Tuesday this year brings your birthday. Each
hand claps another for the king. Adieu,
aerialist. Once the wire held your feet down;
now snapped ends lie touching air. We, awestruck,
karaoke your memory appassionato.

Your rhinestones at the last were off,
obbligato forgotten, your gyrations occluded by flab;
ubiquity buried you.

Vagabondage maybe was your curse. Your
entropic rushes between snapshots ran…
ran down. Your trips to the stage became ennui
yawning, a hunk of hunk of burnin’

mediocrity. This year your deathday will fall
unnoticed on a Saturday. Your outgo
crammed into “this day in 1977…” TV,
having electric memory, might run a tape.

Would a kiss be cool, like
an ice cube on the tongue? Your lips
were warm and yielding. I was falling
into butter and cream.

I thought we were forever, but
by the fifth grade we were done.
Do you remember?

His hackneyed jabs
at the edges of things
always bounced awry, and so
do I.

Always with the half-formed plans
of drunken imagination, he loved
procrastination until he died.
The barman cried.

I trace his steps in cool
darkness. I stand thirsty,
my father’s son. His blood
is the sound of whiskey on ice.

There is a photograph. Two boys stand
in straw hats, their arms draped
over each other’s shoulders, freckled
faces grinning into the camera. Behind them,
I remember, is a leaning barn, and an ancient orchard
scattered through pines. I can still feel
the summer heat blowing across the creek,
picking up the fragrance of tadpoles and rattlesnakes.
The older boy is ten, and is me.
My brother John is eight. He has already lived
more years than he has left.

I don’t know what wakes me up
this viscous afternoon. The phone
is screaming and the crazy dog
is barking like the end of the world.

Johnny is on his back in the middle
of our bedroom. Around him spreads
a puddle the color of apples. It is coming
out of his head. My father’s gun
is at his feet.

He vomits blood from his mouth and nose,
then stops breathing. He clicks.
Kneeling down, I put my hands in matted hair,
careful to keep my fingers out of the oozing holes.
I lift and turn. He gasps.

I am here in the dark, now, thinking
about hot summers and happy boys.
In the distance I hear sirens and some crazy dog
barking like the end of the world.

My gallbladder belches
brown steam downstream.

My liver is a bag of dog shit
burning on Crabapple’s porch.

My catawampus tongue
spits alliterative assonance,
a philological enema
gushing soft soap.

Go away.
The room is occupied.

William walks the beach to look for feathers.
He holds each one against the sky, then runs
its vanes between pinched fingers
before he puts it in his pouch. Most
are from gulls, but sometimes wind
sends eagle feathers down to the sand.

Shells rattle in his pouch as well,
with clicking bits of bone and twisted
sticks of driftwood, river-washed and weirdly shaped.
William glues these things together, lashes them
with strips of leather. “Fetishes,” he says.
“I sell them on the Internet.”

Blond hair has gone to gray on sunburned skin.
“Sometimes you have to quit your job
to give your spirit room to move and tell you
God is everywhere.” He rents a tumbled trailer
down the beach, pays with prophecy
and his disability check. “It’s all in letting go
of Earth and all this shit.”

He slips a hand inside the pouch,
pulls a sandy feather out,
holds it to his ear and nods.

There are fourteen stairs
up to my porch. When climbing,
I put each foot down in the same
place. My feet are even.
Even Steven

When I walk I count
the times my feet come down
without landing on the cracks. Sometimes
only four or five steps go by before
a foot finds a crack. But when stride
and sidewalk synchronize, I go
more. Once I went a hundred
fourteen steps. If you subtract
ten squared, that leaves fourteen. There are
fourteen stairs up to my porch. The door
sill counts.

I don’t know how
to capitalize titles. They taught me
to use capitals on the significant words,
and lower case on the minor ones. I think
all words are significant. No words are significant.
I capitalize every other word. It’s only fair.
Even Steven

I count by sevens in my head. Evan Seven.
The second number is fourteen.

I found a couple of your notebooks written during your highschool days. Some pages are poems, some essays, some song lyrics. These notebooks were in the back of a cupboard at Dad’s place; I found them when I was clearing out the junk. So referencing the post title, what would you like me to do? :)

Here is the original poem:

Acontece quando mais o esperamos:
um punho bate à porta,
não se trata do carteiro
nem da juventude. Diz-se
da família. Vem para ficar.

Começa por brincar às escondidas
com os nossos pensamentos.
Acorda-nos de noite, diverte-se
a romper as sapatilhas,
deixa frascos de formol
sobre a mesa da cozinha.

Primeiro, não sabendo o que fazer,
tentamos distrair a sua fome,
mostramos-lhe o relógio,
passamos-lhe a carteira para as mãos,
os botões da gabardine, os anéis.
Por último, os dedos.

Neste passo, depressa nos convence
a tratá-lo por senhor, a ceder-lhe num sorriso
a cadeira do avô, o telefone
dos amigos, a vista da janela.
De cabeça descoberta
servimos o jantar.

Com o tempo percebemos:
quer vestir-nos do avesso,
forrar de vento norte
a gola dos casacos, levar-nos a dizer:
“há nas folhas do Outono vivo lume,
que faço eu em minha casa?”

Here is my “translation:”

The Corn Feast

I see four bushels of corn on the sidewalk:
cobbed bites all a-yellow.
The dancing sister brought her cart
and left these children, a brightness,
pleasant as parrots among the pinyon.

Come, you poor, and we will eat.
Come, I have sweet pimentos and Juan
will play the accordion! A diversion!
And sobriety isn’t for corn, so
bring beer if you can.

Primarily, we do not bend or hang our heads,
should even ten distresses advance. They will pass us
like the sister’s cart. We are natural like the corn
and the wind. We can live in our place.

We won’t die tonight, or be afraid of any beast.
Though we are poor we are firm, never sorry
to sing our songs and to tell our friends
of our jangling, inner vistas. So don’t
be disconcerted. Let us serve each other
from the pots and jars.

Come, let us be tempted to be at peace. I question
vestments and other aggrandizement.
The rich venture forth for nothing, clicking
their golden castanets. I remember the words of my father:
“All are fools, so enjoy the moonlight dance!
Are not our faces soon enough vanished from the house?”

This was such a fun exercise. I recommend it to all!

Oh yeah. For the curious, here is a real English translation of the poem:

HERE TO STAY

When we most expect it
there’s a knock on the door:
not the postman
and not youth calling. He says
he’s family and is here to stay.

First he plays hide and seek
with our thoughts.
He wakes us up at night, rips
our slippers apart for fun,
leaves jars of formaldehyde
on the kitchen table.

At a loss for what to do, we try
to divert his hunger.
We show him our watch,
give him our wallet,
the buttons of our raincoat, our rings.
And finally our fingers.

At which point he persuades us
to call him sir and to offer him
our grandfather’s chair, the phone numbers
of our friends, the view from the window.
With head uncovered
we serve dinner.

In time we realize
he wants to dress us inside out,
to line our coat collars
with the north wind, to have us say:
“the autumn leaves are burning bright,
what am I doing at home?”