FEELING FEVERISH
I put in a sixty. Too dim.
And when the moon and four planets lined up last night
Saturn was plunged into Pensacola Beach.
We could not see it, so plunged was it,
way below the Gulf.
This was no light affliction.
First distance swayed and then the close ups.
When the call came it was temperature
like a nose against glass, insistent but muffled.
It lodged in the answering machine of the cerebellum,
a sound like a single collective swallow
as if all the city of New York’s complimentary Zinfandels
were accomplished at once, echoing into Connecticut.
There’s more. I saw the modern mentality
could be traced to the cabbage
the heart of which is both exfoliate and blind,
very old, approving of solace, vaguely explained.
It was clear everyone wanted visions hot as opera,
then, to quench them.
I thought of purged first. I thought of heat smothering
resistant bacteria, vegetations forming emboli like planets,
magnets moving toward a reconciliation with the sun,
ears ringing, serenity dismissed.
New intrusions were rickettsial and glum.
Water was collecting. There was talk.
IT BRIEFLY
I hear someone pestering dogs off in the distance,
unpredictable in sequence as spooked deer or electrons
entering a cloud chamber at high speeds.
They yelp and spin, corkscrew wildly
creating new entities in decay.
That is one order, another is the river which can be everything else.
I do not live on a river, but I know they are nerves, trees,
and threads of forgetting, reefs and their tropical populations.
I know the river assembles tree-shapes from rivulets forming
the trunk of the Ohio or Mackenzie, and then spreading
again as they delta to the sea, a favor flaring at both ends.
In the middle, dogs and deer, and clouds forming a ship-city.
I entered the dream where the first few images leaked
from neurons and pooled near the pillow.
The porch and clothesline were at first a telegraph, then NBC,
channels deepening and swift as the Corps of Engineers
have made the Mississippi, making it impossible.
Down-dream from me the carpet man dreams of tile.
Rejecting feathers, he sleeps on his buckwheat pillow.
Still he flies. In doing so, he also hears it briefly.
RAINBOW IN SPANISH
After the door made its plaintive moan when I used it,
like a single unanswered canary in a room
reciprocating misery to a dim space with a single window,
the ten-speed looking like leftover bones
of something long gone, and the minuscule electric worm
in the light bulb died in its flash,
the sudden fatality that regulates the system with antecedents
but without clear causality or the dread of penalties for self-murder,
the face of the sky grinned egregiously in color.
And when, despite the pitfalls of conclusions from direct experience,
that the hinges “calmed” when I oiled them,
that the earth was “thirsty” when I turned the hose on it,
and when just turning around suggested circular reasoning,
an arco iris appeared over the snapdragons, the gold beneath it as foretold.
So ideas were not inert, and distinctions between appearance and fact
were finally denied. Buzzards are the birds of death,
the rainbow is the arc of an eye afloat in the garden,
watching for opportunity, rocks in the driveway remnants of fires.
NOTHING PERSONAL
A saw fly brought me its message, persistent
as a missionary, and stayed before me till I waved
my hand, a curt dismissal
of the urgent pleading in its wings.
If it left thinking
I understood, I will have missed another opportunity.
If it took my wave as annoyance,
we are distinct and hopeless as ever.
I had mixed on my face emollients and sunscreen,
my own recipe.
For all I know I had said something terrible
on the communicative rags of wind.
It was nothing personal, but ignorance,
I say to the gossiping air, aromatic, annoyed
spending a day off thoughtlessly.
LIMITS TO RESOLUTION
The joke on the pilings set the gulls horselaughing
but I was busy with melancholy
even when the dog pussyfooted and I began to see zodiacally
zoologically how phrases passed like planets and animals.
One look is all it takes between the couple in the movies
to serve as shorthand for desire moves the stars.
The plot will start to contrive itself till they resolve together
lights walking themselves to vanishing like the point at the end
of the moon’s shadow and the camera turns to stare at the wall
while tons of sand grind westward past Pensacola.
I want to write beyond the page long lines like highways
in the water that leave my paper far behind
like the white block coastline houses of New England
then a bird’s shit spot then minuscule then gone.
The humor is a handmade lens that cannot resolve heavens
not even a few dogs nosing the bridge abutments or the gull
standing on one pink leg to mock me as I try.
Photography Credit: Jason Rice
A visual artist and poet, Allan Peterson’s most recent book is This Luminous, New and Selected Poems. Other titles include All the Lavish in Common (Juniper Prize), and Fragile Acts (McSweeney’s).