by D. A. Powell
and pheromones. But always
another invader tends to come. Just ask
the avocado commission.
Just ask the woodbine to show you
where the varmints hide,
waiting to punk you in the plums.
VALLEY OF THE DOLLS
9 o’clock. Time to smoke a joint
that lets me take my pills.
10 o’clock. Time to take my pill
to take my pills.
11 o’clock. I take my pills.
12 o’clock. I take my little pills.
I call them dolls this time.
I take my dolls.
I always loved this film.
But then: I wasn’t in it.
When did I stop feeling sure, feeling
safe, and start wondering why
Suspense, you’re killing me.
[close-up on dolls]
LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES PARTIALLY ERASED
First, it’s just the faces disappearing.
Because, deflected, as the faces long have been,
with their hunched trunks
and mercilessly twisted necks,
they can only be regarded from a ground’s-eye view.
The bellwort tips its fallow head down
in the hot tomato field. The green snake rests
beneath the green leaves, and the air is toast.
Diesel tractors grind to the frontage and idle there,
their heads bowed, too, like giant wooden horses
meant to sack an unsuspecting city.
Down come the earthen walls.
My father used to pour libations onto the ground
from the gas pump’s nozzle, and I’d swirl
its iridescence, respire it into my lung’s core,
so woozy, so sick, and awed by the vapors.
Fire beguiled me, too. As did the concept of force.
Whole villages burned in a single spritz.
Even now the past gets altered. We forget
because our friends won’t suffer that subject again.
Because the students tap their pens uncomfortably,
look around to see if anyone else is taken in.
That’s when we figure it’s best to make a joke.
I’ve wandered, now, from the corrugated sheds,
with people half in and half out of nuclear range.
My retention of the facts is not a silo.
Even if it were, some disrepair gets fallen into.
I like to think we dismantle thought
as much as tortuous thought dismantles us.
I have seen sharp men lose limbs. Women too.
A hand pulled off, conveyed into the hopper.
But these were country matters.
Like frilled silhouettes of flowering wild carrot,
white against the mackerel white sky,
the texture is imperishable, the details
so far off. These bodies: their contours
uncertain. Just a general cast to the light.
HOMESICKNESS
There were others I’d forgotten, who,
without vocabularies
to commend them to my broken landscapes,
went missing
throughout the daylight hours, then struck
their faint electric jags
upon the silhouettes of water birches.
What is he doing there along the bypass?
Or that one, thumbing up into the hills.
Spikelets.
The field and the fire devoured them.
I don’t drive, nor return, nor conclude.
I wouldn’t know now the etiquette
of being in someone else’s car,
much less someone’s memory.
How do they stand it, these apparitions.
Summoned from the nude buckwheat
with blatant inaccuracy
then dispatched with a gesundheit blink.
He could have taken the train.
He could have just decided he’d rather walk.
He was an EMT who owned a pinball machine.
He was the jeweler’s son.
Carried hardly any cash.
He was a fragment friend, that one.
I only saw him after hours.
From Dunnigan. Woodland. Galt. Esparto.
Recollection isn’t mine to master.
Worse than all the figures I could choose,
the gangly birds.
They are the heedless shapes we come upon
suddenly, and without warning,
their dun quills overstating
that final moment of distress.
And then the scattering.
And then the progress,
which is always away.
Where did that one go?
He went away.
Away now, then,
my feathered friend. You are not now,
nor have you ever been.
BUGCATCHING AT TWILIGHT
A round yellow fury to the evening’s light,
though ultimately it shows clemency. Shadow,
you put out your gentian-lipped goblet
and the night’s lost sailors bumbled in,
a whole handful of them, squeezed into
those snug white pants.
Sorry. I mean
those were meadowhawk’s wings.
You long for places you shouldn’t go:
billiard halls, the pachinko palace,
behind the parked car where a Zippo flicks,
twice (sometimes you need to be summoned
twice), the places where no neon glows.
(And the you here is not so much you as it is I.)
I have this rearrangement to make:
symbolic death, my backward glance.
The way the past is a kind of future
leaning against the sporty hood.
On leave, he says.
He doesn’t say it, but you can see it:
flattop, civvies, shirt tucked too neat.
He is so at ease, you think. You think: at ease.
You only have between now and o-dark-thirty.
The swift birds amass.
They, too, drawn to the buzz
hanging on the cusp of dusk.
HEAD OUT ON THE HIGHWAY
The search for a likely place to pull over
gets more difficult each day,
as cloverleaf and cloverleaf give way
to fast food exits and unlikely outlets.
We get better at doing something,
so we do it every day. Every day,
we do the something, even if it kills us.
Which it does.
There’s nothing at the package store
that we can’t get on the internet.
And it’s not like the price of gas
goes down. Nor anything else.
I’ve been wanting a lonely lane
that’s off the map. I need to stretch.
And if you want to neck, we’ll neck.
As long as I can get out; take a leak.
Frog bodies spread like throw rugs
across the blacktop. So enticing—
were we small enough—to cuddle there.
But everybody’s small in a Pontiac.
Or rather, no one ever is too big.
TARNISHED ANGEL
Though they’re slightly eroded, one still might surmise
the commanding force in those tensile coppery legs,
their responsive bent, their brutal extent. I draw up
into myself at their coming; I stumble as one cast out.
Look down on me. I, fallen, would meet him, fallen,
in the blunt blue light of morning. My angry god
would contest his angry god, to clutch at sheer cloth
and recompense of lean, fusible flesh. Once lost wax.
I long to know his vulgar tongue. To feel the cool verdigris
of his shanks, the clas
ping down upon my own extremities.
I want to be with the one who will not have me. Will not,
despite our mortal errors, which seem terribly to twin.
RIVERFRONT PARK, MARYSVILLE, CA
Half the year, all we smell is the sewage treatment plant,
down near the boat launch ramp.
And all we hear is the chug of bass boats idling in,
the slide of the hitch pin.
The black-coated dog swims and shakes himself dry. He is
rid of fleas, which weren’t his.
Would that we could rid ourselves of everything not ours:
reverse the birthing hour,
return the beastings to their teats; jizz to its bushed nub.
Cars circle here at night—
They flash their lights at someone in the outhouse shadow
or pass like slinking cats
afraid to taste the stranger’s milk. It’s okay, my dear.
Someone cares for you here.
Were you dying, here’s a fine place for your mangy head.
Hush. Someone’s backing in.
LOVE HANGOVER
Old Tricks Mix
I could not tell you then who actually was attractive.
I’d blow the devil if he offered. Apparently he did.
& neither can I tell you anymore what goes together.
Love, as a song, is sorry enough, without its equally sorry singer.
Love, when it’s truly sorry, is sorrier than a broke-dick dog.
LANDSCAPE WITH LYMPHATIC SYSTEM, SYSTEM OF RIVULETS, SYSTEM OF RIVERS
My body, when did you amble down
from the levee, begin to wade
with no bead head midgefly or green glitter jig
to flick, quick winglet, at the end of translucent line
nor noontime college bake party
along the weed-slumped banks
nor the tiretube, tame-water floating.
Nor encounter with same vivid weekday man
previously unknown to you, and unknown still.
Stepped down to you, into the water with you,
parted you, transfigured you said leave me alone
said punish me I am an unrepentant boy.
You are not that body now.
Wherever you were headed was not this stream.
Your asscheeks sag. Your abdomen distends.
Nothing has a tight hold on your guts.
Guts spill at times when they’re not tucked away.
Winded, white-haired body. Splotchy skin.
A face uneven as a river jag
and asperous as the mullein’s flannel leaves.
My undesirable body, you’re all I have to fiddle with.
The fiddle’s wood has cracked but it still plays.
The music, rival falls into the eddy, into brisk cascade
and latterly to rest on strand exhausted.
You are the form of my exhaustion as you break.
Tenderness in the testes, tenderness of mind.
I have come to admire you in the water.
You are the yellow crown of some narcissus afterward:
the fizzled salvo. The burst of yolk
that has begun to dry on the stoneware plate.
The mess. A young Picasso’s stab at fingerpaints
hung and fading on his mom’s refrigerator door.
But not without a certain coruscating charm.
You are run-off from the melting foothills,
with your specks of gold. Mostly pyrite,
though that captivates as well.
We need those flecks to break the river’s surface,
its decided syntax. I need you to come down
from the sunflowered shore. Unexpected oxbow.
Unexpected age. You are an engineering failure.
I’m your systemic glitch.
Here, where the shallows pool up into habitus,
I behold the imperfection of you, my mass,
my faulted body. Despite the plunging falls
with you, I swim.
AN ELEGY FOR MY LIBIDO
Well, here it is, the Oscar race has started
and there isn’t a single movie
I’m dying to see.
What ever did I like about the winter?
There was the taste of candied yams—
but all that sugar.
The other day a young man on the bus
offered me his seat.
I was quick to take it.
Meaning that, as I sat,
his rear filled my horizon
like a khaki-colored sun.
I’ve had a profusion of dawns
in every Abercrombie hue.
Catalogues? Frankly, catalogues
are a goddamned waste.
The better I felt,
the quicker he moved away.
ABANDONMENT UNDER THE WALNUT TREE
“Your gang’s done gone away.”
—The 119th Calypso, Cat’s Cradle,
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Something seems to have gnawed that walnut leaf.
You face your wrinkles, daily, in the mirror.
But the wrinkles are so slimming, they rather flatter.
Revel in the squat luck of that unhappy tree,
who can’t take a mate from among the oaks or gums.
Ah, but if I could I would, the mirror version says,
because he speaks to you. He is your truer self
all dopey in the glass. He wouldn’t stand alone
for hours, without at least a feel for the gall of oaks,
the gum tree bud caps, the sweet gum’s prickly balls.
Oh, he’s a caution, that reflection man.
He’s made himself a study in the trees.
You is a strewn shattered leaf I’d step upon, he says.
Do whatever it is you’d like to do. Be quick.
THE PRICE OF FUNK IN FUNKYTOWN
Because I have no sense
and I like the way it sounds:
if I was to buy me a little place,
I’d buy me some bottomland.
The reason that the bus is always stopping here
is that it used to stop here.
Nothing’s bound to change until we make it change.
“I’ll get off when I want,” the gentleman announces.
“I’m getting very old. Besides,
I’m leaving.”
okay, stop me if you’ve heard this one …
TRAVELING LIGHT
about the yellow flowers of the flannelbush,
those little Danish cookies made of butter.
I mustn’t tarry. The snails that feed here
just might consume me. And why wouldn’t they?
I have known them occasionally to hustle
for a chance to slurp away the dreamy stars.
Q: how do you ruin any good trick?
A: you fatten him up.
If I can’t have my health, at least I’ll have my humor.
Good Humor. Here come the icecream man.
A GUIDE FOR BOYS
And no one goes back to his God unscathed.
—Nelly Sachs
OUTSIDE THERMALITO
Persimmons ripen with the first frost.
The bitterness inflicted on them
takes their bitterness away.
Would that there were some other way.
THE OPENING OF THE COSMOS
You’d have thought me a blushed newbie, to look at my face then.
And you’d have been wrong.
Discolored, yes. But that was an accident on the pommel horse.
That was the beating I took from the wind,
trying to work my way uptown.
If I retracted, I’d retract just like the milksnake’s scarlet skin:
welcome to the past. Here is my private self to greet you.
I am the spitting image of the night’s prehensile lips,
ready to clamp y
ou against the solid surface of my palate.
And I am the new sap, aroused by spring, the hard xylem,
the knotty stick whose protuberance sends forth new shoots.
Didn’t you say you always wanted a child?
I can be that too: the whippersnapper who follows you.
Or maybe you want the youth who’ll do your labors
and be paid in what little kindness you can manage.
Go back and try to snag me while I’m yet unspoilt.
The morning’s saporous dew, the early strut of the cockerel,
the first fugitive act of copulation, which,
because it is a first, feels like a last.
You picked it all when you picked me out:
what satisfied you, what couldn’t love you back.
The endless act of revising. And with that, the revision.
ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS
& afterwards.
The carnal is one type of aesthetic display
a little hamlet can suffer through.
Along with all the body’s meta-meta-metaphors,
from transients to the Department of Public Health.
There are so many reasons I’m not there.
So many reasons to let that lazy sentence
stand as substitute for work I should want to do.
I should want to toil those imaginary fields.
For they are imaginary fields, many, by now.
That’s where a good deal of the tension lies.
All fields catch fire.
That’s not so dire.
I got to be the toast of C Street
for a while, the bee of The Beehive on B Street.
There was no A to speak of.
Besides.
It was a B kind of town, wasn’t it?
An exhibition to celebrate the humble prune.
Six stories high, the grand hotel.
That’s the gamut, dammit.
Minus the gore. I had to spare you the gore.
How else could I lead you this far,
except to pretend that nothing perishes, especially
matters that disturb the heart.
Ah, the heart …
What is the heart but a boob, anyways,
that it should hang out at the rodeo arena,
