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The Seasons
Know Me by Name
In
the diner I slump and fade
for
an hour while customers
come
and go and the waitress
ignores
my plea for coffee.
A
snow squall blanks the plate glass
windows.
The grill fizzes with fat.
The
cook, shaped like a tulip,
flips
a burger onto the floor,
wipes
it on the seat of his pants,
replaces
it on the grill.
Neglect
has soured me, so I rise
in
a huff and totter outside,
letting
the steel door slam like
a
bank vault. A day ago
I
walked away from an Artist
in
Residence slot because
the
institution failed to provide
the
contractual private room.
Last
week I refused to read aloud
a
poem by a nineteenth century
newspaper
poet when the host
of
a radio show politely
requested
I do so. The diner
closes
like a clamshell. The waitress
sneers
through a window at me.
Installed
in my car and desperate
for
coffee, I gnash my molars.
The
world and I are rejecting
each
other, the winter sky
dappled
with warty snow-clouds,
parking
lot murky with grease stains
frosted
with fatal black ice.
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Struck
Deer on Granite Street
On
Granite Street a broken deer
sprawls
by the curb. Two cops
survey
the carcass, their faces
blank
as snowdrifts. Driving past,
I
note blood-smut on the grill
of
a black Ford truck, a woman
screaming
into a cell phone.
To
hit the creature in daylight
in
a thirty-mile-per-hour zone
she
probably was quacking
stupidly
into that phone
while
her three-ton vehicle
plowed
forward madly on its own.
Classical
anger makes me rhyme
with
the dead deer, the cold light,
the
snow-ruts of the highway.
Johnson’s
Tow arrives to haul
the
carcass to whatever poor
and
hungry family’s on the list
for
roadkill venison. Around
the
bend and out of sight I calm
a
little and observe the black
wound
of river rimmed with ice.
The
deer descend from the hills
to
drink, but in the village
streets
hem their route so the deer
sometimes
ramble downtown and dash
through
the diner parking lot,
their
white rumps flashing like pages
from
sketchbooks. This one small death
seems
criminal as creation
itself.
I drive as slowly
as
I dare, watching for the next
deer,
the next one and the next,
so
ashamed that unlike them
I
won’t be edible in death.
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Becoming
Bear Again
Dragging
the snow off the roof
with
long aluminum roof rake
strains
me into visions as wry
and
animate as a shaman’s.
Although
this isn’t Siberia
I
suffer a massive brown bear
shuffling
from the woods to wrap
me
in its pelt and convey me
to
ancestral silence brimming
along
the Arctic coast where seals
grunt
and splash in terror and birds
drift
on the gray edge of mist.
The
pelt warms me so terribly
I
accept its sticky blood flavor
and
become the bear who vacated
himself
in favor of me. The mind
of
bear bristles with a hunger
I
can’t sate by clawing fish
from
the icy shallows or feasting
on
the carcass of a rotting seal.
Whatever’s
still human raking
snow
from a roof in New Hampshire
agrees
that it’s partly a bear
so
I revel in the reek of oil,
the
lanolin warming me against
the
polar landscape arching
eight
hundred miles to its apex.
As
I swagger about enjoying
the
pale air a man approaches
and
drops to his knees. He offers
a
puny weapon, which I swat
into
the sea. He wants to pray
to
me, but I can’t accept
human
sincerity, so bat him
with
the tips of my claws. He runs
so
clumsily I laugh myself
alert
atop the flimsy ladder;
and
as I drop the rake and topple
still
laughing into a snowdrift
the
long Arctic curve of the earth
flashes
a razor at my throat.
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Sex
and Music Will Never Solve Us
A
flamenco guitar rains notes
on
thirty café tables.
We’re
crouched, fondling, to absorb
the
music. The guitarist chews
a
cigar as crude as a twig.
His
thick face looks constructed
from
obsolete anti-tank mines.
His
hands resemble manhole covers.
The
melody he’s knitting
fits
us like a chain-mail sweater.
As
it agonizes over us
you
flinch purple with orgasm
more
aesthetic than sexual;
and
as the hushed waiter refills
our
wine glasses, you blossom
into
whatever adolescents
mistake
for love. Not directed
at
me but adrift somewhere
between
Capricorn and Leo,
a
swath of night impossible
for
astronomers to measure
or
astrologers to fully parse.
The
eager guitarist has noted
your
ecstasy and therefore assumes
one
more baroque expression
will
lure you upstairs to a room
where
you and he will explode
in
the drollest primary colors.
He
doesn’t realize how fragile
our
mutual fondling has been,
how
neatly concealed by the table.
In
the middle of a song he learned
from
a gypsy great-uncle we laugh
without
sound, our bodies forming
a
single entity; and dousing
our
humor with cheap house wine
we
agree without speaking that sex
and
music will never solve us,
even
though sometimes they rhyme.
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A
Likely Story
After
midnight, gunfire startled
the
dark. I’ve lain awake for hours.
At
dawn I creep to the vacant
flat
at the rear of the building.
It
overlooks the parking lot
where
drug murders often occur.
The
flat’s unlocked. From the bedroom
I
peer at the lot where tenant cars
swim
through the first streaks of light.
Nothing.
But behind me a snore
rends
the shadows and I turn
and
discover a shape in bed,
a
squatter. The head looks deformed,
the
body awkward as a question.
A
man with a bullet hole square
in
his forehead. But he’s alive
and
breathing as dynamically
as
the bellows of a blacksmith.
I
should call an ambulance
but
his comfortable posture suggests
I
let him sleep away the morning.
Down
the hall I reconsider
and
phone the cops. Two hulking bulls
arrive
and I show them the room;
but
although the three of us hear
snoring
there’s no one in the bed,
no
one under it or anywhere
else
in the room. The cops think
I’m
gulling them, and stalk away mad.
In
my own flat I lock the door
against
further incursions of ghost;
but
when I look in the mirror
to
comb my restless hair I note
an
old, long-healed gunshot wound
square
in my forehead and wonder
in
which forgotten life I suffered
such
derision of the brain.
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