RE DRUM cadre: 3 Poems
LEGACY
In the halls of old text messages,
you avoid last night
like lingering campfire heat
over the cold eggs of morning.
You come here, to nakedness,
to undress, to empty
yourself. You think
Forest! and hope for seed.
•
Speeding west through salt whispers
between mirage and sky,
225 tons of cement
metaphorize the unsurvivable.
87 feet above the crust, a desolate
that couldn't be left alone.
30,000 acres of brackish memories
reduced to destination—
all wedding photos & model shots
at 1,000 miles per hour.
•
Thistle, because we couldn't stand
to be lonely. To whittle down
to choke, to so little. What shape
were the trees before the kudzu.
The bamboo. The mongoose.
What native elsewhere in the world,
invasive here. What else besides
the seeds in our hair, the burrs
in our boots. Nature, can't spit out
the taste of you.
•
When the sun slouches, a phalanx
of squinting eyes & gaping mouths
inch out toward horizon
from the speedway museum
& visitors center. Everything
is smoking metaphor for
last hurrah & slump. You lean in
and acquiesce. You trade your chainmail
for a warrior's grimace, your racing jacket
for lassitude & former glory—all
lidded eyes & yawning mouths.
When the sun slouches
at 1,000 miles per hour.
•
Upon retirement from service,
even our neglected possessions—
honored as artifact: undeveloped
negatives, untapped water veins, yesterday’s
unsent messages. Every littered impression
intruded upon—culled & catalogued,
coalesced into synonymity.
From a puppy-patterned blanket
that provided infant-warmth
to the deceased's discarded cold-shoulder
wanderer's cape—all flattened
into narrative. Once we're decked out
& done up, wept-over & buried, whatever
gets remembered is what we are
remembered for.
REPAIR
There is a crack . . . in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
—Leonard Cohen
Each day repair the cobble
that daily drops
like breadcrumbs
noting the day before
the day before last,
in hopes to gather
some whole healed picture.
Cobble the crumbs
to loaf again.
Give us our daily stone.
•
How long before the wolf falls away & I find it
pale amongst the rushes,
the smoke moon glinted orange the time
the cold before harvest? It wheezes at night & I tried
putting straws up its nose. The fog dredged up to my
ankles, the way a house floods. I tried to lose it
in the willows, but it wants
a name. To bring back
whatever I
throw away.
•
Turn wrench before back breaks.
Braking before wheels roll.
Caws along the crawl beneath
carcass. Passed by with slip of mind.
Discs on credit rolling across pebbles.
Urgency is a creeping tan dust
and a cough across a defeat
but the wrench looms large.
In its weight the flash of bone,
flesh, spine, fragrant blood and thinning hair.
•
Japanese potters attend to crises
using tree sap lacquer
dusted with powdered precious metals
to celebrate imperfections.
Crack: a seam of gold's jagged glint down the wall--
a once-in-a-lifetime streak of lightning luck.
Piece: a platinum pool at the base of a crimson vase--
the only worldly place to view oneself.
Joint-call: fragment of a flowered vessel
silver-grafted onto an otherwise bland brown urn.
For these artists of the broken
the brilliance of the metal reflected
in luminous healing.
•
The wrench never reaches the smoke dressed moon.
Wolves lacquer the broken land with reformed rivers.
These bodies lightning struck with nerve and vein.
When the flesh is opened
a flood of rusting blood hardens
and names the body repaired.
Days dropping bones
like lost peasant children
full of faith in bread and return.
The soles of their shoes slowly turn to soil.
SECRETS
It's no secret that with snow comes a quiet.
Porous as coral, snowflakes are riddled
with open spaces that absorb what groans.
In the quilted forest, deer does not
hear wolf coming. Rabbit can't detect
falcon hovering; the thrill of kill in its mouth.
Greedy little recorders, these frozen fractals
have been hoarding sound since the beginning
of winter. And when thaw comes they melt the evidence
back into the earth's infinite audio.
•
That somebody peed in the reservoir & all
the water had to go. That the homeless
lie asleep on the lawn in front of town.
Somebody told me it's sad but their bodies
can also handle it better than most. The freezing.
That somebody told me, I could be in love
with anybody. That this confluence
of rivers is notorious for flooding. That I
could love the word levee, but more so
that the levees break and this, this inland sea.
•
This embargo of plains my touch toes
with gloves where the sky keeps
on keeping up into the tips of vast
lies; the liars in golden vests,
the clouds reflecting pale yellow
wildflowers wilting under bootcrush
as fingers flex in time
and smirk musicaldancing with the wind.
•
We watch movies to tell each other
that the world will be bigger.
That Gargoyles taught wall how to tall.
But every orchid hides the same.
Every daisy says their name.
•
Trust me: follow the cattails to this lake.
Skip the stone. Taste the berry. Prod
the skin on lurking snake. I know
it feels overwhelming,
the way from one form, form escapes. Don't worry,
despite the scorched drumlin
in the mountainscape where you placed
the hope Hollywood had placed in you,
your dreams are safe in white rapids
rushing from the levee break.
RE DRUM is a Seattle-based poetry collective with a partially-rotating cast of contributors that makes work for both print & performance. For the cadre project, core members Alex Bleecker, Willie James, and Jeremy Springsteed are joined by Greg Bem & Justine Chan.