Comments..

I've been trying to post comments, but it won't work.. So I will do it this way

A Country Woman:   I thought this was really good.  Your best expression of your nemesis plot that I have read yet. I was intrigued by the character and her actions. The transitions into verse were interesting , definitely made the plot move... If there was a part 2. I would be excited to read it.

V: the lineation really compliments the theme of the poem.. As the lines spill over and suddenly stop, it added a sense of out-of-controlness.   Very good job conveying emotion, intense poem.

Until the Landscape Rang:  imagery stood out amongnst all else.  The part where he turns to fluid and then resolidifies is great.. Very interesting to imagine.  I thought the story flowed along well and was very easy to read and understand.  And, of course, I dug the pop culture plugs.   

A Country Woman

R. Boon

December 20, 2013

A Country Woman

With forced calm, Rachel set aside the solar panel and lifted the lid of the incubator, looking at eggs inside.  The February temperature, mid 80s day, 70s through the night. That helps, she muttered to herself, thinking and muttering not much separate in these, her lonely days and longer nights.  If only the little solar battery would last through a night.  All those nights getting up, checking the temperature, transferring the eggs so carefully against her skin, bundling up till her skin was itself an inferno, layer over layer, though never quite the 99.5 ideal.  Just never below 97.

            She looked at the eggs, smooth, simple.  Brown and blue and green.  Something exotic that had amused Mary.  Seven eggs.  We—funny to say that.  We, when it’s just me here.  But there will be others.  If I can find ways to feed them, find protein and fat without shooting everything that moves.  And I would do that, too, but that bullets are also hoarded now.  She poured a bit more water into the tray beneath the eggs. We need every one of them to hatch.  Seven—not a great gene pool, but if we can just keep these alive, someday a trader will come through with more chickens. 

            She touched the one blue egg.  To be so impractical, they always told me, being a professor of Medieval Rhetoric, learning Old English, the ancient rhythms and riddles and prayers.   Nu scylun hergan   hefaenricaes uard  metudæs maecti  end his—she broke off here, again, at the start of Caedmon’s Hymn.  Her purpose, Her nurturing and angers, giving this middungeard, this middle earth, to the ones who will care for it.  That’s where the praise should fall.  Her fingers felt the struggle inside this one lonely blue egg.

            My coop needs repair, she thought.  I wish Kate were still around.  She always called herself “a handy gal.”  And she would be handy now.  Moved to Iowa before…  She closed her eyes, felt the grit in one.  Yes, Kate fell out of my world just before the world fell apart.  She looked down and talked to the eggs.  I’ve worked so hard on feeding you, all of you in this future.  I have persimmon trees back there in the chicken yard, and some mulberry, and those old twisted plums, fruits that will drop for you in different seasons.  I need to get some pear trees.  And for us, learn how to use the hickory nuts and acorns.  I’ve read about that.

There was a noise from a brown egg.  Rachel gave a startled laugh.  Almost.  Maybe today.  Soon, you there, scrabbling for bugs and--no, there won’t be corn.  A bitter laugh.  Corn.  Was that the start?  The blights that ran through America’s monoculture, that wiped out a whole season’s corn.  And no seed.  All of it sterile, by design, and the corporations with nothing to offer.  A little famine?  Or, a lot of famines, stretched over a year and a half, and the storms and floods and droughts.  All of it in two bad years.  So fast to crash the whole world.  Food riots in Egypt, across Africa, into the Middle East.  And China desperate, buying up all the grain they could find.  Then India, and Pakistan.  And oil supplies cut.  And threats and military actions.  And then all at once, that one explosion of rage and we lose a thousand years. 

            She wiped her hand on her apron.  The half-full jar of peanut butter sat on the table, the very clean spoon beside it.  I cleaned out how many stores?  And I put in that special order, just in time.  500 jars.  16 servings, two tablespoons, in each jar.  8 grams of protein, 16 grams of fat. Don’t ignore that.  Fat isn’t the evil anymore.  Two spoons a day, by myself, that stretches out some seven years. The damn plastic jars won’t even last that long, hidden, buried, dispersed in a dozen places.  Not enough, but it will keep us going.  And there will be more of us.  More women.  I won’t leave the rest on their own.  Not forever.  And I have the pumpkin seeds.  And the cows.  If I can learn to make cheese, keep milk longer, trade it.

The patrol had ridden through two weeks ago, warning about three drifters seen off the old Interstate.  No mail.  How she ached for a letter.  Some personal link, someone out there. Not just…. She had known as soon as she saw the firelight just over the hill that night.  No one would waste that much wood these days.  That Mary and Frank… 

            Ah, the “noble fragment,” she said and chanted the old poem to the eggs:

Then, Holofernes grew joyful, that tramp and drifter,

Gold-friend of warriors, glad o'er his wine-cups;

Laughed he, shouted he, raised clamor and uproar,

That the children of men might hear in the distance

How the stern-mooded leader stormed and bellowed,

how he burned and destroyed and believed in no future,

How, insolent, mead-drunk, he mightily urged  

Braves on the benches to bear themselves well.

Thus did the evil one all day long, with rape and fire--

And so I found a last old bottle of scotch, she said, still talking to the eggs, found the jars and measured out the milk, fresh and wholesome, and made them ready, made my plans and put on a nice skirt—yes, a skirt, no tailored suits for me, no department meetings, no conferences in Chicago or Boston—brushed my hair, and went to visit, the concerned neighbor lady, concerned, competent, not too old, not too plain.  And I walked over the ridge, and saw what I knew I would see, the barn gone, still smoldering.  I had a little hope when I saw the chicken coop still there, and the house. 

And then there was Frank, Frank’s body out in the yard, disfigured, parts taken as trophies, or for grisly humor.  I didn’t see her till I got closer, didn’t see Mary there, naked, and…  Their boy, too, the 12-year old.  Naked, violated, thrown out for to feed the wild beetles and crows.

How my hands shook.  And my legs.  I almost turned back.  But one of them saw me.  Came out.  I made my offer.  My barter, for the chickens, trying not to look at their crimes.  How they laughed.  Hauled me inside.  I opened the box and showed them the jars.  The two followers, they grabbed the milk, guzzled it right down, the sweet, dear poisoned milk.  Yet,

Quick to his bed, in this house violated and stolen,

Led they the wise-mooded woman; went, then, stout-hearted

Heroes, to announce to their prince that the pure-souled Judith

Was brought to his tent. Then, waxed the illustrious one,

Ruler of boroughs, blithe, thought the bright- souled woman

With foulness and shame to corrupt,

And the third, their leader, he took me and the last jar of milk and the scotch into the bedroom.  He drank and touched me, and drank, too slow it seemed, and I closed my eyes and never screamed, said nothing till I felt him slump off me, and then—

they lay in a stupor, undone with stupidity,

Outstretched his troopers all drunk, for blind death had blasted

them, Of all their good things deprived.

With her own right hand, no longer shaking,

Then, the curly-locked lady, our dear Judith,

With flashing falchion smote the foeman detested,

The hostile-hearted one, the headman upon whose head

Fell the whole horror, she half cut through, then

Severed his neck, that swooning he lay there

Drunken and wounded. Not dead was he yet, now,

Nor gave up the ghost again vehemently,

With might and main, the mood-valiant woman

Smote the heathen hound that his head whirled rapidly

Forth on the floor; lay the foul carcass

Lifeless behind, his spirit departed

Down 'mid the damned in dire abasement,

Ever thereafter in agony fettered,

With serpents be-wound, in torments bound,

Firmly fastened in the flames of perdition,

When death took him off.

The chickens they’d slaughtered, she whispered.  That mild hope destroyed.  They didn’t even know how to clean them.  And just these few eggs, these few eggs, this slightest window into a future.  Not a good gene pool, but someday, someone will come up the road.

A tiny crack showed in the blue egg shell.  She touched her stomach.  A triangular piece of shell flecked away and she could see the tiny beak.  I hope it’s a girl. 

Websource for Judith:  J. LESSLIE HALL, 1902,

 http://archive.org/stream/judithphoenixand00halluoft/judithphoenixand00halluoft_djvu.txt

© 2013, Robert E. Boon

Until the Landscape Rang

R. Boon

December 25, 2013

Until the Landscape Rang

He slid and spiraled down the road, drinking, gliding on the ice, amused at his every near-fall, inviting the moon to laugh along with him.  The ice storm had danced through all afternoon, coating trees and grasses and fence posts and phone lines.  No one was out driving.  Near the bottom of the hill, he came across an enormous yellow road-grader, there waiting for the snow that was expected to follow.  He up-ended the bottle of cheap red wine and tossed it behind him.  He stood, unsteady on the glassy surface.  He held up one wavering finger in front of him, picked the spot and touched the road-grader’s engine.  It came to life with a dinosaur’s bellow and then lurched forward, buckling the pavement across both lanes, then sputtered to a stop.  He fished around in his pocket and pulled out an impossible length of bent rebar, and used the thick iron to puncture crankcase and tires.  He spread his arms, sliding backward, and yelled to the moon, “Edward Abbey would be proud!”  He trailed a finger along the road-grader’s proud yellow paint, and crumbling patches of rust appeared.

Humming, he stepped off into the fields.  “Revealed complexity,” he laughed, looking at the ice that coated what would usually not be seen.  He spotted a bottle tossed out by the Franklin boys, a bottle stolen from the Buy-and-Drive Package store.  He shook the bottle, drank, and felt the whiskey fire down his throat.  He sang “You know that it would be untrue / You know that I would be a liar, / If I was to say to you…,” then pulled at the whiskey again.

                                

  He wandered through the fields, touching stem and branch, alive in the moonlight, stepped along without breaking any of the ice.  The alcohol pulsed inside him.  He emptied the whiskey, and spoke to the bottle, “just a wee sup more,” in a put-on-Irish accent, “a wee drop,” and the bottle complied, refilling a third.  He drained it.  “But na’more, I suppose,” and tossed the bottle far out into the field.  “Girl, we couldn't get much higher,” he sang, then added, “what bullshit.”

He stood for a moment, listening to the near-mute water. “Brother Creek,” he called out to the glassy trickle, gravity-pulled, moving north to south.  He began to race along the creek edge, looking for another bottle, dropping his human shape, moving into the ice, racing along, a fluid moving against gravity, inside all the tubes of ice coating stems and trees and grasses, became himself a spreading field of moonlight, breaking tubes and icy jackets as he burst from one to another.  The whole field began to ring with the shattering.

He found an empty brandy bottle.   He flowed back into a human shape, picked up the bottle, coaxed it to fill.  He downed half of it in one long pull, and stood reciting a poem he liked:

"Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this

In a long time; and many a change has come

To both of us, I fear, since last it was

We had a drop together. Welcome home!"

Convivially returning with himself,

Again he raised the jug up to the light;

And with an acquiescent quaver said:

"Well, Mr. Flood, if you insist, I might.

“Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this

In a long time; and many a change has come 

To both of us, I fear, since last it was      

We had a drop together. Welcome home!” 

Convivially returning with himself, 

Again he raised the jug up to the light; 

And with an acquiescent quaver said: 

“Well, Mr. Flood, if you insist, I might.”

He drank, then fumbled with his trousers, taking a long piss across the weeds.  Ice broke, and with a wave of his hand, pigweed, knotgrass, thistle, purslane and wild mustard blossomed, scattered, took hold, and would not soon leave this farmer’s field.  He recited again,

For soon amid the silver loneliness      

Of night he lifted up his voice and sang, 

Secure, with only two moons listening, 

Until the whole harmonious landscape rang—

He stopped the poem, drank.  A mile away, he heard the high-pitched chorus, the yips and yowls.  “Ah, my little gray cousins!”  He finished his brandy and sang, loud, off-key, in a gathering howl, “The time to hesitate is through, / No time to wallow in the mire”—he paused, laughing, “but I like the mire, too,” and sang again, “Come on baby, light my fire, / Try to set the night on fire/ Try to set the night on fire.”  He shifted form again.  “Wait for me,” sang Coyote, bounding through the ice.

 

   
© 2013, Robert E. Boon

 

V

We spent hours together like they were lifetimes 

Quiet kisses in the cozy corners of your couch. 

Nestled in your neck and yours in mine. 

How could you forget

The brightness behind our eyes lit the dark

Huge warm smiles that carried the toiled tattered miles away 

Laughter that was as easy as the breath we breathed 

And somehow you forgot 

I've been wiping dead skin and dust from this heart

Picking up the pieces of what I believe is me

Killing my memory of you one death a day

Yet I am unable to forget. 

That's love...? 

Carcass

R. Boon

11/26/13//12/8

Carcass

            Dragging the deer carcass uphill on the gritty road, muttering every few steps, Daniel, old Daniel, he muttered to himself, struggled against the weight.  He snarled at his three dogs, who followed too close, pulling on a dangling leg or bit of hide, pulling the wrong damn way. 

            He stopped in the middle of the road, tugging at his torn coat, wriggling cold toes through the holes in his shoes.  “Damn headhunters.”  Saw off the antlers, leave the rest.   And no sense.  “No sense,” he shouted at the dogs, who danced back and then resumed tugging at the carcass.  Take the antlers, gut the old boy, hault him miles and miles, slung ‘im in a ditch.  He forced a few deep breaths.  “Damn 8 foot ditch, too!  Lucky I could drag him downstream to get a better slope.”  He looked down at the deer, its head hanging limp, and said to the deer, “last year, one carcass lasted the dogs all winter.  They were wrestling over one piece of hide in April.  We appreciate you stopping by for us.”

Daniel flexed his cold fingers, looked out at the stars, a cold, cold night.  “Look up there, Cory,” he said to a young dog.  “See the trail we’ve moved?  There over to there.  These damn constellations change so fast.”  He turned back to the deer.  “Thanks, by the way…”  He shifted the weight.  “Been 12,000 years we’ve been at this round here, and you never get any lighter.”  He cocked his head, listened at the presence, that sound in the grasses, crashing through the hard frost, the hooves of ten thousand generations, echoing just at the edge of the last great ice.

He didn’t notice the truck til the dogs started in, barking and growling.  The truck stopped dead middle of the road, headlights full on him and the carcass.  Daniel let the carcass drop and signed the dogs to run off into the fields.

Two young guys got out of the truck, engine still running.  The driver hung back at the edge of his open door.  The passenger, a young guy, trying hard to be a redneck, boots and jeans and flannel shirt and cowboy hat, ran round toward him and said, “What the fuck, old man?  Where you going with our deer?”

            Daniel lifted up his ball cap, ran a hand through his hair, shook loose the greasy gray strands that hung a couple foot down his back.  “Your deer, is it?  Gutted and throwed in a ditch?  Horns took off, and not a bit of the meat?”

            The driver called out, “Ryan, it don’t matter.  We’re done with it.  Let’s get out of here.”

            Ryan yelled back, not turning his face away from Daniel.  “Ain’t the point, is it, Hal?  This old fuck thinks he can pick up anything he wants.  Don’t have to even have a gun, or sit out in the cold waiting.”  He pushed up next to Daniel, only the deer carcass on the ground between them.

            Daniel glared back at him.  “So you got a tag for this, or just out killing anything you find?  You kill just for the trophy?”

            “Not any of your business, old man.”  He fumbled one hand at the back of his jeans, where the pistol was tucked into his waist.  “You some kind of government-fucking-agent?  Huh, old man?  You some sort of fed?  Gives a shit about all the little bunnies?”  He stepped forward, over the carcass, pushing Daniel back.

            “Ryan, it ain’t worth it.  Let’s get some more beer, go look up Suzy,” Hal called out.  He took a step closer, rubbing his hands, tucking them under his arms.

            Daniel heard the low growls out in the darkness, and let out his own low growl to warn the dogs back.  He leaned closer and stared into Ryan’s eyes, then breathed out slow and heavy, the mist coming up around both of them.  “Yes, the old give and take,” he muttered, and let Ryan see the ghostly herd around them, the spirits of the millions that once thundered these hills.

            Ryan lurched back, stumbled over the carcass.  He pulled the pistol as he hit the ground and shot into Daniel’s side.  Blood dripped on the carcass, which stirred to life and enfolded Ryan inside the hollowed out rib cage.  His arms became the deer’s forequarters, his legs the deer hindquarters.  His head joined through the deer’s neck.  A great rack of horns, 20-point at least, grew back on the mutilated head. 

The stag, Ryan, struggled to his feet and tried to struggle away.  He ran toward Hal, trying to ask what had happen.  Strange bawls and grunts came out instead of words.  He pushed forward.

“What the fuck?  What the fuck?” Hal called out, scrambling back toward truck. 

Ryan moved at him too fast, goring Hal again and again, til Hal fell back, twisting on the ground in pain.  The dogs came in from the field, barking, and Ryan, the stag, ran out to join the ghostly herd.

Daniel came over, looked at Hal on the ground, and shook his head.  He stepped into the truck, put it in neutral, and let it roll back cockeyed into the ditch.  “Come on, dogs, let’s get home.  I need to heal up.”  He whistled, and walked up the road.

            Only two dogs followed.  Daniel turned, and saw Rachel nuzzling Hal.  She lay down beside him and put her head on his chest.

            “Ah, no.  This one?  Really?” said Daniel.  “He’s pretty far gone.  And likely a shithead, just like his buddy.”  He whistled again.  Rachel put a paw on Hal’s chest.

            Daniel sighed.  “Fine, damn it.”  He stepped back down the road and knelt beside Hal.  “Ok, get off him,” he said to Rachel.  He rubbed his own bullet wound, til his hand was coated with blood, and then rubbed his hand into Hal’s wounds.  He shivered, with the sudden loss of heat moving out of him.  He stood up and watched the recovery, the wounds closing, Hal’s body shifting.  He whistled.. 

            “Come on,” he called to his four dogs. “Cory, Justin, Rachel, Hal.”  They all started back up the hill.  “Sorry ‘bout that deer.  Maybe the next carcass will stay put.”


© 2013, Robert E. Boon

               

Rational Thought

R. Boon

December 6, 2013

Rational Thought

            He loved running, hard, chest heaving, great plumes of lung-steam swirling past him like tormented fog.  Night skies, December nights, the bright moon diffused behind water-color clouds, just on the edge of storm, an icy rain, snow.  Like a scene in that Bergman film.  Seventh Seal, wasn’t it?  And he loved the bare trees, their limbs ever-finer, not skeletons, but this reaching out in subtle patterns, strategies to manipulate solar energy.  An alien intelligence almost.  The only ones smart enough to deal with climate change.

            He stopped at the creek, tapped at the damp sand, where the creek struggled to flow.  A bad summer, disguised by a little rain last month.  He leapt across, from one rock to another.  That same old song came back, stuck in his head.  I was tired of my lady, we'd been together too long, / Like a worn-out recording… He tried to growl the song out of his head.  And in the personals column, there was this letter I read / "If you like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain…if you have half-a-brain”… He picked up speed, running across the open field, trying to only hear his own hard breath.  …making love at midnight, in the dunes of the cape / I'm the love that you've…

            Surprised, he hit the ground, rolled twice before stopping on his left side.  He twisted slightly, and whimpered once at the pain.  Damn, they shot me!  He controlled his breathing, flexed his ribs.  Not broken, but a damn big slug.  Bet it’s a 30-ought-6 in there.  He snarled, and his front paw scratched at the ground.  A hard pulse of anger rose up in his gut.  He winced, and snarled again.

            Ok.  Ok.  Suppress that first urge to just go total full-berserk and rip out every throat I can find.  Remember The Incident last July at that church fireworks thing.  Don’t need ministers to start quoting Lon Chaney movies from the pulpit again.  He twisted around and licked at the wound.  Maybe these guys with the rifle are just scared.  He sniffed the breeze.  Lot of adrenaline, sweat.  Lot of cheap whiskey, too.  Four humans.  He focused on the bullet inside, felt it start to move.  Or maybe it’s that human dominance thing.  ‘See something, shoot it.’  Assholes.  Are they ever going to read Genesis the right way? Why don’t they just go blow away their boss at Taco Bell? “Fight the man, don’t shoot the wolf”—that would make a good bumper sticker.

            He squeezed his gut once more, and the bullet oozed out, fell on the bloody grass.  Yep, 30-ought-6.  Fuckers.  He staggered to his feet.  I got to eat.  That healing took a lot out of me.  He sniffed the breeze again.  Aw, yeah.  A bull, right over that ridge.  He trotted over, spotted the bull, and took it down in three seconds.  He ripped into the throat and shredded the chest open, going for the blood-hot heart.  Ok, don’t overdo it.  I need some energy, but I don’t want to be at my laptop tomorrow morning still seeing hunks of organ meat stretching my belly.  He bit into the heart.  Yeah, but remember that bull over in Calloway County a couple years ago.  Bet he weighed in a ton and a half.  Huge fucker.  Could have made five human meals just on his balls.  Ripped him open and lost it.  Blood-wild.  Tore him to shreds, rolled in that sweet blood for an hour.  He let out a satisfied growl and pulled loose a tendon in the bull’s throat.

            But what a pain, walking back to my apartment in human form, into those streetlights, just covered in blood.  How does it go in Hamlet? “Head to foot

Now is he total gules, horridly tricked

With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,

Baked and impasted with the parching streets,

That lend a tyrannous and damnèd light

To their lord’s murder. Roasted in wrath and fire,

And thus o'ersizèd with coagulate gore,

With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus

Old grandsire Priam seeks.” 

Love that shit.  He ripped the heart totally free from the bull’s carcass.  ‘Eyes like carbuncles’—can’t beat a line like that.  And there I was, blood boy, in the neighborhood, almost home.  That old guy shrieked and pissed himself.  But those two college girls—they wanted to chat me up.  Guess they could see what they wanted.  Might have gone somewhere if their damn poodle hadn’t flipped out.  What self-respecting dog wears a pink ribbon?  He rubbed his muzzle across a leaking artery, breathed the blood, felt the urge grumbling in his throat, felt a half-erection further down.  Ok, ok, don’t lose it, don’t go full out bloodlust.  Get that damn song back—getting caught in the rain…blah, blah, into health food, something… into champagne…meet you by tomorrow noon…something, hmm, hmm, bar called O'Malley's where… He lapped at the surging blood.

            Behind him, from where he had been shot, he heard human voices, and a couple dogs.  Assholes, bringing their dogs.  I like dogs, except maybe poodles.  No reason to drag them into this. He gave a low growl that raced along the ground.  He heard the dogs yelp and refuse to follow their humans.  Their stupid humans.

            He picked up the heart, ready to leave.  He heard the pop just before he felt the pellets sting into his hide.  He didn’t stagger at all this time.  Really?  A shotgun now?

            He set down the bull heart, turned and noticed as he ran the three older teens in front, the two boys, one with a rifle, just beginning to take aim, the other with the shotgun, finger on the trigger, the overripe and drunk girl with them, noticed this as he ripped through the rifle arm and then the shotgun’s chest and crushed the girl’s throat.  These three lay there, beyond any rescue, twitching, collapsing, faces and body parts open to the moon, like some panel in one of those creepy 70s horror comics.  The fourth, a younger boy, 13 or 14, held the cheap whiskey bottle, too startled, too overwhelmed to even let that drop.  The clouds opened enough that the view was clear. The boy stared into his eyes.

            This one—is he swearing to kill me when he grows up?  The life quest he’s always hungered for?  Or will he dream tonight of running beside me? You’ll see me again.

            He shifted just enough to have some human voice.  “Go.  Go home,” the guttural snarl.  The boy paused one last moment, then turned and ran, still clutching the whiskey bottle.

            The enormous wolf howled, a howl no one would challenge.


© 2013, Robert E. Boon