Loam For Sale

To hell with awe. Seven consecutive mornings
of an alarm-clock grackle’s carnal song,

and the dead are pounding through their lids;
earth gives accordingly. I never looked

so forward to bluebottles dinging
storm windows, to boredom, the known hazards

of winter. To hell with obedience! The land
takes it lying down anyway for the trees.

©TEH

It would begin to appear that I am unfit to surf.

The pings and tweets and comments of friends, all but asking me to clap the laptop lid and turn my back and leave the Internet for good, are piling up.

This Saturday past, I completed the hat-trick of system errors: my Twitter feed was hijacked. And just as swiftly, my account was put on suspension for “nefarious activity.” I learned the hard way not to 1) leave your browser open and unattended, nor 2) leave your PC wireless router connection unsecured. Inside of a few minutes, an anonymous source tweeted on my behalf, linking my unwitting followers to video of a European road race disaster.

This of course comes on the heels of wreckage I caused weeks earlier on Facebook and GoogleTalk. Twice I was the victim (on the surface, the culprit) of phishing. Twice I ate the FAILbait. A friend was had, I was off-guard and clicked their poisonous link, so I was had; consequently, my friends and their friends, ad infinitem, were probably had.

But only, my missis likes to point out, “if they’re as dumb as you.”

Several changed passwords, a couple tech-support slaps on the wrist, and a secured wireless router later, I can declare myself ready for Web 2.0. Right as everyone else laces up for 5.1 or time travel, for all I know.

I did not imagine I’d pine for the days Mom picked up the kitchen receiver, yanking stupefied me from chatrooms and the evolving menaces.

Curiously, we find all three of these gentlemen difficult to bear.

As when, after so many nights, the whooping crane’s
saxophone sags and the commoner frequencies
of crickets come back, his tinny existence left
a wake of miscellany* to be done with what you will.

 
* thousands of tiny plastic building blocks, rookies
in mint condition, cafeteria loneliness, impressions
of actors of the Golden Era, lame knees, digital
alarm clocks inside old shoeboxes, books and books
on tape, all the ruthless derision of a brother never
apologized for, checkers coins, several lies, &c.

©TEH

Plywood-painted mermaid of the changing
faces and merciful flattery of

fatted masses halter-top-and-ponytailed
and red around the shoulders (aloe-smeared

by night)—deliver us from elephant
ears, malted balls and generations-old

taco shells spilling out the other end.
For why you let us let ourselves go is

misconstrued in the inexplicable
prizes: Chinese finger traps for seventh

finish in the water-gun steeplechase.
By your seashelled bosom, modify

the thrills, for cars held upslope on the Lost
Coaster of Superstition Mountain get

the finest views of her majesty Lake
Shafer, Monticello, Indiana,

and blessed is the terrified child white-
knuckled, daring to open eyes.

©TEH

I step where I write this dawn: path of wild hogs frozen stiff,
snouted boulders in crude formation, their flaring bristle.

Nothing moves, not too light out anyways—an unrepentant
spell. It takes till glare in the elms and a spade to puncture

Sickle Lake: bluegill so thick no bucket’s getting in, no water.
October’s old craving, dried-out wells from here to Pierceton,

echoes yet. The wind too. Brouwer’s round barn’s windows
gave in; the coop in there is quiet. On every side’s a pale

unwritten newspaper. The weathercock makes his own sound.
We have no way of knowing when it will come to an end.

©TEH

At the annual Great Rhubarb Bake I come to find
out Earl and Donna Masterson’s girl run off to a ranch
meant to make her into a trapeze artist or an army
seamstress I’m not sure I couldn’t hear but Norma
Yoder’s back in the hospital they don’t know why
her boils keep acting up says Bob Miller’s second
wife the one with that awful wig meanwhile a dime
can’t buy you a sack of ice outside Wendell’s Feed
either says he wants a whole quarter he says folks
got fat off the hog says Henny Kleinfelter I run into
by the lemonade thermos and come to find out
this year’s charity wasn’t the athletic boosters
but instead the majorettes and I thought those
girls should’ve had more on no colder’n they looked.

©TEH

Full-speed’s ten, maybe fifteen, but can’t think
about that or the creeping bumper-to-bumper

build-up behind me, two-handing the wheel
half-composed in its puny bucket seat,

so to stay hugging the curb another couple
hundred yards farther down Wards Corner Road

to the pasture’s mouth, a loose-hinged fence-gate
that’ll need pushed in against the heavy

brush, goddamn thick enough to prop the door
up on its own. Remounting the tractor in one

full vault, sweltering rectangle of chore
ahead, snug again between two massive

tires that have the ability to exalt
the farmhand, I reach down for the lever

that in the short course of pulling up on, shudders
and activates the hog. Guttural grind and wisp

of pulverized turf is how to know you’re alive,
ready to stand on the clutch, throw the gears

and carve a single stripe the length, but brake
now to look back. What it is is reward

of doing, beside the yet undone, and to coast
along on the savory air of gasoline.

©TEH

Out our third-floor window, this mesh of mid-winter
branches—chart of rheumatic bones, marble

varicose—three trees deep, disappearing
like unkinder details eluding a statesman’s

aerial survey of rubble. This is the gift
of an empty gaze overlaid, voluntarily,

by blur; therefore, the tinted-glass conversion van
below, festering contagion of coughed-up

smog, neither waiting nor waited-on, has come to
an oozing liver on a stainless steel table

and passersby the surgeon’s raring instruments.

©TEH