Syndicate
Daniel Carter
Daniel Carter
Behind the glass, backed by a hotel’s paper facade: an idol we made of a box
and a hole, a pipe and a bowl. I’ve seen temples crumble, but the postcard says
it’s made of stone and Greetings from the Holy Land.
Once upon a time he climbed into a tree. Seen from above, only the darks count.
Let the blonde and the sandy come to me. We toss out our travels—scribbles
on napkins, the way to the beach. We leave out the bits not fit for the father; he
returns the whole tale.
We owe him only our droppings: motes of dust, scattered black dots. But he
takes them in and pours out a stream. Not bearings but the way.
How many men does it take to shake out a Pharisee? It’s best—I’ve read—
to hold him by an ankle, turn out his pockets, slap his cheeks. Make gold
coins fall down. We give him shake, but he returns clean smoke; he never
lets a leaf drop stray. Everything floats up, but he never comes down.
Long married feet in the field of blue, smashed among the other pairs.
Between leaving and love, seasons and sleep strung out as sheets—sheets
cast in iron, clasped, made illegible and re-forged in the hot wind.
The new star surveys, cuts a little from each of our tendrils. Presses one wet to
the other and wraps the cut in plastic and foil. Dew condenses; lines wander.
So two feet bear a third.
So the tail of the serpent turns to a tongue.
So stacks flare and fall dark, taken.
Graft is a process best undertaken at high altitudes.
That summer we split ourselves in the lamplight. The book man fell and spilt
his pack. Children played over the waste and made habits of folded newspapers.
Each house corner was prayed before.
And now the mass in the sky goes flat, grows darker every day. I hung books
from a rope and watched water run down their sheets, wash away their lines.
A man turned water tower, I kept watch between the empty stacks. Fall’s
approach brought down clouds, and the children—crusaders—camped in fog
banks and quested for new answers.
She’s got pieces. He put her perfect by the highway, her toes dangling off the
faded lawn chair. The most marvelous part of the grey motorcar isn’t that he
doesn’t know it’s there, but that I took out its beating six-cylinder engine, buried
it under the sand, and it kept zooming over the desert, headed for Los Angeles.
Peach now, she’ll melt to deep blue when the sun’s gone, sit in the pool of
almost-purple, almost lost among the rocks. What he doesn’t know is that a
coyote can lose a leg to a trap, but the man with the knife won’t recognize the
beast’s limping gait. Las Cruces blew off the map, but cars still pass through the
city. No forests here, but a songbird in each stone.
So I censored everything. I scrubbed her clean. A perfect worker, blonde and
glass-eyed, she’s a catch in painted daisy dukes, and a man with a knife is sure
to take her. In his cab, in a parking lot motel: little television or radio says
despite unpredictable thermals, they’ll still race on Saturday. I scrubbed that
clean, too, and when he laid her on the bed, he thought it felt like home.
In the desert: nothing dies. A toad in the dry season learns to love the dirt and
finds all my secrets buried there. Boxes are the most marvelous things. Dirt
clods are a hobby; the rock formations that bite, black, into the sunset house my
real treasures.
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