Trees here, never being trees,
are always born from growling binary stars
slumming the world. You can dream them
with a cluster of orchid flowers strangling
a flag, hoisting it inside a plum seed,
or home across your brow where all
imagination is suspect, and isolated.
You can fall from orbit, go crazy,
track the moonrise across fallout shelters.
You can divvy up the salt, the stress,
the last communiques, wolf pups, jonquils,
two dazzle bolts, three crates of kit puzzlers,
and the last bag of visors whittled from skulls.
Trees, never being trees, have been painted
towards our frozen city, to start new wars.
I read you the news, you read me a reply.
Our diplomats start shooting each other.
A drunkard can always teach a squirrel to climb a tree.
—Proverb from the Storms—
One midnight the highway starts sneaking home.
It drags three sharp curves across a mountain.
Caney Dencottle swears that you both danced
right down the center line and then the pavement
jumped along with you. A mailbox flinched
like a rubber-legged hound trouncing its fleas.
A ditch slithered towards potholes for two miles,
then coiled up, and played like a giant rattler
trying to fang the Big Dipper.
At Prillaman's Switch, there's a long trestle
and sometimes it hops moon craters, clanging
louder than empty coal cars smashed off a cliff.
Might be the three a.m. coal train hitched north.
Might take a hobo five years to tell it to himself.
I can hear it like one mean gunner flubbed in jail,
groaning for stars, smacking his lips for bootleg.
I sell it to you now the same as fire.
The stars will harvest your mind
when it launches you down the shore
past the sandalwood and cormorants,
the salt ponds, and collapsed bridges.
If a neighbor wakes you sober at noon,
you’ll blame a novel in the trash bag.
Or you’ll pray like a monk in the window,
watching heaven emerge like moths.
Your grandfather said, let there be
space travel. Your grandmother kicked
flower pots across a Texas railyard,
cactus spines catered to a cop’s face.
Jail time’s past Neptune, then your mother
toddled, floated a slice of cake to a kitten.
The torus of an out-world slurred the sky
like green graffiti on the landing gear.
Then you were born, a jungle of voices
witnessed the redbirds, the mesquite,
the blue and chartreuse reptiles of your life.
How else could you ever arrive alive?
We drank a hauler’s gin in space.
The stars whittled it from glass.
And it distilled down like a smile
when the sky rolled us off a wheel
until we stretched past the satellites.
Next we flew away not quite sober
and not quite couraged up for heaven.
We shared more gin with the chef.
His mind was gone. He said our supper
would be six winters from now, derby
hats and butter with a flask of godlike
islands melting on a coin. Recon
said the chef would curl into a plate
and shiver for bread. Recon said
we’d carry the earth to another star,
and we’d keep on drinking.
My drunk cousin named his toad Neruda.
It sang in a flowerpot like static at sunset
and when we imitated the song, tongue-tied
shadows loped across our jaws, a giant
toad jumped from light and stared at beer
bottles, and a book of mistranslated Spanish
on the couch where my uncle had circled
many words and poured whiskey on a cactus
that began to splurge with a white flower
just past the toad. My cousin asked him:
Daddy, dónde esta el sapo...right here, he said,
and the giant toad emerged from its shadow
and said: dear earth aliens, keep drinking.
Dear humans, it is better to keep amphibians
in your dreams, rather than on the stove.
Clyde Kessler lives in Radford, VA, with his wife Kendall and their son Alan. He is a founding member of Blue Ridge Discovery Center, an environmental education organization with programs in western North Carolina and southwestern Virginia. His poems have been published recently in Cortland Review, Metazen, Now and Then, Your Daily Poem, and Contemporary Haibun Online, and a few poems will be published soon in Convergence, Triggerfish and Sow’s Ear Poetry Review.
ISSUE:
S P R I N G
2014
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