by D. A. Powell
Like, how did he know?
I could have dozed through half a dozen shows and all the ads.
Even commercial noise
might have eventually been absorbed into my dreams.
It might have become my dreams.
But it’s hard for me to lie still (lay still?) while I am getting fucked.
Sorry.
It’s late and you been at me all night and I hadn’t risen from it.
I was tired.
I’m even more tired.
But now I’m up.
ORCHARD IN JANUARY
Like a ramshackle crane fly,
the limbs, the rusted harrow.
Itinerant workers
with pruning hooks in tow.
She had that first child young.
They cut him out. Tilled
each day: short, clear, & cold.
A smattering of hailstones.
What’s gone will be restored.
What grows grows in exile;
grows obdurate as any bough
that puts forth a good crop
and is sheared back, scanty
as the spring is populous.
ODE TO JOY
So many automobiles. It must be Friday night.
These are the golden eyes of catatonia of the valley.
Of. They are the lights of of. Their procession
is a thread of yellow ore
across one bridge, across another
confluence of rivers,
the ones that sometimes leave their beds
and leave the shambled houses bare.
Well, even to belong in this congested state,
you have to spend a little bourbon on your nerves.
They keep their low-beams on.
It’s part of of, a subset of belong.
Switching gears, to Slaughterhouse Rd.
or Garden Hwy., or up to the junction,
or out to the boat ramp at cottonwood Star Bend.
Everyone’s a little wet in the vee tonight,
they’re all getting sticky on the bucket seats.
In their humid zones, there are humid smells.
They stopped for eats.
Will everyone be fed this good in heaven?
Hey there, cowboy. Here’s your Whopper.
All roads lead first to Burger King it seems.
Or Hal’s Grubstake, home of the dudeburger.
This is one of those dreams that cause sleep-eating
in which, as we float across a tiny bridge,
our bodies, patty and bun, converge
and all we got to do is put the mustard on.
The condiments of of can’t stop your heart.
Of intimacy that flourished here, an outlaw,
just as the outlaws themselves had flourished
in the slapstick goldrush days, and men
who came from China without wives, and boys
who bundled together in the Okie jalopies, girls
finding their way together through the pass, and others
leaving Mexico or Vietnam behind
could reinvent the space they occupied.
Of teens, as teens must do, eating the potato nuggets
of cupidity, scheming them onto that hunting road
of dirt, whereupon the greatest intimacy
of of and in and through occurs.
Of all the random shots one young man takes,
of hit-and-run trade, the hidden features
of men with boogie-woogie on their minds. Their cups
of catsup and other dipping sauces creating little o’s
of transparency in their suck-me-off jeans.
Of horrible missteps with fucked up chums.
Of low desire. Of powerful urges.
Of release by one’s own adulterous hand.
Of and of and of the feeling.
Of somebody else should drive.
Push Push in the Bush is the title of a dance hit,
but it’s just as easily a country song.
Out there, in the dark, they have found each other
like lightning bugs, despite the pesticides, despite
the blights that hit a town’s periphery and stay.
There is a luminescence of all things.
Of all things, which are of a place.
The place where they begin. Therefore, belong.
MISSIONARY MAN
We must bear away the body to another place.
—Oscar Wilde, Salome
Then said I, Here am I; send me.
—Isaiah 6:8
The product of poor radiography,
this one rectangular window through which
the faintest of flowers might be seen.
As each plastered, vegetative eye awoke in traction,
and sought to be dismissed
from the unreliable dispensary to which it was tied,
so too did I petition to be moved
into any upper room that might have me.
Let the next who comes invite me so:
If night can take it, shall we thread it like a spider,
glance around its unlit cistern
complecting our moonstruck strands
toward the vortices we’ve kept from thus exploring.
Let him knock with a promise of books. Good looks,
cut-away collar, skinny black tie.
The pocket protector with his name engraved.
For the bandages were still to be unwound.
Had I ever thought about being saved?
No. I had only ever thought about being spent.
And unmended in my bones,
I fostered such attraction to this ardent host,
himself the aseptic argent lancet
brought to pierce me in my side.
It was his first penetrating glance
that filled me with a sudden surge of blood,
wrack, rent & bungle of my corpus.
Let me say I stank like the rim of hell in all my lust
and would have blushed at my own heat
if not for the shameless eagerness in his eyes.
The world is full of lovely but tragic boys.
Get me on the joy bus, I said.
Nobody ever really rides the joy bus.
He prepared a place for me in empty houses,
received me in the shaded summer lawns,
wrapped in our own light jackets at the riverbottoms,
hid in manzanita clumps, the brake, the brittlefern,
in the foyer of a Pentecostal church
where we took our gladness to spite the pious,
took the praise of God as an offering of our bodies,
each of us crouched in the doorway in turn,
mouth to the vine, lips to the eucharist,
flesh of my astonished flesh.
Jon, my elder; Jon, my boy.
The body is dead to us: naughty, then gone.
Suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Jon; I will kiss thy mouth.
Let him be born of every ash that glows
in the oil drums of winter parks.
Let lesions disappear, let brittle bones be knit.
Let the integrity of every artery be restored.
There is no God but that which visits us
in skin and thew and pleasing face.
He offers up this body. By this body we are saved.
MASS FOR PENTECOST: CANTICLE FOR BIRDS & WATERS
There is no cause to grieve among the living or the dead,
so long as there is music in the air.
And where the water and the air divide, I’ll take you there.
The levee aureate with yellow thistles.
White moth, wasp and dragonfly.
We could not wish unless it were on wings.
Give us our means and point us toward the sun.
Will the spirit come to us now in the pewter paten of the air,
the fluted call of dabbler drakes, the deadpan honk
> of the white-fronted goose, the tule goose.
Tongues confused in the matchstick rushes.
High, high the baldpate cries, and in the air,
and in the air, the red-winged blackbirds chase the damselflies.
Triumph over death with me. And we’ll divide the air.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some of these poems first appeared in the following journals: Alehouse, American Poetry Review, A Public Space, Barrow Street, Bayou, Boston Review, Catch Up, Cincinnati Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, Dritto, Field, Fourteen Hills, Granta, Gulf Coast, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Harvard Advocate, Indiana Review, linebreak.org, Nashville Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, NOÖ Journal, PEN Poetry Series, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Poetry.org (Poem-a-Day), Sonora Review, Southern California Review, Subtropics, The Journal, The Laurel Review, The Morning News, The New Republic, The Normal School, Tin House, TriQuarterly, Washington Square, Yale Review, Yalobusha Review and Zyzzyva.
“Bugcatching at Twilight” appeared in The Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner, 2011), edited by Kevin Young.
“Landscape with Sections of Aqueduct” was reprinted in Poetry Calendar 2010 (Alhambra Publishing, Belgium, 2009). “Pupil” was reprinted in Poetry Calendar 2011 (Alhambra Publishing, Belgium, 2010).
“Landscape with Figures Partially Erased” was reprinted on Poetry Daily.
“Release the Sterile Moths” was reprinted on Verse Daily.
“Goodbye, My Fancy” was reprinted in New California Writing: 2012 (Heyday Books, 2012).
“Do the Hustle” was produced by Court Green as a limited edition broadside.
“Orchard in January” was printed as a limited edition broadside by Bow & Arrow Press for Emory University’s Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series.
“Cherry Blossoms in Spring,” “College City Market, College City, CA,” “Landscape with Temple, Mosque and Little Crosses,” “The Kiwi Comes to Gridley, CA,” “Do the Hustle,” “The Fluffer Talks of Eternity,” “Pupil,” and “Almonds in Bloom” appeared in the chapbook How Must Might Stain, part of the Dory Reader Series from Small Anchor Press.
“Panic in the Year Zero” was delivered at the 220th Phi Beta Kappa Literary Exercises at Harvard University on 25 May 2010 and simultaneously printed in Harvard Magazine online and in the Harvard Gazette.
“The Great Unrest” was written for OccupyWriters.com. This poem is in the public domain and may be reprinted or distributed freely.
My thanks to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for a fellowship that greatly assisted in the completion of this book. Thanks to those who read and responded to portions of the manuscript while it was in progress: Jeff Shotts, Ryan Courtwright, Carol Ciavonne, Katie Ford, Sidney Wade, John Casteen, Kevin Prufer, J. Peter Moore, Jake Kelly, Austin Smith, Michael Theune, Peter Covino, Ryan Berg, Randall Mann, Cody Carvel, Susan Steinberg, John Beer, Matthew Siegel, Sho Sho Smith, Sam Witt, Rachel Zucker, Peter Kline, Luke Sykora, Christine Marshall, Andrew Rahal, Vincent Guerra, Joanna Klink, Luke Goebel, Walt Hunter, Louise Glück, Bruce Snider, Christopher Davis, David Trinidad, Max Andrews, and T. J. DiFrancesco.
And of invaluable service has been the assistance of Michael O’Donnell. Thanks, Mike.
D. A. POWELL is the author of five collections of poetry. His first three are published together in Repast: Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails. Chronic received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in San Francisco.
Book design and composition by BookMobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.