THERMOS 2: Jennifer Denrow

Here’s another of the poems I’ve spent a lot of time with over the years, from our second issue in late 2008. Jen Denrow subsequently published this poem as the first section of her book, California, available here from Four Ways Books. She also talked to us about the book, here. — AS

 

California

Forget your life.

Okay I have.

Lay something down that is unlike you:

Sold boat, Italian song.

I’m losing my head over this:

this is what the doll said when you pulled its head
from its body;

all the girls laughed.

I’ll move to California. I should
go alone. I’ll go

with the knowledge of fake
snow. I’ll ask my father to bring me.

 

*

 

I liked it better
when my fingers
were people.

I should drive away from my life.

If a man comes through town on his way to California, I will go with him. I don’t care who
he is:

if his wife is pretty, fine;
if he is returning to her, fine.

A man should be going there today,

at least one man; this city
is so big.

When I’m in California I’ll go to the beach
and cry. All of the seagulls will crowd

around me and force my mouth open
with their wings. One

will bring me a fish. I won’t be able to leave them.

My fingers
aren’t people
anymore.

I forgot to train them. They were over watered. They drowned.

There isn’t a steeple, no alderman discussing the loss.

That was a hand-church;

that was my folly.

 

*

 

My life in California will be inspiring. I’ll send postcards to people who didn’t know I was
going. I’ll even send postcards to people I haven’t talked to in years.

I’ll buy a guitar once I arrive.

I’ll audition at a local club to become the nightly entertainment.

I’ll say, I can do anything you need.

I’ll show them card tricks and how my dog can talk.

I won’t have a dog.

Everyone will laugh at me.

When it’s winter and the woman next door needs to borrow some change for laundry, I’ll
call someone and say how unhappy I am.

I shouldn’t go to California then.

No one can be alive there.

The store windows are just so the owners think people are alive.

I’ve never even wanted to go to California before.

I should leave now.

 

*

 

I went to wake up my husband to tell him I was leaving. He said, Why do you want to go there?

Because I have to.

You should fly then.

He won’t let me borrow his car.

My car doesn’t have AC.

I know a guy who should be driving to California this week. I check my email to see if he
has written to invite me.

He hasn’t.

The computer says the right person is out there waiting for me. It asks for my name and
age. I tell my husband to make a profile on a love match website and I’ll do the same
and we can see if we are compatible. He doesn’t want to, so instead I ask if I can
talk in his mouth andhe lets me but says it tickles.

Later when he wakes up he’ll say, What was all of that about California?

And I’ll say, Oh nothing.

And he’ll say, You’re pushing me away.

And I’ll say, Probably, but I don’t mean to.

He’ll leave for work and I’ll spend the day listening to my favorite musician sing very sad
songs that will make me want to go far away from myself.

I’ll go to California then.

 

*

 

When I went to the backyard,

I said to myself,

this doesn’t look like California

and nothing in my life does

and my husband says he’ll have to deal with this forever.

I want to go so bad I clench my fist
hard in the air, I push my finger into
his chin and cry: it feels like this, I say.
I need it this bad.

 

*

 

I realize now that I’m a woman.

I go to the store.

I buy California style pizza and beer. I drop my ID when the woman asks to see it.

No one in the store looks like they could be from California.

A baby eats some keys.

I buy a magazine with people from California in it; they are all very beautiful.

I come out of the store and the sky

is filled with many white clouds

that could be stand-ins for California clouds.

I don’t even have a tan.

I know this is the only time I’ll leave the house today.

 

*

 

When I get home my husband sees me balling my fist and he scowls at me. On the radio is
a story about a woman who walked from California to New York. She was 80. She says we
don’t have a democracy.

I need to arrive at something.

Now there is a story about a thirteen year old boy who is dying. He tells the reporter not to
sit around being miserable. He gasps for breath.

He won’t ever be able to dive into a pool.

He is a beautiful child.

He is dead.

He told the reporter to always let someone in line in front of him.

The next story is about the Unabomber’s brother. His mother kissed his cheek when he
told her about her son.

She said, I can’t imagine what you’ve been going through.

If I was in California, I wouldn’t be listening to the radio.

I write California in the air.

Another story comes on about a man who built a cork boat.

I bring up images of California on the computer; there are three million to choose from. I
set one as the screen saver. It’s a yellow map of the southern part.

 

*

 

Instead of going to California I make my husband a ham and cheese sandwich to take to
work. He doesn’t like the way I place the cheese on the bread.
When he leaves for work I sit in a quiet house.

I told him I couldn’t have this life.

This wasn’t me living here.

I was living in California.

He said cruel things that he knew would scare me.

He brought the ring from the cabinet and tried to put it on my finger.

I said no.

I said I can’t be married right now.

He said this happens every year.

He may be right.

 

*

 

My mother took me to California once when I was very small. We visited Disneyland. I
wore Mickey Mouse ears and had my hair in braids.

I wasn’t afraid. No one talked to me.

On the plane ride back the stewardess offered us soft drinks.

 

*

 

Once on a plane a foreign woman offered me fruit.

I declined.

This was when I was older, after I’d already been to California.

When I was there, I wrote my name in the sand. I wrote my name and drew a heart and
then I wrote my mother’s name. This was when she loved my father so I wrote his
name too.

We were visiting my uncle.

I see a picture of him holding me and laughing.

He’s dead now, so I can’t visit him there anymore.

He had diabetes and drank a lot and died alone in a motel room.

My aunt said she received a phone call from him after he was dead. He groaned a little and
said unintelligible things.

He lived in California because he was in the Navy and had to live there.

If I lived in California, I would buy an iguana. I would meet a lot of nice people; they
would make kind remarks about my decision to follow my intuition.

 

*

 

Leonard Cohen went to California.

He went there to become holy.

I could become holy in California. I could live in a small room with only a little light.

My husband says I can rent a car if I really need to go. I tell him it’s not the same. Why
doesn’t he ever feel something like this? He just doesn’t.

He lives in this house completely.

This house could be the problem.

I suspect that I’m the problem.

He says I want to abandon our animals; he says I’m crazy.

I don’t feel like I’m crazy,

I just feel like someone who wants to go to California.

 

*

 

I just remembered that I do know someone who lives in California. He’s a man I worked
with several years ago. He moved there to make movies.

We made a movie once. It was a horror film that took place in a movie theatre. We worked
in a movie theatre.

Our dialogue was poor.

I finally gave up.

I fell in love with the manager. We had sex. We laughed the whole time.

This was the first time I had sex. I was twenty two. He didn’t love me.

Later, I realized that I never really loved him either, I just pretended to so I could be sad
about something. He was very charming and said funny things. He never took his hat off
because he was going bald and didn’t want anyone to know. His girlfriend was very sweet.
He made all of the girls love him. Even the prettiest Mormon girl loved him. I started
taking a lot of drugs so it didn’t matter that she loved him. I saw them kiss and felt
nothing.

He is the kind of man who could live in California.

He had a very fast car and a lot of friends.

If he lived in California, he could be a politician.

 

*

 

On the television I saw the President in a fast food restaurant in California. He was buying
a cup of coffee for a reporter. Someone went to get the coffee, a recently new citizen, and
when he came back and tried to hand it to the reporter, the President pushed his arm away
and said, I’ll handle that. He took the coffee from the new citizen and handed it to the
reporter himself, and then he took some folded ones from his pocket and handed them
back to the citizen.

He was trying to be real.

He was trying to look like the kind of person who wanted to be in California.

 

*

 

If California didn’t exist, I’d still want to go there.

As I look around the house I think of things I’ll take with me.

I pack my bags.

Before my husband left he asked if I would be here when he got home.

Yes.

But you’ll be gone someday.

Yes.

Will you at least leave a note?

Yes.

The last man I left got a note. I didn’t leave him for California but for my husband.

He was an angry man. The note I left was filled with a lot of statements about aggression
and happiness.

After I left, he went to California for an art show. He married his ex girlfriend. I knew he loved her the whole time he loved me. I didn’t talk about her. I let him have her in silence.

 

*

 

My cousin calls. She tells me there are only 363 days until the new Harry Potter movie
comes out. My aunt gets on the phone. I tell her about California. She tells me about a
man who lost his leg but can still feel two toes fall asleep.

The reality is that…

My aunt talks like this.

She says his leg is not really gone. That’s not reality. She tells me how Christ replaced
someone’s ear.

I hear her daughter in the background asking to borrow some pot. Here, but make it last, I
don’t want to go back over there in two days, my aunt says. Back over there is to the house of the
man with one leg and phantom toes.

When I was a teenager my mom would put extra pot on a cheese plate that had a mouse
cover. She would say, it’s there in case you need to relax. I didn’t need to relax but I still took
the pot. When my friends came over I said we had to smoke in the garage. This was a lie.
I don’t know why I said this.

My aunt says California is a little far, but she could pick me up in a few days and we could
go to Chicago.

I am suddenly terrified to leave the house, but I tell her that will be fine.

She probably won’t come. She usually forgets to do things like that, so I don’t worry too much.

We talk for two hours. She tells me how frustrating it is to get laid off three times in four years.

She applies for nine jobs a week.

No one calls her back.

She says perhaps if she was in California it would be easier to get a job.

 

*

 

By this time it’s apparent that I’m not leaving for California today.

The street light comes through the window like a forgotten angel.

I should go to sleep.

I’ll leave tomorrow.

If I’m lucky, I’ll meet someone who’s going there.

THERMOS 5: John Craun

Perhaps the poem I return to most often of all those we’ve published over the past five years is John Craun’s “Picks Up Lucid,” reprinted below. It’s rare that a long poem satisfies me at every line like this one does. — AS

 

Picks Up Lucid

I remember talking about her
or the vicinity,

something purse,
an arrow to be around,

a rope—conjecture: it leads
to the river.

It is of the braided sort.
The soiled sort.

(Ships at anchor.)
Pick it up.

There are two ways
to look at someone
in a subway

car: directly,
or in reflection.
Reflection

also has two meanings.
Of the two I prefer

getting off
before the cars
completely stop.

Now and then
one also sees
a double reflection—

like a double rainbow,
or a unicorn,

or a pegasus (none
of which I’ve seen)

it seems fortunate:

with two widths
of the car and the chances
of surface in between…

I have swallowed the whole rope,
and now, have only a whole rope inside me.

What would you give me for it?
I like to think of the ventricles of my heart

as boots. I do not know what fills them

except feet and feet of rope—The Whole Rope

in corridors of the imagined garden burrow
worms I missed as a child:

their greater part in the hole, and my pull,
well, not determined enough

to stretch long or kill. Though I knew, I know,

.

You were a sham
and I was quicksand
and our moribund periodical was called
Victory de Samothrace

“The plinth and base are made
of gray Rhodian marble,
while Victory is made out of
white Parian marble. The left
part of the bust and right wing
are plaster reconstructions.
The right hand, found in 1950,
is on view in a display case
on the landing.”

Only the ring finger and thumb
remain.

* If I am going to do
what one is not to do
I will need engine,
Dutch, English, and Russian
friends, acute tendrils

If I am going to do
sore engine again
on viola, I will need harp,
license, registration,
and proof of insurance

persons. If I am to do,
throatily, scotch tape-
leaves-the-wall, I will need,

Don’t ask him

If I am going south…
Pardon? Yes, you’ve
scanned me personally,
and found me lacking,
sewn me up. If I
I am going south,
figuratively—follow
me now? Questions
up front, answers
in the back, I said. Once,

said friends were lacking
and have come to excuse
that part of me from
outdoor dining. Early.
lanterns, early light

says one thing to me:
do
you want to dance?
Keep

various things in play?
Yes, I think I will,
thank you Rabbi
and Rabbinical Committee
on the Recycling
of Sacred Texts.
I think we all agree:

If I am to do
what has not
been done, Jehova,
Berryman’s Bones,
his right sir and ma’am

could come to my aide
by ferry—free, I might add
at certain hours
a lamb cries no one
and goes away hushed

on the lamb equivalent
of tiptoes, Lamby,
I say, in a letter,
with some confusion
as to the postmark date,

come to me in a dream,
it seems safer that way,
and needs not postage.
For what man can give—
postage—I have need not

for am to do
something you-know-what

The rotisserie keeps turning.

Downstairs,
everyone keeps looking up.
You can’t have a rotisserie

downstairs. (Don’t ask me why.)
There are things in this world.
Things that keep the rotisserie turning.
I have identified at least one.

But it was not my invention.
Nor am I the first

to identify it. In fact,
my specialties and allegiances
lie elsewhere, now.

I had a suburban idea;
I moved in

to a hedge
and set my stone there
on a patch
of level ground.

Grant me two wishes,
I said, sleep…

and a new idea
with more space

and a ground floor
entryway motion-
sensing threshold

that warms the tile
before touch

warms it.
I was not myself.

The stamps that I licked
wouldn’t stick to anything.

Fertile soil, I thought, fertile soil,
and began to clean.

I can’t move my eye.
The train no longer stops

(I can move my eye) here.
I can move my eye, with pain.
There are chairs stuck in trees

And my question is

for an elder of a dead town:
Did the fruit
stop growing?

The fruit of my eye?
The oranges and grapefruit
and pecked-out pomegranates
of my eye? The figs?

The figs of my eye
are fine:
they have a place to sit

when full, unlike my eye,
my closed eye.

Light from the opposite
direction on return
sheep
in new positions
in the field—
I remember them
in valleys, now
they’re on hilltops—

is an essential form
clusters? friends?
I don’t know how to talk

and don’t have to,
ever, but especially now
as the girl next to me
wears headphones
and is playing a game
or something

as the nucleus. Electrons
crowd around to see.
Like sheep: Sheep don’t want
to miss anything. Thus

my visions of light or tide
may have nothing to do
with their movements.

Anything sheep set course by
is fine with me. That is,
until we reach France,
then I wish I could talk.

THERMOS 5: David Bartone

David Bartone’s first book of poems, Practice on the Mountains, will be published next year by Ahsahta Press, as the winner of their Sawtooth Poetry Prize. I’m pretty sure these poems, originally printed in our fifth issue, aren’t in that book. But please enjoy them anyway! — AS

 

L

I know we are loving the love that is the childhood
Of the love we ought to

I know we resist the body like I know I need
To tell you about Lavallette, New Jersey:

When the bay is separated from the sea by
An isthmus as in my birthplace
The only way to know it as a link between the two
Impressive bodies is to climb out of the water
Walk the noticeable strip
And rinse off in the teeming of the ocean

And feeling pride only if concussed

Or else we are the lonely Beirut doing some other separating

Go ahead       be cavalier with my belief of you, L

There’s the need for alchemy to have existed
Or else how were we supposed to have taken our
Positions on it

There’s the want for sport and dressing
Right in front of the one small evening

What’s to make
Of all this trying to get to you
The question having only sat there
With angelic patience
The searcher having no memory of behavior

I am drinking from your coffee again today

I know it’s rude to keep craving poems for you, L
On and on I’m so sorry for bringing you
Up to pace

About singing in the kitchen is the safest I get

Of all the reasons I carry my beard as so
The double-take factor I beg for
Is most becoming of mind

Dropping my sigh with a shove
I hold your whole finger with my whole hand
For you to lead me into the forest

After the one flower without a Latin name
And we’ll have all the tools to safely poach it
Back to civilization       without even asking

We will know to move on in the direction of the seasons
How to prepare the ruin       to dismount one measly scree
How to dismantle each of our cairns along the way

 

Crush Upended Like Crash

I have been so afraid I don’t even know your smell

Beg you notch me on your loss-board

Make the siding brick red across the farmhouses
here in the Pennsylvanian absences
(there are many) of the heart

I am talking about one intersection with you
missed slightly, abruptly

How it seems we crashed into our own trees thinking
of each other’s body

How the thigh burns when we’re catching each other
let it next time
it’s the way we land

 

Song: Pink Fray of the Spray Mum

Across western horizon to be here.
You, Nebraska coated and up rooted to be east
with me.

Long natured satin scripture.

How you love bring me flowers
at our pennilessness.
Eileen, thank you.

Talking the spray mum, talking ripening
beyond to its end. Last night the thought:

first farmers experimenting, dropping
pink droplets on the petals, hands
coated in boron lush soil, men

with strong hats/straw hands/
strong hats. Aches and aches
of acres.

THERMOS 3: Lucas Bernhardt

Lucas Bernhardt, a recent father, wrote these five poems and gave them to us a few years ago. I’ve used the first one in classrooms a number of times, and the success of that endeavor is one of many reasons I’m grateful for the set of them. — AS

 

Allegory of the Drivers’ Ed Vehicle

Mr. Hall, in the passenger seat, rests his foot
lightly on the instructor’s brake pedal.
Mike, a reticent, even-handed stoner,
has us stopped at a red light. Lisa
and I sit in back, looking out
our respective windows at the dead
wild hay on the edge of town. The light turns,
but Mike is elsewhere and does not
accelerate. I dig my knee into his seatback
and he comes to. The car moving,
Mr. Hall sighs through his teeth.
He had been my middle school gym coach,
and also, by his own account, a world
class wrestler cut at the last minute
from two U.S. Olympic teams.
Once, in international competition, he played
a trick on a stronger, more skilled
opponent. Certain he would
otherwise lose the match, Mr. Hall dug his finger
into his own eye socket and popped out
his eye, then pinned the other
wrestler in his “Dutch” vomit.
I know almost nothing about Lisa,
just her dull brown hair.
I could not look at any other
part of her. She had been
scolded earlier for repeatedly failing
to come to a complete stop, to look both ways,
to cover the brake. Mr. Hall
asked her to pull over and delivered
a humiliating lecture. You do not have to drive,
he said, You can always walk or ride a bike.
Mike pulls onto the freeway as directed.
His posture less rigid,
he seems to enjoy the freeway.
Gaining on a semi, Mr. Hall says, Easy.
Lisa sits as far from me
as the back seat allows. A rabbit leaps
from the shoulder into the hub
of one of the semi’s double wheels.
But for a spray of grey-brown fur,
it disappears. Mr. Hall laughs, nervously
at first. Lisa shifts and looks further away—
I really like her.
Mike, staring deep
into the wheel of the truck, says, Sick.

 

Some Notes on the State of Romantic Pessimism

I hadn’t planned on describing the immunization clinic, but the woman across from me in the waiting room began taking rapid notes as soon as she sat down; she is about my age, maybe younger, wearing black pants, socks, and shoes and a lavender High Sierra jacket. Her purse looks like it’s been to Guatemala. If it is in poor taste to sketch down one’s impressions only in the presence of the poor and infirm, perhaps my notes on her note taking will cancel the fault.

Weltschmerz, a word I learned from watching the national spelling bee on ABC, means sadness caused by comparing the actual state of the world with an ideal state. I would like to know its antonym, a term for the world outstripping an ideal, and I would like to know what that feels like. If all this doesn’t sound like sanctimonious nonsense, I should add that the woman looks familiar, like we had a long talk at a party once or I bought staples from her many times. I’m what they call bad with faces. Perhaps this is a feature of a more generalized weltschmerz: strange faces are never strange enough, friends somehow unfamiliar.

The woman was just called in to see a nurse. Her name is Aurora. A toddler with a rash on his upper lip takes her seat.

 

Manifesto of the Atemporalists

The mirror in the mirror is the mirror in the mirror.
We are still human, wheel within wheel. Accept
the illusion of “Dinner at seven!” wryly, and be reminded
of the fates of the multitudes of counterrevolutionaries.
Time is eternity’s shop floor. Eternity is time’s tokenism.
The cog knows sameness of expressions is not sameness
of feeling. The pendulous need only sway. As we know,
confronted with what they can neither renounce nor achieve,
those allied with time are sure to die. We recognize
all temporal measures are drastic, uneven, unfair.
In plotting its approach, retreat, and utter stagnation,
the four Williams of the apocalypse proclaim
reality is indivisible. Ulysses never left home.
Mohammed loved disloyalty. Life never suffered
death’s imposition. The wrapper tears awake.
Search, research, and comprehension defy syntax.
Nations and institutions refine and restrict fictitious bodies
inscribed with the sign of Augustine.

Though you often feel confused and drowsy, speak
reasonably. As the first William’s He did not go in
eagerness, He comes up the lane fast, and as a loan
and used it though he would not have had to occur in
the uncertain distance wherein perspective fails
the barrier, analytics fail perspective, and trust
dissmells—Augustinian time is here. As the second William
bathes the fall in corrosives, Augustinian time is here.
As the third William admits, I went into deep water,
and admits, I went in too deep water,
and in both instances, Trying to get home,
Augustinian time is here. Augustinian time, the eye
in the wheel, sequence and collapse—as one hog
waits for another, we await the fourth William.

 

O.T.

A girl in a red silk dress
tries to cross the street,
though no one I know
is making her. On the porch
above her trouble, who can I tell
about the girl and the dress
while a birthday labors through,
again, the Al Green record?
Down there a girl who bought
a dress with money her parents
hoped she would keep
involves the street
in predilections of silk
and legs of wine. Honestly,
I’m glad I have imagined
rather than lived seventy-
thousand sexual encounters,
and so is she who,
all throughout the dress,
and before her plastic cups,
was my girlfriend.

 

Infidelities of Coal

The difference between
saying What’s funny
about having
a reputation
for doing things you
regret at parties is
and thinking first
of confidantes
beneath leaves, napping
like gnats in the
afternoon, swarming
toward dusk, then of
the smoldering, always
approximating self,
more hooked than
awhirl, a thread
of ash looking back
at the crawling
coal, and finally
of regret itself
resting with its wings
tucked across
its back like a
closed pair of scissors,
housed in the eye,
glinting in the facets
of the eye, is
that our words
outsmart us the way
a diamond out-
smarts a seam,
a miner outsmarts
a diamond, a boss
outsmarts a miner,
etc., and even
if the diamond-cutter
does sometimes
grimace, there we are
atop the fiance’s
finger wondering
why, if our lives
are so important,
they should be
so proscribed.

One thing I admire about Sam Reed’s “Regarding the Domestication of the Horse”

When immersed in a summer full of childhood, its trips to the beach, the playground, the pool, its lunches to pack, grocery store snack searches, toy car processions extending endlessly; when a day opens fifteen hours from the dawn and every minute is full in its turn; then my manner of meeting a poem, like every “adult” activity I attempt, undergoes a change, is imbued with something like hope, hope for a brief encounter with ordinary (though what is more ordinary than a child’s summer?), a bit of it that I can carry around inside my mouth all day like a gift I’m not required to give.

In this poem, built on a series of epithets and grandish claims (“Gods who make everything but promises,” “the wind does not deserve them”) that I have admired for years without forgetting, I find finally that the line that best fits my mouth is its quietest, its most ordinary line: “This is the prairie of shale and arrows”. I say ordinary, but maybe I mean reliable. Either way, though I haven’t visited a prairie of shale and arrows in years, the manner in which those three nouns enhance one another sonically is sufficient poetry for me this summer, this fatherhood, is sufficient language for me to see my just-mowed lawn for the prairie it isn’t and look back at the children from a richer vantage.

Should poetry hope to do more than that? The rest of the poem believes so, and so do I. But sometimes a line will do, sometimes a line that marks the essential smallness of cause poetry opens from (Valery said this somewhere) is enough to sustain a poem, or an hour, or a day, full of other impulses, other demands.

 

Note: the “one thing I admire” series is intended as a place for saying small things about poems or books of poems, and as an invitation for anyone reading to say something they admire about that poem or book of poems, via comment…AS

THERMOS 2: Michael Comstock

Reading a poem by Michael Comstock is one of my favorite ways to spend a minute. Even a very old poem by Michael Comstock. — AS

 

Home Movies

They come calling, they who

mystery. Very aware of the light

doll, the house where we all

recycled dates. We all create

clock, a number of notes called remember

thunder? It followed

church. If there is a second chance

enchant her, write back in bliss

avalanche.

 

[Untitled]

I repeat hit
the tiny
stop
of the sky
Huh
says a friend     oh
goddamn

the sky       How

I repeat hit
blink                  A sun
Leaves out, flowers

out You are sporty
dear Drumming

circles     This appear

 

The Internet

This is hello, a towards-crown motion of hands. Hello, this is
just to say hello world why. This is Steve: Hello. Older gals
need lovin’ too. Sure. Terry: Why not? Care
to share a story? Steve: No, I… This is “Hello”
by Lionel Ritchie, and this is hello in each of the official
languages of South Africa. This is hello, your smile
gets my heart pounding [sound f/x:
fangirls screaming]. This is hello.pdf.
This is hello, I don’t know what I have to do
with all peace, and this is hello
hello, a super software
from which I am posting hello, like I am
like hello a little green halo.

 

03/01/2008

“I Can’t Be Me” going out
the opened window with

the day’s hey
blowing in.

It’s afternoonish I don’t notice
the planes spaced out

for LaGuardia. Live on
how many dollars

a day? Move close
to water: Gowanus

or Greenpoint wherever.
No more March

April, just a lot of Mays
I swear I’ll pay back

next winter. X and Y
please move here,

hated friends
go ’way.

THERMOS 2: Lauren Haldeman

Today we re-print four poems by Iowa City’s Lauren Haldeman. New work from Lauren will appear soon in the forthcoming THERMOS 9. – AS

 

We Who Were Guides at the Oldest Estate in Virginia

We who were guides at the oldest estate in Virginia
found ourselves parallel
at five o’clock in the evening.
Each tourist left with a path in their bags.

Earlier, your tooth grew a branch. A rainbow avoided me. I was sad.
I could think of nothing better
than your sweet-bread & quicksand. It was enough
to simply picture your jacket.

All the chimes on the porch, one by one,
started swinging. Behind the photograph,
a figure approached. We could see him, still –

still near the treeline. Locusts. Humidness. Humidity. Gross.

No one can say we did not give our best
standing in that giant bag of crisp air.
All ashor…but who was going ashore? We measured ourselves
as the only ones left.

 

Courage Courage Courage

Black-hole-view from the center-of-the-earth:
The circular grave begins.

I dreamt an orange balloon, exhaled from a well,
Greeted the horses cantoring past our hatchback,

Their eyes, a necklace of marooning fronds,
Flashed like travel pics taped to the valley’s lampshade.

Waking, I concentrated on a single post in the woods:
Counting its wavering perspectives & angles

As an ongoing want rumbled rocks smooth inside me –
Inside this box I made for you.

There is no boon but the world’s colors you told me, how
The waterfall drinks in all four dimensions –

You told me to tell you I loved you enough
To believe my hands were holding a magnet.

 

Expo of the Ash-People

The ash-people hover
above the tendrilled living tunnels

of our expo. They’re the hollow us,
filling up: our ashes sucked

into their moving bodies; their bodies
hoisting away our fears, turning

a fire-wheel into another fire-wheel
nailed on a dogwood’s mirror.

We don’t go insane. Sometimes we step
so deeply into sanity that the birds

swallow up their singing, backing
into the cat’s bright mouth. These things

that carry us are not scary – just
our days, our hours born

from their own memorials.
Faces still enter the air expanding,

our cheeks grow, full of backwards hellos;
our houses still stall their motors

in the backyard’s almost horror;
the relegated shed and its mechanics

of dream, shoveling steam
into the camera’s one nostril…

Ash people they are, sketching
blueprints of themselves

on the light-shaped lovemaking
that wallpapers our brains, as

they wait for the motorcycle
to compost below us, a glowing box

of endless forgetting – trust me: they
are our friends. Watch as

they bite off their heads, exhibiting
milky underworlds through

the acorn’s pillage.
We’ll never get it – until

worn by them, we pivot and
enter their ultimate ultimate expo, hovering

all pristine & see-through above them,
strung to their shoulders, balloons of

past odors, collecting their dust
as they sift into time –

one passed-citizen
tied to every ash-person.

 

Fortress

This is the place we pressed on the porch screen. The tower opened up
its fan-fold of sun. Wrestling, we became both knife
and accordion. Saying your birth date got me there faster. While

you’ve been away, I rub grease-clouds on postcards. Today it is Thursday.
Tomorrow is Thursday. I drop a stone in this rum, call it evening.
A squirrel near the oak-stump digs and forgets. Typically

we’d just hook our pinkies together & our minds would stay unchanged
for one hundred years. But there aren’t enough fires. Just a smudge-flock
of starlings – specks on the x-ray of the one chance we get.