From “Leafmold”
- From “Leafmold”
From “Leafmold”
A dizziness between alarms, a pain like fishing line drawn through the heart. Amanda cooks pot roast with green olives and cherry tomatoes and it just about rips my sails from the rigging. I eat it like someone who has been farming lizards in the Sonoran for a thousand years. To speak fluently or just earn the minimum—or something between the two. The baseball-sized tumor begins as an atom. God is a magnet that attracts everything. Richard Petty at the gas pump with his sunglasses, mustache, and feathered cowboy hat advises me: It’s a good deal! Before death, the bearded raven asleep beneath your ribs. Brave little bonsai covered by snow—has no choice. For no good reason, the name Thaxted floats through the morning. The doctor’s right hand comes out of the gopher hole—a reckoning, a gesture, groping the hair of the earth. A spotted dog in the throat of the embassy. A bridge of fur from there to there. A chance to call home and be left waiting for a fervent signal. No one ever talks about the fourth pig who walled himself underground, his casket-bed with the small emerald cross glittering on its lid. [End Page 160]
Talked all night about braising meat—nickels a day for the rest of our lives: gorgeous, expensive, final, stout. Oh, to change the channel! Saturday morning in the used bookstore I was overwhelmed by the surgical regurgitations of contemporary poetry—name after name, title upon title, memorialized briefly as bloodstains beneath the stilettos of commerce. The city of wine has no stomach, no undercarriage, no gnats curlicuing from branches, no terror—just seven blue pigeons waiting out the fog, lulled half to sleep by the thrum of the fountain’s heart. You have no idea the lengths, the air-conditioning, the trepidation and splendor. It comes from beneath rage but above spite—a slice of ennui aloft but descending towards a shore littered with beach houses, turquoise sand dollars, and the graves of the rich decorated for the apocalypse. Ted Hughes is writing about a fly entering someone’s nose and a bluebottle fly appears from nowhere, midwinter, and flies up the nostril of Ted Hughes. I’m sorry to have brought you here again. I’m sorry the lamb was cold and the dancers less than fine, sorry for the stuffed owls—sorry that we have nowhere else. [End Page 161]
F. Daniel Rzicznek is the author of two poetry collections, Divination Machine and Neck of the World, and three chapbooks: Nag Champa in the Rain, Vine River Hermitage, and Cloud Tablets. Also co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry, Rzicznek teaches at Bowling Green State University.
