Dana Rushin - 2
HivesNot
far from now and not far from here you will look for ways to surrender. "Each time my heart is broken it makes me more adventurous" O'Hara wrote. But all lies, are at best, inaccurate statements. So this month, another one without intercourse, when a red moon came to me in that movie about a fist, and me, caught licking the salt from walls and measuring the water line from last years flood, I drifted back to childhood tea parties. The ones where the grownups stood and sipped pretend air from tiny cups as if grace could be imagined however extreme and love, unsure of it's rightful task. Then I had a kid. Trembling. Slippery but loyal who sat with her legs crossed below her reaching up with those same empty cups of tea. Beloved: Soon the interminable heavens will give back it's angels to the death walk first intended. And we dumb-ass Americans will think them either bees or Martians and stay in our hive homes. certain acts of magici saw the back of a bird today.
Not the whole bird, that would be a confession. But the glimpse of his hind quarters, his left foot the one he plants on the headstones of civil war soldiers. Then I thought, this is a sort of magic, the way flying compels us; how the jazz of it kick starts our reasoning. How Whitman and Miles Davis were somehow complicit in our planetary woes. How wanting to dance, and then dancing is how we choose the half seen. That's why I don't discard my old databases, My IBM, my COMPACT, my E Machines, my Acer. They clog my attic with their old songs, their old dangerous rhythms. I still have a SONY tv bought brand new in '87 and with the converter box it still shows a lovely picture. But it weighs 100 pounds and is too heavy to carry to the curb for bulk pickup. So along with multiple, wired mouses and old keyboards with sticky keys it too sits among the others. Sometimes we keep things because losing them is too painful to discard. Others we lose because keeping them is too painful to hold onto. Like broken snowblowers. Joel Osteen. Love. And all the saved photographs you took while in it knee deep. Then you slam the cover of the album shut which gives mortality to the entire bird. Then you close the attic door. Seasonsif truth be told,
there are no real seasons; no plausible connections to the cold. Only that at certain times we push damp towels into the door jam so that boneless mice might not squeeze their bodies into warmth. I wrote a poem last evening about their great migration: the onomatopoeia of it. How the soul of everything searches for that certain buzz that suggests the eternal voice. Then how that voice lays dormant, perhaps slothful until the image of meadows corrals the conspectus of learning. As if Lewis and Clark didn't think twice about having to eat the flesh of uncooked buffalo's while discovering the great North West then sat their foil asses on the ground, writhing for Pepto Bismol. This past hot summer burned up my lawn, so I fertilized it in June which burned it up even more. So I stopped doing everything and it became green again. Then the neighbors boy played in it's glade and ran for his ball. the acquittalThe afternoon O.J. Simpson was acquitted
we had lunch behind the engine house on Ryan road. Ham sandwiches and a loaded potato salad that had sat too long in the sun. Boisterous was the throng assembled, then disassembled. All the blond, slim white girls in tears. Some being carried, like me, for different reasons, to their cars |
BonesDad,
mother found an empty bottle of Royal Canadian under the seat cushion of the brown chair in the room she has refused to enter 20 years after your passing. Suspecting that you are like the corn in September and the psyllid and the cutworm have already torn into you. You use to call out "dead man" then smile as if we kid's knew well that empty meant that the man inside was gone on from the burning hallways. Or was drug from the teetering cliffs, or that Coltrane was there with you in that abstract hell place where old horn players and people who drank so much in dark spaces but hid their secrets in the tonality of the blues or in those many sequences with James Garrison making ugly faces, in that darkened tower where below the damsel is left to howl alone. This just came to me, so I thought I would mention it, that mother is old now and has forgotten how to cook. But shit like this makes her recall you. sucklessthey say of shame that it's capacity stays with you forever
and that's why I keep my poems in boxes. Because you never know when you might rise from the gurney they've strapped you to before lethal injection needing an Al Green or Coltrane album, only to stumble across something you've loved. Only that what you thought was black pepper was mouse droppings, but for that brief moment you pretended that black pepper could magically walk itself into your upstairs attic, course through the shackling of those last words and sprinkle itself onto what remains of sentiment and confession. What unwilling role will I play in the afterlife? What nomad will I meet carrying large cakes of salt to trade for the poem I wrote in 86 of thirst? I dreamed. I loved, sometimes hard. I cried out loud with the others who's fragile hearts the mouse too, treaded on. HeatGrandma pried the dogs apart with
hot water and probing fingers, through which, the wet grassy smear quietly avoids sentimentality. There's something mutually haunting about a backwards embrace. Dogs enter a dark place before sex. A thorny curved drifting elegance, that above all else, beneath the exchanged secrets of angels, just feels damn good. WisconsinYou've heard,
well over a million times, the story of alien abductions. Where each time the alien becomes smaller and the spacecraft larger. Tiny impish, caricaturist slit for a mouth. Eyebrowless, with no sense of humor. The one whose tiny body has known no American hysteria. No all you-can-eat buffets. No Ambien nightmares. No overdue mortgages. No three day rainfalls. No flooded basements. No Freezers and water tanks floating from the shipwrecked stairwell. No child support payments. No cheating lovers. Just calm and spinning lights, Pale hostages and silver exasperating nights. ♢ |