ALL RESPONSES |
| --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
I'll give you some background on this photo and write a poem later. I was still single when this was taken, most likely by my soon-to-be first wife, Barbara. I was a Staff Sergeant in the USAF at Holloman AFB in Alamogordo, NM. Behind me, looking west, is the city of Alamogordo. In the distance you can make out White Sands National Monument and the Organ Mountains. The first atomic test blast occurred just north of here. I'm wearing cowboy boots and that's a new Toyota 4WD pickup. Good times.
OK, here's the poem:
BACKGROUND DATA
Before sciatica,
Before the umbilical hernia,
Before depression, anxiety,
Panic disorder, diabetes,
High blood pressure,
Obesity, Plantar fasciitis,
A torn rotator cuff,
Runner’s knee, Lyme disease,
An inguinal hernia,
And androgenic alopecia,
There was, mostly, health,
Except for asthma
And pale, freckled, itchy skin,
Prone to sunburn.
There was also naïveté, arrogance
Impatience, sloth, ignorance,
And blatant disregard
For the consequences
Of a hedonistic lifestyle.
There was ludicrous optimism,
Misdirected mania,
Unrealistic idealism
And lust for artistic expression
That disregarded all reasonable
Needs of body, mind and soul.
There was certainty that
This is an eternal state of being,
Uninterrupted by death or disease,
A cosmic mandate which
Must never be disobeyed,
A path etched into consciousness,
A destiny as constant as
The laws of physics, a journey,
A calling, a way of life.
So far, so good.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
I’ve been a crane at poor St. Richard’s
for the many listings in life
“for sale” signs to the past
His novelty still smokes, and the
Now-where-never Man sleeping.
In Andy War’s, Hal painted this area green
to being lost on streets of Albuquerque
covenant and purity gone by balloon
Along the roadside pining for the things
Of How we were once engaged by the lands
we’ve “done in” now by Mines.
This is Andy in the overLook magazine whatever
Will be... will be... our amoral casing
Mourning the air of red sky and next Spring’s
immortal wounding
Soon to come flowers in May’s swollen deluging.
Sepia tone in this rare viewpoint here
“taken with my girl Sierra, in 1988, I write:
if in my future's absence
we should ask what is ‘to be,’
then ask what is Abject with piety
for surely ‘will be’ soon by poverty.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
At 9:00 the TEA party meeting will resume in classroom One at the Senior Center. Bring hoods and white board markers. For further details, contact Mrs. Palin at 328-7448.
At 10:00 a.m. our annual Dog Wash will be held at Alamogordo Fire Station, Stall 3.
Get ready to vote by registering at the Alamogordo Public Library between the hours of 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m.
The owner of a 1988 red Toyota pickup needs to call the Alamogordo Drinking Hole on Water Street. Transients have been seen taking up residence in the truck's bed. |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Boogie,
I found an old(er) photo of you from 1988. You are standing next to that red Toyota pick-up and your face is slightly pinched.
Your expression amuses me now, you are conflicted but at the time you seemed so confident.
Was I projecting onto you all of Beth's assurances? She was so sure a little time with you would do me good.
Molly was struggling that year. She'd just finished High School and Eddie and I had finally called it quits.
I am not sure why I refused comfort her.
"Call Boogie" Beth said. "I hear he is in town, visiting his mother. Barbara, sometimes a night with him can just... fill a girl up"
"With what?" I asked.
"Barbara, just call him"
You took me out and we drove up to watch the sunset from "The Bluff".
I had a camera. Why? Who knows, but I recall your mood changed when I pulled it out.
From debonair to disappointed.
Was it evidence you feared?
Boogie, there are some things us girls will never tell.
But we will always remember.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
In May of 1988
the United States
Supreme Court rules
police officers do not
need a warrant to search
through discarded garbage
All this the day after
I throw out all the advice
my daddy ever gave me
on how I’m supposed to love
a woman ‘til death do us part
because what daddy doesn’t know
is I love my 1988 Toyota pickup
more than the other pickup
I married in 1984
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Here I saw the first star
shooting the life I left
in the trunk;
the place where love was found,
made and then burned, like the oil
when climbing long uphill stretches
over the mountain pass.
The weight
of that sadness on four wheels
felt like rarified air, thin and far
slowly seeping in where
it served a purpose
other than fear.
Here the wind blows tears
out the window, noxious memories
out the tail pipe.
This is the only token
I chose to take;
the license plate falling apart,
the busted turn signal
were reminders that this was
the ticket to my own movie.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Clouds, how to open a sky.
The beauty of skin, bathed in saltwater,
in virtue, the crimson blush
of the September moon
and the heaving sigh of an oyster shell.
How the world, when it is pining
falls as silent as a canvas, and blood
like paint and sin, is most stunning
original and new.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
a national monument
atomic blasts
explosions of lesser import
a passion for boots
good cars
good times
now zero in
from a distance you can make out
write a poem
reveal what the camera can't click on
how it is now comes from
how it was then |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
A man in his pick-up, his sweetheart.
His dog may ride along. Front seat.
Window open lets the dog Don look out,
ears flapping in the wind. Tongue
tasting, lapping up the breeze, a kind
of dog lust. The man, behind
the wheel, the world his cherry,
red like his truck, all the necessary
world inside that capsule. Don’t
bother him with rules, regulations.
The way forward follows a white line
leading dog and man through desert,
over mountains, eschewing yellow
lines or any kind of scarlet stop sign. |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Outside Joyce’s tower
I sit on forbidden rocks
Twelve feet beyond the
men only sign.
Inside the round tower
a museum for the almost
blind master’s
manuscripts, magnifying
glass and his black eye
patch.
This morning a woman
jumped in nude.
The TV cameras caught
her springing flesh
white where her bathing
suit had been.
Two hundred people
came to watch.
Underneath divers
waited.
Seeing through his
blindness
Joyce found inside
himself
Leopold and Molly
and the words to tell
how we are men
and women both.
Now the ocean smooths the
rocks and the poet’s
black eye patch
circles like a raven
over the cheering crowd
crying see see.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
never used craigs list before not 4 missd conextions
whos this craig neway?
nehoo, me and my bffs were cummin from Alamogordo dog wash n 2 a party they herd bout
i got me a flat and u cute yung thng fixed it n evrything
u said u were in the army and ud meet us at the party but u never showd
im hopin i waz readin ur signals rite cuz ur just my type
just like my last 4 huzbnds
herez the pic u let me take of u
so can we hook up or sumthin? |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Tongue tied cowboy,
eat your beef and potatoes,
stutter your way through a
something- sandwich.
Chew the gristle and search for words
while I leave your boy-toy
smelling like butterscotch mist
and beer. The truck
overlooking Alamogordo,
land of large poplar trees
I can see home from here
Elliptical the rain
the gypsies say,
there’ll be no sun today.
But we’re in the desert.
No more talk of this drought.
Alamogordo
if you say it enough, it will lose meaning,
because words also have commitment issues.
Drive your red Toyota through New Mexico
I’ll cry over Arizona,
by Nebraska,
I’ll be fine.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
As if
The Whole Night Sky was the Black Mouth
Of a Chow Chow
And its Tongue
Was a Sunrise,
A Pink Flower
Licked the wind! It bloomed!
As if the Cactus
of Dad’s unshaven
face siphoned a blush
from within
and diffused
affection,
a pink pink flower
puffed the air with
an impossible perfume! It bloomed. It
bloomed
but
on top
of heartbreak
dunes
gray curve
after gray
curve
bodies he knew
a long leg
a turgid torso
a prosaic breast
a junkyard
of significant shapes
woman, women
whirled in the wind
of dad's
memory
dropped on the
operating
table desert
blinded, blindness.
But don’t loose
the dance! the image!
Please, o, please!
No, it’s bloomed! It’s bloomed,
the trembling mirage
of my parents
writhing in
love
a pink finger
of gossamer
come hithering to
more-than-naked
white sands and
black mountains
so distance they
could’ve been ancient
thunderstorms
turned to
stone
or
nightmares(so soon)
not
even the blackest
curls of my mother’s
hair could wrap
around
their terrible peaks,
alone alone alone
in darkly dreams!
Pink vanishing,
vanished pink
like
love in the
white skull of stillness
falling silently
in the mid
sentence of its tango
to the mattress
sand, dead.
It was then
All
lost its color
And the longest night
rolled across
the desert
like the
gathered tumbling
of all those
intimate somehow shadowy
moments:
tongues, pedals
groins
in flame and tumbling
It was then
the fear of the farthest
mountain devoured
my parent’s love
like a black dog
again.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
It’s what a blue shirt is meant to be--
a truck stopped outside the edge of creation,
sunrise like the side of a carp flashing across the sky--
somewhere a child is being born. Somewhere
there is also silence. |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
I don’t know the man in the picture
he seems familiar somehow
my eyes wander his youth, his greater fragility
tightly held in fists that needed to feel
hot blood rushing over the swollen breasts of his lover.
He reciting Rilke from memory in the dark passages
the door barely ajar
oh hubris!
bathed in turquoise sunsets
licking ice cream from God’s cone
then demanding more
than just one little lick
amid the chaos and happenstance
echoing through the eye
22 years later
I had arrived unannounced for world cup soccer
(have I mentioned that we had not met outside of this box)?
Surprise!
dogs went to howling
Peg was chopping
Britt was sweet talking
Bloody Bloody Mary
a beer found my hand
that nights meal birthed the umbilical hernia
He introduced me to a woman I love too briefly
He has shown me Mankato
in spades
the dives we shined
and the upscale joints we sullied
talking smart
drinking
eating
drinking
our bellies full (mine more than his)
pounding on tables (me)
making lewd comments (me)
buying necklaces made from the tabs of beer cans (he)
I think Peg has had time to relax after our tornado of souls
rearranged the yard (and the neighbors by the by)
We’ll do it again in a few weeks.
I know the man who is faded
but gleefully champions life as he knows only to love
hope and its everlasting indulgences
his wife loves him
so do his dogs
as do we
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
A fringed buckskin jacket
made for a young cowboy
who certainly wasn’t young
anymore when I bought
it at a thrift store in
Fort Collins, Colorado.
For twenty years that jacket
was a sort of trademark.
I recklessly left it
in a hotel in Moscow and
actually called after,
fruitlessly,
trying to get it back again.
I’ve tried several times
to replace it, but
I’ve always failed.
The rock I found
at Horseshoe Canyon, Utah,
a perfect so-called Apache Tear.
It was the kind of rock you’d buy
but I found it,
seemingly shining in the sand
though really it wasn’t shiny,
just smooth, and soft in my hand
the way a hard thing like stone
can be if it’s smooth enough.
I carried it everywhere
for four or five years,
once leaving it on a restaurant table
and calling back later: “Did you
happen to find a little rock?” and
the disappointed-sounding hostess
saying, “Yes, I have it.”
So that’s not when I lost it.
I lost it and something else at
a Swans show in Boulder,
but mostly I miss the rock.
A pair of sunglasses
that fit my face just right,
made me feel pretty
and which flew into
the Gulf of Mexico
when a pelican on the dock
bit my ass.
It didn’t hurt, but I started.
I have a clear recollection
of the image of the glasses
sinking into the water, and
my temptation to dive in after them;
my acknowledgment of the futility,
and my fear it wasn’t really futile
but that I was just too scared or vain
to pursue them.
My first car,
a red pick-up truck,
from Alamagordo, New Mexico.
I worked at a summer camp
and saved up my money,
turned sixteen in August,
bought the truck to take me home.
It blew two tires and a radiator
on the way,
costing me everything I had left,
leaving me compromised and tearful.
Wait, I don’t miss that truck.
I miss believing that a thing
could make me happy,
or set me free. |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Empty, half-crushed cans of Coca-Cola Classic: 3
Road map of New Mexico, folded, line scratched in red pen from Gila to Alamogordo: 1
Red Bic pens with chewed caps: 6
Best Of Hank Williams, Jr. cassette tape: 1
Stainless steel flask half-full of Jim Beam: 1
Suitcase full of blue button-down shirts: 1
Pots of polishing grease for cowboy boots: 2 |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
carter has a theory
he says
when we get older
we spend most of our
time thinking
about the past
he believes
it’s because
our past
is longer
than our future
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Park the car on a strange mountain turnout,
stare down at a lake I've never seen before
- Colorado water -
water pooled in high rocks,
water stuck way up here now.
But I know this water must come down,
if it has take the mountain with it. |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Red and the clouds shine over the hood.
His slouch against the outstretched arm.
Earth clatters against the mooring of sky.
There are so many, many means of stillness.
The entire world refracts, reflects.
There is stillness and the moon will rise.
There is nothing as live as your breath in the wind.
Come, we will drive through this earth,
breathing.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
