Philip, Stephen, Larry: these are the names
of my fathers. Where is Michael?
He is off in the woods with himself
not being my father. Michael is a ghost,
Michael is unseen, and Michael
drags a fiery sword that unmakes
the world. Michael is un-is.

Michael, when I lost the words
I hated you. It’s in the poems, the ones
not found, not written: the unpoems
in the unbook, the names that tell the story,
and I wanted my name in the book,
St. Michael, if only as a way to show
with your fiery sword
a version of the world
where words
can rise from ash.

It all seems easy to an innocent mind: there’s a method
to the rules, with children wedged between adults
and dogs in God’s arrangement of the cosmos, and so as a kid
you take orders from the top down. But there’s no provision
for what to do when your parents start acting like fools,
for when your grandmother kidnaps you, when your
mother brandishes a knife at your sleeping throat.
Then you think about that God with his locusts, his plagues
and droughts, whole tribes of the faithful put in time out
for forty years or forty nights, depending on what
felt right. He’s as crazy as the ones who brought you into
the world; no wonder it’s all fucked up. Then one sweet
drunken night you forget the pill and wind up in charge of a life
as well. This is how it begins, how the madness gets handed down.

We each start out as paper, I suspect—
just a name mused across some blank scrap
to tease out the way your identity will come
to sound and soon suit you, and before
you know it you’re being torn from the woman
who dreamed up your name, who slept
like a rock the night you first fused into her,
though she couldn’t have known at the time
what was settling inside her like a stone,
or how the weight of a child could sink her
in so many ways. She starts out as your rock,
looking after you as carefully as a swan folded
from origami, but quickly you find how easily she can
be cut or crumpled, and so you slice your own

path into the world, finding yourself
forever wedged between the hard places.
And the shortcuts that were supposed
to make everything easier just look
like knife slashes on a weathered map
where some other person, trying to roll
through this life, got fed up with the constant
figuring, the tedious, endless balancing
of life’s equations and remainders.
What are your options in the end?
Dear John or Jane? Cut yourself loose?
Get stoned and cope? The world isn’t
without hope, but there’s no best choice—
it all depends on what you do with your fists.

There really isn’t one that wins
them all. Each time you go to choose
it could fall either way, and even
though it was just a silly game to pass
the long bus ride on the way to the
loathsome school, maybe the real
lesson was in those shaking fists
that met in the aisle on the slow
yellow barge. Maybe the teachers
knew that algebra wouldn’t save us
one wit when our ass was in a sling,
but deciding to cut or cover or smash—
this was what life had in store; no easy
calls, the only trump our vulnerability.

Everyone thinks loss is the worst, but worse yet
is what isn’t known. Those loves that ended in bitter
words, smashed glasses—we may wonder, What if…
but in our hearts we harbor the truth: no good
was ever to come of that. But the calls that trailed off,
the unanswered letters and drunken, late-night texts:
where did that other person slip off to,
what bright corner of the world welcomed her home?
It sets one on edge, gives the mind leave to roam
the alternative future with that absent kindred soul.
One can hear, in the lull of thoughts over time, the heart and its perfect
limbo beat, lowering the bar of expectations
until you’ll accept anything to rid yourself of the memory
of that dance where your moves were matched without hesitation.

It’s a shame you’re not a fan of westerns because this
has all the makings of a good one: a woman alone,
her husband prospecting in New Mexico, the sudden return
of the fork-tongued old lover. She and that smooth
talker laze in her marital bed, smoking, blowing
rings that waft out the window and carry like beacons
across the dusty plain. (And the worst part is that even
the husband’s dog has been untrue.) In a western,
all of this would make for a hanging: I’d be strung up by your
man and some rowdy boys from the local saloon. Or if I wasn’t
done in by the limb and rope, maybe a shot of lead in the gut.
Then again, I could be the one quick on the draw…
Too bad this life isn’t a movie: we’d solve this fast,
but as it is our betrayals are just minor offenses we wallow in.