Clint Frakes
Mystery Not Always Unkind
And who am I? the man sleeping at the border asks, that in my love dream sleep I have become the guardian of the lion?
—Robert Duncan
John Berryman where did you put those translations?
It’s already November & I’ve conjured 23 oceans in my search.
I looked first under that black Minneapolis bridge,
then wide Nebraska & its tiled stations,
murals of gone bison
& righteous soft red wheat,
Oklahoma draped purple in July, like the time
the cop let me and the yoga girl off with a warning
& we ambushed the Super 8 swimming pool
unbathed & thirsty.
Wyoming was to me just a blown PCV on hot prairie
& we picked sage until the cavalry came,
patient in our dark skin.
Farewell then and now to land speculations.
They say you cannot tear a cloud in half,
only stare it down until one of you breaks.
After I licked my lips in the crosswinds
it was half a yellow moon that dried me,
fresh out of the pool
under the aching unrest of spheres.
I am not King of the Dead,
but rising in the ranks
eons behind those Jains brushing the earth
with sapling brooms
not to accrue the assassin’s weight
in a step.
Something beautiful always emerges from underfoot:
the smell of wet volcanic soil,
lean yarrow;
hummingbirds push on honeysuckle--
& even in Detroit
hawks dive,
just like you,
John Berryman,
I can love what I can’t understand, but
it takes an ounce of grace & seasons more kind.
Let’s dance then & now
even if we are poorer than we are sad
with fathers fallen under the plow
& the old Appaloosa curling its lip,
brought kicking to the final field.
Paradise Confession
Approaching the Methodist Church at 3 a.m.,
steel end of the blade up my sleeve,
I seize another cluster of fat stems,
make three swift diagonal cuts
& slip a plastic bag over their conspicuous heads:
three more flaming beauties to smuggle into my alcove
where I’ll dunk them in tapwater &
arrange their rooster-headed spectacle
against the dishwater cinderblock of my north wall.
Appetite for their company sends me
stalking the Oahu heights with ready scissors,
seduced into forbidden family groves
by purple-hooded prongs,
orange flags fanned like startled macaw,
pistils & stamens reaching with magnetic urgency.
They are my secret currency
gathering light still in the next uncertain morning
like the regalia of an Aztecan dance
while on a lush hill
a sweaty Filipino gardener shrugs
over more clipped stalks
as I stare at their raw anatomy
leaping from slender canoes,
pulling their legs like night heron
to other islands.
11/11/01, Manoa
Dream with Willie Mays
for Steve Marcotte
Muggy Michigan summer nights I took batting practice
in the cool, gray basement under a bare light bulb &
sweating copper pipes, surrounded by stripped furniture &
dank boxes of forsaken Tonka trucks & Gumby dolls.
I bounced a tennis ball off the naked cement
& thrashed at it for hours with a fractured yellow bat
penciling manifold score sheets: entire leagues,
statistics & rivalries developed over years.
I re-enacted canonical exploits of the diamond
from Cobb to Kaline—even apocryphal leagues
of my own invention from Mexico & Japan.
Treaties between nations were made, worlds saved
where cinderblock & steel held up the house
near the red pine lake.
Willie Mays walks down the stairs in uniform &
stands by the light switch at the left field foul pole.
With a smile serene as Vishnu, he asks for the bat,
takes his stance in the box delineated by dripping condensation.
I bounce my twistiest knuckle-curve off the wall.
It squirrels back like a washcloth in the wind
& he takes the pitch on the outside corner,
leaning in to assess the movement.
“What was it like coming up in the majors,
being so young & black & all?”
I ask, setting into another wind up,
this time bringing the hard stuff.
He swings late & misses, inspects the duct tape on the bat.
The ball skitters to a stop by the rock salt bags
& corner sump pump. If it had fallen in,
his at bat would have ended by house rules.
He is beyond the conversation of this world,
an omniscient apparition.
I grab at anything more to ask, retrieve the ball
realizing that if I strike him out
it will send him back beyond the veil.
Stupid questions leap from my mouth:
“Have you ever fallen for the buzzer-in-the-hand
handshake trick, or the squirt-in-the-eye carnation trick?
Have you ever mistaken a small cloud for a galaxy?”
Father Fisheye
in memory of Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
I am I, old father Fisheye that begat the ocean, the worm at my
Own ear, the serpent turning around a tree…
1.
Working for minimum wage & wearing a paper hat
you served me ice cream from behind a stainless steel counter.
I couldn’t decipher the strangely Latin flavors.
“You choose,” I said, “something chocolate.”
Soft, deft diabetic hands scooped cream into sugar-cone,
offered with folded napkin.
“I need a place to stay,” you said, almost embarrassed.
Aren’t you lofted on immortal Blakean cloud?
You set up stations of herbs, flasks & electronic monitors in my studio apartment—
strange apothecary, like Melquiades or Harry Smith
& the appearance of a long, empirical stay.
As soon as your lab is erected,
you fold it down again into shiny, stacked aluminum cases &
wave goodbye at the door.
Sad pressure in my chest as you turn to the darkening street.
What was your deduction, what evidence gathered?
For what journey did you prepare across the astral splay
of northern belt Milky Way?
2.
The radio announced your death as I drove icy I-96
listening to a long lost tape of a family Christmas feast, Detroit, 1972:
gasoline up to 52c/gallon, Nixonian energy crisis, price of potatoes rising.
The history of Monopoly lucidly explained to attentive uncles by my father,
a budding insurance executive dreaming his own red hotels & green houses.
And you, teacher, already battle-scarred in revolution games
were immersed in your new mindfulness practice in cities far away.
This very night I sat at holiday table you dreamed of kissing
Einstein’s salty thumb.
Flying back to Arizona over the flat, roadless west Texas earth
I studied the crinkled web of arroyos,
manifold Apachean tributaries,
olive sagebrush shelves & shadeless dusty groves—
not even cattle mulling the alkaline reaches.
I thought of your “mashed jack rabbits” en route to Reno,
frosty Steens Range radio enumerations,
your Czechoslovakian sneakers marking the Oregon frost
as you got sick at roadside.
Who will talk to America now,
erase its borders & keep track of its prisoners?
3.
A sleety March night in ’88,
seven of us crammed into Tom Peters’ Capri,
you on my lap speaking of Reznikoff’s old neighborhood woman
with bacon hanging from her lips like a dog tongue,
Ma Rainey’s black bottom vowels,
the nuances of Sapphic meter.
On Arapahoe Ave. I watched you
walk off coughing in the cold haiku rain.
You covered your palsied face & I thought,
I hope he doesn’t die.
4.
We stooped to read the Rocky Mountain News
through the warped plexiglass of the box:
the streets of Beijing buzzing with revolt
& the lone student staving off the tank:
your Bolshevik DNA atwitter.
A steamy July afternoon & long elevator ride
twenty-three floors above anthill Babylon for radio show.
Looking down on the sooty railyards,
metal heaps & blackened warehouses,
your Cassidean Denver long gone,
you sang “Father Death Blues”
while I tapped beat on the counter top.
The host opened the lines for Denver to speak with the noble bard:
an eerie gap as all the Front Range
from Loveland to Buffalo Creek &
east into the alfalfa flat prairie
& all the hot metropolis beneath
fell silent.
The host repeated,
“Come on Denver! Ask Allen Ginsberg…anything!”
The dead air crackled like Kerouac’s haunted radio gaps
listening to The Shadow in old time Lowell.
I winced at the thought of America enslumbered,
in need of the Lion’s Roar.
& you just learning how to grow old,
floss regularly, oil your feet
& eat your morning millet.
5.
A fly on your forehead as you took my picture,
fireworks, children & beer—poets under the tent.
A hug & I begged you to play softball.
“It’d kill me,” you said.
We stood under a catalpa in the summer field & I remembered then:
your glasses punched by a black kid in Patterson.
Never one for such games:
would-be labor lawyer, borsht-lover,
eulogizer of revolutionaries,
mouth of West Wind—
ole Father Fisheye.
Son of Abraham
Son of Whitman
& Prajna Paramita
I vow to forever wield thy sunflower,
its corolla of bleary spikes,
to lift thy scepter, throw thy sickle—
to step in the same river twice.
I will finish Brothers Karamazov
conjure a million hungry Russians,
memorize the Buddhist categories of heaven & hell
& let my ego die on an Arizona knoll.
I vow to kiss Moloch on his baby-eating lips,
invite the demon for green tea on my good rug.
6.
They say when you died your mouth made an O.
They administered the final liquid blue Buddhist food
& closed your lips for the last time—
something for the trip.
No worm to be at your ear.
The Detroit News printed “Flower Power!” & “Smoke Dope!”
beside your obituary.
I knew you as crystal-headed sage
in crisp white, buttoned business shirts;
first-thought wizard of candid snapshots & scholarly blues
who gave up his seat at the auditorium for late arrivals;
haiku meditator explaining the updraft from the marsh,
taking off his shirt, putting it on again;
treaty-maker between San Francisco and Kazakhstan—
who appeased rioting streets with mantric calm.
Now ashes in the snow
dharma-nutrient of Red Feather Lakes.
April, 1997-April, 2006
Desire #37
She stirred her latte at the condiment counter
like a panther eroticizing the horizon.
Architectural schools sprang from the cut of her hips &
that dress fit her like a razor:
bayonet shoes, sapphire toe ring
& buttery gold all over.
I dropped The Bacchae & lunged for the raw sugar
by her wrist, leaned in to speak but
the glint from her ear deflected my best line.
She knew she was the axis of the planet headed for town,
Said, Nice satchel & left with all the oxygen in the room.
Saturday night, 10 p.m.—I returned to the ancient drama on my lap
wanting to sculpt a church out of the Ko‘olaus,
spar with the rain, betroth myself to Pleiades.
Or chase her down to Waikiki
with exotic liquor & dripping lilies.
Desire # 15
(another late valentine)
1.
Today was foretold by stray headlights &
the crumbs that escaped the broom.
Everywhere I see necklaces of hearts
but no necks. Memory is the slickest fraud.
I’d direct you to the landscape as an alternative
but it’s been stolen back by the Sioux.
Please settle for this photograph of a cotton field
from the Great Depression, drowsy afternoons
in Acquiescence, New Mexico,
a long inappropriate stare at the checkout line.
Settle for this white orchid in raging bloom
I bought so the girls at the office would envy you.
Kuan Yin’s thin equanimous hips suddenly divided
the gallery between the righteous & the forlorn.
2.
Santa Fe is a misleading town with its fossils & stalagmites
& I always returned with new wounds, a cornhusk for the altar.
I never danced naked in a green plastic apron,
cooking Sunday meatloaf to Van Morrison tunes.
Overstated to say tragic, but there was
your purple dress, my colony of hands.
3.
For the ancient Chinese, stone was the most refined
spirit energy & I am soon to be a facet of the San Juans
taking sharp chinooks on the cheek amid the brinks
of what love favors in this shadow country:
bedrock shelves of winking aspen,
a Cavendish prayer to smoke.
4.
They say the jewel between man & woman glitters only
a few seconds a day & we must burnish the possibility.
A waterbird’s wings bang through my covered veins
as if your body promised the sky on the other side of my skin.
But after all these deaths I know what Love loves best:
when we still love in her certain absence
her seldom-sought little sister, named:
Loving What Remains.
Clint Frakes was selected by former poet laureate Mark Strand as one of the Best New Poets of 2008 for an anthology of the same title from Meridian Press. In 2006 he received the James Vaughan and the Peggy Ferris awards for poetry. He is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute where he studied under Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. He is also a graduate of the Northern Arizona University writing program and received his Ph.D. with emphasis in creative writing from the University of Hawaii in 2006. He has appeared in over fifty journals in North America, England, Australia and Argentina since 1987 with recent work appearing in Bamboo Ridge, Bottle of Smoke, Cause and Effect and Language and Culture. He is the former chief editor of Hawaii Review and Big Rain. His extensive interview with Allen Ginsberg was printed as a chapbook, Don’t Fuck up Your Revolution by Elik Press in 2001. His chapbook, Unreal Cities is forthcoming through Trainwreck Press in St. Johns, Newfoundland.