Puzzle Piece

Puzzle Piece

11/30/19

Here in the drawer

A lone puzzle piece

Its odd shape designed

To fit only one particular

Space.

On it is a splash of red,

Maybe once   part of a heart

Or a singing flower.

Its edges slightly worn

From having been

Inserted         and replaced

So many times.

And where is the puzzle

It once completed,

Once made whole?

Where is the big picture

Whose promise it once had fulfilled?

Cast away by a careless hand?

            Lost forever

In time’s missing shoebox?

Deprived of meaning,

It is a lonely sight.

I don’t expect to find that puzzle.

            But I will leave this piece

                        In the drawer.

Irony

Irony

I awaken missing you and wishing 

you were here

Then realize you are 

somewhere else wondering if 

You could somehow tolerate 

being around me.

You always lived with one hand 

on the doorknob,

A mental valise packed

And things never mentioned

Now become faults 

And the fault lines become chasms.

This was your idea, you remind me

Over and over again,

            Like some mantra of absolution,

But you got in the car.

John Michael Hurt   11/15/19

The Cheese and the Worms

The Cheese and the Worms

(Thoughts on The Cheese and the Worms, The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, by Carlo Ginzburg)

John Michael Hurt

The cheese rots and the worms emerge.

Turning into angels, saints and savior,

they rise with shimmering halos

through flickering rainbows

past the winking disco

mirror-ball of reason

to the painted ceiling.

The judge, blinded by certainty,

raises a trembling finger

and Menocchio prays for a windless day.

We expect the Inquisition,

and hide the children of our minds

deep in the hive

where we cap off their cells and hope they will

grow in silence until they are strong enough

to escape on their own.

But when the storms of passion,

rip open our hiding places,

they fly out unguarded and bare themselves

to the harsh, penetrating eye of our fears,

and once beyond the pyre

they are free at last.

Note: One who is to be burned at the stake prays for a windless day so they will suffocate before the flames reach them.

The Burial

The Burial

John Michael Hurt

It was a Saturday and I was sittin’ on the porch with a glass of sweet tea with the sweat dryin’ on my chest. I’d been out on that old Farmall Cub tractor mowing the side lot. I don’t know if the damn thing is going to run from one year to the next, but somehow it keeps goin’. I guess I’ll sell it for a bona fide antique one of these days. Bobby come across the back lot and up through the yard about three in the afternoon. He’d asked me if he could hunt on the back part of my property that morning and I told him it was okay. Hell, I don’t ever get out there to hunt anymore anyway, so it don’t really matter to me. There’s even some pheasant out there that come over from where this rich guy tried to plant them on his property so he could hunt ‘em. Of course, they come over to my place where there wasn’t anybody shootin’ at ‘em. He wanted to come over here to shoot, but I didn’t much like his attitude, so I said no. I figured Bobby was just coming to check in and tell me he was goin’ home. When he got close, I could see that somethin’ wasn’t right. He was pale and his eyes were wide, and he was breathing hard. He come right up on the porch and I said “Well hi, Bobby. Did you do any good?”

He looked around quick, like he was looking to see if anybody else was there listenin’. I could see then he was real scared.

I said, “What in the world’s wrong, boy. You look like you seen a ghost.”

“Seth, you gotta come see something. Come on. I need you to see this. I need your help,” he said looking at me with one of the strangest looks I’ve ever seen on a man. My first thought was that he’d accidentally shot somebody.

“Bobby, what’s happened? Did you shoot somebody or something? Are you hurt?” I asked him straight up. I know about how the law treats stuff like this. I could easily go from ‘helping Bobby’ to ‘being an accomplice’ if he had done somethin’ wrong.

“No!” he kind of half-shouted, half-whispered. “Well… no but I gotta show you. I need you to see.”

Now, right off, I could see he’d been drinking a little bit, but that wasn’t any big deal to me. Lots of folks carried a little somethin’ out with ’em when they were huntin’. And he didn’t seem drunk, just agitated and upset. Bobby wasn’t any kind of a bad guy. I’d known his family since I’d been a kid. He’d done some farmin’, and when he had a hard time making ends meet, he started working over at the paper mill in Winston. He got in a fight over at the Mountain View Lounge last year, but it wasn’t nothin’ really. Just some argument over a pool game. -- So I just thought there had been an accident or somethin’.

After I pulled my boots back on, he started back over the field with his twelve-gauge shotgun still in his right hand, like it had been ever since he come up to the house. He was walking fast, and I had to tell him to slow down twice before we got to the back part of the property. I was breathin’ hard by then. We come across that little crick that kinda divides my property in half – it was so shallow we just walked on the rocks – and went into the big twenty-acre field I keep cleared off back there. I just mow it for hay sometimes, but this year I didn’t, and he took me out into the middle of the field in the waist-high grass. This was late summer and the broom sage was already yellow.

There on the ground was a person – sort of. The face didn’t look like either a man or a woman. It was wearing clothes that were kind of like Roman clothes, but also kind of space-age looking. I know, that don’t make no sense, but there it is. I can’t say it any better, and neither could you, even if you saw it yourself. What was crazy was that it had wings. It had big wings like goose wings only a lot bigger coming out of its shoulders in the back. I thought about those cloning experiments I read about in the paper, and about how they mixed frog genes or something with tomatoes to make them better. Anyhow, there it was. It had been shot twice. There was two holes in its chest. There wasn’t any chance it could have survived. It was laying sort of face up but the wings underneath caused it to be pushed over at an angle like. There was a lot of blood soaking into the ground. It just looked like any regular blood. I’ve sure seen enough of that to know.

“Shit,” I said. I know my eyes must have been bugging out. “Bobby, did you shoot him..uh, her, it?”

“Well it just popped up and took off,” he yelled defensively. “I didn’t know what it was. It was just kinda automatic. What is it, Seth? What is it?” He was looking at me like I was going to tell him it was okay. Like this thing had been raiding my corn or somethin’, and I appreciated him taking it down.

“Damn, Bobby,” I whistled through my teeth, “It looks like a goddam angel to me. I don’t know what else in the world it could be. I don’t think they can make people like that, at least not yet.”

“Oh, shit,” Bobby said in a whisper. “What am I gonna do Seth? I done killed an angel. Do you think God knows I killed it?” He was really panicking.

“Well, God’s supposed to know everything,” I said thinking hard, “But if he did know, and if he was mad about it, I think you’d already know that by now.”

Bobby threw the shotgun down on the ground. It was a pretty new Browning, so I knew he was really upset.  It was an automatic. That’s how he was able to get off two shots so quick. The angel laid there with its eyes open starin’ at the sky. It had a beautiful face and its eyes were dark brown. Its arms and legs looked slim and strong, kind of like a marathon runner or something. I was in Vietnam and I’ve seen people die, so…… that part didn’t affect me…. so much. I felt like I ought to close its eyes, but….. I was really kind of afraid to touch it, as though I would be acceptin’ part of the blame for killin’ it if I did. When I saw that Bobby wasn’t going to do it, I finally reached down and pulled its eyelids closed.

That was when I had a sort of like a flashback. I was in a hamlet outside of Dong Ha and we come in there after the Viet Cong had been in there the night before, and we hit it too, and a lot of people got killed by both sides. There was a lot of what they used to call ‘collateral damage.’ That meant non-combatants…civilians….. had gotten killed. There was this girl that was dead in front of this one hooch. It was like she had just laid down there to rest, but when I come up, I saw she was dead, but I couldn’t see a mark on her. She was so pretty and she had these dark eyes. I reached down and closed her eyes, and the angel’s eyes were just like that, so I guess that’s why I thought about it.  I hadn’t remembered it really for a long time.

“Damn, Seth.” Bobby said. He was sort of fuming around. “What are we going to do with it?”

“We?” I said, but knowin’ that I’d have to help. “You shot it!”

“You got to help me hide it,” he said and he seemed as desperate as I ever saw anybody act before.

“Who are you hidin’ it from?” I asked him. “God?  The police? The police ain’t gonna know about this, and God already knows!” I just threw my hands up.

Bobby was crying now. “Just help me bury it or something. Just help me. Please help me Seth.” He was really scared and panicked.

“Okay, okay,” I said, “Take it easy now, Bobby.” Like I said, he wasn’t a bad fellow. No worse than anybody else. I went back to the house and got a shovel and a grubbin’ hoe and some sack cloth. When I come back, we dug a deep hole in the bank of the little crick there and put the angel in and covered it with the bags. It was really light to carry, like a kid…. I looked at its face one last time as we laid it in the ground. It was still really beautiful, even in death. We had to fold the big wings behind it to lay it down. They had feathers, but they was soft. Then we buried it, and I said a few words over it. We did our best to cover the place up so’s you couldn’t tell there had been anything there.

We walked back to the house without talkin’, and Bobby went back to his truck and went home. I think he was still shaking when he drove off.

Well, If you was to ask Bobby about it now, I know he’d say he don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. But that’s just because he’s afraid to remember. I remember it very well and sometimes I see that angel’s face in my dreams……but I have forgotten exactly where she is buried. Maybe that’s for the best.

  

Michael Cimino-Hurt  / 2014

Construction

Construction

Yes, I made this great dark creature.

Put it together on rainy nights,

            working furiously

under a single bare bulb,

on a folding table in the reptile

            basement of my mind.

Scraped in the damp corners

            for that nameless goo

                        my soul had

            tracked in after days of

                        aimless wandering.

Tacked on a skin of betrayals

            sculpted on a leer of cowardice

                        that drooled numbers

painted limbs with falsification

I made a heart of plaster of Paris

            like the one in my doctor’s office

fashioned a brain of disappointments

            broken glass

                        razor blades

When the ballbearing eyes snapped open

            and saw what I had done,

It ran away to hide.

But now I have tracked it down and I will

            finish the job.

John Michael Hurt   11/9/19

Fifteen

Fifteen

I want to tell you about the mouse in the bottle,

and how memory can punch a tunnel through time

to bring you back to the consciousness

of a fifteen-year-old boy,

on a cold, quiet night, when the stars

are pinpricks in the black velvet,

and he is walking back from the parade.

He will be wearing a marching band uniform

of black and gold and brass buttons,

and white buck shoes he has polished,

and there is a shako on his head

and maybe it has a plume in it.

Maybe his buddy is walking with him and

in his hand is a cold trumpet.

Not so cold as when he has to play it

at the football game when

he keeps the mouthpiece in his pocket

so it won’t freeze to his lips

when he goes out to play worship tunes

for the football heroes he is not.

But on how walking back with his buddy

under the cold stars,

he sees a coke bottle by the road

and picks it up,

and in it is a dead mouse,

and he thinks about how the mouse died

looking at the stars through

the prisms of the coke bottle

that was his prison,

and that he saw the beauty of those cold stars

magnified and glorified as he died

beside a dirt road in a small town,

and how that memory punches a tunnel

through fifty years of time

to be focused as through a crystal ball,

through a lens so pure and so clear

that I am frozen back there in that moment

with the mouse and the trumpet and the cold stars.

John Michael Hurt / 2016

Drums on Pennsylvania Avenue

Drums on Pennsylvania Avenue

The drums of Kennedy’s funeral procession

rolled in somber steps,

The rhythm to a collapsing worldview.

I hear the same rhythm from the broken faucet in the library restroom,

and I tell the librarian about it.

She smiles and exclaims because she is my friend,

but not because she can still see in her mind

the little boy saluting the passing caisson,

and she does not hear the drums.

In my mouth is the taste of glass,

the flavor of half-a-century’s distance

from the collapse of the capital F Future:

the death of the supersonic, spandex,

happy and germ-free future,

In which we could see by the dawn’s early light

the glory of forever.

The taste of glass separates me from the world

where segregation gasped its last gasp,

and all would be well just tomorrow, just tomorrow.

I land on the moon and take that first step

Onto the Mall to protest the war without understanding

that one day my son would stand on foreign soil

fighting for an unjust cause,

and that my heart would be laid on the front steps of the

Washington Post and Morning Edition every day,

until we ran from the bleachers onto the parade ground

to clutch those who had returned to us.

The taste of glass is the taste of that search for pure spirit

that led my soul down a rabbit hole

to emerge in confusion so profound

that I still shudder sometimes when I awaken

to an emotion I do not understand.

And who are you now looking in?

And where have you been?

Were you too bound with Odysseus to the mast when the sirens sang?

Do you still hear the drums?

John Michael Hurt / 2016