Far-Fetched (3 page)

awaits, from which we'll be dismissed

(we both have too much history).

I wish him well in his campaign.

STRANGERS

On an overbooked flight from Houston,

I find my seat beside a woman

in black shades, with the hard-bitten look

that sometimes follows addiction,

nails chewed down to the quick,

talking too loudly into her phone:

Yeah, I got my dad a new amp.

Rocking must run in the family!

As we level off in the tenuous dusk,

she orders a Red Bull and Skyy,

scarfing down her portion of pretzels,

shifting abruptly from side to side

to cross and recross her legs,

swiping through files on her phone.

Meanwhile, I skim an Audubon guide

and pause at the boat-tailed grackle

with its iridescence, yellow eye,

and long, harsh trilling song.

You like that book?
she interrupts.

I got some crazy shit to show you.

Here, a silky fantail

from the State Fair of Texas.

Have you ever seen a mule pull?

This team's dragging five tons.

Oh, that's me, getting an award.

I'm a doctor, you believe that shit?

In the snapshot, she wears a white lab coat

with a ribbon pinned to her lapel,

her arm around a soldier's waist

in what looks to be a shopping mall.

I love birds! So check it out:

I raised fuckin' racing pigeons

with my dad, a top geneticist

at Baylor—total brainiac.

We banded squabs, flew them in batches,

drove them out for training tosses.

This one, with a Belgian pedigree,

came first in the Texas Showdown.

Fuckin' A, I loved those birds.

On and on, an improbable mix

of tough talk and expertise

that finds no resolution.

But then, consider my own account,

withheld: an invitation

to read my poetry aloud,

tequila and a fine
lechón,

a morning free to watch a pair

of caracaras take apart

the carcass of a wild hog

along the Chocolate Bayou.

What would such scraps mean to her?

Even in our final descent

she pushes past my doubt

and reticence, to say,

I started as a dancer,

and now I'm a goddamn doc.

Looking back, it all makes sense!

—the incidents of a life

fanning out in a strange display.

NIGHT AND DAY

Newly a father, half asleep

between the dark and dawn,

I lean against the kitchen sink

and struggle to recall

a riddle of the sphinx,

the western sky a color

that the Greeks refused to name

because it extinguishes all others,

their sea of green or wine,

their sky of hammered bronze.

What starts as a faint

migration of light

extends itself alone and widely

across the kitchen tile,

pewter on a soap bubble,

bombycinous, endored,

adding word to word until

everything gets remembered.

There are two sisters: one

gives birth to the other

and then is born from her.

OWL-EYED

A golden hand

imprints the dawn

figurative

intent forgot

A black jug

with beak and brow

returns the owl

face to Pallas

Countless broken

pots unearth

evidence

of deep thirst

an afterlife

in earthenware

three thousand years

of twilight

THE SUDDEN WALK

after Franz Kafka

When evening comes to find you still

at home and settling down to stay,

when the last rays have lit a cloud

of fingerprints on the storm door

and television's lambent flame

plays across veneer and glass,

when you have dealt a hand or two,

the dinner dishes cleared away,

and shrugging on the familiar robe,

you open an atlas of the world

to archipelagoes engraved

with light of other longitudes,

when a cold fog descends and drives

every creature down its hole,

when you have sat so quietly

that your least movement brings surprise

to everyone, and when, besides,

the stairs are dark, the deadbolt locked,

and in spite of all, you start up

in a sudden fit of restlessness,

shed your robe, snap a coat,

and bang the door shut more or less

emphatically, according to

the pique you fancy having stirred,

and when you find yourself once more

at unexpected liberty,

absorbed in rhythms of breath and limb,

attention racing on ahead

and then returning like a dog

through hawthorn blooming in the dark,

that rich potentiality,

when Mars and Jupiter ascend

above the cloudbank, bright and crisp,

then you become a clean stroke

of ink-and-brush calligraphy,

a lone figure strolling west

on Shenandoah Avenue.

Returning home, still full of such

euphoria, you stop to watch

flitting across your window shade

at this late hour, the silhouettes

of children loosed from all constraints.

TURNED LOOSE

On Friday afternoon, turned loose

like cattle dogs across a slope,

kids fling themselves out of doors

with a thin shout as though through bronze,

descend on idling cars en masse,

and then disperse on separate paths

as we distinguish one of ours.

On Saturday, stunned by the week

of school and work, we rise late

and linger at the table

above the morning's residue

of orange peels and magazines.

Light and unobtrusive,

a pencil rustles paper

to sketch a horse with arched neck

and whipping lines for legs.

Does anybody have the red?

On Sunday, after small delays—

the ritual of a coat refused

or shoe misplaced—we find ourselves

within the hall of mastodons,

our clothes still radiating cold.

We scrutinize an arc of tusk

and chronicle of bone.

Among so many strangers,

the children cling to me like burrs

and I disregard the impulse

to be free of them.

Monday in my office,

a day that will not bring them near,

I want nothing but their presence,

my ears attuned to outdoors

and the timbre of their voices,

the damp friction of their shrieks

so primitive and freshly peeled.

WANT

Let the child cry awhile

with a rasp that strains his throat.

Let him learn what can't be satisfied

and break him like a colt.

Beneath a blanket, let him find

some solace in himself.

              *

I need mine cuddy!

—the family word

for a blanket frayed

to a snarl of yarn,

a mushy cud

that smells of spit.

As the soporific

takes effect,

eyes roll inward

and night unravels

the wale

that day has knit.

              *

Tilt this lacquered disk

against the sun

tap tap

its pendulum

pulls each head in turn

to pivot in a slot

and peck at painted

flecks of scratch

the hollow tap

of appetite

SCHOOL DAYS

Passing our porch, a girl of ten

holds a drum against her stomach

as you might a covered dish.

China trembles with a truck's idle

or the white hum of compressors,

the morning air muted

as though near the ocean,

lightly ruffled by subaquatic

scales on a clarinet

and the tuning of strings.

When she passes again, near dusk,

the insect chorus subsides

to a pinprick of cricket song.

Narrow pens of fenced yards,

as yet unraked, lie thick

with indotherms and agitrons.

Something keeps brushing against me!

Around a plot of ragged mint,

the lemon zest of walnut leaves

illuminates the lawn,

brickwork slowly revealed.

LATE OCTOBER

Kids crowd the stoop

backs to a darkened house

so close to nothing

yet incurious

              *

Across the brick façade

a kestrel

races to meet

its shadow

              *

Hawk and starling sport

through all this rigging

of blocks and lines

counterweights and arbors

the street

a theater set for storms

              *

A chunk of sycamore

adorns the telephone line

branch and trunk long gone

stump a faint impression

just that cylinder

faintly nautical

hung in a crown of air

              *

Triple your chances to win

Take it at twenty-to-one

No money down

No faith in desire

              *

Cashing out

the bartender croons

If you see me getting smaller

Trobar clus

Closing time

              *

Two boys lug

a Samsonite

full of leaves

across the lawn

              *

A starling whets

her thorn of beak

and song gives way

to sunlight on concrete

LEAVING HOME

after Eudora Welty

One beech within a winter wood

glowed with a crown of leaves

and slid behind the bare trees,

a little evening sun.

It traveled with you awhile

in ghostly fashion,

your own crown of hair

in faint reflection,

here and gone.

COME AND SEE

A Sunday in Saint Louis,

the avenues

quiet as country lanes.

Cabbage whites

ride a current of air.

Sycamores lean

and scrape the sky

like schooners

not yet under sail,

their leaves in tatters.

A soft rustle,

a nautical creak.

More faintly still,

sticks clatter

on the playing field

behind Our Lady of Sorrows.

You've lived here

thirty, forty years.

Suddenly a Clydesdale

with no tack or rider

clip-clops around the corner

and trots along

the yellow lines.

A marvel of

the Pleistocene,

creature of grass and dung,

it must have wandered far

to reach us,

through all hours

and seasons,

trampling the dust

of every kingdom.

From dark recesses

residents

step out to watch,

stepping away

from busy lives,

something on the stove,

a bath drawn,

the phone covered

like an astonished mouth.

SMALL TRIUMPHS

Along the freight yard, a cop

waved me to the side.

Windows down, engine off,

I heard the clink of chains

and steady brush of pads

before a pair of elephants

entered my left mirror.

              *

A lyrebird at noon!—

fossicking for worms.

No song, no
éventail plissé

of filaments and plumes.

Regardless, clear as day—

a lyrebird at noon!

              *

You talk with animation

of what you've seen, and where—

proud to have been so lucky,

amused to feel so proud.

IN SEARCH OF MULLOWAY

for Bob Adamson

The fisherman makes an appointment

by map and tidal chart

unfolded across the bare floor.

Sorting through his gear,

he ties a knot and talks of jewies,

not jew- but jewelfish

for the otolith within its ear,

a bob for equilibrium

like the bubble of a spirit level.

According to lore, a traveler shines

from weeks on the open sea,

cold sluicing along its flanks

and buffing its soft scales to chrome,

crossing Lord Howe Rise,

who knows why,

then home past Lion Island's head

with a worm inhaled en route

writhing in its gut.

All the while, a resident

turns to bronze and tarnishes

at the mouth of Mooney Creek,

wolfish yet asleep

in the shadow of a pile.

Motionless, the monster steeps

in its own ammonia tang.

Traveler and resident,

both taste about the same.

SAILING UNDER STORM

after Horace

This heavy weather drives you out