A Target

Don’t call me that other name,
that time-warp you folded me into
with your Movie-Tone death.

The stress lines in black and white, the crackle of speakers:
These brave lads aren’t coming home.

Near its source in eastern Turkey, the Euphrates appears to run uphill
where a bloody Kurdish child tries to eat the orange
I have given her in the rubble of her home.

When I awake above the Atlantic, my wife is gone, so I walk the isle
whispering her name above the hiss of engines until the door to the cockpit
opens and I see her there under the arm of the pilot.

Dear Mother,

He talks in his sleep and prays to your god he never believed in.
Last night he told a man he called Lucas to step down from the tractor and fight.
This morning after we made love he corrected my grammar again.

She got the rug with royal blue crosses framed in tan
that they bought at the covered market in Ankara.
He got the samovar
that they found in the shops of Erzurum
with an airman from the American missal base.
How much is that in real money?

The camera pans back from a fogged, green mountaintop,
and the music builds as he holds her there dying on eight wide-screen TVs
up against the wall
of a Target.

Across the aisle, more screens with talking heads:

Those who seek their other in pornography
may find their lives as viable as the tumor
behind the ear to which they hold their cell.

Sight Unseen

Beneath the swing set she fed
her little brother a toadstool.
Not to be saved by the reflection in her patent
leather shoes,
not to be caught up by the angels
flapping on a neighbor's clothesline,
not to be recollected through the green lense
of a Kool-Aid pitcher,
carried by a mother long dead,
she denied her innocence then and there.
O child,
O bloody cut healed then picked then healed then picked,
O storms who drive their winds harder in the night,
take her sight unseen,
orphan that she is,
into the witch's cottage.

And so the brother
sits alone on a log
in the park
knowing that something is coming
through the gastropod of his inner ear:
the spring on a screen door
slammed in the last century,
the crunch of a tadpole (still alive)
fed through the claws of a crawfish,
the whine of a child's pet ferret
crushed on a road in a D.C. suburb.

You there in the toll booth,
a fly is on the tube to your oxygen tank.
You there on the seat of that toilet
six miles above the earth,
hurry up, a child is at the door.
You there in the corner of that elevator
where a fight has broken out,
is that a tooth beneath your foot?

You there.
You.
There.

Before the Gander

I didn't wake up with a large pod by my bed.
On that road to Damascus, I didn't spot a UFO,
but a somehow pleasant hum fills me, as though
life weren't all that bad after all, as though dead
birds hadn't accumulated under my windows. Or
am I just imagining this interlude from these, of late,
patriotic mites scribbling on the blank slate
of my sleep, conducting their erotic wars
in my dried up snot and tears. Big and happy,
I’m a vegetable cultivated by a commander
of intergalactic tramps who records my snappy
come-backs for posterity. Before the gander
came this program shaped like a golden egg,
and monogrammed along its helix: GREG.

Wildlife Management

Bees and clover winter in the sad facts
that pepper sleeping children with doubt. Never
walk under a blossoming tree unless the act’s
reflected somewhere—a pool, the eyes of your
dog, a compact mirror. You’ve probably seen
the way geese lose formation as soon as you hear
their distant voices. Do you think they mean
to hint at suicide? Have you considered a career
in Wildlife Management? As long as you’re
down here on your knees, you might as well take
a good look at the grass. Is that a tear
or is it dew? Does it really make
any difference where the water came
from when the reflections are the same?

Those Were the Days

We found the Nordic wallets more challenging,
the way their flippers shook
when we opened them.
The blood wasn't as bad as with those
we abducted from the Argentine Mission
while all of the mothers were praying inside.

They were small but we cleaned them anyway
in the tidal pools along the coast of the Tierra Del Fuego
while enormous jackrabbits watched
through the cataracts of their sun-damaged eyes.

I remember Bertrand singing sea chanties
he had learned from slavers on the Ivory Coast.
Viscera flew from his hands
as he accompanied the lyrics
with lewd gestures.

They don't make money like that any more.

Pissed Is Nothing
after "What's Going On" by Pamela Gemin

It’s spring, it’s 1970
and we’re on our way
to Janis Joplin. Careful with
that water pipe or you’ll
burn a hole in the buckets
before this yellow bug gets
to Oklahoma City where Janis will
be drunk and yell pig
so the security cops drag her
off before she really gets started.
With a bridesmaid and a best man
in tow, this marriage is as new
and destined to fail
as I-35, cheap concrete already
buckling under them from shady deals
and kickbacks. The bridesmaid
passes the Ripple back and says
pull over I’ve gotta puke while
a grasshopper the size of a clothespin
guts itself on the windshield
and thunderbellies turn purple
then green to the west, churning
up their spring tornados. The new bride
holding down the smoke squeaks Dad’s
pissed we’re moving to Dallas.
The best man says pissed is nothing.
Mine won’t let me in the house
after he found that hit of windowpane
in the glovebox. We all know Janis will
make it o.k. with “A Piece of My Heart,”
so the groom guns it down the off ramp
and the world tilts just so for the
seconds it takes for someone to
turn the war off the radio,
turn up the Jimmi Hendrix
and keep the heat off our tail.

Wordsworth Parody

Daffodils

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.


Big Yellow Flowers

O.k., so I was wandering, I was lonely,
and I felt like a cloud I was so wasted when I saw
these big yellow flowers. I mean not only
were they big, there was a bazillion all
along the banks. The wind made 'em look like they
were dancing. I mean it was so awesome it
was hard to take it all in on the spot. No way
was I gonna remember such a buzz. But shit
man, later that night when I crashed, I thought about
'em again, and I mean like it was even better.
And I wasn't even wasted. It was fuckin' far out.
It's not like I remembered the whole thing to the letter,
but more like lying right there on the bed
with a wide-screen TV inside my head.