In our house it rained brothers,
which drained our mother of incentive
to do anything. She invented a daughter
for a plaything, but our father threw
the girl out and didn’t say a thing.
That shattered our mother’s world.
It lay scattered among the make-believe
toys on the living room floor
while we boys stood in the doorway
and watched our father sweep
everything away with his broom
woven from our mother’s weeping.
Below the dam,
along the bottom where the river
once tumbled and raged over rough stone,
ancient sturgeon with their musing mouths
knead drowned memories—
the beautiful swollen legs of the women
the tattered root-gathering baskets
the men’s knotted fish-nets
the stretched elk-skin dance platform
These wordless historians, miming
woeful “Ohs,” suck up and spit out the muck
and mud of a peoples’ history made mute.
the flower fades to make fruit;
the fruit rots to make earth.
—Robinson Jeffers
The stone becomes a tool for making,
a tool for maiming. The foolish become
wise through their folly, the wise foolish
through their knowledge. Time comes
for growing the flowers of despair
and for reaping the fruits of grief. Relief
from the weight of living is gained through
receiving the healing tension between
two extremes. The whole becomes whole
by gleaning the spoiled with the sound,
by bounding up the stairs of convention
to explode above the breath-spent air.
If your knock gets no answer
come in, the door’s unlocked.
No chump would heist my junk,
no fence would hock it.
A thrift store would truck it
to the dump. You’ll find me
hanging among my moth-gnawed
coats on a cedar hanger
to keep pests away. If you
must take me out just give me
a good dusting, then thrust me
back in the closet. Maybe I can
hang in there a few more years.
…we never failed to fail/
it was the easiest thing to do.
—Steven Stills
Promised early a well-pruned garden,
we grow surly with our weed-swathed swales.
Our plots, filled with fruit we’re certain
we’re the first to have seeded, crowd our minds
with untended stubbornness. In trying to seduce
wine from these vines we produce acrimony
and irony only. So, we faithfully fail, misnaming
imponderable order chaos, tangles of thoughts
untamable jungle. If handed pruning shears
would we know the handles from the cutting edges?
Like a wind-shorn billboard
his words have torn away
and scattered, tatters wedged
within the angles formed
by walls, or tangled in storm-
galled hedges. He retrieves a few
and traps them in the wraps
of his unraveling overcoat
fumbling for them when spoken to.
They spill forth as muddied
as the puddles at his feet. Folks
smile, then hurry on. They think
he’s befuddled. He watches them
and a few more weary words
tear loose to tumble down the street.
The neighbor gazes about from
his roof. I, aloof and unseen by him,
puzzle over the turn of a phrase
as he struggles with bricks and mortar
patching chinks in his chimney.
At this moment, we’re not so different,
he on his sun-baked roof
and I spying from my darkened den.
We each think. We each wonder
about the effort of our tasks.
We each ask ourselves why we choose
to do what we do. He might have
hired someone to do the job.
I might have ignored my muse, taken a walk,
called to my neighbor and talked with him
about patching up our wounds.
Just what words as hard as bricks
had we hurled at our thick heads?
Geordie de Boer, rattles around rural Washington these days wrangling rhyme and wrestling rhythm. He’s been published most recently by elimae, Offcourse, Right Hand Pointing, and Eunoia Review. Visit him at Cockeyed Fits (geedeboer.wordpress.com/).
ISSUE:
W I N T E R
2011-2012
ART FEATURE:
An Introduction
to Deltiology
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