Letters from Iowa - Eight Poems by Rustin Larson

 

Letters from Iowa - Eight Poems by Rustin Larson

Bananas

 

My cat Finnegan is sleeping with his belly up

to the sunshine. I'm playing a CD of Beethoven

Piano pieces. I think I am most like a bunch of bananas,

too green at first, and then too soft to be of any use

to anyone. My brother loved driving through thunderstorms.

He has been dead four years now. I like thunderstorms

if someone else is driving. There are four bananas left.

The cat is still asleep. I hear thunder, but it's sunny

and the sky is blue. I think maybe my life is a segment

of a film by Kurosawa. Beethoven crashes like a storm.

The doors of Vienna will not close.

Coffee

 

Coffee used to be magic. Seriously, it was like a happy

brain transplant for at least two hours. Now? I dunno.

Boom, boom, goes the thunderstorm, glancing us,

scraping the edge of town, grumble of the gods.

The only thing coffee makes me want to do now is sleep.

I have a couple bags of Puerto Rican espresso

in the cupboard. I spent part of the morning trying to remember

the word “autism.” It was a black hole around which

these words circled: atrophy, atmosphere, audible, acronym,

astonishment, adherence, acclaim, attribution, attempt,

autonomy, and so on. Now the coffee makes my legs want to dance.

Parade

 

It was the day of the big campus parade.

The frat members had finished riding around

on a large chicken wire and papier mache float

built around the chassis of a 1939 Ford pickup truck.

The float resembled an antique train engine,

and one costumed frat brother marched in the street

in front of it swinging an oversized sledgehammer

in one hand, waving with his other hand,

and occasionally dipping into a Jonnie Appleseed

bag sashed across his chest and throwing

Starlite mints out to the children jumping

at the edges of the parade route. That frat brother

was Joe Palooka. The children screamed,

Joe swung his sledgehammer, flung wrapped candy.

KWKY

 

The cabinets are brown and hang from the ceiling

above the electric range built into a brown cabinet

island. A radio, spray painted white, pulls in the local

Country and Western station, KWKY. The announcer

sounds like he is wearing cowboy boots. It is May

and the kittens play in the yard near the junipers.

The sky thunders, but it is clear blue. My mother drinks

a glass of water and cries a little at the sink.

I have not been born. I haven't even been conceived.

There is only sunlight. There is no name to it with the sound

of aircraft landing nearby, big planes, propeller driven,

that have been to Fresno and back again. Why?

Who are these Fresno people and why do they come here?

The sunlight does not know. The sunlight sends out

the warbling of a robin. Cars drive back and forth,

honking, driving to heaven.

Fishbowl

 

It's Thursday, about a quarter ‘til two. I am covered

with kitty hair. But that's neither here nor there.

I'll make noodles for lunch. I want to thank me a heck

of a bunch. I'm awake and I'm asleep. Life is a fishbowl,

but the water is deep. What I spend I can also keep.

The name of water is sunlight steep. I'd tell you more,

but I'm a creep. I am eating reconstituted bok choy

in lo mein with a sprinkle of dry roasted peanuts.

It's like having lunch on Moon Base Two with a robot

Yoko Ono who is wearing a clear plastic raincoat

and screaming like hundreds of small rain forest animals

being consumed by out-of-control wildfires that burn for months.

Randallooney

 

My guardian angel is watching over me and frowning.

I write about death and corpses who woke up and then set themselves on fire. Randallooney just sighs and shakes his head. He is personal friends with Samuel Clemens. They laugh and laugh and laugh together. It's the celestial autobiography of Mark Twain. I want to read it, but it is not available here.

I am listening to Chopin piano waltzes in random order. Finnegan, my tuxedo cat, is sleeping, happy to have me nearby. I am sitting in Mrs. Abercrombie's favorite chair, a lime-gold high back lounger from the 1970s. Chopin wanders out into a meadow of blue and yellow flowers. The notes have a narrative I can follow and believe is true although I was never invited to read at the President's inauguration.

Finnegan jumps from his little soft pillow bed and stretches out on the hard floor. He does this often as he sleeps. Back and forth. Back and forth. I am full from the noodles and bok choy, a little sleepy. I stare at my tall glass of ice tea. I can see the leaves moving outside the window, but I can't hear the wind blowing. The music has stopped. Chopin goes back to rest in his grave for a while.

Swing

 

I sip my tea. I should take a walk, but you know how it is. The music is a gorilla pretending to sing like a cat. There is chicory and Queen Anne's lace growing next to each other all over, lavender and white. It's a poem to the sky performed by flowers. I should take a walk. 

I mailed off two books and Sherry at the post office said she saw two of my daughters one of whom said I never swung her enough at the park when she was a kid. So I call her up for lunch and we meet at the park for sandwiches, and after, even though she is 31, I push her on the swing set and she squeals, “Wheeeeee!” People gather around to watch us. Some older moms who knew us back in the day wipe tears from their eyes. It is the day of the Art Walk, and she, my daughter, will be selling prints at her studio. The radio plays Elgar. The mowers trim our grasses. I push my 31 year old daughter one more time on the swing set, just in case.

Careful Not to Step in the Wolf

 

I'll go park my car at the reservoir

and write three lines on the 11^th

of each month for one year.

I got July, and now it is August.

Cicadas sing as the sun goes down.

We need a carousel, with horses,

lions, rabbits, and camels all carved

with ferocious expressions and painted

vibrantly and lacquered slick.

I want the calliope to play "In-A-Gadda-

Da-Vida" and then “Born to be Wild.”

Rustin Larson’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, North American Review, Poetry East, and The American Entomologist Poet’s Guide to the Orders of Insects. He is the author of The Wine-Dark House (Blue Light Press, 2009), Crazy Star (selected for the Loess Hills Book’s Poetry Series in 2005), Bum Cantos, Winter Jazz, & The Collected Discography of Morning, winner of the 2013 Blue Light Book Award (Blue Light Press, San Francisco), and The Philosopher Savant (Glass Lyre Press, 2015).