Jeff and I attended the MFA at the University of Oregon together, and he's since published all over the place, won a "Discovery"/Boston Review Prize, and received a prestigious Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at Pepperdine University.
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Old News and the Borrowed Blues
I’ll play it and tell you what it is later.
--Miles Davis
All winter the dog’s run his track around the yard’s edge
deeper into the mud; he’s pissed on the same fence-posts,
Snorted at the squirrel between the weathered boards,
and he circles always, as if there were a better place to shit.
I don’t think he has it in him to mind, but thing is, I can’t stop
feeling sorry for myself and the piss-poor state of my days:
Rain and a walk to the market. Rain and the same old news,
the anchor trying to manage a segue from seventeen burnt bodies
To ten tips to kick your shopping addiction with something like grace.
And there are forms to fll out and co-pays to make.
There’s the institutional AC’s unwavering rumble and hiss.
But isn’t that the thing about the blues? At bottom,
It’s always the same: One, Four, Five, One, repeat. You always know
what’s coming, and only The Greats can make you forget
To expect it: We sleep-in on weekends, eat breakfast late,
sit at the kitchen table and listen to the radio.
But it’s the waking I like best, whole hours of it, tangling
and untangling our bodies, fixing on the grace of the neck
Or wrist before circling back into a dream of a day beginning.
It used to nag at me always, I was such a child, asking,
Is this all there is? But these days together, a little sunlight
out the window rinsing the leaf-tips of the familiar,
I tell you, Honey, we’re the richest dogs on Earth.
from Indiana Review, Winter 2010
