Every Crow In The Blue SkyAnd Other Poems

Burgess Needle

Published byDiminuendo PressImprint of Cyberwizard Productions1205 N. Saginaw Boulevard #DPMB 224Saginaw, 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: 2009936669First 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

ForBarbara

CONNECTIONS

On Reflection: Do You Like Me Now? 2Billboard Of My Eye 3Charmed Helix 4Scott Joplin 7Red Stain Under A Full Moon 8Grandfather Antonio 9Where The Boy Never Falls 10Where The Boy Falls 12Magic Table 14In The Mill 15Alejandro 18Trust No Promise Given On Earth 19The Man Who Found The Ring 21Pixel Lives 22An Altitude Strange to Her 24Green River Armistice 25George Dreams Us Into Being 25Sandwich Game Sermon 29Shutter Click 33Life’s Customary Inquisitions 34Ms. Death Takes the Very Best Part of Me 35

TRIPS

Cat Food, Fresh Fruit, Yeast and Psilocybin 40Ribs 41Rahoo Is Eating The Moon 42Azure Echo 43First Day In A Town Called Sit And Cry 45Only Good News 46Damn Net 47Gila Monster’s Retribution 48Chop’s Tattoos 51Singularities 52Some Pompei Déjà Vu 58Cobras Of Kali 59On The Great Wheel 62Pistachio Ice Cream 64Dancing the Beguine in a Town Called Sit And Cry 65Empty Box 67Seeking Pbreeda In Prakhonchai 69Community Of Men 71My Next Incarnation 73Questions We Ask Ourselves 76Kumari Of Khatmandu 77Who Collects The Eggs? 81Buddhist Monk In My Bus 84Visiting Wasan 85

CLOSE TO HOME

My Lover Left In A Fit Of Logic 88Day’s Absorbed Fire 90Somehow Not Safe At All 91Ebony Saguaros 93Tucson Night 94Wall’s Revenge 96Last Kill 97Mirage In Texas 100Rads 102Two Modern Trials 104Night Out With Caravaggio 106Thinking of You And Sparrows In The Ocotillo 108Imprint Of My Heart 110Blockage 112You In The Kitchen 115Glory Day 116It’s Not Domestic 117Every Crow In The Blue Sky 118Welcome 120

Trailing in the Wake of Story:The Poetry of Burgess Needle

by Adam PietteProfessor 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 wide-eyed 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 pre-Pueblo 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, true-democratic 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 Kalifamished eager to be touched by stars

eager to rub against the moon until polishedHard 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 beat-regulated 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 SkyAnd Other Poems

CONNECTIONS

2

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 linesWith 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 untilA petal tide swept down from a high mountain meadow, urging me to take a plunge, rollMadly 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 realAnd they all agree, nodding,Backing away, covering their childrens’ eyes saying, yes, it’s been wonderful.We’ll call you.

3

Billboard Of My Eye[New billboards are equipped with digital cameras that collect information about citizens who stop and stare] YouDo you remember meAre you still watching recordingWhen you first saw me my hair was black I returned as a blonde then I wore a babushkaDid you know it was always meOnce I winked at the time I was taller in high heelsYou never change same black velvet dress same vodka bottle same seductive smileWeekends I’m a street person family traded for freedom got some sterno I askMondays my scarred neck hidden by a Hermés scarf tailored faux suede jacket same color as your dressAll of us love youYou have captured our quirksWithout judgment without dismayAll of our ticsAll of me simplifyingMy many facets from analog to binaryDo you remember meI’ve come seeking your blessingI need to break free

4

Charmed Helix

Bamboo pole on shoulder my brotherheaded out local kids gawked

danced from driveways behindthis 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 awayWhat did anyone then know of DNA pieces held by phosphate linksCrick had not yet seen coiled snakes in a dream conceive the charmed helix My brother learned

dragonflies were different from damselshow 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 filedBy the slick banks of the mottled water we bloodied our hands

tore hooks free

Piercing the clouds to Omega blue

5

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 platesOne 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 gravityhis heart raced

Everything discarded except bird songs Stopped eating meatEnveloped himself in Mozart on the third floor home facing the Atlantic walked over 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

6

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 shimmerDragonflies kiss them eachOver and over and over….

7

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 tumbledThrough in pieces too small to hold.

8

Red Stain Under A Full Moon

See Marisella’s moist eyeson 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 moonnear Barrio Anita.”Mostly bulldozed. “Barrio Anita will not die!” Her declaration was unassailable. The freeway and the industrial parkshave 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 factshave dried and blown away.

9

Grandfather Antonio

Alfredo said, “Let me tell you my grandfather, Antonio, is one weird dude.”Twisting and turning the tale came outhow the old man and his friendsnever 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 overfor 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 meof a wake in Bahia Kino when the new corpse twitched and stared, he thought, at him Making him drop his glass and leapout a window badly. “My leg never healed,” he grimaced,“so I still limp to this day, hardly ever drink Mescal andI never, ever, go to wakes.”

10

Where The Boy Never Falls

Beyond sight of the sluggish Mekhong Cassie juggled four mangoes and presented evening’s planUnder an Asian Moon we draped petals of jasmine upon Buddha’s bronze imagePbee mai the children called out in Laotian Happy New Year monks tied the bai sri stringsAround our pale wrists and a shy vendor described Cassie as ma petite jeune fille she rememberedWhispered it back to me in bed and then dreamed of elfin clowns and a boy falling who could have been brushed by Bruegel missingAn outstretched hand to crash unannounced in the main ring’s centerUnder a startled morning sun she said I remember him when I do thisthen up she dancedPoised on a taut rope between stiff palm treessee she cried see my old life was thisArms as wings she barely swayed quivering only when some tree released a fruit to dent the wet earthWhat’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 freeOf the trapeze and loosen her memories of jugglers and flying miracles of graceHesitantly I traced scented water across her brow concerned as much for this love this placeAs for merit and a promise of life in some lush domain where the boy never falls

12

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 cooledQuickly 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 balanceOn a rope held taut between coconut palms

See she cried to no one at allMy 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

13

Clutching tightly to this place this time hoping the boy who had fallen so many times would not fall again

14

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 jointsAnd 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 leastDealt 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 creationIn 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 timeShe places a dish on the magic table.

15

In The Mill

May tulips were still visible beneath a festival of stars when I foundmy 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, urgedto surrender their pale neutrality to finally match a colored swatch pastedon the holy formula card by a bald chemistWho did not know my pedigree and cared less. I kept my breathing shallowafraid I’d suck in some cancerous lint. Crushed cilantro’s scent from abag lunch slipped a spicy noose around my attention and luredmy 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 pointedto 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?

16

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 droptwenty 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 frontof my vat and proved my manhood by liftingtwenty 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 attachedburnt 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 WATEROr, 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

17

while he cursed and prayed that notone 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 sacredTwelve 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? Café?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 weekWe 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.

18

Alejandro

they told me to keep an eye on the white guythe new one they hired for the dye roomkeep him from being killed or dismemberednear the big steel vats where velour tossed and turnedchanging color with each pinch of german dyeuntil the cloth matched whatever the chemist gave usthe new guy never took a deep breath as if every piece of night air was poison but he sucked inmy burritos with jalapeños like every biteof all his bologna sandwiches was dirthe was so happy when we got it right I hadto explain that milagro meant miracle but he didn’tget the joke then we had to add 2000 pounds of salt and sulphuric acid to make our batch stay truehis arms so puny i had to help with each hundredpound bag and he almost burned hmself with acidi couldn’t believe this guy was in college he wasbetter than the cable channels i swear he criedwhen Domingo got hit with a wave of caustic ashbut i was the one who held the hose until he was cleannone of us thought the new guy would returnnext day twelve hours later there he wasshit-eating grin in place like he won a warso I gave him a few chips during the breakjesus didn’t the guy have any friends now he waswith me all the time we even ate together on top of the salt out back and he talked about the starsI laughed and gave him some salsa frescafor that stupid bologna I thought he wasgoing to kiss me hey I told him we got a job to do wait he said there’s an eclipse of the mooni’ll get used to him if he’s careful and doesn’tget killed during my next shift

19

Trust No Promise Given On Earth

fade in look to my time machineat the bishop’s shift trailing freshbodies leaving a crimson wakeah the dim age of hungry churls

popping crumbs of faith flickeringtallow shows the spit hitCopernicus for saying god’sgolden eye holds us in restraint

with me please the day’s hymns risefrom matins by faint brothersthe bishop eats cake on my right scanningthe latest edicts from rome he fartsthen as apologia didat deus god enricheshis pale eyes rest on me the ahmotto of arizona he intones

i tell him the surgeon’s hand correctsrandom slips isotope clocks never ticktime is now coinage soul is in rhythmnervous folk see grace in a good EKG

our masses he nods do not yet see the lightobviously we should dynamite tonight

oh christ my fellow anarchistare both of us now savedstand up for the liberal cognoscentestand up united for sacco and vanzetti

ripping the teletype out in stripshe dresses himself in print

20

pausing to read his left arm’s newsastronomers plot the shift into redbow to a black hole’s infinite depthas the Sahara extends its death knelland bedouins jump from their camelson to land mines

lord this is a grim ageso ripe for zealots give me your handwe look at our wafer-host neither of us preparedto bite we yell instead a farewell toast

dynamite tonight

dear father look to my time machinebeaming a clear image with soundas i kiss the hem of his newsworthy robehe raises me up to his lips and shoutsthere is no meringue in heaven or spacetrust no promise given on earthfade out

21

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 foundone of those holes dugduring a great scare.This one was square, deep and plumb cut into a knoll on his land he’d bought with a deedthat had no mention of secret spaces;But, the man found it cool and dry and since the fifties were overhe lined the walls with a construct of fine wood to form secure pockets he filled with Bordeaux, Pinot Blanc, Médoc and Chablis.

22

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 TruthOur 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 crispSpider-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,

23

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.

24

An Altitude Strange to Her

at the road’s highest curvefir trees carpetedthe horizon she nibbled Tillamook Cheese shook crumbs off her legs then slippedoutside to inhale a rushof chilled air filling lungs that had been transplantedinto her only a year earlierbarely pubescent lungsshe was sure had never breathedsuch clean high mountain aireverything was so startlinglyreal she looked about in surprisesmall birds hovered chirped and flew into her as ifthey’d never seen such a phenomenonthat’s how she feltnew and fresh at an altitude strangeto her as she was to the birdsuntil this moment she’d forgotten the rushof the new and was aware the birds hadnever flown into boredomor casual acceptance or for that matterfear and trembling because whenthe car doors opened the birds went right inside scaring her with their braveryonly exited when she threw crumbsoutside the car and again imposed herselfwithin a scene that includedeyes she could not see takingher measure

25

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 senseA neurotic self detached aloof. Beneath the nervous bobber movementinstant pressure on the line yellow flash

leaping once splashed backhard 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 shoveledearth 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 terrorsthe 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 vouchinga 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.

26

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 lightlyit is dearness only that gives every thing its valuehe 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 tonightdear martha let me dream of you alonethen 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 thatfield 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 cameat six and my father waved him in from the snowShouting, “Gimme two blues, a lemon, an appleand a Boston Cream.”

Friends, is it any wonder I’m flaky?

Frank, the cold-cuts guy, stormed in every afternoon, haulingbologna 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 cellophaneall unknown to the Earl of Sandwich,God rest his soul, he never imaginedMy family up even before the distant roosters, layingout whole wheat for the sliced egg, lettuceand tomato special.

Lettuce, what’s lettuce?“Watch that lettuce, it’s green gold!” pa shouted,and cut by half whatever I lovingly placedon the mounds of tangy egg salad.

Remember those athletic kids whoalways had friends on the diamond? My pals camefor the hanging salamis and mountains of cheese.

Oh Lord, you got it, that old sandwich gamewhen ma’s arthritic hip made her lean

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tightly against the work bench as sheplayed the artisan, slicing breadin 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 garageand shoot you,” pa laughed, winked at me and I blushedto be his audience and my mother’s own traitor.

No boy scout troop told me about using the north starOr how to start a fire with flint and dried mossBut I learned to chop celery down to jade nuggetspeel three dozen eggs fasterthan filling a gas tank.

Some mornings ma slept an extra half-hourbecause she’d been up late de-boning chickensor carefully scrubbing the meat-grinder clean:poking a stainless steel skewer throughevery gristle-clogged hole.

Pa made an art of running red lightsto get the last order in before noon, or we’dhave to eat the rest of the sandwiches ourselves.Never mind if it snowed and the plow droppedanother six feet on the driveway up and out.

Pa’s eyes have the same veined networkas AAA travel guides, except he’s not going far,only over a bridge or two (selling half dozen on ryeto the guys on the Tobin Bridge toll booths).Until he went ahead and pastedQUESTION AUTHORITY

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on his front bumper. Then, the once-cheerytoll collectors stopped smilingor ordering sandwiches for their lunch.

I recall watching the freight trains pass, thinkingthe sound they made wastuna 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 beanby a rear-swinging door from a passing truckhard enough to net him 5,000 buckaroos and a solotrip to Madrid! His name be praised!Hugging ma on the rebound, slippingher liquor-filled chocolates that changed theanger-flush on her cheeks to shynessso that she looked away, over the sink,out to the lilacs it was late Spring.

I guess it bothered me more than herand he did eventually get her a new dryerwhich she seemed to like well enough;and the varicose veins that drew her bloodback to an ever larger heartwas Braille of the skinthat told the story of her years, standing.

In October, the leaves flamed and Pa called me outto join him in the cold dawn,to bite into a crisp roll and sip coffee and watchAutumn fall at our feet. Afternoons, I wasin his car that was filled with produce and feltas if I was driving in an enormous salad.

“What’s your father do? What’s your mother do?”