JISM
And shot his wad all over the wall,
but wasn’t that bound to happen
in the pitch black room when he’d
missed the correct orifice and fell
back, and she whooshing beneath him
like an engine building steam, this being
the trouble with arousal, the paradox
of rushing ahead of himself, the hasty
projection and hapless failure, because
it wasn’t the first time; and it took place
despite the pricy ointments, vitamins,
New Age meditation, stabs at distraction,
like imagining pushing a red Cadillac up
an icy parking ramp while the inevitable
debacle hung in the air like the dirigible
Hindenburg over Lakehurst, New Jersey,
before its own tumescence discharged
in flames; and so he quickly polished up
the old excuses: e.g., a superabundance
of passion, for didn’t she bring to mind
Anita Ekberg frolicking in Trevi Fountain,
a splashing that did the reverse of putting
a damper on his ardor, or he might boast
he’d blasted a warning shot across her bows—
or he frets about making a racket, getting
decrepit, feeling carsick, smelly armpits,
a list falling from likely to silly, as his fearless
Don Juan is morphed into a figure of fun?
VALENCIA
Droplets of water hang from the rusted ceiling
inside the butcher’s truck as clouds of steam
rise from six slick bodies, like prayers ascending
to an empty heaven; six bulls suspended upside
down from hooks, and stripped of their hides,
pink and wet, their black hooves jutting straight
out, like a lost argument’s second thoughts,
heads sawn off, severed necks nearly touching
the mix of blood and water, the floor’s lake:
accept this afterlife, the dead flesh still alight
from living exertion, vapor surrounded and
slashed open from where the pretty killers
had thrust their sharp points during a fifteen
minute rush between certain accomplishment
and certain defeat; the work begun by a blare
of trumpets as the double doors banged open
and each creature took its turn—shiny, dark
and self-assured—to charge a few steps into
the ring, then pause to acknowledge the crowd’s
shout, their great heads erect, the needle-tips
of their horns pivoting left and right—how strange
we must have looked to them—their front legs
all but dancing over freshly swept sand, and eager,
surely eager, like someone at the start of life.
Thanks
for Rick Mann
Your friend grabbing your wrist, as he hung
from the rusty metal ladder, calling out, Do
you need help?—the ladder fixed by bolts
to the concrete abutment sticking into
the river above the falls, your fingernails
dragging bit by bit over the rough stone
with your legs at the lip of plunging water,
and you being powerless to pull them back,
the current being too strong, grasping that
you’d soon be swept into the white caldron
below—the result of not seeing the current
was pulling you into the center of the river,
as you’d half-swum, half-floated, supposing
a few strokes would take you to shore. So
what did you think might happen out of all
the decreasing possibilities? Why, nothing
at all, as you stared up at blue sky and trees
coming into full leaf, because why think
in such glorious weather? So you didn’t notice
you were gathering speed as you floated under
the small bridge; so you hadn’t considered
anything but pleasure when you first waded
into the water, leaving your sandals on the bank,
the current no more than a gentle tug, a dip
before dinner, as you thought of the evening
ahead—your wife, a movie, a book—but not
of the river where many swam, but not past
the bridge; stepping into the river, secure
in your belief in on-going tomorrows, which
was stupid, stupid, because soon you’d be
an instant from being swept over the falls.
Then would you still think you could determine
the end of an action at the start of an action
as you had done when drifting downstream,
because, really, what is the meaning of safety?
A dream, an ambition? Why, nothing at all.
Bio:
Stephen Dobyns’ most recent book is a novel, The Burn Palace, published by Blue Rider/Penguin in February 2013. Palgrave released his second book of essays on poetry, Next Word, Better Word, in April, 2011. His most recent book of poems, Winter’s Journey, was published in 2010 by Copper Canyon Press. His previous work of fiction is a book of short stories, Eating Naked (Holt, 2000). His other work includes Best Words, Best Order (Palgrave, 2003), essays on poetry; and Velocities (Penguin, 1994), a volume of new and selected poems. He has also published eleven other books of poetry and twenty other novels. Two of his novels and two of his short stories have been made into films. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, three fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and numerous prizes for his poetry and fiction. Between 1995 and 2007, he wrote more than thirty feature stories for the San Diego Reader. Dobyns teaches in the MFA Program of Warren Wilson College, and has taught at Emerson College, Syracuse University, Boston University, University of Iowa and half a dozen other colleges and universities. He was born in New Jersey in 1941. He lives in Westerly, RI.