When we first met Peter Mulvey after our Type Rider II: The Tandem Poetry Tour, we spent an evening with him at Three Springs Barn in Lancaster, Wisconsin, where he was performing. He introduced us and our project and we read some of the poetry we had written for strangers (on our typewriters) along our route.
As fellow travelers cycling along with him on his Fall Bike Tour over the past few weeks, we got the chance to surprise his concert-goers with spontaneous poetry. Peter would introduce us from the stage each evening and ask his audience to call out a word. Then, while his performance continued along, we would each craft a poem from our seats in the venue. Excerpts of lyrics would make their way in, or a fragment of some story Peter would tell between songs, or an image from that day’s bicycle route, or even details from the venue itself, the town we were visiting, the people we met. After a few songs, Peter would call us up on stage to read our poems aloud. It was our way, we suppose, of co-creating a new experience - finding a language to connect the audience, the music, the landscape we were in, the journey we were on - and sharing it. Below are the poems we wrote, in order of appearance throughout the tour.
September 21, 2019; Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Pomegranate (Amy)
Everybody knows it’s coming apart at the seams.
Once you were all here and Jack was wearing his black Converse then, too.
Nathan was not playing the tea kettle, but we were all here.
We were definitely all here.
What are you doing? How do you split yourself in two to dig out your seeds?
You go into the woods and you sit .
You go into the woods and you sit and you dig in the dirt.
You watch birch trees grow.
You make yourself irresistible to the sun.
You perch yourself on the edge of a field with an egg timer.
You make yourself a tremendous listener.
Don’t panic. Put yourself on the lip of an ocean where the dolphins already know
we mean it when we say we can’t hold this anymore,
when we say my soul is swimming in this tin cup,
when we beg, "please carry me because my back hurts."
Peter is asking me to get to the point,
which was fleshy and red,
which was juice and seeds,
which was here and now.
. . . . .
pomegranate (Maya)
We are countless. We are uncountable. We are fireflies. Stars. Pebbles
on the path from Lori & Jack’s back porch to the cemetery at Saint John.
We are the sound of a tea kettle posing as a drum. We are a drum
posing as a tea kettle.
We are always leaning back or forward in our seats,
looking for our old lives, or our new ones.
There is always some story we can’t let go of,
a nest of seeds embedded stubbornly in the pith
of our pomegranate hearts.
Maybe we are still 17, always 17, in the woods, at a farm
in Gun Barrel, Colorado, head out the window,
loving ourselves, loving the buffet of an irresistible breakfast,
not thinking about how there is never enough time, not thinking
about where the next sweetness is coming from
because it is everywhere, even Denver International Airport,
even the record two records back, even tired, even hungry,
and especially then.
Let’s bite down hard. Let’s tear the flesh open, again.
Let’s wonder if we mean it. Let’s mean it. Let’s
start counting, town to town. Stars. Fireflies. Pebbles.
Back porches. Cemeteries. Tea kettles. Drums. Friends.
There is laughter coming from the kitchen, still.
Are you listening?
September 23, 2019; Flushing, Michigan.
Hope (Amy)
A postman with a clutch of poems in his fist,
one poem about tacos and skunks.
A Blizzard in the cemetery this morning.
Bea’s shock of rainbow colored hair like a welcome sign.
The name of a virus she has long forgotten but the feeling she can’t shake.
A drum kit housed in a suitcase.
A photograph of myself as a baby
A photograph of myself as a mother.
A woman in an alleyway singing an aria.
A dog named River who eats cucumbers.
Turning on gravel riding through milkweed winding around a ribbon of river.
All of us here under a spray of lights, which remind us of stars,
stars that remind us of the word goodbye goodbye goodbye
It really is that simple, it really is that fragile.
I am here to tell you,
we are the lucky nows we are the lucky nows.
. . . . .
hope (Maya)
We are still falling in love.
We are still playing songs we haven’t played in six years.
We are still walking through doors.
We are still entering room where there are enough seats. We are still
dreaming of Dublin, or our old high tops, the sheen of a parquet floor.
We are still drinking cherry cider from that place down the road. We are still
wearing our favorite shirt, the one emblazoned with cacti. We are still putting on a hat
before the show, letting the wet grass have its way with our pant legs, letting joy
run wild and hungry, syrup on waffles, foxes on a thin crust of snow.
We are still hanging twinkle lights on beams, asking “What am I looking for?
and coming back to ourselves.
We are still watching the leaves come down, petting an idiosyncratic cat,
lining up rain boots and bug spray along the back wall of the porch,
eating spaghetti suppers and making garlic bread and slicing cucumbers
fresh from the garden. We are still riding bicycles to improbable places.
We’re going to be fine. You can be a kid
a little while longer. Make 6 or 8 bucks feel like a million. Bathe
in the fleeting light of Nova Scotia.
Lift your head. Re-tune the guitar. Say, “Here’s a song.”
Then play it.
September 26, 2019; Babeville, Buffalo, New York.
Orange (Amy)
Every night I have the same dream,
we are training dogs the size of bears to ride bicycles.
They are sloppy and have no attention span.
I am patient. You are feverish.
My son is playing nearby.
He has a camera, wants to shoot photographs of the moon.
I say gently, Come. Wait until it dips down low, makes its orange reflection on the water.
There. That’s better.
Later, when the dogs lie resting nearby swatting flies with their lazy tails,
you and I take the bicycles out for a spin.
Circling,
we keep riding by the same field of purple flowers covered in small yellow moths.
I don’t know how this makes you feel or where we are going, but I am sure we will be there soon.
. . . . .
orange (Maya)
You were at Heathrow, in Frankfurt, at Bilbao. Or you were
on Ambien, watching Jeff Bridges on an airplane screen,
thinking about some Mercedes in a ditch. Or you were just
hearing your human voice, having the same dream every night,
the one with horses and magpies and us with our feverish bodies,
Or you were walking alone in a galley of paintings,
weeping for everything that once was, like those whole pies
you ate by a lake. Or you were so tired you didn’t wonder
who was going to love you. Or you were, simply, honest,
every hair of you, listening, sweeping the House of Emanuel,
being a stand-up person, wondering what you were going to play next,
you and that thumb of yours.
And so you did what you could.
You wrote a thank-you note. You thought about a tree. You
hummed a few bars. You remembered your niece’s lost tooth.
You ate an orange.
September 28, 2019; Photo City Improv. Rochester, New York.
Blender (Amy)
The start and the end will soon begin to blend.
Yesterday I read an essay about the universe.
We are speeding toward completion.
In 20 million years our centrifuge will rip this world to shreds, and then where will we lay our heads?
So hang her bicycle on the wall above the stove to remind you where your balance rests.
Crack eggs into a pot, dozens at a time, but don’t eat them, so you know your edges have always been raw.
Wake before dawn every morning and lumber through the forest with the dogs pointing out it is time to rise.
Take your shoes off before you enter the dojo.
Ask everyone, including your father, to kneel at the altar of your dresser drawers.
Worship in the house of your younger self.
Draw strength with yellow and blue crayons.
Sit cross legged on the floor.
The start and the end will soon begin to blend.
. . . . .
blender (Maya)
There were people sitting at small cafe tables.
There was a wide-eyed woman holding a camera behind the musicians.
There were burlesque dancers getting ready in a room behind an exit sign.
There were trees falling down somewhere and no one to listen.
There were question marks on the tips of tongues, like devils.
The cyclists on the path rode to avoid each other.
Lately, it feels like we are riding to avoid each other.
Satellites. Blue chandeliers. Broken strings. Things
we keep leaving on airplanes in the overhead bins.
What we use to tell ourselves apart,
to keep ourselves apart.
The thing is, we spoil. We go bad.
Maybe we are on our very last song.
Let’s not be the same people standing as we are
sitting down. Let’s be wide-eyed. Let’s wear sequins
when we dance. Let’s pay attention to the trees.
Let’s stop wagging our tongues. Let let ourselves collide,
legs accidental against each other, without apology or embarrassment,
palms out, touching unambiguously,
our imagined walls tumbling into a blender.
You’ve got time for a new life.
You’ve got time for a new life.
September 30, 2019; Funk ‘N Waffles. Syracuse, NY.
The Howling Infinite (Amy)
I loved you when you were fine. Or nine.
And you were beautiful.
Once I was eleven. Or seven.
And I was beautiful.
Before Wikipedia. Or before the encyclopedia.
The world was beautiful.
The yellow jackets are in their death throes, flinging themselves against September.
The geese are flying south, or west, depending on your perspective.
Herman Melville was a cabin boy on a merchant ship.
I imagine he gazed at the moon when it was out during the day,
when it was out during the night perched among the cold and distant stars.
Eventually he jumped ship and wandered among the natives on Tahiti listening to them speak in tongues.
The point is, there are stories inside our stories.
There are pages of books piled inside of Glad bags.
We are sinking into debt.
We are insnared in brick and plaster.
We are prose, clear and swift. We are whispers.
We are scuba divers diving with whales.
We are beautiful.
We are all beautiful.
. . . . .
the howling infinite (Maya)
Where were you when Chapter 23 rolled around?
Someone was along a tow path by the Erie Canal
while someone else was driving 67 miles an hour west back to Milwaukee.
Someone was ordering a waffle laced with spinach and green onion in downtown Syracuse
while the leaves were doing their thing, turning red, and a blue heron
skirted to the opposite bank to devour a single fish.
Someone was wondering who was going to love them,
now that the money was gone.
Someone was drinking a double shot of bourbon poured by a bearded man in a purple sweatshirt.
Someone’s children were howling, and they were playing a game
with pillows and towels, saying “Bury me,” then springing out of the pile,
scaring them delightfully and one day one of those children,
missing his father, would pull a washcloth over his eyes,
disappearing the world a little, and remembering.
Someone was looking for a parking space, feeling less than infinite,
while someone else was sleeping by a woodstove in the hills,
dreaming infinitely of a tow path by the Erie Canal,
and a savory waffle, and that time in Syracuse when two men were singing
occasionally sad songs, and loving even those sad songs, perhaps especially
those sad songs, Milwaukee and that time they were 23 in their rearview mirror,
and all the while the leaves, the heron, and the fish were doing their thing.
They were doing their beautiful thing.
October 3, 2019.; The HiLo. North Adams, Massachusetts.
Box (Amy)
You are every lovely thing in a box,
cardboard soaked by the rain
or a Texas accent, dripping wet.
You already know me.
I am Botham Jean
I am Amber Guyger.
I am a fool’s errand.
This is all a long goodbye.
These are all the rivers we have crossed.
You already know me.
I am from pig farmers.
I am from sea nettles.
I am from a shotgun that killed a man in a country store.
This is an end to emptiness.
This is a ragged house without stiff walls.
You already know me.
I am a flag at half staff.
I am the mother of an architect, a barista, a potter, a poet.
We are all the x’s crossed.
You already know me,
our ghosts are small boats tossed.
. . . . .
box (Maya)
Whatever it is - Texas, blood sugar, the moments that go way too fast,
I want out of it. Give me lilacs on a breeze carried by somebody’s mother.
Give me a town square, dark tablecloths in a dark bar, give me
a curtain of fog descending down the back roads.
Give me the thought of coffee at the top. Give me an Airstream
hovered above an old factory, a detour of curves and switchbacks and signs that say
”Take it down for good.”
Leave the basement that got your hands so tired. Let November
flutter your throat. Close the box of whatever it was you were looking for.
It isn’t there. It never was.
Instead, take a violin to the dressing room. Consider all songs. Release
a sea turtle on a field in Ohio in January.
Watch the Mohawk River from the seat of a bicycle, giddy
from electrolytes, a stranger to your own life.
Tremble with the thought of what you don’t yet know,
like the greenness of trees, of everything that is still holy, that still
has the smell of kindness,
that stings you with love, that still makes you say,
“Help me finish this poem.”
October 4, 2019; The Stone Church, Brattleboro, Vermont.
Slug, Silence, and Waterfalls (Amy)
We are all magicians,
under a burnt orange sky we eat watermelon freshly cut from a garden.
Between bites I might have found an end to the emptiness
that has been nipping at my heels since Niagara.
Something about the weight of water has been weighing on me and it’s true,
I’ve had too much time to think about it while we pedaled over mountains
not saying a word to each other.
This morning we rode sluggishly. The only sounds were little stones under our wheels.
And wind, of course, always wind.
Our legs kept showing up for duty until a general store
where they sell samosas and mango lassies
appeared on our left.
We decide to wave a white flag.
We decide to whistle.
We decide to call your mother.
We decide to eat chocolate cream pie.
We decide to join a ukulele workshop.
We decide to make a sound like a loon.
And this is where the emptiness leaves me.
Where I am no longer invisible. Where I cut myself in half, pull a rabbit out of my hat.
This is where Dietrich surprises us all and plays a trumpet while my cape unfurls.
This is where I let you go.
Oh, yes. This is where you let me go.
. . . . .
silence, waterfall, slug (Maya)
You learn certain things in the basement:
You learn to stop time, to hold your hand on the dial between cycles
to stop the laundry, your fingers lie slugs on a slice
of fresh-picked watermelon.
You learn to have no purpose, and also to suffer,
and to be in the middle of a hunger you can’t take the edge off of.
You learn how the walls feel like a stone church,
blocks from where the action is, a place where the muse
is always on time.
You learn how to hunt and trap the workings of your mind,
to move your lips around a mouthful of feathers,
to turn a coffee maker into a typewriter into a banjo,
to love yourself so much.
You learn that what is at the end of a waterfall
is what makes a waterfall. You learn
what you don’t need. You learn about roads that end in the woods.
You learn how it might feel to pick up rice at a wedding.
You learn that at any moment, a man might arrive with a trumpet,
Rounding out the song, making a point.
You learn that it is good to be a little strange,
to do things in the key of F,
to take a chance, to slip through a hole in the landscape
and reappear, even if no one is there,
even when non one can safe you,
and especially then.
October 5, 2019; The Parlor Room, Northampton, Massachusetts.
Ostrich (Amy)
Glass and mohair.
These are the ingredients in the clothes you wear, explains the seamstress.
She would know, she has been sewing your wings since the beginning of time.
Flightless, you are still able to spill yourself across the landscape in front of us like an owl on the Mohawk River.
Like a blue heron on the Erie Canal. Like a black loon. Like a chocolate ice cream cone after a long hot ride.
Your bird shape is licking the dusty sky.
The circle of your mouth is an opening.
An open door. A doorway. A way through.
Even your shadow is a striking brass instrument .
The bell of us all is ringing in your throat, your long neck like a clapper.
We are here in the audience applauding furiously again, while the blue fur curtain behind us is closing,
even though none of us wants to say goodnight.
. . . . .
ostrich (Maya)
Fortunately, there are some things you can’t look up,
especiall from the seat of a low-riding bicycle, steeling yourself
for the long climb up to some coffee shop you hear might be open,
but who knows.
There is nothing to do but keep your head down
as the leaves descend around you, November whispering,
“I’m coming, baby. How does it make you feel?”
There is no higher ground, just this, your wobbling body,
legs spindly as an ostrich plucking through a coast line.
Don’t think of the possibility of fresh-cut watermelon at the finish.
Don’t think of what you need more of, or less, like the weight
of that memory from a hotel room in Oregon, or who
picks up the rice at a wedding, or the blue suburban skies
that hold you back from too much wildness.
Here is the song you are singing now,
a song of tiredness and slow yards, of star-eyed moles
lying dead, of canals flourished with algae, of ninja trumpets
in the distance, of the parlor room of your heart which,
even when it’s raining, keeps playing “March of the Elephants.”
Don’t look up from this muddy, muddled way. It is an elusive way.
It is your way. It is
the only way.