Dana Rushin

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the spirit of the deep keeps watch

In my daughter's old schoolyard, the building boarded up now
with curly dock and eclipta growing thru the brick walkway
like those brown folk in Gauguin's Polynesian journeys,
next to the chop shop that, according to Ms. Walker, was
raided three times this calendar year. She makes a motion
with her teeth out, of engines and transmissions sitting in
their oil and trans fluid like a kind of burgundy blood that 
will not dry. The posts for the wire fencing standing erect,
one bent by an Alero in sudden reverse; the fence long
stolen by the scrapers. Nearest where the pit-bull strains his chain
between blue moons and ambulance sirens; it is his
ceremony of interring. His way of finding freedom and
perhaps some interlude of love. What else could it be?
What else can anything be but love if you do it all the time?
If you do it until it chokes you?
​

when i fell in love i pulled the front of
​the house off

because I was scared, again, of being injured; of the sound.
In that way you fear pulling too hard on the zipper

of the sweater a dead aunt embroidered. Or looking 
at the sun too long as if the eyes could kill themselves without
​     your skull being aware.

Because this time, I want more workmanship
which is the same as demanding excessive delicacy.

Before I went to all places slow since a lonely person goes
everywhere slowed down.

Before the demons of self-doubt come from behind
the dresser where the top of the Jergens lotion still rests

on it's side like the hull of a shipwreck. Or from behind
freeway signs, to wag their fingers in my face 

and say how silly you are to think it was love in the first place
and not just the house being spun on the fingertips of a
​     Sinbad dragon

interminably homesick for the sea.
​

Apollyon

I'd like to trade my Taurus for a pickup truck
so I could have less room in my garage for your
mothers furniture. That way the final

strings to the horizon will be broken and I can
reach past that bottomless heart you share with irony
and Colorado-ness.

And I will hear you when you ask me again,
what poems have done for me; how have they
changed the workings in the night? And I 

will tell you again about energy. Of how effortlessly
one can become a swallow,
a crocus blossom or a beatup ballerina.

And with my radical fist raised, you will kiss me 
beyond all entropy, drag me by my apron thru the house
and free me

from this magic spell I've woven.
​

for some Americans passing

Before I get too comfortable on your couch,
pull my Bostonian's off, slide
my feet, still twisting in those brown
dress socks, over the Saxony rug
your mother washed with Tide,
the spot your dad would sit eating his
dinner and rooting for the Pirates,

and if you could unearth the origin of everything;
shadows, the refusal to accept as true
that all our dad's have gone on now,
yours being the last to go
but needed two live-in nurses,
to get his story out perhaps. To
document the stuff younger minds quickly
forget.

Then we got the call, and it's always a call,
not a flyover drone or a Mitsubishi A6m Zero
(where you could see the pilots goggles)
in that battle of the eastern Solomons in '42.
Or a glistening sign on the side of a goat
announcing your passing.

Or any Greek goat, naked but unharmed,
walking through that order of peonies,
then turning to suckle the baby Zeus
as Amaltheia did, nursing him with milk
in a cave on Mount Ida. And like all
the nurses I've known, forever

placed among the stars.

Tornado Watch, 1963

This, is where Grandma pointed:
A spot on the orange butterfly wallpaper
where Papa splattered; his Tip Top
cigarette papers and the tin
of his half full Prince Albert
crimp cut, the last thing he held.
"Their Gods ridiculous and themselves
past shame" Milton wrote. Because
as you grow older
spots on walls can transform themselves
like little children getting over the
measles. Is there any greater
scatter of chickens into their
wire house than wind? Longer this
time than normal but their little
thin asses taking position.

I've grown now to compare the
diaphysis and epiphysis of all things:
The Blackened spirit that brings forth life.
The end of sorrow. How hippie and
with such impractical sadness the explanation
of the locomotive is. "This is where the
kitchen was. And in this spot, right here
next to the overturned cow, was where we
took our meals for 43 years". Even in
the hollow dark, the sadness wore on.

pink job:

I had a girl who,
from a newborn child, loved pink.
So now I love pink. I have a pair
of pink pants. Some pink shoes.
A pair of pink Scooby Doo headphones (willed to .....me).
The neighbor girl wears her hair in
a pink bob.

Sometimes the outline of night is pink.
There was pink in my brother-in-laws casket.
The pathologist showed us
the model of the healthy pink  lung.
His was not that color.

The insides of 93 percent of the
vertebrates on the planet earth is pink.
I don't think I like frogs much. But
don't they burrow in the mud and sand
in their neo-Darwinian mornings
with pink vertebrate on their sticky tongues.

I went to Washington DC with my folks
where the declaration of independence
was under a glass casing. The years had
turned the corners of the document pink.
Oh shit! The dove bar swimming in this

tub of soil and excretory skin is slavishly
devoted
to washing me pink. Pink hospital gowns
are worn by the women who
bring my towel.

Dana Rushin's profile
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Select and Audience

Nope. no more love poems from me.
Not a single one pearl shaped and pinned,
ankle length like quick impressions made the
pedal-pushers hold inside of me. 
It's my shibboleth I will say to
you, my truism; how I felt
when you want to mean a painful
thing which floats as a myth

like pushing a large stone in front of the garage.
Like having to go to work
knowing that a huge rock is there;
Right there.
Like tearing up stuck with the
motor running and your
cigarettes. Like first
feeling hungry, then going
to a sudden sleep

Like Sexton in her mothers finest mink coat.
Yeah, just like that.
Embodying beauty and translucence 
just like that.
​

i go about pretending

Most of the time, I go about pretending
that there is a part (though granted a small part)
that wants to be tied up to the bed-post
and my naked ass whipped

while I plead that the dominatrix invite me
home for new poems. Especially on those
days when I've slept too long on my face
and the blood wells up behind my eyes.

See,
it's not always the heart;
Sometimes the mind breaks as well. Because to
be separated hurts to touch your elbow
on the hot roof of it

and loneliness makes the room dark
and the furniture licorice
and the sofa a too tight corn roll.
And to that resounding that dragged me to it's lap:

Please stop! I beg of you. Or in other words,
Please don't/
​

in season, peaches

And soon,
the peach season will be over
where we will only get the unrealistic ones,
the ones you put in paper bags, for that incredible few days,
to soften. Though this process is as highly improbable a
supposition as landing softly in a hot air balloon.
What Grandma called voodoo, ancestor worship,
the chemical action of bones. Can you imagine the
hot talk? The panicked crematoria chatter?
What if,
it is true,
what the others have said about going quietly?
Is a pit the same as a heart? As kids, with bricks,
we would crack them open to see what the center
of the universe held, and each time, there was
nothing there. Just disappointment;
the burden of centuries of evolution,
voltaic white,
folds of coil.
Bewitched, one could surmise,
is the hardest thing for fruit to understand.

Cali. and Me

I had heard that California
had burned to the ground, that through the cinders,
the fine granules seen in the cross sections
of the virion
 
helicopters dropping bales of water
like a hawk letting go of a pigeon
she refused to eat.
 
Over and over the light by an arc made.
Teacherly, in that sort of olympian way.
Clay, as my father called him,
 
still trembling in 02 (which we refused
to see through); the sudden ardor of youth
is the wine we drank. The architectural
 
quick feet shuffle. The rope-a-dope
delirium of frenzied fiend strata. Then a man
lay still. His eyes wide open but dreaming
 
of a sudden shining. A hot calm. Sandy beaches,
volleyball, and little dogs running through the shoals.
I had wondered was a wolf burned out, an owl family?
 
From my back window, I heard the firebomb thrown.
Saw the carnage, the Red Cross vests. The sirens.
Heard they owed the dope man money.
 
Which are the astronomical fires
of another poem.

Oto

I grew up believing that Pygmies
were little short Americans who,
fed up with cultural materialism,
hid away in jungle overgrowth
 
dressed in what remained of
the animals they beheaded. That they promised
each other, around a still flickering
fire,
 
to kill themselves before returning to
Chicago's south side or Detroit's east
side. Not now. Not with the taste of
the simplier life so fresh.
Not when clean death suggests
a drifting from human to conglomerate
flower cluster,
 
where the dead are not passed away
but departed to the unskeptical land
of deities and truth-tellers. That land where
only serpents die off. Not the daily
processionals of young boys
 
clawing at their neighborhoods
in the brightest blues and reds,
defending the motionlessness of
the impure air, waving 45's
at some mythical foul future; promising
 
revenge in the tiniest of candlelight vigils.
Yet for so long
I understood, reluctantly,
this concept of borrowed space; I mean,
the precepts of being mad. That
 
poetry, when done with aggression,
takes up such little space.

this time, lets give a name to fate

Easily
a runaway train
could jump the tracks and kill you.

Two old lovers in a garden hugging?

Not so much.
​

Go to page 2 of Dana Rushin's poetry

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