Five Poems by Rustin Larson

 

The Midway

 

The acne-skinned repair diggers

are at it again outside my apartment.

My knuckles feel like poison ivy,

but only because I have been washing

them so much for Covid-19. Still

people go on to their parking

lot, their grilled chicken and frankfurters

on such a fine day with the escalator

to the sky in full swing with tens

of thousands of new riders. I can

see a red and white football when

I close my eyes, and the repair diggers

have found geodes to crack open

with hammers, and just now I want

to hear a train's whistle, but I hear

nothing, like the day I was stranded

at Montpelier Junction with Mrs.

Electro and her husband, Jonquil, with

their portable bar and velvet carry-on luggage. I read

A Moveable Feast and ate cheese and

crackers in coach class, while

they road south in their port-a-room

to a meeting at the Algonquin

with their publisher, Sam the one-eyed diplomat.

 

 

The Cottage on the Hill

 

Bears and brownies and sour

disgraced elves lived there

high on the hill

a mile distant.

I could see their brown shuttered

cottage through the mists of a shattered

April struggling

with impulses of ice and snow

and cloud and sun and daffodil.

The bears dug landscape gardens,

loaded wheelbarrows full

with black dirt.

The brownies served orange pekoe

and almond ginger bread windmills.

The sour elves wrote

pages of unrhymed verse,

groused

about how small the world of fairies had become.

I kept an eye out from

a chair shoved to the room's window,

focused father's night watch

binoculars on their arched wooden door

the enchanted dark year before

kindergarten.

 

 

Shelter

 

Ten years ago, I was turning

my attention to short stories.

I lived in a part of town that

was economically mixed--

we were probably among the poorest,

though I tried to keep the place neat.

 

A meth lab on one side

and hillbilly-evangelicals on the other.

Most of the housing was subsidized,

though some of the earliest settlers

on the street were school teachers,

their mortgages at least half paid.

 

I taught the mentally challenged at a sheltered

workshop that specialized

in light assembly, shipping

and other details. I have doubts

of my impact, although

standardized tests showed,

 

at the very least, no backwards

progress. We would frequently

do artwork, and I made a few

watercolour caricatures of the students:

the shapes of heads in attitude,

the structure of eyebrows and lips.

 

I painted their likenesses

with such exaggeration,

everyone could successfully

name the subject of each portrait.

They were simple people

and truly tried to be good--

 

much in the way children

tutored in religion try

with a simplicity and strength

of faith of young children

who believe in Santa Claus.

I couldn't help myself in admiring

 

and half-believed there was hope

for the salvation of the world,

as if it could accidentally spread

like a contagion.

 

When Hemingway lived in Paris

he wrote of a man marked for the kind

of shadow only the moon can cast upon

the earth in an eclipse; he would come away

 

with spring at his heels and an appetite

and his small son in his arms on a cold fall day;

it's not the drink that makes my legs want to dance

and wander but it is the recollection, the bits of wire

 

and cracked solder joints that tend to make up memory

itself and so the back aches and the legs go crazy

and there is a restlessness in the groin

and the inner saviour wants to scream;

 

these are what I took with me out into the small city

and brought to the table in my small classroom

with the watercolour paints and the drawer full

of junk food for when they behaved awfully

 

and the drink packs for when they were angels

and we studied the nutrition of steak and potatoes

and got an eyeful of spelling and math and hygiene

though I washed my hands with regularity

 

and expected there was a quitting time,

a reprieve, and an interdimensional vacation

in which all the scattered remnants and revenants

of my soul could rest not bothered

 

by another incarnation or the insistence

there was a world to drag back from the edge

of doom, no, a whole millennium of rest

even if it were out among the cacti and flowers

 

of an entirely different universe, so that is what

I wanted my work with them to accomplish

and eventually I quit and went on to something else.

 

Real Peace

 

Sun brightly shining, or the entire city

banked in fog, in Amsterdam, someone eating a thinly sliced,

cold breakfast bacon, yellow cheese with coffee,

croissants. Someone will make his way

to a marijuana café and see specks of light

as the trains run more or less on time.

Clocks will chime on mantels trimmed with blue tiles.

For five seconds of real time, no

violence anywhere.

An eternity in God's eyes.

Peace. The trick to continuously

relive five seconds like

Scrooge keeping Christmas (the spirit of)

365 days of the year, perpetuating that

like how the carpet needs to be vacuumed,

laundry put away, collectively speaking,

an at-risk household. In 1972,

I was some sort of turkey-killing Davy Crockett,

my friend and I waging battles

with toy muskets on the earthen dome

of Katie's root cellar,

she blind with diabetes

and living in a shack attached

to that mound of earth. We patiently

accepted her bug-dented and half-green apples

as treats on Halloween, standing

in her dark shack and inspected by her blind witch's fingers.

She couldn't see,

but saw deeply what we could only vaguely sense,

making the hairs rise on the hackles

of our necks. Wind blew

out the jagged smile of the pumpkins.

Somewhere in black spits

of rain, a cat screamed.

On Sundays, I lit the candles

at Good Shepherd, balked at lifting the lid of the baptismal font,

envisioning a green ball of snakes writhing in the water,

was criticized for lighting the candles too slowly,

praised for lighting the candles

with much reverence and dignity. If I moved

too quickly, truth be told, I'd extinguish the flame

on the thingamajig. (I never truly knew its name.)

 

 

 California

 

My friends and I fantasized, calculated

how many peanut-butter sandwiches

and Fritos it would take to get there. Running

away from home meant packing a bandanna

full of toys and hiding behind the huge

elm on the playground until noon. We skirted

around it, its huge roots, imagining

a narrow mountain pass. In winter, frozen

puddles on the roots were lakes as seen

from 10,000. Our scarves were oxygen

masks. Small branches were hiking staffs. Christmas

came but once a year and it was the X

on our treasure map: A Johnny Eagle

safari rifle with telescope showed

how to take down the big game, a bull

elephant collapsing into the dust.

Nebraska was number one, playing

in the Orange Bowl. There were cookies

and caramel-covered marshmallows. The darkness

of night would bring a stranger to the door.

No room at the inn. We would light Wednesday-

night candles in church so the baby Jesus

could find his way to the manger. Every

winter a child was born, and every spring

a young man died at 3 a.m. on McVicar

Freeway & the circus came with junior

lion-tamer's whips for $3 and plastic

megaphones. Spring's grave grew thick with grass;

the sun grew hot. We emerged from chlorine

blue shirtless and whole and nine years old

with Monet in Venice for water flowing

out of our pool-clouded vision, and Vermeer,

the gist of his metaphor, the light not

only from the stillness but from inside the eye.

Rustin Larson’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, and North American Review. He won 1st Editor’s Prize from Rhino and was a prize winner in The National Poet Hunt and The Chester H. Jones Foundation contests. Larson is a graduate of Vermont College MFA in Writing.