LOVE SURROUNDS YOU
LIKE A POSSE IN BULLETPROOF VESTS
Howie Good
Chapbook Genius
Publishing Genius 2010
www.publishinggenius.com
Copyright © Howie Good 2010
Creative Commons license: non-commercial, attribution.
This one is for Dale Wisely,
elegant poet, wise editor, good friend
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author thanks the editors of the publications in which the following poems originally appeared, occasionally in somewhat different form: “In the City of Bad Dreams” and “Anomalies” in Recycled Karma Press; “Spring, Delayed” in Fogged Clarity; “Signs” in a handful of stones; “Left Right Left” and “The Secret Policemen’s Ball” in Full of Crow; “Song #4” in ouroboros review; “Epitaph for a Dead Bouquet” in Lesser Flamingo; “Refrigerate After Opening” in Heavy Bear; “ “Love Surrounds You Like a Posse in Bulletproof Vests” in Deuce Coupe; “Window Light” in nibble; “Love Note on Cheap Paper” in No Teeth; “Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century” in Sugar House Review; “What the Television Saw” in Radiant Turnstile; and “Left Lane Must Turn Left” in Dogzplot.
WHAT THE TELEVISION SAW
Fire splashed up at us. Please don’t yell at me, I said. No amount of coaxing could get the canary lying on the bottom of the cage to sing. What looked like snow or ashes were scraps of paper on which good deeds had been recorded. The fireman remembered it as a turquoise building, with its pants around its ankles. Someone covered the holes in the screen with electrical tape, but night still got in. We held each other. The fireman raised his ax. The television stared back at him in awe as a crown of flies revolved around his head.
WHAT THE TELEVISION SAW
Fire splashed up at us. What looked like snow or ashes were scraps of paper on which good deeds had been recorded. The fireman remembered it as a turquoise building, with its pants around its ankles. Someone had covered the holes in the screen with electrical tape, but night still got in. We held each other. The fireman raised his ax. No amount of coaxing could get the canary lying on the bottom of the cage to sing.
IN THE CITY OF BAD DREAMS
I walk past spies and assassins
without knowing it, and no matter
into which doorway I step,
there’s a heap of rags
that might be a person.
Everywhere I go I meet men
with the same name.
What happened? I ask.
Doesn’t matter, they say.
Now that the moon has turned
the yellow of crime scene tape,
I don’t quite believe them.
To teach superstition
as truth is a terrible thing.
SONG #4
But on a morning
when my wife,
so softly dented,
stands naked
in front of the closet,
still deciding
between the dark blue
and the black,
I resolve who I am
like the last calamitous
emperor of Rome
writing
profusely on the ground
with a red
can of shaving cream
love and without
quotation marks.
ANOMALIES
1
The young look at me with curiosity –
one might even say anxiety –
my heart leaking green brake fluid,
and the queen of nothing on her knees
drinking from the puddle.
2
But who was it,
was it you,
who had the question
mark removed
from my typewriter
and buried
at night without
ceremony
LEFT RIGHT LEFT
You’re already halfway home or more
when you remember you forgot the baby
in a shopping cart in the vast parking lot.
Oh, they’ll wail, how could you?
And saying your brain was temporarily
deprived of oxygen isn’t a good answer.
So, of course, you look with newfound seriousness
for a place to turn around, but there is none,
only the thud of night smashing into your windshield.
All you can do now is drive faster and faster
through the sirens and confusion, the hairless face
of the cretinous moon beaming over your left –
no, your right – no, your left – shoulder.
THE SECRET POLICEMEN’S BALL
Ever since magic fell into disuse,
I wake up every morning
in the same room but a different city,
the buildings a bright blur,
like something out of a secret policeman’s
florid conception of heaven,
a place where millions
anxiously spy on each other
from between their fingers
and all you can hear is
the yapping of small dogs.
LEFT LANE MUST TURN LEFT
There was a time I might’ve enjoyed the tang of truck exhaust following me home, or the boarded-up windows of a discount liquor store. Then tick-borne diseases in fitted choir robes climbed down from the scaffold and disappeared into the crowd. I sat on the curb heartbroken. In theory every sequence of moves ought to be reversible. But somewhere it’s always the summer after mom died, and raining, and the rain is passing notes to us through a slit in the ground.
SPRING, DELAYED
Birdsong alarm
don’t cry
I can feel broken idols
change trains
upturned hands
forfeit fire
uncle decay still trying
shhh tree
sleep
EPITAPH FOR A DEAD BOUQUET
Here’s something I was interested to learn
talking to another man in line:
it’s possible to break your jaw
merely by laughing.
He smiled without showing his teeth,
and I felt a familiar emptiness,
as when voices float down at dusk
from the barred windows of Juvenile Hall,
or the shadow of the photographer
falls crookedly across the child in a photo,
or minutes turn into days,
and days into nine leafless oaks.
SMALL DOGS LIVE LONGER
A double-yellow line
means one thing
when you’re driving
on this side of the border,
but another
when you’re the passenger,
your hands lying
uselessly in your lap
and the bored children
in the back seat foolishly
insisting on asking,
as the road turns north
and then disappears
among the barbwire trees,
why you named them
for people who were dead.
REFRIGERATE AFTER OPENING
When I wake at last from a hundred-year nap,
my wife is still on the phone
attempting to reason
with the Disputes Department,
and our daughter,
the beautiful, black-haired barista
who li
ves in a distant city,
is finishing up a double shift.
Her back was turned to me
throughout my dream,
her sun-brown shoulders shaking
as if she were crying.
Was it the small table of ghosts
that so upset her,
or had she seen reflected in the metal surfaces
water birds stumbling about on land?
Nothing is more stupidly honest than failure.
The spruce tree may become a cello,
but the heart chokes on its own blood.
WINDOW LIGHT
And I wondered,
as the wind stirred,
suddenly full of plans,
if the window
was ever content
with this view.
ELEGY FOR THE UNADOPTED
I was resting on the flowered couch after work. You were there, too, nursing someone else’s baby. We heard a noise like the sky emptying black baseballs from its pockets. We thought about hiding the baby in the basement. Or in the field behind the house among the mournful eyes of meat cows. It’s so long ago now, but the birds at the feeder still talk about it, how night scratched at the door and I let it in rather than go searching for some matches and a candle.
LOVE SURROUNDS YOU LIKE A POSSE IN BULLETPROOF VESTS
A new teller at the drive-
through window,
she wants proof
you’re who you are,
a stream of despondent electrons,
light of the same
crumbly consistency
as the snowflakes melting
in the lonely blackness
of a girl’s hair.
LOVE NOTE ON CHEAP PAPER
Every day has become
something like crossing
the time zones of hell,
a feeling of being sullenly
present in the world,
and even then by proxy,
when all I only want to see
is what might be seen
if my heart were a lantern:
a red tree, blue horses, you.
SIGNS
1
How the crocuses
bustle about –
dumpy cafeteria ladies
in blue hairnets
2
Sunning
in the garden
among the unsure
sprouts
of early spring
our cat sits
and licks
its murderous
paws
PEASANT WARS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
A cottage in the woods.
A woman weeping at the table.
A wolf with eyes like red slits
spying through the window.
A wood-cutter passing,
an ax on his shoulder
and his thoughts faraway.
Another night on earth
preparing to fall.
Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of 12 previous poetry chapbooks, including most recently My Heart Draws a Rough Map from The Blue Hour Press and Ghosts of Breath from Bedouin Books. He has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and five times for the Best of the Net anthology. His first full-length book of poetry, Lovesick, was released in 2009 by Press Americana. He is co-editor of the online literary journal Left Hand Waving.