County Fair/Cook County Accidental

 The next two poems were written together -- literally so, in linked terza rima, with the middle line of each stanza rhyming with the first and last lines of the next stanza, in the other poem. I haven't submitted these for publication; I suppose I should now, and see if these siamese twins can survive separation.

County Fair

Brown moths derange the neon lights;
in congealing August heat the skee balls miss
in flight to buzz the midway's sodden bites.

Teens graze the rancid ground for clues
to sell each other in bundled random scraps,
dangling cigarettes & attitudes askew

from beer bottles drained, so sad dying young,
to fall & roll through muddy pasture
lent this day to muddier cars. Boys tongue

their rough knuckled hands in practice longing;
under the Zipper’s glow the ropy air sticks
to body, to each gaze stretched taut conning

the eye for loops of cool glowstick strings,
unfocused as their general disgust
with self & not yet each other’s offerings,

or the tramping boys, their damp splay
of knees & hollering, lithe & shirtless inside
locked cages swinging not quite at play.

A moon-faced girl looks up into the catcalls,
her mouth taffy soft, spun-sugar sticky –
warn her yes but of what you barely can recall.

Out at the chainlink fence the cars pass
mere feet away; a single moth unfurls onto
tangled bindweed, white petals shut fast

against night, & clings to the drapery
whispering what is to become of me – stay –
without you what is to become of me?

Source: Henry Domke

 Cook County Accidental


How does anyone come to inhabit this
body in which you are born, grow into
your skin & contentment at what is?

Consider the monarch: her wings a map
to a home never seen, her belly slung
low with ancestral orders. Her slow flaps

utter the last sweet syllables of summer: asters
on an iron gate, a striped steel awning
to echo what my strayed tongue unmasters

the nine hundred names of here. It’s almost six,
the wind still cool from its night wanderings,
I step out just as the last of sunrise picks

out colors for the day: dark slate & rust
re-used from cemetery rock & clay,
empty office glass caught by boom & bust.

Below the El his cap pulled low to warm not hide
cracked face & voice, a man asks for menthols,
coins cringed through fingers nicotine dyed

in the derelict’s embrace, tobacco’s hickey—
& says to no one today is less likely than the last.
 I grab the Sun & paper matches, avoid his eyes -- ecce

non homo; see the monarch readies to go,
leaving all she knows for her known history,
the silken knots we could never ourselves undo

but themselves unravel in the long fall away.
I did not become save as I did –  how unexpected
to me came the relentless chisel of day day day

Jacqui

Source: Abandoned Turnpike

Clifford Brown died in 1956 at the age of 25. You can read a 1961 Downbeat piece about him here, listen to "Jacqui" here.  There really are abandoned tunnels at Ray's Hill, Laurel Hill, and Sideling Hill, on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, at the above site and here.

Jacqui


Snared by wind & the sunset’s sidelong glare,
unspooled tape, a smashed cassette
flutters on the guardrail,

caught
between decoration & garbage, 
once fled now unsure which way to turn.

On the road you gather only this kind of silence.
Beside me the roadcut sluices tears
& barns

pierced
and collapsed, ambitionless for themselves
but inside the swallows listen for the unmeant

parting, goodbyes never knowingly the last –
thanks muttered into the turnpike
basket.

They live
on this, on the haze of misdirection
and outright lies swarming above the roadway,

as bats feed on the night’s disguising radio static.
In last defense I rummage up
a tape

Clifford Brown
 & Harold Land stroll out:
"Jacqui," all loose-limbed loping grace. How could

anyone speak so clearly with a trumpet
at his mouth, his breath inflating
the noumenon --

this is how
spirit speaks through body.
I nod & would close my eyes but think of

Brownie, Nancy, Richie Powell all dead:
a nighttime carwreck not far up
this very road,

whose tunnels
 like tunes left unwritten sing:
Sideling, Tuscarora, Laurel Hill,

to name a road from Delaware to the stars.
Where we headed next he whispers
to Richie,

each night
asks again into this crackling loop,
the endless gigs, going to sleep believing

dawn will come when the tape starts up again,
always the same, always different
in ways

we live,
we survive to understand: to know,
or remember, a kiss goodnight to a bedstand photo,

the pull of something gathering out there insistent
as the call from Max’s pressroll across
a tight-wound snare.