by D. A. Powell
for one easy out, for one chance to lead
with chin and shoulders high. The athletic slug
returned the sport of a dug-out’s underhanded night
that picked at downy fuzz and nap on tarpaulin
or sedately sought among the clover for a cohort.
Fleet leaf, so brief. Not even worth the time it takes
to say, “the Stallions trounced us roundly on that turf.”
He made clever with the puns on balls and strikes.
More clever still with brawn. He used his body as a club.
I nabbed his easy lob. The stands came scurrying down.
That queer joy of meteoric triumph shouldered me,
who spied his tinct, his quick red head hung down.
DYING IN A FALLOW
One by one appear the luminary pills
that flaw the blank black provinces of space.
Here lies my madder self, my nettled self,
spanning barbed goat grass, catchweed.
I might have assumed shearlings huddled
at the land’s broad flexion. I might have expected
some creature to adhere in kind, to straddle
its mate, not for all the closeness of the moor,
but that it open, beyond one soul’s duration.
& counted upon, certainly, the ambient gleam
of encroaching hamlets, now that their grainy noise
imprints the nerves of any living thing.
The self is such a bore with what it knows.
And maddening what a body can allow.
The weather has changed little,
but it has changed irrevocably.
Come, crude sun, and I will avert my gaze.
Hurl me over your shoulder.
Strewn dag. Cracked feed. Little lamb.
REACHING AROUND FOR YOU
Every invitation to lie back under concealing foliage
resembles in some way that earliest invitation
to wander the heady orchard in the long sharp afternoon.
Or to slip naked into the slough
with the wiry boy who peeled each apricot—
as if slightly uncertain how to partake of it—
and savored: dribbling it down his damp chest,
between his long clammy legs, and moistening
his whole delinquent body with pleasant juices.
The river rocks globular and slick,
the catfish with its wet dark skin,
and the afternoon’s durable glassy eyes.
I do not mind you closing your own eyes, reclining.
Summoning the image of a lover put away.
Because virtue is hardly what either of us saved
from our separate, desperate beginnings. And because
stonefruit from a tin is almost as good as fresh,
when the spiteful frost arrives.
GOODBYE, MY FANCY
For years now, we’ve been criss-crossing
this same largesse of valley.
It has provided for us, plenty. You’ve been
my homoerotic sidekick, Bryan.
Excuse me. Ryan. There. You see?
I am promiscuous with even my own wit.
& I can never keep you straight.
All the boys of recent memory
have been like this: accomplice,
adjutant, aide-de-camp.
I should just toss you my thesaurus.
There are words for the kind
of love we have,
though none of them quite suffice.
Well. Why be verbose?
This is—to put it quite demotic—
how we roll.
Whether stopping off in Stanislaus
so I could nibble me some ribs,
or taking the backroad up to Dixon
for your taste of hot tamale,
we’ve served each other well.
Oh, we’re a fine pair.
We also know exactly what to order.
Eventually, they kick us out
of the Silver Dollar Saloon.
Buck up, my little buckaroo.
Every Western ends this way:
Sunset. Chaps.
The valley’s just like San Francisco,
but without so many kissers.
The warbler has two notes
that he prefers from all his repertoire.
But there are others he reserves
for loftier joys, profound sadness,
as well as his most savage flights of fancy.
These he also reserves for you.
HEREAFTER
Shorty the bouncer and frog-eyed Dixie did it
up in the buckbrush, on a bank of the Yuba.
The banks of the Yuba chirred, and pewees caught
a belly of mosquitoes; they made their bed.
He made her belly full and the gas tank empty
the night he drove her in his pity truck.
Bright was the moon and the name of the town
where he worked was Bryte, but he: not bright,
nor she, nor child, nor we who drove, hellions,
to Bryte and back, underage, bribing Shorty
with greenbacks and underage Dixie, so we could
fill our bellies with drink, drive back to Yuba City.
Town without Pity by Gene Pitney on the radio.
On the Radio by Donna Summer. Summer in the City.
Running on Empty. Hot Child in the City.
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.
MIDNIGHT COWBELL
One Night in a Lifetime
They must have been fine woodwrights,
joiners, masons, to build a tavern sculpted
After Dark
like flesh which wasn’t wagyu beef; not prime,
in fact, it gave off a cattle company vibe.
Deputy of Love
Who laid a foundation for my ghost town,
then desecrated it as a form of public art.
Can’t Slow Down
The venue was torched. & then the men.
Their hot bodies. The arsonist’s revenge.
Shame
Audacious rooks will chase away a hawk
with notes this flat and this intense
All Night Thing
and reassemble with a cachinnating laugh.
I’ve never known this lurid bunch to quit.
You Should Be Dancing
DO THE HUSTLE
The true hustler had yet to be conceived, though his forebears,
lumbering freight trains, unlikely to couple, would find a way
to exert their will. Move in tight on that tight urethra.
Planning an accident, are we? You’ll want the full insurance.
Elsewhere: the mess I made was to be nobody’s boy.
One too many slow grooves with Aretha; one too many
pony kegs, and I’d have slipped it up with Joanie.
Fortunate: Jaws at the drive-in. Splattered sun visor.
Later some slick kid’s mitts did rummage my drawers.
He had come for the shag. He tried to stay for the swag.
Tonight, I’m packing exuviated clothes in a FedEx box
like the stillborn infant his parents should have received
in time to save us all the grief of his living. And yes,
I too was a bastard. Doesn’t mean nobody gets slapped.
ONCE AND FUTURE HOUSEBOY
Might have stranded you there
in the pumpkin dotted tillage of Wheatland or
the strawberry patch with your bum self sucking
every last drag off the cigarette you wore
like a piece of tacky jewelry piercing your upper lip.
But you are my little liebschen.
Refined as a packet of sugar I dump
into 8 ounces of coffee. I like it when you’re sweet
enough to peel the gums away from my teeth.
I like when we’re in misery together, accustomed
Let the cloying begin, my fine friend.
Do houseboys have houseflies? Something spews
white maggots still warm on the chaise, some
lone peacock preens in the sideyard, shakes
its feathers loose all over the portico roof.
I’m not pointing fingers. I know what happens:
you’re feeling blasé; you go to the convenience store.
Six days later, you’re disentangling from Reno,
pawning the only portable device you have
(which might just be your booty) and hoping
the locks weren’t changed while you were away.
I should be glad to be rid of such a profligate.
But you’re my evening lark. Up ahead, I am lost:
clouds smutching the drouthy stalks of corn.
My rake, unreliable as you are. Care for me awhile.
BACKDROP WITH SPLASHES OF CUM ON IT
Often I got stuck to the bottom of someone’s shoe.
You’ve got a wad of toilet paper on your shoe,
his friends might observe. Well what do you know
about that? he’d say. But let’s see how far this goes.
His turn. He felt a tickle in the back of his throat.
My turn. I went down easy as a good line of coke.
And so it went. He stripped me down
like a stick of good poplar used as a switch.
I got quite a bit done in those meetings.
Ten minutes here, ten minutes there …
You might use the mouth as you use the lavatory.
Now, that’s industrious. In that case, go ahead.
Our love was lonely as a handjob and as frequent.
I’d try to tell him that in a better way if I could.
Usually not.
Those cigarettes will kill you man, he’d say.
And maybe they will. Come to think of it,
maybe they will. That’s the way we talked.
We lived in an age of adolescence and irony.
Unless I’m thinking of another dude. That happens a lot.
How could you have anything but a vague memory
of a guy whose savoirfaire was delivered in the form of
I already told you that I think you’re hot?
Well suddenly the present arrives, and it’s a autopsy.
Maybe not that dramatic. How about the nerves
eroding. Slowly, the levee gives way.
Or maybe there’s just a bad bout of hail.
A surprising amount of hail, considering
it usually won’t hail here. Wind catches you off-guard.
Upending lawn furnishings. Overwhelming the poultry.
Yardbird’s called a yard bird, you see,
on account of it don’t fly.
When I see the flattened box of an out building
lying in a rusty rhombus on the ground,
I think of so-and-so. Or whojamadoojy.
That’s where I met him, the man who was it for now.
The Luke who was my mark.
The Matt who was my john.
So many acts. xx
TRANSIT OF MERCURY
At the beginning,
these were indistinct: the cortege
attending me my every astral night.
Before the sandy lake of light pollution
sounded its coarse tongue
across the seductive bottom of the sky.
Now you’re the one alluring planet
I hope to reach, before we plunge
toward our separate gravitations.
Never having had affairs in order,
I might not try to save you for the last.
Run, brief page, lest I should catch you.
I’ve got a heat-seeking missile for heartbreak.
& so do you. If there’s another side
of the sun, then you must hide there
in less than your underclothes,
emitting every molecule of thermal funk.
Thereby, create some other world that I
can be disclosed to, adamic, flayed of this sullied
atmosphere. Promise to take away all my air,
astride me, astraddle, & hurl me to oblivion.
PLATELET COUNT DESCENDING
Which is why no biopsy.
Which is why no root canal.
Which is why the blood draw
made that simple stick
into a plum branch bruise.
I’m singing Lady Sings the Blues.
Panhandle Park is a bit attenuated,
too.
Easy to spot the blackbirds
in the sycamores,
as the branches denude.
What protects us
goes away. I get it now:
you probably still go bareback
as you were wont to then.
I needn’t tell you check the mirror
once in a while.
I know you do.
And that you’ll worry
if, like facts and blood,
you, too, begin to thin.
BACKSTAGE PASS
The rigging has come down again. Just last week
you fed on the free candy from the bank’s candy dish.
Now you will be everywhere: Toronto, Ithaca,
Chicopee Falls. It’s a bigger job than you expected.
So many components to the trap drum set: pedals,
wingnuts, hi-hat, snare. Be gentle with the heads. Yes,
that’s what they’re really called—check the package.
Just keep the bandmates happy, mister, just bring them
fudge, the Bud they asked for, the Amstel Light.
Whatever you have to do to keep yourself: in the back
of the bus, on a bumpy road, the scent of their underarms,
their bobbing heads, patting the back of your wrist.
Did you remember to pack extra sticks, the strings
and picks. Did you check. One, two. Did you check.
HAVING A RAMBUTAN WITH YOU
How implausible, this metropole:
its foreign-sounding streets,
imported golden privet, feral parrot,
camellias broad and red, the blushing fanny
of another naked runner flashing past.
And us, how we hang together.
In the leathery palms, a couple of fruit bats
wearied by all the domesticated pears,
the orchards blanding the razed inland,
the hybrid gist upon the branches in the barrens.
Delicate-scented polis drew us into its syrup,
with its heady buds and plump upthrusting fare.
Come, let’s hunt for night’s banana flower.
Such are the words you put in my mouth. Like sport
& darkling wood. Feels good to have them there.
In part, because you put them there. In part,
because we share a purblind foray in an urban patch.
City of such heretofore unknown delights,
we’d rather pull its little legs apart.
The furry pink button I wrestle you for
splits underneath like the backside of briefs.
The anus has started bleeding and will not stop.
That’s one of six symptoms to worry about.
Symptoms of love? Perhaps.
Sometimes I tug you, too, with my happy teeth.
Sometimes, I forget to spit out all the seeds.
SUMMER OF MY BONE DENSITY TEST
The cottony skirts of the Matilija poppies
will wax old quickly,
as the panniers of yesteryear have done.
Carbs will turn to sugars, and sugars to fats,
so even the most hopelessly beautiful man
might soften and dwindle.
But isn’t everything impossible to resist
what makes the living possib
le?
And isn’t there a Paradise
in the foothills above Oroville.
Formerly unincorporated Poverty Ridge.
You’ll have to go with me sometime.
“Decent food despite remote location,”
Zagat might say, if Zagat cared to come
crunch an apple some slow afternoon.
You’ll get a choice of sides with every entrée.
You’d love the sweet potato fries.
In which case, I recommend the salmon.
And the wild salmon will return to the brook.
The hives will sit fat with honey.
The least shall be exalted. Wow, you’ll think,
that could have been so much worse than it was.
I die a little all the time. And so do you.
So do we all. It’s the little things
like that that keep us from getting saturated
in the panjuices of loneliness.
Otherwise, it’s a cookout. A veritable meatfest.
We light the charcoal,
and the charcoal warms our little hearts.
We are practically at the bedroom door of disclosure.
You’ve got me in this paper dress,
just the way you’ve imagined.
I. Boy. Tell. Telephone. Prompt, please. Can’t
tell, something something, delight.
Oh, I used to be so good at this.
Turn on one of your machines, then, Jacky boy.
Tell me how much I’ve got to lose.
THE GREAT UNREST
When I lie down I think, ‘How long before I get up?’
The night drags on, and I toss and turn until dawn.
—Job 7:4
You’d think, bedraggled as I am by the illness of my age,
I’d be able to lounge a little.
That I’d shut out the noise, as others do,
and I would sigh and sleep.
Let me eat Tootsie Pops, I’d think. Let me lay in the moonlight
and grow the opposite of babyfat.
Lie, I mean. Let me lie. I have had to wrestle with grammar
all my life. And what people call ideals.
I used to love ideals, but that wasn’t cool. Plus there was money to be had.
And ass. Scads of ass.
Now I forget. The principal’s your pal and not the principle.
At least I’ve retained that.
Give up your sleepless nights the man on TV said. Talking to me.