Читать книгу Alamo Theory - Josh Bell - Страница 15

Vince Neil Accompanies Josh to Luncheon with Scholars, Poets, and Others — Gets Cell Phone Number of Grad Student Sitting at Far End of Table — Orders Cheeseburger, No Tomato — Borrows Josh’s Cell Phone — Calls Grad Student Sitting at Far End of Table

If I’d been born a girl, like you,

I wouldn’t have lived any longer than I will,

and whether I’d be waiting

in my new long johns, or in the plus-size version

of your blouse and Target pumps,

still the ancient Boy Scout Death would sidle up

and find me in the houseboat,

compliment my penmanship, my knots, and then

he’d lead me to the minivan, never to be seen

with this hairstyle again, the handsome scalp

and blond fringe now worn

by seagulls, who hit the high notes like it was nothing,

who think in unison, though they never

seem to fly that way, instead go dropping singular

from the squiggled flock

after bread crust and fish eye, blip-blip

down from the sky, rogue threads of EKG. I mean to say

what’s globbed is globbed for good

and even John Keats will not unfuck it for us.

Though maybe you have this feeling

about me — good! — and maybe then

you paste that feeling down with words

and I do the same, and then dreaming in our beds

we get the lonely message from each other,

just in time, just as the jackbooted soldiers

come rushing in, over the picket fence, with every fourth beat

of the fearful heart gone pulsing out its tracer bullet

into a potholed DMZ of sky — I’m not sure

what your dreams are like — the moon

now a cross section of bludgeoned tomato

over the schoolhouse, and now a white pants button

lost on the highway asphalt. Learning is strictly

for girls, the guns still going chop-chop-chop,

and John Keats, in those remaining years,

he kept sending up his test obituaries

like weather balloons, poems still floating even now

over Tulsa and the like, their comely

bivalve pentameter interfering

with radio signals, just the reverse

of the way a beautiful, living body

can scan so vibrantly it zones out

all the ghost code, can get between me

and the important messages

I should be getting from the underworld,

one code for another, the dead only interfering

with the living who’ve interfered

with the dead, and along those lines

I really think I’d be suspicious

of that veggie plate if I were you. It’s strange

how rarely the meat they serve us

resembles an animal, and strange how the vegetables,

despite their cleanliness and grace, so often do:

a tail or torso of zucchini, and once I saw a rat-shaped eggplant

hunched feral in a kitchen off Hermosa.

Look to the sea, as usual, for echoes:

of course the many benthic cousins

of the turnip, spindly fruits morphing up their bodies

for our inspection in unsounded caves

filled with various see-through creatures

easily mistaken for prostitutes,