
“Cicadas, dirty oil, dogs, Venus, gloves/clouds, manholes, fled storms, black notes, harmonies/float indiscriminate as my head throbs/then disappear on the next wisp of breeze”
1
A mournful elegy I’d best avoid
I’d rather speak of leek potato soup.
Before I stare into a stark, blank void
I’d sooner sing of goopy, viscous scoops.
Hubble showed that galaxies are soup
triggering star-form waves, same way we burp
yet don’t know why stars’ heat-pair stops abrupt
as flesh that falls apart to sudden dirt.
Nonbeing, it’s not scary, no more than
a pencil stick figure becoming faint
then fainter, then an invisible man
who wishes he’d at least been drawn with paint.
These fretful words were written to recede
as sacrificial beasts were born to bleed.
2
The cold bleak air has bit my lips, has chilled
even my armpits, though sweat nestles there.
Weather’s a paradox. Distemper fills
each crevice of my clothes, socks, underwear
with steam that’s made from rain, now vapor trace
made wet spots that will dry and disappear
leaving a musty kiss on thigh, chest, face
sweet slobbery lips of love vanished to air.
True love embraced me to pick my pocket
pick my brain’s locks, steal the jars of fig jam
I’d hid there, and left a silver locket
smelling of faded pine and Easter ham
made from a sacrificial beast’s black blood.
3
Behold me as you would a shrinking hole
into which mud falls from a nameless source
becoming less while trying to grow whole
as optimism tries to outwit force.
Its wet spots soon will dry and disappear
just like this poem, which isn’t meant to last
the paradox of negative space, the fear
that we are nothing but a vanished past
the day we’re born. Still, magpies brought fine bones
and other trash to that hole, just in time
to make its gap their temporary home
this former pit of desiccated slime.
4
I lost a glove and ransacked every room
thinking it might lie in a foreign street
neglected, tires disfiguring its form
or tossed inside a store’s lost and found crate
becoming less while trying to grow whole.
I am an animist, and objects live
for me, they have a presence and a soul
and unlike us, they most exist to give
their substance so that others thrive.
Therefore I mourn that glove, each day
knowing it misses me, somewhere, alive.
5
I’ve lost my way on a hot foreign street
without a map, euphoric and afraid.
I’m dodging open manholes with my feet
but if I fall inside, at least there’s shade
as in the underworld, where drear undead
are there to meet you, pallid but distinct
dispensing wisdom while projecting dread
dissipating more with each word they speak.
One reaches out her hand, and there’s the glove
I lost some years ago, breathing sighs of love.
6
Why do I cross out half the lines I wrote
perfectly good ones, with keen metaphors
now banished to a netherworld, floating like ghosts
of dead invention, gods I turned to whores
through sheer neglect, pure skin pockmarked with sores
begging to be restored, black notes falling
from off-white sheets of unfinished scores
disintegrating iambs with no ring?
Deep in the manhole, I begin to sing.
7
There’s time for me to voice two brisk quatrains.
My steady tenor echoes in the shaft
while onlookers peer down, braving the rain
concluding that I’m full insane, or daft.
Three or four harmonize, else counterpoint
aware this song can’t last. They reach to raise
me up, dazed and besmirched as if anointed
by God’s dirty oil. A lone voice prays.
8
Dogs bark as crimson light slices rooftops.
The barking stops, leaving blue-gray silence
and slate raindrops from a departed squall.
Venus, the wandering star, makes her presence
known, then slips behind a cloud to undress.
Like her, I’m chaste and shy, afraid to shed
my clothes, lest underneath lies nothingness.
9
A lone cicada, slender as its name
that only lives four fast weeks above ground
springs from fresh grass to drink deep from an elm
having spent seventeen years underground.
This curious bug first lives its burial
as afterlife, which for it comes before.
10
Turn out the lights and let the streetlamp shine
the one that makes the darkness darker
and renders its own halo more sublime
turning the glossy, fresh-clipped hedges starker
ensuring I’ll toss and turn, awake till dawn.
11
Cicadas, dirty oil, dogs, Venus, gloves
clouds, manholes, fled storms, black notes, harmonies
float indiscriminate as my head throbs
then disappear on the next wisp of breeze.
12
Dawn flings ten blackbirds
night gathers them in its shawl
and flings them straight back.
13
Beautiful couplet
you’re unbreakable.
14
One line. Why bother?.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.