Already
It Is Dusk
Poems by Joe
Fletcher
Advance Praise:
James Tate:
“Joe
Fletcher’s world is so rich in language and dense in experience, I
wonder where it all comes from. He seems to have lived a thousand
lives, each deep in feeling and insight.”
Dara
Wier:
“Powerful, fully-realized complications, by which I mean
accurate demonstrations of the twists and turns a human mind can
take, of the serious dark deep dangerous and beautiful kind. This
poetry is never slight, often nearly fatal. And it sounds so
good.”
Michael Earl Craig:
“The poems have a dark and
old-world feel to them that I love. It is a time when men carry ropes
of jerky; a time when cows ride on ships and the children’s heads
are dented by doctors’ tongs. ‘Don’t go too near yourself,’
we are warned. ‘You are not who you say you are.’ This is the
voice of our guide. And he has his gloved hand on your
shoulder.”
Already It Is Dusk
© 2011 Joe Fletcher
Ebook
ISBN-13: 978-1-936767-07-6
Print ISBN-13:
978-1-936767-00-7
Published in The United States of America by
Brooklyn Arts Press at Smashwords
Brooklyn
Arts Press, 154 N 9th St #1, Brooklyn, NY
11211
www.BrooklynArtsPress.com;
info@brooklynartspress.com
Library of Congress Control Number:
2011929334
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced by any means existing or to be developed in the future
without written consent by the publisher.
Front cover art/design
by Aaron Sing Fox. Overall design by Joe Millar.
First Ebook
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Table of Contents
ANTENNA
ALREADY
IT IS DUSK
THICKET
RETURNS
ISLANDERS
MY
NAME IS DALLAS
EMIGRANTS
BRISTLE
REACH
ME MY THINGS
SOLSTICE
SEQUENCE
THE
SHAFT
THE
DEAD SEA
ELEMENO
BEN
NEZ THE WINGED
PIONEER
VALLEY
A
NIGHT OUT
OUR
PASSAGE
HUNTING
NEED
ANOTHER
TALE
BLOOM
I
AM YOUNG
THE
WOUNDED AMERICANS
Author’s
Page
ANTENNA
Let
us return to the discipline.
Let the melons be halved and set
to
drink the sky’s cool milk.
A leaf is born.
Brigades
advance, bearing in their flesh
the recipes for unborn cities.
Let
the first word speak, shatter
the glinting spyglass of the one
on
the far hill, sheltering in larch.
Is he traveling? Is he
resting,
like a sloth? Is that a skin of ice
on the lake, or
are winds gathered
elsewhere, rattling the sign of a pawnshop,
or streaking skies with turbulence?
Philosophies unhinged
from life
snap in migratory winds like worn
streamers on a
flagpole in the desert.
Listen. Watch for what comes out
of
cracks in the tundra, out of
the sink in the demolished villa, out
of
you, who want so badly for things
to be stirred, for
breath
to rise to your brow and to break
in the salt-spray of
an idea.
Is the politician alive?
His name is branded on
the small of his back.
In his final hours he cried out
to
passing bandits. Should we
dig him up and kill him
again?
Sharp-winged landfill birds careen.
A sniper practices
on a frog.
Let us enter the mud. Let us wait
for the furtive
prophecy blown
from southern swamps, where
a theater presents
The Worm in the Goblet.
Does the day’s lust end?
Rains
rub the land. Truth slips.
Let us touch, in awe, the stem of
thunder,
the stone wheel rolling through meadows.
ALREADY
IT IS DUSK
Today I forever
lost my yesterday
to wind-seared weeds and
brackish channels,
to the throat
of the osprey and the smooth white
bone of the
castle. Is it possible—
so many souls condensed to twitch
in
my cup of coffee, which reflects
a piece of my forehead?
There
they go, to cities of gutted
industry, where swords clatter
deep
in museums, where lindens
absorb the murderer’s laugh.
I don’t want it back.
It had already chiseled me
into
a new behavior and made sad
every road that plunders
green
hectares of forests. Men can stop
holding the walls up
because today
is a javelin whistling through mist,
a pumpkin
shattered on a pier while
final boats wink over the lip of world.
Don’t go too near yourself.
You’re not who you say you
are.
You never were.
THICKET
Beneath
a sky recently shredded by thunder
you follow the yellowing
thicket
past the city’s radius. You follow
into heavy
silences some thread of dream
the birds sense—they watch you as
if through masks.
You cross a footbridge tilted by a slow
earthshift.
Above shallows hover the blue darts of damselflies.
A
brickheap in weeds radiates noon heat
like the head of a
sun-crazed man
who seeks the refuge of rhododendron
exhalations,
corn splitting damp green sheathes.
There is a gravel lane
abandoned by sowers
and a brown pond in which a cow stands,
chin-deep.
A blue haze pulses to cicada drone.
Crows assemble
on the rusted dome of a silo roof.
They are iridescent holes
piercing day’s radiance,
and among them your mind wanders,
carried along
the forest fringe, disappearing behind an oak
line
dividing soy fields that ripple like molten tin.
Your brow
breaks like a ship’s prow the intricate web
whose weaver
scuttles away through rain-matted grass,
dragging a foamy
birthsack twice her girth.
There are clumps of cinquefoil and
swaying doilies
of Queen Anne’s lace snapping with
grasshoppers
wound as tight as industrial springs manufactured
in
the factory along the disused railroad, where
fat employees smoke
cigarettes at joyless picnic tables
and look as if fallen down a
rickety staircase within themselves.
You pick up a hollow turtle
shell still smelling of rot
and peer through it at a cloud you
will forget.
Mushrooms sprout from soggy drums of hay.
Here are
some violet berries nestled in thorny tunnels.
Sweet juice coats
your throat. The essence of summer
is packed in those dark
clusters you scar your wrists to reach,
in whose depths open night
skies swarming with storms
that knock pinecones to slick highways
lovers race down.
You pause to pee on a fallen gum tree
and an
immense freedom bubbles through you,
splashing like festival
rockets against under-ribs of cloud.
You crouch to plug your
finger in a snake hole
and feel—for an instant—as if you were
suffocating the earth.
Then you stand to follow the thicket’s
verdant curve.
Your mouth is open and the air swerves in.
RETURNS
What
helps? The sun?
The tribal mask I hold
between it and me?
The
grass? The hiss
of gases burst from mud,
borne on winds
that scour trenches?
Where is the true food?
I climb
through a day
that eats me, like a weary
orgiast on the
morning
after the debauch, when
a limb is again a
limb
and the river sheds its filth
in sooty heaps beneath
docks.
In whose custody am I?
I hear a child
shouting
from the cellar
of the sagging farmhouse.
An animal's blood
stains the fence.
Whose arthritic hand do I see
splayed on
sheets
through the bedroom window?
A cloud uncoils above
wheat.
A storm passes through the forest.
To what does it
cling? What thing
is not a hindrance? Whose wrath
returns upon
our heads?
Drunk on the blue musk
of wilderness, wolves
gambol beneath
the sky's balm. I follow the orchard path.
What
tethers me?
A stable is strewn with urine-soaked hay.
A
magician staggers
from a carnival tent, staggers
past me
through a fog of gin. Who
wakens the psalm from the pit, who
slaps me from my sleep? At night
in the ravine I climb into
the moon-
thrown shadow of a twisted tree.
ISLANDERS
The
sand is cold. It’s not going well.
The oceanographer stands
stooped
with his hands on his knees.
Did he throw up?
Is he
studying something the ocean
dropped off? He’s unsteady.
Last
night, drunk and shirtless,
he told me of his youth.
I saw
his nipple was missing.
He said the stars were flying.
And
yet: there they were.
Something squeaks. A bird,
or a machine
running
inside one of their tents.
But it’s a girl on a
bicycle
riding along the dock.
She’s pregnant.
Her eyes
are glassy
but she looks refreshed.
She rides off the end of
the dock
and I think for a moment
that she is free, but
she
swims ashore to take part
in what they do and what they do
they
do quickly with much shouting,
consulting the briny ropes of
kelp
and the still-beating heart of a sturgeon.
Last week a
ship came with cows
and now the cows stand around
looking
frightened. A few got
confused at night and the tide
took them
out and the fish got
to them and the bones washed back.
The
children like the bones
and make small forts with them
in the
sand. A boy whistles to me
through a massive ribcage.
MY
NAME IS DALLAS
I am from
Dallas.
It’s where sunlight bursts
on tinted office towers
and night
winds rustle the husks of dead lizards.
The
little boy with his mouth
full of butterscotch? That’s me,
in
Dallas, a child. I was floating
down my inner stream when
mother’s voice entered me like hooks.
They caught on
something solid
and pulled me into a world where
jackdaws
rioted in gnarled scrub.
It’s not hell, she insisted, and
pushed
me flat on the brown lawn and
laid a heavy book on my
back.
I was to be a scholar.
Father made adjustments. I
never
saw his face. He was just a long arm
reaching from a dim
room, slapping
me lightly on the cheek when I grew
introspective. It tingled. Was he joking?
Sometimes I
heard laughter through
the vent. Sometimes I saw his
fingers
poking through the crack beneath my door.
One night
I looked out
and a long sedan was idling in front of
our
house. The moon was bent
in its windshield. Blue exhaust
curled
into the darkened leaves of a tamarisk.
In the
morning father was gone.
We never saw him again, though
sometimes
we received photographs
of a Japanese bridge, and
once
we found a bag of strange vegetables
on our doorstep.
Mother silently
sautéed them, lost in thought.
What does
one do for fun in Dallas?
There is the arcade called Eye Candy
and
the zoo where I watched
an alligator devour a small white bird.
I
remember a movie entitled The Glove
of Confucius, in which
a series
of pursuits through a black and white city
caused the
hero to cross the Indian Ocean
on a yacht, a piece of jade
clenched
in his fist. I stepped out of the theater
into the
chrome-spangled, heat-hammered
street. So there was a world
beyond
the rattle of locusts and the tornado-
scarred
suburbs and the ladies wandering
down the fluorescent aisles of
stores,
and if one had the volition, the verve. . .
I
moved to Lubbock.