Four Poems by Damon Hubbs

 

I hear the sons of the city and dispossessed

Get down

Get undressed

-The Sisters of Mercy

 

 

Dancing at Le Phonographique with Sylvia Plath

 

the smell of afterdark

and dry ice crimped

from the brutalist bowels

of Merrion Centre,

and you, Sylvia

red was your color back then.

 

although you wore

a Batwing Coffin necklace

you kept time

at the clubs in Leeds,

your Hellenic two-step like a peacock

blessing the black engine oil carpet

with arsenic feathers.

 

down here the sky

is always falling

through a sisterhood

of long glitter kaftan.

to the barking black lung

machine of doctor avalanche,

white roses and March violets

hatch like snake bites in Margaret’s garden.

 

you attract men

who perch in the margins, crow-eyed,

meaty-hands like tree trunks, tongues

brackish as the tails of northern pike.

They never dance with you

like I do, Sylvia

around the Phono’s mirrored pillar,

watching each hammerfall of stone

ripper names into the dark.

Pail Shop Corners

 

I watch from the window of Pail Shop Corners

Enough sky to patch a Dutchman’s trousers,

And the wind’s tra la la in the darkening greens

In the low-lying swamp off of Goose St.

 

Galas and Gravensteins pressed pummy dry

Cider from the rig and rottletraps;

I watch the women jugging and singing

Old Vine Welch charged a bear with a broomstick.

 

On a day when the spider guides string on Fly Creek,

On a day when the devil honeys the blossom,

On a day when the hammer trips a pail full of poundflesh,

I watch from the window of Pail Shop Corners.

 

The women jug the cider’s black-legged broth,

A whitetail is cranked high on the meat pole.

Our leatherstockings darken with snake spit

On a day when the hand presses rack and cloth.

 

The Kings of Rattlesnake Hill

 

On Pushkin’s birthday

You challenged the busker to a duel

At a gas station in New Hampshire,

We’d been snorting rocket fuel

 

And stealing granite

In the heart of Rattlesnake Hill; 

Feldspar, Concord Grey,

We strayed deep into holes

 

Cutting lines, quarrying time.

Everyone lords a gun in New Hampshire,

Except the busker at the gas station;

He owns a blue guitar. We give him a ride.

 

Paul, with the scampering eyes

And merseybeat smile, wandering

The White Mountains, busking

Cadaver towns north of the Merrimack.

 

A flat tire in Moose Alley—

Our car’s outcropped fender 

Flecked in the sun’s quartz and mica,

The lupines angled in repose

 

As Paul challenges

The purple finch to a song.

It hops three times, turns

And fires.

 

Impressionists

 

The talk is of tennis and tulips.

Ants wheel cheese in brush strokes

across the banks of the Seine,

that’s the impression in the light, at least.

 

The ducks have bell-shaped eyes

and mean forehands,

that’s the impression in the light, at least.

You make a perfect martini from a picnic basket.

 

I taste lips sepalous with olives.

The ducks are at it again, their all-court game

and the ants are busy, busy

wearing vests and running bookstores.

 

We won’t go with the cars and trucks.

We’ll stay among the loose grasses and glances.

That’s the impression in the light, at least,

cross-hatched in the sun’s little golden match.

Damon Hubbs - film & art lover / pie bird collector / author of the chapbook "The Day Sharks Walk on Land" (Alien Buddha Press). When not chapbooking about walking sharks, Damon writes poems about 1970s heavy metal, girls who cry at airports, and swimming pools the color of Italian liquors. Recent work featured in Fixator Press, The Beatnik Cowboy and Apocalypse Confidential. @damon_hubbs