|
Molly Fisk Page 3
Orion Over Burning
Man
Last night at
dusk a log cabin rumbled past,
front porch with
three rockers, gable window.
People sat and
leaned, carried
on what must have
been a truck-bed,
four wide steps
not quite reaching ground.
Its cab, a
tractor's engine, towed
cabin and a
trailing outhouse from which
raucous techno
music blared. If you
could have closed
your ears — it's hard here
to close them — a
century and a half
might slip away,
a brighter twilight glaze
the railings.
You'd be the one in motion,
passing a fixed
dwelling in your wagon, waving
to ranch hands
home from their dusty day
as the sun
dropped behind these same blue
hills.
You'd be heading
toward a rumored spring
to settle the
oxen, swallow a cold meal,
wrap the sleepy
children in their blankets
and tell them one
more time about Orion,
able hunter from
a distant past, his outline
slung above you
the way — now that darkness
has descended on
this alkali lake bed
throbbing with
disco and neon — he hangs
over us tonight,
history written in stars.
American Riddle
When you
can’t figure out how to stop
the war in
Iraq, much less how to make
enough money
to pay your mortgage,
moving the
hundred and eighty dollars
from savings
back into your checking
account as if
that will help — when it’s
all you can
do to acknowledge the actual
world and not
lose yourself half the afternoon
in People
Magazine where the movie
stars
revolve like
frosted cakes in a glass case
at the old
Lady Baltimore bakery
on
Throckmorton, before your home
town
became so
chic none of the kids
from your
high school could afford
to live there
— when you’re so tired
of
reinventing yourself you want to
lie down
on the road,
right on the double yellow line
in front of
your driveway, exactly where
two of your
cats have been killed and wait
for someone
to run you over but with your
luck
you’d
probably just lose an arm, no
doubt
the right
one, so you’d have to relearn
holding the
pencil against the page
at the proper
angle, and your sweater’s
sleeves would
need to be hemmed
to cover the
stump and then you’d really
have
something to complain about
as well as
something in common with
soldiers
returning
from the Middle East
who left
precious parts of themselves
behind,
which is
where this poem begins and ends:
How the hell
are we going to stop the
cavalier
waste? How
are we going to apologize?
from The More Difficult Beauty,
Hip Pocket Press, 2010
© Copyright, Molly
Fisk.
|