The live oak still lives in the birthplace of Dallas,
ramified high enough, fifty falls after,
to block a bead drawn from the sixth-story window
at Houston and Elm. Why call it story?
Says here originally a row of windows
painted with pictures, but what’s the story
of a white-gloved hand grabbing the arm
that jerked up convulsed? What a day.
The sun crusades across the sky
despite the dark attacking early
as highs hit eighty, but does it count
as Indian summer without a prerequisite
killing frost? Doesn’t say here
why Indian summer, and as for pictures
a thousand words each, no way
any picture snapped at the scene
ever beat assassination
lisped by a six-year-old
missing two teeth. What a day.
No wonder he wanted the top down.
Author: Stephen Cushman
Stephen Cushman is Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is The Generals’ Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). Author of several volumes of verse, he is general editor of the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012). Cushman has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Greece, and Rogers Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library. LSU Press will publish his next book of poems, Keep the Feast, in 2022.
Spitting Distance
Leopard skin dangling
there she leans salivating
braced by the wall bending her over
just beyond reach what she likes most
a fantasy to focus her if she still hopes
to get through it soon no faking this one
rubbing her cheeks pretending to chew
thinking of lemons thinking of you
you try to think too whatever it takes
to get a gland going with good eastern view
from garage level three while you both lubricate
cc quintuplets not counting bubbles
sufficient secretion drooled in a tube
takes more than you think
Pavilion for Washing Away Thoughts
Wash away the mockingbird
The western one that doesn’t sing
The repertoire of eastern mimics
Wash away the single point
Fourteen billion years ago
From which it all exploded
Wash away the wondering
What was there before the bang
And was it just the latest?
Wash away the word for bird
Wash away her foot
Washing in the stream that runs
Beside this small thatched hut
Three Sisters, Los Angeles
1.
Head to her knees, her back’s to the statue
of Beethoven brooding, his back to yanks
she’s giving her hair, taking the veil
of gray by the fistful in Pershing Square
under a fan palm, skirt of dead fronds
and high-rise beyond.
2.
She on a bench shadowed by the dome
Chaplin cast as Dictator backdrop,
her purple hat cardboard
elastically chinstrapped by the big heads
of Jackie and Mack, the Robinson brothers,
Jackie facing sunrise
looking to Brooklyn, Mack facing her
wailing out Why at first light on Sunday,
Why oh me why sobbed at the sky.
Granny Was an Angelfish
As for me, I collect pets: young girls—girls from ten to sixteen years old; girls who are pretty and sweet and naïve and innocent—dear young creatures to whom life is a perfect joy and to whom it has brought no wounds, no bitterness, and few tears. My collection consists of gems of the first water.
……………………….Autobiography of Mark Twain, dictated February 12, 1908