Written by
Thomas Lux |
More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged.
This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries.
Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social.
Maraschino cherries, maraschino,
the only foreign word I knew.
Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
of a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth.
Not once.
The same jar there through an entire
childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat,
pocked peas and, see above,
boiled potatoes.
Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child's?
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.
|
Written by
Thomas Lux |
A man risked his life to write the words.
A man hung upside down (an idiot friend
holding his legs?) with spray paint
to write the words on a girder fifty feet above
a highway.
And his beloved,
the next morning driving to work.
.
.
?
His words are not (meant to be) so unique.
Does she recognize his handwriting?
Did he hint to her at her doorstep the night before
of "something special, darling, tomorrow"?
And did he call her at work
expecting her to faint with delight
at his celebration of her, his passion, his risk?
She will know I love her now,
the world will know my love for her!
A man risked his life to write the world.
Love is like this at the bone, we hope, love
is like this, Sweatheart, all sore and dumb
and dangerous, ignited, blessed--always,
regardless, no exceptions,
always in blazing matters like these: blessed.
|
Written by
Thomas Lux |
As you descend, slowly, falling faster past
you this snow,
ghostly, some flakes bio-
luminescent (you plunge,
and this lit snow doesn't land
at your feet but keeps falling below
you): single-cell-plant chains, shreds
of zooplankton's mucus food traps,
fish fecal pellets, radioactive fallouts,
sand grains, pollen.
.
.
.
And inside
these jagged falling islands
live more microlives,
which feed creatures
on the way down
and all the way down.
And you,
in your sinking isolation
booth, you go down, too,
through this food-snow, these shards,
bits of planet, its flora
and flesh, you
slip straight down, unreeled,
until the bottom's oozy silt, the sucking
baby-soft muck,
welcomes you
to the deep sea's bed,
a million anvils per square inch
pressing on your skull.
How silent here, how much life,
few places deeper on earth,
none with more width.
|
Written by
Thomas Lux |
What I love about this little leaning mark
is how it divides
without divisiveness.
The left
or bottom side prying that choice up or out,
the right or top side pressing down upon
its choice: either/or,
his/her.
Sometimes called a slash (too harsh), a slant
(a little dizzy, but the Dickinson association
nice: "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--"), solidus (sounding
too much like a Roman legionnaire
of many campaigns),
or a separatrix (reminding one of a sexual
variant).
No, I like virgule.
I like the word
and I like the function: "Whichever is appropriate
may be chosen to complete the sense.
"
There is something democratic
about that, grown-up; a long
and slender walking stick set against the house.
Virgule: it feels good in your mouth.
Virgule: its foot on backwards, trochaic, that's OK, American.
Virgule: you could name your son that,
or your daughter Virgula.
I'm sorry now
I didn't think to give my daughter such a name
though I doubt that she and/or
her mother would share that thought.
|
Written by
Thomas Lux |
each day mowed
and mowed his lawn, his dry quarter acre,
the machine slicing a wisp
from each blade's tip.
Dust storms rose
around the roar: 6:00 P.
M.
, every day,
spring, summer, fall.
If he could mow
the snow he would.
On one side, his neighbors the cows
turned their backs to him
and did what they do to the grass.
Where he worked, I don't know
but it sets his jaw to: tight.
His wife a cipher, shoebox tissue,
a shattered apron.
As if
into her head he drove a wedge of shale.
Years later his daughter goes to jail.
Mow, mow, mow his lawn
gently down a decade's summers.
On his other side lived mine and me,
across a narrow pasture, often fallow;
a field of fly balls, the best part of childhood
and baseball, but one could not cross his line
and if it did,
as one did in 1956
and another in 1958,
it came back coleslaw -- his lawn mower
ate it up, happy
to cut something, no matter
what the manual said
about foreign objects,
stones, or sticks.
|
Written by
Thomas Lux |
follows the river as it bends
along the valley floor,
going the way it must.
Where water goes, so goes the road,
if there's room (not in a ravine,
gorge), the river
on your right or left.
Left is better: when you're driving,
it's over your elbow across
the road.
You see the current, which is
what the river is: the river
in the river, a thing sliding fast forward
inside a thing sliding not so fast forward.
Driving with, beside, the river's flow is good.
Another pleasure, driving against it: it's the same river
someone else will see
somewhere else downstream -- same play,
new theater, different set.
Wide, shallow, fairly fast,
roundy-stone streambed, rocky-land river,
it turns there or here -- the ground
telling it so -- draining dull
mountains to the north,
migrating, feeding a few hard-fleshed fish
who live in it.
One small sandbar splits
the river, then it loops left,
the road right, and the river's silver
slips under the trees,
into the forest,
and over the sharp perpendicular
edge of the earth.
|
Written by
Thomas Lux |
Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone.
It's all
over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail.
And you,
your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing.
You did, you loved, your feet
are sore.
It's dusk.
Your daughter's tall.
|
Written by
Thomas Lux |
One wave falling forward meets another wave falling
forward.
Well-water,
hand-hauled, mineral, cool, could be
a kiss, or pastures
fiery green after rain, before
the grazers.
The kiss -- like a shoal of fish whipped
one way, another way, like the fever dreams
of a million monkeys -- the kiss
carry me -- closer than your carotid artery -- to you
|
Written by
Thomas Lux |
Senator, statesman, speaker of the House,
exceptional dancer, slim,
graceful, ugly.
Proclaimed, before most, slavery
an evil, broker
of elections (burned Jackson
for Adams), took a pistol ball in the thigh
in a duel, delayed, by forty years,
with his compromises, the Civil War,
gambler ("I have always
paid peculiar homage to the fickle goddess"),
boozehound, ladies' man -- which leads us
to his mouth, which was huge,
a long slash across his face,
with which he ate and prodigiously drank,
with which he modulated his melodic voice,
with which he liked to kiss and kiss and kiss.
He said: "Kissing is like the presidency,
it is not to be sought and not to be declined.
"
A rival, one who wanted to kiss
whom he was kissing, said: "The ample
dimensions of his kissing apparatus
enabled him to rest one side of it
while the other was on active duty.
"
It was written, if women had the vote,
he would have been President,
kissing everyone in sight,
dancing on tables ("a grand Terpsichorean
performance .
.
.
"), kissing everyone,
sometimes two at once, kissing everyone,
the almost-President
of our people.
|
Written by
Thomas Lux |
Shelves and stacks and shelves of skulls, a Dewey
Decimal number inked on each unfurrowed forehead.
Here's a skull
who, before he lost his fleshy parts
and lower bones, once
walked beside a river (we're in the poetry section
now) his head full of love
and loneliness; and this smaller skull,
in the sociology stacks, smiling (they're all
smiling)—it's been empty
a hundred years.
That slot
across the temple? An ax blow
that fractured
her here.
Look at this one from the children's shelves,
a baby, his fontanel
a screaming mouth and this time no teeth, no smile.
Here's a few (history)—a murderer,
and this one—see how close their eye sockets!—a thief,
and here's a rack of torturers' skulls
beneath which a longer row of the tortured,
and look: generals' row,
their epaulets
on the shelves to each side of them.
Shelves and shelves, stacks stacked on top of stacks,
floor above floor,
this towering high-rise library
of skulls, not another bone in the place
and just now the squeak of a wheel
on a cart piled high with skulls
on their way back to shelves
while in the next aisle
a cart filling with those about to be loaned
to the tall, broken-hearted man waiting
at the desk, his library card
face down before him.
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