Four Poems (August 20, 2010. Issue 20.)
Dolores
The little girl I used to babysit for grew up like Wendy
and got her drivers’ license before I did. She drives
around in a minivan the color of burnt sugar, Scandinavian skin in the summer,
a busted overbite from trying tuba and not quitting too quickly.
When she was eleven she told me her stomach was broken. I knew
what she meant but was too scared to believe a little girl could be brave.
We were sitting at the bottom of her sleigh
bed in the dark, trying to summon the angel Gabriel
with a Ouija board. We plucked the bells from her pet birds’
throats and tucked them under our fingernails.
The nuns at her school wear their habits
over their ears so they don’t accidentally get pregnant by an angel
whisper, she told me smiling, mouth
not yet injured by a boy’s instrument.
She pushed the Ouija piece with a gentle vengeance,
as if it were a plastic buttercup that had guessed an incorrect love
of butter in the past. Guided by the voiceboxes of dwarf house swans
at our fingertips, the angel Gabriel was unable to predict
the disordering of her body’s future
and spelled all the answers to her soul’s questions wrong. She asked
me not to blow out the dollhouse lamp so he could find his way
back home. She plugged in her horse shaped night-light
that caste a trail through the dingy clouds of her wall
and told me to Shut up, he’s foreign,
though I never said a thing
to save her.
Guest Star
The boy in the apartment on Poplar-street is into thin, white
t-shirts, women of the same architecture. He wears a crystal
on a black string around his neck, a prison for deficient rainbows.
In the ice storms, people across a ten block radius are all listening
to cassettes by candlelight, like a confined cult
dedicated to the noise that carries us to heaven.
The boy on Poplar closes the window
in an attempt to retain the heat from the electric
honey you coated the cobwebs with and spread on the slices of bread
stacked at the center of the hook rug.
When you stuff yourself so small
to his right side inside the sleeping bag shaped like whale hide
and he says this is the gal for me under cold breath,
you don’t point out the obvious in the space where you go to not be found.
You wait for your turn to whisper, for the ice to melt, for another snow to fall
with grace so that once again the ground will be covered by a pulp
detective story, early rising phantoms disturbing the white with patient leather
heels. Who stepped here before me,
you will wonder as if the silhouette that fit
the tidy prints might have been your twin
on the moon. You’ll wonder if she would catch your hand if you fell
ill with nostalgia for gravity’s pull. You’d wander
in her honest footing’s wake, following her shoes to the ends of some earth
if it meant their tender guidance up the mica embroidered paths of homes
when you know plainly, there is no home.
Lower Pennsylvanians
There’s a barbeque after every Flat Earth Society meeting.
The sponsoring professor provides the bulk of the atlases,
but members bring plastic
globes that melt easily, road maps through Saskatchewan that they lost
themselves on last July. They soak it all in black honey and light
a match after saying a few bruised words about Galileo. They pick
regulation sized spines from their teeth under the shade of an eclipse
and gentle fireside conversation. According to the math of flatness,
I am exactly where I'm supposed to be
and so are you—
24,901 miles to the left of me, just right.
The Apologizer/Good Poem
Yes, I am in love with popular music from England,
even at night from that shy state of the hunted, hidden
between the lines separating church and our prayerless parts.
I’ve mourned the passing of Damon Albarn’s MTV face
into middle age. I’ve spent some time crying,
the silver infection of his sideburns spread, a rotted strawberry jam
growing fur and complicated
teeth. Despite having eaten ghost meat in the chapel of never scared,
our mouths fill with trembles we can’t fix, his something haunted
that no longer fits the blond harp
or a bad word his professional mother was paid to ignore
when she placed a plate of wilted pancakes in front of him
at his assigned seat in front of you.
The arms of maple leaves coated his throat then, the chords
strummed by nymphets no one makes up. Believe
in the year of the hair
belonging to scrawny island kids, intravenously nourished
in the years when heroines and thieves
of rave knowledge performed miracles on Debussy’s dead body. Don’t be surprised
if you feel nothing on the bare back
of a horse navigating the coastal octopus traps just out of reach
of the Pacific’s curled fingers. You have the right to be unsettled
by the sun calming down, the colors of opium uncut
caught in the bright skin of the sky. You don’t have to be moved
nine degrees away from the equator,
the closest you’ve ever been to God. It’s okay
if something matters more. |