Digging in Black Mountain
The decorated bowls were placed on the deceased’s head and then “killed” with a sharp object. The resultant hole in the vessel presumably allowed the spirit to escape.
—J. J. Brody, To Touch the Past: The Painted Pottery of the Mimbres
I shape the bowl, coil
crimped to coil, working inwards
to the spirit hole.
It’s formed like the ones
the Mimbre of America’s
Southwest used to sculpt,
but no elder holds
my hands, only photographs
instruct my shaping.
Slip slicks the inside
where I paint—when it has dried--
a rectangular
man, big eyes and cock,
who dares you to look away.
Arms trail to feathers.
It is not his time,
but the spirits of his pasts
circle closer than
this glaze-darkened cloth.
I see stars above the hole
starting nighttime’s slide.
I will figure him
in a spray of light that breaks
up constellations
others have outlined--
the black bowl above my head,
patterned by piercings.
Attack Point for the Wind Chest
—for Walter Holtkamp, Holtkamp Organ Company
The construction crew’s nailgun shoots
apart my dreams and hammers my head
into daylight’s headachy glare.
I put in earplugs from my nightstand,
stumble towards a shower only to find
every sound’s attenuated, strung out
and loaded down with the internal
hammers of blood-thump and echoey
ear chamber hums, so water plays
a whole new set of scales. Delirious
with my discovery I dance.
Mirrored me shakes as the jackhammer
rattles and rumbles our stuccoed walls.
I flick on the electric shaver I took
when cleaning out my father’s effects
and attend to a thrum running around
and through my head, as if I were
a cathedral and someone were trying out
all the registers of the new organ, plying
the furthest pluck point to see what the outer
range will produce, as once, hitchhiking,
I met up with Dad’s organ-builder friend
from his boarding school days
when I hitchhiked to Belgium.
Walter used a handful of Francs
to open a closed church so he could try
the just-installed organ. How I spun
through the forest of stony pillars
like a low-ranking dervish of desire
as now I spin inside my skull, the back-
beat of construction tools a drumkit’s
thumping accompaniment. I’m opened
by what assaults my ears, the clear
chiff of rebar rattling against rebar
just outside my window, the backhoe’s
pedal boards creaking when depressed…
Once I caught my father intoning
an off-key aria with headphones clamped
around his failing ears on an evening
when he thought no one else was home--
spinning inside his private paradise,
which I, until he caught my shadow, shared.
Ashes, One Year Later
My brothers and I
throw Dad from the knoll’s summit.
He showers the leaves,
small particulates,
wind-lifted, rise and burnish the air:
Vesuvian dust
silting eyes, eddies
dancing currents, whisked remains
of his ash-grey hair.
How little we know
of the wayward upper airs,
their ways of going.
I lick dusty bits
from fingers—powdery talc--
a gymnast’s white hands.
David Allen Sullivan’s first book, Strong-Armed Angels, was published by Hummingbird Press, and three of its poems were read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. Every Seed of the Pomegranate, a multi-voiced manuscript about the war in Iraq, was published by Tebot Bach. A book of translation from the Arabic of Iraqi Adnan Al-Sayegh, Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet was published in 2013, and Black Ice, about his father’s dementia and death, is forthcoming from Turning Point. He teaches at Cabrillo College, where he edits the Porter Gulch Review with his students, and lives in Santa Cruz with his love, the historian Cherie Barkey, and their two children, Jules and Mina Barivan. He was awarded a Fulbright, and taught in China for one year (yesdasullivan.tumblr.com). His poems and books can be found at http://davidallensullivan.weebly.com/index.html
The decorated bowls were placed on the deceased’s head and then “killed” with a sharp object. The resultant hole in the vessel presumably allowed the spirit to escape.
—J. J. Brody, To Touch the Past: The Painted Pottery of the Mimbres
I shape the bowl, coil
crimped to coil, working inwards
to the spirit hole.
It’s formed like the ones
the Mimbre of America’s
Southwest used to sculpt,
but no elder holds
my hands, only photographs
instruct my shaping.
Slip slicks the inside
where I paint—when it has dried--
a rectangular
man, big eyes and cock,
who dares you to look away.
Arms trail to feathers.
It is not his time,
but the spirits of his pasts
circle closer than
this glaze-darkened cloth.
I see stars above the hole
starting nighttime’s slide.
I will figure him
in a spray of light that breaks
up constellations
others have outlined--
the black bowl above my head,
patterned by piercings.
Attack Point for the Wind Chest
—for Walter Holtkamp, Holtkamp Organ Company
The construction crew’s nailgun shoots
apart my dreams and hammers my head
into daylight’s headachy glare.
I put in earplugs from my nightstand,
stumble towards a shower only to find
every sound’s attenuated, strung out
and loaded down with the internal
hammers of blood-thump and echoey
ear chamber hums, so water plays
a whole new set of scales. Delirious
with my discovery I dance.
Mirrored me shakes as the jackhammer
rattles and rumbles our stuccoed walls.
I flick on the electric shaver I took
when cleaning out my father’s effects
and attend to a thrum running around
and through my head, as if I were
a cathedral and someone were trying out
all the registers of the new organ, plying
the furthest pluck point to see what the outer
range will produce, as once, hitchhiking,
I met up with Dad’s organ-builder friend
from his boarding school days
when I hitchhiked to Belgium.
Walter used a handful of Francs
to open a closed church so he could try
the just-installed organ. How I spun
through the forest of stony pillars
like a low-ranking dervish of desire
as now I spin inside my skull, the back-
beat of construction tools a drumkit’s
thumping accompaniment. I’m opened
by what assaults my ears, the clear
chiff of rebar rattling against rebar
just outside my window, the backhoe’s
pedal boards creaking when depressed…
Once I caught my father intoning
an off-key aria with headphones clamped
around his failing ears on an evening
when he thought no one else was home--
spinning inside his private paradise,
which I, until he caught my shadow, shared.
Ashes, One Year Later
My brothers and I
throw Dad from the knoll’s summit.
He showers the leaves,
small particulates,
wind-lifted, rise and burnish the air:
Vesuvian dust
silting eyes, eddies
dancing currents, whisked remains
of his ash-grey hair.
How little we know
of the wayward upper airs,
their ways of going.
I lick dusty bits
from fingers—powdery talc--
a gymnast’s white hands.
David Allen Sullivan’s first book, Strong-Armed Angels, was published by Hummingbird Press, and three of its poems were read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. Every Seed of the Pomegranate, a multi-voiced manuscript about the war in Iraq, was published by Tebot Bach. A book of translation from the Arabic of Iraqi Adnan Al-Sayegh, Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet was published in 2013, and Black Ice, about his father’s dementia and death, is forthcoming from Turning Point. He teaches at Cabrillo College, where he edits the Porter Gulch Review with his students, and lives in Santa Cruz with his love, the historian Cherie Barkey, and their two children, Jules and Mina Barivan. He was awarded a Fulbright, and taught in China for one year (yesdasullivan.tumblr.com). His poems and books can be found at http://davidallensullivan.weebly.com/index.html
