D.A. Powell & Haines Eason
MacGuffin
I
Murders strewn like plum petals in Pacific Spring :
unpeopled cities, where the newly dead rear
up into locust swarms
Silenced swings, the mothers’ muslin
light—remembers who, torques the chains
unuttering?
A lineage of chests strewn steer as curbs
As hiding in each doorway strokes : on abandoned sofas,
yielding sisters
from the faceless orders—long suffering
vineyards : disemboweled upholstered chairs, broken lamps
burn upon the sills, the still remaining
strands of traffic, an iridescent muddle.
& gaunt the streets, swifter decline into—but that was before
these years of feed. Drawing on our skins, our plush
rumps spreading across the Naugahyde honey dripping from
a boy’s spray-paint thinly filling the air
watch your ass, crackwhore.
These tender,
these first winters
so gelatinous and white, like American flesh, like the women & men
from their broken towns to Vegas tables :
and their sons, slump on the streets of
Anyville, USA—is this promise, pulsing. Each carved evening
sky blinking, wherever the desert the ageless, aging anyway.
What cortege to this eviscerated world? Hoardings announce
each quartermile with paradisiacal come-ons :
CONJOINED SISTERS, Enc anted
Se p nt S al owers, swallows his
OWN:
electrical cord binding
the wrists, found floating—
II
From pages memorized he dealt
the city’s improbability—of course the evening
is a fountain. Jet nozzles harp
the instrumental My Way dulcet and
glossy, our friend (and since, his face)—he was like a
tearful moon, a high-cloud curtain :
Torn soldiers blew by
drunk and insatiate, passing
the dice or the single die : blind alley
ahead. The mystery’s always the material—
the buildings—it’s always gone as foretold—
collapse cards into a shuffle of futures
tomorrowland and tomorrowland and tomorrowland
creeps petty fools
—for J. Peter Moore
Rack Focus
the city walkways, supple as mortal
memories fluttering meaning “nightingale” :
warm Southern revolver, places gently
through the lips beaten sumac. A cotillion
of urgent ravening
arms about the throat, presses
trigger : memory of the flyswatter, the poolsweep, the myriad
rod-like extensions of the arm that corralled us kids—
blow out the pilot light tonight, we’ve had it
on the fatal rock of blue hometown. Dull perplexed
the humid traffic, the wind rising
up the jumping chest tender tones, awash
in a sea of eyeless doors
—which could not be the world
For the world, possum, is built from a series of escapes
narrow wingspan of nightbirds roosting in gutters
& a fluttered moth unsinged at the edge
of oildrum fires—
Midnight reservoir : the limited breezes, culling
from the built-out nightsweats come
the close crowd.
A dry wood the sycamores refusing
any more than shadows
Any more than the over-exposure of existence
Its raw resinous light leaning us up against the car, pulling
down our trousers, shoving its ugly snout between our lips : I had
called from this wooded hell so many times—
the occasional warm clue :
wingbeat of a bat, broken over embers.
The dawn we wake it
in segments : the footprints, a memory of trucks
and jagged, fired cans, the taut and slipping lines
to this light. Caking out as paper, or ivory.
Somebody is always cowering
in the shadows, a blur we couldn’t call
memory because memory has edges
(i.e., allowing somebody else to treat our body
as their own)—the roundness : having been inside
that burning oildrum. Papery to the point of combusting.