Four Poems by Rustin Larson

 

August

 

Seventeen year locusts emerge

from their royal armour, buzz

a treetop concerto in half darkness.

 

This is the hour of earliest

memory, the sleep of infancy,

the sunset of decades.

 

I imagine stepping quietly

into the room where I sleep

as an infant.

 

I gently pick up the child

from its cradle

and hold the warm bundle

 

in my arms with a love deeper

and more protective

than mother's.

 

I kiss the child

softly on the forehead

and then return them,

 

their plurality, back to their sleep

where the eye of the moon

and then that of the morning

watches over them.

 

 

Today Sounds Like a Washing Machine

 

but I don't know

 

where the sound is

 

coming from it rains

 

but I hear things

 

managing the rain

 

from above

 

a giant disk

 

turning embossed

 

with gold-leaf portraits

 

of the poets

 

Edgar Allan Poe

 

and

 

Charles Rimbaud

 

and

 

pendants

 

of turquoise

 

and topaz

 

 

Raising Myself

 

1967, my parents out for a little bowling

and boozing with Jack and Jackie,

I am studying for an hour alone

the cover art of Sergeant Pepper's

Lonely Hearts Club Band, my sister,

my babysitter as it were, behind

closed doors with her high school

friend imitating the boxer (I later

understood) Sonny Liston and

not Cassius Clay as I thought, and

there were so many faces to study

including the Beatles themselves who

appeared to be attending their own

funeral. 2019, looking at photographs,

I see my mother's face

emerging from the face of my

grandmother's, and I see my face

emerging from them both.

I have been my best friend for

60 years.

 

 

Courtyard

 

One year, tiki torches. Another year,

angry wasps. Another year,

ghost stories under the stars

by candlelight. Another, barbecuing

chicken on the hibachi, drinking

Corona or iced tea or Juicy Juice

punch. The house is sad we are

leaving, but so is the courtyard,

where I roasted rabbits for Trotsky,

where dancers danced waving

their orange saris off their bodies,

and levitated nude into outer

space. I kiss the paving stones of

the walkway and say goodbye; I

say goodbye to the sounds of the

hateful hotrodders, grateful they

made us patient and slow and

worshipers of shadow and sunlight.

It is my hand's shadow and its

obedient roller ball shadow pen

that writes this. It writes it for me,

alone, a human act absorbing the

early spring rays of sun, the last

of winter sighing through the branches

with its harmonium and its one

lyric, “Beware!” I love you, conclusion.

Nothing that has been would have been

without you. I love you, blind space.

I love you invisible stars, lost years

tumbling and wandering

like crab husks of leaves.

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.