John Gallaher
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The line runs through the hotel lobby, then extends past the pool,
and down and around the graveyard. The pool
looks nice. Some manatees
are performing. There’s a little island in the center
with monkeys. “I can still remember the floor plan
of that house in Amarillo,”
the person beside you says. “I’m sure it’s still there,”
he adds. I’d like to think it’s still there, anyway. That
would bring some elegance to the equation.
The manatees wear little pink tutus and the monkeys
wear little red hats. We’re leaning with or against each other,
as the line extends to the cloverleaf. We bring all the rocks
we can carry, and make little piles
when we get too much. Then we start over. The sweet smell
of a brand new day. True,
but no matter what the resemblances we undertake
there will never be a final correspondence,
despite the lists we pass back and forth
of the living and the dead, and the in-between.
It’s said the line was seen in Westminster once,
where it got tangled with other lines. But so many things could be true
about losing touch, and having this be it, blinkered by where
we came from, but as there were two ways about it,
we found our noses a little off to the side of the grindstone
where there was a comfortable divot
within which we could rest a bit and introduce ourselves
to those around us.
And then it came time for us to find chairs
as the music stopped, and the dwarf with the garage door opener
was looking off toward the casinos,
pretending darkness. A few old-timers still meet there
with their checkerboards and little pieces made of filed bone. “We’re
bone workers,” they say, and the air brings a bit of dampness
as the line extends through the sand traps of the golf course
which stand there like a new idea, one you’ve just thought up.
Box with Noise Elements
At some point the wind always shifts suddenly
and the gust carries off small dogs
past where the king is caught in the tree
dancing along the edge of the roof. It’s been nice,
and now we’re applesauce.
Further postcards in the gift shop include
paintings of barges and counter girls waving
from ferries in New York harbor. We take two
of everything, and carry them outside
hoping for kites.
While falling, all you want to do is fall, they say,
sounding like all those children’s stories we hid in a shoebox
under the floorboards, so we’d have something
to find someday
when perhaps we could explain them. We left detailed notes
before we moved, with Xs
and dotted steps.
Such things always start out as a memory
but end up as a question. It’s no wonder we lilt
when we meet in doorways, only to bump into each other
and get turned around so that we go back the way we came,
spending the rest of our lives where we just were
thinking it was where we were going,
with the wrong children,
and feeling something’s not quite right
about the wedding anniversaries. That’s it,
isn’t it? The story of the girl
in the woods? The darkness of the trees?
Ethel & Myrtle Try to Avoid How Emotional They Get
In the bric-a-brac of the yard, or the people across the yard,
Ethel and Myrtle are thinking it’s not necessarily bad
to be completely misunderstood. Sometimes it’ll help,
or at least buy oneself time, out in the middle of the ice storm
when what goes on in the minds of the possessed
is far from what the manuals project, with that if-you-could-
see-me-now thrill making way for the temperance guild
and general din of all our forfeitings and acquiescences.
I used to worry about my father, for instance, there
at the microscope, and now they’re criticizing us for it,
as apparently they’d like us to have little adventures
that remind ourselves of just how sweet it is to have lived,
and how we all live again through it, and there’s
some hope out there that feels like a rush of air
on the Stutz Bearcat, while we practice turning off the faucets
with our elbows. But they criticize us in such lonely,
defeated ways, it’s difficult to feel anything
but sorry for them. “Be happy,” we say, “don’t cry.”
Maybe if we lift something heavy. Maybe if we sit awhile
reading them sonnets that go, “How are you doing, Joe? Geeze,
I haven’t seen you in forever.” How maybe such questions
would help us think about things differently,
so that we might be better able to get past blaming
old pictures of ourselves— Look, we’re all people no matter what,
with our mothers losing their minds in the living room
as we order pizza from the hall, keeping an eye on them
while juggling scissors. We never had a choice which door to knock on,
and now they’re all the same, swinging outward, and then breaking.
Your Hands as the Third Law of Motion
The clocks of Pangaea never run backward, true, but sometimes
they go forward in pleasing, sparkling ways. The shrubbery
that was rather unsubstantial now looks like Lincoln,
and people are lining up wanting tickets and a look
at your herbicide, even if all your ideas are smaller now,
including the ones for the backyard Ferris wheel
and corn maze. It had to do with your uncle,
and now we all love the same animals. The platypus, the yak,
the manatee, and the effervescent forts they make
in the camp fitness yard, begging you to stay away from home.
Things are going on there, unlike here where everyone
has stopped in mid-stroke, even the fire in the hearth,
the choir in mid-lunge, the lovers grasping the porch rail
with everything they have, as the princess lies waiting
for some light molestation from a stranger, like when
you’re in a crowded theater and something you say
sotto voce sounds like “fire,” and the next thing you’re able
to define clearly is filled with forms, and stories you make up
from glancing over the detective’s left shoulder, laconic stories,
like the ending of some movie you didn’t get to see,
but of which you had this clear vision.
Now the fields are filled with wind farms, and we’re worried
we might have to start rationing weather. It certainly
seem to be calling out to be done, or to have a song written
about it being done. We should have brought some instruments
or taken some lessons, or understood music better. Some idle
practicing that could remind us that perhaps we should have
had children. But there’s always something we were
meaning to do that we forgot to do while power washing
the deck or picking up the pool passes. So maybe we did
have children after all. Maybe that’s what all these rooms are for.
Of Certain Small, Valuable Kitchen Appliances
Take whatever it is, and call it Layer One,
and suddenly it’s layers
up and around the room.
A table. People leaning over a table.
One of them is pouring maple syrup. A chrome jar
for powdered sugar.
“I’ve always been here,” they say,
which is drawn away
or applied. Of the one and the rest.
I did not know you, and the brush of clouds
was too forceful.
I did not see where I was going
and I reached
what I can’t remember what it was
I was reaching for.
Vanish the windows. Vanish this tablecloth
for this one that was always here.
That was the house with a missing wall
so we could watch. Maybe it was a table on wheels,
or there was never a table.
A counter. Some people around a table.
“Tell me a story about me,” they say,
from the darkness between thoughts.
This is the Part Where You Whistle
The clouds went by and so did we, just fads,
probably, we thought, in that hoping-for-ice-cream
way we’d grown so famous for
before we went hopelessly out of our minds. I remember that
from an experiment I was in once, where
I had to keep changing my pants
according to the tones from a wall speaker. I liked
several of them, where they prompt you to take
a self-guided tour. A feeling came upon me
like nausea then, some thought I’d been driving past
for years. There were children in the yards singing
“I Demand a Horizon,” though I doubted they knew
what they were asking for. It was the view through a window
from a commercial for cereal that the altar boys
were so going on about, practically out of their robes
they were, and into their I LIKE BANDS t-shirts. They
named rocks and taught them tricks. They were
very good at holding their breath. I’ve always
wondered about that, and about myself,
as well. But what’s the use in wondering,
when the schedule that the guy at the booth gave us
shows that many more things should be happening
than currently seem to be happening. I arrived.
I changed my pants a few times. I left. Why not
just say that? As there’s always another model
in demand, with sale frames and years of research,
saying “I Love Goodness.” The box set was still
in transit back then, though anything that rises
in a closed system could appear to be the reason
for that system. Invisible dogs on studded leashes,
for example, 1-900 numbers and comment cards.
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John Gallaher is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Map of the Folded World, from The University of Akron Press, and Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, co-authored with G.C. Waldrep, due out in Spring 2011 from BOA, as well as the free online chapbook, Guidebook from Blue Hour Press. Other than that, he’s co-editor of The Laurel Review and GreenTower Press.