Doug Roy, Birds of Paradise, Cut Paper
Junkyard Blues
for Frank
I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it….
No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
–Zora Neale Hurston
Under a steaming Sunday noonday sun the sullen bees swarm
over the abandoned cars and the empty hulls of sailboats.
We remember pausing to catch our breath on the high climb
up the steep hill to our humble white house above the lake.
An empty trailer, windows broken out, lies helpless and tilted on one side.
Nothing belonging to us works. The car motor stalled, went completely dead.
We sold our old car parts, and you bought me flowers and chocolate.
And as the sun’s afternoon heat melted the candies inside my hand,
the irreverent metal turned to rust in a rain shower.
On our way home from Mass, we witnessed a minor miracle:
a cross of smoke rising into the azure sky. Prediction: extinction. Apocalypse.
But tomorrow arrived with a cadence of new sun & long hours of leisure.
Someone is keeping a selfish secret.
The other one has been betrayed.
__________________
Beth Brown Preston
Review by Massimiliano Nastri
Confession: I knew I would like it because of the epigraph, because it had one and went immediately to the end to see if it hooked me back and how. It did and with a classical move, like the Wisdom Books in the Old Testament. They sually go: there are two things that do or are, no three. Images and sound kept my attention (I wanted no fall, no flaw): Steaming SunDay noonday Sun Sullen beeS Swaarm, catCH breaTH hI climb HumBLe. “Nothing belonging to us works. … Someone is keeping a selfish secret. / The other one has been betrayed.”) I will actually cite her lines. Sonnet-like length (3+3+3+3+2) which I like, because what is says, how it lands depends on how much is said. There’s also a strong preference for the tone: minor miracle, extinction, the sign that is ambiguous or rather counterpointed by ordinary beauty: “a cadeNSe of New Sun and loong houRS of leiSuRe.” I thought the structure really propelled that ambiguity, more than nuance, knowledge that it takes little to dance on the edge of extinction, and such a little is both a positive and a negative notion.
Review by Bruce Parker
I like this, especially the musicality of the first stanza.