Nocturne for August, Ailing Things

Rite

After Arnold van Gennep

My hamstringer: I’ve never done anything
without watching myself do it. So the first time I drank

to unanimous drunkenness, it was like getting my walking papers
from a 30-ought-6. Somebody’d pawned me

Hermes’ sneakers. I was winged chic. Or what a peddler of showponies might term deft
of shoe. We, me & Delbarton & Goodnight, were drinking gin through a straw

out of shag carpet—quaffing in with such vim it was apt to tornado
a rib, mug corpuscles—until it felt like a phrenologist, starved

for ethos, had me calipered by the sinuses. This was our usual: scrounging
more lint & cat litter than buzz. But that night was alien to the others. Delbarton’s pap

was the eight days a week kind of drunk, bad to racket & rambunct. He drew
SSI, but one Tuesday a month he was a scab

driver for the rock quarry, hauling shale by the ton along the matchstick tendons
of creeks & hollows, ratfinking wages for the hourlies. Typically, he’d be in bed

with a bottle sludged full of meanness by six the evening before, so as to take
a molasses-paced relish in drinking the light away, but still wake up in the morning

with minimal eulogy. But, that night, he must’ve gotten himself
malign with the wife, who drove him to the living room floor with all the courtesy

a 3-wood could muster. & mid-crumple, this fifth of Beefeater fluttered from his hands
like a graveside dove. You can augur the rest. Goodnight said Lord God this gin

tastes like airport cologne. Woah there, Fauntleroy, you’nt been to no airport. My tongue was 
already lawless, & things beyond fathom were taking form at the municipal limits 

of my eyes. Every sup was a guffawing peal of thunder, & the backwash fizzed
genial against my tonsils. But soon we were gin-poor, & my mind went elsewhere: howling

into the business end of a straight pipe, sniffing what stirred. There was this griping
in my gut, but I wanted more likker like you want something

womansmelling in bed next you. It felt like I was all over
creation, but I hadn’t graduated from the wingback, still just sitting there in the significant

grooves my ass had begat. So while they were in the kitchen vulturing around a freezer
full of good aim, I doused out the old man’s Rapture stash. It was a pint of vodka—spuds

rotgut enough to harelip a Tsar—bobbing inside the flushbox. Through it
I wolfed. & by the time they found me, I was scowl to scowl with the unchaste

veneer of the commode, all my assets
liquidated. Windless in those doldrums, it was still damn near rocket science to keep

my keel even. But the moment I felt their hot concern on my stubble, I was sabers out
like J.E.B Stuart at Brandy Station, like the Black Prince laureled

in slaughter at Poitiers. Why you got to be so choleric? Goodnight said. He chided me
in the face & my sight was severaled. Between the ears, there was lupine

static. In defeat, I was Roland dutifully eating
Saracen arrows. I figured I’d just laze a minute, take stock, but wouldn’t you know

they already had me quicklimed, totalized in salt. I was aslosh on the cooling board
of their joined hands, forearms latticed slipshod, & the procession

back to the futon was afflicted. Mussed by drink & the slack hour, they brained me
against anything with an edge. But I wasn’t cross about it. & that noise wasn’t my head

dribbling against ground, a bindle of trauma. That’s just what it sounds like
when you hit paydirt. 

Nocturne for August, Ailing Things

In cadence there is the COPD of porch swings. & somewhere not terribly distant the sleep
crusted voice of an engine, steam

tapeworming off hot blacktop, all hauntological, after an evening 
that was something to be seen

through stout glass. But, in this yard, between the slop-giddy hogs & sporting dogs
there is détente—a torrential hush. If you could parse past the waxpaper of tonight, you’d see

only eyesore: the toothed spearmint
of Camino hoods, trucks tucked in the dust

of last decade. Jumper cables like macabre spaghetti, pistons, schismed manifolds: a Gettysburg 
of tinker & shrapnel to paw through. But this junkage, this totaled zip code, does not trouble 

the squirrels, who are like clockwork laying next season’s supper away in the dark
escrow of tree holes, a clobbered sedan. & the locals don’t bemoan it either. Breeze

grieves the shutters, shorts the circuits, but their rest is bassinet-pure. Heads on pillows
full of what the crummiest roosters have shed. & even the children so colicky

to be back at play, to again summit the jungle-gyms
they’ve made of hulled out septic tanks, have been smoothed moot by Nyquil

& a few sugar spoons of Rye. & a pair of twentysomethings are deep in the woods
of one another, still undoing buttons on the black flannel

that midnight has spread flat for them. Afterward, they’ll shower together, won’t even wince
at the hot water heater sighing cold

curter than the word of God in the Hebrew verse, just fall straightway to snoring
still toweled, guts jungly from too much beer

& cellophaned snackcake. Box fans rasp oomphless. Bugs suicide in citronella. This is gnarly
terroir, but all are battened blithe to mattresses. Even the olden among them, catheters

pebbled choke with sediment, are in mangy comfort. The motherly solace of powder
on bedchafe. Dreaming caffeine-free, they don’t want evicted from this quiet

complete enough to hear yeast proofing in kitchens, on genitals. They call foe the exam lamp
of noon, the day on them escapeless as credentialed hands, puckered latex, & the antibiotic

pleas of a chaplain. Natal light pranks the windowlip. The sun 
is a yellow-headed brat.