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Three Poems
by Michael Shorb
Cures for Insomnia
Night unending and rain
Spearing the pavements
I turn sleepless
Imagining each watery
Shaft an echo
Of the world's unending
Troubles
the pallor of starving skin
Gray feet of refugees
Navigating bone-
dry roads
The cry of the prisoner
The arching emptiness of
Loved ones washed away
In memory's red water.
I put on an old noir mystery
And soothe myself to sleep
With a focused and specific
Evil
a gunman staring
From the window of a seedy room
A detective
Shouldering the burdens
Of the last honest man
A beauty in a sports car
Engine running smoothly
Aimed at the nearby
Borders of resolution.The Black Box of Angus the Tinker
I walk backward in the steam-
Shrouded light of depots.
I ask the lounging railroad men where
I can get hot food.
They point out the door
A battered Camel billboard
Fast food strip joint
Araby beyond the intersection
Of alarm and vision
To the north shore of Lake Huron
200 years ago.
Walking again I'm startled
By geese overhead in roaring profusion,
Darting shoals of passenger pigeons,
Hundreds of black bears and grizzlies
Drinking at lake's edge without looking up.
Maybe the earth, its ozone girdle
Ravaged by moths of chlorine monoxide,
Its atmospheric immunity system
Riddled by bromides
and chlorofluorocarbons,
Is filling up with blind animals,
Radiated micro planktons.
Acquired Immune Deficiency
Planetary plague.
I am pulled by something out of time.
Toward the Great Plains.
Empty farmhouses
and baseball diamonds streak past.
I approach a group of Crow Indians
Busy roasting a buffalo hump.
Ever the scientific Western man,
I am about to ask them
To tell the story
of their migrations,
The significance of their feather
Markings, the vision behind
Their ritual dances.
All that comes out
Is a crude sign indicating
The one constant: my hunger.
Sit down eat, they say,
Expressionless.
I gorge and fall asleep.
The red men are gone
When I awake.
Only a few bones
Left in the ashes.
I am invested in a wilderness of bones.
Bones of Mandan and mustang,
Mohican and prairie chicken
knotted together like coral
reefs beside a sunless sea.
Song chokes in my throat.
Puccini aria, Apache chant,
St Louis riverfront jazz or motor city
Rhythm and blues, nothing comes out.
A human form appears.
Down from the charred hills in a tradesman's van,
Rosebuds painted on each side, circa 1867.
It's Angus the Tinker, mutation of an old
Scottish immigrant to eastern
Wisconsin in the 1850's.
I feel better now that commerce is here.
I rush over to launch a barrage of questions.
He silences me with an imperious
Gesture.
"Damn you and your questions,"
He says gruffly, throwing down
A large black box and clattering
northward in the waning light.
Eagerly, with shaking hands,
I open terra concordia
The Black Box of Angus the Tinker,
And look inside.Escaping
They weren't after me.
I wasn't the one tied
by the ankles to
a Cyclops of uranium
dragged across floors
of the Age of Invention
a convict in chains
ram in the thorns
steel mill rabbit
in thickets of rain
they didn't hunt me down
in coal-
black veins of my own land
smash the colored beads
of my alphabet
hook me across the gills
with a printing press
shoot me in some
neck of the woods
when nothing was looking
I'll see you around
drifting
through town
soiled parody from
the Book of Prophets
blurting the old green songs.
last seed bursting
last wind stirring
last swordfish
in slate-green sea.