Autumn House Press

Landscape with Onlooker

One night shy of full, the moon
looks not lonesome shining through the trees, but replete

with the thoughtless sensuality of well-being.
A chill in the air? No, under the air, like water

under a swimmer. The unsteadfast leaves grow crisp
and brittle, the better to fall away. Some nights

fear, like rising water in a well, fills these hours—
the dead of night, as the phrase goes, when you quicken

and the dank metallic sweat beads like a vile dew.
But tonight you stand at your window, framed and calm,

and the air’s as sweet as a freshly peeled orange.
There’s a moon on the lake, and another in the sky.

– William Matthews

Blues

Love won’t behave. I’ve tried
all my life to keep it chained up.
Especially after I gave up pleading.
I don’t mean the woman,
but the love itself. Truth is,
I don’t know where it comes from,
why it comes, or where it goes.
It either leaves me feeling the knife
of my first breath
or hangdog and suck
at someone else’s unstoppable
and as the blues song says,
can’t sit down, stand up, lay down pain.

Right now I want it.
I’m like a country who can’t remember the last war.
Well, that’s not strictly true.
It’s just been too long.
Too long and my heart is like
a house for sale in a lot full of high weeds.
I want to go down to New Orleans
and find the Santeria woman
who will light a whole table full of candles
and moan things, place a cigar
and a shot of whiskey in front of Chango’s picture
and kiss the blue dead Jesus on the wall.
I want something.
Used to be I’d get a bottle
and drink until the lights went out
but now I carry my pain around everywhere I go
because I’m afraid
I might put it down somewhere and lose it.
I’ve grown tender about my mileage.
My teeth are like Stonehenge and my tongue
is like an old druid fallen in a ditch.
A soul is like a shrimper’s net they never haul up
and it’s full of everything:
A tire. A shark. An old harpoon.
A kid’s plastic bucket.
An empty half-pint.
A broken guitar string.
A pair of ballerina’s shoes with the ribbons tangled
in an anchor chain.
And the net gets heavier until the boat
starts to go down with it and you say,
God, what is going on.
In this condition I say love is a good thing.
I’m ready to capsize.
I can’t even see the shoreline.
I haven’t seen a seagull in three days.
I’m ready to drink salt water,
go overboard and start swimming.
Suffice it to say I want to get into the bathtub
with the Santeria woman and steam myself pure again.
The priest that blesses the water may be bored.

Hung over. He may not even bless it,
just tell people he did. It doesn’t matter.
What the Santeria woman puts in it with her mind
makes it like a holy mirror.
You can float a shrimp boat on it.
The spark that jumps between her mind
and the priest’s empty act
is what makes the whole thing light up
like an oilslick on fire against a sunset over Oaxaca.
So if I just step out into it.
If I just step off the high dive over a pool
that may or may not have water in it,
that act is enough
to connect the two poles of something
and make a long blue arc.
I don’t have a clue about any of this.
Come on over here and love me.
I used to say that drunk.
Now I’m stark raving sober
and I say, Come on over here and love me.

– Doug Anderson

New Woman Blues

Inside my white armor I am covered with hair and lice.
I haven’t bathed for so long I no longer stink
but give off the odor of perfumed catacombs.
When I open my mouth to say I love you
spiders run over my lower lip and down into my beard.
There is a mouse tail hanging out of the corner of my mouth.
I want our first moments alone to be messy.
I want you to feel all the terror of me you will ever feel, now.
If you take me as I am I will never disappoint you.
I wake at night and cut my dreams into paste-ups;
the snack snack snack of the scissors will test you.
I am violent and unpredictable.
I eat snake heads.
I have invited my beast to come live in my skin,
look out through my eyes.
I deny nothing.
I have no secrets.
I will give you more truth than you ever wanted.
I fuck like the last day on earth.
When your parents come to visit
I will lead them into the room which is always in darkness
and there under the black light
show them my collection of missionaries
from all over the world.

When I say I love you
great greased cogs begin to turn
down below the sewers.
With me you have always more than you wanted.
Your leprosy is nothing to me.
Your psychotic episodes,
your collection of Filipino war knives,
nothing; your vibrating bras
ringed with Italian Christmas lights,
nothing compared to the vise-grip I’ll put on your heart.
Your legs will shake so badly waiting for me to come home
you’ll scarcely notice they get worse when I’m there.
I drink a glass of blood every morning.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses will not knock on my door.
Now I’ve told you everything.
No surprises down the road, no disappointments.
I’m sorry I’ve done all the talking.
That’s the hardest thing of all you’ll have to bear.

– Doug Anderson

My Father Teaches Me Light

7 AM I get the call you have died.
To get to the hospital before my mother &
sister & their arsenal of sorrows:
I rush to your bedside, nothing
has ever been this important.
I’m standing in the shaft of morning,
the light through the window splitting
The room in half: the dead body of you/
the living me. I talk to the air, tell you
it will be alright, look to the ceiling
for floating bodies: there is no you there.
The part of me in your heart, where is it?
And what is the body now, old empty house?
You said you’d come to haunt me,
pound your cane on the floorboards,
I’d hear you say, Pay your bills!
I hang your cane on my bedroom door,
I wear your VFW jacket & sometimes
old men stop me to make sure I’m not
mocking the War. I want to tell them: You
were the one who spun me into the fire
of myself; I am the one you left behind,
the one you saved while you were here.

– Jan Beatty

My Father Teaches Me Desire

Once it starts you can’t stop it:
My father leans into it like a hunchback
at the particle-board table in the light
of our kitchen, arranging his little world:
Vidalia with paring knife; Iron City next
to French’s; open sardine tin/no plate.

His left hand grabs the onion/the right
slashes a fat slice/the right dips into
the briny swamp of sardine/lifts one
by the tail/down to the French’s/then
plunges its headfirst into his cavernous mouth.

Crunch of Vidalia, then pump an Iron, and
we are livin now, baby, we are home—
me watching my Dad from the dining room,
the grunt and slosh of it all, thinking,
My god, he’s eating the head—where
are its eyes?

What world is this? He’s god and brute,
half quake/half precision, what kind of man
can stare down the milky eye of the sardine
sans flinch, then sever its head with
those same incisors he grew in his mother’s belly?

Now he’s starting again, reaching
for the onion, two-fisted and ravenous,
king of kings in this 6X6 tabernacle,
he’s the holy spirit of torque and focus,
and this is more action than
I’ve ever seen in church.

I’m standing here at age 12, learning
that sweet seduction of revulsion/desire,
I’m learning real good that the guy I want
to marry is the one who can do the worst
thing without blinking, a man who eats life
raw, the heads of things—and what else
won’t scare him?

Oh Father, oh terrible primate, I am one of you.
Together we can skin the rabbit, stuff
the apple in the pig’s mouth, in this kitchen
there is so much I don’t know yet:
That I can write this poem.
That I will want to die many times in this life.
That in ten years I will drive back to this house,
to this kitchen, looking for your glasses.
I’ll drive back to you at the funeral home
and gently place them on your face
in the casket, with no flash
or fanfare, just the music
of my heart playing:
too soon,
too soon.

– Jan Beatty