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  Fourteen

  Bill Yarrow

  Copyright 2011 by Bill Yarrow

  FOURTEEN

  Bill Yarrow

 

  EYES OFF THE ROAD

   

  One by one I lost my desires.

  Dirty ambition left first.

  Knowledge raged but then it cooled.

  Riches never had the hook very deep.

  Achievement uncoupled from success seemed pointless.

  Friendship became recursive.

  Appetite lost its urgency.

  Form declined into artifice.

  Love stopped feeding me so I stopped feeding it.

  Insight evaporated when memory left.

  Lust lingered longest.

   

  My desires, gaily arrayed, bolted to a

  lapis slab, await me in Heaven.

  With any luck I’ll go to Hell.

 

  HITTING THE WALL

   

  I hadn’t seen her since Carter was

  President. Everything about her had

  turned white, even her beauty marks.

  I faced her strangeness and fumbled

  for the past. The time we went crabbing

  on the Chesapeake. Her imitation of

  Barbara Mandrell. Playing lawn darts

  at my Mom’s. I tried to talk, but only

  whispers slithered out. She pretended

  to understand what I was saying,

  then said, “Wasn’t it fungible to have

  run across each other?” Fungible? I

  questioned. She slapped me—hard.

  Then her perfume returned—with a vengeance.

 

  BOGDAN

  Dad was dying. Meanwhile, the blood

  from a puncture wound was drying on

  Bogdan’s palm. He was a tenth grade

  messiah famous for acts of attrition.

  I had solicited his help with a bully

  who had been threatening to beat me

  up for wearing a leather tie to school.

  He said he’d see what he could do.

  The next day, my tormentor was not

  in class. I went looking for my savior.

  He was loitering by the cafeteria tray

  return, eyeing the cruelty in passersby.

  I went up to him and asked for another

  favor. “You only get one.” I pondered that.

 

  LOVE AND HOW IT GETS THAT WAY

  You were the most beautiful girl in third grade.

  My thoughts were restless escapades. My heart

  was roasted butter. I donned wax wings and flew

  toward the highest sky I could find. And then,

  among a score of others, to be invited to your party!

  We all stood on the lawn behind your house, most

  of us in wide-striped tees, one of us in a bowtie,

  eyeing that thing in your backyard, that thing

  you pumped to spin around, and we all took turns,

  you on one side in a yellow dress and one after

  the other of us on the other, and we spun you,

  spun you! and then that kid in the bowtie got on, got

  dizzy, and vomited, and you looked at him with disgust

  and I felt like Adam’s apple had just landed in my lap.

 

  JOAN OF DARK

  What happens in heaven stays in heaven.

  “That’s not true,” she said to me. “You know

  it’s not true.”  Yes, the acts of paradise,

  slippery like syrup, slide down the clouds

  and drip onto the tops of the trees where

  birds and squirrels reveal them to man.

  “What color are the birds?” she asked. Pink.

  The pink birds and checkerboard squirrels

  reveal the sly doings of the chubby cherubs.

  “What’s sly doings?” I meant “sky” doings.

  Reveal the sky doings of half-pint angels.

  “I love heaven, don’t you?” I’m not allowed to

  tell. They will burn me at the stake if I tell.

  “Like Joan of Dark?” Just like Joan of Dark.

 

  STEVIE’S KNEES

  They broke both of Stevie’s knees.

  Gambling debt. Just like in the movies.

  Except in real life it’s a little more

  tearful, a little less marauding.

  Aunt Pol didn’t see it. She was diabetes

  blind by then or dead. I don’t remember.

  The main thing is to avoid heartache,

  but only the frozen know how to do

  that. The arteries of time are running

  out of blood. The lungs of love are caked

  with soot. Stevie’s skin was a peerless

  jewel undervalued by the college

  bourgeois. I’ve read about the algebra

  of need. Stevie’s need was arithmetic.

 

  GEORGE

  Skinny guy with glasses sent to Viet­nam,

  comes back with an under­stand­ing of heroin,

  an acquain­tance with who­r­ish­ness, a clar­i­fied

  wife, and a hel­met on his soul. His fam­ily alive

  but indif­fer­ent, he makes his way back

  to the ocean, back to the pop­corn, back

  to the pin­ball machines, wants to see

  the boss who had treated him well. “Hey

  Bob! It's me, George!” Kind­ness is mag­netic

  but the past is a loose adhe­sive and rarely

  is employ­ment a glue. “How nice to see

  you, George!” He hangs around for about

  an hour, then slinks back to the deserted

  battlefield he has had tattooed on his future.

 

  NOTHING BESIDE REMAINS

   

  It was the 70s. My students carried

  guns. My colleagues died of AIDS.

  My married neighbors were cineastes.

  I walked the rent-controlled boulevards

  of Sunnyside and watched the glib sun

  set over loquacious Manhattan. Every day’s

  evaporated apogee had its inky epitaph.

  We exist only insofar as we are remembered.

  Remember going to Carroll Gardens for those

  fake IDs? Remember the urine urn in LeFrak

  City? Remember the coconut kishke from

  Zabar’s? Remember the Ely Avenue Cleaver?

  Under the bridges of Kew Gardens Hills

  the invented truth still has street value.

 

  FOUR NOBLE LIES

   

  When Carlotta left me I cried

  into my soup. I shriveled into

  harsh mathematics. A decade

  later I was living on Iowa Street

  with Karen. She had goldfish and

  good taste. I loved her for her fleshy

  neck. We drank sinewy Dos Equis

  and played Mahjong. In March

  I developed that cruel facial tic.

  That precipitated the divorce.

  At the thought of losing her

  my heart contracted into a span.

  But I knew one day I’d replace her

  with a brutally neutered cat.

 

  THE PROUD ACCOUNTING

  You were the first to be found

  head down in the sewage

  of what we do for a living

  but time will purify that.

  Your wife is losing weight

  in the hope that grief will

  make her body attractive

  and it will. S
he is radiantly

  unhappy without you

  but worst off is your daughter

  wrapped in the newspaper

  that announced your death.

  She walks alone in black high heels

  down the corridor of sterile engagement.

 

  UNCLE MOSCOW

  He asked me to bury him in Vegas.

  Instead, I had him cremated in Trenton.

  But I did hang his dog tags on a high bough

  of an alder tree outside the Frontier Hotel.

  The last time I saw him was in an assisted-

  living facility in Pennsauken. He stuck out

  a wine dark tongue and punched me

  in the chest. Poor one-eyed Uncle

  Moscow—a fruit fly flew into his eyeball

  and stuck there—then two hitchhikers

  in his backseat hit him on the head

  with a ball-peen hammer and stole his car.

  He had a mind like a whorehouse martini, but

  that doesn’t negate the leverage of a man’s heart.

 

  RAW SALT

  I poured bleach on the bloody moon

  and turned it scalding white. Then I

  wrote my autobiography on it in ash.

  When the bill came due, I joined the

  cowboys who navigate by fear. They

  locked me in a cabin inhabited by

  moles. I escaped through the mirror

  and landed in a lake. I baked for weeks

  in seaweed and lost a lot of flesh.

  Hittites picked the barnacles off me

  and packed me in raw salt. I healed

  in time to see the airmen welcomed home.

  A tall barker was hawking condo lots.

  It was Gatlinburg in mid July.

 

  GABRIELLE IN ARREARS

   

  It’s 10:46 in Newark on New Year’s Eve.

  You’re rushing to the Ramada ballroom

  for an evening of kisses, hors d’oeuvres,

  and darkened drinks. Someone honks.

  Unnerved, you swerve to the right, side-

  swipe a Buick, slide back across the lane,

  flip into a ditch. Doctor Causson warned you

  more than once about the consequences of

  being distracted. Well, it’s too late to resuscitate

  advice now. You should be calling 911, waving

  at headlights, flagging down trucks, pulling

  your bleeding husband from the car. Instead

  you’re just staring at your hands as if somehow

  they were imperious tools capable of magic.

 

  PICKING THE BARK OFF EXPERIENCE

  As he gets into the oil-soaked tub

  he recognizes the Jupiter Symphony

  playing on the floor below.

  Any minute now the waiter will

  bring him his lobster omelet.

  After breakfast he dresses and heads

  for the blackjack tables. When he

  wins a million dollars he will stop.

  He remembers his mother’s dead body,

  the reunion strippers at the funeral.

  Carrying a mimosa in a fluted glass

  he fights his way through the lobby

  packed with firefighters from Marietta.

  His mind is full of anchors and Bar Harbor.

  ###

  Copyright © 2011 Bill Yarrow

  All rights reserved

  These poems have previously appeared in other publications:

  “Bogdan”

  Negative Suck

  “Love and How It Gets That Way”

  And

  “Gabrielle in Arrears”

  Ramshackle Review

  “George”

  BLIP/New World Writing

  “Four Noble Lies”

  Right Hand Pointing

  “The Proud Accounting”

  LITSNACK

  “Uncle Moscow”

  Everyday Genius

  “Raw Salt”

  new aesthetic

  Cover design and artwork by Matthew S. Barton

  Cover photograph ©2011 Bill Yarrow

  First Edition 2011

  ISBN 978-1-61584-282-7

  With generous support of Exact Change Press

  Printed in the United States of America

  NAKED MANNEKIN