Popular Culture

OUR PATRON OF FALLING SHORT,
WHO BECAME A PRAYER

On a backwards-running clock in Lisbon,
By the marble statue of Pessoa;
On an antique astrolabe in London
Tracing out the sky above Samoa,

Thousands of miles away — in time, in place,
Each night conspires to create a myth
That stands for nothing real, yet leaves you with
The vague impression of a human face.

A chicken soup for the rainbow lover’ s soul.
A chicken soup for the lover of chicken soup.
A carnage of birds, a devastation.
Chicken soup for the dried-up garden —
It’ s been a lousy summer sucking us dry.
Chicken soup for the grocery list.
Chicken soup for unwanted potatoes.
Chicken soup for extinct animals.

A Caledonian megalith.
A tinted bather from Cape Ann.
The 1937 kith
and kin of a Kentuckian
beside their Model T sedan.
The Celts. Who set me this arith-
metic of icons? Who began
by pasting in Bob Dylan? Zith-
erpicking rhinestone charlatan.
He tries to be American.

Not Delft or
delphinium, not Wedgewood
among the knickknacks, not wide-eyed chicory
evangelizing in the devil strip —

But way on down in the moonless
octave below midnight, honey,
way down where you can't tell cerulean
from teal.

After three months, Virginia is still a frontier.
Late at night, I close the door
on my husband practicing Mozart, the dishpan fills
and the network affiliates sign off one by one.
Now the country stations, tuning up like crickets
on radios in scattered valley kitchens:
Har yall this evenin folks!
(Wanting to say ‘I’ m real fine’ I whisper ‘Wow.’)
Got your Green Hill chicory perkin’? An army
of women, straightened and ironed and blued
like Picasso’ s ironer — jerking coffeecups

Live jazz at El Fresco is one guy, electric plinks,
until he turns off the switch, closes his eyes,

and warbles a boy’ s tenor, wood-flute tones,
pure séance hymns from before Christians.

Rowdies at the bar stop fighting and stare
as seawater washes through the room,

seeping through floorboards to serpent dens.
The chorus stirs spirits from family lore.

Desmond, Big Miller, James MackGehee —
all rise from steerage and sing with the lords.

November 22, 1963

First, a black mark in the sky,
a speck that grows

into a plane widening,
dramatically circling
before it touches
a gray strip of land
designed for its landing.

Then the players descend
the wheeled stair

to the stage
for the cameras,
our collective eye:

first her, then him,
as is custom,
and their entourage
trailing behind,

those who believe
the world is young
and the future spreads
out like geography.

A horse is shivering flies off its ribs, grazing
Through the stench of a sodden leachfield.

On the broken stairs of a trailer
A laughing fat girl in a T-shirt is pumping
Milk from her swollen breasts, cats
Lapping at the trails. There's a sheen of rhubarb
On her dead fingernail. It's a humid morning.

Tune yr sandwich to the key of C
Make biscuits in kitchen B

Miss Scarlet with her lead pipe
Waits behind the cupboard door

Clubs one from the other limp
Only to begin again innocent

& nothing to do but gather into
Legion gather into constellation

Coming along then a spider its web
Holds the walls together holds the floor

Up gathers toward a central point
Mean & distribution derivation

To insert a thumb & see what sticks
Past the earth’s crust cirrus