Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Travelogue

The city
(or was it the other one?)
spoke through house ducts
terrifying children
with consonants of dried leaves
and dead rodents
who couldn’t beat back
the rain's current.

If you're wondering.

II.
The apparitions didn’t appear
until I got sober
at my parents house
near East Glacier.
Then every night
-all night-
memories flew.
Living too fast,
in the wombs of stranger women,
than I could.
The booze the class the books the smokes
the lanes changed pedaling
to a two bedroom home
I and a man
live and try
to succeed in.

III.
Sleeping in the bed
I lost my virginity in.
Its weird,
you know,
that I sleep here all the time.
Curled up to the dress she wore
and the corset I never took off
my senior prom when I got drunk
enough for two people
and the four who weren’t even there.
(She cried that night
I heard.)

Dance with me now,
take a walk.
Maybe to the portico
off the red brick and white banistered building?
You know the one,
it’s over there;
inside the tragic auburn trees.
Really,
what happened to the pines?
Children will grow old
in Helena and not know
a full pine except
for in a photograph
like southern temperaments
know a northern winter
because of Hollywood
and greeting cards.

This night
moves forward.

IV.
Mad women were thought
to harbor their mania
somewhere near the crotch.
Scientists, civilized
with modern medicine,
morality, and sanitary conditions,
removed labias
and placed leeches
near clitorises.

The blood flowed
with unparalleled speed
and didn’t cease
for days
and days.
In and out of heavy breathing
with moans pleading the unwrong
accomplished
to deserve such ferocity.

V.
The mountains
are waiting
for the train here,
the same train
that has gone by the intersection
of Dillon and Armory
for a hundred and thirty years.
Unfathomable amounts of people
have witnessed it
who were stopping in town
going east
to go west
back home again.

VI.
A bicycle takes me
to a state park on a lake
with a beach
that overlooks a pine-lined
mountain range,
the Grain Belt taste,
and the last woman
I woke up with.
She liked me
for what she thought
I was
and I didn’t mind
the me she created
in our tonal situation
where black
could have been white
(if paying attention
were important).

VII.
It was dark
and our state was gorgeous.
The moments knelt
before a thunderstorm
and however brutal
the dawn was,
it calmed thought
then forgot…

Where am I again?