Selected Poems
by Patrick

Keep Moving

(From “The Devouring Land”)

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We belong to the dust, the dust
belongs to no one.  Ask the bones
of Domingo, who crossed into Arizona
with his six-year old son, walking
through the mountains, avoiding
the desert snakes and the eyes
burning a hole through the sky.
On the third day, they ran
out of water, and on the fourth
Domingo began to run out, his skin
tightening, his eyes wandering
through heaven and earth, the heaven
you make in your mind when flesh
begins to die, skin for skin,
bone to its bone, the heart’s fierce
surrender.  There comes a moment
in time where the mind can accept
what the body knows.  We belong
to the sun, the sun belongs to no one.
Domingo placed his right hand
on his son’s head, drew a crooked cross,
commanded him on.  The son
obeyed with his feet. The last order
of the living is the first wish of the dead:
Keep moving.

To my 6th grade science class

(From “The Devouring Land”)

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At the root, in the dark, in
tandem with rhizome and wish,
bacteria beg nitrogen
from the soil. It is lifted
up the xylem like a psalm:
some days lament, some
days praise. Seeds die
and stems are born. Leaflets
appear as wings out of
a chrysalis. Sun kisses
chloroplasts into sugar,
and the stamen and pistil
bathe in the nectar that
sirens in the bees. It’s
all done without an eye,
without a brain, and yet
deep in the deep, roots
burrow like moles: ancient
rock has bedded down there,
ancient ice is flowing. Taste
and see: this tomato, this corn
has been waiting for you.

Quitting Time

(From “Quitting Time”)

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I sweep up the hair that lies like pigeon’s feathers
on my father’s shop floor: Callahan’s red
mixed with the dark Slavinskys and Knauers and Ryshavys,
and one blonde Swede who must have snuck
in just before five. His candied fleece shimmers
on top of the pile. Dad double counts the till
and snaps caps back onto brown bottles of tonic
and grunts with the weight of the day. And all the men,
who sat in the chair while he plied their heads
with scissors and razors and combs, the men
from the plant, still aching from cutting hogs
and steers into bite size pieces, the men
who smoke Camel Straights and hit their kids
because God says it’s good for them and because
their hands were tied behind their backs
by fathers whose tongues were stolen from them
when they crossed the sea, all of them have
trailed off into the twilight like fog,
leaving their hair to sparkle under my broom
as my Father and I work in silence, and in hope of wings.

Grandfather, standing

(From “Quitting Time”)

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Some thin twilights, when the meadowlarks
sang over the vast plains, he stood and stared
to the west. The sun was German, like him:
hard working, constant, to the minute
on the clock. And when the work was done,
when the hay was put up and the animals
bedded down, there was this exultation
in the western sky. For a moment,
the birds outmuscled the insects for song,
each blade of grass breathed, and
the deaths he had known, and the ones
he would face, fit closely in his hand.
Sunset twilight nightfall evening vespers dusk:

between the sky and the soil
there was this fire, watching.

Listen

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In the upper reaches of heaven,
a deaf angel sings. Perfect pitch.
Precise enunciation. No need
for piano or maestro, no back up,
no stunned congregation. Her job
is to sing the last bit of sunshine
to sleep, after the afternoon has
passed, the evening, the trinity of
twilights: civil, nautical, astronomical.

In the upper reaches of heaven,
a deaf angel sings. Minor key.
A slow progression of notes and
pauses from a being that has no need
for breath. Her duty does not vary from
night to night, but her repertoire stretches
from the time before there was a time,
to the coming time when time will be
no more. Silence is her favorite chord.

As the thousands of myriads
of colors flame out, one by one,
and Venus and Mars come out
of hiding into the deepening blue,
she sings, not hearing her own voice,
nor the music of the spheres she
was present for at their creation.
If she could hear the cries
of earth: children sold, lands
pummeled into dust, peoples
erased, perhaps she would sing
the blues, but on this night

in the upper reaches of heaven,
a deaf angel sings a lullaby,
softly and tenderly, calls each
restless flame to her breast,
wraps her wings around their
dying light, and coos them into sleep.