I contemplate the land at night and
relive
my
ancestors’ doubts,
their
morals and discrepancies,
how they
built unnecessary fires
and
slaughtered to be warm and satisfied.
Three crickets sing on the hood
of my father’s Chevrolet; three purple finches
nest in my neighbor’s pin-oak.
We came to be here—all of us—
through accidents and intrigue,
a sly pioneer with a rifle, a hungry reptile
making do in dawn’s slight heat.
I’m only sixteen, yet I surmise
the largeness that surrounds me,
surrounded them all—them who presented
themselves as gods, them who tried fire
but couldn’t taste it.
My grandmother prayed to the stars
above Park Crossing, hers to Jesus
Who baffled the servants with wine
and words. I listen to the rain at night,
ours and theirs, or no one’s at all.
My uncle raised pigeons; my mother’s aunt
lit candles in the Byzantine church
that gave sweet smoke. I, who was born
on a Friday, moaned the night
Ritchie Valens died: our preserve
against history, against the obstinate-
always-forward. I hummed and swayed
and imagined his face. I danced in my room
while my sister was asleep and tossed
myself against the drape, the window,
the inside and the outside. A squirrel
leapt, frightened of me.
We make music to be faithful
to a thing we cannot see. We cut earthworms
for bait because our ancestors did,
because we know the taste of blood
lingers long on the tongue.
Exhausted, I imagine falling off
the land of earth toward blue-black space,
drifting backward through calendars
and frenzies of being. I imagine—
most of all—not being me.
Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylül University.