Love Surrounds You Like a Posse in Bulletproof Vests Read online



  LOVE SURROUNDS YOU

  LIKE A POSSE IN BULLETPROOF VESTS

  Howie Good

  Chapbook Genius

  Publishing Genius 2010

  www.publishinggenius.com

  Copyright © Howie Good 2010

  Creative Commons license: non-commercial, attribution.

  This one is for Dale Wisely,

  elegant poet, wise editor, good friend

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author thanks the editors of the publications in which the following poems originally appeared, occasionally in somewhat different form: “In the City of Bad Dreams” and “Anomalies” in Recycled Karma Press; “Spring, Delayed” in Fogged Clarity; “Signs” in a handful of stones; “Left Right Left” and “The Secret Policemen’s Ball” in Full of Crow; “Song #4” in ouroboros review; “Epitaph for a Dead Bouquet” in Lesser Flamingo; “Refrigerate After Opening” in Heavy Bear; “ “Love Surrounds You Like a Posse in Bulletproof Vests” in Deuce Coupe; “Window Light” in nibble; “Love Note on Cheap Paper” in No Teeth; “Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century” in Sugar House Review; “What the Television Saw” in Radiant Turnstile; and “Left Lane Must Turn Left” in Dogzplot.

  WHAT THE TELEVISION SAW

  Fire splashed up at us. Please don’t yell at me, I said. No amount of coaxing could get the canary lying on the bottom of the cage to sing. What looked like snow or ashes were scraps of paper on which good deeds had been recorded. The fireman remembered it as a turquoise building, with its pants around its ankles. Someone covered the holes in the screen with electrical tape, but night still got in. We held each other. The fireman raised his ax. The television stared back at him in awe as a crown of flies revolved around his head.

  WHAT THE TELEVISION SAW

  Fire splashed up at us. What looked like snow or ashes were scraps of paper on which good deeds had been recorded. The fireman remembered it as a turquoise building, with its pants around its ankles. Someone had covered the holes in the screen with electrical tape, but night still got in. We held each other. The fireman raised his ax. No amount of coaxing could get the canary lying on the bottom of the cage to sing.

  IN THE CITY OF BAD DREAMS

  I walk past spies and assassins

  without knowing it, and no matter

  into which doorway I step,

  there’s a heap of rags

  that might be a person.

  Everywhere I go I meet men

  with the same name.

  What happened? I ask.

  Doesn’t matter, they say.

  Now that the moon has turned

  the yellow of crime scene tape,

  I don’t quite believe them.

  To teach superstition

  as truth is a terrible thing.

  SONG #4

  But on a morning

  when my wife,

  so softly dented,

  stands naked

  in front of the closet,

  still deciding

  between the dark blue

  and the black,

  I resolve who I am

  like the last calamitous

  emperor of Rome

  writing

  profusely on the ground

  with a red

  can of shaving cream

  love and without

  quotation marks.

  ANOMALIES

  1

  The young look at me with curiosity –

  one might even say anxiety –

  my heart leaking green brake fluid,

  and the queen of nothing on her knees

  drinking from the puddle.

  2

  But who was it,

  was it you,

  who had the question

  mark removed

  from my typewriter

 

  and buried

  at night without

  ceremony

  LEFT RIGHT LEFT

  You’re already halfway home or more

  when you remember you forgot the baby

  in a shopping cart in the vast parking lot.

  Oh, they’ll wail, how could you?

  And saying your brain was temporarily

  deprived of oxygen isn’t a good answer.

  So, of course, you look with newfound seriousness

  for a place to turn around, but there is none,

  only the thud of night smashing into your windshield.

  All you can do now is drive faster and faster

  through the sirens and confusion, the hairless face

  of the cretinous moon beaming over your left –

  no, your right – no, your left – shoulder.

  THE SECRET POLICEMEN’S BALL

  Ever since magic fell into disuse,

  I wake up every morning

  in the same room but a different city,

  the buildings a bright blur,

  like something out of a secret policeman’s

  florid conception of heaven,

  a place where millions

  anxiously spy on each other

  from between their fingers

  and all you can hear is

  the yapping of small dogs.

  LEFT LANE MUST TURN LEFT

  There was a time I might’ve enjoyed the tang of truck exhaust following me home, or the boarded-up windows of a discount liquor store. Then tick-borne diseases in fitted choir robes climbed down from the scaffold and disappeared into the crowd. I sat on the curb heartbroken. In theory every sequence of moves ought to be reversible. But somewhere it’s always the summer after mom died, and raining, and the rain is passing notes to us through a slit in the ground.

  SPRING, DELAYED

  Birdsong alarm

  don’t cry

  I can feel broken idols

  change trains

  upturned hands

  forfeit fire

  uncle decay still trying

  shhh tree

  sleep

  EPITAPH FOR A DEAD BOUQUET

  Here’s something I was interested to learn

  talking to another man in line:

  it’s possible to break your jaw

  merely by laughing.

  He smiled without showing his teeth,

  and I felt a familiar emptiness,

  as when voices float down at dusk

  from the barred windows of Juvenile Hall,

  or the shadow of the photographer

  falls crookedly across the child in a photo,

  or minutes turn into days,

  and days into nine leafless oaks.

  SMALL DOGS LIVE LONGER

  A double-yellow line

  means one thing

  when you’re driving

  on this side of the border,

  but another

  when you’re the passenger,

  your hands lying

  uselessly in your lap

  and the bored children

  in the back seat foolishly

  insisting on asking,

  as the road turns north

  and then disappears

  among the barbwire trees,

  why you named them

  for people who were dead.

  REFRIGERATE AFTER OPENING

  When I wake at last from a hundred-year nap,

  my wife is still on the phone

  attempting to reason

  with the Disputes Department,

  and our daughter,

  the beautiful, black-haired barista

  who li
ves in a distant city,

  is finishing up a double shift.

  Her back was turned to me

  throughout my dream,

  her sun-brown shoulders shaking

  as if she were crying.

  Was it the small table of ghosts

  that so upset her,

  or had she seen reflected in the metal surfaces

  water birds stumbling about on land?

  Nothing is more stupidly honest than failure.

  The spruce tree may become a cello,

  but the heart chokes on its own blood.

  WINDOW LIGHT

  And I wondered,

  as the wind stirred,

  suddenly full of plans,

  if the window

  was ever content

  with this view.

  ELEGY FOR THE UNADOPTED

  I was resting on the flowered couch after work. You were there, too, nursing someone else’s baby. We heard a noise like the sky emptying black baseballs from its pockets. We thought about hiding the baby in the basement. Or in the field behind the house among the mournful eyes of meat cows. It’s so long ago now, but the birds at the feeder still talk about it, how night scratched at the door and I let it in rather than go searching for some matches and a candle.

  LOVE SURROUNDS YOU LIKE A POSSE IN BULLETPROOF VESTS

  A new teller at the drive-

  through window,

  she wants proof

  you’re who you are,

  a stream of despondent electrons,

  light of the same

  crumbly consistency

  as the snowflakes melting

  in the lonely blackness

  of a girl’s hair.

  LOVE NOTE ON CHEAP PAPER

  Every day has become

  something like crossing

  the time zones of hell,

  a feeling of being sullenly

  present in the world,

  and even then by proxy,

  when all I only want to see

  is what might be seen

  if my heart were a lantern:

  a red tree, blue horses, you.

  SIGNS

  1

  How the crocuses

  bustle about –

  dumpy cafeteria ladies

  in blue hairnets

  2

  Sunning

  in the garden

  among the unsure

  sprouts

  of early spring

  our cat sits

  and licks

  its murderous

  paws

  PEASANT WARS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  A cottage in the woods.

  A woman weeping at the table.

  A wolf with eyes like red slits

  spying through the window.

  A wood-cutter passing,

  an ax on his shoulder

  and his thoughts faraway.

  Another night on earth

  preparing to fall.

  Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of 12 previous poetry chapbooks, including most recently My Heart Draws a Rough Map from The Blue Hour Press and Ghosts of Breath from Bedouin Books. He has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and five times for the Best of the Net anthology. His first full-length book of poetry, Lovesick, was released in 2009 by Press Americana. He is co-editor of the online literary journal Left Hand Waving.