Martin Ott
My Recurring Dream of Brad Pitt
OK this one is hard to admit.
Each time we meet I am drenched
with sweat. I sprint up to a clearing
in Pan Pacific Park, having kicked twenty
klicks (he taught me this expression).
He lies back on a picnic blanket
fingers laced in red wraparound
shades and tells me that he’s bummed
he hasn’t had time to call with how busy
his film about my life story has kept him.
Brad asks about the times
I fired guns, passed out, fought
men and took home girls with bruised
legs who wanted to wrap me in papyrus,
and escape in a cocoon of poetry and lies.
We passed around a Pinot Noir
from New Zealand with a screw-off
cap and recounted the time we sang
karaoke with Thai Elvis at the Palms
in order to save the world from terrorists.
Finally, we mastered our own
language of curse words and cool
until the sun revolved and he faded
into the eyes of women who drank
him dry until morning and I remained.
Bookmarks
A dry leaf from a winter garden pressed
between the pages, just before the paper
yellows and chlorophyll crumbles into dust,
marking yet another page in our lives.
You remember a piece of string from your
shirt, candy wrapper from your appetite,
toilet paper folded into a bulging cover,
grains of sand from a desolate beach.
You reached for what was important
because you needed to read and remember.
You think about listing the books you’ve
branded, a leaking pen for Poet in New York
that left smudges deeper than ink, than blood.
A fingernail for The Arabian Nights as though
in sleep you would not twitch from the dread
and hope of an empty bed. And no bookmark
for Naked Lunch, dog-eared, page bent back,
random works spewing to people on subways,
on street corners, sounding like hello, fuck you,
please help me. No. Listing books will not do.
So let’s remember those tales without authors,
the incantatory chants of mysterious knights
roaming woodlands for monsters, wicked step
mothers combing root cellars for children.
These tomes we remember with sharp
tongues, dry tongues sticky with epitaphs,
wet tongues. And what about the authors
hidden behind the lambskin and papyri?
Their endings are our passages, echoing
down a hall we close on a shelf before
returning to lives indelibly marked with bent
corner, a tassel in the velvet spine, a leaf stain
upon the page that tells us we have lived
and lived well. Or that we will conquer
mountains of air on words that form
translucent ladders to the constellations
of our adventures. Remember and it will be.
Step from the book and do not fear. Your place
is kept here with me. You will not be forgotten.
--
A former U.S. Army interrogator, Martin Ott currently lives in Los Angeles and still finds himself asking a lot of questions. His poetry and fiction have appeared in more than 100 publications, including Confrontation Magazine, Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review, New Letters, Notre Dame Review, Prairie Schooner and Zyzzyva. His book of poetry, Captive, won the 2011 De Novo Prize and will be published on C&R Press in 2012. He has also been nominated for two Pushcart prizes and his short story manuscript “Perishables” has been a finalist for the New American Fiction Prize.