Young Cops
All young cops have soft
mild eyes. Their upbringing is lavish.
They walk between blueberries and ferns,
rescuing grannies from rising waters.
With the motion of a hand they ask for
a snack from those plastic bags. They
sit down on tree stumps, looking at valleys
and thinking of their moms. But woe is me
if a young one gets mad. A Scourge
of God rings, with a club that later you can
borrow to blot your bare feet.
Every cops wears a cap, his head murmuring under it
A sled rushes down a slope in his dreams.
Whomever he kills, he brings spring to,
whomever he touches has a wound inscribed.
I would give my granny and my
grandpa, my mom and my pa, my wife
and my son to a cop to play with.
He would tie up my grannie's white hair,
but he'd probably chop up my son
on the stump of a tree. The cop himself
would be sad that his toy was broken. That's the way they are
when smoking pot: melancholy. They take off
their caps and breathe their tears into them.
Actually, they're like camels riding
in the desert, as if it were the wet palm of a hand.
(2006)
Mosul
The donkey. The donkey pulling the cart.
The caravan of dust. The cart made of plywood,
of crossbeam and junkyard tires. The donkey
made of donkey. The long face. The long ears.
The curled lashes. The obsidian eyes blinking
in the dust. The cart rolling, cracking the knuckles
of pebbles. The dust. The blanket over the cart.
The hidden mortar shells. The veins of wires.
The remote device. The red light. The donkey
trotting. The blue sky. The rolling cart. The dust
smudging the blue sky. The silent bell of the sun.
The Humvee. The soldiers. The dust-colored
uniforms. The boy from Montgomery, the boy
from Little Falls. The donkey cart approaching.
The dust. The laughter on their lips. The dust
on their lips. The moment before the moment.
The shockwave. The dust. The dust. The dust.
(2011)
At Last
One general dead in the afternoon
The bells are not ringing, the rain
Continues to beat to no lament
In your heart you moved
Mountains of holes, the soil
Of course the river took its toll
The dream a million times
Writing down the sounds to make
Some small thing of your own
Left out in the stars
Faint, not really in heaven
You and she belong together
You smile, it was all unspoken
She came back pulling an old suitcase
Tied round with rope, a broken wheel.
© 2011 Rob Schackne
The Moon In Time Lapse
The moon in time lapse sliding over skyline
the way a remote frisbee might wheel through air
as slowly as a banjo once floated across the wide
Missouri River in my mind when as a boy
the devil to pay permitted me to dream-up
my get-away from home, far from my parents'
witchy vigilance & the wine-barrel cellars
of their household—this after my experimental
stuffing of a dinner fork into a light socket
in the green gazebo under backyard grapevines.
That fuse box blown & blackened was the bliss
of departure—it was thrilling, but sometimes
I have to stop to touch my life & see if it's real.
How surprising to find that I wanted so much,
and mostly got it. My fantasies are fewer now
(one involves living through a day without
resentments, the other getting seated next to
gorgeous Fanny Ardant on a puddle jumper).
No need to see my life as a story the world
has to read, no need for sentimental
mooning & nostalgia—blessed with a bit
of amnesia anyway, I don't recall much
of what went down. I know that it's engraved
there on some cellular level, & that I can't
command the consequences. Like a spider
who has climbed atop a survey stake in a bull-
dozed field, I feel slightly truer in any case.
(2011)
Fears We Have For Children
The old man said, Johnny
It's time for us to leave
Lou Reed
You'll keep plastic bags away
From the cracks and absent soft
They miss the sounds in the womb
The wild electricity they sense
Drawers of pills, sharp knives
Child's play, what's in store
Years later the stumbling blocks
Most voices singing gloriously
Of that one track made perfect
Keeping errant cars from them
Roads they don't know the way to
Bad directions that change the mind
Danger in a sky above, the earth
Behind, the eyes left and eyes right
Below, keep all bloody things away.
© 2011 Rob Schackne
Young Cops
