Michael Ives

 

from THE FLOATERS

MARASCHINO HOUR

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

from THE FLOATERS

 

 

 

 

 

In the dukeÕs bastard sonÕs dream

we were crossing the Atlantic in a funerary urn

shaped like a large ship. 

 

Soon I was guiding this ship

along a shelf in front of the bank tellerÕs window. 

I can still smell the bank. All banks. 

 

What is it to write such things 

while delivering the testicles of the dowser

to his nearest of kin? 

 

Stepping out into the street that day

felt like an insertion of solid state technology

into the water wheel era. 

 

TheyÕd put ginger pellets

where my liver was. 

Now I learn how to drink water for a living. 

 

At night my shoes become a fluid that glazes a rock ledge. 

ŌLetÕs trade damages,Ķ Trish used to say. 

For a living. 

 

I heard a man I didnÕt know tell someone

her dried blood made an effective drain cleaner. 

She drew the warbler in me toward

 

the little mound of poison on her palm. 

I donÕt complain. They taught me how not to. 

ŌTheyĶ of course is Trish. 

 

 

 

 

 

Careful, reactive stew-drums

in vicinity: step

around, please.

 

Hudibras was

here. Plucky. 

Yeah, sports law. 

 

The quintet in its

usual huddle.  Your

vegan ultimata have

 

been deemed wroth. 

One unit

of clay for

 

the puppy, and

one for Judge

Griswold. The romp

 

shoved her nabs

in my trousers. 

I was as

 

good as a

Saint Hubert in

Vegas – sphere and

 

temperance and the

excellences generally. They

de-corroborate someone elseÕs

 

lunch plans, not

mine, not now,

during the christening.

 

 

 

 

 

Anything stippled at

its hind verge

illustrates the rule:

all the worldÕs

 

a slurry. This

is the fundamental

way. Heritage Paint

Co. and the

 

glad-to-be-

me crowd: what

is a systems

theory without small

 

metal arrows shooting

through the core

values? Answer:

flux stabilizers. In

 

a trice I

would have palmed

the fabled Kovacs

pellet. Not this

 

time. Wakefulness rises

out of a

compact groundmass. Pollen

grain as against

 

coils of rebar.

Squelch the flashpoint

but donÕt get

comfortable. Or do. 

 

 

 

 

 

ItÕs up to some hidden source of candor

to decide how weÕre to be

 

a nation in a blender.

You canÕt even try not to think of it,

 

that other Kennedy I mourn

when IÕm hooked to the machine.

 

And always the ceaseless round –

living in the village, putting out feelerz. 

 

WhoÕs just folks?

And how about a little more

 

of that unexampled intensity?

Want to see me Doris Kearns Goodwin-

 

ize it?

An imbuing goes on

 

in the tanning parlors.

Time and appliance

 

saturate our vibe.

Bar graph of my bush-league assays.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maraschino Hour                                                                        

                                                 for Paul Stephens and Robert Weston

                                                                                    

 

 

 

 

Eating snow, resisting the call of the redeemer, making a wad of my personally monogrammed now.  The goon charade this comprises dissolves all too swiftly into that olÕ black eel waltz, fraught with the spoked tensions of night.  Your forearm peeling away from the hot naugahyde of the car seat, the two of us frightened and alone at the cape, weather overhead like a cloche. I adjust the idle on my hindbrain corvette. 

 

Does this ring a bell?  You kept repeating the phrase Cepheid variable.  A string quartet was about to play, but the sonata wouldnÕt let them.  All the note heads, which were rotating on tiny hinges, turned away from the musicians.  My rhetorical questions brooked no repeating.  But my large Thai dinner is now repeating.  Call it a pay out in sand dollars – oh, call it whatever you like. 

 

The whole cow of the thing?  Basically, a burning heart with eyes turned in toward the power vowel.  But IÕll never forget that last night at the clam bar, little tea set of an expression on your face.  The way, after drinks, you let your shyness go play in the waves.  And yet I still wonder if the babysitter is stealing our cold medicine.  So I canÕt get you to pay for my surgery?  Well ding-a-ling-a-ling, you know?  If I had it to do all over again, a second freezer in the basement would help. 

 

Dirt bomb tucked into undercarriage of Frisbee as a way of asking what?  When rhombs of smoked glass pressed in the moist concrete begin to prophesy.  Sometimes the collective just wants to be whatever the binding agent among members of the collective throws into the kitty.  With the head of a puffin, my gaze blank and.  I feed greedily on the heat of my own swaddling.  A zone of blue urine controls and dominates.  Now that I am come to speak of the pink corn.  When it is yet in the ear.  And pelted with heated responses to my rickshaw anecdote. 

 

The animal that sprays formic acid in the direction of an invading force walks on six legs.  The animal that sprays a summer pilsner along the facial planes of his sexual competitor edges his lawn with a rapidly rotating string. 

 

Hi-fi Buddha and adjacent Philco melt: such magical fruits, with upon them a bloom.  In the year of the Pontiac.  And your Delcon shield lay many leagues distant.  Inside the world egg.  Begotten not made.  My nuts for a piece of bright metal.  It was money in the bank.  Then it was I Dream of Jeannie. 

 

I repeat, the odor of my syllogisms will numb the opposition.  If I can just establish the time line of where it went wrong.  Wrestle all that shuttered vehemence.  And everything looking like my mother naked in the traffic median with her dead dog.  Kind of go right in there and reconfigure.  Erect a goal post, resurrect field advantage.  Oyez, this varsity Proteus is lettering in a nameless sport.  Call it hair growing on the arm of a doll.