Brook & Rainbow

“Go ahead, touch,” you said so I petted
both almost dead fish. A drool of blood
clung to the rainbow’s underslung jaw.
By default I know the brook, its flanks
delicately freckled, tawny as a smog-bound
sunrise. A scant hour and I can’t
believe the change: the rainbow’s pastel prism
purpled over; the brook’s spots swollen
into splotches, enormous empty fish-eyes
staring back. I watch you scale, slit, gut,
wash, dry, dust with salt and peppered flour,
pan-fry and filet them. On my plate, two

half fishes: you won’t tell me which is
which but it’s plain to see each carries
into death something of life—pink. blue,
and green veined near-translucency beside
opaque late summer sunset. We take a bite
of brook, one of rainbow. Then another
rainbow, and a brook, until tiny bones
fringe the rim like lashes. Why should we
have to chose? Yet, even when we don’t,
we do. If I could, would I undo everything
we’ve been through? Any scientist knows
a rainbow doesn’t actually exist, except

in the mind’s eye. Just try to hold on
to flowing water, it escapes or becomes
something else. But one changeable day,
showers vying with sun, you brought us
both, brook and rainbow, and I wouldn’t
trade the heartache that brought us to this
happiness for the world. If I had to,
I guess I’d take the brook, its down
to earth sweetness, the miracle of bugs
converted to muscle, like love
fattened on grief, lingering sweeter
on the tongue for what it’s consumed.

—First published in The Wildwood Journal

Bonanza

Dennis Hopper got his big break playing
a preacher’s son turned bounty hunter
after Pawnee scalped his ma and pa and
brothers and sister. There was a woman,

too, of course, the abused wife the escaped
gunslinger comes for. She goes with him
to save her alcoholic father, whom the bad
guy shoots anyway for fun. they hole up

on the Ponderosa until the final shoot-out
when the lawman discovers he cannot pull
the trigger, and Little Joe, hiding behind
papier-mâché boulders, kills the killer

and saves Hopper’s life. Commercial break.
Jump cut. The Cartwrights see their new
friend and his new wife off to Bible school,
those scary very blue eyes burning now

with a different light. We watched “Bonanza”
religiously each Sunday night. My sister loved
Hoss best. he was fat and sweet and hated
to hurt others, but I liked the whole above

its parts: Three brothers and their father living
in relative harmony, their scrapes and scraps
straightened out in an hour, the homestead
that hummed without women, the house that

felt like a home. We should have guessed then
that, Dennis Hopper would make, grown up,
a better bad guy, and that Michael Landon
would become a great pa on his own

“Little House” although for him there would be
no  “Happy Golden Years” but a short-lived
“Highway to Heaven.” Waiting on line
at the supermarket, I watch him shrivel

week by week as the disease eats him
from within until, the end near, he decides
he wants to be buried beside Lorne Greene,
his “spiritual father.” So he guys

fifty nearby plots for himself and his family
and is. Dan Blocker went a long time back,
a heart attack, but that Little Joe should go
so young and so fast hits hard. After “Bonanza”

was canceled I stopped believing in life
after death and God. Now I almost wish
I could. Instead I unpack all the old
dog-eared “Little Houses” that one

had saved me and let them again wreak
their magic as a glossy new life and death
story eclipses the last and some lesser
star makes headlines near the cash register.

—First published in Penumbra

St. Thomas Aquinas and the Brahma Bulls

 
After the cowgirls’ cloverleaf competition
and a family of four jumps in and out
of a rope circle suspended in the air
at their knees to “God Bless America,”
a man in pink and purple satin leads six
white bulls with dinner plates growing
straight up between their shoulders into
the ring. Nose to tail they trot two by two
around him, them wonder of wonders,
three abreast followed quickly by the pièce
de résistance: with whip and prod and God
only know what else, he coaxes these bulls
up onto stools no larger than their hooves,
where they teeter as he bows to the ground.

The first time I saw “La Conquitadora”
she wore black and that fish-eye expression
mothers have meaning you can do no right.
So while others lit candles and prayed, I told
her off and went my way. But faith requires
only need. Those who seek, the book says,
shall find. After the rodeo I find myself
again before her, that forbidding gaze grown
five years later more fitting. May bitterness
not poison my heart. The plea of all vanquished
is good enough for me. Some may care how many
angels can dance on the head of a pin; give
me St. Francis any day, his bare feet planted
on earth, his punctured palms raised in submission.

—First published in Many Mountains Moving