Duluth - watercolor on paper

Jellyfish Pickle

      About don’t, headache and bull bauble twirl

nestled in the coarse gladden, has milieux in the tuque,

sluice in the wine bag fluke and bum along is breading.

Align unless. Be live and we believe in now, a moose.

He clomp ginger over meadow, a gherkin muse

of moist breath vale pall. Snort the jimsonweed

burlap bitter notions and drop hide sack to muck.

In pickling sludge soil, supine tureen bowl over blister

and silk scrub hisses. Wormward. The nipped flute stem

wear bent wet cord petites upon that which even crow 

molt. Course the hair gone grass thin cluster rot now

rise to glass opaque bell structure, rise to fill a sky

by electric nettles. Lightning bug wander string.

Jellies graze in cluster of timid nuzzle, though       

lick a clouds staid of may craggle blues. Snuggle

a petite cigar. An echo void between jelly fishier.

Moose bull thunder now gone to kowtow.

Such the quiver pickle in the vinegar brine inch.

Goodnight Minneapple

Brimful Jug

If once the pond they rose to hold to hurt,

  her hands she cupped and spoke so slow and she

    the one they sing of ply the veil. And she

that stood were kept at least and blind to put

  such drink today my mouth she bruised if once

    from me withdrawn to which I gave undone.

The walk the toil the veil ornate as one

  in this belief and gleam of sun so that

    we all in kneel to pray. We lay that was

if once unscathed by will confess and His

  the hallowed scorn had mount and now if each

    whose word were stir and simply left to lyre.

Bones & Skillets pt. 1

Bonsai

She also happened with her sense left upon this

 and again she saw awhile a couple and went after

  until the night garden exploded and with her ongoing

   were left pure, were it not to divert the elysian field

    that set with relative features. With no touch were it

   made possible to peach. And in this way was she asked

  for the cushion sugars that she had tried to the koi pond

 and she laced herself into such fragrant liqueurs there

and were to bloom to. Ask when the daisies emerge

 waterproof and demonstrate such plague signals after

  having put at the rational hook which had left with

   enough to denial when turned to easement. Then

    she turned reclusive. Use. She spared unframed then

   by the altered body compositions with no recourse

  to greater definition. Just as she had chosen persistence

 liners that you are now a snail alongside the tinier rind.

Gush Hedge Then

My life

from this

stirring a

gentleness

which movements

like a considerable

beast designed to

refract sun were

sculpt the molded

prairie flowers. And

crushing against some.

I slept in violets,

were silent that

we heard and as such

that trembled

of the render deep

toward me to wake.

I ceased sleep here,

its cloth of derision

taken and also

from then on.

The Conservatory

The Balloon Station

Our clicking heels fade down the cobbled stones

and around the rainbow’s end that pot-houses the golden slurry

of bubbled beans and franks. Far from tilled fields,

the lines of heaving trees, once daunting and rimmed with mystery,

become as undulating rows along a familiar boulevard.

We’re gingham girls from out the family clapboard.

We chase crystal ball whims and bow down to crowned heads of Europe.

And though there are many faces in the darkened wood,

we feel safe clutching the trunk, running our fingers

across rough hides. Trees are so terrifyingly tall

with tendrils screwed deep under sod. They whisper

to one another, pass ancient secrets culled from out the husk.

We’re little. We like the cover as ambient light filters

through a shifting lid of latticework. It’s what we know.

We feel safe beneath the burls.

But like Valhalla dumped out from Odin’s nest,

a city of light rises from the sodden prairie.

Celestial voices call us from the safety of the wood.

We step out into the sun, into the light where trees tower

no more. The splendid city is close now and holds wonders

forged to fit every prayer. We want to lick it.

Hidden somewhere deep within the polished walls of the city

is a balloon station, baskets at the ready

for feats of stratospheric derring-do.

We want to ride on currents of air.

We break from the trees, run there

laughing, bounding through the fields

of poppies, poppies.

A Summer Song - Minnesota

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire - 100 years ago today!

The Old Knickers - by James D. Autio

The Old Knickers

She wears threadbare floral prints.

She has a family back at the tenement

waiting for hugs and feed: hurly bulk of a husband,

perpetual scent of sweat, nails ringed with black.

Her hungry young are growling in the gulliver.

Had the shirtwaist factory floor an unlocked door,

she’d run out and home, into eager arms.

But the immigrants were not to be trusted. Still,

who’d ever have imagined that an oldwoodframefiretrap

full of sewing stations with frayed cords,

rooms packed to rafters with ready-to-wear,

could sear with such excitement

that doorknobs might melt?

Missus has now gone beyond the mullions, face blackened with soot,

once-long hair a smoldered bob and she sees the fire ladder

two floors shy of doing much good. Leaning out

over Greene Street her ears pop to silence and the sky turns crystal.

Her boys are off kicking cans in Miller’s field.

Firelicking closer, she’s urged to shuffle another inch.

She snatches up her children’s smiles, her parents’ final words,

her husband’s simple straightforwardness and urgent lovemaking.

She grabs old Mrs. Rosen’s hand, and together they rush down,

skirts billowing beneath them,

showing their old knickers to all the looky lous.

Wikipedia page about the fire.

Hey Crow

      I’m a stringer

between leafless trees

in a Minneapolis

ice grey morning.

They struggle, yet

hold their own

between flour mill

ancient factories.

      Rounding

from 8^th and down

the dead alley, I notice

abrasive brick sliding slow

beneath my touch,

so far removed

from the feel of skin.

      If I could write

to you, I’d wax poetic

on streamers of industrial

white reaching for the skies,

and that lone crow

in our loading dock

eyeing me with  

      mild interest.

Lord Dog at the Fork

The bowlegged dog looked mighty solid

standing there, lord over the fork of a dirt road.

And as we, she and I, approached in our carriage

her boot eased back from the gas. I quipped:

Let’s let the lord decide which road we’ll travel.

As a poet I like to make vague allusions to things

like the work of another poet, especially knowing

that I stand alone, heel toe and unbalanced, entrenched

in ruts dug by the itinerant poetry wagon that crisscrosses

the solar fields. And as I struggle to keep my look of cool

and maintain a semblance of self-assuredness, a grooved out

beatnik hipster of daydream delusion, a tightrope walker

with Converse treads in the bumpy ditch of the

poetry wagon solo allusion semblance wheel rut—

wait, where was I?— that dog watched our approach.

We watched him. He stood solid. We rolled forward

nearing the point where a decision would need to be made,

because, after all, a man and a woman can’t just climb

into a carriage and set off on a journey together only to

pause indefinitely at the first juncture and be unable

to make a decision about which way to go, left or right,

or whether to fork at all, perhaps choosing to remain

stalled at the crossroads and set up shop selling groceries

and souvenirs to couples traveling on, undaunted

by the big choices. But we, she and I, are watchers

and we put our faith in the lord, knowing in our hearts

that he certainly wouldn’t steer us down

some dangerous path pocked out with wheel cracking divots.

He stood solid. We watched him. He barked one time

and turned to his right, our left, and raised his snout

slightly to sniff the breeze. We looked down that way

and the road curved a slope to where an old covered bridge

passed over a creek. The dog looked to us back over his haunch.

We had come some distance already and didn’t know

where we were at all. We trusted the lord though. In the short time

we had been together, he hadn’t yet steered us wrong.

But guide or not, we, she and I, had to choose our path.

We drove. We paused again. Backpedaled and turned.

That old covered bridge sure was pretty.

Snow at Silver Lake

Innocent Nine

My mind breezes between things. Tring tong goes the bell, then a fist – leather gloved – pounding, pounding. Innocent Nine and I scuttle across dark carpet, try to peer between pulled drapes, but the crack left onto our corner of the world reveals nothing. Bam bam bam. The door, solid core I think, withstands another onslaught, but the hinge brasses blanch and shudder at the barrage. Innocent Nine and I exchange wide-eyed silence. Peripherally, I pick up the cheap steel deadbolt. In an instant, Nine is there sliding the bolt into place, without even a sound.  He holds his head low under another volley of bams and tring tongs. Then, the noise stops. Nine bellycrawls back to me, whispers that he heard muttering, footstomps receding. Outside, a door muffles shut; a truck grunts and peels away. Innocent Nine looks up to me and he asks, “Dad, why do we hide from Swan?”

I ease back a drape in time to see the ice cream truck round the corner. Knowing he’s gone, I settle down for the moment to try to explain what Schwan’s represents, but my mind breezes between things and I find maintaining coherent thoughts to be a lot like Eskimo pies. While Eskimos have 381 descriptive words for snow, Baskin-Robbins has only 31 flavors, though that’s still more than Schwan’s offers at the door, but they do have those pies and Baskin-Robbins only deals in scoops. “Eskimos have only 1 word for pie,” I say, thinking it meaningful, but Nine, not even yet a teen, has already stopped listening. 

Sky People

Boarding the Bus

The month of June in ‘92 was a scorcher. The sun had more than doubled in size, air conditioning was prohibitively expensive, and I was sharing an apartment near Lake of the Isles in South Minneapolis. My roommate was a young woman who regularly overindulged in smelly liqueurs. Back then I was an oil painter and my roommate, alcohol permitting, was my model. Jody and I would drink day or night, sometimes even finding some time to create art. More often, Jody and I would frequent one of several of the Uptown neighborhood pubs, spending our afternoons perched on barstools, watching sweat beads roll down highballs. By sundown and paychecks permitting, I’d be floating in a vodka tonic and Jody would be sinking beneath the bubbles of a fizzy green on the rocks with maraschino squeezings.

            This one afternoon I was sitting alone in the apartment, Wink Martindale grinning from the small black and white TV. Jody hadn’t been around all day, but I was hoping that she’d call. I was itching to get to the bar. Just then the phone rang. Two minutes later, I was standing on Hennepin Avenue, waiting for the bus. Jody was in Uptown. Her parents had given her some cash to help her get by, and so, drinks were on her until the tap sputtered out.

            I boarded the bus and dropped my change in the meter. Only a few sweat-stained riders were scattered about inside. I plopped into a seat as far from any other person as geometry would allow, and I leaned back and smiled. I imagined that Jody was already ordering me a cocktail. I could hear her voice calling the bartender man. “Hey man, can I get my friend a drink?” To my left, on the unoccupied seat across the aisle, was an abandoned paperback. As the bus arrived at my stop in Uptown, I grabbed the book and went to meet Jody.

            As we got loaded, we read the works of Arthur Rimbaud. Years earlier, Jody had briefly grazed the periphery of the college-aged literati of Austin, Minnesota.  Jody knew Rimbaud’s work somewhat, but poetry was a foreign language to me. Throughout high school, each year’s English class poetry unit was complete torture. I never liked the sense of disquiet and confusion that poetry raised in me. Mr. Leitie taught me to avoid poems whenever possible. For the first time, however, a whisper seemed to come off the weathered pages in the subdued lighting of that Uptown bar. Across the swelling Atlantic and half of the United States, the voice of a nineteenth century teenager spoke to me:

Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed. One evening I took Beauty in my arms—and I thought her bitter—and I insulted her.

Rimbaud was eighteen years old and he already spoke with an air of wisdom. How many young people mistakenly believe that they are wise with the accumulated knowledge of their few years?

I have seen archipelagos in the stars,

Feverish skies where I was free to roam!

Are these bottomless nights your exiled nests,

Swarm of golden birds, O Strength to come?

True, I’ve cried too much; I am heartsick at dawn.

The moon is bitter and the sun is sour...

Love burns me; I am swollen and slow.

Let my keel break! Oh, let me sink into the sea!

If I long for a shore in Europe,

It’s a small pond, dark, cold, remote,

The odor of evening, and a child full of sorrow

Who stoops to launch a crumpled paper boat.

Washed in your languors, Sea, I cannot trace

The wake of tankers foaming through the cold,

Nor assault the pride of pennants and flags,

Nor endure the slave ship’s hold.

Jody and I shared Rimbaud that one afternoon, but afterwards, the young man belonged to me alone. My years spent as a painter were in a long slow decline from a highpoint of mediocrity, and I knew it. For me, needing a life model was more an excuse to get girls naked than serving any nobler purpose. If Jody realized that, she never called me on it. To her credit, she allowed me the fantasies I constructed to give my life a greater sense of purpose, and to get laid. I had very little that I could call my own back then. I had my paintings, such as they were. I had Jody with me. And on that South Minneapolis bus, the great spirit of the clouds passed me a freebie:

—Sometimes in the sky I see endless sandy shores covered with white rejoicing nations. A great golden ship, above me, flutters many colored pennants in the morning breeze. I was the creator of every feast, every triumph, every drama. I tried to invent new flowers, new planets, new flesh, new languages. I thought I had acquired supernatural powers. Ha!

. . . I called myself a magician, an angel, free from all moral constraint.

. . . I am sent back to the soil to seek some obligation, to wrap gnarled reality in my arms. A peasant! Am I deceived? Would Charity be the sister of death, for me? Well, I shall ask for forgiveness for having lived on lies. And that’s that.

                                                                        Arthur Rimbaud

June, 1873

Jody and I read as the sun completed its rounds and dipped its orange blaze behind the trees and urban skyline. I didn’t tell Jody that evening, but by the time we were drunk enough to board the bus heading back to our dirty little apartment, I had already become a writer.