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Suddenly Everything
The hills mimic—
They settle into themselves.
The ugly faces on the train project
Themselves onto it— The landscape—
So now the moon is disconsolate—
Following us around like a runt sibling. A dwarf memory.
A young man lurches as if the train had braked
Abruptly. Though he is not ill. He has
The demeanor of a wild animal—
The wolf.
Easy to attach mystique to. He is looking out the window.
It is obvious
By the lampblack light of the star pierced sky
And the blue sheen of curving railroad
That he is suffering
A privileged disease.
In his heart he is uttering.
The click of hard wheels amaze
With its complacency.
In its complicity with his prayers—
Chiming with every word.
Those wheels are resolute—
They are hurting— Prick them.
They whine. Spilling
Stars. The boy blackens
The evergreen forest with just one sweeping glance.
Oh God he sighs.
The trees snatch shadows and take on new forms.
They swoon.
They have never been more alive— More close
To obliteration.
He clutches at himself.
He sighs.
Something howls. The hills open
With a yawn. The horses its teeth.
The river its tongue.
It screams.
He begs. He cries out— If you do not come— all
These things would mean nothing
If you do come all these things would mean nothing.
Suddenly everything—
Disappears.
Her left mitten, the car keys,
meetings, birthdays, the way home,
even you – lost. She has left
it all on the bank like so much baggage.
She’s emptying grain by grain
like a salt shaker, she stands
neck-deep in loss.
You visit the nursing home,
and her eyes are a slow drift of ice,
dim now, an unfathoming gray.
She looks past you when you
speak, when you tell about
the new granddaughter, the war, the rosemary
you still tend in her garden.
Her whole mouth thins into a question
you can’t answer. Neither words
nor love will reach her, now.
They tie her down at night
so she can’t float away.
It was worse before she came here.
You’d wake at midnight to a cold bed,
the sunken hollow where she
had been. Always the same thing—
You run downstairs to find her drifting
in the kitchen, naked despite
the season, scouring the cookbooks
for some hint of her own name.
When she sees you, she starts to cry.
Asks you to hold her, whoever you are,
and you do. For over an hour, you do.
And over her shoulder you see the television
on the counter, broken but still on.
On the screen—a bright June morning,
a woman laughing under an apple tree,
a yapping black dog. All fading
to snow,
snow,
snow.
Dear Impresario, the television
told me to live better, so I try.
but I don’t know how, because
the television didn’t say.
I read that to make something tender, it should be poached. So, I am preparing
a pot for my love. I am rubbing
it with duck-fat and demi-glace.
I have not found a recipe
for commitment, or how to
read moods in the bite of
an apple too sour to eat.
Or how to make the quinces
hanging from the trees, turn sweet.
I tried a recipe for a cake
made from scripture.
I substituted the broken pieces
of your myth, for manna, and
milk instead of wine, but it fell
when I hoped it would rise.
What I’ve lost is the will
to be thin, and so forth.
Six pennies and my favorite hat.
I know that hitchhikers are
the things that make us whole;
the eggs in my batter.
I heard that in Norway,
you can catch a whale
of sadness, if you cut
a potato in half, rub it
with salt and hold it to
your forehead for the
shortest hour. I tried this once,
and its true, but I got only
a narwhals worth, when
I was hoping for blue.
a walk home, i live briefly in the basement of a long day
shuffling in navy black boots,
in crow feet’s not properly sealed,
the madness of wet socks.
the wool yarn humming,
becomes a conductor, a sidewalk
hot on the trail of desk lamps,
an explosion of neon ash
and snow is falling again.
across the wintery desert,
of one of jupiter’s tagalong moons.
the madness of wet socks,
the damp braided cable tounge
begins the humming of me
dry, brittle me north-facing the dusk
disappears despite a 100 steps taken towards,
a dawn suddenly died before dawn.
Baby Blue
The kitchen clock says 5:05.
That means that Dad is late.
I know this because the kitchen clock is how I tell time.
My bedroom clock says 5:01, so I know that it’s
…five minus one equals…
Four minutes fast.
Or four minutes slow.
I don’t know which.
I go back upstairs to my room because that’s where my Terminator action figure is.
Through my bedroom window I saw Dad’s baby blue
jaguar rip into the skin
of the neighborhood road,
leap with terrific speed
past the somber 10 mph signs
and screech-brake the length of our driveway.
My fast father,
his car the color of sky, reflecting
an incensed orange ball of sun
as if my father were the world,
encased in sky blue car, like Earth
encased in sky blue sky.
But he was also the wind
driving the sky, too.
Sky.
Sky sky sky sky sky.
The best poets are the most self-deprecating ones, I’ve heard.
My dad drives very fast and it scares me.
I run down the grey-carpeted stairs and stop at the front door.
The front door is made of a heavy thick brown wood.
I have to pull very hard,
For very long,
To open it.
So I start working on it before my Dad even gets out of his car
Because I don’t want him to see me struggle
Dad sees me out in the open
Doorway and he knows
I haven’t forgotten about the promise,
And he knows
How important it is to keep a promise.
So he comes inside,
But not before making a joke.
I could never make that man laugh.
I think it’s funny when Dad makes jokes
because Dad is very big.
VERY big.
He works out.
It’s also funny
Because Dad is funny.
We walked into the family room and knelt
on either side of the coffee table:
solemn suburban monks.
We each moved
piles of magazines from the varnished off-white table’s center,
and littered its corners
with Vanity Fairs and Peoples and Times and Vogues and together,
big hands and little hands,
we placed the board upon the table
and positioned our pieces.
I have never beaten Dad in Stratego.
We play chess or Stratego once every week on whatever day I make him promise to.
Sometimes I beat him in chess
But never in Stratego.
And I try very hard
Because Dad says that if I ever beat him,
He’ll buy me a Nintendo game.
I have so many Nintendo games.
I have Regular Nintendo and I have Super Nintendo and I have Sega Genesis,
And I have Road Rash and Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario,
And I call them all Nintendo games,
Even though some of them aren’t Nintendo games because they are Sega games
And even though they are all “video games,”
I call them Nintendo games.
I don’t know why.
My mom says that I don’t need anymore Nintendo games
And she says that Dad shouldn’t give me any if I beat him in Stratego
My father is a callow irate child and my mother is a weak submissive neurotic.
But once she came downstairs with me while I played Nintendo,
Because I’m scared to play Nintendo in the basement by myself.
It’s very dark.
I love my mom.
Dad takes my One with his Spy and tricks me.
He is very tricky.
“Good game.”
I say that because I am a good sport.
The clock says 6:00.
And I know it’s right:
It’s the kitchen clock.
Habitus
By Becky Olson
I.
The five wild turkeys on the side of the road
at the line between highway and woods,
are the same five birds that my grandfather saw
when he woke up with frost on his bedspread as a boy.
They are the same birds as the robins
my sister saw, but could not name,
before she died. They are the same as the five
naked hatchlings sprouting from my palm.
How can you tell me that the lacy frost blue jay
eating out of my bowl when I begin,
isn’t still watching me from a hole or a crack
in my skin?
II.
Every time I see you, I forget the pouch of flesh
under your chin. I didn’t remember that you were old
or had you lied to me about your diet.
I forgot that your hair is dyed and you have sunspots
I have never seen to the left of your eyes.
That you live in a house you claim I was born in
and a body I was born from,
You tell me
This is your room
Here are the clothes you left
I will give you your favorite foods
I will give you fresh baked bread
I will pull it out of the freezer.
I forgot the touch of bare feet on the carpet in the basement,
the taste of biting my own toe nails,
forgot what I looked like before I could reach the top
of the freezer and find the cigarettes and chips you hide there,
twenty two years ago.
III.
I don’t know what the distance between colors is.
I suspect there is a five hour bus ride between green and brown,
or a 30 minute walk to magenta.
I don’t know how I managed to survive
all this time without eating,
without pulling shredded muscles of birds through my teeth.
I do know that there is only one shade of yellow.
There are bodies found, swollen as the snow melts,
Bodies pulled out of the ice in the same spring
that brings blood to your two lips in November.
There is only one shade of yellow.
That is why aspen trees drop daffodil petals like skin cells.
Why tulips birth golden ash leaves
and the pinks of a sunrise on the coldest day of a year.
A consumptive man
Takes out his pen
One more time
To see if words might finally
Carry the weight
Of all that promise
But each damned word like
Mercury evades things
And reminds him that one
Is nothing more than a renouncer
An ascetic, the contained center
Of all that has been refused.
An audacious project
Has been emptied of itself
The poetic capacity refused
In a deafening revolt against
All that color.
What’s left is no carcass,
No fleshy meat you could at least
Kick and bruise
Or dine on in hell.
Instead one finds, at the end
Of all this blabbering,
Only the emptied out frame
Of a body.
In the novel about failure, there is no failure, but a marriage ending all the time.
I work for a charity, which names boats without oceans.
I call it a scow if it’s not a skiff, and also in the case that
it’s not a schooner. Someday I will also never be on the sea.
Say something nautical, driftwood, say, I will never even think of salt
water, and if you think of knots, of the binding or of velocity,
I’ll think of hemlock and if you try to rub salt in my ears, I’ll swear
it’s poison, Listen. If you tear up the loaf in your bag and toss it,
the gulls will get it before the waves, that’s a law, an important one,
after the one about blood: when it dries things are stuck together, like say,
your feet to the wood floor, I learned that, otherwise, I would
only know it like the pulse and the quick; the airfoil. If you give someone
food you are beautiful. You won’t finish your drink, I read that once
in a dream. So you say: “All the best lines start with: ‘I’ve never
lost a bet.’” And later: “Let’s sleep inside the ground, let’s be
the dirt down there, let’s get incumbent to the word: soil minus ess is
oil, a worm with a tail is warm, and why not? Let’s be the sulfur spring
and the broken back of an acrobat.” And finally: “All the best books start
with: ‘Let’s get high and listen to Wilco.’ and all the best books end.”
She is Buddha-like in her worn out pear of a body
Because of her magical out-of-body experiences-
Each trip feeling like water and ice, water hardening to ice,
Expanding laterally in the dark.
The color of cold is not white or blue or black.
Cold comes and turns things purple red. She knows
This and smears herself with what is called “Luscious Lotus.”
Her Lotus lips glower, lisping like wet wattle,
Gobbling up the air, gobbling up men ridiculous as turkeys
With faces the colors of the American flag, red / blue / white
Depending on the season. No matter the season,
She sails through the film of nighttime bodies, people, litter,
Pigeons as big as her head, unfurling the two huge pillows
Of Luscious Lotus to flap in the sweat pinched, crowded breeze
On a pilgrimage to a different country. This country
Has an arid landscape sere with freckled cement,
Blooming with light all the colors of excitement,
The fantastic colors, neon snakes shaped in pink, green, lust,
Luscious lips guiding the rest of the body as masthead
Through the black water, arrowed in the wake. Every man
An island, iceberg deep. Every man
A handle of solidity, sometimes detachedly beautiful,
Depending on the altitude and tungsten intensity
Of blank headlights, but never handsome. They glow deeply,
Opaquely. Some populations snow white,
Some fat, some bald and shiny as eggs, some still
Budding pink with adolescent infancy, blue with hate, hairy
With sadness. Mostly sadness. Delightful sadness. The young
Sad ones are the cleanest, having no odor. Age cannot erode
The lavish dust motes, the fungal aroma of in-between skin flaps.
Each man’s fermenting breath an unusual flower. This land
Helplessly abundant with flowers. Luscious Lotus
Herself, helplessly drifts further into the old. Flesh
Acquiring the texture of beached seaweed,
She throws herself out and catches clusters of marine animals. Men
Hooked in her fishnet legs. Heats them and eats them. Each meal
Is a meditation. When they come, she is not there.
But she sings songs at them, songs from wild places, songs
Made of cold vowels that make their nest on the sides of edifice,
Vowels neither white, nor blue, nor black. Vowels that flap with wings.
-MFC
