Fubar Clus

Ron Silliman

“That much drinking

does not come free”

A ride

in a cheap rent-a-car

after an hour of tea

in the sun

Large screen TV

playing basketball

with the sound off

Movement

quick & muscular

though seeming

curiously slow

Rodman’s hair

an impossible yellow-white

Talking of death, of

cancer, this one’s

prostate, that one’s breast

a woman described as

“a poet of the seventies”

who is in fact

a friend to many here

wind-up kangaroo flips

but fails to land

standing up

“Thinking of getting married again—

a beautiful French woman—

so I ask him

what does he think he’s doing

and he admits

he doesn’t know”

2.

form festers restless void

—Charles Borkhuis

“Behind these pictures

I have other pictures”

Haze blurs the margin

far up Suisun Bay

though to the east, Diablo

etched in summer heat

(though it is only Spring

Little blue butterflies

the underside of whose wings

prove gray as rock

alight atop

wild chamomile

To the west

out beyond the Gate

the great white cloud bank

sits low over the water

a blur to Tamalpais

while between

lays what I conceive of

as the past

The burden

of time

old men

in the gas station shadows

sitting on overturned drums

spitting into the grease

A woman

beautiful thin face a little more etched

after a year’s absence

brings out a tray

on which sits a pitcher and several glasses

out into the brilliant sunlight

of the deck

high over the terraced garden

Masks & kites

hanging from a line

paint drying

Great Wall of Duplos

children’s chairs

tables, easels

webbed together in yarn

Choir

of the nearly inaudible

hum in the walls

crackling constant in every light bulb

deep breath of the furnace

   ice maker’s rattle

in the empty kitchen

overheard

Up the block

an engine turns over

Report of a blue bunting

where none should be

3.

The cat stalks slow

across the cut grass

bird barely visible

in the last light

that might still be called

predawn

casts

a narrative

over the whole yard

mealy bugs impervious

in the damp soil

The brief season of tulips has passed

So that

an image is layered

out of the visible

through extraction

of characteristic

detail

She rose up

after the act

straightening the camisole

she still wore,

  picking

the rest of her clothes

up from the floor

and looked back at him

alien now that he slept

wondering

had he even seen her

during the fact of it

Cars abruptly

leaving the freeway

climbing the dirt path

up to the off ramp

or the road north

to Germantown Pike

ahead

(then below)

long sea of red lights

the Schuykill transformed

into a parking lot

headed East