Becoming a Ghost Rider in the Sky
You hid behind your father’s La-Z-Boy while your grandfather babysat the evening Walt Disney broadcast The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The aroma of Cherry Blend pipe tobacco hovered over you like a virile angel. But you lacked the bravery you imagined from “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” a horse opera instrumental deepened by Neil LeVange’s guitar on The Lawrence Welk Show. The six-string pulsing like a gunfight between Shane and Liberty Valence in a ghost town at midnight. On television Ichabod Crane’s flight from the Headless Horseman left you quaking on your knees. When the bumpkin teacher scurried toward the bridge near the Old Dutch Church and Burying Ground, you squeezed your eyes shut, still hearing the pursuit of the Hollow’s boogeyman who armed himself with a jack-o-lantern club. All while the relentless gallop of the hell-steed drummed against the worn trail. At such moments your grandfather pulled at his pipe. The blend from his draw summoning you into the sanctuary of his ringers and lures.
2
Your grandfather rooted for one-run baseball games rather than routs. He fished in the Whitewater River and the streams of Fayette County and inspected metalwork for the factory that built the first Lexington sedans. The News-Examiner printed his name at summer’s end when the horseshoe champions were posted. On Sunday evenings he offered you butterscotch candies when you emerged from your fear of cartoon headless Hessians from the Revolutionary War. Of a witch with poisoned apples or a dragon atop Bald Mountain. The last time Ichabod Crane vanished crossing the bridge over the Pocantico River, your grandfather roped you into watching Maverick and the Lone Ranger, a legion of cowboys with horses that raced through the arroyos of Monument Valley. You sat on the floor beside your quiet guardian as Maverick solved a sixty-minute conundrum with a trick shot or a ruse that outwitted an outlaw. You came to joke like your glib heroes and to salute school marms and saloon coquettes with a deft tip of your hat. At each story’s end, you rode out of town alone.
Swamp Sunflowers
after A Faded Picture of Our Father And, Blas Falconer
The woman I haven’t spoken with in forty years wore a black half-heart pendant. She undressed behind closed doors and cried while I played the fool at making love. Those were the years of asymptotes and standard deviations. Helianthus had not yet taken root in my vocabulary. Now I wander beside a waterfall in a town famous for its moment of justice. Far away, the wars of the world are fought behind the shield-bodies of children. I catalog my blackouts by unknowing what I know and saving what remains for me to salvage. The woman with the half-heart pendant counted roadkills on our drive-in theater sprees. We cowered at the cusp of being beautiful, while a waitress named the pies she baked. While boys, not yet in their beards, hiked across a railroad trestle to stand awestruck before a chrysalis ghost. The woman with the black pendant rented the upper rooms of tall buildings for their acoustic hardwood floors. Both of us fled from father rage, bad clutches in our Ramblers, Spam suppers, and skeleton keys. During our last breakfast together, she smoked European cigarettes and drank black coffee. Her eyes were green, like the emerald leaves of a sunflower that once grew in my pollinator garden. One with burgundy midribs. This season, I listen for the silence in what I hear. Along both banks of the waterfalls, swamp sunflowers bow before autumn.
Hermes
The oldies station played “Don’t Step on Superman’s Cape” while I devoured too many slices of chocolate pecan pie. I type on a mint keyboard, pecking for a synonym for “pangolin” or an antonym for “illywhacker.” Who has the job of slathering chocolate inside those shelled nuts? Two squirts and I’d book it for Beale Street in Memphis. I have visions of quarks spinning around my head like a dozen Supermen reversing time on Earth. I already confuse Lois Lane with femme fatales in black-and-white noir. I want to be hugged by more Brazilian supermodels before the next meteor strikes.
Roadrunner
I spend most of my set time noshing martini olives by a pool while my archnemesis sprints headfirst into a locomotive charging out of a painting of a tunnel. Or rehearsing for a scene with a few wind sprints on the hard pan. I’ve had my lines perfected since ’49. Anything more complicated I wave on a card. “Here we go again.” And “Roadrunners can’t read and don’t drink.” It’s a good life. Dodging duds that blow up in Wile E.’s face or waggling an “Adios” sign while my fool tumbles through the air after running out of land.
Road Trip, Untaken
What does anyone from Connecticut know about the small towns of Indiana? Carolyne called me a liar when I swore there was a city in Indiana named Santa Claus. Carolyne, the J. C. Penney clerk from one of those east coast states I had difficulty learning to spell. I’d owned a reliable ’76 Nova for a year, and my driver’s license was a year older. She was looking forward to marrying a Marine in Hawaii, but didn’t know it yet. What does anyone know about the four-hour trek of a man-child on a road trip to a holiday town when the rube doesn’t know how to change a flat tire? How might such a fool navigate the switchback roads through Birdseye and Oolitic and the four-way stop in Lawrence County with its persimmon festival in September? How many farm stands must he pass before turning west at the corner of the waist-high gourd pyramids and the swaying crates of Indian corn?
On her sister’s couch in a sun room, Carolyne leaned her face into the place where men and women kiss, and I swore there was a Santa Claus. A town with streets named after Donner and Blitzen. With a campground around Lake Rudolph. And a statue of the jolly one in the town square where we might pose for a photograph. We could have eaten tenderloins served by North Pole elves. Window shopped for the Christmas gifts one wishes for when twenty-five. We could have stayed overnight in a motel close to the Hoosier Forest while its panther cried and prowled through the downcountry hills. When I tried to kiss her, she turned to raise the window shades in hopes of an unscheduled blue moon. Instead, a new moon rose over her unlit backstreet in Muncie, Indiana. while we divvied our futures between us on an autumn couch, the false promise of Chanel #5 untasted on my lips.
Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. His poems have appeared in The Prose Poem, prole, and Last Stanza Poetry Journal. Poems are forthcoming in Superpresent and confetti.
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