Giving Thanks

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Ranked about the table,
bricks in the mortar of tradition,
we wait to exhume turkey’s corpse
centered in silver bezel,
great scarab cabochon dismembered
with ravenous pre-grace gazes.

A dull pop. Drumstick wrenched?
Lower jaw unhinged? I wonder
who will get the turkey.
Two forks stab
inflicting mortal wounds
in a mound of oyster stuffing.
Amen.

Brother-in-law begins a joke,
another in a daylong concatenation
of obscenities and slurs.
His sister’s eyes roll back
as she yawns for laden fork.
I look for a membrane to flick
from the ductless corner of an eye.
But she senses no danger from headless
bird, or chewing, joking brother,
who punctuates with glottal plosives
as bird-flesh torn and sheared,
plunges to porcine bowel.
Punch line. Eighteen smiles,
six reproachful glances.

Another slice, another ladle
of good gravy, and good God,
another joke.
Yawning sister tries to tell
of a tragic Appaloosa.
Would have been a champion.
Another sister of daughter’s GPA.
This is reunion, after all.

Another pop.
I notice jaws now tire
of only chewing,
conversing with tablecloth,
but joker persists, solicits attention
with quick strings of one-liners,
then launches his story;
“and so this cowboy,
he says to the sheepherder-”

Pumpkin pie, apple cobbler,
a magnum of cheap Chablis,
complimentary groans,
matrons insist upon dessert.
Grandkids eat from trays,
trade faces, wrinkle noses.
Two laugh at their uncle’s jokes.
Father O’Malley arrives
bearing blessings:
“hoc est corpus, hocus pocus…”
Ensanguined pleas
for the lawyer, the teacher,
the millionaire,
but skips the lost, strayed,
tainted, and unbeliever.

Joker switches gears;
”and so this Rabbi,
he says to the priest-”

Sun

Mixed Media / Bob Evans

Billy-Joe and Antoinette

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She concerns herself with symmetry,
of snowflake and tourmaline,
thrum of a mythic dance.
Her breath; a sonic intonation
of visions in a leaf.

He hangs out in foothill jumble,
turned sod, dust;
sees himself in stratigraphy of clays
while smoking ruts of war-wings
seer scars in his sky.

They meet in dotcom’s ether-chambers,
of unknown X and Y
ricocheted off satellites,
as refracted anti-matter
caught in nanotube and cache.

They touch, in shocked-quartz moments,
in cryo/pyro pools,
sip on virtual Chardonnay,
then dissolve in mud-pot pixelations;
brief collisions in a fossiled space.

Drag Racing in Antarctica

Why whiskey should be classified a vegetable.

Felix Catt flew through aether
as television's first image.
We all knew it was conspiricy.
We are so hard to foolhard to fool,
so geologically fresh.
As Americans,
we can stare anyone down.

I think I've lived here forever,
dancing on Charon's raft
where everyone deserves an Oscar
despite papal edicts
for the baptized and blessed.

I shall opt for Excursion du Lethe,
watch the sharks
as they wiggle the water fat-finned
earning frequent swimmer miles
while Vienna's bakers
listen for larksong
and tunneling Turks,
shape croisants as scimitars.

What relief to know
we are all aristocrats
spurning Procrustus' spare palette.
We are, with biblical pedigree,
symbols of power.
Captains quite capable
of disdaining lesser mammals
and starvation's Mozarts
no matter that from here on the raft,
reflected in this quantum pool,
we see through
our edifice of anthems.

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Two Horses

Bob Evans Photograph

Lunkers

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Betting rich flesh
agianst times of drought,
deep ice,
the big ones hold
to dark water where
amber light goes gray,
cools and slows.
Moving from pool to pool,
they wait with needle teeth
for weary, broken, or careless
to quit swift current.

Rising from shadows
at 17th and Broadway,
silver Rolls glides
into the flow,
angles upstream,
cross-current.
Returns to shadows.

Malinche

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In a land where your children
spit the name La Malinche,
your bones lie unmarked,
unflowered in a secret place,
perhaps the foot of Popocatepetl,
or Iztacihuatl.
Names that flowed from your tongue
in liquid Nahuatl song.

Maybe in a must earth
shallow under El Zocalo
where you bore the hairy,
fetid weight of Cortés
and gave birth to a people
whose faces pucker about their eyes
as they expectorate:
Eve, of Culua-Mexica,
Helen, of Tenochtitlan,
La Chingada.

Perhaps they leach
in the heat of Potonchan
where you spoke another tongue
like breath through a flute,
like water falling.
Can you wince
ten-thousand times a day
and still forgive your children
as you forgave your royal mother
for selling you to el puerco,
who gave you and gave you
to other pigs.

Can your ghost find sleep
in the cool breezes off Texcoco
where you stood between two empires,
conquered both and wed the words
traitor and translator in dialects
you did not live to hear?
Does knowing you gave birth
to Paz, Neruda, Vasconcelos
give you some small quiet?
Did Diaz ever say he loved you?
Would he sometimes call you
Doña Marina to your face?

Now, only the Vulcan lovers
Smoking Mountain and White Lady
know who you really are,
woman of this place,
where the dust of your bones
is trod by donkey hooves
and the callused soles
of your Mestizo children
who slaver your name.
Where only the Jaltipan
Iguana eaters hear you
weeping for them.

Red Horse

Bob Evans Digital Art

Today

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At dawn I awakened
and covered the ground
like flood water,
looking under boulders,
behind clouds,
into fine sand
smoothed by bullets
and ice.

Noon, I wondered
at chimps thrashing brush,
bombs falling on hooches.
Poked about for old tusk,
shed antler,
agatized bone.
Swam in ink dried yesterday
at Melikhova.

This evening, smowmelt and wind
expose winterkill.
Between stiff limbs and death-grins,
larkspur and paintbrush
push from new loam.
I search for wheatgrass, morel,
scratch for placer and beryl.

Tonight, I will sleep.

TheSuitPie

Bob Evans

Coercion

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She said:
You make me feel stupid.

I asked:
How could anyone make anyone
feel stupid?

She said:
See? You're doing it again.

Lessons

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My father, the cougar,
came from shadows,
danced with deer and chuckar,
shared kills with magpies,
schooled me in swirls of leaves,
scratched lessons in gravid streams.
To discern white tracks
of snowshoe hare.
To listen for the sparrow.

Taught me life is for the dancing,
not the having danced.
Disappeared when winter
sank to spring.

Red Dance

Bob Evans

Saada Shoe-Fly Pie

Framing Space

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Giving weight to blade,
an aromatic curl arcs
from cedar planed to join
philosophic changes in a line.

Forgetting from which side
of infinity I took the kerf,
I cut and cut to build a whole
as Pythagoras insists I might.

Reductionist’s knives
snik shavings so damned thin
they’re nearly fit for Occam’s bin
as space is hewn from space.

Four limbs wed in eyeball-perfect
portrait shape, yet still a cleft
so wide a tachyon could enter
and dance in drunken ambits.

I recalculate the angles,
strop laser sharpened blades
but ancient Zeno rasps
he’d sooner take a bus around
these roughly mitered joins.

Prometheus scorns this lack of rigor,
points a pregnant finger at my eye,
cocks and shoots dry lightning
which with luck but singed my psyche.

I shave more cedar, making space
to subtract from space enclosed
in space in another covert try
to verge the heart with mind.

One Explanation

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Suck It Up... and Like It

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Social Relativity

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Equations of mass and energy
are gleaned on impact,
in radii of exit-wounds,
rotations of a cup of bone
on the trunk of a limousine,
volume of crimson miasma.
Particles accelerated
beyond comprehension
of matter.

Ellie

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Write Eye

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Easy Questions

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Woman at the bar
turns and says:
"I've been watching you,
the way you walk,
the way you hold your head.
I wonder who the hell
you think you are."

I wonder-
if she always asks
the easy questions first.

Seeing Through the Wall

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Armageddon: The Dressed Rehearsal

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Will I come and lend a hand?
My Goodness, no, I answer,
ducking three-round bursts.
Please consider what would happen,
should I change my battle tactics,
to the Promised Land.

Alexander's lancers are about to
charge my Western flank. I need to
call in salvos of phosgene gas.
The archers guarding my howitzers
are drunk and Patton's reading
Chekov in his tent. Col. Custer
fell asleep at Mass.

Please understand my problems;
Machiavelli's DeskJet just
printed out my orders in Sanskrit.
Eisenhower was taken up in rapture
watching Salome dance.
Shouldn't you be at Golgotha
posting RSVPs? I've got
laser-guided ARAMs to advance.

Sorry, I can’t help you.
Agamemnon’s on the march,
signed a pact with Mussolini,
promptly goose-stepped into war.
Sitting Bull is dreaming
soldiers falling into camp.
Last night, Pancho Villa
gave his pistols to a whore.


Our satellites are saying
weather’s on the way.
Dense fog around Jerusalem,
my Tomahawks would go astray.
Centurions would wind up
slogging through the mud,
Someone else will have to help you.
Oh, and by-the-way,
Herod is an ally, as of yesterday.

I know He needs a lawyer, but mine
are busy now. Gerry Spence is
shielding Eichmann
in a tort at Nuremburg.
Clarence Darrow is excavating fossils
in a forest near Krakow.
Moses wandered up a mountain
whispering a mantra.
They say he lost his marble
shooting craps with Cleopatra.

A temporary halt? Hell, I couldn’t
order that. Herodotus has his
press-pass stapled to his hat.
I can only prosecute this war.
If this battle should go badly,
I’d be crucified.

Bob Evans Digital Art

It Was Like This: You Were Happy

Jane Hirshfield

It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent -- what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness --
between you, there is nothing to forgive --
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is now a thing only for others.

It doesn't matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

Holes in the Snow

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Sometimes in winter
when we came home bleeding
we'd leave blood trails
in the snow.

And in a few hours
the blood would turn black
and then in time
the black would sink down
leaving holes in the snow
and we would walk along
looking into the holes,
our boots packing the snow
into a long, narrow snow-ridge
with blood-holes in it.

Not like in summer
when the blood would just
turn to dust
and scuff away.

In winter we would
stare and stare
down into the holes
and there at the bottom
would be the dark blood.

And then spring would come
and the snow would melt
and grass would grow
and we would play tag
and hide-and-seek
and run all over the grass
and forget about
the blood-holes in the snow.

Memories of ‘45

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In an early morning
late December ice storm,
I peed in the doctor's face
to salute his welcome slap.

Windows glistened ice-blue fractals,
jagged razor shapes and shadows,
wind-whipped branches shattered.
Inside; warm blankets,
milk-damp breasts and comfort.

Heard the doctor tell my mom:
"He's healthy, but small
and doesn't seem to know much yet.
Maybe in time."
She smiled and looked at me.
"I only want to hear him laugh."

My father bent and whispered,
through din of screaming men,
death camps and fire-bombs:
"Cotton candy, Radio Flyers,
Daisy B-B Guns."

I gripped a gold and purple heart,
tried to suck
the glossy medal on his chest,
heard their nervous laugh.
They all agreed;
"He'll know more- in time."

The Valley

Padraig Rooney

The Jewlim hordes appeared on piebald ponies
and fought pitched battles with Cribud tribes.
Superior arms, stones, decided the outcome.
Economies of stone and open-faced quarries
brought uneasy peace to the fertile valley.
The half-caste and merchant class converted.
The Jewlims believed in cutting off the ears
of subject peoples in honour of their god.
A new tolerance reigned. Trade flourished.
They settled down to barter stone for stone.
Cribuds were animists who taught that stones
had soul: the Jewlim quarries caused offence.
Cribud anchorites who lived in caves
codified their laws and sowed rebellion.
Man-made penetrations were strictly taboo.
Dust was sacred, precious stones revered
and fossils read for signs of afterlife.
They taught that sex with slaves enriched
the lineage and kept the peace (uneasy).
Children's names derived from Crib, a tongue
employed in rites of passage, courtly speech.
Cribud dead, embalmed with stones, were buried
in passage graves along the fertile valley.
Pidgins took the place of classic tongues,
the glottal stop died out, a minor creole
become a major language based on clicks
that colonized the estuaries and hampered trade.
The classic language rallied, died again.
Holy men appeared among the people
who farmed the delta mud and used the stones
from ransacked royal tombs as barter. Slaves
were sent to quarry hills where anchorites
protected passage graves of Cribud dead.
The Jewlims now believed in cutting off
the tongues of subject peoples. Clicks died out.
A class of scribes emerged who wrote on stones.
They taught that sex with slaves was wrong.
The half-castes converted, merchants thrived.
Uneasy peace returned. The valley flourished.

garden sprites

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glancing through
dawn window
first sip

jesus
in neighbor's garden
not even sunday

but about time
she’s sent
so many invitations

closer look
from back porch
image changes

is it krishna
mohammed

from back fence
wind-draped
trash bag
on peeing
fountain sprite

walking back
i see

shadow figure
in my yard

closer yet
it looks like me

it is

i stop

look away
glance back

tumbleweed
on shrub

stand-off

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my last glance
you were pastured
fenced
no longer at stud

grazing
banal grass
no longer breathing
my air

i would sooner
have killed you
were i able
to spare the blood

but even at risk
of a trampled gate
it's better this way
than dying