About the Dead

Read an Excerpt

ABOUT THE DEAD

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By Travis Mossotti

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Travis Mossotti
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-826-8

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Contents

Foreword by Garrison Keillor....................ix
Decampment....................1
ONE Country of Forgotten Language Inside the Skull....................9
Crossing the Gap....................11
Peregrination....................12
Red Roof Inn....................13
Alice....................15
I'm explaining a Few Things....................16
Still-life Minus Fruit....................17
The Dead Cause....................18
Henry's Blues....................20
Passport....................21
Preparing the Table....................22
At Church....................23
Outside Pinckneyville....................24
Wheat Field with Crows....................25
TWO About the Dead Creating the Garden....................29
The Second Coming of Christ in the Form of a North American Alligator....................30
Today, Houdini is Buried....................31
Funhouse of Mirth....................32
Box....................33
American Song....................34
variations on a Political Theme....................35
An Apology....................36
Saxifrage....................37
Barber....................38
Form....................39
For Years....................40
Surgery....................41
reminiscing Skyros....................43
happens Slowly....................44
About the Dead....................45
THREE As Broken in the End My Brother's house....................49
It's No Secret....................50
Float Trip....................51
Getting Arrested....................53
Too Many hillsides for the Dead....................54
Glass of Water....................55
news of Surgery....................57
O Captain! My Captain!....................58
Open Mic....................59
Trivial Pursuit....................60
Questions of Heaven and Hell on Sunset Blvd....................61
Rick and the Hooker....................62
I watched her going into a gas station,....................63
As Broken in the End....................64
Yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion....................65
Only Then....................66
Acknowledgments....................68
About the Author....................70
The May Swenson Poetry Award....................71

Chapter One

Country of Forgotten Languages

    INSIDE THE SKULL
    ~after a painting by Francisco de Zurbarán


    Once inside the skull, I felt free to choose the décor
    without recourse or disapproval, so I hung a portrait
    of myself on the western cranial wall, potted two

    African violets and placed them on an end table
    (two inspires competition for light and affection).

    I rolled out my grandmother's Slovakian rug,
    and upon it, two folding chairs facing
    the ocular windows. Soon enough,

    morning came stampeding into the room
    like someone had opened a blast-furnace door.

    Venetian blinds crossed my mind. I just thought
    of the words, and there they were,
    a flood of orange gathering at my feet.

    From then on, willing things into existence
    occupied my time: first, I was bitter, gorgeous,

    chiseled from marble, and then on the eastern wall
    a mirror appeared; second, she appeared: I named her
    Darla. I conjured a decanter, Cornish hens, a kitchen table.

    That night, I invented a bed where we made love. The next
    morning the folding chairs were replaced with a couch

    I must've dreamed up, with Darla on it, resting.
    She said, It was like it just occurred to me, rubbing a hand
    over her rounded and very pregnant stomach.

    Out the window, I noticed a mendicant dressed in rags,
    edging closer to us along an old goat-herder's path

    under a variegated row of stone pine. he lifted us up,
    cradled us in his palms like we were a strange
    and fragile object—peered with the intensity

    of a man walking through a darkened field. But soon,
    his eyes dropped to the ground like a broken mule,

    like someone who understands he's been cheated.
    It's as if he had seen something that wasn't there.
    It's as if he had seen us cowering inside.


    CROSSING THE GAP

    Try asking Ernie Watts, a local bricklayer,
    to explain how after a long day of work
    and league night at the Lucky Strike
    he can glide across the kitchen floor,
    Old Style hovering like a ghost on his breath,
    bowling shoes slung over one shoulder,
    singing fly me to the moon to his wife Cheryl.
    And when he dips her over the linoleum
    like it was their first homecoming all over again,
    ask him to put into words what that sinking is,
    that shudder in his chest, as he notices
    the wrinkles gathering at the corners of her mouth.
    He'd rather tell you about the time they rode
    the Tail of the Dragon the year after they'd married,
    crossing Deals Gap at the Tennessee state line
    on his '77 Triumph Silver Jubilee.
    How they heard talk of a young couple
    dying on that same stretch of road a week before,
    and how hard she held onto him that day-
    curve after potentially deadly curve.
    Afterwards, in bed, she'll reach for the Virginia Slims
    on the nightstand, and he'll open
    the windows behind the headboard
    as a summer breeze creeps past the lithesome curtains-
    wild grass and honeysuckle mixing with the tobacco.
    If the drone and flicker of a gathering storm should disrupt
    the silence of the room, she'll tighten the wing nut
    of her body behind his, so close that when her lips
    brush against the nearly imperceptible hairs
    on the back of his neck he'll be convinced
    there is no other life but this.


    PEREGRINATION

    In recent
    history,
    the plated
    armadillo
    became
    determined
    to travel
    northward
    to Illinois
    and beyond.
    I know of this
    journey
    only from
    sad little
    remains
    on shoulders
    of highways,
    from windows
    of speeding
    automobiles,
    from darkened
    crests of blue
    mountains.


    RED ROOF INN

    I.

    The mattress had a dead-man's
    give to it. I snapped off
    a rabbit ear, set it on the table.

    I had the place to myself.

    Nobody fucked on the other side
    of the wall unless they fucked
    like a breezeway door,
    like a five-minute shower.

    I left my boots on the mat.
    I paid cash for everything.

    I wanted you
    to find me like this.
    That would've meant something.

    Instead, blind static,
    room reeking from the awful,
    yellow liver of the last trucker
    who slept here. He must've still been
    in the walls, part of him at least:
    a work flannel, a pair of boots
    tossed aside.

    Dark enough, early morning,
    I bit the end off my last cigar,
    fired it up like a cat's eye.

    No way would the fog keep me
    from leaving.


    II.

    You never believed me when I said
    I didn't have the guts to kill him:

    dark guts, blackwatch guts,
    sawdust-burning-quick guts.

    He squirmed
    in pig shit,

    blood rose
    in his throat,

    Death's knees on his chest.

    One time, and it carved me up inside.

    One lousy time and you swore it meant nothing,
    kept kissing my hands
    like I was a goddamned saint.

    I snatched the shotgun from the shelf.
    I left myself.
    It happened that easy.


    ALICE

    Walking down the highway's soft shoulder
    on the way to you, I passed a single lichen
    covered boulder the color of your eyes.
    I brushed it with the backs of my fingers
    half-believing you watched from the pines
    like an owl. A quarter-moon stalked
    from a distance, and I imagined you, alone,
    standing in a doorframe, wrapped in a quilt,
    cigarette lazing between your fingers.
    Maybe it was the seam of your black stocking
    I trailed through Appalachia, chicken dinner
    cooling on a billboard, the sky opening up
    its empty skull, gravel dust powdering
    my unkempt hair with the same dull ivory
    of the letter you sent telling me not to come,
    for the sake of your children who by then
    were bean stalks winding their way up your legs.
    Half the state of Tennessee still lay between us.
    I unrolled my sleeping bag on top of a flattened
    patch of thistle and saw grass near the trees
    and dreamed I was riding a boxcar through
    a country of forgotten languages—a field
    of cotton on the verge of telling me a secret.


    I'M EXPLAINING A FEW THINGS

    There's an old bullet lodged in the field of scrub
    behind my house that's grown colorless as dirt.

    The land is implacable, even as its familiar scene
    of death and light retreats into the browning dusk.

    Offspring of the offspring of the offspring
    of crows cross over the thistle and brush,

    cross over ground that remembers nothing of human loss.


    STILL-LIFE MINUS FRUIT

    Morning rolls over on its side
    as delicately as an African violet
    first unfurls petals of pink and
    white, and you are still a thousand
    miles away, asleep; your dreams
    puncturing the walls of incalculable
    distances. You will scribble down
    your dim reflections on the skein
    of water pouring from the showerhead
    and consider the simple pleasure
    of warmth laved over your nipples—
    my lips traveling against all odds
    and practicality to meet them.


    THE DEAD CAUSE

    On the porch, a grasshopper waved
    its serrated foreleg at me while I juggled

    groceries for keys; it was the kind
    of friendly wave I might've expected

    from a loved one, recently dead,
    reincarnated into this green husk.

    The whole ordeal triggered an alarm
    of distant thunder, stuffing my head

    with dark seeds; so after waving back,
    I ducked inside, fearful

    of inadvertently giving the dead cause
    to haunt me—the last thing

    I needed. Regina was off doing research
    in Glen Rose again, otherwise

    she would've identified the grasshopper
    using the scientific precision that always

    fussed my mouth with cobwebs.
    As it was, I dialed her number

    just to make sure she was okay,
    that she wasn't yet a grasshopper.

    Probably nothing more than a locust—Melanoplus
    spretus, she said. It could've been Buddha. Maybe

    I shouldve invited it in for tea, I said before saying
    goodbye. Raindrops the size of doorknobs

    began chasing a garbage truck past
    the kitchen window. I set the kettle

    on the stove to boil, and with curtains
    curled back slightly, watched a procession

    of locusts lope out from the tall grass,
    apparently no longer waiting for an invitation.


    HENRY'S BLUES

    My musician neighbor hollows out
    a piece of sky with his guitar,
    until there's room left
    for nobody but him—
    a broken concerto

    he still lugs around
    for Angela, his ex-wife,
    each chord fouling
    in the attic of his chest.
    I watched them once,

    through the window: Angela
    pinched her little castanets
    like lotus blossoms,
    and danced slow twirls
    around the kitchen table;

    Henry, humming whiskey
    through a harmonica, blessed
    her sweet can with a spatula,
    while night's ivory sullied
    outside.

Continues...

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Excerpted from ABOUT THE DEAD by Travis Mossotti Copyright © 2011 by Travis Mossotti. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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