From the monthly archives: April 2010
Mother as a young leftist
Sang: O I can boil eggs in a pot and
Fry them in butter for lunch
Three little comrades heating in my tummy
They wanted their turn to wear striped pants
and grow ponytails, croon harmonicas
and agitate tambourines, thousands
of them trying to make the Sixties last longer
by floating in a sea of hair and bare shoulders
Looking like Jesus in curls
Jesus on blow in tinted glasses
he sidles up next to me
at the Kohler & Campbell spinet
that separates us from the dining room
where his sisters set the table as if it’s art
candied yams and cranberries
candles lit atop the fine holiday cloth’s
stitched pattern of autumn leaves
a Bible open to chapter and verse
to read aloud before the meal.
O the difference
between dialogue and harmony—
how I understood
in one blue moment
to give myself to water
Take four steps left & four
steps right, my daughter sings
as she draws her new
dance on the wall’s white
board—bluegrass to blame
for it all:
In light of National Poetry month, shaking like a mountain will run a series of new poems this week starting tomorrow with Simmon Buntin’s “Desert Jazz.”
“I remember when he OD’d. Who was that actor? … anyway, some doper, some actor, calls me up and says, ‘Hey man, we’re getting together tonight to talk about Jim. You know, like, tell stories about him, remember him. You comin’ over?’ I said no, I had other plans. I ran into about a half-dozen other people who also begged off on going to the Jim Hardee Wake or whatever you’d wanna call it. They all said the same thing: They hated the fucker when he was alive and they sure as hell weren’t gonna kiss his ass now that he was dead.”
Brink would sit before his father’s recliner, as if in worship, and play Barney’s “Old Favor-Rites,” as he called them – as well as new songs Brink had learned that week. After every number, his father would raise glass to lips – God, Brink could smell the volatile, petrol smell of whiskey even now. Sometimes it was more the antifreeze aroma of Courvoisier or Cognac. And his father, military man extraordinaire, would stare into the fire, pupils aglow with reflected flame, and utter a single word:
“Fantastic.”
Sometimes he’d French it up and say:
“Fantastique!”
*Broken Flowers, a strange and wonderful little film by Jim Jarmusch, stars Bill Murray as a long time bachelor who receives an anonymous letter informing him that he has a grown child…As good as that is, the music by Mulatu Astatke, the Ethiopian Miles Davis, as he’s been called, is truly a revelation here.
Yeah, so we all get born, we die,
the nights are dark between
the two. So what. The room
is dimly lit and I’m no expert on the blues,
white girl sitting here cozy dreaming
of her own gone dad, but hey—
we all pass this way, nights now
