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| kenneth pobo |  | 1. DATURA JAZZ Back creaky, I yank up grasses, see a datura, white with a purple throat, beside a wilting tomato. Two years since a datura performed here, yet what a splendid job of surprise. Weeding, like sorting hundreds of papers that all look alike- this datura, sprouting from hard ground, lively, a jazz singer hitting every impossible note-- I weed harder, hum along. 2. DINDI AND THE DEER "We can't use you," the bar owner says as I pack up. Cursing, I get in the car, drive several miles, hit a small deer that darts out. Now what? This road's empty, tourists under the bridge. An early snow. I can't just leave it to die- or can I? Drivers hit them all the time. I swerve around the body, feel like I'm leaving a crime scene, turn up the radio-- Tammy Wynette, "Til I Get It Right." I performed that years ago, before "We can't use you" became a quick goodbye. I killed tonight and went on. My apartment's right where I left it. Though it seems to be floating. 3. DINDI CLOSE UP I bought Frankie Valli's Close Up for 35 cents in a Marquette resale shop. Ghosts of men who drowned in Lake Superior walk the streets, hunch over diner stools. Back home I played it over and over, decided it was the most romantic album I'd ever heard. At 18 I wanted romance--to eat a bowl of Wheat Chex and look across the table to see another bowl of Wheat Chex. By 21, my body had left me for another. And another. When I'd hear Frankie sing "My Eyes Adored You," I felt like I did when I saw my baby shoes in my parent's house. I still play the album, just less often. 4. END TIMES Like rapids, prophetic books come faster and faster-having botched the Earth, we dine on extinction. Or religion. Look up, the aging post-drugs rock singer says on stage. He's returning. He means Jesus, I think. Or the scientist who bites into a lemon wedge and pours over Greenland's going glaciers. 23 feet the sea will rise, goodbye New Orleans and Bangla Desh. Humankind is a flat tire. We can't be pumped up yet again. Or not. We might morph into machines, download our brains, shake off flesh, head to other worlds, leave our trees. May mornings when the first tulips bloom. 5. LONG POEM Pennsylvania is long, Philly to Pittsburgh, the highway a toothache, dentist closed. Sometimes we get along. Peggy Lee sings "Longings for a Simpler Time"-- no simple time. I long for a long stretch of Texas bluebonnet blue, My seventh-grade science teacher, tall Mr. Pentner, looked very long-- chemistry felt long. Speaking of the long-winded, a politician, like a MacDonald's cup, just blew in. Don't be long. Don't belong. George sang, and he's dead-death is quite long- no legs are long enough to outrun it. Sometimes winter feels long, like icicles grow in my eye lids, not melting even when the first hellebores show off long pink overcoats. This poem is running long. Homer says, keep going, poems should be long. I can get along with dusk, her orange goldfish in a pond sky, her long face when she sees a long night ahead, a long red vine holding its first hours. | |
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