luckykobold

is the rill of the oyster
beaten into sand.

Last night I opened the front door to let out the dog. Breathy old forgotten summers rolled in. The air was hot, damp enough to be heavy, a wet ghost towel. At 43, I normally adopt my father's old obsession with the cost of the cold air flowing out, but last night I got ambushed by unexpected memories flowing in. High school days, parking lots and paper bags and beer, and not a damned thing to do. The unpopular girls I was too stupid to appreciate, laughing at the gawky antics of unpopular boys, all of us skinny, unkempt, bad hair or huge glasses, half of us not really knowing what to do with beer, the other half all too familiar. Natalie held nervous sway as the hottest pariah girl, her jaw only slightly jutting and overpowered anyway by the big hair, but her voice shook and her hands hid behind each other obsessively. I was brash, arrogant, oversold on myself and my nascent ability to think in universals, and I harnessed my wits to make sarcastic little assaults on conversations I could not have cared less about. We leaned against cars, kicked at garbage and killed time, summer heat and the old-style pewter lot-lights pressed over us like a bowl, noisy birds in an inverted nest, bragging like pilots. Five years earlier I'd spent my summers outside in the afternoon sun, swatting at red wasps on the lawn with an over-sized plastic baseball bat left on the lawn from the day before, the red plastic cracked down one side by the heat. Now at 17 I was looking over the top of the fence that kept me out of the adult world, pondering smoking and drinking and fucking and mustering the courage to drive us over to the U-Totem to try to buy a girlie mag from the old bastard in the smock who told Ben no two years ago. We could pile in and swing that big silver Buick around and blast the AC and roll down the windows because that fucker Scott had to smoke and I could push the skinny flat pedal down like a playground seesaw and we could lurch away, smoke and chatter and exhaust trailing, dragging like chains in a jailbreak, jangling out the hot early sounds of leaving this goddamned redneck town....

Bosom rages with a nametag,
Pine cross and vinyl and
Cut-cloth chip-sack bent-down-dangle,
I
Slaked by liquors of grass and drunk in cotton cot creak
(And in the eaves the granddaddies bunch)
(Leg over leg)
Throw my chip.

two ants on the walk
great cracks to the left and right
i think of my home



i cannot lie here
the oak, the pine, their children
will not allow it



i prefer the bark
in loose tatters from white boles
to the bishop's paint

Such consolation–
your hand upon my shoulder,
like a yellow wasp.

nightbird sings dulcet sorrow
rapt in angry arias

dull clouds
cover the moon

I
too
often
rue the day

the preserved letter
(her fingers so familiar!)
from her enemy

true love
you never seen it noways
true love
ain't got such big cajones

you love
you drip into their hot hands
you, love
a broken cherry nightstand

through love
we enervate our dead souls
through love
we lose the ache of dark holes

THIRD STORY WINDOW
A WOMAN I DO NOT KNOW
SCREAMS ALL DAY AT ME

While the backroom fat cats gloated
and the evil omens boded
and the Diebold crooks encoded
and the lobbyists corroded
and the lawyers all eroded
and the process got outmoded
and the anecdotes emoted
and the grandmas all got quoted
and the candidates all toted
and the guns all got reloaded
and the godly got devoted
and the lifers pro-zygoted
and the singers golden-throated
and the Grecian urns got oded
and the painters double-coated
and the wastrels all wild-oated
and the epicures got bloated
and the intellects misquoted
and the smart bombs all exploded
and the markets all imploded
and the memorizers roted,
I voted.

I am in love. Suspecting so, I conducted a detailed analysis and the truth is now clear to me. I am in love. Not with the original object of my desires, which turned out to be a fig and I have no great love for figs, but I am in love with my analysis itself.

Such clean lines of reason! Such becoming permutations and hotly necessary derivations! My deepest ardor stirred at the glimpse of the most modest of her many shapely premises. I tell you my heart sings! Oh sweet induction! Oh luscious deduction! I blushingly tremble at your contrasts, you vixen of a proof, you siren of solubility!

"Kettles for sale, cheap,"
hawks the soldier. His girl sneers,
"Don't buy the black one."

My contribution to contemporary political discourse. Do labor to vote, oh citizenry, an' it please ye.

a half-spool of thread
a blanket from old clothing
mothers share stories

Years ago, when time still had meaning to me, I heard a knock upon the door of the house I dwelt in. The particular knock was this mutter from my stoop: "Cripes, what a dingy looking door.”

I flung the door open and surprised there a fellow holding a case in one hand and raising the other toward the bell.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“The fuller brush man,” he replied.

“Than who?”

"Than who? Than who what?"

"It must be than someone. Do you mean than me?"

"I haven’t compared you to anything."

"Let me ask you—have you eaten?"

"Are you inviting me to dinner?"

"I haven’t asked you anywhere. I would rather you remain here so that I may continue this discussion. Who is less full than you?"

"Not you, apparently. You are quite full of something."

"So you do compare me?"

"I think perhaps I should not have called."

"Called yourself fuller?"

"No, that was correct."

"Then I must know than who!"

I'm useless when I'm museless
Like the Brothers Grimm if Gooseless
Like Ms. Palin if she's mooseless
So useless

I'm useless when I'm museless
Like Joe Jackson but not shoesless
Scientology if Cruiseless
Is useless

I'm useless when I'm museless
Picture Yeltsin only boozeless
Picture Schindler only Jewsless
I'm useless

Detective Chief Many-Words-Spent
Was asked where his harlot muse went--
"It's abundantly clear
She never was here;
I can tell by her lingering scent."

Belching Interstate Highway 35,
     running northsouth trillions of unmoving feet,
     and thousands of screamwheeling footless trailers coursing:
     bloodborne pathogens
     pumped through the thin black skin
     of some facedown nether-beast.

A blessed contrast to this thrumming arterial horror
     is the wholesome chipper courtesy
     of the buxom Christian Youth at Dairy Queen,
     all smiles and cherry-bloom
     and tray-on-hip blind radiance,
     jangling their apron change and my longest memories.

Not a jalapeño short of laden, I swing back out
     into the pitch,
     robes stuffed with packety balms and steaming yellow crucifixes
     to banish the dibbles of the road.

I carry the pickled word of God to Dallas
     with overbearing cheese.

I've traveled a lot this year. I've seen places so beautiful I couldn't describe them. The people living in the middle of all that beauty were so accustomed to it that they hardly realized how fortunate they were.

A little more than a year ago, I realized that I was also one of those people. You can live at the base of a mountain and not know it.

You can live at the base of a mountain and not know it. You can breathe the air made calm by the mountain's shield and not understand that air is often violent. You can lie comfortably between the great arms of the mountain, not understanding that what you feel is protection and what you live in is shelter.

You can emerge, fully formed, from an existence watched over by a sleeping giant, a giant that never let you come to harms you never imagined, a giant whose invisible back broke the fury of the storms sent your way, whose face never crumpled to show the buried forces churning, a giant who never spoke of his importance and never demanded appreciation.

Now a mountain is gone. We meet here today on an open, sad plain. A mountain has been torn down, and the memory of its shadow, and a vast, vast, empty, empty space, are all that I am able to carry with me.

In my mind's eye, I point to a place and say to myself, "There, there he was. I was lucky to have lived at his root."