Jen Robinson

 

Animal Life

Well, I said –
meditating an elliptical phrase
but unable to reach a conclusion –
they’ve filled the WPA pool on 21st Street
for the summer again. Not the deep-diving part –
that’s still empty and dry, a half-moon crater of
flaking aqua concrete. But the rest is
shimmery green chlorine smelling and cool,
with an animal life of its own at sunset – orange on rippling green
glimpsed through trees – through brick umbrellas –
deflated mirrors – fictitious louvres –

 

The Secret Phrase Is

The man in my head is a security guard
who shoots hoops where the tracks end.
He waves his metal-detecting wand around
my outstretched arms. Will I come back
and have cake at the end of his shift? His smile
leaves no room on the rest of his face so I say
What time? Thinking of the time

I passed through a town in Florida where
everyone was a psychic, or a medium, or at least
a reader of cards. We knew you were coming,
they said. Watch out, you have a target on your back.

 

Four Poems for Todd Colby

 Adhesion

I’m not talking to myself, I’m singing
read the sticker on the rear bumper
of the minivan parked in the driveway of
the mosque on Twenty-third Avenue
that used to be the Korean Methodist church,
proclaiming its owner a member
of the Northeast Oratorio Society.

Another sticker on a Honda parked down
the block said Justice for Mumia
Equals Death, which seemed ambiguous
to me: was it meant to express approbation
for the killing of an alleged killer? Or was it
a bitterly ironic indictment of
American criminal courts?

Propagation

 My doctor
asked me if I consume any
street drugs; in the interest of
full disclosure to my health professional
I said yeah, I smoke a little
once a year or so at a party. She said
Oh you gotta stop!
It can lead to other things.

 
Citree

Sweet-gums drop sickle-hooked seed burrs
in fall; parks department personnel call them
waste trees. Mottled flesh of Sycamore, that is
London Planetree, dangles twin seed balls
through the winter. Cherry-bark blazed with
horizontal lenticels, pores through which
the tree breathes. Red Oaks, Northern Oaks,
broken glass and acorn caps, squirrels
watching me as I watch them, nuts
in their mouths. Touch Not This Tree
reads a green sign in the crotch of an Elm
somehow a survivor of the Dutch
plague. Tulip tree in Queens, near intersection
of Cross Island and LIE, the largest in the city;
a baseball cap and a ho-ho wrapper
shoved inside a hole in its base.
This tree is dedicated to those who died
September 11, says a sign taped and
twined to a trunk on 31st Street. Stumps of
victims of the Longhorned Beetle
in McCarren Park.

Derivation

Watching Chicago I thought
If I had a heart attack now
I could die in this movie theater seat
And no one would know until
The popcorn sweepers found my lifeless body.

I felt sorry for them, probably
Teens pulling minimum wage –
They’d be scarred for life.

 

Astoria, Texas

That the chaos in my head might be
a spinning ring of glee –
a firework calliope – a rain of silver spines
surrounding me: in other words
other than fearsome

Externally as I should be in our Volkswagen foursome,
myself in the passenger seat, radio tuned
to the Hendrix station. Sharon leaned forward
to whisper, “Well, kids of divorced parents
are always fighting about something.” I nodded

yes, but thought allowing someone else to choose my clothes
was going too far. Still, it may be
that I deserved it, for many reasons, like
falling out of my chair, or telling lies,
or shouting “fuck you”

 

Vitrescence

1.
Pulled me down on his lap and said he’d like
a malt-and-malt – malt liquor his favorite drink.
Every window a french door so the grass could be close
to his toes. In this house he built for him

and for me. Coming home one night I watched
a cab driver pull over, get out, and hit his headlamp
with the heel of his hand until it came back on.
I was waiting for the bus in front of

the museum. No house awaiting me but an apartment
with cracked walls and peeling paint, and paint-chips
stuck on the walls with tape where I meant to do something
someday. In the bedroom a bed where I dreamt

of the kitchen I’d have, stacked with glass jars
for every item, tin screw-on tops decorated with
words and pictures for each – the sugar, the barley,
the wheat flour. Where he stood on a ladder

to rewire the ceiling-lamp. I could see the underneath of his throat
as he reached with his pliers to make the current flow.

2.
Even the smallest of animal skulls
are eaten clean by the museum’s colony
of dermestid beetles. Tiny black creatures,
they live in porcelain boxes together with
the bones of specimens. They cannot fly

unless the air becomes hot; microscopic
spiky hairs jut from the skin of their babies,
larval worms who enter the most convoluted of osseus spaces
with ease. They do not like feathers or fur,
preferring flesh and sinew. A brain,

like that of a deer or bear, is good:
it is wet and nutritious, and a perfect place
for incubation.

 

The Doctor’s Finger

Brushes my burnished shoulder
where the flesh closes over
the openings made to receive
the metal; the present isn’t etched
but plasmic. Paleontology now
tells us the story of human evolution
is more like a bush than a tree
as was previously thought. More
like a bush, a woman’s metaphor,
neither straightforward nor exact.
On the legendary island of Hi-Yi-Yi

A zoologist discovered a group of animals
reminiscent of the rhinoceros shrew,
which he dubbed “Snouters.”
The noses of these tiny cutiepies
had evolved to fill all manner of
ecological niches: one moved the animal
backward in a springing jump; another
assumed the form of a flower
the better to catch insects; a third,
divided into four legs, made a hissing sound
as the creature walked. Sadly, scientist, island
and snouters were exploded
by a nuclear test bomb in the late
nineteen fifties. (Some say
the island sank in a seaquake;
the truth is lost to history.)

---

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