WAMBLE
Reynolds and me we roamed like vaqueros,
spat on the range, ate gooseberry pie
on checkered table cloth. A buxom blonde
with bouncing locks brought in a bisquit basket.
Old father Hubbard wouldn’t let us feed
until we lowered our pates and panted amens
so Penny the meatfed farmer’s daughter
calmly her words loured over us like clouds
while long the lank bookseller leaned
his phiz slant on the board and nodded
ably along I raised my stubble chin
and so took in the breach between her breasts:
like Christmas loaves, like partridges,
like banks of snow or gabardine.
Reynolds was later on to claim
he sniffed invective in the snapping
knuckles of the farmhands, sure,
but all was well and over the trilling hills
the churchbells clinked like ice-chunks
in that big-ticket manse of a hash house
by shitfouled water near the sapless tracks
on which Old George was flattened,
leastways his rendered smiler embossed
on strangely expendable two-bit pieces,
for how could those scabkneed ragamuffins’
pockets tinkle with mugs and buffaloes?
which isn’t to say they weren’t toughened
by threadbare denim or queer duck aunts
who fixed their shoes with cardboard snipped
from cereal boxes where black cooks beamed
and proffered bowls of steaming meal,
but none for me nuncle no for me neither.
Now see how one in a kerchief slimmed
and gained in cultural cool and hip aplomb
what she had lost in the crupper (which
is also good for something), still,
our corporate suits are taking baby steps
toward civility, which reminds me,
Reynolds, I said, we never do what we say,
we always talk too much and never get on with it:
we said we’d jump a train to Baltimore,
stow-away on a cargo ship to San Juan.
We’ll see those palms and temples of the south
before we croak. But as it happens
we slouched along and found Camp Crook,
a couple of rattlebrained galoots,
and no one nowhere, no, not anyone,
will ever tell our sorry story.
AMERICANS (MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND)
They come with shades propped like tiaras,
like royalty, says Reynolds, pushing up his shirtsleeves,
they keep falling down, he says, turning up another roll
sodden with sweat and fouled bleachwater.
What a way to make a living. A pidgeon beats
out of the dumpster like some greasy phoenix,
clank of bottles, fetor of beer, milkfat rice krispies.
Scared the piss out of me too, the bugger.
That’s what this town has done, he says,
lighting a smoke, made cadgers of the birds,
made their lives too easy, like under the Bridge
those ducks paddling fatly along like pontoons.
But isn’t that the nature of living things,
to take the easiest way? I says, and he flips
the cigarette to the other side of his mouth
like he was Clint Eastwood and the sun glaring
like a nimbus over his hat, sure, but it doesn’t
mean I have to like it. Look at that one, proud
as a peacock, lord of that pile of residuum.
You’re no poet, I say, a pidgeon like a peacock.
Meanwhile some genius in his courtly muscle shirt
left us a dead battery on the tarmac,
smack in the middle of a parking lot, like he figures
there’s no lawnorder here in Mayberry,
and that’s really what he thinks, he says,
look, there’s an El Camino with some screaming
retards in the back stopped dead in conversation
with some other screaming retards in an Escalade
fuckdab in the middle of the avenue.
Seven bullets for seven screaming retards.
But I know he doesn’t mean it, that’s Reynolds
for you, he’s just can’t stand the fact
that he’s good for nothing but this kind of grind,
he knows it and I know it, but thanks
to good oldfashioned human ingenuity
we can bury the facts in a slagheap of becauses
and even dodge our faces in the mirror,
except when we shave, when we do, at which times
we’re bashful like suicide girls with no beads
and boy’s hair dyed pitch and impeccant breasts.
UPSTATE NEW YORK BY AUTOMOBILE
Take those coal-gathering Chinamen, he says, dangling
like Christmas lights, and slides his finger straight
to skim the foam, or those Lakota Sioux
they rounded up like a bunch of knock-off Hummels:
We’re planted when they’ve tapped us of our resources,
when we can’t make the mercury budge its scant degree,
or curios, uncle-eyed in sepia prints,
praised for our wisdom and dancing, then scattered like dung.
In North Plank Tavern, under the highest ceiling
I ever saw in a fuddlehole, we got stiff.
The barman took our money and poured our lagers
in schooners where the sediment swam like sea-monkeys.
Monks brewed this stuff. It’s punchy like wine. So easy.
Well, I was way beyond easy, so Reynolds, he hied me
home in that tight little saffron Karmann Ghia.
There’s not much else to this story, says Reynolds,
hands on the clock, taking tree-skirted turns
as savvy as a gigilo under the hood
or behind her wheel, letting her do the driving.
The snow doesn’t care, or cud in the hinged cow-mouth,
rocks in the fences wet since Washington,
silos’ cracks, dodgy salamanders’ spots.
I showed him my poems, but Reynolds, he just shied,
blonde unbeliever with long-soured Mayflower blood.
OF DEATH IN THE HOUSE OF THE HALF-DEAD
The question is never should I or can I or when
but how, and it has to be quick, no chance to back out,
no chance of failure, he says, and stares through drapes
that have become nostalgic, so memorably ugly,
at farm equipment scattered like artworks: tires
long still, weed-bellied; tractors; worn-out backhoes,
combines, furrow ploughs; coiled chickenwire.
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, you only skewer them,
compass-straight through fields, random clumps
of trees no bumpkin scribbler oded, patches of snow.
He stares in the rancid cloud of hangover, eyes
chasing the clamoring rigs that blacken the banks
on either side of the highway, oily gutturals
loud and punctual; and here they equal ritual,
ground the wanderer like the tink of churchbells,
taillights at sunset melancholy, like candles.
Here I am wondering if he really means it,
and sip warm water from the clotted taphole,
bully through channels where a tenor drawl
is absurdly normal, like rips in a shower curtain,
a bald spot in the carpet, blanched and crepe-flat,
the bolted-down remote, the absence of spirits,
and decide right then and there, Reynolds, I say,
this is the place, right here. Let’s haunt it: shriek
by the ice machine, nocturnal god whose voice
is a glassy harrumph, by the front desk, out in the gravel
where radials come crunching and reluctantly stop,
blow out gray windows and the tacky drapes
with death-breath, boozy from some vague beyond,
make neatly wrapped soap wafers levitate,
make plastic cups buoy up and break the mirrors.
He smiles, turning from the window, from the song
of semis, and he says, there should be a law, he says,
no mirrors in these havens of the half-dead
who have passed from vanity into nonchalance,
from bloodwet life to strawy limbo. Hollowmen.
So he takes his belt for its heavy buckle and whacks
with a quick whine of lashwind and gladly cracks
his leaping reflection, the shockhole and its deltas
of tiny fissures scream once and once only,
an impotent exlamation, coward’s signature,
material fullstop for a weakling’s sentence.
It won’t be seen, but new bedding will be smoothed
by hands not watched by dead eyes buried in the sky.
THE DEATH OF ROMANCE
We walked over the hill behind the house
where Reynolds was whelped, heads stoned with lead
cloud, gray mist, smoke. My strange hands curled
like marionettes.
I swept my arm to refer to the square fields,
and fancied a battlescene. He just snickered,
but that was his power, the ever-present elbow
in the kidney.
I thought of Napoleon’s armies or some king’s:
a country quilt’s innocuous slide across linen,
the bloodless advance of logic and order
over stone fences
across the field’s furrows, wintered hard.
Imagine a skinny horn pressed to a mouth
still barely dry from its mother’s nipple, breath
from a virgin’s piehole
threading the brass throat, aspirates hallooed
in gold fear-pitch. And bullets punching zeroes
in birch trees where they stood like girls behind
the marching tyros,
white, switch-waisted. By that quick dismissal
he gave me the wrench for my silly machine
that chugged and coughed: faces that stared skyward,
eyes turned off.
SACCHARINE
Reynolds said Parker Dam looked a sight better steeped
in sugar, lime and salt. All those daiquiris,
pina coladas, margaritas: they sat in the belly
heavily like the drawl in drinking songs.
No spittoons, but you could smell the flannel,
the chaw-grueled sawdust, hear the specious twang
of leatherskinned and bottleblonde-mopped
California girls under ridiculous hats.
I was saying I took a girl here once, changing
the subject. Which was? She drank cape cods
and poked odd numbers into clattering cups.
Eyes applauded, fastened on copper-rivets.
Did you ever think you could have everything?
Yes, when I kissed her later. But that fancy was dead
in the chute, killed by a slow sunrise, back-strain
and headache, lemon-sharp light, lemon-bitter.
The heart is a mayfly, but a fool’s delusion
won’t cost him. See, the pendulum swings narrow,
closer to the pulling core, each interval
between soft clicks drawing toward silence.
GAIA THE GREEN GODDESS
I spared a thought for Gaia the green goddess
under the bridge where the Colorado seethed
with shadowy sucker fish. Knees to the chain,
I cast out pellets bought from a gumball machine
for panhandling ducks and gulls. Reynolds ogled
wandering hennas and washing-instruction tags.
Notice, he says, the eyes are dark enigmas
furtive behind reflecting shades because
in everything, Americans have it backwards:
soul-windows shuttered and kept for lovers, asses
out like bedsheets drying down Maple Drives.
Take Gaia for instance, he says, the deified
collective guilt of the not-me generation,
a fresh spook for the Olympian compost heap.
It wasn’t enough they roasted Servetus
or buried the living in the Dungeons of Venice,
drove Nietzsche mad or made those leggy blondes
crusade down boulevards in Sin City
with pamphlets and a balsawood cross to claim
if you don’t know Him you’ll gnash your teeth forever.
They make her up sexy and sleek as a pop icon,
the first tight-bottomed queen of the universe
with breasts like adams apples, jewel-bellied,
sweatbanded wrists and a bitchy middle-finger
saluting Yahweh and every swaggering cock
that crows at His command; but still she’s spun
of the same old stuff: hominian dreams of dominion,
vanity trumped up, dressed in a beggar’s togs,
contempt for brains and a cowardly wish to snuff them
out like tapers. There’s one of them there,
that knapsacked wanderer with her arms stretched out
like Jesus, tie-dyed sleeves dotted with birdshit.
THE BEARD
He could be all of us turning up at once:
a quetching chorus in the skull machine,
the I of yesterday in a fresh skin-layer,
or, as Odysseus said to the one-eyed giant,
No-man. Let him rein this Rosinante and tilt
at will-o’-the-wisps, shoulder the tongue’s slips,
the accidents of misremembering.
He has his shoulder to the wheel, his nose
to the smell of his belly-hole. He can lie
and swear, his hand in the honey jar,
slide through the rabbit hole, a greasy thief.
Let him come up in a flash of sulphur,
Gehenna-dragon, Mephistopheles,
and drop his poison in my ear, possess
each neuron, make me over. He was tall
in the snow-fringed furrows, weed-savvy
seed-finder and bud collector, gaunt Fagin
who got me sotted in the farmer’s fields
from a flask in his old topcoat, iconoclast
who hated poems and prefered the aphotic
mysteries in motors. I see him masked
in the light of a welder’s arc, my father’s son
who never was. But he is Janus-faced,
not only this friend of oily metal but grunt
and greenhorn, fingers chafed with bleach and fouled
water who haunts with fat birds in the stink
of scrapheaps. He’s my good friend, Reynolds.
