by D. A. Powell
long after the bulls have been roped.
FUNKYTOWN: FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE PLAIN
I wanted to be either the first man, unashamed of his nakedness,
or the angel sent down to test the will of man.
Take my scrawny youth, the mischief I made, the way
I faced my God down daily. He made me a slab of clay,
and I could be molded, kneaded, pushed through a Fun Factory™.
I gave myself to a lot of men. It was okay. I was okay. & them.
It happened when the canneries shut down.
The vats were finally hosed, the pressure valves
turned off and rolls of unused labels got warehoused.
That’s when the fellows packed it in.
And discontent was discontent to the power of ten.
Because I was a minor then, my record’s sealed.
Besides, who would want to know my shady ways,
except projectionists who caught me in their beams,
the lanky escapees who worked the dime toss at the fair,
or pulled the saddle ponies,
demonstrated the strongest knife. Who made their way
to the wood that constellated the valley. Oh, the many,
many balls a single man could juggle then.
And I would ask “are you my angel?” (I got that from a book)
((I was so unoriginal. They called me “Unoriginal Sin”))
The humor of it all fell flat. Humor does that.
S.O.S./Fire in the Sky and Funkytown. The rapture happened.
Exactly who most people wouldn’t expect:
I’d rather withhold names. Besides, you’d read the entire list
and never know the sass and grace of them.
Ladies from the D Street storefronts, boys from fields,
the pickers, gleaners, lifters, lumpers, men who shot cogged dice,
women on foodstamps, kids who got blown, who were blown to bits,
the wizened gents, dramatic boys who knew a man Bojangles
and they’d dance a lick. The quarterback. Somebody’s ex.
As long as there is room, why not let all the people in?
There’d be no heartache then.
We will outlast this time, my friends.
When I am taken o when I am taken o when I am taken
NOTES OF A NATIVE SON
I’m the truest sort of resident. The kind who,
asked to offer proof that he resides here, fails.
The guy who comes from someplace else & thrives
better than fremontodendron or another local shrub.
I am the child of Argonauts. I’m that Ithaca man
who’s been pre-ordained to wander
just like a common fieldhand, a vacher.
Lotus eaters tempt him.
Sorcery. Seduction. With your permission,
I’m going to make a lot of this story up.
Here is California, region of new mythologies,
the substitute for plot: a history pageant
covering every prospect of the valley
and its processions, from the tardy Donner Party
to the efficiency of the Overnite Express.
That was some caravan.
I slept a long time in the backseat of the car.
Which worked out well for me. For I knew little else.
Except to keep expectations low and myself high.
Who wants to go to Lodi? So do I. So do I.
DONKEY BASKETBALL DIARIES
The rules are fairly similar.
Dribble before you shoot.
Touch your own foolish beast at all times,
even as you covet the strong asses of others.
Don’t expect to remain impeccable
in this gymnasium—
incarnate, after all, you certainly might slip
a bit
especially where there’s shit on the floor.
Frankly, these planks are prosperous in shit.
You are an unrepentant wretch
from the moment that you tip off
to each moment that you score.
Go on and beat this dumb animal
if it drives him down the court.
That’s the type of player you’ve become.
Even though it’s scrimmage.
And novelty scrimmage at that.
The crowd came out to see you at your worst.
Get to the top of the key first.
My Saturday athlete, the donkey is braying.
Let me lift you into some triumphant dream,
wherein we’re entering the gate of a city.
Before I toss you into the warm brown loaves,
let me carry you toward that celestial hoop
if only for a few cloddish steps.
Were we fully able to enjoy each other’s agony
I’m afraid it wouldn’t be very much of a game.
A LITTLE LESS KETTLED RUM, PLEASE
The field commander, in his regal busby,
tosses his corded mace into the air.
He, too, excites the eye. Just as the color guard,
those shako hats and twirling sabres,
trot out our choreographed
tribute to something. The Hundred Years’ War?
Boom shaka-lacka lacka, boom shaka-lacka lacka,
I’m part of a fantail movement
stepping time in the eye of a peacock feather.
Hear me, up there in the bleachers?
I may be the least of all the piccolos.
But mine’s the tune you’ll whistle as you leave.
Now have all the mosquito trucks come by
to prepare the grounds.
And now has the unnatural grass
been freshly mowed and limed.
The drumline has reviewed all day
wheeling a battery of tympani without a glitch.
If you heard a chirping flycatcher out of place,
that was not me. It was the reeds.
For I save all my wind to expend uptempo
on Close Encounters of the Third Kind Theme
by the maestro, Mr. John Williams.
We do a scramble pattern then.
That’s when I imagine I am to be struck
by the first trombone, like a turgid wet wiener
thumping my shower bum
when coach averts his supervisory gaze.
Or, abject under the walnut tree,
he’ll make me practice the Overture to Tommy.
A junior who slides through valves like that,
who works the phrase with such aplomb,
will surely be able to play me something
from the Great American Songbook,
be it Body & Soul or Jelly Jelly. Anything will do.
Except I Can’t Get Started with You.
& just for the record I’ll have you know
I play on the football team, too.
I just don’t play on all of them at once.
NARCISSUS
Not every boy who desires fame gets it the way he wants.
Not every flower, leaning vainly toward his own face
reflected in a murky puddle, gets to meditate upon himself
more than a few transitory days, before he, too, molders.
You should have stayed wild in some valley town
if that’s the life you wanted. You can’t have it now.
Too many people know you as the affable but obvious
mussy downtown hussy. Blown limp by any passing wind.
MY LIFE AS A DOG
If I was a dog, the only three things I’d chase:
a firetruck, a ball, and my own tail.
If I was a dog, you wouldn’t be petting me
I might have rolled in something.
As a dog, I’d roll over for cheese. Not very good cheese.
I’d bark all night until you let me out.
You’d have to let me out.
Don�
�t worry, I wouldn’t chase anyone’s cat.
I’m sure I’d think about it. But I just wouldn’t.
Someone would have to hold me when I got my shots.
Would you hold me when I got my shots?
I’d sneak into the garden and eat the pears off the trees.
How would I do that? I’d be a dog. A crafty dog.
If I was a dog, I’d have run away by now.
I’d be a runaway. You’d think bad dog.
And when it was time to put me down, you’d be
a little blue. Then put me down.
A GUIDE FOR BOYS
The first knot doesn’t count.
You’re bound to fuck it up.
The rabbit comes out of the hole;
he starts to circle the tree. Halfway home,
he finds another bunny. So they tangle.
To build a fire without a match,
locate a woody-tissued branch
that’s light in lignin.
Also something to cause friction. You
may need to ask a pal for his assistance.
You might need to use
somebody’s shirt to catch the sparks.
Now you’re ready for the lean-to.
Now you’re ready for the closeness
of a makeshift bunk and shelter.
And in the night you make your meal
of foraged mushrooms.
Careful, friend. The edible ones,
with their sublime aroma of earth,
are what you’re after. Not the snowy,
bulbous caps of amanitas, no matter
how much they entice you.
Nuts are always nice,
though they may need grinding.
Try acorns, shagbark hickories,
piñon pine, or burry chestnuts.
Roast the flowerheads of cattails;
make a salad of their shoots.
In the woody honeysuckle vine,
you may find robins’ eggs. If so,
you might try roasting them in clay.
And why not devise a language
while the bonfire dims. The camp’s
a temporary site, you say, using
Navajo Code Talkers’ tongue.
What else you know? Dot-dot-dash.
Now add the old Caesar Shifting Cipher.
A dash of Latin learned at catechism,
in camera, sub rosa, in flagrante delicto.
All the signals made with flares,
all the signals made with hands:
Bravo: I’m discharging dangerous cargo,
India: I’m coming alongside,
Zulu: I require a tug, and
Uniform: You’re running into danger.
Vulpecula, the little fox, is in ascension.
The rabbit comes back out of his hole.
No one’s going to see what happens here.
We might as well be in India. Zulu.
Bravo. Bravo. Bravo.
BOONIES
Where we could be boys together. This region of want:
the campestrial flat. The adolescents roving across the plat.
Come hither. He-of-the-hard would call me hither.
Sheer abdomen, sheer slickensides, the feldspar buttes
that mammillate the valley right where it needs to bust.
And I could kiss his tits and he could destroy me
on the inflorescent slopes; in his darkest dingles;
upon the grassland’s raffish plaits. And he could roll me
in coyote brush: I who was banished to the barren
could come back into his fold, and I
would let him lay me down on the cold, cold ground.
Clouds, above, lenticular, the spreading fundament,
a glorious breech among the thunderheads
and in their midst, a great white heron magnifies
the day. We’d keep together, he and I,
and we’d gain meaning from our boyage; we’d pursue
each other through the crush of darkling rifts.
Climb into each other’s precipitous coombes.
Where would it end, this brush and bush, this brome
and blazing star? There is always some new way
to flex a limb and find its secret drupe.
Not only the hope of nature; the nature of hope:
so long as culverts carry us, so long as we stay ripe
to one another’s lips, and welcoming to hands,
as long as we extend our spans, to tangle them,
as spinning insects do their glistered floss.
This is not a time to think the trumpet vine is sullen.
Rather: the trumpet’s bell is but a prelude.
It says we all are beautiful at least once.
And, if you’d watch over me, we can be beautiful again.
LESSONS IN WOODWORKING
I’m in the clearing, now.
He is my master carpenter;
and I, his joiner.
We’re putting up a front.
We reckon it’s the front of a house,
and that we’ll live herein.
The raccoons haven’t micturated
yet upon the beams.
The pallid bats have not deported us
back to the hot garage.
We’ve got our treehouse to erect.
“Pass me that piece there,” he says,
although he leans across
to grab the block himself, and where
his arm just skims the knot
that is my shoulder, I come undone
a moment, spilling tacks,
and there’s a hammer in my pocket
so uncomfortable
I have to pull it out and drop it
in the grass. I will forget it
there. It’s going to rust.
He’ll take on more apprentices.
I’ll never learn to make
a miter joint. For one thing
I’m just messy with the glue.
And though I pound the damned
things down, my boards
come loose. My hinges stick.
My only saving grace:
I am discreet. This time I’ll meet
him by the twilit wood. I’ll
lift the rafters up. Just let him pound.
PUPIL
How is it that you hold such influence over me:
your practiced slouch, your porkpie hat at rakish angle,
commending the dumpling-shaped lump atop your pelvis—
as if we’ve one more thing to consider amidst
the striptease of all your stanzas and all your lines—
draws me down into the center of you: the prize peony,
so that I’m nothing more than an ant whose singular labor
is to gather the beading liquid inside you; bring it to light.
I have never written a true poem, it seems. Snatches
of my salacious dreams, sandwiched together all afternoon
at my desk, awaiting the dark visitation of The Word.
When you arrive, unfasten your notebook, and recite,
I am only a schoolboy with a schoolboy’s hard mind.
You are the headmaster. Now you must master me.
ELEMENTS OF A CROSS-COUNTRY RUNNER
The horned lark favors a bare field.
Yellow nylon shorts, willing to glide
into crimps and gentled spans, as needed.
As needed, the singlet in scarlet,
which is also a towel, a headband,
a scrap to sop up excess perspiration.
The axillary funk, odor of the groin.
In the hacked terrain, his jerk and lurch.
The way the shrubbery scrapes his knees.
The rare spectator, who comes
to this inconspicuous stretch
between start and finish,
to attend his rise and stumble
across small heaves of shortgrass,
who
hears the quick and slapping sound
as the runner propels his sleek body
forward, closing in.
MAGIC KINGDOM COME
Let in the needy, the glutinous,
the bald-headed children nearly posthumous.
Finish each thought with a sprinkle of pixie dust.
Hello, once formidable kingdom. Goodbye.
Usually, the days are crowded hot.
The line into tomorrow’s weightless zone
takes considerable agency. Baby strollers bump
against one’s anklebone. What a hangover one has.
Yes. One does.
Every choo-choo completes a similar circuit.
Zippedy bippity. Almost merry enough
to propel us into the firework-fretted fume.
How we do persist, ourselves and little urchins,
when every new attraction warns us off:
this is where the heart stops pumping.
This is where some big bad thing will get you
and shake the marrow down into your toes.
It were a barf. A blur. As pink as cotton candy.
Once more into the splash. A tiny choir shrieks
Please, Mr. Toad. The snug bar lifts too soon.
—for Vincent Guerra
SPACE JUNK
You are the sovereign who rides me; I am the ass.
We had made contact just beyond this sphere.
From among the planets, a tiny bit of space junk fell.
What would a cosmoplast look like if it were us?
Struck by its own discarded stages, which didn’t burn up
on impact. That’s why we need a more formal class
in matter. That’s why physics. And that’s why God
allowed us to make junk. He himself made junk of the void
and called them planets. A tiny bit of space. In space.
Alert the media that things are going to have to change.
For one thing, there’ll be no trip up the Irrawaddy.
What would Jesus or Roger do? Take it up the Aswan
cataract as a suitable alternative. If love may be fallen into,
so might the meteor crater. So might gravity suck us
toward the great black hole in our own unheavenly crown.
Oh, infernal orbits. Even they will not keep us. Falling.
SPORTING LIFE
Love from someplace far afield dismayed me.
The pop fly, brusque rondure, dropped into my glove