Bill's Tavern Pastoral
Outside, I saw
in all of its dumpy, serene glory,
Cheney, WA. Through the window
of Bill's Tavern an orange sun
smudges my evening, September
in a new place. A dust storm
wraps the sky in blur blankets
when I sense, somehow, the electric
boiling inside myself, nerves shifty
in the dust and brown décor. Turgid
sky of lukewarm milk
and gray lint: pink fists of cloud
struggle in the turmoil, slug it out
about space and time.
Below, yellow and mute, shorn hills
still glow like paper lanterns
cradling the core of earth:
elbows and arcing back,
belly forms all
jostle to define the planned patches
of rolling farmland.
The bar looks out
on stout grain silos, silent
as Protestant church pews between prayers.
A railroad sneaks by
as if with that last watery Rainier
tipped back for good
we're going to be out of here
soon, ready to roll along the iron lines, spin
our wheels of boxcar dreams. I long
for graffiti of the heart, and as I sip
a virtual moonscape rubs against the language
of horizons. I want to shut up
about past lives and hear the jazz of tractors.
But it's here inside the hurricane prose
of the bar that I can still listen
as the tavern talks
around me. I'm going to roll,
she chirps. Snake eyes and sixes
for jukebox money. Her man speaks
of how Hindus do it that way.
And overheard: Lock them all up, out of sight
and then, Just one more for tonight…
I hear the cue ball is more certain
than Patsy Cline on matters of true love,
so I smoke a third Lucky Strike.
If that were my daughter,
I'd kill him, says Jim in town
from Alaska, sawdust and grease in his beard, and maybe
I would, too, though not tonight.
Desert of Indirection
Your pickup stalls in Leaves of Grass, the clutch
like a bad line break. You hoof it to shelter,
a roadside ditch. Weeds and winds tell you
to smoke up Lucky Strikes, then breathe in
the explosion of stars. Get up, you say
to yourself, be the unrolling of words
out of a fishnet stocking.
The Ford in the mint fields -- blossoms
leaning into the wind, bringing knees
to lonely places: light of
the first page. Turn to
passing cars with night
inside the gaze of each passenger:
sweatshirts zipped up
like cocoons. The lake
of your smile.
Thoughts worn out
like old fishing line, tense
and ready to snap.
Bad Safari
Here, help me remove
the poacher's arrow.
Wound me, I heal.
Increasingly fragmented
in this territory,
this functional wild.
An orphan, I miss
too much.
Life's a mixture
of what's human
with cracked coconuts. Me?
Still shy and angry
about losing
dreamlike scenes:
a mud bath and blankets
of night, elephant beds
near Nairobi,
starlight simplicity.
Wild counterparts
and memories, traumas
in South Africa.
Small radios
perch in the arms
of precocious kids,
establishing position
in their mammalian brains.
Outside, I saw
in all of its dumpy, serene glory,
Cheney, WA. Through the window
of Bill's Tavern an orange sun
smudges my evening, September
in a new place. A dust storm
wraps the sky in blur blankets
when I sense, somehow, the electric
boiling inside myself, nerves shifty
in the dust and brown décor. Turgid
sky of lukewarm milk
and gray lint: pink fists of cloud
struggle in the turmoil, slug it out
about space and time.
Below, yellow and mute, shorn hills
still glow like paper lanterns
cradling the core of earth:
elbows and arcing back,
belly forms all
jostle to define the planned patches
of rolling farmland.
The bar looks out
on stout grain silos, silent
as Protestant church pews between prayers.
A railroad sneaks by
as if with that last watery Rainier
tipped back for good
we're going to be out of here
soon, ready to roll along the iron lines, spin
our wheels of boxcar dreams. I long
for graffiti of the heart, and as I sip
a virtual moonscape rubs against the language
of horizons. I want to shut up
about past lives and hear the jazz of tractors.
But it's here inside the hurricane prose
of the bar that I can still listen
as the tavern talks
around me. I'm going to roll,
she chirps. Snake eyes and sixes
for jukebox money. Her man speaks
of how Hindus do it that way.
And overheard: Lock them all up, out of sight
and then, Just one more for tonight…
I hear the cue ball is more certain
than Patsy Cline on matters of true love,
so I smoke a third Lucky Strike.
If that were my daughter,
I'd kill him, says Jim in town
from Alaska, sawdust and grease in his beard, and maybe
I would, too, though not tonight.
Desert of Indirection
Your pickup stalls in Leaves of Grass, the clutch
like a bad line break. You hoof it to shelter,
a roadside ditch. Weeds and winds tell you
to smoke up Lucky Strikes, then breathe in
the explosion of stars. Get up, you say
to yourself, be the unrolling of words
out of a fishnet stocking.
The Ford in the mint fields -- blossoms
leaning into the wind, bringing knees
to lonely places: light of
the first page. Turn to
passing cars with night
inside the gaze of each passenger:
sweatshirts zipped up
like cocoons. The lake
of your smile.
Thoughts worn out
like old fishing line, tense
and ready to snap.
Bad Safari
Here, help me remove
the poacher's arrow.
Wound me, I heal.
Increasingly fragmented
in this territory,
this functional wild.
An orphan, I miss
too much.
Life's a mixture
of what's human
with cracked coconuts. Me?
Still shy and angry
about losing
dreamlike scenes:
a mud bath and blankets
of night, elephant beds
near Nairobi,
starlight simplicity.
Wild counterparts
and memories, traumas
in South Africa.
Small radios
perch in the arms
of precocious kids,
establishing position
in their mammalian brains.
