Some people think that history is made by people. Others think that people make history. If Alexander the Great had never lived would someone else have consolidated the known world after Philip the II? I believe people make all the difference; which is why raising children should be an exercise in providing opportunity, then in getting out of the way. - SC



A green curled tendril clean and new can wave in slow sweeps
As gingerly and sleepy as Asher who looks to stretch warm muscles of his neck
In the calm of tawny mornings

The tendril unfolds at night, scribing the arcs ‘til it touches
Then wraps a coil as a root hugs a rock in neighboring earth

And this is the node, a one of many
Bent to use by the beanstalk to climb with the mandate of ancient bits in the cell
Toward the loft of a garden stake point where sunlight splashes on broad green patches and pools

And where is the need for me?
For the pull of cellular bits calls also the child.
Calls wonder and touch, bend and re-wrap
Calls fingers to mud like ten points of a web, with points in the billions

No grower am I, but a watcher of Asher as keen and calm as a clock I hope
That measures with patience the science of delivery into newness and grace

And there is another watcher. No, two. No, four.
Save for a stir, the first would dissolve as a garden mist
Her words in round warm tones, part always from the edge
Of a half smile, part always from a further thought kept tucked inside
A wonder as real as bone for the children on the film of her eye

And two is a heart.
Like a pillow for a gem, the child pops softly to alight
For a pause in the ticks, for a brace, for an eave and the golden glow of hearths and ovens

As a favorite the third is a tether to good things
Kept floating aside the raft, the name drops easily from Asher’s lip
As if he knows the watching more proudly cast by an eye with wisdom the shape of children

For the fourth there is truth.
Made real by the distance of the glance, a watcher as close as skin with an eye
Across an ocean, and power from the word that sounds and sees in the same instant

All watchers.
And what thanks can be strung from my watching to theirs
That I see too their patient gaze on the ticks and their placid joy sprung from the full fine task
Of watching

April 9th, 2001

There is only one moment that a human has no past to run from, or stand upon. I sent this to a friend while he was still in the hospital with his newborn and firstborn. We lost touch afterwards and I never got to meet his child. We all walk somewhere and I sometimes wonder how her walk is going. - SC


This is the instant
when nothing is behind you.

No airless room of retreat

No crumpled papers in a pile

Just the cool breath of life in front
humming quietly in space
drumming its fingers
smiling
and waiting to be filled with you.

April 26th, 2000

The idea of good luck has always puzzled me. On the one hand I like the humility of acknowledging good things may not always come by our own hands. On the other hand, it just seems stupid. This was for a friend on his wedding day. Sometimes good things just come to good people and that should be enough of an understanding. Right? - SC



The wheel is turned
to the top for you
and fortune, like a glittered heaven
is wondrous and deep
in company of two.

But to the baker goes
the smell of bread
(no fate or fortune needed)
and these good things also
have come to you on the back
of lives well lived,
and a soul now shared.

June 1st, 2000

Through a bizarre chain of connections, I ended up teaching for a few weeks in a public high school. Even now, it seems like it never happened. Maybe it didn’t. There was this girl who had just moved from Bulgaria. After I saw the crowd she had fallen in with – I knew with mathematical certainty that she was in big trouble. And if you are wondering how I related the busy hallways of a high school to the intestines of a drug smuggler – well, then you just have not been to a high school in awhile. - SC



On that day, sitting small and
moving her head in slow, rounded evasions
the student from Bulgaria
was shrinking from the barbs of an
over loud English world.

Sunlight-less and sliced in the high style of warehouse blocking
at least five interior walls away from air that she could share with
those still breathing in the back room of her birth

She scribed the curves of the words of a land
too dense with things
to give space for breath of her own

To continue on

That day she stepped with balloon-thin skin
into the snaking movement of the hall
like contraband in the stomach of a nomad.

And I was not ready for that.

My wife and I had a dry erase board on the side of our refrigerator for making lists. Occasionally, I would leave her notes in the middle of the night. Over the years, there must have been dozens and dozens. I found these 7 or 8 because she liked them enough to write them down. In fact, a lot of good things in my life are because of her foresight. - SC

Note 1

My note to Karen

No storm
Rose colored and thick
Furious and salty
Lime-green or candied
Is half the sight
Or half the mist
Or half the shadows
Of her
When she is locked
When the furnace is
White in her eye and
She knows her mind,

And would I love you do?

1997

Note 2

In ‘98 in Tennessee First of All

Her kitchen was always
Yellow and blue.
Even as a pig-tailed-
not-meant-for-this-town-
the reason-evolution-worked-
was-because-one-would-
rise-above-and-it-was-you
little girl.

Her kitchen was bright
Not woody
Keen
Not pudgy
And beyond all caught in couches
Beyond all meek and plodding
She
With yellow blue and white
As clean as that blue eye in
That tousled head.

1998

Note 3

To Karen When I Get Back

Did I tell you I could build and buy
And make gardens with decks
Things of copper and brass
In the high and cool air?
Ziplock bags of orange slices
For Saturday soccer
And backpacks?

Fits of Hubris.

When I get back
I’ll have none of these.
I’m sorry.

When I get back
I’ll come too
Not torn and angry
Acid in the corner,
I will have been to where
I tried
and I’ll bring me back

1998

Note 4

Like a pair of showbiz
Pals whose names are
Always tandem

Gray and Black
One tall and buff
One small and fat
Like toothpaste or
Pictures of a 1972 Christmas
Familiar and kind

You’d think they grew-up
Together
Crunch and Jackson
As a finger or an eye
I could not live without

Meat and Pop-Tarts
Cheerios and Frisbees
Jingle and jangle

Always
A love quiet and sweet

1998

Note 5

Cracked pepper and spice
And blue eyes darting this way for the icebox
And that way for the serving dish needed right then
That she might have bought anywhere
(for those eyes see things)
A stainless cup for quarters of oil
And mushroom caps cut just so on a walnut board
Pursed lips and small quick steps
Bustle and feign
(I think I burned the rolls)
And don’t kiss me while I’m cooking

They have the Wonders and David
And a mossy rock
And misty glens
And dried flowers
But I have this
And what else is there?

She gets flush and content

And thank you for leaving the applesauce
Until just when
So the chill still sits in the air
Between the lid and the fruit

1998

Note 6

The only reason I’m
sad tonight while
you’re sleeping
warmly,
is I can’t
see your
eyes.

Of course
they are building
like a camera flash
with high squeal and
will see them soon enough,

But I do love your eyes.

1998

Note 7

To Karen on this Wednesday

Snapping like a pine stick
My huff and puff promise
Is dry and old
Under the lead-heavy glower
Of things real

So I am not all I gushed to be.

A Roman might have
The notion to go
I can’t even promise that

But even this French-butter pear is a
Little too brown and I
Thought it a little short too.

Can it be true that
Things fallible and flawed
Are also sweet and sometimes
just right?

1998

Note 8

Beyond all things good
Is the wonder of the human spirit
Surprised and pleased
That life has collected itself
From a swirling and indifferent
Drink of water
And she is in the middle
As lovely and sternly delicate as a human cell
Breathing life into my cold head
And fluid into yet another

To you, Karen.

For all the world
condensed into a spot
when you came along.

1998

Perfect days are never planned. I believe the two ideas are mutually exclusive. And they are not all from the foggy past. It seems the common practice is for someone to choose a day from their past, exaggerate its importance, sanitize its memory, and forever wax longingly for its return. That mode just strikes me as very sad, kind of absurd, and the product of a weak mind. Perfect days are everywhere; erstwhile and otherwise. - SC



She called just to say
She loved the jeep

2 am was so hot still
that moving through the air
was like the stroke of
warm hair across cool skin

Jerry Lee Lewis from a
backseat so filed with
speakers there was little room
for guilt and less for sadness

A summer made too short
by the click and clack
of pool halls and
first base bleachers
and,
can you lie still while the
mist from that open window puts
silver dots on your eyelashes?

Because I’d let this whole
city roll right past my
arms and straight into my
chest
there’s room enough for this
and more

Where the faint
buzz of commerce goes
thin and clear and the
notes of the spinning spheres
strike a deep and sweetly
wrought chord

And pools of pungent ash
and wax
and a cool washcloth
pass quietly into a
warm memory

and nothing is as short
as a perfect day

1999

Some people carry such heavy memories. When I meet them, I can feel the gravitational pull towards that spot in them that is taking their joy, or their ambition, or their wisdom. I can not say whether or not I could carry such things with me. This single acknowledgment is enough for me to give almost anyone the benefit of most any doubt. - SC



Some things are too heavy
For the string that passes
Between us

What speck
Slips between the cells
That makes a mother dog turn
And with a glint
Eat the pup she once suckled?

Dumb and insentient of the string
Walk we all until it is
plucked like a whisker
And the orbits fail
And the thing so quietly hung
From our umbilici
Brings noise and rage
Like a river from a tap

Too many and too much too long
To go back and count

But why wonder at a thing
That’s done

No force of will brings back the pup-
Just a cold turn and a
Pointed push
As memory gives way
to order

1999

By the time I was in elementary school, I knew I wanted to leave the place of my birth. By the time I was in 7th or 8th grade, I was dreaming of other places in vivid color. I don’t know when I wrote this – but it must have been a song, because I rarely used any rhyming outside of melodic accompaniment. I do remember the girl, and the steps by the state capitol referenced. - SC



Did you see her by the riverside?
We got a boat and tried to fly
The little sister of a friend
Is acting all grown up again

And I’m allowed to stay out late
Cause even trouble hates this place
The water stops right at the steps
But no one cries when getting wet

By the salt licks and the clouds
I dreamed alone of getting out
You got to drive to see the sun
But even then it tries to run

She took it well that I was gone
Sometimes the hunted just won’t run
When I have counted 40 years
I’ll bet I’ll never come back here

‘Pandemonium of the Sun’ has four parts (Knowledge as Clarity, Living Against Dispersion, Desire as Purity, Supersedence of Greed). All of it was set to music, some of it spoken and some of it sung. - SC



- Knowledge as Clarity -

If all of the pieces
Were laid flat and clear along a thin edge
Each placed with the care and diligence of a mother,
And if all hues were in quiet bleed
One dissolving the other with the force of sharp rebukes
Or the placid and unwitting machinations of
A bright and simple child,

Each would be the magnetic flower of the other
An inspired chevauchee through confusion
Trenching a bunker for the infallibility of thought
And we would find a dry heath behind
To lie insentient and blissful in that round swale

I’m a doctor let me see the thing that makes you frail
I can see inside the thing and know where others failed

Did I get a moment?
Was I given grace?
Did I have a moment?
Just for a moment’s sake?

A glass for me I’m staying
A glass for me I’m home
A glass for me I’m staying
A glass for me I’m home

- Living Against Dispersion -

There is an ineffable sadness lying in a field with
Evening mist and the exhales of the sun.
Rising vapors lick the dying of the day
And bring the whimpering scent of
Ungathered walnuts and bark-less cottonwoods
That grind dynasties into sausage skins,
A seminal part of balance

And in the mastic of that seam there is a garden for celebration
Where life meets entropy like the clack of two rams
Each knowing only to move forward
And but for the ignorance of the two brutes
A sideways step from either would loose the atoms from their orbits
And the firmament would unceremoniously fail,
A spot and moment that resonates with conclusion
And has the satisfying gravity of a drop into deep sleep
Like vague grumbling in the gut that we are on our way to an end

Thick as cotton
Star and beam
I’ll smoke before
I’ll have to leave

I am cables I am wires
Telephones and VCR’s
I am like likely to expire
Like a plastic credit card


- Desire as Purity -

A substrate of chemical pulls and thousands of years of
Wanting something better,
She is layers of nascent grace and angular steps
Feathered out into the bones of her collar
The dish of her spine
The grove of her thigh
The narcosis of blue eyes in a tousled head,
She is all but one drop of an amnesia-slumber
Which but for the species would bring relief from her draw,
She is too earthen to be caught in the cold air of
A space vessel
And too complete to be the scooped and shouldered frame
Of one mantled in the mystery of want and not need,
She is firewood and wine
The photon stream of beauty bent only by the
Frail and steady pull of love as charged mine


She’s a methamphetamine
Wax along the pages
She’s a methamphetamine
Do you want to draw me?
Do you want to draw me?

They say she’s a part of me
They say she’s a part of me

I like her shirt left on the floor
I like the back of her hands
I like her shirt left on the floor
Dizzy from the dancing


- The Supersedence of Greed -

Ambition is the coin of the realm
Where he holds forth in a circle of jackets and vapid air
He busted the stern of an oaken boat
And dropped cash on the slighted soul
Just a snub, but through the false verve
Of privilege and self ordained mastery
This tall scaffold has the heart of a fish
But the badge for passing unobstructed
Any Jasper is the pit of the fruit too far
For his sickly reach

His is nihilism of the pulse for a flush of the skin
Ignoring the sold and rooted fact
That supplanting the sprout by inverting its map
Brings to fore the supremacy of tropisms
And the transcendent push of life
The futile imposition of greed as law

Black shoes marking on the side
Of something left for me
Black shoes marking on the side
You’d better let it be

I might be missing money
You might be in the fold
I might be missing money
But you don’t have a soul

I’m a thousand types of fuck-ups
But I’m stronger from my past
I’m a thousand types of fuck-ups
But you’re weak without your cash

We are animals with brains – which makes for some interesting times. Pondering does not have to come at the expense of action, but it often does. I would rather act than ruminate endlessly. The prefect truly is the enemy of the good. My grandfather used to say that big thoughts are important, but so is ditch digging. In their arrogance and weakness, people who like to think big thoughts forget the second part of the equation. And vice versa. - SC



our cells are not so blind as to
forget the quarrelsome brain
and its mass of ponder and tilting

but breath is precious barter in the
battle against dissolution and decay

and wonder, whether jocund or despairing
is a fine thing, though useless
as a broken spade
when time to dig a ditch

1994

This is about a real girl and her all too real story. I don’t why the existence of real human brutality in modern times surprises me. After all, it has been with us forever. But when children are the victims, the senselessness and sadness of it all seems to resonate more deeply in me. The rule of law in our land and the celebration of the right’s of the individual are among the most precious commodities of our modern republic. I love living here. - SC



I knew some hands were chopped in Sierra Leone
during war or revolution
or some other brutal parch
to crack the African air
But R. Guet was on her way here wasn’t she?

I knew that kindness is not made common by level or law
That it is dripped onto limb and ligature with guarded bottles
By culture and claim and cost
But she seemed to float on great black pools
Of smooth and calm
A warm summer wash on a spider-mud flat
I was glad R. Guet was here.

Inside the black earth of her face,
upside down on the wetness of her eye,
I thought I could see the image of a child
being flipped by her lens so her brain could understand

The image of a child being drug with a truck
till dusty and dead,
Naked by the ankle
through the street by an army
But that was in Africa

Now she sits angular and regal
in the desk of a metro school
learning her fourth language as fast as a pumping rain
but not faster than her parents got her out of Africa
saying to this child, ‘they will never let us come, and you can never come home,
but we love you enough to make you go. Goodbye R. Guet.’

Then,
on the fluid of my own eye
was the image of a boy in the desk at the side of R. Guet
with enamel bits in his head like spikes
and my lens flipped the image so my brain could understand

The image of a R. Guet in golden wisps of heat
rising from a field in Sierra Leonne,
a tether to her family clipped by urgent need, ‘Goodbye R. Guet’
and landing with grace
bird-hollow-bone-light
in the filth of another human jaw

2000

Deep underground somewhere in Europe, there is a stack of wine bottles that is so covered in dust and webs and age that it is barely recognizable. It represents the diligent efforts of people who are probably dead. It also represents potential wealth to its current owners. I saw one in France in 1987 and it struck me sharply. Is it possible that our need to save and hoard is connected not just to a biological mandate for self preservation but also to a need for forgetting? - SC


The Need for Stacking Bottles

Horse sweat smells and an
Amber stone table in a
Cellar of bottles stacked and stacked
And fuzzy from the hope
That time will make them better

The mold and webs of
Days and days
Are witness to
The slow and simple footfalls
Of a mind that begs for distance
From the hard things
That can’t be taken back
And hopes that age will
Soften and weave a screen

But the mold and webs
Feel also the promises likely to be broken
In the bottles beneath their feet
And the smell of horse sweat
And oak planks
Says clearly that good things also
Fall away and age will soften
And build a screen
So days and days
Give balm and boost
To wounds and things unsaid
But fade also
Sweet and gentle things
That give rise to a
Need for stacking bottles

1996

For nearly 10 years, my life was a bit nomadic. School or travel to Europe, Africa, and Australia. I played a show in nearly every American state and saw plenty of interstate ditches and highways. Our culture does not celebrate dislocation of that kind, but I value those experiences above almost any in my entire life. Like the song Forgotten How to Walk, thematically this poem celebrates the journey for the sake of itself, and as a tonic; or even nutrition. - SC



this morning with the fog on the glass in the van
I am tilting my head with a grin and wondering
how things so sharp and beautiful
cross my path

split plastic on the seat and some pea-gravel cracks in my eyes
luck is more than chance
and driving is just the thing

1991