Far-Fetched (2 page)
Authors: Devin Johnston
For her, the stone is new.
An oval fob of brass,
key still attached,
surfaced in a shop on Cherokee
and now rests atop my desk
beside a small obsidian axe.
Absently, I rub my thumb
across the fob and feel
Southern Hotel, Room 306.
The elegant lobby survives
in a few steel engravings:
palms and spindleback chairs,
fruit in thick cut glass,
men loafing in spats.
One of them slips next door
for a quick nip
and winds up slugging down
half a dozen oysters the size of eggs,
rummaging through the shells.
Amidst the bright din
of cutlery and chatter,
the whiskeyâa second, then a thirdâ
encourages equilibrium,
then a calm indifference.
The evening sun goes down,
drawing river smells
through shadows of the Sixth Ward,
blushing the hotel's stone façade,
enflaming its westward-facing rooms.
Behind the front desk, a plaque
commemorates Chief Pontiac,
leader of the Ottawa
and great friend to Louisiana,
buried in a blue coat
beyond the cemetery gates,
no one knows quite where.
From Baden, or what's left of it,
pursue a long, smooth curve of road
that skirts the northern flood wall
to parallel a palisade
of channel markers sunk in earth,
the folly of a cement works.
Its blank silos overlook
a pit of argillaceous shale,
the fine and fossilized remains
of bivalves, sponges, spines of shark,
quarried and burnt with limestone charge
to alchemize a binder of brick
and the city's shallow, brittle crust.
Around a bend, the riverbed
swings wide to open a fetch of field.
Shadows skim its mucky thaw
as juncos, whisked about by the wind
on courses neither fixed nor free,
give but a quick metallic chink.
Behind you, rain has wrapped the bluffs
and scumbled limbs of sycamores.
Ahead, each bend assumes the name
of a gaudy packet run aground,
or snagged and sunk, or blown to bits:
for one, the side-wheel
Amazon,
pluperfect wheelhouse painted green,
that struck a honey-locust pike
still rooted deep in river mud
and tore its hull from stem to stern.
Down in minutes! Within the month
an island silted up behind.
A flock of luggage floated south,
remarked by those on Water Street
loafing before the trading post
and the barbershop of Madame Krull.
She can
eternally
be found
at work in her elaborate room
toujours prête
to clip and coif
or wield her razor with great skill
for those who favor her with their chins.
The scent of ginger tonic blends
with that of borscht, its acrid tang,
consumed behind a wooden screen
as Illinois grows dark. In this,
her second year since coming west.
A pair of Orpingtons,
one blue, the other black,
with iridescent necks
and fine, ashen fluff
cackle through the dark,
their damp calls close enough
to chafe, a friction with no spark.
They settle down to roost,
two rests along a stave.
Each curls into itself,
comb tucked beneath a wing,
as the days grow long enough
to kindle in each a yolk,
the smallest flame of spring.
after William IX, Duke of Aquitaine
As sweetness flows through these new days,
the woods leaf out, and songbirds phrase
in neumes of roosted melody
incipits to a new song.
Then love should find lubricity
and quicken, having slept so long.
The bloodroot blossoms, well and good,
but I receive no word that would
set my troubled heart at ease,
nor could we turn our faces toward
the sun, and open by degrees,
unless we reach a clear accord.
And so our love goes, night and day:
it's like the thorny hawthorn spray
that whips about in a bitter wind
from dusk to dawn, shellacked with sleet,
until the sun's first rays ascend
through leaves and branches, spreading heat.
I have in mind one April morning
when she relented without warning,
relenting from her cold rebuff
in laughter, peals of happiness.
Sweet Christ, let me live long enough
to get my hands beneath her dress!
I hate the elevated talk
that disregards both root and stalk
and sets insipid pride above
vicissitudes of lust and strife.
Let others claim a higher love:
we've got the bread, we've got the knife.
Just a glimpse
of rufous thatch
and curved bill
a brown thrasher
flipping up
wood chips
at the water's edge
scuttles through sumac
and shakes the hedge
with oscillations
Panic constricts
the double syrinx
water reeds
bound with wax
goad and goaded
again and again
toward improvisation
chelping a wet
couplet through ceramic
licentious yet pure
yellow eye
disinterested
witness to the song
A mockingbird
perched on the hood
of a pay phone
half buried in a hedge
of wild rose
and heard it ring
The clapper ball
trilled between
brass gongs
for two seconds
then wind
and then again
With head cocked
the bird took note
absorbed the ringing
deep in its throat
and frothed
an ebullient song
The leitmotif
of bright alarm
recurred in a run
from hawk
to meadowlark
from May to early June
The ringing spread
from syrinx to syrinx
from Kiowa
to Comanche to Clark
till someone
finally picked up
and heard a voice
on the other end
say
Konza
or
Consez
or
Kansa
which the French trappers
heard as
Kaw
which is only the sound
of a word for wind
then only the sound of wind
Hot days, violent storms,
high clouds, cold rain.
              *
Sheets and curtains cast
a white-diamond gloom.
Are you asleep?
Wind heaves
against the glass
and slow breathing
fills the room.
              *
Soft pillows, soft
blankets, soft sheets:
Her kiss? Sweet,
and hard enough
to crack your teeth.
              *
Dark at noon
and darker still
beneath a tossing oak
where subaquatic
light renders
ironwork remote.
              *
Clouds purl
in a conch whorl
around a center
yet to be declared.
Curve of recurrence
Horns of dawn
Wheels touch down
on the smooth
ceremonial runway
a grand plaza
of stenciled arrows
to and from the sky
              *
Soft clatter of plates
Clack of rain coming on
Her head sunk
in a leather menu
Her white fingers
turn a fork
and harrow the tablecloth
with tines
              *
At the Electric Cinema
a hand waits its turn
outside a bag of popcorn
              *
Browsing through a bookshop's
narcotic dusk
she comes across
an aquatint
of brook trout
in the bargain cellar
submerged from street life
Day slips past
              *
Stout and tobacco smoke
Tail end of a head cold
Bespattered pigeon cote
              *
A bathtub
brindled with rust
glows in the dusk
Her white knee
sleek as a seal
breaks the surface
Estuaries
overflow
across the tile
1
You ask how many kisses
would leave me satisfied?
As many as the grains of silt
that flow from Alton south
across the wide
Missouri's mouth,
as many as the stars that shine
through quiet August nights
on tangled forms
of humankind,
so many kisses might
leave this craving satisfiedâ
more kisses than the curious
could tabulate
or bitter tongues malign.
2
Lizzie, you once said
I knew you as no other did
and that you'd rather lie in my arms
than in the light of Jesus.
I loved you then, not
as most men do their women,
but as a father loves his children.
These days I know you better,
and though I'm more
aroused by your touch,
you flaunt and flutter
through my thoughts
without much hold.
You wonder how this happened?
Such betrayal as yours excites
more desire and less affection.
Excrucior,
the crux of it:
torn between
two states of mind,
the axes of
a new life
and of the one
you left behind.
Time and time
again, you learn
nothing but pain
from pain.
Behind the school
each bright thorn
collects
a bead of rain.
Not long before your tongue
flutters inside
my
mouth,
nimble tip searching out
something to be said,
just as the deaf and blind
brush hands in tactile signs.
Do not share food or drinks.
No rubbing arms or touching faces.
Visitors and offenders may
hold hands across the table.
You will only be permitted
one greeting and departing kiss,
a closed-mouth kiss
of one to two seconds.
Do not leave children unattended.
When he turns fifteen, you'll be fifty-four.
When he turns thirty, you'll be sixty-nine.
This plain arithmetic amazes more
than miracle, the constant difference more
than mere recursion of father in son.
If you reach eighty, he'll be forty-one!
The same sun wheels around again, the dawn
drawn out and hammered thin as a copper sheet.
When he turns sixty, you'll be gone.
Compacted mud, annealed by summer heat,
two ruts incise this ghost-forsaken plain
and keep their track width, never to part or meet.
The courtroom, clad in wood veneer,
could be a lesser pharaoh's tomb
equipped for immortality.
A civil servant drags her broom
around the bench and gallery
as jurors darken a questionnaire.
One coughs against the courtroom chill.
One drums her fingers atop the bar.
One finds escape through Stephen King,
as through a window left ajar.
One talks and talks, a reckoning
of who got sober, who took ill.
The talker seeks me out at lunch,
a bond of passing circumstance.
He slides the food around his tray
disdainfully and looks askance
at those nearby, as if to say,
In here, you can't expect too much.
Across the hall, five years ago,
the talker fought for custody
and lost, his daylight blotted out.
He'd spent the decade carelessly
and sucked a mortgage up his snout.
He never sees his daughter now.
They meet online for Realms of Ra
as siblings, catlike humanoids,
survivors from the Hybrid Age;
or Foxen riding flightless birds
across the plain, a scrolling page
above which two moons light their way.
They gather gold coins as they roam,
and relics, sometimes holy ones.
They seldom map attentively,
but swing their swords and have some fun.
They chatâbackchannel strategy,
but not of school, her friends, or home.
Last night, they entered a castle keep
infested with the living dead,
whose breath abruptly turned the air
to crackled glass. A pop-up read,
Initializing Griffin's Lair:
please wait,
and soon he fell asleep.
Of course, he can reboot the game
tonight, with nothing lost or missed.
Meanwhile, a case of larceny
