What Frightens, Comforts Me; Last Night, This Morning. & Bird Lesson
What Frightens, Comforts Me;
Last Night, This Morning.
to Rob, pastor and painter
I wake and it takes a moment
to recognize the shadows that fall
across the rug and up the comforter.
Then another to realize a man in
a ski mask isn’t pointing a shotgun
at my father’s chest and I don’t
have to leap in between; I never
grew a ponytail so nobody cut it off;
My ex isn’t screaming at me and
never will again; Cheeseburger
grease isn’t running down my arms
and embarrassing me from the front
of my shirt; I’m not swimming
marlin-quick towards a tidal wave;
And, disappointingly, I’m not
swooping over the woods and
fields of my childhood home.
The half-written verses
for you call to me from
my desk in the moonlight.
Even in a dark room at 3 A.M.
a brightness pinkening the folds
of our minds like a hand tight
over the head of a flashlight.
I am not you,
I have no brush,
no paint,
but somehow,
pen, paper,
nightshirt
sleeves rolled
as high as yours
in your studio,
as high as yours
the day you
baptized me in
a mountain stream
down the thistle-
lined path from
my mother’s garden.
The chill up our ankles.
Damp hands on
my shoulders
holding me in place
till the end of a prayer.
Later on my morning jog somewhere
between the asphalt that sends the sun’s
early heat up my ankles and the lush
riverbank trying to burst into Fall and
failing, I turn off my usual route down
King William Street to find rows of
white tents like gap teeth. Tinkerers
with their trinkets and twists of copper;
crude nudes; landscapes smeared
on creekstone; abstracts with palettes
of fast food chain playgrounds, sloppy
swirling paintings, a few inexplicably
with the chubby arms and heads of
dolls reaching to escape the inferno;
portraits of bored calicos and golden
retrievers and even goldfish that would
fit perfectly on any bathroom wall in
any suburban home, a visitor absently
reading nuance in lop-sided eyes.
I think of all the good little American brains.
I think of every poem I’ve ever written.
I run home as fast as I can.
Bird Lesson
We are born. We dance with our shadows.
The skin loosens. The neighborhood goes quiet.
If we blame blowflies, blame bacteria,
the ant (Squash it!) sneaking up your arm
seconds after you lay in the grass.
The yard will be a meadow but now
your shadow pinned beneath you,
the criss-crossing shadows of buzzards
like bobs of a pendulum.
At my uncle’s memorial (liver cancer)
Aunt Coco flinches when comforted,
reaches for air at the dining room table
as if to fashion a body there.
The ash in the urn does not stir.
Days later she asks a bald eagle
perched at the top of the fir tree,
“Have something to say, Davey?
What do you want, baby?”
We are on her back porch
a margarita or two deep laughing so hard
we don’t notice his silent lift-off.
What lessons birds have to teach us
I haven’t the slightest but
Cardinal after bluebird after mockingbird
slams against the plate glass of my office building.
On the way home hawks careen towards my windshield,
veer off with the timing of a capoeira dancer.
Crows look up from carrion unconcerned.
Cynthia sends an email saying she requires
brain surgery and for weeks in dreams
friends visit the balcony of an apartment
I never lived in to disclose what grows inside them.
I wake knowing what I somehow didn’t before:
The longer I live, the truer the dream becomes.
Dustin King would always rather be sneaking a bottle of wine into a movie theater. When that isn’t an option, he teaches Spanish and runs a small organization that provides aid to the undocumented community in Richmond, VA. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Ligeia, Tilted House, Scapegoat Review, South Broadway Press and other journals.