Larry Duncan

Poetry

 

 

Last Light at the Biograph

 

The streets will splay,

a monkey’s paw of perdition,

black fingers curling to claw

the ancient fissures of the palm.

Without map or memory,

each road will braid a common scenery.

The signs will mean nothing.

 

Girls in bathing suits will press

hands to the observation window,

a mushroom cloud of white

billowing in their wake,

bleached cotton draped over scarecrows,

the thorny men in supplication

to the body behind the glass.

 

We will eat the fingers first,

sacrificing the hands

before the delicacy of tongues,

the most abstract of numbers

finding measure in teeth.

 

“Do you chew?”

will be the tenor of the thin and famous.

Bleached and horned skulls,

carved clean by jungle ants,

will grin under a bloody moon.

 

We will eat the ants.

We will eat the roaches.

We will eat the fleas.

We will eat the sand.

We will eat the ashes.

We will eat the air.

 

The pyres will be like Christmas trees

when at long last the final mourners pass

and in the body of Dillinger we trust.

 

 

 

After Midnight Melancholia IV

 

“There are only three things to be done with a woman,” said Clea once. “You can love her, you  can suffer for her, or you can turn her into literature.”

~ Lawrence Durrell, Justine

 

Didn’t you quote Justine once?

Or was it another?

A different you

from a time before or after,

an old friend,

someone I’d seen naked.

 

I could have imagined it.

I imagine so many things,

the comings and goings,

the meaning of leaves,

the unsettling connection between whirring of ancient

mainframe computers buried miles below the surface

and the slow dissipation of the astrological theater in the stars.

Can you imagine?

Like I imagine you.

 

Either way,

I think we can both agree

the book was butterflied,

propped open by your bedside,

quick in your hands

like a prop in a play,

something with purpose,

design.

Who placed it there?

Was it me?

Do I have design?

Or was it a different me?

From sometime before or after.

Someone you’d seen naked.

It seems unlikely it was your mother.

You being older then,

older than you are now,

and living alone,

not as a child in someone else’s house.

 

It’s hard to tell the pears from the pages.

After so many years

and so many cigarettes,

it all begins to taste the same.

There’s only a hazy sense of place,

as if it were all clouds

and I just a child on a hill,

time only where the tether slips

when I reach my hand to pluck another dandelion.

 

Even so, I think we can agree

Durrell reeks of corpses.

But then, so do you

and I,

and this city,

and the traffic lights

turned by wind and made to spin,

and the cars clicking

their dirty clockwork all night

and the half-naked woman,

eyes blinded in the bus stop enclosure,

pulling her shorts to her ankles,

and turning a circle with her hips,

the men from the liquor store

drawing out their cell phones.

Everyone becoming camera now,

a seething wave of insect eyes

mapping the map,

dressing the bride in her digital gown.

Every ounce of air

full of frantic particles

eager to expel heat.

 

But why should I blame Durrell—

He’s never done anything to me.

I’ve never even finished one of his books—

or the palm fronds like desiccated wings

gathered around the trunk of the tree,

or Pepsi-Cola,

or Big Oil,

or Charles Babbage,

or anything.

I mean, they’re my eyes after all,

my lungs so full of smoke and coughs,

my bones so brittle and shattered into spines.

I can only drink so much before I get sick.

 

Besides, I love corpses.

They’re my business.

All this flesh falling away,

I gather it up,

make a kind of origami.

“It’s alive. It’s alive.

It’s five for a dollar.

Everything must go.”

Everything a corpse

until we breathe life.

 

 

 

My Father’s Legs

 

First, I remember

 

frayed denim.

Braided helix

of soft cotton

fingers crowded

around my father’s

angry knee.

 

only his legs.

One stretched

across the oil

stained asphalt,

boot toward heaven.

The other bent,

boot flat to the earth.

 

the bottle at his hip.

The light turns liquid

when he rises,

thick fingers wrenching

at the chrome.

It is all erased.

It is the sun I see,

and not his face.

 

Here is the fray,

the open mouth

and its flailing teeth.

Here I begin.

The rest hidden

under the pitted frame

of a mustard colored dirge.

 

 

 

River Blind

 

When the days came due,

the spiral procession of cards

swept from the table

for a final shuffle

and every hand laid bare,

I knew I’d have to settle.

 

There is only so much you can wager,

a limit on every run.

Go on and mark the ledger—

double-headed or straight—

the house keeps a secret count,

beyond the blind and off the books,

balancing the score.

 

Win or lose,

the house cuts deep.

 

If I can say anything,

I can say I held my chips

and learned the feel of aces—

so few and far between—

but also to feign loss,

to strike a miser’s face

even in the perfect symmetry

of sets of four and the opulent

glory of royal flush.

 

Even now,

slouched under the seraphim

glow of this carnival arcade.

My fist clenched around the terminal

grace of  my last silver dollar.

The unfired bullet of providence

pressed against my naked wrist.

 

 

 

After Midnight Melancholia XII

 

I lose books in bars.

I leave them like tips,

butterflied by an empty

pint and a bundle of bills.

If a stranger picks it up,

begins to reads where I left off,

does that make us brothers?

Lovers?

Do we complete

one another’s thoughts?

 

I never exactly remember

where or when a story ends.

It’s a big empty,

an open mouth

like the Outback,

or the American West in movies,

or when you realize that even stars age.

Besides, you can’t count

on the weight of last lines.

I mean, when was the last time

you ever marveled a frame.

 

Things disappear,

or rather move toward their end,

or rather toward disorder,

but any Buddhist or physicist can  tell you that.

It’s all there, spinning another turn.

 

I’ve lost my driver’s license,

my credit cards,

and every morning my keys.

Once, I lost the heel of my boot.

I teetered to the right all the way home,

and fell into a bush a block

before I reached my door.

I didn’t notice until the next day.

Holding the flat sole in my hand,

I turned it around and around

unable to understand.

I thought the world had just gone crooked.

 

I’ve been losing a long time,

all the time,

every time,

moment to moment,

flaking off like old skin,

tossed like pennies to the street.

I’ve lost my train of thought,

my Saint Christopher,

my last dime,

my wonder,

my word my wonder,

my will to speak

and a thousand thousand lonely

socks to the void of various dryers,

but apparently so has everyone.

 

I’m not sure when I lost my self,

maybe puberty,

or my first job,

or the last round,

maybe at the freshness of first breath,

but either way the bastard’s still humming

with the moths around the bulb.

 

Sometimes the things I’ve lost come back.

The other night I ordered a shot

and the bartender said,

“I got your Bolaño,”

smiling another dollar into her tip.

I was whiskey enough to give her two,

every inch of her fingers

at the edge of every bill.

She left under the arm

of a guy with both his heels.

Who can blame her?

It’s an easier walk home.

I stayed around drinking,

losing quarters to the jukebox

and hours to the day.

 

I often lose my way,

find myself in unfamiliar neighborhoods,

knocking at strangers’ doors,

hoping someone will answer

and say, “Come inside.

We’ve been waiting.

We’ve been gathering

all the things that you’ve lost.”

 

 

 

Larry Duncan currently lives in Redondo Beach, CA. His poetry has appeared in Juked, the Mas Tequila Review, Emerge Literary Journal and the Free State Review. He is the author of two chapbooks, Crossroads of Stars and White Lightning and Drunk on Ophelia. To learn more about Larry and his writing, visit at http://larrydunc.wix.com/larry-duncan.