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MIKE LANDERS
Only weeks ago I would have
dolled it up, romanced it,
primped and pimped it—
mythologized the whole spectacle,
spun its dross & bones & tentpoles
into a stunned and vanished kingdom:
grass that ached and meant.
Stagnant lakes that revealed themselves
upon closer inspection
to be sapphire-tinted ragamuffin lagoons.
Tricks of the light, rain on a weeknight.
The trees before the leaves started to turn.
Bullfrogs that bellowed their
hopeless early-autumn chorus
like defiant troubadours
in front of a firing squad.
Missing roofs, drowsy ballrooms,
floors that buckled and swayed,
perfections and imperfections
on a body I was just beginning to know.
Night noises and the distant aura
of the purple town. The sweep
of the swamp, the widescreen manifesto,
the smoke-choked romance
of the thing itself,
preserved in amber,
laced up in language.
But I can't do it like that anymore.
The vision can become so embellished,
so gossamer and peacock-feathered,
that it has no foothold in the world
as the world reveals itself to us.
I know this because I've been guilty.
Like Gatsby, like F. Scott, like Fitzcarraldo,
I've tried to hoist the dream aloft
above the reckless, jostling crowd
like a bobbing and weaving waiter
.with a precious cocktail on a tray.
I've tried to keep the slinking dogs at bay,
send the rubberneckers packing.
At times it works, at times it doesn't.
The current of the world is strong,
and morning always charges
through the windowpane at more
or less the time it's supposed to.
Lettuce wilts on the countertop.
A cabaret singer misses a note.
The call gets dropped.
The engine won't turn over.
The stag chases the doe.
Water slapdashes into the creek.
And the vision? The green light,
the honeysuckle, the graceful arm
on the veranda, the abdomen
that rose and fell against the backdrop
of a blue bedspread on some
penultimate October afternoon?
It's still perfect, and still irretrievable;
it's there, and it's not there,
it's bad for you, and it's not.
Perhaps it's better to rough it up
a little bit—see it dredged and sifted,
see it vanish in the blaze,
the blue smoke and water.
Watch what jagged light
its mirrored glass reflects.
You have to let the world in,
must love the flaws, in the end,
more than the golden moment.
What's motley, piebald, freckled, cast-off,
patchwork, hot-wired, slight, and strange—
let it in and learn to love it.
So yeah, I guess, give me love-pain,
give me transcendence—
some redhead, some rainstorm,
some cross-current, some nickel candy,
some debutante, some cracked-jaw drugstore window—
but give me flesh to clothe them in,
blood that will blossom and wilt,
eyes that will light up and close.
Life goes on happening.
Crickets start chirping again in the spring.
The evening floats through the air
like a trumpet in a swimming pool.
The world behind the world
intrudes upon the world
when it wants, and then withdraws.
It's glorious, and it's all muddled up.
It costs me a lot to say this.
I'm running smack up against my sensibility.
I can only abjure so much of myself.
I want the celestial light
in the shadow theater of the real world,
and that's a hell of a lot to ask for.
So allow me this last
crescendo, this final flourish,
and let me send it out to you,
and you, and us, and them,
and me, and you again:
Let's untuck our shirts.
Let's bob in the black water at night. .
Let's let our stomachs plummet and whirl.
Let's toss our safety pins into the fallen territory.
Let my magpie meet your nightingale.
Let the muddy river run muddy wild.
Let me kiss you on a tin roof in a flood plain,
under the incandescent half-light
of the half-drunk white-wine moon.
Jeff Fallis
Jeff Fallis (poem) and Mike Landers (photo) both live in Athens. Fallis’
poems have appeared in The Oxford American, The Iowa Review, Quarterly
West, Pulse Berlin, and Ploughshares. See more of Landers' work online
at www.mikelanders.com.
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