by D. A. Powell
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I used to love ideals, but that wasn’t cool. Plus there was money to be had.
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USELESS LANDSCAPE, OR
A Guide for Boys
ALSO BY D. A. POWELL
Tea
Lunch
Cocktails
Chronic
By Myself: An Autobiography
(with David Trinidad)
Repast: Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails
USELESS LANDSCAPE, OR
A Guide for Boys
D. A. POWELL
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2012 by D. A. Powell
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-605-7 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-55597-695-8
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-512-8
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Paperback, 2014
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014935839
Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter
Cover art © Blue Lantern Studio / Corbis
for Ryan
CONTENTS
Useless Landscape
Almonds in Bloom
Tender Mercies
Cherry Blossoms in Spring
The Fluffer Talks of Eternity
Landscape with Sections of Aqueduct
Useless Landscape
Bidwell Park
The Kiwi Comes to Gridley, CA
College City Market, College City, CA
Seven Sketches for a Landscape, Unfinished
A Brief History of Internment
The Bathers
Little Boy Blue
Dying in the Development
Chicken
Bojangles
Dying in a Turkish Bath
End of Days
That’s Where They Hide the Silos
Panic in the Year Zero
Landscape with Temple, Mosque and Little Crosses
Landscape with Combine
Quarantine
Release the Sterile Moths
Valley of the Dolls
Landscape with Figures Partially Erased
Homesickness
Bugcatching at Twilight
Head Out on the Highway
Tarnished Angel
Riverfront Park, Marysville, CA
Love Hangover
Landscape with Lymphatic System, System of Rivulets, System of Rivers
An Elegy for My Libido
Abandonment under the Walnut Tree
The Price of Funk in Funkytown
Traveling Light
A Guide for Boys
Outside Thermalito
The Opening of the Cosmos
One Thousand and One Nights
Funkytown: Forgotten City of the Plain
Notes of a Native Son
Donkey Basketball Diaries
A Little Less Kettledrum, Please
Narcissus
My Life as a Dog
A Guide for Boys
Boonies
Lessons in Woodworking
Pupil
Elements of a Cross-Country Runner
Magic Kingdom Come
Space Junk
Sporting Life
Dying in a Fallow
Reaching Around for You
Goodbye, My Fancy
Hereafter
Midnight Cowbell
Do the Hustle
Once and Future Houseboy
Backdrop with Splashes of Cum on It
Transit of Mercury
Platelet Count Descending
Backstage Pass
Having a Rambutan with You
Summer of My Bone Density Test
The Great Unrest
Orchard in January
Ode to Joy
Missionary Man
Mass for Pentecost: Canticle for Birds & Waters
USELESS LANDSCAPE, OR
A Guide for Boys
USELESS LANDSCAPE
The beauty of men never disappears
But drives a blue car through the stars.
—John Wieners
ALMONDS IN BLOOM
In heaven, I believe, even our deaths are forgiven.
—Dunstan Thompson
Who could sustain such pale plentitude
and not want to shake the knopped white blossoms
from the swarthy branches.
The petals seem more parchment, and more pure,
in her upright phalanges
with a box of soap flakes, tackling the mud-cake
somebody made on the quarter-sawn floor.
Just when we think we’ve been punished enough,
there’s a bounty to contend with—
she’s at the spinet, now, and every key’s a plunker.
She hasn’t had it tuned since the flood.
Yes, she really troubles heaven with her deaf singing.
But after all, it’s heaven.
Even death will be forgiven.
TENDER MERCIES
The dandelions, ditch-blown brood,
the evening snow and dew-soaked phlox,
the Brewer’s pea, the Jepson’s pea
(these, the bright eyes of the viridian fields)
in chaparral, the hillside pea and angled pea,
intensities of light and pomp
that distress the easy upswept grass.
The smack the rain plants as it smudges past
and penetrates the canvas.
The smattering on field and railroad tracks,
both hardy blooms and dainty flowers,
the judge’s house, the chicken farm,
a migratory camp, a flesh motel,
a stucco digs
where all that mitigates the August swelter
is the swamp cooler’s immutable burr,
a straggling house that draws its water
from a hard-water well and flushes out
with the help of a crude sump pump.
Before the flatland is occluded
by the staunch of light at end of day,
I wanted to be content with all its surfaces:
weed, barb, crack, rill, rise …
But every candid shoot and fulgent branch
depends upon the arteries beneath.
The houses have their siphons
and their circuit vents.
The heart—I mean the literal heart—
must rely upon its own plaqued valves;
the duodenal canal, its unremitting grumble.
The brain upon its stem,
and underneath,
a network, vast, of nerves that rationalize.
The earth’s a little harder than it was.
But I expect that it will soften soon,
voluptuous in some age hence,
because we captured it as art
the moment it was most itself:
fragile, flecked with nimbleweed,
and so alone,
it almost welcomed its own ravishment.
I was a maiden in this versicolor plain.
I watched it change.
Withstood that change, the infidelities
of light, the solar interval, the shift of time,
the shift from farm to town.
I had a man that pressed me down
into the soil. I was that man. I was that town.
They call the chicory “ragged sailors” here:
sojourners who have finally returned
and are content to see the summer to its end.
Be unafraid of what the future brings.
I will not use this particular blue again.
—for Betty Buckley
CHERRY BLOSSOMS IN SPRING
I’ve already pieced it out in my head:
there’s almost nothing to go back to.
The wide flat palm of the prickly pear
outside Bent Prop Liquors. I kid you
not that the air’s so red, day’s end,
that it unlooses a fat ribbon of regret.
Yet the air does not move; it hangs
its squalid rags on the post; it poops
dirty bats out of the public
library’s colonnade. I wasn’t the first
kid you raped. In this indifferent orchard
where many a shallow boy got dumped.
I think of you often. I think of you never
so much I dare to touch my stolen twig.
THE FLUFFER TALKS OF ETERNITY
I can only give you back what you imagine.
I am a soulless man. When I take you
into my mouth, it is not my mouth. It is
an unlit pit, an aperture opened just enough
in the pinhole camera to capture the shade.
I have caused you to rise up to me, and I
have watched as you rose and waned.
Our times together have been innumerable. Still,
like a Capistrano swallow, you come back.
You understand: I understand you. Understand
each jiggle and tug. Your pudgy, mercurial wad.
I am simply a hand inexhaustible as yours
could never be. You’re nevertheless prepared to shoot.
If I could I’d finish you. Be more than just your rag.
LANDSCAPE WITH SECTIONS OF AQUEDUCT
If the crown of day is not gold, then it’s a marvelous fake.
Merciful present tense: if the brown grass is always flowing,
if the sun is always just brushing the dry hills, and if
last summer’s suicide is still a loner whose white t-shirt
knotted, so tight it had to be cut off his neck with a penknife,
then evening is the same bare patch and the same fat crows,
the crushed aluminum cans and the hamburger wrappers
or the ribbon of tire tread where a road crew hasn’t come by.
They have taken him away and I do not know where he is laid.
Among the soft cheat and meadow barley, a live oak begs relief
from the hardened light, the beating of its own gnarled limbs,
and the unrelenting rustle of its own beige blooms that tumble
together shyly like a locker room of boys once boisterous, now
called to roll and suddenly bashful, clasping at dingy towels.
Let the dead be modest. Give the tree, solitary being who feeds
on wind and the mote of another’s distant beauty, cause to brag.
Except that the kernel would fall upon the soil, it abides alone.
One guy peeled labels off beer bottles here; another climbed
the remaining concrete piles and wrote JUSTIN LOVES, wrote
STEPHEN LOVES, WROTE HANG ’EM HIGH—CLASS OF ’93.
Cabbage moths flickered in tansy and clustered broom-rape;
bore the pain of creation for a little yellow dust, a smear of light
on their fidgeting legs and the sudden buoyancy in updraft.
Ruin, by the wayside, you took as sacrament. You, abiding rock.
USELESS LANDSCAPE
A lone cloudburst hijacked the Doppler radar screen, a bandit
hung from the gallows, in rehearsal for the broke-necked man,
damn him, tucked under millet in the potter’s plot. Welcome
to disaster’s alkaline kiss, its little clearing edged with twigs,
and posted against trespass. Though finite, its fence is endless.
Lugs of prune plums already half-dehydrated. Lugged toward
shelf life and sorry reconstitution in somebody’s eggshell kitchen.
If you hear the crop-dust engine whining overhead, mind
the orange windsock’s direction, lest you huff its vapor trail.
Scurry if you prefer between the lime-sulphured rows, and cull
from the clods and sticks, the harvest shaker’s settling.
The impertinent squalls of one squeezebox vies against another
in ambling pick-ups. The rattle of dice and spoons. The one café
allows a patron to pour from his own bottle. Special: tripe today.
Goat’s head soup. Tortoise-shaped egg bread, sugared pink.
The darkness doesn’t descend, and then it descends so quickly
it seems to seize you in burly arms. I’ve been waiting all night
to have this dance. Stay, it says. Haven’t touched your drink.
BIDWELL PARK
When the previously withheld faces grew tough as flax
or softened into pliant pine in the umber wood, inclined
together, numerous, when the cobble crushed underfoot,
and pistachios cracked in their shells, grown heavy,
grown consummate among the nibs of leaves, then curious
seemed the stars, those nether eyes which scrutinized
each shape that stirred against the unlit trunks of trees.
He could say he knew the men he did not know. Arrived
in the cedar grove and parted, sated with little effort,
or left unsatisfied, ruminating upon such unfamiliar flesh
across the glade. Silent the approach, a fawn, fluid
through the damp grass, the current in the full creek
surrounding the mossy rocks, pulling them a spell
a little ways downstream, inevitable their deposit.
Thus he would peer the woods, and quarry eluded him,
sloughed that lustrous hide and slipped innominate away.
Retraction: there were times he stood the corsair’s nip,
gained midnight’s reticent stroke, the haphazard coitus
of loaded collegians stumbling the poison oak. Hermit
thrush or Wilson’s snipe. Something bolts the dark,
flushed from the thick rushes, that most temporal cover.
THE KIWI COMES TO GRIDLEY, CA
At first it seems truly foreign, like the downy brown nutsack
in a health class textbook: almost too firm, almost too perfect
to be edible. If it gives to the touch, it’s ready to pluck.
No robin’s egg, though you might nestle it in your hands.
A few more boys deployed this week. Under jade green vines
they crawl on their crusty elbows, helmets tipped, their
backsides up. And they all went to bliss in their little skiff.
You may never understand the intersection of small & large,
conquest & defeat. For now, miraculous surges simply come,
a series of peaks which are not quite the purple monkshood,
not quite the crusty, papillated surface inside an alien geode.
Consider this odd yield: overgrown berry with
its easy sway
and pubescent peel, how it will proffer its redolent fruit.
This mysterious being now enters you: to arms, to arms.
COLLEGE CITY MARKET, COLLEGE CITY, CA
When you come to a fork in the road, you’ve reached the limit
of inhabited space. That goes for most points on the compass,
leastways true north. And it is true, the pavement that splits
the difference, offers you half its lean sandwich, sanderlings,
stink bugs. When you just can’t drive: offers you a pallet.
The register sticks. The swatter will not nearly vanquish its prey.
Bursts its lid in geyser spray, a jar of pickled pork rinds.
Eats its way through tin, the green chile salsa called verde.
Dies one afternoon, the rat who had nibbled too much cereal;
and, though his location is vague, you can smell him decay,
up through floorboards wafting. Light a candle then blow it out.
When a customer wrinkles his nose, just look the other way.
Grasshoppers pitch themselves against the wire front door.
Nothing in the cooler they desire. They don’t want flan or beer.
SEVEN SKETCHES FOR A LANDSCAPE, UNFINISHED
1
The state, begun as a series of missions,
used native men & women as cheap labor,
edified through occasional public floggings.
As the indigenous populations began to die,
they were replaced by immigrants from China
used to build railroads,
with pickaxes and blasting caps.
And when the Chinese were too many,
the US Congress passed exclusion acts.
2
In Wheatland, hops pickers, fired upon
by Yuba County sheriffs and their henchmen
for attempting to protect themselves
against exploitation and unsafe working conditions,
retaliated by rioting; were beaten and cuffed.
3
In Cocoran, the Mexican strikers were refused relief.
Some infants starved. Some workers died.