, socks to darn.

And you would likely wonder again
What it is you get from all this
That is so different from the woman
With no writer in the garret or exam room
Without a man who, it seems,

Can't quite write a love poem.