56
CIRQUE
Map For Hugo Dick you can’t get here with apologies. I have rum ricotta and beer to chase your imagination. You would have said “Yes, way,” if I’d said imagination is faster than light. Remember Seaside. You sat in my Nissan, out of breath, minus a lung, whispering to the passenger seat sagging from exhaustion. I dropped you and your sandals off at a side street and now it’s time to visit here. Time and space are never late or too far, the science professor says. Time and space are two seasons on the Mobius weft of our gravelly earnest world. You can ski into spring or fly into Italy any time like you’ve written. Time is a peek between the pickets. Emily knew this. Have you seen her in the blue warp of eternity? Has she edited a new atlas of poems? Stop by. The walkway is clear. I await your report. I’ll leave the light on.
Shane L. Harms
Iron John on the Wagon Iron John is on the wagon after a retreat to California. The ibogaine was strong. The ayahuasca ate him alive. Now body building in BC, there is not enough protein to eat. The scabs on his face have washed away. He is clean like the lepers in the Book. Black needles do not pierce his dream-tissue. He holds the original rib. A mother in Minnesota rests like a kettle at the fire. She knows a son like seething wind that blows young sailors into sirens. This time must be cleaner, longer. On Facebook his hairless bulb-baked body projects ripples to the world: “I am competing this Saturday,” says the screen. The mother sees the man-cub finally turn to wolf-man. She knows the snow is building along the house, slouching seven feet high, almost past the windows. A radio is on. Garrison Keeler is talking now. Talking about Robert Bly now. Reading a Bly poem now. Outside a holy man went back down the hill as the mother posts a message on her son’s page. Electrons push her words to the abstract ether. Does he see it? Is he really there? She remembers finding him under a bridge in Minneapolis, his voice like the ore in Hibbing, and a face more scarred than the land -- bones like broken birch branches. A phone vibrates in his pocket, as Iron John watches the sea rush a BC shore in furrows of obsidian steel and long waves of Persian White. He does not feel it now. The black sheep’s wool covers his eyes. He finds Shiva’s slumber in Pacific storms. O what original violence out there, thrashing water and sea-foam. There it beats in an opium heart. Why does it come in old oil drum dregs combusting the family wagon back to Minnesota? A wave rolls up the sand. Iron John cannot tell if it is a trough or crest that finally closes, but feels another wave approach.
Nils
Kt Medred