c.rohrbacher

Father and Son


Dreamers Are Gluttons

 

Inheritance

 

Over  A Bowl Of Potato And Corn Soup, Mr. Marvin Tells Me How He Castrated Baby Goats

 

Love Poem #1


Leather Death Fruit and Flying -- A Consideration


The Mechanic Takes on Language


135th & Crossing


It Could've Been


Kermit's Jazz


The Muse


Herman


Immortality


In Time


Bottomed Out Language


Such Fears


Spreading Out Histories


Days Unfold


There is a Flutter of Noise in My Head






 

Leather   Death    Fruit    And Flying — A Consideration

 

I.

 

Glaring off black steel and

thick chrome of a dozen

airbrushed Harleys lined up

like a column of black seeds

on the sidewalk’s ledge,

the sun screams:

 

“For the sake of Henry Ford, stop the madness.”

 

Fayeteville, Ohio, 1998

 

Yes, there are men with long beards and goatees,

dark jeans and leather vests, sunglass

wrapped around their tanned skulls

and women with black shirts and bandannas, long

hair and blue tattoos who hang

off their men like jukebox songs after last call, like

juice dripping from an elbow, a wrist.

 

II.

 

Greasy spoon.  Old men

and women with coffee.

Plates of toasted hash-browns

and salisbury steaks, eggs

and stacked chipped beef.

 

       Cigarettes smoldering in yellow ashtrays.

 

Everyone eyes the scene outside.

 

III.

 

The crowd gathers

like ants on a dropped ice cream cone. 

                                    Like old men at the porn store. 

                                                Like flowers on a casket.

 

IV.

 

A biker studies the geography of watermelon

littering the street--juice and pits and green shells

with the guts hanging out.  He finds

an unbroken one thrown against his bike’s tire,

picks it up, breaks, bites, chews,

spits seeds into the gutter. 

 

V

 

The history of the moment--what they saw:

 

The couple with matching black helmets

raced by on a rice burner

            as the rusted Chevy bearing hundreds

                        of watermelons pulled out.  An argument

of metal and flesh ensued.  People

on the street dropped their bags.  People

in the stores gaped.  People

in their cars pulled over. 

 

A woman with short red hair jogged down the street

with her hand over her mouth like she was going to be sick.

 

Like she saw a woman in a movie who witnessed

something horrific, and this was how that actress had reacted. 

 

The wife or girlfriend lay still in the gutter’s arm, her helmet cracked

and beaming: a split black egg in the sun.


Originally published in Sub-Terrain

 

 

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