The trouble with owning hammers 
is that you have to store them somewhere, 
on pegs or at least in a drawer
or inside an emptied out tackle box, 
long after the house is built
and the circus folded like an envelope
on the backs of unfamiliar trucks, 
all night from Maine to Hollywood.
I want to go by three names 
like child actors and serial killers.
My father kept hammers in a drawer
and once, when he stopped by 
but I was out, he nailed a two-by-four
he stole from a construction site
under the sagging cushions of my couch.
I keep my hammers in the closet
but he found them anyway. I would
like to be a hammer, I think, 
and swing all day down on the heads
of thin, unsuspecting nails
even though I am not particularly 
violent or unmedicated, if that matters.
It’s true, I was never any good
at math ever since that one bronze 
star in fifth grade, and I know 
you’re not supposed to begin a speech 
or say in a poem how nervous 
you are, but I think there are more nails 
than people, and more hammers
than people, and I am weary of these
constant reminders that nothing
built after the pyramids
seems able to hold together for long--
not just relationships, but other things
like bookshelves, governments, 
the new consensus on circumcision.
They say Man’s first tool was a hammer, 
which makes sense since I can’t
imagine apes working a protractor, 
much like a sextant under the wet stars.
But each time I swing, I can feel
my own head loosen from its shaft
of lacquered bone, and I know
once it flies, it will never be tight again. 

Forget the wrestlers with quick-
silver torsos and Spartan shoulders, 

the sheen of cornstalks like secrets 
wrapped in green evening gowns, 

sunsets that forgive our clichés
of spilled oxblood and lavender, 

lakes where marijuana grows wild
between farm-towns called Osage

or Sioux City after the lost tribes, 
teenagers swimming by moonlight.

Forget the impossible darkness
of freshly plowed soil, the heat

from the blacktop along 218, 
fields of turnips and bell peppers

and petunias, each seed pulling 
a different memory from the earth.

Forget too the full-breasted farm
girl blinking purple-tinted contacts

while she wipes each watermelon
at the fruit stand—just another one

wishing she were somewhere else. 

How they pinball through the mind
like the combinations of outgrown lockers,
a mishmash of Virgos and Cancers

on whose soft favor we once depended --
useless now like the few syllables
bored in from foreign language classes,

the equations of elementary physics
they swore we must memorize
if we held any hope for future happiness.

But no — the world knuckles along
whether we remember or not,
hauling everyone for whom the heart once

flounced like a broadsided schooner,
for whom we raised mythologies
all sin-sweet, proud as a dead religion.

After the funeral, your hair 
and skin baked to ash, 

your body brought back in a gray box
with a bag of soot inside, 

box and bag on a pedestal by the table, 
your brother came to see you.

He asked where you were, 
and when I said By the table

he thought I said On the table
and he said Here? 

peeking under the lid 
of an empty drinking cup, 

as though we had gone 
to the local Kwik Stop

for gas and fountain drinks 
then decided what the hell? 

and used a cardboard Pepsi cup 
for our mother’s urn.

He actually thought that, 
and his eyes got wide

as he stood in the dining room, 
unspeakably appalled, 
staring at that cup

and mother, oh sweet jesus
how I wanted to laugh.