Isabel in Iconium

April 22, 2009

to Nate

I had found work at The Hybrid Apple Orchard in Iconium where days hooked together like cars jumping one another.  At night I shared a gypsy wagon with an elderly tenant named Amos and during the day we would discuss the mythos of the Leafcutter Bee while filling barrels with the Hybrid Honeycrisps, Copied Cameos, and McIntosh Mimes.  Isabel would come visit on weekends and during Black History Month our midnights together stretched like sinews in a lion’s jaw.  She and I drank Ezra Brooks to computer speakers, the ones where you could feel the thin, grassy notes from Picastro fall like lawn darts onto your ear drums.  I told her about the appetites of harvest season, and visitors like Gallagher who brought their own lunch.  We couldn’t say much at night, enamored with all the ubiquity roaming the universe. We stared at the pixelated stars in lulls noting how astronomy might seem like bird watching from the bottom of a pool.  When I gave her a Burlesque Braeburn she asked for a Parodic Pink Lady, and that blew me away.  I liked her for that.
“Can we settle for the Surrogate Gala ?” I asked.

The day we found a lone Hackberry across the warren of Red Delicious Reruns I asked Isabel if she knew what the five o’ clock shadow was symbolic for.  She said it was the time of day that all fathers had together and a testament to all traffic lights emphasizing the real colors in the sky.  And I liked her for that.  Under the Hackberry we sat half-moon-eyed where we found consolation in each other and discussed the stipulations for the new “lazy” world and what it means to be satisfied after guitar solos.

Still loose in the atrophied grip of five o’ clock, I took her to the Iconium convenience store in town.  I bought Arrow Root flour and Xantham Gum for a vegan Irish Soda Bread recipe we found scribbled on the back of an old circus poster while Isabel bought the local newspaper and charcoal for the kids that meandered naked around the Feigned Fujis.  She read the headlines to me while we sat in my truck waiting for rain to die down:  Deer Suspended in Air, New Tax to Fund City-Wide Drum Lessons, Windy and Acerbic.  I told Isabel the headlines didn’t sit right, like this town’s got a weight problem, but she wasn’t listening.  She was preoccupied with the magic in headlines, tickling an aesthetic in her like the punch line of a joke.
As the rain subsided I felt an ominous breeze pet my neck.
“Did you feel that?” I asked her as I peered out my driver’s window.  The rain had stopped.  When I looked over, Isabel wasn’t listening; she was pressing the newspaper to her cheeks, smelling the black ink, enjoying the texture of course newsprint against her face.
“There’s only so much knowledge one can acquire in the heat of a moment, in a darkness that is precipitating,” she said nuzzling the paper.

Back at the orchard, Amos had taken a vow of silence that was to protest a pesticide our landlord found on clearance at K-Mart.
“Such integrity was a long service road with patches of abandoned rest stops,” I told him as we picked our way through the yield of Gesticulated Jonagolds.  “Even the off-ramps endured a songless silence that could let weeds propagate from one rest stop to the next.”
The silence was dulling after a while, an illuminating monotony that crested the pain in my picking fingers.  I asked Isabel to join us after our break, to tell us of her quiet days in Fayetteville or her New Hampshire homestead.  She became embarrassed and blushed the color of the Caricatured Cortlands when she couldn’t remember the name of her first horse.  She said she wishes there were other things she could forget instead, like when she scored on her own team in P.E. basketball or when she got caught smelling her teacher’s pencil box.
“Is it that birds can fly because they can sing, or they can sing because they can fly?” she asked in a quick digression from her candid memories.  Isabel was always into the far-reaching wonder in birds.  I broke the silence as I was reminded of a passage from Ecclesiastes.
“Observe the time, fly from evil” I said.
“You can fly from evil but don’t pass the virtue in song,” she said. The rest of the day was spent in a consoled peace by our heightened awareness of birds that flew in shapes that resembled chalk lines around our bodies.  Thank you, Isabel.


Dust and Grime

March 17, 2009

Down spiral
does dust descend
in morning rays.
Fragmented 
follicles
settle on the sheets
like mountains
incomplete.

So grime goes,
from skin grain
to biofilm grit
makes the detritus.
A plaque 
that paints
and primps
the shellac.


Accidentally Joined the Counting Crows

March 17, 2009

I,
summoned to the coterie,
an itinerant Ace;
     virtuoso-so.

So unfamiliar 
are voyages to freedom
      from guitar,
          jousting in arena brights
          cauterized in nylon mail.

Hoist pianos, and
clean underneath nails, a pinky
      to lackluster polish. 

Every night, tour
       and puke 
       the prolix phrase.
           Formidable hand jobs
           behind the fortuitous
                 dinner plate. 

We,
for fans aroused by inerrant prose,
are caught between the exclusive message
          and slightly perfect tuning.


March 10, 2009

Distended eyes
on oceans of deep air.
High, dolorous reality,
sometimes,
down under the
hallway closet’s
detritus.

There speaks feign passion
in the phonemes.
Momentousness
in a perplexed baby,
irresolute for days
at a time.  Be what mine
in yours, sottish yet
emblazoned with crayola.


March 8, 2009

Fostering tiny telephone voices,
inert and distant like space
between TV stations.
We, like hot air balloons, talk down
to water.

We sport bad hair days
and half hour moonlights.
And you,
sentimental to sunshine
that shadows your hair hue
under wheat light.

Unavailable to conclusions,
Unfamiliar to elders.

Unavailable to conclusions,
Unfamiliar to elders.


Black Presidents

March 4, 2009

Summoned
by empty chairs,
like the championed cafeteria kid
lonesome in his long rise.

A herd of swelling trumpets
picking at his ankles,
inversely keeping his momentum
asurf.

Where does this fanfare reside?
If not in the ubiquitous moments
of an internal voyage?
Sea-faring with landlocked legs,
Elbows in oil.
Socks as symbols,
and Families in the pm.


Hot Air Balloon Sketch

March 4, 2009

Over pulsing carpets of people,
our giant lung
plastering majestic ideology
all over the young scene.

From up here,
leaves fall to form macro beasts,
    seasons head east,
       and the sun consumes a cornea.

I couldn’t find the camera
in her purse
or her glasses.
just manila chap-stick
wrapped around napkins,
my only object-cathexis
not swallowed by the hot organ.

We,
giant objectives,
slowly circling a cul de sac. 
She,
my ragamuffin,
once beautiful bag lady.
The one in Hawaii
renouncing cats in sermons,
on the soil of an orchid farm,
to an alligator-skin father.
her penny shoes
tied together
like symbols of graphic unity.

And by visions from a north,
we are connected through phone lines,
cup and twine,
to an old dark at the end of a south.


2008 Nothing

February 23, 2009

A horse death, a famous laugh.

Empty is as empty does.
Because.


To: Mields

February 23, 2009

You starve a British rock
no continent brave enough
for your praise.

When that sun was looming
that early morning river bridge
you hung
in tough comforters. You
had water glasses
cough for you.

There is no blancher, face-down man
surer-of-matters, carpet-father,
vidja dweller.

Yours, a bathroom mirror
emaciated because time.
Because time dresses lightly
but with sterling intentions.
Yours is a way through,
or yours might as well be
a staple on the floor singing an organized blues,
sun gazed on vending machine light hue.


Itinerants

February 23, 2009

“We are leaving now.”

The simple air filled with manna and kitchen pie
Clouds are sweeping the sky
And we’re scurried from afar.
Wonder in our veins
Collect dust
In the vintage sun.

“We are going down.”

A secular coffee
Sugar cubes singing storms
Of blind love parables
The drinkers of indubitable
Indulgence, serious
Uninspired and short.

“We are going down, indubitably.”

If you keep moving
Under arbor starlight 
Past the fork bins and
The schizandra berry bushes
They collect something
Like our garish half
Famous laughs
Under the arduous light
Continue, honey lemon plight.

“We are chaste, because it suits our face.”

I wouldn’t be dreaming of you
If I weren’t itinerant
A serious picture of
Serious winter, I came here
To uphold a shaky hand
Curling in Gregorian light.

“Tell me where you’ve been
Under what light
Serenaded on Mountain Hymn.”

The milky chalcedony
Resembles shrapnel in our past
We pull out too fast
Like ductape and mustaches
Pain refilling and refilling
In the water glasses.

“We are ravage beasts circling your veranda.”

Propagated
To more beautiful eras
We don’t speak like bards
Affable to even the most distant backyard
Inoculant praise shrouds
Like a poultice of Carmenere cloud.
But we are at several ends
Lost, unopened
By the fork bins.