Jeff Thomson

fabulous ones

This poem is brought to you by the letter C.

Cattle egret, Big Bird says, cetacean,
the word squeaking like wet whale skin.

Big Bird keeps it real—his thug-life strut.

Do you like giants?
Only the small ones, the boy says.

Chinese catfish, cassava, cassowary.

He’s an intellectual, spends his days off
in coffeehouses, crossing and uncrossing
the long orange tubes of his legs, discussing

Chomsky, conditional freedom, and Cervantes

with anyone who will listen. He marches
against the war, a thousand people
at his back, chanting

Catastrophe, cruise missile, children.

Big Bird refuses to fly south for the winter,
puts on his scarf and heads out the door.

You can’t fool me, the boy says.
I know Big Bird’s not real.
It’s just a suit with a little bird inside.

"fabulous ones" was first published in Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, RopeWalk Press 2007

Imaginary Numbers

i2= -1

As in light coming distances
in the humming blankness
from stars already shuttered
and collapsed, as in the volume
of water not in a bottle, the area
of the shadow of a missing limb.
The way winter light through
glass warms nothing. The speed
at which, on the rain-slick
leaf-scattered Kittaning Pike,
the accident doesn’t happen,
the car doesn’t slew and swing
out against the oncoming traffic,
the horns don’t blare, glass
doesn’t turn to a geometry
of pain and so she returns home
after work with the dusk
already clambering up the house,
the porch light out, haphazard
mail and the message light
flashing down the hall.

It could be that her child,
gone to stay with his father,
has called to say he loves her,
or that her husband has left her
for another man, a rodeo clown,
and she won’t know whether
to be enraged or amused.
Or perhaps it’s her dentist
confirming her appointment
as her cats twine between
her legs, demanding to be fed.

If possibility is the square
of experience, what can she say
of this day, its unknown grief
haunting the house, painting
the walls with its brushwork
of headlight and shadow? Would
she wish to take it to the root,
the absolute i on the margins
of a tertiary world? Outside,
the rain begins again and
slaps the grass, the trees’
bare limbs scaffolding
the exponential dark.
She snaps on the light
and sees herself repeated
in the mirror, at once doubled
and inexplicably exhausted.

"Imaginary Numbers" was fist published in Renovation, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2005

The Coffeehouse War

In the coffeehouse
where I sit in the width
of my day off,

the girl behind the bar
sweeps the counter
into damp circles,

her buckskin hair
curling around her face
like parentheses,

an expression
of continuous afterthought.
The slow pull

of summer runs
deep beside me.
The door opens

in a wave of wet hot air.
There is the weight
of what needs

to be read hanging
above my head,
the giddy heft of Homer,

the triplets of Aeschylus
and a book by a friend
with its laughing dog cover.

I have hacked
my way into the Iliad,
into the rage and sad pain,

into the wet peal
of bronze on bronze,
the squeals of men

who lost their bowels
to the dirt, and hear the echo
of Nestor’s censure

of Achilles on the silent TV
that glimmers in the corner.
In Pritina, a mob celebrates

the war’s end with fireworks –
saffron and gold,
a particularly Cyrillic red –

an architecture of fire
and smoke beyond
the silhouettes of buildings

pulled down
when the antiaircraft
lashed its dark lettering

across the sky.
Embers filter down
across the town –

this not quite Troy.
And somewhere,
some new Andromache

weeps for her child,
the last to go
over the walls (a postscript

in the closed earth)
beyond which wait
the terrible ships.

"The Coffeehouse War" was first published in The Country of Lost Sons, Parlor Press, 2004

those that tremble as if they were mad

Sunlight slits into the mist which lingers
in the forest, leaves
so jittery with the pulse
of dripping water their shadows
tremble on the forest floor

and a hummingbird—a Green Violet-ear—haunts
the lilac-blazed path
down the rio Savegre valley
where in stock ponds trout rib the water
with interlocking loops as they rise

towards a late hatch of stonefly.
The bird’s incomprehensible heart
hammers up into the rafters
of its chest as its black tongue wires
the blossoms from below,

and what this has to do with knowledge,
who can say? Madness could be
the road down canyon,
laddered switchbacks testing the gearbox,
could be coffee plantations

woven into the cliffside, the crimson pointillisme
of the fruit against
the waxy leaves. But benevolence
must be the oceanic color of the tear
that streaks the emerald iridescence,

must be the act of naming
this bird for the sea—Colibri thalassinus—
Far from the shore,
the clouds’ surf breaks against the coast
of the cordillera far below.

"those that tremble as if they were mad" was first published in Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, RopeWalk Press 2007