Nine Poems by Rustin Larson

 

SEAPLANE

 

My father pointed out the seaplane flying

in the clear blue sky over Lake Michigan.

We were at the Great Lakes Naval Station

and he wanted to show me where he finally

grew up in the Navy's boot camp.

 

The seaplane grumbled over the Lake

and tilted its wings in a turn. I chewed

on a bologna sandwich and drank

from a bottle of Orange Crush. The wind

was cold off the lake, even though

it was summer. I wore a small white

commander's cap and a navy blue

sweater. There was the sound of furious

typewriting echoing from an open window.

 

We returned to the Chevy to let the sun

warm us through the glass and to finish

our lunches. “Look at that!” my father said.

“He'll land right on the water!”

Like a mosquito landing in a pool

of wine. “What was the war like, Dad?”

He stared at the seaplane. His wide eyes remembered.

“I saw many places and many things

I would not have otherwise seen,” he said.

“Did you have any friends?” I asked.

“Lots,” he said. “Some of them I met right here.”

 

He turned on the radio and they played

something old, old. “Well I'll be darned,”

he said. He chuckled and he started the Chevy

and we drove all the way back to Iowa.

I eyed the hood ornament as we flew along.

It was a silver jet. It flew low, sometimes below

the tips of the cornfields, sometimes level

with the water of rivers we crossed.

 

 

CIRCUS

 

My dad had this little maneuver.

When his shirt became untucked,

he would unbuckle and unzip

his pants and then file his shirttails

down aft and fore and then redo

himself, even if it was in the middle

of a store. Besides being embarrassing

to me, it freaked my mom out.

“Virgil, what in the hell are you doing?

This is J.C. Penney's!” Just shoving

the tails discreetly into the engine room

was not enough, I began to call

his ritual “The Wild Thing.”

“Does your old man still do

The Wild Thing?” Rhonda asked me

when I offered free tickets

to the Shriner's Circus.

“No thanks,” she said.

Who could blame her?

So there I was among the orangutans

and clowns and elephants

and there was ensign Virg

whistling “Anchors Aweigh,”

stuffing his moss-green shirttails

into his unbuckled Dickie's

as the lions panted and their eyes

became alert and 120 clowns

spilled one by one from a smoking

Isetta and howled and laughed

and shot blanks from muskets.

 

 

THE FORT

 

Twelve hours later, I am at work staring

at Mike Johnson's sonnet that says, “Wondrous

wake in deathless glory.” I told them

I'd be pall bearer after all since they promised

no strain on my knee. I'm testing the miracles

and the curses. It's cooling down, not quite

but close to autumn. My mother would

come in from outside with a red bandana

over her head and touch my face with her cold

hands and say, “Brrrrrrr. October”.

Today its like a tepid bath. Maybe in about

an hour, I could have noticed the street lights

blinking on in our old neighbourhood,

right above our rural style mailbox.

I have dreams that it's the middle of the night

and I'm pulling my father's mail from the box,

and there are packages addressed to me also,

decades old, copies of books containing

things I had written. I never knew they wanted

them; now here they are. Nervous grey cats

stare at me from the bushes. I see their eyes

glowing. I know my mother and father

are only ghosts in the house now,

but I still bring in their mail and place it

on the telephone table. I step to the liquor

shelf above the refrigerator and open it

and look at the bottles, the one of crème

de menthe my mother loved, green and fluted

with a genie living inside of it. But it's my father's

whisky I pour a glass of. A small one. I drink

its burn and feel mellow as Thanksgiving.

And now my brother is gone too, and now

I can't see myself in the bathroom mirror.

 

 

TEMPEST

 

I wake and notice my father has parked

On the shoulder and is now outside

Watching warplanes dogfight

In and out of huge billowing brown clouds:

Lightning, thunder, planes, missiles,

fiery explosions. Debris clatters on the highway.

 

As the battle ends, a massive invasion

Of brown moths erupts. They themselves

Had been the clouds; they drag the ground

With a whirr, a leaf-like clattering.

Their bodies drift like brown snow, bury everything.

 

When I awake a second time, I am in bed

Sitting up, slumping on a stack of pillows.

Ice crystals tap against the window

And I reach for a glass of water.

I had been the same age as my father in that dream.

We had been travelling west.

 

 

THE HOBBYIST

 

Tunnel of brown glazed tiles

Leading down to where? Steady

High-pitched drip of water

Near the bottom. At the desk

Of the evil scientist, or part-time janitor,

Are these things: a folded pair of eyeglasses,

A pile of beige rubber bands, a Bakelite

Coffee mug, black, two old baseball cards,

Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, a dispenser

Of hand cream, a small campfire

Of ballpoint pens, pencils

With their erasers eaten away, dented

Thermos jars, clipboards noting

The physical characteristics of moles

And shrews, paper the size

Of poker cards numbered 73 to 80

In large black type, a thermometer,

Empty jug of apple juice, stapler,

Phone, dirty magazine. There are four

Drawers jammed with belongings pilfered

From student lockers: scarves,

Pills, reefers, textbooks, condoms, cigarettes,

Candy bars. There is a wrench

That fits only one thing that is not in the room,

That is parked far away near his ex-wife’s

Flower plot, and is permanently and forever broken.

 

 

THE URGE TO PAINT

 

I want to paint, lay on

Colours from tubes,

Toothpaste dollop of yellow cadmium

On the edge of a small knife

Rasped onto canvas.

I tell you my father with teeth

Is still breathing. You

Zip him up to his stocking cap

Inside a brown sleeping bag

In a second story room

I do not own. He is grateful

When I free him, but I notice

He is quite decayed and you

Were right. I paint

The blue and white mix I call

Oxygen. I inhale

And exhale as I scrape the paint

Across the canvas’s sky, horizon,

Ocean, destruction. My father

Insists we had sped the light

To such a degree that the earth

Is no longer distinguishable

Or necessary. He reaches inside

His sweater for a lighter

And then sets his body to flames.

 

 

GHOSTS

 

There is the story of the bride who caught fire

brushing the candelabra, who took a tumble

down the marble staircase, who broke her neck

on her wedding day. She continues to haunt

the hotel, dancing alone in the ballroom

as the elderly Scottish bellman, also a ghost,

applauds kind-heartedly. “Poor lass,” he mutters

to himself. “Poor wee lass.”

 

There is the woman with the wild poodle's hair

who haunts the library. She insists I find the book

on The Ecstatic Dance which we do not own.

At night I watch an episode where everyone

catches an aphasia virus and starts speaking

coffee house poetry from the 1950s.

My Kleenex takes a nap on the table

and looks like a weary ghost.

 

The money in the coin pouch has touched

so many hands, some of whom are no longer

living. I can hear the mouse singing in the rafters,

a soft song like an anaemic wren.

 

I keep meeting myself as a child who walks

with no shoes down the burning sidewalk, seeking out

the curbing for patches of wet grass, passing

the telephone company's local nerve centre,

the door propped open for the heat,

the women inside with their headsets

and black spaghetti of cables and plugs

and switches. One of them once scolded me

when I made a prank call to a neighbour.

I pretended I knew about Harry who was betting

on the horses. “You don't know my Harry!”

The woman laughed. I hung up and a few seconds

later the phone rang. The jig was up.

All those telephone workers are dead

or in the nursing home now, but one of them

scared the bejesus out of me. Her voice

was so stern and cold and I could tell

her name was Phyllis and she wore

a blue print dress of maple leaves and sharp branches.

 

 

INSTRUCTION

 

In first grade my hands would sweat pools

onto the fake blond woodgrain

of my desk. Math classes made me tense.

They warped my spine and made my neck hurt.

Lift up the curtain of stars and show me

the King's magic exit. They served chili

in Styrofoam cups and offered tiny half-pint

bottles of milk. We ate on mess hall tables

that folded up and were wheeled away

through the gymnasium as recess began

and we beat each other with jump ropes

and blew ground chalk powder into each other's

eyes. I can still smell those blue tiled corridors

mopped daily with disinfectant to keep

us pure. I see the tall nurse in her white

sweater and the red cross pin on her lapel.

I see our hedgehog principal whose name

was Violet. I see our Polish Phys Ed instructor,

Mr. Jotsky, with his net bag of volleyballs,

and with his black whistle dangling from his neck.

We called ourselves “The Hawks” and wore

dark blue sweatshirts on the cold soccer field,

and ran back and forth chasing a black and white

ball made of patchwork pentagons.

We were allowed one point per score.

Stingy. Ungenerous. I visit this place

occasionally in my mind, not frequently,

but just enough to remind me to alter

the details the next time I live through it,

to do something violent or to do something

kind, to alter the axis, to fiddle with the outcome,

to change the scenery. I once sat wide-eyed

exclaiming to my sister we had lived

this 1000 times previously, exactly

the same way each time.

She and I were convinced it was time for a change.

 

 

AMISH GROCERY

 

So many Amish people. The women work

at the checkout and behind the meat

counter and at the deli counter, all wearing

their lacy caps and modest blue and lavender

dresses. They are polite. I order

a lot of sliced turkey and roast beef.

The prices are remarkable. That's why

I stock up on everything: beans,

chicken, spinach, cucumbers, grapes

lemons, lettuce and so on. I buy several

bags of bulk pasta, consider the aisle

dedicated to powdered flavourings

and nuts and snack crackers. Do these people

vote? Do they have a political life?

What do they think of Donald Trump?

Do they elect their own private Amish president?

They take our money but it's more than fair.

Everything is so cheap today and well lit

and clean; it seems like hundreds

of people are shopping. I keep my eyes

glued to the basket and the task,

otherwise the scene of people moving

around like cattle becomes unnerving.

I know outside it is warm, the kind

of early summer day people rejoice,

get naked, ride motorcycles

to their deaths in vine-tangled and unnamed

creeks and ravines. Some kid waits

outside the store patting a beagle.

Is that your doggie? No, I'm just watching

him. Who are you watching him for?

I don't know. The beagle wanders away.

Seems to live here, has the run of the street.

A woman in a wheelchair looks sideways

at the potted pansies on a rack outside.

A man waters them.

Rustin Larson's poetry appears in the anthology Wild Gods (New Rivers Press, 2021). Recent poems have appeared in London Grip, Poetry East, The Lake, Poetryspace, Pirene's Fountain, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal. His chapbook The Cottage on the Hill was published by Cyberwit.net in April of 2022.

He is on faculty in Maharishi International University's MFA in Creative Writing program.