Poems by Rustin Larson
Acknowledgements
Poems here have previously appeared in the following:
American Poetry Journal
Art Scene
California Quarterly
Carnelian
The Daily Palette
Fact of the Universe: American Poetry Since Now
The Iowa Source
The Mid-America Poetry Review
Nasty
Weather Eye
Thanks goes to the editors of these publications.
4:44
My guitar and I share DNA. Behind its strings sometimes,
some evenings, I put words to it,
how I am “a rat in a cage”
though I don’t sing this very loudly
for fear of the neighbor’s terrier.
When I use the public bathroom in the wee
morning hours, I hear from the adjacent stall
a squealing like that of a puppy or a guinea pig
or a vampire squatting there, his leather
wings folded around him.
When I go back to sleep, I can’t,
and so the early morning hours and I
share the same whispering stars.
Then at 4:44 a.m. all the birds wake up
and start worshipping loudly and excitedly—
Methodists in their finest plumage—
call and response—hallelujah, brothers & sisters,
hallelujah, hal-le-lu-jah!
Verdant is the world in its ripeness.
SOON
Soon the month will turn and we’ll
all be older. The moon will dose its eye with cloud
and the planets break their string of pearls.
Soon the tulips will shed their crowns
and the mole will carve his cavern,
a hill blossoming from the ground.
THE BEETLE
Yesterday, walking on the outskirts of some forest
with my three daughters, we came upon
a brilliant green beetle recently loosed
from earth’s jewel box. Skirting up
an embankment of well-trod mud, the beetle
shone brightly as the sun touched its shell.
Soon Sarah kicked off her shoes
and headed for the muddy trickle
through the woods. I want to walk
up this stream, she said, and looked
over her shoulder. How far will you
walk with me, she said, How far?
LAST DAY
Last day of May, my fingering hand
callused, but my guitar leaning mute
on the love seat. The pocket calculator
faces the caramel stone. The stuffed
poppy lies tangled in jump rope. Julia’s
laundered jeans are folded over the arm
of the sofa, their flower embroidery hidden.
On TV they promise not to use nukes
in their fight over Kashmir.
1985, I bought incense: Kashmiri Rose.
I think I worshipped silently as it burned,
and when it was all ash
I splashed semen on my woman’s cervix.
I was meditative. Katie’s here now
playing her Game Boy—
some virtual martial-arts combat
fought to disco music—the troops massing
on the border—the sun healing our living
room—the last day of May—
a different century.
ANNIVERSARIES
Went to dinner in Columbia, Maryland
at the house of your closest work-friend.
Her hubby, who spied for the CIA,
could be called “to duty” at any hour
and he could never tell her where.
She handed me a Miller’s High Life and told me
to loosen my tie. We had a strange
dinner of peanut-butter chicken and hand-
grenades (as her hubby called artichokes)
lovingly prepared by her slightly handi-capable
brother who had washed his hands slowly
singing “Happy Birthday to Me” three
times, twirling the Life Buoy in his mitts.
I once had a cocker spaniel puppy for three days
who would not leave my side and who curled
upon my pillow at night and farted
in my face.
I woke often
to let him out.
I’d sit on the steps of the moonlight
as he chewed grass. I’d watch
my breath cloud above me.
SPEAKING IN TONGUES
Tug and his family, Holy Rollers,
sometimes got the power,
spoke in tongues
that cadenced sex and punishment and fried chicken
pot lucks.
Preacher, an umbrella bird,
genus Cephalopterus Ornatus,
laid on hands and beauties writhed
on holy linoleum.
Religion, primitive
and pure, no stained glass, but a view of Lot’s
souped-up Chevy, back seat of conception,
visitation of angels,
denim-clad:
pronunciations, annunciations.
PNEUMATIC HAMMER
At the symphony honoring my birthday,
a new tone poem written for brass only.
A huge success and afterwards I sat alone
in a coffee house with a large mocha and reflected.
Now the difficult part.
Write a sentence, write a sentence
using 12 different words—
they are like marigold seeds.
I came to the conclusion that if I waited long enough,
kept a fresh carton of milk in the refrigerator,
kept my colon cleansed, my spirit refreshed
and my wallet full, she’d be back.
And one night, lo and behold, comes she in boldly
crashing her pneumatic hammer onto my nice
clean linoleum, ripping her hat off with a clank
and screaming, Love me, love me now, you fool!
She had an eager Danish mermaid type of body,
said, I want to have your baby,
but I told her I was too young to be a responsible father.
And so she went into one of her psycho fits
and I had to shoot her
in the ass with a rhino dart,
then gently lay her
sad limp body on the bed
right after my cold pill
kicked in
and I felt I could finally quit.
KURTZ JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL
Ravens play in snow. I deserve a some inner sanctum time.
A school kid, I’d press hard into my paper,
sometimes engraving
the soft wood beneath. Not much
has changed. Clock above the cabinets.
Smell of burnt wood splints. Bunsen
burners. Mr. Williams rubbing his fingers
over his forehead. Carcass of a dissected
mink. The smell. Sun a communion disk
through winter clouds. I’d walk home
swinging my black cornet case crammed
with evening’s homework. Folder
full of sheet music. I’d stop for a bottle
of green soda or, Thursdays, my lesson
at Southtown, canyon
of amplifiers, Gibson SG’s: hanged men.
Played “My-Mama-a-Told-Me,”
theme from “The Godfather”
for Louie Cattarucci, maestro and former
drummer for Captain Beefheart. The Ravens
visit Thailand, look at each other quizzically.
Tower of London, The Ravens wear blue
bands on their legs. Julie
looks at the television through her yellow
Ranger Rick binoculars. Sunday evening,
work tomorrow, and I don’t know what pain
reliever to take. A life rich in detail—
dirty snow, worn rubber, oil, exhaust
and ice, a cocktail the bullies loved to wash
one’s face in, cornet case thrown in a slushy
drift, traffic crowing and Louie smoking
calmly, watching from his storefront window.
THE FIND
Everything I’ve found
continues to find itself
wherever it is hidden.
Someday I will split
an apple and there—
complete—whatever it is.
I could have chosen nothing,
but I have chosen struggle.
It pays about the same.
THE NOISE
It comes from the recklessness
of the everyday:
clawing at the insides of my coffin.
I don’t need an alarm to go off.
I wake about the same time,
not remembering too much—
my seat in the theatre,
the obstructed view,
the past tense, too referral.
I sit on the edge of the bed,
reach for my glasses,
everything an influence:
the clock pointing at 6:45,
the sound of someone walking
through the grass, water running
through pipes in the building,
the smell of burning toast,
the murmur of a couple arguing
downstairs in—what language is it?—
Persian? I dress carefully,
thinking camouflage. It seems
all right: a ball cap, sunglasses,
an air of the well worn grave
Sinatra sings from, the crackle
of dusty aged vinyl, the dull needle
holding its own at 33 1/3 rpm,
the canyon of sound down which
the flood of reality cascades.
The first things I see outside
are sunflowers and the sun;
I see my car, looking like
a neglected harmonica.
I climb inside and create
this noise, one person out of billions.
But then I hear another tone, rumbling.
I can feel it in the tips of my fingers
as I turn the wheel onto the highway.
Though I see no one else, only my eyes
in the mirror, I can hear it, feel it.
THE PHILOSOPHER SAVANT CONTEMPLATES
HIS IMAGINED ABANDONMENT AS A CHILD
Pretend they drove away. They didn’t care.
Playthings–bear
in a burning wagon, beads of glass
to crash within a circle
of dust. We haunted
the crooked house in the district
of color, smelled the century’s
smoke, decaying beams
of oak. The dust breathed. The dust
settled the land. Firelight
in the eyes of pumpkins. The witch’s
broom angled against the hearth.
THE PHILOSOPHER SAVANT MEDITATES
Once, sitting in the dark
under a tree in the damp,
my breath ghosted above.
Suddenly, someone I didn’t see
was behind, shoving
me off the park
bench, and I hit the cold
ground, breathless. My enemy
ran briskly fifty yards
before his body turned utterly
to vapor below the gold
of a sodium lamp.
*
Your mind goes on around you,
practicing piano in the apartment below
or standing in the cathedral of time,
meditating its stained-glass window,
its mandala of red and blue,
frankincense twisting to deletion.
Wind gushes against the blinds.
You listen not for completion
nor what’s forward, nor behind.
*
Memory decorates this room
with lanterns, lace,
the sound of an ocean:
the window: light hammering
of hours from the body: a Detroit
of nerve cells in place
of sleep under the landing
pattern of dreams. I had fried
my brains. Relaxants tried
to find rest for me:
some state like drowning,
redemption, practice
for what my ghost would be.
THE DANGEROUS SUN
The tinsel under which I showered this morning
kissed my cold closed eyes and made me shine
sadly. The soap, that fragranced my thoughts
and hair, rode on my skin
in the car on the street of the miniature city
through which I clattered humbly
to my cross and grave and otherwise euphonic
emblem of a job.
Later, at the Army Post Tap, my friend had a great tribal song
he yelped like a coyote in shadow
purpled into the corners of abandoned
playgrounds, schools, rubble.
The dangerous sun burned itself to sleep.
And that was the only thing that kept me going.
And that is the only thing I love.
A DELIVERY
Koop is drenched in Hai Karate. He soliloquizes
about Dr. Who’s dilemma with the trierarch
of the Dalek’s spaceship. It’s hot and hidrosis
is Koop’s problem du jour and he pops a cherry
in his mouth and steers the van much like a bicorn
rascal released from the netherworld, a red crown-of-thorns
for a boutonniere. Today’s oak cross and crown-of-thorns
is a TV-stereo combo, an agony
up three flights downtown. Momentarily, though, by corn
and soy fields, we fly this ‘71 Ford mass of oil leakage,
warning blinking on the dash, the earth’s hidrosis
collecting in mirrors on the roadside. Mirage.
Soon we are struggling up a stairway,
our hearts pounding, the combo’s owner
in the doorway upstairs, shaking a can of salted cashews.
“I wanna catch the start of the Cubs game,” she says, cashews
turning to butter in her mouth. She soliloquizes
in her housecoat how he left when the air-con died,
the bitter master of summer now. She snaps a Royal Crown.
Of thorns I dream, in winter snow and ice. She says her crown-of-thorns
is a lousy husband and being tortured by corns.
I see her refrigerator’s hidrosis,
a huge puddle on linoleum.
The electricity hums, soliloquizes.
WHY WRITE?
Nothing better for you to do, you think,
than tease giraffes and eat bing cherries?
Nothing better than surround the ink
your leisure invented, scrolls that hid.
You teased giraffes, ate bing cherries, read
all the crap you could before you died.
Your leisure invented scrolls that hid
in the glove compartments of Mitsubishis.
All the crap you could before you died,
of course, didn’t save you. But it’s better than dying
in the glove compartment of a Mitsubishi
at the tail end of a life of bean sprouts and lying.
Of course, it didn’t save you. But instead of dying
in a routine the color of dirty socks
at the tail end of a life of bean sprouts and lying,
you punched the earth until your province rocked.
Even in a routine the color of dirty socks
there’s nothing better than to surround the ink
and punch the earth until your province rocks.
Nothing better for you to do, you think?
LETTER TO KINDNESS
…it is…only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread…. –Naomi Shihab Nye
Before I send my letter to the Great
Midwestern Tornado, I tie,
carefully, the laces of my shoes:
Silver Spring station, my briefcase
full of mail to strangers
who will or will not use
these letters to more strangers.
Your words are the purchase-
price of another survival–
they are mortal bread
I swallow on the streets
of Washington, D.C.,
communion bread of a whisper.
My shoes do all the thinking
on the filthy pavement, on splatters
like letters from a doomed
language of concrete.
I send my mail because it is only –what?–
that makes sense anymore,
letters I mail directly against “No.”
I purchase fresh-cut day lilies,
merge the blood of petals and stems
with the rain’s stuttering flow.
TOURISTS
In a dumpling house, we sit down
at a crowded table. Chinatown:
smoked poultry strung in a window;
cigarettes; fish on cases of ice;
umbrellas of lacquered bamboo
blossom in the drizzle and cold.
WHEN WE KNEW FOR CERTAIN YOU WERE NEVER COMING BACK
The water sang.
I could hear all the fishes burst
the surface oxygen, see them
on the docks, early evening,
mother and father
talking softly, sitting in their Adirondacks,
no traces of mourning.
1968. The world was new. A dove
ate an olive branch.
My mom sang,
half-drunk on the dock at night,
“That Ol’ Black Magic,”
frozen daiquiris
until the clouds swam.
The water, its chill, its song
of disorganized sensation.
Now, the doves
have gone to sleep;
the crickets chirp softly
in the gardens of kale, chard and dill;
fire arches above.
SPIDER CONCH–LAMBIS CHIRAGRA
That cold November we walked down the length
of our beach, climbed the switchback staircase
up the tide wall to “Thistle,” our rental. Water,
a bucket of clams, a fire, tide-rise
was pulled in by the moon’s bone body.
We dreamt in the coast’s darkened horns.
The conch was left on our doorstep, its horns
a strange compass in daylight, its thorny length
equal to my hand which held its body
like a weapon. I spied down the staircase
to see who left it, who might, walking, rise
in the distance, footsteps erased by water.
There was no one. You put on the water
for coffee, the steady blue flames like horns
lifting the kettle. I felt your curiosity rise
when I showed it to you, placed it on the length
of the table. You disappeared up the staircase
for your camera, then had me pose with its body
crabbed over my heart; I acted out a body
in anguish. Click. This is how memory works. Water
was busy with its breaking. The beach, the staircase
to the sea was as smooth as sleep. The devil’s horns
on my forehead were lovely, you said. Length
of love, your hands in my pockets. Sunrise.
I took the spider conch to a rise
of sand and placed it there; my body
bowed in supplication. You laughed. Down the length
of the beach, gulls cried; the foaming water
fizzed its bitter ale; the six horns
of the conch pointed to the horizon.
OX-BOW LAKE
Onto the wormy earth, no shoes,
into the bright-beaten patches of mud
and bottle glass, I could dig for treasure:
blind plastic grenadier with his wrinkle
of anguish; blue Indian, his bow
stretched back in vengeance, arrow
poised, a one-way sign down a narrow
road of smartweed to a cul-de-sac of shoes
abandoned with other clothes, the ox-bow
splashing with naked swimmers, orange mud
of clay, undulation, a wrinkle
of sun across the water.
WINTER
We live at the bottom of a sea of snowflakes.
They fall ruled by a mathematics
no one can resolve. When my brother
reads my poems, his brain turns to mineral.
The dawn’s yarn
knits itself into an evening sky. (Flowers are snowflakes
grown wise.)
If I empty the wallet of my memory, evoke the mathematics
of emotion, scrape the excess mineral
of my loyalty, I can recognize my brother
as he was, soldering the radio together. The smoke, the mineral
encrusting the hot iron, the pure snow
of radio static, “Woolly Bully.” Brotherhood
of sparrows, mathematics
of prayer, accumulation of snowflakes
sloping against the basement window,
night walks like a brother
up from the bus stop and pauses in an urn
of lamplight on the sidewalk to smoke.
It’s the winter we learn to breathe mineral,
every breath is a breath earned;
confident I’ll see somehow another summer;
not certain whether I’ll see this brother
again this or any other season.
AS A CHILD I HAD A TELESCOPE
As a child I had a telescope.
It let me see the empire of the moon,
The bridge over the Sea of Tranquility.
The people there were beautiful.
They swallowed the milk of the tranquilizing sea.
IN THE QUIET RAIN
6:35 a.m. Not suffering. The quietest time
of morning. I can hear a train rumbling
miles away. A Charles Pretzels can serves
as a waste basket. The rodent digs
litter under its spinning wheel. My senses say
attack another expectation. Run by another
temporary solution. I think I’ll make oatmeal.
I haven’t heard a thing happen yet.
The magnifying glass sleeps with the geode.
Maybe I want to run. It’s starting to lighten.
Birds by the millions, flying away. Vienna
Waltzes. Imagine never to hear Strauss again.
You are up and dressed and smiling. I gulp
down my requirement of water. Prepare.
It’s amazing how easily things don’t rhyme.
Iggy Pop. Waltzes. The Spectrum.
Well, anyway, it’s off to work. My legs are
sending me a message. The begonias, white and red,
guard my doorstep. The girls are still asleep.
That train is finally blowing through town, past
the wrecked Iron Works, past New Chicago
and the falafel place. It’s 6:50. I think
it’s safe to go outside. In the quiet rain.
Past the people who haven’t any plans.
MY LION
My lion watches from the kitchen window
and listens to the schoolboys yelling hai-YA!
He breathes his loud purrs and then roars,
grunts rhythmically
as the afternoon drains into gutters.
He would like to prowl and prance
the savanna free and eat a villager,
and I would like nothing better
than to unlock the door and hold it open.
My lion pads up to my recliner, licks my feet.
The Hungarians downstairs are afraid
of his sheer weight and power everyday
pounding above them.
He claws up to my shoulders
and gives my neck a playful bite.
I know (and he knows) he could snap me, like that!
This is what keeps us so close.
SOCKS
My socks look beat, slung on the chair.
I put them through a hell of a lot today
on the eraser end of me, walking nowhere.
MY SWEATER IS NIGHTFALL
September, the safety pins
that know my phone number
taste grape jam and sweetness
that softens my nostrils vanilla.
Pipe smoke or ice cube
memory, my fingernails absorb
the last jeweled ray of sun
sustained in a note of Saxophone soprano.
Milk tasting like nothing I had,
the target made the buildings
dream elephants the undertaker froze
and thawed out to the full moon.
Remove the appendix from the orange,
c’est la vie at the end of the saloon.
A Swedish lullaby sleeps beneath
the night’s wolf-grey balloon.
INVENTORY
The way my body looks, notwithstanding, and as I’ve said
many ways before, there is a house on the other side,
a white house, a big sloping lawn. The house is high
enough to be far from even record floods. Sometimes,
I think my eyes and my spirit, some golden rod and black-
eyed Susans; my spirit; but not to feel the sunwarmth
and the watercoins’ sparkle; how impossible it would be:
no sun of idea, no peace
of sleep, no daydream.
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