Doug Anderson

Fifty was poignant, heavy pear departs the tree and the poem a sigh between branch and mulch. But no more. Another decade, I’m all song and scruff, the mind’s hot wire threading joint to joint. I’ll tell you straight out what I think, no sweetener. Nor has Aphrodite left me collapsed in a stairwell and don’t you father-flirt me, girl. This morning the world unbelts her robe, rose fleshed and randy. I like the rats that skitter under the subway’s hot rails. The little black dog who’s afraid of no one, not even the dope dealer’s pitbulls. Montaigne said sickness is God’s way of weaning us from life but I don’t think yet. I like the way soul clings to gristle like a newspaper wrapped around a light pole in a storm. Death’s a street away walking parallel and at my pace. He gets a nod.

Esto no es realismo mágico Dear Martín: In Izalco, while Christ waits for Easter in his glass tomb in the cathedral a single long note is blown on a trumpet en el parque central. Los perros flacco forage at the feet of la gente. Los poetas mount the stage in a shower of rose petals thrown by old ladies. The Mayor opens his arms wide. In the audience are campesinos, hijitos, shopkeepers, viejos, the town trauma surgeon, and a generous contigent of la policia con pistolas, escopetas y M16s. Solamente el volcán duerme esta noche. Los perros flaccos jump into the big blue garbage cans. Martín, you will certainly believe this. Each poeta is introduced with a fireworks rocket. Los perros flaccos jump out of the big blue garbage cans. Poetas de Argentina, Taiwan, Guatemala, España, Peru, Nicaragua, France, Costa Rica, Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, y Los Estados Unidas open their mouths. Out come pajaros, serpientes, y duendes, hombres, mujeres, y alquimistas with flasks of aether; out come revolutionaries in diapers, ambassadors in limousines of obsidian, the Virgin in a Madonna T-shirt, y los Indios with flutes made of thigh bones and bombs made of skulls; out come the dead dictators chained together by ectoplasm swinging censors that emit the stink of money, priests with rifles, nuns with giant beasts whose names are forgotten hidden in the musk of their habits; out come conquistadores on roller skates, Moros in black on black motorcycles, Mad Max with tattoos de los Maras Salvatruche. When los poetas have finished, there are more fireworks. They are swarmed by hijitos, viejos y otros wanting autographs. Their hands are as soft as their hearts. Death does not hide here but lives among them dressed in white lace with earrings rattling on her skull. Life does not hide here but steps through irony as if it were the vanishing fog.

She sits there on that high hill    just sits there and lets things pass through her until one snags and she fits it into the pattern of this fine mesh of    what    spirit?    But, ah, there’s a cowboy hat and a cherry bomb tattoo and it snags    and what she lets through may, 
I say,may be caught second time around like that oil pan off an old Hudson or that artificial leg    toward morning she’s collected some radio signals from a dead ship    and a janitor’s song and some folderol from a church picnic with iced tea fried chicken collards and a whole lot of stentorian god-speak with apple pie and ice cream.    I’ll be damned if all those things aren’t moving around in one another’s magnetic fields, some kind of counterpoint that happens each time she breathes    it’s a mobile only no wires    there’s a piece of mirror turning on a spider web and now she’s a    signal beacon    says come on up I’ve got something to read and somehow it all works. Then she pulls this silk thread and it becomes a form.