Masques
In the third year of the pandemic, you look in the mirror to find Sasquatch and the Loch Ness monster strolling across a landscape of jackalopes and thunderbirds. The sky is clouded with saxophones that play rainbow notes. Along the horizon a jokerman rides a white moose bareback toward a grievous angel’s watchtower. History no longer repeats herself. No one remembers how to rage against the machine. Shakespeare’s butterflies have passed into a white dog’s starry night. Along with the poet’s insults. Three-inch fool. Cream-faced loon. Fustilarian. The huckleberry season approaches as the last band of Nicholas saints circles a campfire. At sundown they don Guy Fawkes disguises to serenade Kokopelli with ballads by atwoods and vonneguts. With lyrics about a headless Thompson gunner and the werewolves of Bardstown. Look closer at your reflection. You haven’t wept since the last time you rebuilt a bridge to a woman’s heart.
Autumnal Equinox Meditation
You settle into the cabin’s rumple chair with a view of the passing river through the window. The gaudy neckties you collected are in a closed room in the neighborhood where you once lived, secured among garish shirts printed with impossible birds and improbable histories. Now you remember the woman who wore a necklace with a red half-heart pendant. Another who knew all the lyrics to “September.” And one who burnished the crucible of your intimacy. In this retreat, you will ask yourself to birth a new language. A vocabulary for loving what was never yours to love. Imagine tasting the savory nuts you will never taste. If the white dog of your loneliness appears at the door, remember this place belongs to her. Breathe. Even here you will find bees pollinating the purple blush of a black sedum.
Ghost-Dog Walk with Sadie on the Outskirts of Redemption
after watching The Quick and the Dead
She waits for me in the shadow of an abandoned Conestoga. The nearby town sounding like a dia de Muertos celebracions. Sadie refuses to visit the graveyard with its dead man hanging from a barren tree. She turns away from the yellow dust leading to the street where a shackled priest is uncuffed to draw against a witless cowhand and an Indian who believes himself invincible to bullets. Sadie tests the scents of the wagon’s broken axles and squats to mark on the neck yoke. Avoids eye contact with me during the gunfight hours. At dusk the coffin maker rides out with a pot of pork and beans to recite the names of the dead. Among them, Spotted Horse, Eugene Dred, and “Ace” Hanlon, the Hickok wannabe with worthless aces hidden up his sleeve. Sadie whines as the kill shots explode across our horizon. Asks what led me to this perdition, instead of Tombstone or the town the Pale Rider painted red. I tell her how I wore a red cowboy hat as a boy, a straw discount from J. J. Newberry’s Five and Dime, with a brim ragged from where our family dog chewed at his solitude. Sadie scorns my descent into a nostalgia for TV bounty hunters, cap pistols and a hero who rides out of town alone. Surrenders to a restless sleep after the gamblers collect their evening’s blood money and repair to the saloon. When she awakens, she chastises me for mankind’s frivolous use of thumbs. Cringes until she achieves invisibility as bombs demolish the shops along showdown row. I lean back against a boulder. Against the skyline, a woman in a duster and a black hat escapes her past...
Ghost-Dog Walk with Sadie Through George Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
Sadie climbs out from the Seine and shakes the water from her spirit. Around us, the picnickers pack away the leftovers from their lunches and sit or stand along the bank to watch the sailboats glide past. The ghost of my white German shepherd weaves in and out of the crowd, sniffing and rubbing against the legs of the men and the long skirts of the women who have gathered together for this holiday. When she returns to me, she walks a half-circle around me until I share the sweet-potato morsels I carry for her. While the boats draw the eyes of the shoreside patrons, Sadie and I edge into the forest to search for the strange gifts the Earth leaves. A trilobite fossil. A golden mushroom. A miniature sunflower. Away from the throng, Sadie asks me how many more years I will have with my heart. She digs at the loam beneath a linden tree, having learned the scent of truffles in our sojourn through southern France. I scratch the places behind her ears that close her eyes. She likens it to a blessing. I feel starbursts in my chest I cannot name.
Doppelgängers
I write songs to myself. While my anthems thrill the Jersey girls strolling Thunder Road in my rearview mirror. I play villains in Hollywood and detectives in Denmark. Fly through Toy Story without wings or a cape, brag my way into winning a Super Bowl and drink milk after crossing the finish line in Indianapolis. I survive the boy who tortures toys and Halle Berry’s assassin bullets. And torpedo a German gunboat in a lake fed by the Ulanga River. The annals of famous quotes include my signature mantra “I’ve got a fever. And the only prescription is more cowbell.”
Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. His prose poems have appeared in Unlikely Stories, Mark V, Red Eft Review, and Keeping the Flame Alive. Brockley's prose poems are also forthcoming in Ley Lines Literary Review, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, and Stormwash: Environmental Poems, Volume 2.
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