ADAM O. DAVIS
Nicaragua, Naturally
Lilies limn on their way to the dentist’s office where pulled teeth sing their own tune to winter and its cadaverous school buses.
This theme may diverge over time. Similarly, unrelated themes that were once confluence can now only hope for convergence.
After salting the cinderblock of friendship we claimed even God and his sledgehammer could not smash it.
Those were titanic days.
A Law of Inevitability
In our city of tomorrow, machines have malfunctioned again. So much gone haywire and once more we ask: why are the things we designed to play chess trying to kill us? It happens: a quiet dinner, interrupted at the window by a pair of eyes, red and pulsing. Will you be the homeowner to welcome the murderous toaster oven inside?
Erstwhile, in a lesser age at the zoo, you lunge into the monster pit to retrieve a pretty lady’s errant hat. Soon enough, hirsute with shame, you find yourself in a Komodo Dragon’s claws, and in its jaws you recollect your wrongs. Hard as it is, you must acknowledge the Earth and its axis of which you are no longer part.
Imagine a hunter, his ankle snared in his bear trap. Even now, at the city limits, ostriches are neck-deep in sand and the first of many meteorologists lay down before the monsoon. Who claims catastrophe as a crèche? The guilty are always alphabetized in time. Calamity, though it could have been by any hand, it was most likely ours, more likely mine.
Capitals of Tin
What nocturne, what nickel exclamation, what wolfish kind of worry creeps among the phantom limbs of this razed orchard? Years ago we sent our many libraries here to repent for what we had taken, but what was left didn’t want anything back. The forest floor still a blanket of books. Let’s sit awhile and wait. The wind has already sent its whips. We read from a favorite: “You Caught Us in Capitals of Tin.” In the passage selected, a bulldozer demolishes a shantytown.
Cardboard kept them insulated, but it was steel and steam that prevailed, courtesy of City Hall.
In that pluperfect present, thunder falls like a spool of rusty chain from the sky to foretell the manner of the greedy tailor’s fate, who called out each teacup by name before breaking it. In the city presented, we find nothing but mannequins who haunt their latest fashions with the endless grins of crossing guards.
They created chandeliers with such mouths and through the plateglass you could imagine their crystalline chattering in the idle hours of the crosswalk.
I remember once while reading this we lost our way in a blizzard. Only by setting fire to the pages we had already read did we finish the book. The following morning we stood between embankments watching women cross in burgundy rugs, their children who weed and hum. The sun rose as was recommended in those days. Corridors in the earth filled with the sound of saxifrage.
“Lonely, sturdy work,” she said. “It isn’t like weeping but it is, not like Catalonia but is. And yet no bird yet is bright enough to burnpitfall is our plumage.”
In the book the forgotten dollmaker has privacy, but his hatred is preserved in the whittled eyes of his handiwork to remind the protagonist what lonesome hardship was endured. The guilt is unbelievable. Those who witness this scene can do nothing to assuage their consciences but build orphanages for veterans of the aristocracy. Row upon row of wrought iron cots, now cradled with cobwebs, corrosive as this allegory, this dog-eared myth, this no-man’s land, this largess, this talkative, electric forest flayed with rust, scoured by coal. We drink the lissome light that rakes these ruins.
Such work was made to hurt. Their wreckage so convincing it could only be salvaged by backbone and shovel.
A sweeter literacy waits in a hidden room until our page number is announced. There is a page number for each of us. Sometimes we share the same.
Is the sawhorse a pitiful sire to sit stock-still in his room? Are we really but animals in pantomimeturncoat and top hat and cane?
The full moon bore its cavities with blind pride, its fangs drooping in a foreign sea. Superstition was an opiate, a welcome fever, a relish of evergreen deceit by the end. The final pages are missing and we’re left with this:
The Congo blimps arrived and their anchors fell like anchors. In the crowd, before the explosion, a potentiometer was quoted as saying, “In principle, pleasure is pronounced.”
Funny little machine; it knew this better than anyone.
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