To Better Understand the Birds in the Park
Spin the Misfits
Rex-Goliath
To Better Understand the Birds in the Park
This is my love letter to the birds
that hang like ash over fire. Last night
I could not sleep so I buried myself
in blankets, scarf round my neck, still,
I was cold, so I bundled my bedding and slept on the couch.
On the way down I saw one through the window,
sleeping on a park bench. In the shower I heard
the neighbors having sex. I heard through the wall
someone came in and stole them. Stole what?
I thought, the object obscured by plush dialogue.
She’s 30, looks pregnant. The smart one, they used to call her.
I see her now and then when she’s walking her dog.
She grabbed the banister as she stumbled.
Sure, I’ll have a glass before we leave, she said,
and tipped a watering can to the planted fern.
Layers of prophetic, complicated references
continue to surprise the audience, although
now and then, are lost. Please, I could only carry
enough to survive the winter. Lick the thread for
texture, that’s right, test the wool with your tongue.
See if it is fine enough to weave a blanket from, and remember,
there are no old souls, only those who have grown
old before their time.
City snow plows rumble in the lot. There’s a girl
out there, somewhere, that one of them will marry.
The rest, who knows? If it rains, it rains.
There might never be snow. In case you were wondering,
there is still a fist of mistletoe hanging from the eave,
thought its leaves are brown and wilted.
It works just the same, however,
when you point to it.
With complete understanding of the flooded yard,
I decide that today is the day I will paint my masterpiece.
I will paste one thousand letters to a board
and stand back to critique. I will consider
the metal-drum bonfires in city parks
as a blinking reflection of stars in the sky.
I will connect the assembly bathed in orange light
to the weightless birds hovering above the heat,
assuming once their bellies swell,
they will nest in the trees.
Upon my upturned hand there melt
two snowflakes spinning about the same
concentric axon, dendrites asked to pick up slack
for the winter I slid into a tree. I cracked the nose
of the sled, the doctor said he tweezed woodchips
from my head. The coiled brain-rope, which spans
600 miles, but at 10 microns wide, remains unseen
to the naked eye. Confessional? No. Although
I must admit the oppressive hissing is mine:
I am unraveling.
I have given Guinness the means to kill me
for an evening, and a healthy portion of the following
day. In class, the ghosts of prior lessons
haunt the chalkboard. The greatest method
to address the vestige Guinness in one’s rotting gut
is a bacon-laced cheeseburger and milkshake – any flavor
would do, but chocolate works best. I took a chunk
from my knuckle when I emptied the trash, blood
bloomed and spread as I made a fist. I struck it
on a rusted link of chain securing the lid: the dangers
of dumping in someone else’s bin. My neighbor’s
daughter is a tall Dutch drink of blonde ale, as if
that mattered. I have been in love with her
for weeks. Her husband sits smoking Virginia
Slims at the weather-wrecked picnic table, barely fits
in the seat, he’s watching pigeons scrap for scraps
as their daughter spins, her forehead pressed to the tip
of a wiffle-bat, spinning and laughing and nearly sick,
she stumbles across the lawn, everything kiltered
like the pitch of a ship, that is, off, till she fell
and skinned her knee. Too drunk off spinning
to do anything but snicker, unable to stand. His laughs
turn to coughing as I twist the wand of the blind.
Rex-Goliath, dear friend, I have walked off
my wine buzz too soon, and somewhere
a thimble is waiting in the wings. We would like to
assume we’re more than we are, turning every
hedgeline into a milestone. A handful of soybeans
and another bottle of wine, lamenting
to the pad how you have, college line after college line,
exorcised my consumerism,
writ on a slip and torn from a pad and…
passed out on the couch for an hour. This is all
in real time. It’s much later now, and the child
actors are hooked on drugs. Discursive lashings
of marker-tongue on the inside of a bathroom stall.
The flaking paper on the bruised walls
tastes like skin, reminds me of streetwalking,
of the slow motion spray of sweat
as the boxer falls to flash bulbs.
How long was I out? I wonder
about bruises on the brain and if there is
a connection, in the way we are all connected,
to how Rex-Goliath has affected each Friday night
for weeks. I have been lying here
learning to spell, under the dizzying assumption
that one of these blows might be my last.
As I was saying:
The Drake Hotel will kill me,
and Michigan Avenue will be left wanting.
I admit that when I was speaking of a thimble,
I meant the uproar over the sex-symbol he had
or had not become. Rex, strut like before.
Every morning commute asks kindly that I
write of sunlight and its tumultuous rapport
with water on rocks. You look just like, I say to him,
twelve hundred bucks – because that’s what he paid for his suit.
You have to understand. The course is always A to B
to sunlight on rocks and then, if we’re lucky,
a reconstruction of A, with something unnamable in between.
Forget about that for now: the morning will have its way.
There is something hidden in the scent of night,
like the freshness of the lake that allows me
to roll my window down in winter, and permit
the scarlet darkness of you, Rex-Goliath, to enter.
How long was I out? The bruised walls are peeling.
A slow mounting cheer rises from the crowd.
Sweat pops and kisses the sky.
Flash bulbs.
Jim Davis is the editor of the North Chicago Review. Poems of Davis from his forthcoming collection have been selected to appear in Poetry Quarterly, Blue Mesa Review, The Ante Review, The Café Review, Chiron Review, and Contemporary American Voices, among others.
