Kevin Dooley
I woke up to a light of sky
and you were my homeland.
When did this happen? How?
I turned my hands in the new
earth of you, because you were
there, in my bed, a mountain
rising. My hands, too—earth
I know and am also made of.
I called you into yourself:
Come, mountain, I said, lifting.
I drank you, river who is
outside wetting my ankles
and also inside running me—
a thick ambering sweet. I am
the river and you are you—
river, carving into the clay
I am carved from. How land is
made is how you became mine.
I want to offer you something
equal, and beauty concerns me
not. Maybe I will become yours—
we call that Nation. I arrived
with a war horse already
foaming in my mind; I come
with bullets glinting feelings
or memories—sometimes they
are the same: bullet, feeling,
memory. Ghosts I try to shoot
except I wear a ghost shirt—I am
singing a _______ ghost song,
except I’ve already been shot.
I want to shoot the president
of the club but I don’t have
a gun—I know what it’s like
to pretend to think with one
kissing your temple. It feels
like a meteor leaning into
your mind. The way it feels
when you sink your hand into
a warm lake at night. Instead
of buying a gun, I buy tennis
shoes—air force ones, new,
which are remade versions of
the old ones, except more $.
I have problems: one isn’t
ninety-nine. We poets are
failing. We writers. We are
singing for the same post
reading supper. We are
standing in front of one-
hundred plastic tanks on
the clean streets of Twitter.
We try to pray but only clap—
this is the evolution of Poetry.
The tongues left us for bigger
muscles. We remember them,
tongues, because the seals re
mind us—those thick priests of
the coast praising the tube sock
shape of each other’s body,
lying on the warm flat rocks,
like slugs in all the pictures.
Like words. All beautiful, all
took the top of my head off.
All brilliant. And it is—when
light hits water it is brilliant.
Literally. The vultures are also
pretty—they smell us miles away.
We smell like North America,
and we are meaning to write
poems in the sky—meaning
we are circling our lives. We are
in helicopters, live-streaming,
pointing down at the survivors.
We drop them a thousand poems
we wrote overnight. That’s how
good we are, so fast. The seals
applaud! What is freedom?
My friend says: That’s not
freedom, that’s just running
around bumping into shit. From
our planes, we can’t see that
what else is floating down there,
collapsing down there is our
language. What is a poet with
a line that stopped moving? No
I didn’t ask whose line stopped
working. I am from the desert—
I am not afraid of shade. Some
times it is the truth about a tree.
Sometimes it will save you from
vultures licking your bones clean.
Isn’t the line the body, wrought
again or again? Or is the line
a pallbearer? Must we carry
our own caskets? The editors,
our senators, are in on it,
thinning our ranks. Hooking us,
on the opioid of trauma.
Traumatizing our language.
Is this linked to the CIA?
Seed-IA. We can be dangerous.
Which is why they won’t let us
write good sentences anymore.
Find me a good sentence
and I’ll find you someone
who will fight hard in the war.
Don’t assume I mean everyone
but me. There is always a donkey
hidden in the scrub brush of
my poems, and the donkey’s
name is rigor mortis. I brought
nothing for the children because
they were only wounds,
and still without easy decoration
I brought nothing for the children
because you asked me to bring it.
It’s not easy to tie ribbons to
the chain links. It is not easy
to watch what happened to you
four hundred years ago, or
what is happening to you now
for seven hundred years straight.
I woke up this morning, and
my beloved has become mine
homeland. Meaning I have dis-
placed her with my displacement.
I married her, reader. Invaded her
like any good Nation should.
And then, like any lazy poet,
I wrote a poem about it.
Image Credits: Kevin Dooley
