LARRY DUNCAN - POEMS

Larry Duncan currently lives in Redondo Beach, CA. His poetry has appeared in Juked, the Mas Tequila Review, Danse Macabre, the Free State Review and John Grochalski's Shipwrecked in Trumpland Blog. He is the author of two chapbooks, Crossroads of Stars and White Lightning and Drunk on Ophelia. To learn more about Larry and his writing, visit at http://larrydunc.wix.com/larry-duncan.

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                The Playground Monitor’s Lament
 
I
 
The children are playing their games.
They run in wild, spiraling bursts
away from the schoolhouse.
 
Before they reach the tree line,
I bring the whistle to my lips.
 
I wonder how deep they would go
if I ever stopped calling them back.
 
 
II
 
There are times I imagine my face
at the center of the circles they make.
 
Their tiny hands
                                 clawing at my clothes,
                                 exposing my breast,
                                 peeling away the layers,
                                 all those hungry little mouths
losing their smiles.
 
They would devour me,
and still have room for milk and cookies.
 
 
III
 
At night, I whisper
these secrets and more
into his pillow white thighs
Let us walk backward,
I say, toward our birth,
toward the empty cup,
toward the doctor’s latex hand,
toward our exhausted mothers
shackled in the stirrups of an imagined past.
 
We can leave it to the children, I say.
This is more their ground than ours.
They understand the way to swing.
Our bones have grown clumsy.
 
We can beg the stars, I say
to answer for the state of the weather
and relieve ourselves of questions.
We can sing again,
the way rivers bend.
 
We can grow thin
over centuries,
learn to cut stone,
our backs against the ocean,
splitting the surf like razors
 
We can tell the children
we never stopped.
We can walk backwards,
ride shotgun with the wind.
Just put your hands up.
It’s headed that way already.
 
 
 
 
                               My Old Town
 
                                        I can’t call it home.
                                        I wasn’t born there,
                                        but I lived there as a child.
 
                                        I’ve lived a lot of places.
                                        I can’t call any of them home,
                                        but I remember the faces.
 
I remember them all,                                       I don’t remember one
except the one where I was born.                   from the other. I was drunk
That was before my time.                               most of the time.
It was really more                                           like a dream than not
 
                                            whether woke or asleep.
 
 
 
 
                       After Midnight Melancholia II
 

I think we can agree
we’ve all been diligent
taken each lesson
without sigh or complaint
but what have we learned?
A kind of Hardness?
A sharp blindness?
To be blank razors?
To mouth the laughing echo
in the shadow of canine teeth?
 
I don’t know about you,
but as far as I go,
it’s not enough.
 
Besides, it’s a low wall
and the world marches
along on such long legs.
 
Can you imagine more?
Does it keep you up at night?
Your head vibrating like a hive
with all the bees stuck in the honey,
buzzing on the branch of a lightning-split tree
the field at dawn gathering in the sun
becoming liquid light
a thousand, thousand tendrils
licking at the wind
like unharvested wheat.
 
But we both know the measure of dreams
pressed against the metal
of good old American steel.
It doesn’t amount to much,
Not enough to fill a thimble
let alone an empty hotel room.
 
Do you remember being young?
Not a child but young
in the burn before jacket flesh,
before all the tides and ties and tried(s.)
Do you remember the hum?
The tremor echoed
in our lips when we kiss,
in the static arc before we touch,
in our spine with every step,
the big gray, the other other,
the open wound that smiles,
swallowing our silly spindles of design.
Do You?
Well…do you?
You must.
 
 
 
 
                    After Midnight Melancholia V
 
 
I
 
 My hometown was littered with churches, a bell in every one.
 
They seldom rang.
 
But some mornings the towers would sound in a strange, staggered collusion, blanketing every corner and crevice in an web of conical vibration.
 
You could close your eyes, and, like a bat, know your distance by tone alone.
 
 
 II
 
 When I was seven I fell from a tree.
 
I remember the breaking best, the dull sound like a cough suppressed, like a knee driven to plank by ecstatic ankles.
 
Both my wrists shattered.
 
They became like limp snakes, two Hognoses playing dead at either ear, five tongues flailing from a coiled body.
 
That was a morning of bells.
 
I laid on my back, stupefied by pain and engulfed in the sound.
 
 
 
III
 
 The bell has been with us from the beginning, an instrument whose longevity is rivaled only by the drum.
 
Strangely anthropomorphic in form—bells have a body, ears and eyes, lip and tongue—they are like a lover who by intense, extended proximity takes on the semblance of the other.
 
If the drum is the heart, the bell is the voice.
 
Ringing through millennia of ceremony and state, we live in that sound.
 
 
 IV
 
Long after the body of the bell is still, the loose hammer swings the space between, bones unwrap and the cross-stitch bond of muscle unwinds.
 
I was Seven, barefoot and shirtless, toes splayed over the crown of the branch, ready to jump.
 
The neighbor’s son crouched in the branches above, face in the leaves, smile like a sickle.
 
I don’t remember the leap, only the snap, the branch in both fists giving way before the fingers could curl, the body cut free becoming Seraphim, something like flight, and then earth, arms first to save the face.
 
The hinge of the wrist reduced to frail shavings.
 
 
V
 
How can you find comfort in solid ground when once you were a missile?
 
Your neck, sore and stiff from a constant craning toward the sky, learns to hang limp, studying the feet in disbelief.
 
Gravity is the greatest cruelty in a universe of cruelty becomes a mantra.
 
 Until the mind stops moving forward and the mantra swings, learning a circle.
 
Cruelty is the greatest gravity, it says, in a world of gravity.
 
The words swim, become meaningless motion, a flailing in a lake.
 
Greatest is the gravity of cruelty.
 
The body, finally surrendering to the flatness of earth, gives up its ceaseless fountaining of cells.
 
Only the sound remains, the bell’s tongue echoing the day still licking at the lip.
 
My hometown was littered with churches, a bell in every one.
 
They seldom rang.
 
 
  
 
                     After Midnight Melancholia IX
 

The moon looks angry.
Wrapped in a few loose clouds,
she looks like a marbled fist,
a hand about to unfurl its fingers.
I can’t help but wonder
what she holds cradled in her palm.
Something tells me it isn’t chocolates.
 
My guess is fire,
something like what Moses saw.
But I ain’t no Moses,
so I take another slug
and give the finger to the moon
before she can give me five back.
 
When it comes to fire,
I’d rather be tied to a rock
than lug commandments down a hill
and break up a perfectly good orgy.