My Barefoot Rank. David Craig

      don’t know where they are going,

      but that is their charm.

      Clouds are much the same, older.

      They sniff the ground like the beasts, tribes.

      But rocks! Now they know how to wait!

      They settle in the valleys for the long siege,

      perch upon ridges, look-outs; they will wait until

      only they matter again—things as they should be:

      time, that brigand, a passing, futile thing.

      Men are like beetles, busying themselves,

      fussing, losing all their heat, energy on things

      that do not matter, cities that rise like comic hats.

      They would do better to bide, to learn

      the slow value of the simple phrase, a step

      on the mountain. If they could fathom that,

      their lives would be changed; they would live

      with God, whose voice gives rise

      to mottled sunsets, to rifts in oceans, waves.

      Those shakings are food for rill and mountain.

      They fashion the cold’s flakes here—

      the whole universe, a vowel half uttered.

      The notes on my wife’s piano pages

      are tiny door stops, mice prints

      down a dark hall. I do not live in that house;

      no one ever has. Beethoven sits on a plush,

      dusty chair, lampshade over his illumined head—

      the only bulb under a high ceiling,

      distressed molding.

      A wolf moon shines on a staircase,

      but you cannot live there either.

      This is what you must keep: the truth of how little

      you are, or, better, of how little there is of you.

      (Who would miss that when the time comes?)

      And all the measureable world?

      Something for science.

      Your children, as well: how vain to expect

      some stepping off point, where they will find fertile

      earth, a perfect mate, though in their noons

      it will seem so.

      We work in the presence of a God we cannot see—

      a night. You can lift your little sailboat,

      sail it against a window, the snow outside.

      Whatever you can add, I don’t want it.

      There’s nothing else here—too much to take away.

      Jesuit high get-together

      They’d always seemed to glide

      through the good: one an Arch-Bishop!

      How have you done this, I want to ask:

      prodigals who knew better—never bothering

      with what was beyond them?

      They’d seemed like shiny Pennies from Sky King,

      listened to a different channel.

      Do their children walk on greener turf, I wonder?

      Do their wives, Donna Reeds, still smile bashfully

      when they get home in the evenings?

      And what would it be like to rouse myself

      under that sun, to eat every vegetable on my plate?

      Bad life choices are what separate us—

      though there is more. My father

      walks in me; my mother, too,

      eastern European children on noisy streets

      generations ago, where no one

      could pronounce your name.

      They were loud, finding games,

      behaving only as well as they had to—

      to the envy of no one.

      What did we lose when we left them there

      on those shores? Whose shoes did we learn to tie?

      Though I can’t speak for my brothers,

      I feel like it’s better to eat foods I cannot name

      than it is to wave a flag in the country of money.

      We’d stopped at an alligator farm

      on our honeymoon; and the Everglades,

      people circling its eyelid, sunning asphalt.

      For me that would be like inviting

      arrogant students back into my classroom.

      Yes, they have a right to exist—

      but not here.

      My daughter and I did manage some fun:

      the in-laws mobile home community pool,

      though we couldn’t jump in—pace-makers!

      And Haslam’s city, a huge bookstore

      in St. Pete’s, where you could actually handle

      new books, turn the clean pages, enjoy

      the thick vellum, shiny print. You could

      gather a stack, return a few—like in older days.

      But I keep coming back to those alligators:

      hundreds of hatchlings, one on top of the other

      in hungry cages, some finding dogs

      or two year olds by now.

      They are signs of a sort: welcome to Florida.

      We don’t have much sense, but our newscasters

      are pleasant, and our southern-most