Three Poems by James Kimbrell

FIRST PUBLICATION

I passed out in the barracks
after reading the letter. The ambulance
dropped me at Muse Manor.
I was the charge of one SGT Laughter.
I was all about the heart monitor,
until they shaved my balls. I called
Gordon Lish on a pay phone.
Thanks for taking the poems, I offered,
I’m in the hospital now. “Send us
some more,” he said. I swooned.
Suffice it to say, this was a day of great
swooning. The doctor inquired
if I’d done any drugs. Sure, I said,
quick to add, but not since joining
the Army. I just got my first
poems picked up, I explained,
beaming. He returned with a cup,
commanded me to piss. And this
is what it’s like to be famous,
I thought, and shrugged it off, and did
the rest of the week on light
duty, policing the barracks
for spent cartridges and comic strips.

 

APOCALYPTIC LULLABY

Walking across the snow
to the garage behind my house
in Mt. Vernon, Ohio,
crooked and cold garage
where I’d tinker
with this old pawn shop Stratocaster
deep in my post-divorce blues,
I did not expect
to open the door and find
a teenage couple going at it
like sheep in a prospect
of sun-dappled rye grass
between the mower and my erstwhile
weightlifting bench.
It was sweet how he draped
his stomach, his whole
torso over her back as if to shield
her, or himself, from my view.
What could I do? I said pardon.
I closed the door quietly
and walked toward
the house and tried not
to look out the kitchen window
like the envious creep
I didn’t want to become,
the one who, it occurs
to me now, might have been trying
to tell me something true, ever
applicable: there’s always porn.
Always memory. Always
a good reason to live alone,
to stand outside the radius
of love and witness
the goings-on of shoulders,
breasts, the inimitable
glory and mess of romance
and hair and the brackish
scent that, an hour
later, lingered there.
The world will never end.

 

ELEGY FOR MY MOTHER’S EX-BOYFRIEND

Let it be said
that Tim’s year was divided
into two seasons: sneakers
and flip flops. Let us
remember that Tim
would sometimes throw a football
with all the requisite grip, angle
and spiral-talk. Let us recall
that for the sake of what was left
of appearances, my mother
never once let him sleep
in her bed; he snored all over
our dog-chewed couch, and in
the mornings when I tiptoed
past him on my way
to school, his jowls
fat as a catcher’s mitt, I never cracked
an empty bottle across that space
where his front teeth
rotted out. Nor did I touch
a struck match to that mole
by his lip, whiskery dot that-he
believed-made him irresistible
to all love-lorn women.
Still, let us remember
sweetness: Tim lying face-down,
mom popping the zits
that dotted his broad, sun-spotted back,
which, though obviously
gross, gets the January photo
in my personal wall calendar
of what love should be,
if such a calendar
could still exist above my kitchen table
junked up with the heretos and
therefores from my
last divorce.
Let us not forget
how my mother would slip
into her red cocktail dress
and Tim would say,
“Your mother is beautiful,”
before getting up
to go dance with someone else.
In fairness, let me
confess that I pedaled
my ten-speed bike
across the Leaf River Bridge
all the way to Tim’s
other woman’s house
and laid with that woman’s daughter
beside the moon-
cold weight
of the propane tank, dumb
with liquor, numb to
the fire ants that we spread
our blanket over until
I stopped for a second
and looked up
because I wondered if
her mother could hear us,
or if Tim might not
have stood in the kitchen,
maybe looked out
the window and saw
my white ass pumping
in the moonlight,
and whispered
to himself, “That’s my boy.”