Sam I am

Eggs

It’s a habit of mine to pause a beat

to dwell on the egg, the very essence

of ovum, before I crack one, ker-whack,

on the yawning lip of the black skillet,

broken promise of shell a favorite

metaphor of poets, embryonic

and otherwise, pop and sizzle sunrise

of yolk a buttery shorthand for brains

hopelessly scrambled, fated for plating.

East Egg or West Egg?  The courtesy bay

glitters in the moonlight while I huddle

with the rest, slumped in thin tuxedos, eggs

balanced just so on shifting feet, poaching

ourselves advantageous angles, the light

on Daisy’s dock green as Seuss’s vile eggs.

For all the marbles

Ensign Pulver

shoots Captain Morton in the bottom  

with a ball of foil studded with tacks fired

from a slingshot.   Why no longer matters.

A dictionary makes a cameo as a prop

so Robert Walker Jr. can deliver

the line “I shot him in the bue-tocks.”,

to Walter Matthau, kindling

my lifelong love affair with Daniel Webster. 

Even at eight I could appreciate

a destroyer named the USS Reluctant,

young enough to grow heady

over the word ass-sassin, yet blind

to navy nurses in clingy khaki uniforms.  

The memory of Captain Morton’s appendectomy

at the hands of Ensign Pulver

under frog juice anesthesia

remains with me to this day,

persisting like the handful

of marbles Pulver sews

into the heartless captain. 

Dictionaries bided their time

while I watched Burl Ives

worry his ample belly, puzzling

over the castanet clacking

at the end of the film, words like subversion  

and memento mori shimmering

like corvettes on my horizon. 

 

repost

He Could Play His Guitar

just like ringing a bell, a sound

that carries clean across the decades

to where I laze on a sunny afternoon

in late winter, licks I fend off

half-heartedly, only to give in in

the end.  If I only had a Fender

Telecaster with an old tube amplifier,

K model Lansing speakers crowding

the dog’s bed, I would plug in,

wade into the days final rays

streaming through the window, my axe

lit up like J. Robert Oppenheimer

boiling in the glow of the Trinity test.   

I’m sure the dog would loft a lighter 

to the wind milled power chord

I’d sustain in a kabuki

of feedback, baptizing the pickups

in a Jordan River of looped amplification,

touching off a small fire moments

before smashing everything to kindling.   

My audience demands an encore so I open

my book in the waning light and leave her

wagging for more, “Now I am become Death,

the destroyer of worlds,” echoing in the empty hall. 

re-post

The Journal of Cell Death

one imagines, would be unlikely to turn up

draped across a glossy copy of Barns of New England

on someone’s blond wood coffee table in a fussy

fan of recent Architectural Digest’s and Town and Country. 

Rather, it strikes me as a publication given

to lurking about on the metal desk of the warden

or laying naked on a porcelain slab down

at the morgue, the medical examiner poking through

the somber pages at lunch, carelessly smearing

grape jelly on the funereal cover.  The Morbidity and Mortality

Weekly Report will be there to keep it company, just

the two of them talking deep into the night, long, rambling

existential bull sessions that could put the dead to sleep.

I wonder how many of them passed reading Colonial Waterbirds?

A final exhalation, then a peaceful paddle over to the other side.

This beats, hands down, The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies

whose deceased readership is forever doomed to walk

the earth in search of their souls.  How tempting it would be

to ride the subway behind a copy of the Hoodoo and Conjure

Quarterly, keeping tabs on your fellow commuters through two

perfectly round peep holes.  Probably not as much fun as reading

the latest issue of Fire!! in a crowded movie theater or BOMB

on an overnight flight to Amsterdam.  Next time you visit

your doctor, pass on the well-thumbed Time, skip the sticky

Highlights.  Ask the nurse for Contagion: Journal of Violence,

Mimesis and Culture, but be discreet.  My internist is running

late this morning, but I’m perfectly content to flip through

back issues of Bird Banding and The Florida Buggist. 

Salt of the Earth

Salting North Lake Methodist Church

You can add sexton to my resume,

a breezy document uncluttered

by titles like pipe fitter or white water guide.

It makes no mention of stints in private equity,

is unadorned with the bony armature of certification

by the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery. 

But opportunity came knocking one frozen

Saturday night not long ago.  It lifted me up

gently under the arms, cooed as it plucked

a half empty wine glass from my grasping

fingers and bundled me kicking

into a pair of camouflage Carhartt coveralls. 

F-150 with snow blade, coveralls, canvas gloves,

the five gallon buckets and fifty pound bags of rock salt

are to my brother-in-law as bone chisels,

osteotomes and the Bennett Bone Elevator Retractor

are to a board certified orthopedic surgeon. 

A flood light cast our big baby shadows

into the black line of trees beyond

the silver plated parking lot.  Pitched

sidewalks to the sanctuary and community hall

glistened with a cellophane scrim, a ham

radio crackle the only sound as we listened

to ice surrender beneath our dainty, geisha steps.

I broadcast the last of my salt in the shadow

of the steeple, but don’t assume this reminded

me of the story of Lot’s anguished wife.  On

the contrary, I was picturing myself early

Sunday morning, ushering parishioners safely

into church, clasping the hands of elderly women bent

on the arms of middle-aged sons, men with whom

I exchanged all but imperceptible nods.