With Their Mangled Teeth

After Wendy and Lucy

I

With their mangled teeth
they were good enough friends,
shadows or demons, friends.
The campfire rabble wobbled
misty-eyed in booze and brooding.
Pretty good and pretty cheap,
the stories they told, of great
machinery in rolling landscapes
so much further north, up in
Alaska, king salmon all bloodied,
their goggles and shriveled eyes
loitering along like the officer’s
and his blanket of advice the
next morn after he tapped your
glass and how you wound up there.

Did you think about them again,
and will you, or have you been
completed by your automobile,
completed to us incomplete, to
sit back and capture what was before?

Lucy, as Dantean as any of us, knows,
guiding you silent, canine behavior
of the silent sighs and the opal teeth.

She stares up at you like we stare,
everyone in this world a statue, she
licking her lips while we bite ours,
ready to go in some other direction.

II

Police station;
the cash hungry
bureaucracy.

Where is the dog?
Where is the dog?

Time click shower
and boned legs
stamped to walls.

The blood has
quit its rushing.

The barrels of
regret stuck, jammed.

III

The search
exhausting.

“Come. Now.”
We shout.
We, Wendy,
fail like holes
in brown pockets.
To defer a hero.

To think, there is
no companion here.

We look for our
friends, our inner
energies, and
find the marrow
shivering with
heatflashes,
without boundaries.

IV

Each cell
barks its own call
and we cry a
single chance.

But each cradle
or parlor
or chamber
wails its sighs
in numbing tunes
while grey
whirlwinds arc
to dance as
knives do in
flights to walls.

Goodbye, dog
pound—good bye
like everything else.

V

“You a ‘blowin’
my mind, you—
you a messin’
my mind”

Shoos of air,
deals in the air,
car drummed fingers,
the tips all callous
and no fun, no game.

You’re mess of mind
is a new piece for
the old people to look at.

Nothing turns up in
a town that doesn’t let it.

Three prongs on the
system, the tier
aching for release,
but nowhere to give—

VI

The ghost in the bushes
is a smiling grip on reality.

As you take each garment
and attach it to the form,
the environment built once
and sturdy ever since,
the smile widens and erupts.

There is a ghost, of chance
or time we may not know,
but the operatic tones
sit pale on your skin, and
they are noticeable.

The ghost on the bushes
shrugs as what you do not see.

VII

Suttree revoked
to the steady dark.

They can smell
the weakness on you.

He can smell the
weakness on you.

Because you’re lost,
it is a dull weakness.

Not even a dreadful
strange can take it.

Not even a stranger
would want that.

VIII

With new cash
comes new debt,

but comes new love,
in an old place

with an old destiny
and a people
neither young nor
old nor pleasant.

IX

Playing fetch
in a back yard
with a dog—
it is your yellowish-
brown dog,
wines and whistles,
the state of domain
and relations
upon you in
someone else’s
back yard, green
grass never
so bright; content
and ominous,
certainty ringing
like a rag or
not looking back.
Are there neighbors
looking from
windows, wondering
who this outsider
is bearing a gaze
to this glass land?