A Pretty Sight

by David O'Meara

  taken from the top

  of the bullet-notched ziggurat, each click

  an exhibit of the I was here, desert cam

  lost in silhouette against the level,

  ochre panorama of sand.

  Impagliato

  (Albrecht Dürer’s Rhinoceros briefly addresses the tiger shark from Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living)

  I’ve been trying to get you

  out of my mind, a rival to the crown

  as art’s most iconic

  image of an animal.

  With a half-millennium

  head start, I’ve preened on countless

  woodcut prints, a cathedral door in Pisa,

  a Medici emblem,

  and still am featured on tourist T-shirts,

  my splayed, unlikely toes

  outside the British Museum.

  It’s the same way

  you’ve got presence, kid,

  loitering in that cabinet,

  injected with 5 percent formaldehyde,

  your serrated grin

  trademark to an appetite so wide

  you’re nicknamed trash can

  of the ocean for gulping tires,

  oil-drum lids and licence plates.

  Hirst raised such a royal fuss.

  Outrage hooked the media as neat

  as the gaff that hooked you

  off Australia, cultural status landed

  by all that commission money.

  Dürer never saw a real rhino;

  I’m his vision of one they lost

  en route to Rome

  as a showpiece in the pope’s menagerie.

  A storm sucked the ship down,

  the trapped beast

  shackled to the deck.

  The artist played the facts a little

  fast and loose, sketched my hide

  in absentia with scales and plates,

  mounted a stunted horn

  on my riveted nape

  like a hairy twist of ice cream.

  Hardly accurate, but it shocked the crowd,

  half the battle in making a name.

  I guess raw profit’s why

  the master from Nuremburg

  wrought a woodcut,

  not a painting, guessing sales

  from copies wouldn’t be outcharted

  until the advent of Farrah

  Fawcett. And to compensate

  for investors’ losses

  when the carcass washed up

  against the Ligurian coast,

  they put it on display

  ‘stuffed with straw.’

  Talk

  I thought I’d see you at one

  of the shows this summer. If so,

  talk might have gone in a million

  directions, and been awkward, as we’d likely

  keep it small, complaining of the lineups

  at the beer tent, then finding

  a break in the crowd to slip away.

  Talk was never our problem;

  all those late-night think-tanks

  after closing the bar, cooking up

  subtleties on invented games,

  rules to ‘Quick Drinks’

  or ‘Etch-a-Sketch Portraits.’

  Though most talk was art – what might

  be good and where to find it –

  while we watched the floor dry,

  squashed in the booth

  with the lights turned low.

  I know you,

  so was less and less surprised

  when you sidestepped

  issues people tried to raise,

  and worse, twisted them

  into betrayal by your stubborn,

  bottled-up imagination. They

  were trying to show they cared

  even while you bulldozed into rooms,

  grim as a defeated army.

  Meanwhile, work is work,

  late home, five hours sleep,

  coffee, then a nap. You’ve missed

  a birth or two, the filled and emptied diapers

  of friends’ burping offspring,

  and I’ve moved, so if you ever

  picture me, I don’t know where.

  Mostly, when I think of you, I see

  you angry and mistaken.

  Almost daily, I bike past

  your old studio

  and the re-rented house,

  rooms where our unsuspecting ghosts

  still drink and smoke, contra Yeats,

  imperfect on every count.

  Silkworms

  Home-grown for extra income,

  they’re warmed in the watts

  of a standard light bulb

  till the egg forms a worm, small

  like a hair. Each one feasts

  on mulberry, a month-long course

  of shiny leaves, chubbing themselves

  into a pale, lazy wiggle.

  They wish to be a kimono cloud,

  ball of fog, white

  shrouds spun for their own ghosts

  as they nod off to a creaking dream

  of legs and wings. They wish

  they were metaphor.

  To let them stretch would tear

  sleek work, so each cocoon

  is dropped in a rolling boil, their

  lives pinched out like fingers

  on a match head.

  The strands are reeled on a row

  of spools,

  and the cocoons jig and iridesce

  until the corpse is undressed.

  ‘There’s Where the American Helicopters Landed’

  Sixtyish, wrinkled, Ling Quang’s hard look

  lifts from the gravel where we’ve stopped,

  the Honda’s kickstand staked

  to the road’s thin shoulder,

  our helmets laid like eggs on the leather seat.

  He points at the place

  near the silk factory where

  the craters are almost overgrown,

  green tangles scanned

  through his knock-off Ray-Bans.

  On the bike, I forget to lean

  through curves, tires

  eating the steep grade back to town,

  past the bridge again

  where a man stands fishing,

  nylon net like a smudge of mist

  that skims his catch from the creek,

  their fins struggling in the killing air.

  End Times

  In the tangled field, our boots catch.

  Barns wedged in thick weeds

  are beached container ships

  wrought in rusted brick, dust, rot whiff

  of hay bales. A black stork

  rigs straw on a transmission post

  that sags with dead wire.

  A wolf curls on a park bench,

  sneers through cleft lips.

  There’s a trace of skew

  in the oak leaves’ lost symmetry.

  The pond is hummingbird green.

  •

  The car’s waved through; a triangle

  signs the split where we yield

  to nothing but silence. On the bridge,

  corroded guardrails

  fence the phantom view

  of burning graphite.

  Eleven flagpoles spoke

  the drive at the only hotel.

  The air rings, metal

  lashed by slack chains.

  Pine and spruce glut the playground,

  split the ball court, sprout roots

  in lobbies and rooftop gravel.

  School floorboards

  warp and rake. The pool

  fills with ceiling tiles

  and flaking paint.

  •

  There are many of us here. A whole street.

  They went off just as they were, in their shirt sleeves.

  Around it, burdock, stinging-nettle, and goose-foot.

  I’m not supposed to be talking a
bout this.

  Everywhere we used shovels.

  Get rid of the topsoil to the depth of one spade.

  Changing our masks up to thirty times a shift.

  I would see roes and wild boars. They were thin and sleepy,

  like they were moving in slow motion.

  Something glistened.

  It came off in layers – as white film … the colour of his face.

  There it was – and there it wasn’t.

  Safer than samovars.

  What we saw.

  The wind blows the dust from one field to the next.

  Dresses, boots, chairs, harmonicas, sewing machines. We buried it

  in ditches. Houses and trees, we buried everything.

  There lie thousands of dogs, cats, horses, that were shot. And not

  a single name. What remains of ancient Greece?

  The myths of ancient Greece.

  On the one hand, it’s disgusting, and on the other hand – why don’t you

  all go fuck yourselves?

  We heard that something had happened somewhere.

  So you can picture it: a lead vest, masks, the wheelbarrows

  and insane speed.

  The ants are crawling along the tree branch.

  ‘In several generations’

  ‘Forever’

  ‘Nothing’

  They brought me the urn. I felt around with my hand,

  and there was something tiny, like seashells in the sand,

  those were his hip bones.

  Everyone became what he really was.

  ‘Walking ashes.’

  When I got here, the birds were in their nests, and when I left

  the apples were lying in the snow.

  That was the worst. All around, it was just beautiful.

  I would never see such people again. Everyone’s faces

  just looked crazy. Their faces did, and so did ours.

  We buried the forest.

  We buried the earth.

  We sawed the trees into meter-and-a-half pieces

  and packed them in cellophane and threw them into graves.

  They stood in the black dust, talking, breathing, wondering at it.

  You can imagine how much philosophy there was.

  I felt like I was recording the future.

  We’re its victims, but also its priests.

  When I die, sell the car and the spare tire, and don’t marry Tolik.

  You should come into this world on your tiptoes, and stop at the entrance.

  This person will be happy just to find one human footprint.

  •

  There’s a fecund smell,

  grenadine sweet,

  remnants of mutant hemlock,

  chestnut and wildflowers,

  or it could be

  cotton candy.

  The Fun Fair rusts.

  Stark as a double helix

  of DNA, unused scaffolds

  of the Tilt-A-Whirl

  lean and shriek

  in the refrigerated calm.

  •

  I don’t know what I should talk about –

  A ruined building, a field of debris;

  I’ll remember everything for you.

  Sing Song

  One day all those kittens and pups

  we drowned in a sack

  will come crawling back.

  They’ll drag up shit

  from L.A. to the Moscow underground.

  They’ll claw through our exhaust,

  oil and grease

  that’s decanted into sewer grates

  by generations of squeegee kids.

  Their scratches will resound

  like some turntablist’s retro stack

  that doo-langs

  as it’s tipped from a milk crate.

  They won’t be fucking around.

  They’ll hunt us down.

  They’ll get a fix and calibrate

  like the Hubble’s squint staring in,

  one eye a plaster cast

  from Pompeii, the other in decay

  like Chernobyl.

  They’ll raise a din,

  their yips like drone strikes, their howls

  a martyr’s mother on CNN,

  their meows the opinionated crap

  we generated in chatrooms

  so easily after the fact. Just you wait.

  They’re no Mutt and Jeff.

  On their tags there’s WTO and IMF

  engraved in gold. And when we’re found

  on the business end of their GPS,

  they’ll say, ‘Did you really think

  you’d give our sins the slip

  by filling up some burlap

  and tipping us in the drink?’

  They’re coming around, crammed

  up the yingyang

  with talking points and spreadsheets

  on every bailout,

  g8 summit, profit bonus

  and offshore bank we ever had.

  Doo-lang, doo-lang.

  How I Wrote

  You must change your life, but first,

  wait a few minutes. After all, Rilke couch-surfed

  from castle to château for a decade before

  his internal mood ring shifted to purple

  and signalled the muse. He finessed this later

  as creative possession: an impulse so focused

  he’s said to forget the time of day,

  though Wikipedia claims he never missed

  a meal at Duino. Big deal. Whatever

  it was, he could direct the spirit’s surges

  and knew how to work a crowd in its wake.

  Imagine him on Facebook. LOL.

  Precious, yes, but how not to be

  when you’re born in Prague and write

  about angels. In any case, you won’t catch me

  mooning along parapets and sea walls;

  not because I wouldn’t, but so far

  there’ve been no offers. I booked a week

  at Banff in a forest studio,

  ate scones, startled a ground squirrel,

  kept forgetting to bring a jacket,

  and one night heard blues harmonica

  drift from the aboriginal arts lodge nearby.

  I texted a friend who’s Ojibwa. WTF?

  He wrote back ‘Why don’t you go

  over there and ask them what they’ve got

  to be blue about?’ Touché.

  So I managed some edits, and through

  the skylight watched yellow leaves

  parachute the branched heights to amass

  as ground cover. No thought-fox

  raised its rusty snout, or gifted prints

  across the page, though a few fingers

  of cask-strength Scotch made

  the waiting a little easier. Paradox:

  to be perfectly here, you must

  stop thinking about it, then it’s on.

  Most days I leaf around trying to sidle

  out of the peripheral sight of myself,

  so when I focus again, I might

  be astonished, do something real, feel

  like Jarrett at Köln, overtired

  and saddled with the wrong piano,

  forced to work the corners we get

  backed into. It might be a thunderbolt,

  but mostly a mule I keep thinking of

  when I picture myself in the grind between

  the start of some work and its end result,

  but like an apprentice before the koan,

  I’m afflicted by the absent revelation,

  never sure if it’s better to change the light bulb

  or stare into the dark.

  Memento Mori

  A mariachi band has just begun;

  the cantinero muddles lime, ice and mint.

  Is it industry, folly or perverse fun

  to lounge here, behind my glasses’ darkly tint,

  reading elegies in the sun?


  Charles ‘Old Hoss’ Radbourn, 1886

  (Boston Beaneaters)

  Crouched in the back, the official team

  portrait, his gesture above a teammate’s shoulder:

  who is he giving the finger to?

  Players, those fielders from New York

  maybe, who taunt their league rivals with snorts,

  bored with delay in the April

  dugouts while waiting to pose for their own team

  photo. Or maybe it’s Radbourn’s

  scorn for these ‘pictures’ that’s lifted his digit so

  snidely, irate at the tripod and bellows

  holding the game from its opening pitch. Or

  managers maybe, or press who reported drunken

  brawls and philandering.

  Maybe it’s time with a capital T that faces Radbourn’s

  finger, a signal he’s sent from his age to ours,

  showing he knows we’re all stuck in a world

  made by palookas who dream the fast buck while

  playing each other for suckers,

  so why not break the measure this once

  just to say Fuck You

  and So What, it might be the only

  thing that’s left worth doing,

  the only thing we’re any good for

  in this unexamined life.

  Fruit Fly

  So slight, no weight, a non-bug,

  it wafts past

  like an ash flake bobs

  above a bonfire’s heat,

  its shape

  an ephemeral asterisk.

  Do fruit flies ever die of old age?

  At what moment are they living

  and then they’re dead?

  The only times I’ve seen them die