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Overview
Throughout the volume looms the specter of the black ocean itself, a powerful metaphor for all our collective longings and despair, as we turn to face a menacing and uncertain future.
Lullaby for the Last Night on Earth
When at last we whisper, so long, so lonesome,
and watch our house on the horizon
go down like a gasping zeppelin of bricks,
we’ll turn, holding hands,
and walk the train tracks to the sea . . .
So sing me that song where a mountain falls
in love with an octopus, and one thousand fireflies
ricochet around their heads,
and I’ll dream we’re dancing in the kitchen one last time,
swaying, the window a waystation
of flaming leaves, the dogs shimmying
about our legs,
dragging their golden capes of rain . . .
O my critter, my thistle, gal-o-my-dreams,
lift your voice like an oar into the darkness,
for all the sad birds are falling down—
Nothing in this night is ours.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780809330287 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Southern Illinois University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/18/2011 |
| Series: | Crab Orchard Series in Poetry |
| Pages: | 80 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
VISIONS FOR THE LAST NIGHT ON EARTH Then I saw the floodwaters recede, leaving a milky scum scalloped on silos and billboards, and the eaves of farmhouses were festooned with a mossy brown riverweed that hung in the August heat like bankers' limp fingers, and the drowned corn, sick from sewage and tidesuck, reappeared like a washed-out green ocean of wilting speartips that bloated fish rode into the moonlight, and the lost dogs came down from the hills, still lost, trotting, panting, a tremolo of swollen tongues, their mud-caked undercarriages swarmed by squadrons of gnats as dilapidated barns began disappearing at last, swallowed like secrets by the muck, and the ghosts of handsome assassins sat up in piles of hay and combed their pompadours and muttered in Latin their last prayers before stepping through trapdoors flung open like flaps of skullskin to the skyblue sky of oblivion- that same color of your panties, I thought, as you floated topless across our bedroom in a wake of sparks, a vision sashaying across the bottom of the sea, visions colliding, the sea rising, please forgive me my terrors, love, for I saw your braided hair and imagined a frayed rope lowered from a helicopter, or, worse, the ropey penis of the horse a general sits in the shade as bluebottle flies, querulous and fierce, baffle the air above silhouettes bent digging in a field of clay. For I watched the sunset so many evenings, holding your hand, and thought of the combustible blood of an empire, or lay awake in the long dark listening to your breathing and imagined sad Abe Lincoln pacing our hallway, his arms folded behind his back like a broken umbrella, the clock ticking, the ravenblack sedans idling curbside in the suburbs of America, watching closely, purring greedily, as they gulped down the last starlight, dreaming of some other dawn. IN THE CITY OF FALLEN REBELS -after Jaime Sabines Here comes the boy again, dragging his death by a string. Here comes the gun he waves above his head. Here comes the light raked loose like salted slugs, how it fizzes over liquor bottles and magazine racks, and he must feel it, yes, like ulcers puckering his skin, for he hugs himself with his other arm, high-stepping in place, trying to hold in the filthy burst mattress of the soul. But here it comes nonetheless! Christ, look at it! It won't stop jumping out to bang on the scuffed Plexiglas window of heaven. Here come the angels, they hear him, those starved revenants trampling the riverbank of his mind. But the gods, they refuse to blink, he's nothing more than a speck of shit on the eyelash of infinity, they say, spitting sideways into the dust, though they come anyway, like Confederate marauders spurring their wormy, wide-eyed horses up from the shallow graves. They're peat burnt and staunch, they're flashing their bleary sabers. One has a face that keeps fuzzing out, and one has biceps like a pit bull's flanks splattered with blood, and when he shoots at them, wailing, bottles explode, rum tumbles down shelves, trickles toward the feet of Mrs. Wen. Here she comes too, fumbling the keys, trying to coax the register open. Here come the five English words she knows, flitting about her like flying mice. Here come the gods again (they never give up), and the boiling sargassum of blood she can't hold inside her chest, as some fusty, ferruginous fog blows in from the backside of the ghetto. Here come the dead, they smell it, waking in vacant lots, shoeless and soft in the weeds. Here come the screwworms and roaches, the black ocean seething in its bowl and a whole century like a ship on fire. In the park, where the boy buys his tinfoil surprise, the severed heads of history nod all night on their rotten branches. He blows the gates. He sleeps his dreamless sleep, curled fetal beneath a bench, his eyelids blue and blotched with bruises. Here comes the poet (What does he want?). He's scared of the dark; he'd like to turn into a sparrow, fly into a steeple, hide beneath a broken bell. But a desiccated bat hangs at the back of his mind. He keeps poking it with his pen until the godawful gods come again (They never quit!). Here they come, galloping across the river of a dead king rising, surpliced, bearded in flames, blowing their battered bugles. They want a word with the boy, they say. They take him into the trees. And there he goes, still half-asleep, dragging his death by a string. FIELD RECORDING, BILLIE HOLIDAY FROM THE FAR EDGE OF HEAVEN Loverman, when I woke we were banished on a rooftop together, the city sopped up by the sea. The hours unfolded twice, and you torqued skyward like Atlas holding up the moon the whole lonely night. I begged on those stars. I sang, I aint got no change in my pocket, Mister Trenchcoat, I aint got no galloping white horse but they kept hammering in the attics, they cried out like lions to their Lord . . . Darling boy, we were drowning in our own embrace, and beneath those sodium flares of sleep I kept dreaming we were the lucky ones at last, lifting off like two pelicans that plummet for the same spangled fish.