In IndianaHe shivers in his bones
soaked in sweat,
cold like beer.
He waits
in an alley
smoking with
a jaw like a shark.
He believes
he's as young
as he once was.
He sees no
future in aging.
On an overcast day,
walking a white dog,
he churns his
head to butter
and whips
it, baking
bread made of straw,
eating cardboard jam.
His hands
feel like the grease
in a factory
and under his shoulders
cranes are soaring.But on spring evenings
watching the backyard,
a rattling ice cube.
He kisses a woman.
All around him
descending from the sky
seeds of light
shatter into stars
crawling up his ankles.
Weekly Menu
One Tuesday
he fed himself
fish belly
between rye,
with radish and mustard.
On Wednesday he
ate the heart of chicken
with a side of potatoes
steamed with mashed carrots,
served with avocado.
On Friday
he spread dead bumble bees
on crackers,
spread horse hoof jelly
on wet bread.
Saturday he ate
cream cheese mixed with
the leaves from an oak.
He was drunk on
pinecone beer.
All day Sunday, he dreamed
of onions, in a soup,
with bird beaks
and pig ears.
Monday, it was back to the office,
a whole new week
beginning
veal stuffed with whiskey
cubed frozen gravy
and thin slices of skin
from the back of his hand.
For My Friend, Who Eases the Accelerator Towards Death
Good for you. I'm glad to see you slower.
I'm grateful you have a father who will bring you into his house.
I'm glad you've got loved ones who help.
I always tried to help you, but I needed it too.
I'm pretty unsuccessful.I think you're sleeping in a bed and when
the heat kicks on, little is lost out unsealed window frames.
You're eating good food. When you drink,
you drink the good bourbon. Easy on the bourbon.
You shower in a nice shower, soap and shampoo.What I like, is that Death,
his head on fire and peering from inside a closet,
he seems exposed, embarrassed. Ah, he hangs
his head like he's lost at racquetball
and I say, sorry, but not everyone can win.In night, the powers of your mind
can transform the figure of luck into destruction.
And vise-versa, you can turn totally into life
and swing out of bed like a primate who doesn't
know it, but is evolving into a person who has your name.
Unsociability
The woman at the bar
sits beside a man
with his back towards her
and his chin bobbing towards a man
at his right
and then she says to me
"I'm between conversations,
nothing to say"
and I say
"Oh, yeah, I understand"
and deep in my stomach
in my legs
circulating my system with blood
I know
she has turned the wrong way
if she is waiting for me to speak.
I am willing to sit in silence.
A stranger at my right is nothing
to me, but a mouth.
I won't acknowledge her ears
and i am willing to sit quietly
while a hoop of silence
slides over her shoulders
pinning her to herself.
The Dreams in a Small Town
That whole summer I wanted
to dance with her,
but I didn't. She would
answer her telephone but
I would always not be the voice she heard.
She was beautiful.
I drank her in the morning
as if a spring, in the roof of my mouth,
was pooling in my stomach.
We swam rapids together,
we had dreams that
I made real by dreaming.
She was
carved of flesh
and had a real heartbeat.
She was a doo-wop song
I tried to write that July.
I had a leather jacket,
jeans cuffed,
black shoes and white socks.
My voice was denim
and I sang one quarter of
one part of a four part harmony.
It was laughable.
I laughed in my sleep.Every night that year
was a black night, split with stars,
yellow and white like god teeth.
Understanding Without Words
Like a soapbox derby
we slide by gravity from
which hill it is we sit.We slide down,
wearing abrasion on our backs.
Waiting
to find the floor
of the deepest ocean.
I know what we imagine is there.What we see is,
above us,
a sea without shapes.
A place where nothing has
an edge,
where no edge is up against another.
What we imagine is total wholeness.And this would, of course,
exclude language and the safe
boundary of words that
now, we lean against,
like a fifteen-year-old hoodlum
leans against a streetlight.For now we smoke a cigarette,
in a moment
we throw stones till it's dark.
What One Engineer Does
He designs
and tests designs in his mind,
on paper,
on other perceptions,
till one day they are building
a concrete pillar.
Men in hardhats manipulate
the swinging hook
on the end
of a crane's dangling wire.
There is cursing and spitting
when a bolt strips.
During lunch a man tells
the story of his wife
throwing a burned eggplant
in the toilet,
it was Halloween.
Now they laugh about it.The engineer's wife plays
a song on the piano.
She sings a melody
so like an old song
she thinks she remembers,
but it's totally new,
the magical accident of
inaccurate imitation.
It is the gift of creativity
that we cannot recreate the past.But the engineer is
the one hired to start the memory.
If the bridge is ever to be built,
someone must test
theory against history.
And later, here we come
driving the cars
that carry the families,
and the families
that carry dreams
and the dreams
that test death.
In Forida
He hopes to find
tan smooth evenings
roll like a
scoop of ice cream.
He imagines a silk shirt
and a woman
at a movie, a hand, a kiss.
He sees his grandmother
over a stove,
pork chops and corn.
He will not
drink too much alcohol
but he will drink
a beer with
the salty sea.
He sees that girl
from high school,
she is distant,
a mother of two,
he pulls her from
his Velcro neurons,
he hopes to
lay her out on his
grandmother's back porch
and dry her
in the Florida sun.
Something light as sand
floats in his mind.
He believes the warm
of the south
will make him healthier.
He has dreams in Florida
of obsolete dreams,
in Florida he sees a future
where his imagination
isn't needed.
Really live a life
in Florida. Really
become the meat
of an orange
and be fed to
tropical fish swimming
about his knees.
In Ohio
He grew up
with the turnpike
howling in his throat.
Vibrations sent
down his spine
by the lights
on top
of a state trooper's car.
He felt a flat
wind gurgle
in his stomach
and garlic blood
spread across a biscuit.
Too often,
his version of Ohio
had a radio playing doo-wop
and a Chevrolet parked
in a ditch by a river.
His young girl
in a blue sweater,
her bra undone beneath,
her blue breath in his ear.
There was fire piled high in the trunk.
There was a desperate
poodle in the glove box.
He trained himself
to live on vitamins
and shot
healthy emotions that
fluttered from brush.
His twenty-two
was accurate.
He was twenty-two
in Ohio once.His mother drank wine
one Christmas
and said his father, the bastard,
tried but was no good anyhow.
He saw her
breathing out as
ashes,
settling
on the grave of the dinner table.copyright 2002 Peter Davis
bio