-
Children, and: The New Old-Time Religion, and: Poem, and: Transvestite
- Prairie Schooner
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 78, Number 2, Summer 2004
- pp. 160-163
- 10.1353/psg.2004.0091
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Prairie Schooner 78.2 (2004) 160-163
[Access article in PDF]
Four Poems
Boyer Rickel
Children
long outwardly; others can see it. They desire
so much, even erotically.
So a boy begins to walk across a frozen lake.
There are places in his life, he thinks, that won't support the
weight.Though not so much erotically.
He is thinking about moral matters,
the places in his life that don't support the weight
of his need to understand what is right.He is thinking about moral matters
because of a fight he picked after school.
He needs to understand what is right
given his joy, like a bird taking flight, and his regretall intermixed during the fight after school.
He tries distractions - a video game, an adventure movie.
He enters the joys and regrets of others, taking flight
from the thrill of blood that had filled his mouth.The distractions, a video game, an adventure movie,
convince him he must speak to no one
about the taste of blood in his mouth.
It'll be the secret fire that defines me, he thinks.Convinced he must speak to no one,
he undertakes the construction of a new face,
a shield for this secret fire that defines him,
his demeanor indirect, a sentence that meanders. [End Page 160]He undertakes the construction of this face
as he would a walk across a frozen lake,
his path meandering, indirect, like a sentence that betrays
no outward longing, so that others won't recognize his desires.
The New Old-Time Religion
He tells the young man to be forgiving, especially
of himself. High standards? Who can afford them. A swallow
collects a little mud, makes a house, mud-hovel
stuck under the eave. You don't get good advice
from television or movies anymore, or Grandpop or the corner
market or even porn mags. Revelation counted
for something once. It's an art form now, and art refuses
to instruct. When you're messed up, better to have friends
than read a book of poems, he tells the kid. Dogs dig
in mud to cool their bellies. Hounds are notorious
for this. Beating them does no good. It's practically
an instinct. And nobody but nobody cares to hear your dreams:
that woozy atmosphere, the architecture, the floors six kinds
of erotic somehow at different levels - no way to tell it so
folks don't turn away. All over the world they've discovered
people eating dirt. Depending on where you live it cures
rickets, hives, pleurisy, depression if your potassium's shot
and you're somewhere in Africa. Might be worth a try,
he tells the kid, because nothing you've ever heard about
does any good. Get right down on your knees
and with both hands dig into good old Mother Earth
and eat so you know what you're made of. [End Page 161]
Poem
To begin your life again in the desert in June, the month of light so naked
on whitewashed stuccoed walls their edges against the backdrop of ink-dark
tropical oleanders seem etched by Durer, the air so hot the lungs by 11:00 A.M.
at each in-breath are stunned as children are stunned when told in the midstof hide-and-seek in the little park across from the library that
their favorite uncle is dead; to begin your life again on a day such as this,
first argue with a dog who is convinced her ball is under the bed,
not lost as you know it is lost, though no waving of your hands beforeher stubborn and expectant nose or sustained and emphatic exhortations
in your most plangent voice will suffice to prove to her otherwise. Begin
with a task such as this, a task you know you can't possibly accomplish,
a task which will braid, over time, your love and your frustrationas grape vines braid in the luxurious far away arbors of northern
California or the South of France. A braiding that will lead, upon the...