DYING TO LIVE LIKE HEMINGWAY

                                      Man can be destroyed
                                      but not defeated.

No longer risking my neck in arena theater wars
aboard rodeo horses, I charge at first light’s
silent reveille through a drapeless pane
this notebook’s blank page, foreboding,
bellicose, strong as the bronc’s
shoulders locked for the kick. I’m drilled,
most days, heart-first in the dirt. But
during that scarce dawn when I’m tapped off—airborne,
in tune, in time, in rhythm and sync—line-for-line,
jump-for-black-marlin-jump, I spur the words
vertical across the salty chop
to the bullring’s bravado and salvos of OLE!
and bulges of muscular dust. On those mornings,
I die to live like Hemingway,
posed in a photo arm’s-reach from my desk—Hem
grinning like a grandee,
his black cabochon eyes
deep-set beneath his Stetson’s brim, two
rainbow trout hanging, one grappled in each hand, poised
off his hips like matched ivory-gripped pistols
notched. Papa, my paladin, my patron
matador saint of romance and brutal youth,
you were right. What life, less our sirens,
minus the fire of visceral sin, instinct,
fiction, myth, is worth further journey
upon last-chapter earth.  What life
without the burning swirls of mermaids
luring us deeper
into the moon’s reflection, into the moon’s music
on mute—their vernal world,
thank our lucky stars, only just barely
always out of reach of our foolhardy lines.

                                    For Kim Zupan

SCARS POETICA           

Brushed over with arm hair, the nickel-cigar scars
I’ve not told a sober soul about
since the ‘60s, until now, until finding myself
hanging by a hemp thread
between the devil and the deep blue sea,
(the blank page at 3 a.m.),
so desperately in need of a poetic fix
I’d welcome it from a telemarketer
pushing vertical chicken cookers
or even a graveyard shift Jehovah’s Witness
ringing my bells—these scars
(I started to show and tell)
looking like smallpox inoculations
stabbed by W.C. Fields playing some icepick-
wielding demonic school nurse,
these scars are the mimickings of a biker
flick in which two really really tough guys,
their forearms like a couple of USDA-stamped
smoked hams pressed against one another
on the mahogany bar, place a dog-turd stogy
evenly into the V of muscles
twitching not even a little.
                                       I still cringe
at thoughts of that red-eyed gut-tester
making our nerve centers flicker and buzz
with Blatz Beer neon, all fail-safe
warning lights, at crazy 18, flashing
long after the point of no return or give,
after the stench of our flesh searing
sent weaker-intestined patrons
retching out the door—the bartender, holding
fast with his yellow snot-rag
pressed over his face, one-arming to us
pitcher after pitcher of fire-retardant Schlitz
we guzzled quicker than he could
shuffleboard them
down the bar, our smoldering
stogies eventually going cold
and the joint, Idel’s Hideout, blowing smoke
rings out its opened windows
as we blistered big and ugly.
                                           For months,
our arms oozed like Vesuvius, seethed, scabbed over,
festered again until the grayish blue and pink
paisley sheen began to fade
beneath long sleeves we’d roll up
to show off our medallions
of machismo at Barnabo’s Pool Hall
after school.
                    Thirty-something summers later,
they still itch and flake dead skin—white sand
islands in the stream of deep tan. None of us
won or lost, or croaked, so far
as I know, from melanoma. Nobody
landed a starring Hollywood role
in Chopper Mania. No one got laid
a day sooner than he would have gotten laid
anyway. And now, as I muse
on the fiery rendering of these scars
more closely, didn’t they come into being
just a little like writing poetry?

                     For Dave Alvin—after reading his
                     Any Rough Times Are Now Behind You