Starship Tahiti: Poems

Portland Bardo

32 Portland Bardo The fragile, in between state of larvae hatching is no less desirable than full bloom in a city of roses, if such a city can ever be found. I drove toward it once, through forests smoked with fog, toward what Indians once called the valley of sickness, a place where animals staggered off to die. Always I sought the below ground, and when I arrived I slept in the basement of a youth hostel where foreign tongues spoke softly like the murmur of stalactites dripping into cups of veined rock. Read stories of miners trapped in a partial collapse, rescuers’ attempts to pipe oxygen into the shale tombs and their reluctance to dig for fear of disturbing a labyrinth of tenuous shafts. As I lay there numerous insertions were threaded through my body, so when three days later J brought an ambrosia tipped needle to my fur, I dilated for the stinger. But bees don’t pollinate roses, they damage silky petals infused with blood, unable to absorb any further sweetness. This isn’t a story to be rushed. Homeless I wandered the parks stepping lightly as though on a path of crushed oyster shells, their insides shucked and hissing. It rained and rained and rained. The scorched disaster I’d driven to escape 33 still burned my mind, its rafters draped with geese and something larger split down the middle and hung by its ankles. Where I grew up, when a house was struck by lightning we’d drive by and look, its blackened frame changed into what would never again be refuge, so complete was its new expression, yet no one would demolish it. I’m sure the earth tried hard to deliver it as dawn light made the searing more real, like those bodies found hanging from trees inside the gates of Chinatown as punishment warning those who would betray the Fa-gong, attempt to escape the maze of tunnels that run beneath the grand facades of restaurants, steaming platters of fish and birds’ nests served through swinging kitchen doors and below, in the catacombs, a shipment of black tar heroin taped to a courier’s hairless chest. So the city’s strata are revealed petal by thorn as exotic imports of scavenged twigs, glittering scales and crushed poppies. If I could have lain in a field of them, a crimson entourage dusting my lips and eyelids, 34 and the girl’s, and the lion’s, we three the first to fall, but instead I woke in a Motel 6 bathroom with a girl’s painted toes in my mouth, the lion snarling on the nosecone of a fighter plane that spun through blue and white clouds blazing to gold. Carried beyond bombed schoolhouses where I’d first suffered, playgrounds strewn with blazers and slacks I’d grown out of year after year, memorizing the same song: between the river and the bay there is a school we love, it guides us on and lights the way sure as the stars above. When I woke again, only the city remained outside the cab of my black truck. The girl vanished; she’d skinned the lion and wore his coat as a thong. Hooked, what does that mean? Fleeced, more like it. Or unmasked, the wizard’s holographic image flickering as it dies and the curtain is ripped away revealing a beast with wings. ...