Munsie's Fires

The road climbs, banked, turn after next
into the stands of poplar and oak.
Rhododendron.
Smoke floats still and blue.

A sheet-metal stove in a living room
bought from a high shelf in a poor shop
burns fat pine too fast.
The tin glows.

Pumpers hung with hoses
chase clangs and howls up damp hollows
on Saturday night.
Volunteers in yellow slickers
soak another trailer.

The diesel took too long to fire, wheezing.
It's all a quilting bee and donkey ball
could buy, an engine passed down from the Army
to the foresters, finally to
Munsie Gap and its tractor mechanics.

Bill rages, flailing around the crowd
as his home sighs in on itself
pink insulation singed and hanging
like cotton candy. The aluminum melts.
Everyone pulls up their cars
to point headlights and see.

Mary remembers the photograph of grandmother
and a teapot.
Something in the house pops,
and everyone jumps.

Navigating Elkton

The mayor didn’t recognize me without my black eye. His gold chains were as dead a giveaway as his American flag necktie
or his fingers plump as bratwurst reddening on a Fourth of July propane grill.

He’s still pretty mad at the ski resort up on the mountain because they want to dump sewage on the fields of our fecund valley. The decaying feces of urban skiers fouling the air on still Saturday nights in the summer when secret garages are alive with cock fights and alcohol.

"Don’t let them think we’re just dumb rednecks here," I told him, casting my irony around like a drunk Masonic Lodge clown on a parade float throwing candy to retarded children. "Don’t talk that way. Then they’ll respect us, right?" He nodded under the weight of realization and patted my back with his kielbasas as I went up the town hall steps. Wood risers, peeling gray paint. Daffodils nodding "yes, yes" and "no, no."

Town business is conducted in a house where Rebel soldiers once lay on a dining room table having infected legs sawn off
by the veterinarian who would never quite get over screams for Mamma. The pale cow-eyed suspicious woman behind the counter near where the doctor would weep took my money again.

The boys hanging around the carwash like ticks on a beagle have their underpants pulled up under their armpits. Hip-hop grandsons of moonshiners, sawmillers and pedophiles, gape-mounthed watch the daily Nothing Parade.

They yell something behind me as I pass on my bicycle.

I felt a need to post this.

Rename the Constellations

It takes the vast Western sky to trigger inspiration sometimes, or rye whiskey. The campfire chewed away at her meal of gambel oak and, since the prairie falcons were asleep, did so with no regard to the noise she was making.

I rolled an ice cube around my teeth and a wave of mountain air spoke to the buckgrass. I heard it, as we all did. The Milky Way was a cloud bank. The coyotes chattered and yawed.

The constellations have names and patterns arcane. Four or five stars became a warrior pushing a broken cart over a snowy hill while being pursued by a unicorn. We called it Tony.

The monsoon built fortresses of steam every afternoon and shot sparks through our sockets. One day, the mountains spilled a heavy cloud down the valley in front of the Dirt See'r, covered our alluvial plain with ice, and shot the well tanks out of the ground.

My friend stumbled among the sage, drunk on abomination, radiant in the oranges and reds of evening.

News From America

Sometimes my friend goes to Molyvos on the Island of Lesbos in Greece. It is paradise, according to him. He should know, since he's a poet. A paid poet named Gary.

Gary writes me e-mails from Lesbos, usually from a cyber-cafe in view of the Agean Sea, under the shadow of a mountain, surrounded by goats, creaky old men in black suits, rattletrap motorbikes buzzing past. The sea is emerald, the sky is deep blue, and the colorful fishing boats bob on cute little waves. It could make a person sick.

Gary asks, "How are things back home?" I send him the News From America:

................................
Gary;

I dropped a car off at Buddy's this morning and began the walk home. Buddy needs to fix that rattling strut.

Just ahead a woman named Berdina was walking home, too. It was about 8:30 a.m. and sunny, dry, breezy. Berdina (whom I had never met) waited for me to catch up. How far? I say a mile. She says not so far for her.

I found a black feather, and Berdina remembers stories of the old one-room school hustle-bustle with black children. The school is falling down. Berdina wears a bright yellow slouch hat and stretch pants.

She touched me lightly on the arm and said color doesn't matter, we're all the same. I told her about Mexicans and little shacks.

At a crossroads she disappeared into a white cinderblock house with a pile of cut up hardwood pallets in the yard beside an orange chain saw. I wound my way through a field of new green corn, waist high.

Your Friend,
M. ______
...................................
Gary;

How you ever came to call and claim the life of that dog, I'll never be sure. You see, I tried sending you a fax at a number that should have been zero and yet I was sure was four. Some mechanical bitch answered in Spanish beeping, "Quattro, quattro, quattro!"

Then I called your colleague at the mattress store who said (breathily) no it was zero and you're on the road somewhere anyway tending to the death of a family member. His sincerity smelled of 3M PostIt notes as I thought, "Father? Mother? One-legged cousin who got shot by the Viet Cong?"

Where is my father?

You are supposed to be there to receive this dog after I have his balls cut off in the name of Great God humanity. That'll make him get fat for sure. Why chase the Senoritas when the little man's been shot by subversives? I have all these questions and you're not there to answer them.

I got a letter at the Post Office from the Association and they didn't fold it at all but paid extra postage to send flat sheets re: a meeting I attended and they care as I care about certain outcomes, sincerely, the Association. It's all very clear. Thick white clouds mounted in the Northeast in contrast to a shocking blue, and it's pretty cold for May.

I didn't get too far on the way home from the Post Office when I saw a fluffy white dog at the end of a dark stripe leading from the right lane of Route 360 to the gravel. Why don't these people ever stop? A comical red plastic bone-shaped tag identified the deceased as Tuesday. It's Monday, you bastards. Lynyrd Skynyrd sang, "Tuesday's Gone with the Wind."

The gaze fixed dead fish attention on the cloud banks and hinted of anger, resignation. Tufts of white fur caught the breeze. Tuesday's bright pink small intestine was coiled neatly between her paws. I'd call the name on the tag -- Henrietta? -- but pictured a lonesome old woman calling, "Tuesdaa-ay!" How could I tell her that Tuesday was gone without thinking of that stupid old song, without offering to go with her to pick the dog up to save her from the sight of that hideous intestine? It's too much for me and it'll be way too much for her.

I remember climbing a mountain at one in the morning with my brother. We had one flashlight, a case of beer, two sleeping bags and were to camp somewhere beyond a rock face. It was cold. A white cat was caught on the rocks in a creek, her leatherette collar soaked, her bell silent, her white hair tracing eddies and currents in the water.

A deer came to our camp and our tiny fire, then backed away, all fits and starts. The town twinkled. We had coffee in the morning fixed on a tiny stove and never thought about the cat again.

Now this dog is waiting to have his balls cut off and I'm home with the mail. And I'm waiting for you to call.

Sincerely,
M. ___________
.................................
Gary;

The gargoyles greeted my morning walk glaring, crouching concrete distracting glances from a security camera and a golf cart peeps from behind trees dripping with last night's rain.

A mockingbird hopped to a mailbox, showed me his white blazes and dapper gray while wood thrushes sang their hollow chant.

A new vinyl fence kept a buzzing above-ground swim pool from escaping to the flattened frogs on Route 600.

The burned parsonage is now repainted and awaits a parson. A van from the city is in its yard, and fresh paint signs flip on twine.

A man with a dangling plastic bag walks the other way the shape of his morning bottle pressing white away from his knuckles.

Kisses,
M. ________

The Petting Zoo

There’s this God-damned ostrich. He’s looking at me sideways, like birds do, through that pitiless orb. An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain, the books tell us. The ostrich cannot fly.

Peck.

I am six and screaming in a brown wide-wale corduroy jacket with a hood and Stride-Rite corrective shoes, holding the top of my head. I’ve neither the sense nor inclination to run, as I am bound by fear. The ostrich is moving slowly, each foot gliding to meet each new step, keeping that big rolling eye on his flightless prey. Again, I am pecked.

The dentist will give you awfully interesting drugs to make things easier during surgery. With an Ativan in your belly, your sinuses full of laughing gas, and your veins full of drip drip drip Demerol, you’re just as happy to have your legs sawn off, rob a liquor store, or walk through a shopping mall on Christmas Eve as have teeth pulled out. Same thing is true with a petting zoo.

Most of these animals don’t want to be touched, at least not in the way a dog wants a deep-tissue massage at the base of her tail. But we want to touch all the animals; the goats, the sheep, the pigs, the Godforsaken ostrich. All a person has to do is get the animals loaded on dentist drugs to have a petting zoo. The lion under the influence of opiates will gladly lie down with the lamb. A boy in Stride-Rides can, hypothetically, pet an ostrich.

On Thursdays, my Mom and Dad had their evening out while I was left in the care of my grandmother Dee. I called her Dee out of a lack of respect. Respect for elders is a big thing where I come from, yes sir. No ma’am. Even at six, though, I had this unconscious notion that respect was earned.

My grandmother’s days revolved around trips to Woolworth’s or Miller & Rhodes downtown and finding things for Gladys, her hired black woman, to do. Bourbon kept Dee pretty focused. It was 1968, and Gladys’ people were only just able to sit at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, though they were never there. Sit-ins make digestion of hamburger boats rather difficult.

The Woolworth’s smelled like popcorn and plastic toy trucks. The petting zoo was nearby. My grandmother bought a plastic rain bonnet and we had sodas at the lunch counter.

Outside, a big white Ford Fairlane with red vinyl roll-and-pleat seats waited. My mother drove a black 1953 Chevrolet Bel Air that she later sold to hippies for $50. Dad drove a Pontiac Chieftain with an amber light-up Indian chief’s head as a hood ornament. Later, he got an old Mercedes Benz that Mom said Hitler might step out of any moment.

Ottawa Chief Pontiac formed alliances with two other Great Lakes tribes to drive the British out of the region, and was, for years, a feared and respected leader. When the French abandoned the Three Tribes and sided with the British, things fell apart for Chief Pontiac. Later, he was honored by descendants of the settlers by having his head cast in plastic and placed on the hood of a motorcar to catch moth guts on hot summer Virginia nights. Hitler was a feared and respected leader who tried to drive the British out of London with little unmanned airplanes, but never had his head placed atop anyone’s chromium grillwork.

Later, Mom got a Ford Falcon and Dad got a Country Squire station wagon. One summer, we took the wagon to the mountains and rented a cabin in the middle of nowhere. The air was cool and smelled like trees and soil, while Richmond baked in the drone of cicadas and bus exhaust.

By the time the petting zoo guy got around to swatting off the ostrich, I was crying and running for the gate while Dee howled whiskey-stinky oaths to no one in particular. The zookeeper was damn lucky the ostrich didn’t kill him.

A pet ostrich damn near killed Johnny Cash by gouging him with its giant toe. That’s how the big foolish birds get you and it’s what you’d never expect from something evolution seems to have left behind. The bird leaps into the air and thrusts a sharp toenail into your gut. I keep thinking how the finest voice in American music may have died along a hedgerow as an ostrich played jump rope with his small intestine.