Sun glistens on your skin
as you squeal and shiver
from the tickle of a sprinkler
in your fenced-in back yard.
Your bright red hair
and Spiderman shorts
are soaked and dripping everywhere.
All you want is to show me how fun it is.
All you want is more.
And I remember being five like this
in a yard now fuzzed by memory
way back when a sprinkler in summer
was enough to drown out everything.
My uncle is left-handed like me,
at least before I was in third grade.
Not that I was treated as devil-touched.
Just no one knew how to help a left hand
hold right-handed scissors or share
right-handed space or teach a left hand
to make oblong slants to prepare stand-alone
letters to become cursive-connected.
All this warned that my left hand was a mistake.
But Mammaw believed a body had a right to be
what a body needed to be and didn’t change my fork
from left to right. And she knew my left-handed mother
ghosted my fingers.
At big family dinners, I sat next to my left-handed uncle.
His hand, elbow, and arm held a non-competing
clause with mine. I still eat with my left hand and bat
a left-handed drive. I drift left when I walk and birthed
a left-handed daughter who had left-handed scissors,
who curled her letters in a left-right, right-left, upside-down
way, who answered my right elbow? with a chuckling left knee.
Had he craved the full of a wholesome world
or the foal of a fulsome girl for breakfast,
all of it pumped with a simple syrup
that treacly trudged round a stuttering
paddle wheel—
The moon like a hairline fracture
squirmed through the woolen caul
of young Phineas Barnum,
curled in his ear, still small as a toddling ormer,
rubbing its blistering ends to a spark—
He rose from a blithering vision,
one too free and frenzied to pen in his pencraft.
So he summoned Joe,
on loan to those cringing, whinging gods of Burroughs,
and duly inquired if Bucket had had but a hole
in his honeycombed schedule,
chores borne thicker than all of Bridgeport.
He toured the factory, boused his fist, exclaimed,
“How a sucker’s born every flickering minute
amidst these whimsically whirring contraptions!”
swallowed the con and ravished the traptions.
Hunched in the breath of the burbling buttergin,
here’s what Joe had caught of their plans
for the whistle-stopped promenade slated for Amsterdam:
“—and as the empurpled Hyrcanian wildcats
wrestle Patina Smithee and Maggie the Beard,
and the palanquin plied by a litter of mandarin
ducklings ducks through a fiery column
some smoldering pyre of pennies incenses
green as the flesh of Prince Randian’s nettling efts;
Gerd Bessler, astride a bipedal porcupine
playing the pipes of pan, performing
the Madison, juggling crackling vats
of acid, pinning its tasseled quills
through a yodeling Bessler’s brazenly naked knees
and more tender appendages free
as a scurvied Napoleon sprawled on a hem of the Elba,
bronzed as a dying star; young Bessler enters,
pushing the platform, braying
the rube deserves this and
the rube deserves that and
the rube should be duly disturbed by something.
“And then he unpins from enameled elbows
buttons, Joe. The most beautiful buttons!
Buttons that sing in a silvered helvetica,
‘Bucket or Bupkis!’
Buttons for everyone! All of them bumpkins
riddled with buttons for Bucket.
‘Bucket or Bupkis—say,
like a hymn of the seraphim!’”
*
Joe set Charlie up on his puckering knee,
some pearl-pale pillar you’d pit ‘twixt splintering driftwood,
spit-stiffened ticker tape, shreds of Chaplin’s cane
dispersed across Keaton’s face like a gibbering glair,
and the slyly uncoiling teeth of a crumbling hoodoo
hunched like a cub of the Nothing—
He wheezed through a slurry of strident scree,
“Should you enter a hall
where everyone’s hollering cheese,
then what do you Whisper, Charlie—?
“Cheese!
Say Swiss or something. Edam or Brie
or a walloping Gorgonzola!
“Shibboleths, Charlie!”
He slapped his hand with the clack of cracking porcelain over
a shrunken head.
“It’s the shibboleths
pinned to your sash of calfskin,
candy-coated a peppermint plaid
with shibboleths, Charlie!
Rich as a shipwright!”
Charlie then wondered why his Grandpa Joe would
think that a shipwright’s rich—perhaps its relation to
carpentry, maybe a spiritual richness,
manna from heaven.
“A shibboleth, that’s an old password,
isn’t it?”
“No,” mewled Grandpa Joe.
“No, no. No, no, no, no, no, no!
It’s like the cheese thing, Charlie.
Think of the cheese! See,
shibboleths keep the libra straight.
The shibboleths argue
you’re part of something!
Something bigger than you, now, Charlie,
bigger than all of the law’s contempt. See,
shibboleths saved my life once.
Hand to God! like a bible against my breast.
I swear it, Charlie, swear on your Grandpa George.
It’s all in the shibboleths—”
His eyes malingered with hungering fervor;
glints, once twinkling beacons bobbed
upon coarse and tumultuous muslin seas,
now seemed like shriveling lightning
scarred amidst cataracts grey as departed pigeons,
grey as the scowl of Grandpa George
who’d thought it was something to think about something—
The prattling talk then tarried to rancorous ramblings
thin as the Kraken’s rum.
Joe pined for the stars
discarded,
sang of the brittle scars and pig stars
groaning in the night,
then fell astray,
half-dead, half-buried on Wonka’s abandoned desk
on peppermint dais.
Ants ran rings among
reds and whites, and Charlie
cribbed at the gib of a shibboleth.
“Shibboleths—
like calling the colors that cling along locks of a frazzling steel wool
yellow and green, or red and blue, or but black and white reduced
from a buttery chrome or an ormer’s ear or an aura of moonglow
bruising a luridly star-vexed vesper—
shibboleths, what a thing!
like a Maltese cross or a merit badge muddling
soothing greens we’ve foraged from nourishing forests
wattle-and-daubed to a louring felt.”
*
He dreamt that night of the shibboleths
red and black as basking leeches,
felt all the shibboleths sewn among swollen moles,
drawn swaddling bone, usurping flesh,
supplanting sinew, veins run rigid with shibboleths;
stitches of “I ain’t no pineapple-dandy-do”, or
“No rebus was ever resolved in a vacuum”,
“Suffer, don’t stutter”, and “Damn the man who
deserts his just desserts”, or “aggratology”,
“Folly’s the friend of the victor”, “Choose
or lose”, or “Bucket or Bupkis!”—
callused distractions itching at irksome
factions’ fans, like mold in a chortling HVAC.
*
Barnum’d rung him after the war
and explained the “exceptionally elegant metric!”
“You see, thought’s like a fizzy-lifting drink,
it raises us up in exceptional ecstasy—!
And from that ecstatic parallax, seeing
the full of things, the frozen forks,
the fjord-like halls and hurdles framing
strange, albeit exceedingly nuanced
narratives steering the huddling hulls
of the sugar-footed consumer, maybe say
citizen should we exploit the jargon; one
could, bellied on frank and ecstatic thoughts,
survey the bigger picture.
One could,
although it truly unruly, clearly conceive of a
different picture, cherry pick, trade out
a pinch of privilege here for a dollop
of poverty there, dream up a new world more darling, dear,
deranged, and maybe too damnably motherly—”
He clicked his tongue for a time to a
pensive static, radical sparks of a frazzling circuitry
spluttering gruff as a blown-out wheelwell scuds across
streets of gold.
“And such dreams might make the common man
drift cleanly into decapitation, maybe
coaxed through a lofty window,
smote along bullet-sown tracks of a subway,
maybe fall prey to an aneurysm, a
stroke unfurled from ineffable powder,
dead as the tippling lisp of a dormouse
cracked with the crazing crown of a demitasse.
“What do you do when you’re due to be chewn
to ribbons, Charlie, ripped to a tickling mess of confetti—?
“Why, we burp now, don’t we?
“That’s what a shibboleth really is.
We burp these noisomely well-worn words
to keep from getting too lofty, meeting
the guillotine, being stoned or stretched across
crosses red as the X of a game show.
“And if we can just get everyone burping, my!
now isn’t that something?
Isn’t that something, Bucket-me-boy!
Everyone stitched in a seamless stink—
“Ecumenical eructation, Charlie! See
the syncretic stir of sickening gases
swarmed to inviolate, roiling, woeful wholeness,
sweet as a chess pie?
“Bees seduced by a flurry of pheromones,
too confused by slavering sleuths of stench
to do much other than pitch their cells
and muddle the jism of orchids
strictly into a golden honey.
“My, my, what a world we may have minded.”
*
Though Willy lived on in his liver,
chewing the fat, sweetening bilious spirits,
buffing that gruff and intransigent timbre
shriller than crinkling foil; Joe’d
succumbed to an embolism,
just at the moment Charlie’d chosen
his shibboleth, chosen more rather than
cheese, a yogurt
grown by the ebonied sands
of Iceland.
“Yogurt fills up a Bucket better!”
Brava, brava, brava, Charlie.
And that’s what won him his epithet,
“Charlie Bucket, the cheese-hating savior of Reykjavik.”
You spend the morning with sunsets
looking up their times in various months
at various places refusing to have sunsets
ruined this year having learned
in corporate speak to sunset is to shutter
to bring a thing to its end
What will be taken next the eel-laced reef
algae cozying up to rock a sky-bound thing
each cloud a bandage for a future wound
Something in this word draws me,
speaks to my DNA. It’s where
we came from when we lived
in the trees, the caves. I sense
it in my night vision,
eyes narrowed
making out shapes in the shadows,
alert to movement,
any sign of threat.
Every challenge to us
is like a pencil sharpening,
a weapon honed,
we stay awake–
alert to the next coiled snake.
Birthed on glacial remains, root and branch directed by lake and drumlin, I imagine aging as rock art. All rock carving is challenging, the art of aging the most problematic. Unlike discarding headstones when things go awry, carving living rock preserves hesitation marks, errors, and bold choices. Yet take comfort in the abrasion of time to soften sharp edges revealing lighter rock beneath.
Picking abrading
Carving engraving
Living rock in relief
It’s time to move on
When the answer is unclear
Because while you fight
The next question is unasked
The one that you understand
upon which there is no doubt
An answer which solves the rest
They say writing is the purest form
of communicating with yourself ,
so why do people shy from doing it?
Why do others use so many distractions
to hide, from facing what’s in their mind?
From what I gather; I’d love to chat with Hemingway,
or listen to Steinbeck ramble after a third pint,
or discuss hope with Maya Angelou, read the lost
journals of H.G Wells, and sing along with Mathew
as he jots down parables.
But at this time,
as I write,
I’m happy to know I’m not boring,
and could talk to myself everyday.
I pile leaves,
pine needles,
carcasses
of hickory nuts
into the yellow bag—
surface blank
for new nut
crashes.
I’ll sleep
more deeply
near that space—
closet door
shut tight,
tissues
in closed drawer,
my mind
a windshield
braced
for impact.
