Long Hulks Poems
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Herons fragment the mist,
appear and disappear while remaining motionless.
The skiff rocks as a coal barge trundles past.
A dewy sky shivers.
Nowadays he just sits in a boat looking at Ohio.
This morning the sun reached the top of a willow
and got stuck.
He rowed toward the bank thinking to get under the tree,
filled an imaginary pipe full of tangy river smoke,
sucked on the wet air
as he watched the tree struggling with the sun.
For a while it was a tussle, then the willow shook itself
and the sun slipped away like an unmoored ketch.
At first, the sun just hovered like a blanched balloon
then it found a window above the mounded smother
and it rose up like a Choctaw bass
about to mouth a trill of small fry.
He was near to the shore now,
Ohio slanted down to meet him
cattails and reeds scratching the aluminum hull.
A couple of mallards jumped out of nowhere
and flew over his eyes. The clatter of wings
ruffled the chill bank where a dank light had sunk.
His mind followed them for some time
until they settled deep down
amid a wraith-wrapped Kentucky.
A heron slowly rowed the wind
stirring up the vaporous air, Patches of clarity
drifted across sky-high filtering puddles.
Ohio becomes a river town, the huddled houses
have scuttled their roofs upon soggy pathways.
The mossy hulks of an abandoned industry
wallow in a foggy backwash.
Castaway wharfs drip a spatter and smear,
a hand me down script of a yesteryear.
A small blue-collar marina,
beer cans roll on swaying pontoons,
a couple of dry docked rowboats
and canoes.
Truck tires thump harbor chains.
Someone is up early, someone else watches him
gut and clean a large flathead.
On the damp dock cats circle the bones and scales
creep through the miasma
their fur wet and glistening eyes flashing a liquid silver.
The catfish is naked and shorn of the river
a thing to be watched least it return to life
as something beyond the ken of cats and fishermen.
On the ramp he hitches up his straggling life
and drives away from a berth awash
with the haunted cries of Loons and Redtail’s.
Soon he will be back in the patched-up pockets of Ohio
where corn husks snag hoarfrost and rattle
in a fresh rinsing breeze.
Last Chance,
I passed through you many times and remember you.
You sit on the Colorado Prairie east of Denver at the intersection of two, two lane highways.
In the 1880's you were a stop along the great Texas Montana Cattle Trail.
You really came into your own as a child of the post war Forty's and Fifty's automobile boom.
The say you once were a lively little town made up of gas stations, motels, cafes, a general store, two churches and several homes.
Word has it, you got your name because you were the last chance for travelers to get gas,
food and lodging on their long treks to Denver and Kansas.
In summer, travelers picked cold Cokes, Pepsis and Grape NeHi's out of your gas stations' iced filled soda chests.
In winter, hot steaming coffee flowed from the silver urns of your cafes.
It was Fords, Plymouths, and Chevrolets that created you,
and it was Interstate Highway 70 that bypassed and doomed you
to whither and slowly die.
A prairie fire in 2012 caused by the sparks of a tire blowout finished you off.
Today you are a ghost town of burnt out hulks, abandoned buildings
and distant memoires.
Oh, Last Chance.
The stories you could tell.
Patience of accusations begin to thin
As they toss complaints at me from now til then
If i could summarize my existence that easily i would
But another question is that if i even should
Raised in a household of hulks
Like angry dragons they bulk
Time after time my mind begins to twist
Turning and winding,
Trying to keep my soul from dying
Trapped in purgatory
I question if im still in hell
Was the 3 days just a metaphor for my time?
Or did it just ring with the bell!
I dont know how i came to be...
Seems i was adopted by spirits,
Ones that preserved me for eternities
Oh God! im not ashamed of your help!
Just let me see clearly!
What am i even looking for?
Something or someone i fear
Thats out of my current reach
Waiting, fighting and dying
So something good can be
Maybe il it can?
But i fear i must first put an end to all my enemies
Such is the prophecy of world war 3
No more in the end...will i here blasphemy
Anger departs for now, until it spews upon there ignorant seas.
More than meets the eye
Trapped in my mortal shel
Until the end of mortal time
Form:
Have you ever seen
The portrait of a dog
Painted on the road,
Not in the great tradition
Of living colours as you’d
Expect, but in all the
Terror and detail of
An untimely death?
Have you ever seen
The sketch of an imposing house
Rendered not in vibrant charcoal
But the coal of shattered
Hopes and burnt out hulks-
The work of the Great Artist above
Or the mean imitation of an earthly forger?
Have you ever seen
The picture of an ocean beach
With dark waters lapping
The fish-laid shore,
Not the magnum opus of
A master in oils; but
The work of an oil slick?
Have you ever seen
These great Works of Art?
And have you ever wondered why
You had to be
The great portrait
Of a Master Caricaturist?
Am I the only one,
the only one left to carry this cross
through these wasted lands,
these blasted glass riddled sands.
This cross of madness.
Leagues I have traveled...
Long have I forged this burden for years.
I have come and gone
baptized by my deeds and fears.
I wander through these hidden dominions
directed by the almost forgotten master
vacant at the wheel, empty at the command.
These barren brittle lands.
Of suicide dives and Funerary Lots...
Castaway crimson chemical dots
Dancing ghost; drifts to and fro...
...through darkening hulks
of rusted cars and broken dive bars.
Something skeletal sees,
Something skeletal remains,
into the odd orange oblique history.
As our midnight sky comes to a zenith...
Am I the only one
the last son
to bear the burden of years
I have wandered through these vacant car lots
I have wandered through these lands for years.
Into the cloudburst overhead
Im lost on a thousand yesterdays
forged from my greed in misery mistrust...
Into this cruciform!
Come for men to bear witness!
I wander across these blasted lands for years
Time stands still for no one
I am full of fear
…am I the only one to bear this,
Cruciform!
Small rolling hills, valley plots,
nothing regimented,
graves not scattered, but placed
among natural features.
It’s beautiful here
especially in the Fall.
The Maples are tall and burning bright.
There are new graves among the old.
I thank all of them
for being here before me.
Not that I could afford
to be planted here. Even the Maples
are too rich for my death.
No, I will be ashes
thrown
into the Ohio river.
I imagine the fishes will be pleased
to see me,
the abandoned truck tires
easily accommodating my
swirling dust.
If the shore weeds and cattails catch me,
then I will linger until their own death
releases my essence once more.
Down the slow waters,
in chewed, dribbles and drabs will I go
until I seep within a slick of mud,
just spice for mites and grubs
into the Mississippi.
Days bleed their green entrails into
the empty hulks of passing years.
A future, nourished by the ear bones
of all beings who listened, and once heard,
of the everlasting
opens up into a perfect unison.
I reappear transformed
by generations of sprouting dreams
into a Maple seed.
A seed now planted in these same
pleasant Autumnal acres.
Here, I will grow tall and beautiful;
as a many limbed arboreal fire.
Curious ghosts in their mausoleums
will spy into the Fall daylight
to watch my leaves, turn, and grow bright –
so flame red, so burning bright.
The young woman sat astride the young buffalo
Her dress was a flimsy, homemade from the cured skin of a deer.
Two cured boots, quite wide, hiding each a dagger,
Whilst on her back, crisscrossed were two swords.
One large and heavy, the other lithe, small with a green gem.
They came to a murky river, the small buffalo
Treading the depth of the bottom full of weeds.
Suddenly it stopped. Two dark hulks of a man
Were beating a poor and small old man.
It was clear they meant to kill, such was their force.
A dagger appeared from her boot and flew
It was embedded in his chest, right where his heart lay.
The other man tried to escape, but out came the small sword.
A flash hit him between his eyes, blinding him completely.
Then he fell, trembled in his death throes and lay still.
Birds flew away from the scene, and all was quiet.
The buffalo crossed the river and approached the man.
There was no fear in his eyes as he handed back her dagger.
She picked him up, not much of a weight really.
Slowly, they wended their way towards his shack.
A few well-chosen leaves cured his wounds.
And made him rest on his bed made of clothes.
Later, fearlessly, she fed him to regain his rest.
She cleaned her swords and prepared to leave.
The old man hobbled towards her bracelet in his hand.
“Take this. When it turns red, you’ll know.
Danger is not far away. Be prepared.”
On ocean bowride below gentle titans peep
ghost ships of the Pacific hunt and chase -
where great barnacled seafarers of the deep
beneath the waves its blue waters grace.
Old sea tales of killing lance and spear tip
tell of the dying struggle of the flurry -
once more mighty hulks of beast and ship
haunt the dark shadows of the undersea.
Let no harpoon pierce your skin,
no flense cut and slice,
not body or fin.
Let no kill sound its death throes,
and may long
live the shout of “thar she blows!”
Far and yon an old boneyard whaling station
fluking bulls and cows circle the perilled pod,
and breach and dive in fabled echolocation
the bones of Ahab and wreck of the Pequod.
Still ghost ships old hunting grounds scout
that mystic echo whalesong far reaching,
and still cavernous mouths unmade to shout
trap by moon and tide on remote beaching.
Let no harpoon pierce your skin,
no flense cut and slice,
not body or fin.
Let no kill sound its death throes,
and may long
live the shout of “thar she blows!”
Written: July 1992