Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys Read online

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  USELESS LANDSCAPE, OR

  A Guide for Boys

  ALSO BY D. A. POWELL

  Tea

  Lunch

  Cocktails

  Chronic

  By Myself: An Autobiography

  (with David Trinidad)

  Repast: Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails

  USELESS LANDSCAPE, OR

  A Guide for Boys

  D. A. POWELL

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2012 by D. A. Powell

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-605-7 (cloth)

  ISBN 978-1-55597-695-8

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-512-8

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Paperback, 2014

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014935839

  Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter

  Cover art © Blue Lantern Studio / Corbis

  for Ryan

  CONTENTS

  Useless Landscape

  Almonds in Bloom

  Tender Mercies

  Cherry Blossoms in Spring

  The Fluffer Talks of Eternity

  Landscape with Sections of Aqueduct

  Useless Landscape

  Bidwell Park

  The Kiwi Comes to Gridley, CA

  College City Market, College City, CA

  Seven Sketches for a Landscape, Unfinished

  A Brief History of Internment

  The Bathers

  Little Boy Blue

  Dying in the Development

  Chicken

  Bojangles

  Dying in a Turkish Bath

  End of Days

  That’s Where They Hide the Silos

  Panic in the Year Zero

  Landscape with Temple, Mosque and Little Crosses

  Landscape with Combine

  Quarantine

  Release the Sterile Moths

  Valley of the Dolls

  Landscape with Figures Partially Erased

  Homesickness

  Bugcatching at Twilight

  Head Out on the Highway

  Tarnished Angel

  Riverfront Park, Marysville, CA

  Love Hangover

  Landscape with Lymphatic System, System of Rivulets, System of Rivers

  An Elegy for My Libido

  Abandonment under the Walnut Tree

  The Price of Funk in Funkytown

  Traveling Light

  A Guide for Boys

  Outside Thermalito

  The Opening of the Cosmos

  One Thousand and One Nights

  Funkytown: Forgotten City of the Plain

  Notes of a Native Son

  Donkey Basketball Diaries

  A Little Less Kettledrum, Please

  Narcissus

  My Life as a Dog

  A Guide for Boys

  Boonies

  Lessons in Woodworking

  Pupil

  Elements of a Cross-Country Runner

  Magic Kingdom Come

  Space Junk

  Sporting Life

  Dying in a Fallow

  Reaching Around for You

  Goodbye, My Fancy

  Hereafter

  Midnight Cowbell

  Do the Hustle

  Once and Future Houseboy

  Backdrop with Splashes of Cum on It

  Transit of Mercury

  Platelet Count Descending

  Backstage Pass

  Having a Rambutan with You

  Summer of My Bone Density Test

  The Great Unrest

  Orchard in January

  Ode to Joy

  Missionary Man

  Mass for Pentecost: Canticle for Birds & Waters

  USELESS LANDSCAPE, OR

  A Guide for Boys

  USELESS LANDSCAPE

  The beauty of men never disappears

  But drives a blue car through the stars.

  —John Wieners

  ALMONDS IN BLOOM

  In heaven, I believe, even our deaths are forgiven.

  —Dunstan Thompson

  Who could sustain such pale plentitude

  and not want to shake the knopped white blossoms

  from the swarthy branches.

  The petals seem more parchment, and more pure,

  in her upright phalanges

  with a box of soap flakes, tackling the mud-cake

  somebody made on the quarter-sawn floor.

  Just when we think we’ve been punished enough,

  there’s a bounty to contend with—

  she’s at the spinet, now, and every key’s a plunker.

  She hasn’t had it tuned since the flood.

  Yes, she really troubles heaven with her deaf singing.

  But after all, it’s heaven.

  Even death will be forgiven.

  TENDER MERCIES

  The dandelions, ditch-blown brood,

  the evening snow and dew-soaked phlox,

  the Brewer’s pea, the Jepson’s pea

  (these, the bright eyes of the viridian fields)

  in chaparral, the hillside pea and angled pea,

  intensities of light and pomp

  that distress the easy upswept grass.

  The smack the rain plants as it smudges past

  and penetrates the canvas.

  The smattering on field and railroad tracks,

  both hardy blooms and dainty flowers,

  the judge’s house, the chicken farm,

  a migratory camp, a flesh motel,

  a stucco digs

  where all that mitigates the August swelter

  is the swamp cooler’s immutable burr,

  a straggling house that draws its water

  from a hard-water well and flushes out

  with the help of a crude sump pump.

  Before the flatland is occluded

  by the staunch of light at end of day,

  I wanted to be content with all its surfaces:

  weed, barb, crack, rill, rise …

  But every candid shoot and fulgent branch

  depends upon the arteries beneath.

  The houses have their siphons

  and their circuit vents.

  The heart—I mean the literal heart—

  must rely upon its own plaqued valves;

  the duodenal canal, its unremitting grumble.

  The brain upon its stem,

  and underneath,

  a network, vast, of nerves that rationalize.

  The earth’s a little harder than it was.


  But I expect that it will soften soon,

  voluptuous in some age hence,

  because we captured it as art

  the moment it was most itself:

  fragile, flecked with nimbleweed,

  and so alone,

  it almost welcomed its own ravishment.

  I was a maiden in this versicolor plain.

  I watched it change.

  Withstood that change, the infidelities

  of light, the solar interval, the shift of time,

  the shift from farm to town.

  I had a man that pressed me down

  into the soil. I was that man. I was that town.

  They call the chicory “ragged sailors” here:

  sojourners who have finally returned

  and are content to see the summer to its end.

  Be unafraid of what the future brings.

  I will not use this particular blue again.

  —for Betty Buckley

  CHERRY BLOSSOMS IN SPRING

  I’ve already pieced it out in my head:

  there’s almost nothing to go back to.

  The wide flat palm of the prickly pear

  outside Bent Prop Liquors. I kid you

  not that the air’s so red, day’s end,

  that it unlooses a fat ribbon of regret.

  Yet the air does not move; it hangs

  its squalid rags on the post; it poops

  dirty bats out of the public

  library’s colonnade. I wasn’t the first

  kid you raped. In this indifferent orchard

  where many a shallow boy got dumped.

  I think of you often. I think of you never

  so much I dare to touch my stolen twig.

  THE FLUFFER TALKS OF ETERNITY

  I can only give you back what you imagine.

  I am a soulless man. When I take you

  into my mouth, it is not my mouth. It is

  an unlit pit, an aperture opened just enough

  in the pinhole camera to capture the shade.

  I have caused you to rise up to me, and I

  have watched as you rose and waned.

  Our times together have been innumerable. Still,

  like a Capistrano swallow, you come back.

  You understand: I understand you. Understand

  each jiggle and tug. Your pudgy, mercurial wad.

  I am simply a hand inexhaustible as yours

  could never be. You’re nevertheless prepared to shoot.

  If I could I’d finish you. Be more than just your rag.

  LANDSCAPE WITH SECTIONS OF AQUEDUCT

  If the crown of day is not gold, then it’s a marvelous fake.

  Merciful present tense: if the brown grass is always flowing,

  if the sun is always just brushing the dry hills, and if

  last summer’s suicide is still a loner whose white t-shirt

  knotted, so tight it had to be cut off his neck with a penknife,

  then evening is the same bare patch and the same fat crows,

  the crushed aluminum cans and the hamburger wrappers

  or the ribbon of tire tread where a road crew hasn’t come by.

  They have taken him away and I do not know where he is laid.

  Among the soft cheat and meadow barley, a live oak begs relief

  from the hardened light, the beating of its own gnarled limbs,

  and the unrelenting rustle of its own beige blooms that tumble

  together shyly like a locker room of boys once boisterous, now

  called to roll and suddenly bashful, clasping at dingy towels.

  Let the dead be modest. Give the tree, solitary being who feeds

  on wind and the mote of another’s distant beauty, cause to brag.

  Except that the kernel would fall upon the soil, it abides alone.

  One guy peeled labels off beer bottles here; another climbed

  the remaining concrete piles and wrote JUSTIN LOVES, wrote

  STEPHEN LOVES, WROTE HANG ’EM HIGH—CLASS OF ’93.

  Cabbage moths flickered in tansy and clustered broom-rape;

  bore the pain of creation for a little yellow dust, a smear of light

  on their fidgeting legs and the sudden buoyancy in updraft.

  Ruin, by the wayside, you took as sacrament. You, abiding rock.

  USELESS LANDSCAPE

  A lone cloudburst hijacked the Doppler radar screen, a bandit

  hung from the gallows, in rehearsal for the broke-necked man,

  damn him, tucked under millet in the potter’s plot. Welcome

  to disaster’s alkaline kiss, its little clearing edged with twigs,

  and posted against trespass. Though finite, its fence is endless.

  Lugs of prune plums already half-dehydrated. Lugged toward

  shelf life and sorry reconstitution in somebody’s eggshell kitchen.

  If you hear the crop-dust engine whining overhead, mind

  the orange windsock’s direction, lest you huff its vapor trail.

  Scurry if you prefer between the lime-sulphured rows, and cull

  from the clods and sticks, the harvest shaker’s settling.

  The impertinent squalls of one squeezebox vies against another

  in ambling pick-ups. The rattle of dice and spoons. The one café

  allows a patron to pour from his own bottle. Special: tripe today.

  Goat’s head soup. Tortoise-shaped egg bread, sugared pink.

  The darkness doesn’t descend, and then it descends so quickly

  it seems to seize you in burly arms. I’ve been waiting all night

  to have this dance. Stay, it says. Haven’t touched your drink.

  BIDWELL PARK

  When the previously withheld faces grew tough as flax

  or softened into pliant pine in the umber wood, inclined

  together, numerous, when the cobble crushed underfoot,

  and pistachios cracked in their shells, grown heavy,

  grown consummate among the nibs of leaves, then curious

  seemed the stars, those nether eyes which scrutinized

  each shape that stirred against the unlit trunks of trees.

  He could say he knew the men he did not know. Arrived

  in the cedar grove and parted, sated with little effort,

  or left unsatisfied, ruminating upon such unfamiliar flesh

  across the glade. Silent the approach, a fawn, fluid

  through the damp grass, the current in the full creek

  surrounding the mossy rocks, pulling them a spell

  a little ways downstream, inevitable their deposit.

  Thus he would peer the woods, and quarry eluded him,

  sloughed that lustrous hide and slipped innominate away.

  Retraction: there were times he stood the corsair’s nip,

  gained midnight’s reticent stroke, the haphazard coitus

  of loaded collegians stumbling the poison oak. Hermit

  thrush or Wilson’s snipe. Something bolts the dark,

  flushed from the thick rushes, that most temporal cover.

  THE KIWI COMES TO GRIDLEY, CA

  At first it seems truly foreign, like the downy brown nutsack

  in a health class textbook: almost too firm, almost too perfect

  to be edible. If it gives to the touch, it’s ready to pluck.

  No robin’s egg, though you might nestle it in your hands.

  A few more boys deployed this week. Under jade green vines

  they crawl on their crusty elbows, helmets tipped, their

  backsides up. And they all went to bliss in their little skiff.

  You may never understand the intersection of small & large,

  conquest & defeat. For now, miraculous surges simply come,

  a series of peaks which are not quite the purple monkshood,

  not quite the crusty, papillated surface inside an alien geode.

  Consider this odd yield: overgrown berry with
its easy sway

  and pubescent peel, how it will proffer its redolent fruit.

  This mysterious being now enters you: to arms, to arms.

  COLLEGE CITY MARKET, COLLEGE CITY, CA

  When you come to a fork in the road, you’ve reached the limit

  of inhabited space. That goes for most points on the compass,

  leastways true north. And it is true, the pavement that splits

  the difference, offers you half its lean sandwich, sanderlings,

  stink bugs. When you just can’t drive: offers you a pallet.

  The register sticks. The swatter will not nearly vanquish its prey.

  Bursts its lid in geyser spray, a jar of pickled pork rinds.

  Eats its way through tin, the green chile salsa called verde.

  Dies one afternoon, the rat who had nibbled too much cereal;

  and, though his location is vague, you can smell him decay,

  up through floorboards wafting. Light a candle then blow it out.

  When a customer wrinkles his nose, just look the other way.

  Grasshoppers pitch themselves against the wire front door.

  Nothing in the cooler they desire. They don’t want flan or beer.

  SEVEN SKETCHES FOR A LANDSCAPE, UNFINISHED

  1

  The state, begun as a series of missions,

  used native men & women as cheap labor,

  edified through occasional public floggings.

  As the indigenous populations began to die,

  they were replaced by immigrants from China

  used to build railroads,

  with pickaxes and blasting caps.

  And when the Chinese were too many,

  the US Congress passed exclusion acts.

  2

  In Wheatland, hops pickers, fired upon

  by Yuba County sheriffs and their henchmen

  for attempting to protect themselves

  against exploitation and unsafe working conditions,

  retaliated by rioting; were beaten and cuffed.

  3

  In Cocoran, the Mexican strikers were refused relief.

  Some infants starved. Some workers died.