Every Crow In The Blue Sky And Other Poems
Burgess Needle
Published by Diminuendo Press Imprint of Cyberwizard Productions 1205 N. Saginaw Boulevard #D PMB 224 Saginaw, Texas 76179 Every Crow in the Blue Sky copyright © 2009 Cyberwizard Productions Individual poems copyright © 2009 Burgess Needle ISBN: 978-1-936021-14-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009936669 First Edition All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher and the individual authors, excepting brief quotes used in connection with reviews. Cover: “Crows” Original art by David Chorlton
For Barbara
CONNECTIONS On Reflection: Do You Like Me Now? Billboard Of My Eye Charmed Helix Scott Joplin Red Stain Under A Full Moon Grandfather Antonio Where The Boy Never Falls Where The Boy Falls Magic Table In The Mill Alejandro Trust No Promise Given On Earth The Man Who Found The Ring Pixel Lives An Altitude Strange to Her Green River Armistice George Dreams Us Into Being Sandwich Game Sermon Shutter Click Life’s Customary Inquisitions Ms. Death Takes the Very Best Part of Me
2 3 4 7 8 9 10 12 14 15 18 19 21 22 24 25 25 29 33 34 35
TRIPS Cat Food, Fresh Fruit, Yeast and Psilocybin 40 Ribs 41 Rahoo Is Eating The Moon 42 Azure Echo 43 First Day In A Town Called Sit And Cry 45 Only Good News 46 Damn Net 47 Gila Monster’s Retribution 48 Chop’s Tattoos 51 Singularities 52 Some Pompei Déjà Vu 58 Cobras Of Kali 59 On The Great Wheel 62 Pistachio Ice Cream 64 Dancing the Beguine in a Town Called Sit And Cry 65 Empty Box 67 Seeking Pbreeda In Prakhonchai 69 Community Of Men 71 My Next Incarnation 73 Questions We Ask Ourselves 76 Kumari Of Khatmandu 77 Who Collects The Eggs? 81 Buddhist Monk In My Bus 84 Visiting Wasan 85
CLOSE TO HOME My Lover Left In A Fit Of Logic Day’s Absorbed Fire Somehow Not Safe At All Ebony Saguaros Tucson Night Wall’s Revenge Last Kill Mirage In Texas Rads Two Modern Trials Night Out With Caravaggio Thinking of You And Sparrows In The Ocotillo Imprint Of My Heart Blockage You In The Kitchen Glory Day It’s Not Domestic Every Crow In The Blue Sky Welcome
88 90 91 93 94 96 97 100 102 104 106 108 110 112 115 116 117 118 120
Trailing in the Wake of Story: The Poetry of Burgess Needle
by Adam Piette Professor of Modern Literature University of Sheffield, UK
Narrative verse has found a new voice, a storyteller of verve and brio, recasting the lapidary virtues of the short story into musical lines, new American rhythms and inflections. The tales Burgess Needle tells come from all sides, from his childhood struggle with a casually brutal father, from the Arizona people and landscapes, from the travel experiences of his countercultural youth as a wideeyed TEFL teacher in Thailand. Some of the tales come from myth and history, from anecdotes gleaned in the contact zone along the Mexican border. And some reflect on his own daily life, poems found in the mirror, in the hospital bed, in his partner’s arms. All of the stories share a vigorous and natural style of delivery, a line rich in real things, details, voices, lived experiences, all animated by a spirit of enquiry, a feeling of sympathy, a spirit of openness, candor, love of life. The quality of the tone is difficult to capture – it combines a breeziness, freshness of diction, and sense of story as natural as Chekhov’s; but combined with sharp craft, an ear for a good line, a deftness of rhythm and word-music. The stories inhabit the lines as their own true
spaces, as just as the relation of adobe wall to arroyo. The stories traditionally associated with the Southwest, as Audrey Goodman has shown, look to the desert for the solace of wilderness, an innocent mindscape, the blessings of the purity of empty space. These Anglo literary clichés about the Sonora desert, the canyons, the rocky world of the malpais preserve in aspic a screen memory of a peaceable world without guilt, flattering the conscience of the Anglo communities with the fictions of Zane Grey, Mary Austin’s translations, Charles Lumnis’ ethnography. The arts of peace were found in the Southwest zone, though, through Willa Cather’s dream of prePueblo cliff dweller culture in The Professor’s House, Leslie Silko’s recreation of Navajo oral tales in Storyteller, ‘a peaceful art in full awareness of war and its effects’, as Janis Stout has argued. Burgess Needle’s Tucson stories are peaceable in this spirit – they take stock of the aridity of Anglo assumptions and water them with the quick speech and lore of the more ancient dwellers. At the same time, they are not guilt-stricken, for they have traveled the world and learnt stories which have established a quiet and gentle spirit of cooperation and love in this Anglo voice. The collection is divided into three sections: Connections draws strength and color from the perception of relation in odd improvisations and meditations on very specific and seemingly unrelated topics. A poem about billboards which spy on their onlookers using concealed digital cameras turns into a spin on 21st century love as well as a weird challenge to the reader of this very watchful poem: ‘You / Do you remember me / Are you still watching’. Memories of a tough job working in a dye mill in ‘In the Mill’ and ‘Alejandro’ exfoliate into tender reflections on friendly care across divides. The surreal ‘Trust No Promise Given on Earth’ imagines a dialogue between scientist and priest which explores the violence at the root of history. ‘George Dreams Us into Being’ is an extraordinary war poem in the shape of a dream
dreamt by Paul Revere of American history as warfare – from Revolution through to the bloodbath hypocrisy of the current wars of conquest which betray that Revolution. ‘Sandwich Game Sermon’ reimagines a comic version of Whitmanian democracy in the form of simple acts of fair exchange – whilst finding political roots in his American childhood on top of a Dylanesque comradely wit (‘My parent raised / me to be with the people, so here I am with you’). These random pieces seem to have no common theme – except that they all in some way or another find connections between people which are authentic, truedemocratic bonds of attention, friendliness, and love which are yet in full awareness of war and the creepy exactions of modern culture, spy billboards and all. The second section, Trips, journeys back in time to the time spent as a trippy teacher in Thailand in 1968 and 1969 – these are Vietnam years, but the war is not mentioned. Given the passionate condemnation of Vietnam in the Revere fantasy, this is surely strategic – Needle’s encounter with South-East Asia includes trips into Cambodia and the Mekong, so summon that terrible ten-year war. Yet all the stories are peacable, sweet and entrancing, witty and engaging stories of transformations, incarnations and oddball experience. The Sixties’ search for various forms of tourist nirvana is acknowledged but offered up as a true retort to the devastation of S-E Asia over the border in Vietnam. His love affairs, the travel wisdom he acquires, the gifts of knowledge received from the Thais, the exploration of visionary otherness through spiritual discovery are familiar to the genre of 1960s reminiscence – but here given zest, charm, fertile imagination along the lines, and out of travelogue issues true poetry: My next incarnation shall find me cool as Kali famished eager to be touched by stars
eager to rub against the moon until polished Hard as any glass The warm self-deprecating comedy of these lines fills with a fluid energy close to exaltation you can register in the lovely modulation from ‘Kali’ through ‘stars’, ‘hard’ to ‘glass’. The freedoms discovered by contact with the Thai communities are brought back to the United States in Close to Home, the third section. Here Needle registers the strangeness of America, the alien spaces of a Safeway, the blistering heat of a Tucson evening, the city-threatened experiencing of the saguaros and Palo Verde trees – perceptions heightened by the see-it-new clairvoyance with which his nomadic youth gifted him. The effort to see the real stars hidden behind Tucson’s light pollution in ‘Tucson Night’ (by way of a makeshift telescope crafted by his friend Bob) is a figure for the countercultural credence that still pertains in Needle’s person and art. It is not a romantic dream of pre-modernity, but an ecological sustaining of the vision that helps make his poems, and which helped make the Southwest part of the real (and not postmodern) world of sights and lights and constellations. The enemy is the madness of the city as ruled by the zombie presence of his ‘old tyrant’ father, ruler of money and deceit. In ‘Last Kill’, Needle relates a Jack & the Beanstalk exploit, stealing the ogre’s money – though ruined by the boy’s Oedipally driven betrayal of his mother in the struggle. In these intimate memories of childhood, Needle establishes lines of connection between his nuclear family and the world his poems space out. Other poems detail hospital visits (‘Rads’, ‘Blockage’), but in the context of poems of fantasy and wild geopolitical wit – one poem imagines a night out with Caravaggio, another night journey round the world and into family history through spectral machinery. The effect is to estrange the domestic, and to domesticate the fantastical, with a comic light touch that recalls high ballad. All these poems are addressed to ‘natives and travelers alike’, a characteristic blend
of the local and global which has not been post modernized into commodity and capital, but is rather the product of attentiveness to difference, the preserving of the ethical need for loving vision, being with the people, affectionate ‘commonality’ and ‘light gravity’ of word (‘Welcome’). Needle’s poems are technically of great interest: they are more often than not 40+-line blocks, sectioned into units by lineation indents in the William Carlos Williams tradition, with breath breaks in some lines giving syncopation and interlinear emphasis. The Williams-ite form is infused with Creeley-influenced storytelling. The lines read through with grace due to the powerful onward pull of the narrative, yet the lineation and the freshness of effects within each line make one pause and savor. For instance, with this line – ‘The Greenland ice sheet slips off earth’s bed’ – the Donne-like geographical wit crosses globe with bedroom, eroticizing ecological anxiety at the same time as finding domestic affect at home with the world. The line is spiced up with close sound textures (‘Green’‘sheet’, ‘ice’-slips’-‘earths’) which help organize the beatregulated line into real voice. Burgess Needle’s poems are regional, American and world texts all at once. They bid welcome to all true travelers, all natives of this earth’s bed under so much threat. And they do so through story. A little motif runs through this collection. ‘Grandfather Antonio’ tells the story of ‘one weird dude’ who used to crash funerals for the free booze: he is an expert at ‘trailing funerals’ until one of the dead spooks him out of the habit. In ‘Trust No Promise Given On earth’, the bishop’s shift is seen ‘trailing fresh / bodies leaving a crimson wake’. In a poem about Pompeii, Needle imagines one of the Etruscan women having a time-travel dream forward to present-day America: ‘Trailing bed clothes she pulled / her hair and only then saw / bright magma easing her way’. In all three cases, the poems imagine death and destruction in
the wake of human presence on earth. Yet at the same time the poem-stories are themselves wakes left behind by the people heading for destruction or conscious of the trails of bodies left behind by history. Burgess Needle’s poems enact many things, but they do this best of all: attend to the trails left behind of human story, re-experiencing their lived presence, and alerting us to their fresh reality under menace of the destruction easing our way.
Every Crow In The Blue Sky And Other Poems
CONNECTIONS
On Reflection: Do You Like Me Now? What caused my face to break my social mask in two? Did it begin with that sudden whimper I developed in fast-food lines With those bluetooth zombies? My students noticed a hairline crack that defined the edge of composure’s demise. Applications of Revlon’s Blush #3 a weekend of gestalt resulted in nothing but Cognitive dissonance and I wept until A petal tide swept down from a high mountain meadow, urging me to take a plunge, roll Madly in ecstasy over tourists. Even after penance and promise, I craved clover when walking on Italian tile, felt a desperation when taking the elevator, Fantasized the texture of raw granite while driving. Looking into the rear view mirror I ask my new reflection do you like me now? I tell everyone this is me, this is real And they all agree, nodding, Backing away, covering their childrens’ eyes saying, yes, it’s been wonderful. We’ll call you.
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Billboard Of My Eye [New billboards are equipped with digital cameras that collect information about citizens who stop and stare]
You Do you remember me Are you still watching recording When you first saw me my hair was black I returned as a blonde then I wore a babushka Did you know it was always me Once I winked at the time I was taller in high heels You never change same black velvet dress same vodka bottle same seductive smile Weekends I’m a street person family traded for freedom got some sterno I ask Mondays my scarred neck hidden by a Hermés scarf tailored faux suede jacket same color as your dress All of us love you You have captured our quirks Without judgment without dismay All of our tics All of me simplifying My many facets from analog to binary Do you remember me I’ve come seeking your blessing I need to break free
3
Charmed Helix Bamboo pole on shoulder my brother headed out local kids gawked danced from driveways behind this sorcerer to the Charles where he knew How to hurl a line graceful arc to shimmering sunfish skins matching mica-flaked bottom He spotted the monarch’s chrysalis grasped how a milkweed diet kept predators away What did anyone then know of DNA pieces held by phosphate links Crick had not yet seen coiled snakes in a dream conceive the charmed helix My brother learned dragonflies were different from damsels how they both fanned summer air their orbits physics defying His vestigial-winged fruit flies swept honors at science fairs Everything in the natural world pinned labeled filed By the slick banks of the mottled water we bloodied our hands tore hooks free Piercing the clouds to Omega blue
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two hawks spiraled
Sun bleached our hair platinum wild curls silken halos forced us to tactical retreats of shade We clutched jam sandwiches with worm-stained fingers afternoons sectioned and graphed by thrown lines littered dead pike water soaked soles Randomly assembled genes brothers aged and moved apart continents shifted plates One dried out in a Sonoran desert walked along dry river beds trailed by caws of hungry ravens Another remained in place woodpecker’s staccato rhythm whirring wings defying gravity his heart raced Everything discarded except bird songs Stopped eating meat Enveloped himself in Mozart on the third floor home facing walked over the Atlantic riparian lands seeking another link to his charmed helix life In his wife’s embrace the other one dreams Time is palpable in a cave
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He sees his brother on the wall
Their hand prints glow by a torch His left the other’s right Thumbs touching finally The mouth of the cave opens to a river Standing under a brilliant sun they know Their past present and future Children emerge from the shadows Now following both to the water Where the fish still shimmer Dragonflies kiss them each Over and over and over‌.
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Scott Joplin They said you were depressed laconically, you grinned under a flickering gas flare. Who smells the stale beer now you sipped in smoky clubs as operas unfolded behind your eyes? You saw the hanging notes waiting to be plucked from the sides of trolleys and bound them in melodies that kept Death clear and dogged madness off-step a bit. Playing a maple-leaf rag you wove a quarter-note net to catch your name when the rest of you tumbled Through in pieces too small to hold.
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Red Stain Under A Full Moon See Marisella’s moist eyes on the verge of grief. She checks out books of Southwest Tucson myths. “My aunt saw her throw the baby into the Santa Cruz!” I nod, and wait. “A red stain shows under a full moon near Barrio Anita.” Mostly bulldozed. “Barrio Anita will not die!” Her declaration was unassailable. The freeway and the industrial parks have not killed the barrios. “La Llorona appeared near my Tata’s, floating over the ground and crying.” And in El Paso and in East L.A. Marisella rarely reads about the past; she does not scan words on a monitor. History to her is sticky with new wounds. History is what remains after plain facts have dried and blown away.
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Grandfather Antonio Alfredo said, “Let me tell you my grandfather, Antonio, is one weird dude.” Twisting and turning the tale came out how the old man and his friends never forgot their birth city, Hermosillo. Truth is, he got to where he is by walking. Man, he covered it all. Right through Sonora, trailing funerals! Menudo! Free booze! He’d hit a town, find out if anyone’d died, and go over for the wake. All the women in luto outside while the men passed mescal and watched a fire; Then, back inside to sit and drink some more. Alfredo’s mother said, “Tata didn’t walk here, he waked here!” That’s when Antonio himself limped into the room. When I asked him about that, he told me of a wake in Bahia Kino when the new corpse twitched and stared, he thought, at him Making him drop his glass and leap out a window badly. “My leg never healed,” he grimaced, “so I still limp to this day, hardly ever drink Mescal and I never, ever, go to wakes.”
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Where The Boy Never Falls Beyond sight of the sluggish Mekhong Cassie juggled four mangoes and presented evening’s plan Under an Asian Moon we draped petals of jasmine upon Buddha’s bronze image Pbee mai the children called out in Laotian Happy New Year monks tied the bai sri strings Around our pale wrists and a shy vendor described Cassie as ma petite jeune fille she remembered Whispered it back to me in bed and then dreamed of elfin clowns and a boy falling who could have been brushed by Bruegel missing An outstretched hand to crash unannounced in the main ring’s center Under a startled morning sun she said I remember him when I do this then up she danced Poised on a taut rope between stiff palm trees see she cried see my old life was this Arms as wings she barely swayed quivering only when some tree released a fruit to dent the wet earth What’s that what’s that someone missed the boy did you hear the sound Within her muscled embrace heart against heart
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I did my best to calm her free Of the trapeze and loosen her memories of jugglers and flying miracles of grace Hesitantly I traced scented water across her brow concerned as much for this love this place As for merit and a promise of life in some lush domain where the boy never falls
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Where The Boy Falls New Year’s Day in Laos and monks knotted a bracelet around her wrist for luck That light pressure made her recall the touch of another’s hand the boy falling away from her who could have been colored by Bruegel Unannounced, in the main ring’s center his body outlined in sand her outstretched fingers cooled Quickly as a sad lover’s resolution Seeing morning’s startled sun she declared I remember it all when I do this and up she floated to easily balance On a rope held taut between coconut palms See she cried to no one at all My old life was exactly this Arms as wings she barely swayed quivering when a tree released fruit to dent wet earth What’s that oh god, I missed the boy did you hear the rustling of people turning away That evening she traced scented water around her eyes and vowed not to dream again of jugglers and the trapeze
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Clutching tightly to this place this time hoping the boy who had fallen so many times would not fall again
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Magic Table Well aware of the physics involved, long missing their child’s sweet breath, they planned for inexorable change. Drawing their audience down they pointed up at buttons needing one-third of an inch leeway for expansion in humid climates. Instead of an embrace the father constructed a solid apron secured with mortise-and-tenon joints And only then rested a lustrous slab of three juniper pieces melded as one to test four asymmetrically-tapered legs Although their hearts knew their daughter’s world might skid along tangled avenues, Filled with risks beyond their muscles to protect against, yet this gift at least Dealt with heat and cold, dryness and humidity wood’s ebb and flow. The mother applied her genius to design, her skills to buffer that graceful creation In lieu of shielding their child herself from what? events that may or may never occur. Their hopes were slipped beneath A final sealing coat of oil their wishes reflected up from the glow. They left after the presentation knowing they’d done what they could. Their daughter sees their faces every time She places a dish on the magic table.
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In The Mill May tulips were still visible beneath a festival of stars when I found my way to the graveyard shift at the mill. That spring of my junior year I was broke. They told Alejandro to keep me a few paces from death or dismemberment. We worked in the dye room and stood near stainless steel vats where bolts of raw velour were churned with powdered German dyes, tweaked with pinches of various hues, urged to surrender their pale neutrality to finally match a colored swatch pasted on the holy formula card by a bald chemist Who did not know my pedigree and cared less. I kept my breathing shallow afraid I’d suck in some cancerous lint. Crushed cilantro’s scent from a bag lunch slipped a spicy noose around my attention and lured my eyes from the swatch which, to my innocence, was merely brown. Burnt Umber being the true target. Milagro! A miracle! everyone said at my success after: fourteen tint additions, two ham sandwiches, three lemon-filled donuts, four coffees and a Snickers bar. Before I could celebrate, ‘Jandro pointed to red words on the damp formula card: DO THIS NOW! Add two thousand pounds of salt. Dripping sweat stained with dye scarred by chemical burns he grinned when I asked: Where’s the salt?
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Out back. With a sly smile The salt is near the fork lift. ¿me entiendes? Not much to entiendes. There they were. 100 pound bags stacked in a pyramid. Others laughed as I struggled to lift and drop twenty bags on a dolly. Even on wheels that one ton load was immovable. Si se puede, pendejo! A voice assured me. Watching me drag 15 bags off the dolly they laughed slapped their palms I was better than television. The chemist, in his glass cubicle, glanced my way as I stacked the bags in front of my vat and proved my manhood by lifting twenty bags of salt to the stainless steel edge, slit the sides, watched it pour out like no other salt shaker on the planet. Had someone dropped just such a bag over Lot’s wife as she turned to look back pummeled her until nothing but a granular mystery remained inside? Were those her white grains that attached burnt umber for infinity to my velour? Time for a sit down smoke in the head, get aroused at a hot calendar and spank my monkey even though others could see through the cracks. Back to work, a few grams of protein lighter, I read the sign on the wall: ALWAYS ADD ACID TO WATER Or, sulphuric acid becomes the final act. That guy Domingo added water to acid, got splashed, ended up with white freckles forever. Fortunado got hit with a wave of caustic soda flakes. We sprayed water on him using such high pressure his privates popped out
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while he cursed and prayed that not one flake pierced the coffee skin His mother had loved and bathed. Inside you, that caustic blob becomes a kryptonite ping-pong that burns cells, waits to play peek-a-boo On an arm a leg Or something sacred Twelve hours, on the number, my cloth was totally fixed and all Vicente had to do was remove it tag it store it lucky dog! Half a day later there was Alejandro, again. Hola, hombre! That’s my color? CafÊ? Is that a color? What? Do I put in cream and sugar with the acid and salt? You gotta laugh, hombre. By the end of the first week We were sharing burritos with salsa fresca calmly atop a mountain of salt, considering how to best capture Alice Blue a sullied ivory moon our only witness.
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Alejandro they told me to keep an eye on the white guy the new one they hired for the dye room keep him from being killed or dismembered near the big steel vats where velour tossed and turned changing color with each pinch of german dye until the cloth matched whatever the chemist gave us the new guy never took a deep breath as if every piece of night air was poison but he sucked in my burritos with jalapeños like every bite of all his bologna sandwiches was dirt he was so happy when we got it right I had to explain that milagro meant miracle but he didn’t get the joke then we had to add 2000 pounds of salt and sulphuric acid to make our batch stay true his arms so puny i had to help with each hundred pound bag and he almost burned hmself with acid i couldn’t believe this guy was in college he was better than the cable channels i swear he cried when Domingo got hit with a wave of caustic ash but i was the one who held the hose until he was clean none of us thought the new guy would return next day twelve hours later there he was shit-eating grin in place like he won a war so I gave him a few chips during the break jesus didn’t the guy have any friends now he was with me all the time we even ate together on top of the salt out back and he talked about the stars I laughed and gave him some salsa fresca for that stupid bologna I thought he was going to kiss me hey I told him we got a job to do wait he said there’s an eclipse of the moon i’ll get used to him if he’s careful and doesn’t get killed during my next shift
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Trust No Promise Given On Earth fade in look to my time machine at the bishop’s shift trailing fresh bodies leaving a crimson wake ah the dim age of hungry churls popping crumbs of faith flickering tallow shows the spit hit Copernicus for saying god’s golden eye holds us in restraint with me please the day’s hymns rise from matins by faint brothers the bishop eats cake on my right scanning the latest edicts from rome he farts then as apologia didat deus god enriches his pale eyes rest on me the ah motto of arizona he intones i tell him the surgeon’s hand corrects random slips isotope clocks never tick time is now coinage soul is in rhythm nervous folk see grace in a good EKG our masses he nods do not yet see the light obviously we should dynamite tonight oh christ my fellow anarchist are both of us now saved stand up for the liberal cognoscente stand up united for sacco and vanzetti ripping the teletype out in strips he dresses himself in print
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pausing to read his left arm’s news astronomers plot the shift into red bow to a black hole’s infinite depth as the Sahara extends its death knell and bedouins jump from their camels on to land mines lord this is a grim age so ripe for zealots give me your hand we look at our wafer-host neither of us prepared to bite we yell instead a farewell toast dynamite tonight dear father look to my time machine beaming a clear image with sound as i kiss the hem of his newsworthy robe he raises me up to his lips and shouts there is no meringue in heaven or space trust no promise given on earth fade out
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The Man Who Found The Ring Holes were dug in the fifties. Fearful retreats. Echoes of forgotten caves broken bones and sinew. Every dream depended on the half-life of elements. After we soiled the moon, but before Mars, the man caught his foot in a metal ring hanging from our planet. Now, what on earth… he never finished but pulled on the ring and found one of those holes dug during a great scare. This one was square, deep and plumb cut into a knoll on his land he’d bought with a deed that had no mention of secret spaces; But, the man found it cool and dry and since the fifties were over he lined the walls with a construct of fine wood to form secure pockets he filled with Bordeaux, Pinot Blanc, Médoc and Chablis.
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Pixel Lives Feeling a crisp spider-web of protein drying on her breasts, the woman awoke and recalled being perched on the rim of Greater Sonora. Earlier, they’d toasted his new digital eye, resting on a tripod, sucking in their pixel lives a nanosecond longer than natural. He was a chemist who knew how slow the party became at absolute zero. She was a static-charged bolt of light that brushed his hip with heat: Charm Beauty even Truth Our loss, physics gain, he laughed. Where will it end, she teased with open arms. At Omega! he cried. All laws stop at null degrees whatever. That was when he fell on her at the speed of light, bloodied her nose, bruised her features and dragged her to bed Where her perfume did its work though she was still as death. He lunged blindly shooting the air over her stomach coming and passing out of mind. The shuttered eye caught it all; the dry-bloody sheets, the man quietly asleep, the woman by his side, moaning as a cicada flew straight at the camera and buzzed it until the man sat up. Feeling a crisp Spider-web of protein crackle on her breasts the woman awoke. A man with something red on his beard was staring at her. They turned and saw themselves on his new laptop instant replay photon parodies of flesh and tears,
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finally speechless finally ready for whatever global warming could throw at them. Finally ready for anything at all except another hot and mindless morning in Phoenix.
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An Altitude Strange to Her at the road’s highest curve fir trees carpeted the horizon she nibbled Tillamook Cheese shook crumbs off her legs then slipped outside to inhale a rush of chilled air filling lungs that had been transplanted into her only a year earlier barely pubescent lungs she was sure had never breathed such clean high mountain air everything was so startlingly real she looked about in surprise small birds hovered chirped and flew into her as if they’d never seen such a phenomenon that’s how she felt new and fresh at an altitude strange to her as she was to the birds until this moment she’d forgotten the rush of the new and was aware the birds had never flown into boredom or casual acceptance or for that matter fear and trembling because when the car doors opened the birds went right inside scaring her with their bravery only exited when she threw crumbs outside the car and again imposed herself within a scene that included eyes she could not see taking her measure
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Green River Armistice Spooked by the spring-mud torrent of the Green River, seeking to hook a gilled glitter or two, we stood A lover joyously in tune with every sense A neurotic self detached aloof. Beneath the nervous bobber movement instant pressure on the line yellow flash leaping once splashed back hard lifting our neck hairs. Slack line revealed a round-lipped carp. Pan-friend with onions it delivered a thousand bones styrofoam flesh. On the banks of the river we heated and ate beef stew, then shoveled earth over every golden scale we could shake loose from skin and clothes. The Hunter’s moon etched cottonwood branches on our tent the lover full of night terrors the detached self chilled by the river’s breeze. Suddenly, both were heated by brain-fever. Armistice was declared for the inner war. We swore respect for each other’s view of thought of passion hopefully vouching a constancy neither fish nor shadows survived. Flies came to applaud our pact with encores of mica wings. Around our bones, blood ebbed and flowed, Matching the the river’s irregular pulse all through the long wait until morning.
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George Dreams Us Into Being field reports were in his jaw ached revere’s damn teeth hurt more than the enemy at long island he’d lost 400 men and that imbecile howe was laughing the evening they broke camp from brooklyn heights nightmares again pickett’s gray wave smashing against a blue bulwark fertilizing green fields with their blood he sipped wine just before trenton christmas eve they crossed the delaware so cold the hessians never knew who they were until too late captured and given civilized quarter they were amazed at the rebels’ restraint demanding a higher moral ground he took another drink and a later nap that brought ypres and the gassed kicking figures falling like sacks of flour the general’s face for days a patch of birch against the evergreens colored at brandywine creek defeat it had come unexpectedly blindly he pushed on near saratoga where burgoyne puked up a white flag victory was not enough to prevent blooming mushroom clouds that left silhouettes imprinted on walls red-eyed he planned a southern thrust from new jersey falling at midnight into the lushest foliage beyond anything american then to witness
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napalm fondle a flaming child to ash morning found him frenzied packing swinging into the saddle intent on leaving dropping the whole damn enterprise when they told him of an officer blundering at monmouth courthouse word had it that general lee felt his troops would never withstand british regulars sir they are able and by god they shall do it calling him an idiot before the men saving at least their retreat he’d given himself another reason to stay on finish it up the pride in him was unyielding thomas paine though not his class still was on the mark writing what we obtain too cheap we esteem too lightly it is dearness only that gives every thing its value he wondered if his nightmares were too dear a price for mere success victory at vincennes beyond his knowledge leaving february’s birthday cold dismal closing his eyes on stars he saw el salvador death squards salute him the raped starved and bleeding reach for his hand george clutched his gut lying face down, thinking oh no, not tonight dear martha let me dream of you alone then religious lunacy triumphant wasted those iconic towers blind rage turned us into them hammering grief to secrecy slowly drowning the others as if non-human and so successful they became as the liberty bell cracked again at the shame
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spying on our very selves setting loose christmas bags of cluster bombs though cornwallis stood stunned between continentals and the french fleet did not the stars and stripes mean something after all george ground his ivories until his mouth drooled red rivulets that so suited the white and blue of his quilt not for that he thundered we did not do it for that field reports continued to arrive but the general was indisposed seeing it all as it might be and not for the first time swore an oath against the great juggernaut he’d so ably helped launch
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Sandwich Game Sermon When I was a kid the pie-man came at six and my father waved him in from the snow Shouting, “Gimme two blues, a lemon, an apple and a Boston Cream.” Friends, is it any wonder I’m flaky? Frank, the cold-cuts guy, stormed in every afternoon, hauling bologna ends for our famous chopped ham salad. Then, he’d linger with sad tales from home. Oh yes, it was the sandwich game, folks, that’s what pa always called it. His game his rules. We were all raised with subs and Vienna rolls. All our products wrapped in heat-sealing cellophane all unknown to the Earl of Sandwich, God rest his soul, he never imagined My family up even before the distant roosters, laying out whole wheat for the sliced egg, lettuce and tomato special. Lettuce, what’s lettuce? “Watch that lettuce, it’s green gold!” pa shouted, and cut by half whatever I lovingly placed on the mounds of tangy egg salad. Remember those athletic kids who always had friends on the diamond? My pals came for the hanging salamis and mountains of cheese. Oh Lord, you got it, that old sandwich game when ma’s arthritic hip made her lean
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tightly against the work bench as she played the artisan, slicing bread in clean, diagonal lines. “Can we turn up the heat for a minute?” she once pleaded, “my hip is killing me. I feel as if I’m about to fall.” “If you fall I guess I’ll have to take you out behind the garage and shoot you,” pa laughed, winked at me and I blushed to be his audience and my mother’s own traitor. No boy scout troop told me about using the north star Or how to start a fire with flint and dried moss But I learned to chop celery down to jade nuggets peel three dozen eggs faster than filling a gas tank. Some mornings ma slept an extra half-hour because she’d been up late de-boning chickens or carefully scrubbing the meat-grinder clean: poking a stainless steel skewer through every gristle-clogged hole. Pa made an art of running red lights to get the last order in before noon, or we’d have to eat the rest of the sandwiches ourselves. Never mind if it snowed and the plow dropped another six feet on the driveway up and out. Pa’s eyes have the same veined network as AAA travel guides, except he’s not going far, only over a bridge or two (selling half dozen on rye to the guys on the Tobin Bridge toll booths). Until he went ahead and pasted QUESTION AUTHORITY
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on his front bumper. Then, the once-cheery toll collectors stopped smiling or ordering sandwiches for their lunch. I recall watching the freight trains pass, thinking the sound they made was tuna fish tuna fish tuna fish The sandwich game can do you in, God knows, it almost did to pa, bopped as he was on the bean by a rear-swinging door from a passing truck hard enough to net him 5,000 buckaroos and a solo trip to Madrid! His name be praised! Hugging ma on the rebound, slipping her liquor-filled chocolates that changed the anger-flush on her cheeks to shyness so that she looked away, over the sink, out to the lilacs it was late Spring. I guess it bothered me more than her and he did eventually get her a new dryer which she seemed to like well enough; and the varicose veins that drew her blood back to an ever larger heart was Braille of the skin that told the story of her years, standing. In October, the leaves flamed and Pa called me out to join him in the cold dawn, to bite into a crisp roll and sip coffee and watch Autumn fall at our feet. Afternoons, I was in his car that was filled with produce and felt as if I was driving in an enormous salad. “What’s your father do? What’s your mother do?”
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