USA

The Coefficient of Drag 

At dusk, above your head, the gnats
Hang and wrangle, and ants across the patio
Shoulder their slow burdens back home.
 
Idly begun and idly ended: another day
Gone up in thin smoke, a sacrifice
To the gods of gassy prose and inconsequence.
 
The sacred and the propane, you once joked,
Firing up the barbecue, waving your long fork
Like Pope Bubba the First, baptized in beer.
 
Now your glass cools and rattles
With cracked ice over mint, that sweet weed,
And sour mash enough to sterilize the soul.
 
A man raised with chickens, you used to say,
Can stand anything, and knows how little
Dignity it takes to drag this life around.
 
From the house next door, a piano plays
Through the open window, stubborn and strict,
Six Elegies by Busoni for the swoon-impaired.
 
Such scruples of music in the late afternoon,
The lines narrow and cross-grained, in ornery angles.
They fit the bitter way you feel.
 
Black summer, so hot and dry the wind
Reeks of death and estrus; and then
Rain steaming on the flagstones, sending up
 
Signals of distress.  And what can you do
When even the water doesn't know
If it's rising or falling, vapor or wet?
 
Scorch of babybacks in a blue lick.
Sun below the pine boughs, scrape and curtsy
Where the birds ride them with a hard spur.
 
And the moon, you want to say, just look at it:
A face overdone by some undertaker's drudge,
Dropout from the Lunar School of Cosmetology.
 
And night so soon it scares the shadows,
So foreign it talks to you in tongues.  And stars
As far away as the secret names of sleep.

                               Crab Orchard Review

Exhaustion

I lie down in the Dark Ages, another night deficient in ecstasy.
I'm tired of the old laws and the new laws and the laws they've been
thinking up between breakfast and delirium.
I might as well be driving a dog sled in the white waste of Alaska,
mukluks still feral on my feet,
Or sliding a two-ton truck through Alabama mud, a seizure of fiddles
on the radio and a bumper sticker that says: Living in a vacuum sucks.
The world's run short of taffeta and courtesy and grass widows with a
gamy scent.
And where are you, bare spark at the flash point, when I need the
moony spasms of release?
I'm tired of all the stagestruck mothers with little Hamlets in the
womb, and those snakehandlers whipping Jesus in the lead with their
rattlers and cottonmouths.
And I'm worn out from the terror, the gruesome excuses for a heart
packed in dry ice and a flag strung up by the neck.
The heart frightens me, too, the way it motors off on its own, with
no back-up, no redundant systems for the pump.
So what's the weather like in the otherworld?  Same today as the last
eternity--  nothing changes where everything's changed.
Even the Bible's been divided into tongues, from the Aramaic all the
way to gangster slang: So they brung him down the cross, and the guy's
already colder than     a Jersey whore.
And what about you?  Idle hands, when I could use another volunteer to
stir the fleshpots.
I've survived the drumrolls and the German sense of humor and the
bloody flux--why isn't it someone else's turn to pull the temple down?
I'm not feeling world-historical tonight, though I can still smell
the stench of a rotten hypothesis, like eggheads left out too long in
the sun.
My mind's one wrinkle away from ravenous black--spiders in the
brainpan, and all circuits down on the motherboard.
And I'm so tired of death shouldering his scythe across the fields,
grasshoppers leaping from his bony toes.
Give me freshets from the belly; quicken my desire by some strange
order of magnitude; fix me a poultice to bring the swelling down.
The hour already feels tainted and ancient.  And then, at the low
stroke of the soul, you come.

                               Georgia Review

Least Resistance

To count up all my faults, I'd need
The hands of a mutant, twelve fingers to a palm
And thumbs the size of Rhode Island.  And even then,
A few small flaws might slip by,
Truants from the scroll of boners and regrets.
 
Low mind on a long tether . . .
That's what you get these days,
Out here in West Malarkey, where the pencils
Squirm and whine, writing
Black notes in the margin of error.
 
It's so hard to snap back from
Catastrophes behind the brow, anguish and arguments
Working overtime inside
The industry of dead ideas, brotherhood
Of the lunch bucket and the queasy creed.
 
Even the wind feels rusty here, blowing past
The vacant steel mills, the tinsel blondes.
A wheedling sheen of sunlight
Fidgets on the wall, like a lawyer looking for
Some sly escape clause in the boilerplate.
 
You may think I'm spruced up
For my own funeral, in this double-breasted suit
By Guido of Youngstown, wet carnation
In the broad lapel, buttons like bulletholes,
But there's no dress code in the afterlife.
 
Suspicious of epiphanies, squinting hard at
Any sybil's answer from the smoke,
I trust nothing but
Money under the mattress, winter at the windowsill,
And this clumsy pain stumbling down the nerveway.
 
And to that you might add
A binge of women in their surly lipstick,
Ladies Night at the Hotel de Dream.
I take my faith where I find it,
Like a mouse in a wheel of cheese.
 
Conspiracies of ink don't bother me, or verbs
Irregular and demented.  I spice
The alphabet soup and put a lid
On the pot, letting it all boil down to
Words hot enough to clear the craw.
 
And when the prison lights
In the left-hand corner of my brain
Sweep past the ramparts and the wire,
I cast this line into the dark
And pull myself after it.

                               Georgia Review

Regression Analysis

Back to the sleepy years, rise
Of the rear fin and the crenelated pompadour,
 
Moon like a hubcap rolling loose
In a night sky more sex than science,
 
Beyond the evils of geometry at three in the afternoon,
Back to the long muscles born out of sweat and throb,
 
Soft hair cradling a face at the sockhop,
The nudge of new breasts under blouse and arousal,
 
And records spun at the speed of crazed wheels
Taking you somewhere far from yourself,
 
Stars in a thin glitter, burnt out above
A swagger of smoke in the parking lot,
 
And then the Sunday bells and church doors open
To the half-dead and the bed-wetters,
 
Past the end of Genesis and deep into Deuteronomy,
Black book from which no one escaped,
 
Wound where the scruples put down roots,
Years before the fallen protocols and the undertow,
 
Before the wrought-iron agonies, sudden ripples in the heart,
Cordage of veins and the ropy tendons,
 
Before the ice, wind-whetted, at the lip of the downspout,
And sirens scaring the air with a bloody scream,
 
Blockage of wrecks on a gravel road, plunge of fire
In the tapped-out flats built by sawtooth and studnail,
 
Before the darkness drained over everything, except
The unforgiving light in the guilty room.

                               The Missouri Review

Writing Myself Off
It's late afternoon, winter, the ache of evening coming on,
As if someone had told me, You're in Texas now, that long dark state--
Keep driving.  And I'd like to say a little something here 

About the protocols of dying, the fineness of final lines and so on.
But no one knows the rules.  Laws, yes, no end of laws,
From dognapping to murder in the last degree.  I refuse the
blindfold, 

But not the cigarette.  Why go on with arguments and evidence?
Let's just agree the whole thing's richly confused, and leave it at
that.
No dream of foghorns will lift the dreams of fog. 

And there's no danger in small men with big ideas, or women so deep
They must have false bottoms, like a spy's suitcase.  Off they float
On a raft of wrong opinions, soreheads in the backwater. <

Fact: in dolphins, only one side of the brain sleeps at a time.
Fact: oysters can change their sex at will, though that's not why
they're
Known as bivalves.  Fact: weasels suck eggs better than your grandma
can. 

I could live on slops and oxygen, if I had to.  I could quote you
Chapter and verse from a Tijuana Bible.  I keep my pencils
Lined up in an ammo belt, and my blaspheming tongue in cheek.

In light of my wrecked childhood, would you say I was born
From a deviled egg?  Those infant years of swamp fever and shame--
Diapers of burlap, lullaby of blues, nipple like a shotgun shell . .
.  <

I'm not the type to go barefoot in the ferns, or find myself
Run off by slanders and stampedes.  And I never send back,
Whatever the address, any letters postmarked from Venus.

In the private history of heartbreak, lovers get laid away
Like linen in a cedar chest.  I've been around the butcher's block
A few times myself.  Love's here and not here, like neon at noon.

In secret, I add everything up, the sublime and felonious,
A dim sum of circumstance at a moveable feast.  And always an answer
Swanks out, raised to a ravishing level, like four-inch heels on a
whore.

In the Church of Lost Souls, we've been promised a heaven of
Hibiscus and flamingoes, not this perpetual hell in the hinterlands.
Baptized in gin, we confess our grievous virtues to the universe. 

That's why two martinis bring the sunset down, and then
A stupor of stars, and then the moon like a doctor in his white coat,
At the hour of mercy, in a night no man can put asunder.

                               The Gettysburg Review

© All Copyright, Elton Glaser.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.