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  STATION ZED

  Books by Tom Sleigh

  POETRY

  Station Zed

  Army Cats

  Space Walk

  Bula Matari/Smasher of Rocks (Limited Edition)

  Far Side of the Earth

  The Dreamhouse

  The Chain

  Waking

  After One

  ESSAYS

  Interview with a Ghost

  TRANSLATION

  Herakles by Euripides

  STATION ZED

  TOM SLEIGH

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2015 by Tom Sleigh

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-698-9

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-900-3

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2015

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014948532

  Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter

  Cover photo: TJ Blackwell, Sulaymaniyah City Limits, Iraq. Used with the permission of Getty Images.

  For Sarah

  Contents

  1

  Homage to Mary Hamilton

  A Short History of Communism and the Enigma of Surplus Value

  The Parallel Cathedral

  Songs for the Cold War

  The Craze

  Detectives

  “Let Thanks Be Given to the Raven as Is Its Due”

  The Animals in the Zoo Don’t Seem Worried

  The Twins

  2

  Homage to Zidane

  Refugee Camp

  Hunger

  Eclipse

  KM4

  3

  Homage to Bashō

  4

  Homage to Vallejo

  Global Warming Fugue

  From the Ass’s Mouth: A Theory of the Leisure Class

  Stairway

  The Negative

  Party at Marquis de Sade’s Place

  ER

  Scroll

  Proof of Poetry

  Dogcat Soul

  Prayer for Recovery

  Second Sight

  Songs for the End of the World

  Valediction

  Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless

  Like inmates liberated in that yard.

  Like the disregarded ones we turned against

  Because we’d failed them by our disregard.

  Seamus Heaney, “Mint”

  STATION ZED

  1

  Homage to Mary Hamilton

  I’m driving past discarded tires,

  the all night carwash dreams

  near Green-Wood Cemetery where

  the otherworld of Queens

  puts out trash—trash of Murder, Inc.,

  trash of heartbeat

  in recycled newspapers where

  Romeo and Juliet meet.

  So much thorny underbrush,

  so much ice overgrowing

  my windshield until frost shields a buck

  behind a billboard forest

  selling someone’s half-dressed daughter.

  She melts into the defroster

  roaring like the rich guys’ helicopters

  at the Wall Street heliport,

  rotoring down through skyscrapers

  where torchsong lipstick smears

  onto a handkerchief and starched collar.

  But in my face snow blizzards

  up from sixteen-wheelers and

  three crows clot against limbs

  downswooping, omen of the augurs

  that steers the desperate lovers

  to a crossroads, right here. And where mobsters

  and suicides lie buried

  and the radio breaks into a ballad

  of Mary Hamilton’s fair body,

  but who’s tied it in her apron

  and thrown it in the sea,

  I’m the quake and shortlived quiver,

  the laughter and fractured tale

  of her night in the laigh cellar

  with the hichest Stewart of a’.

  Oh, she’s washed the Queen’s feet

  and gently laid her down

  but a’ the thanks she’s gotten this night’s

  to be hanged in Edinbro’ town.

  I’m sitting behind the wheel

  of our mutual desire

  when the heel comes off her shoe

  on the Parliament stair

  and lang or she cam down again

  she was condemned to dee:

  but the instant the news comes on

  and drones spy down

  on our compulsions, her hands

  under my hands wrestle

  on the wheel as my foot taps

  the brakes, her foot the gas

  when out of the gliding dark

  I spot his velvet rack.

  Last night there were four Toms,

  today they’ll be but three:

  there was Tom Fool, Sweet Tooth Tom,

  Tom the Bomb, and me.

  A Short History of Communism and the Enigma of Surplus Value

  My grandfather on his Allis Chalmers WC tractor, a natural Communist

  who hated Communism, is an example of Marx’s proletariat,

  though nothing near in his own mind what Marx meant by the masses—

  musing in his messianic beard, Marx intuited the enigma

  of surplus value that my grandfather understood

  from a cutter bar and threshing drum driving into the future

  as the combine harvester, thus increasing the bushels

  he could harvest each hour, thus increasing his hourly productivity

  for each minute expended of muscle foot pound power—

  but Marx didn’t foresee, exactly, that the tractor

  would develop into a techno Taj Majal, complete

  with safety glass cab, filtered AC, a surround sound system

  that could rival Carnegie Hall or blast Led Zeppelin

  at decibels that left your ears dazed, easily drowning out

  the invincible tractor’s roar—and the hydraulics, so swift

  you could lift the discs with a touch—and all this,

  in the old man’s mind, contrasting with the tractor

  he put me on to learn, a four stroke with a crank you had to turn,

  cursing and turning until it shook itself and shook itself

  like a drunk with the DTs, until clearing the mystification

  of its hallucinated roles, the tractor refused to sing the song

  of its own reification and hiccuped and lurched into the real.<
br />
  I’d climb onto the iron seat with a threadbare pad

  that made my ass sweat, a jug of iced tea wrapped in burlap,

  a bandana knotted to keep dust out of my mouth, goggles

  snapped onto my face like an ideologue’s dream so that I saw

  the fields foursquare as I contour-plowed acre after acre

  unfolding before me with such dialectical rigor

  that the ground of being would hold still forever, never blowing

  into reactions of horizon-shrouding dust whipped by the hot winds of contingency.

  Such a theory Marx made to argue the enigma into sense—

  and not just for himself but for the eponymous masses!

  But my grandfather’s big nose and wary drinker’s eyes keep breaking through

  the mask and posing an alternative enigma: what if his surplus value

  led him not to solidarity with the worker but made him into a Kulak

  who must be killed? So the locomotive pulls out

  of the Finland Station, so the colors red and white

  make uniforms for themselves: Lenin. Trotsky.

  Moth-eaten Czar Nicholas. Technicolor Rasputin.

  The ones who stood in front of Kresty Prison

  for three hundred hours. But the colors saw them coming—

  and wore the ones who wore them to rags.

  But fast forward a hundred years, my grandfather dead for fifty,

  and there, in a window on Fifth Avenue, the enigma

  hides itself in the headless, sexless torso of a mannequin

  as a fly lands on its finger, the window shattering

  to a thousand windows in the lenses of its eyes.

  And all the while the enigma, like the embalmed body of Lenin,

  keeps on breathing through his waxworks face.

  The Parallel Cathedral

  1

  The cathedral being built

  around our split level house was so airy, it stretched

  so high it was like a cloud of granite

  and marble light the house rose up inside.

  At the time I didn’t notice masons laying courses

  of stone ascending, flying buttresses

  pushing back forces that would have crushed our flimsy wooden beams.

  But the hammering and singing of the guilds went on

  outside my hearing, the lancets’ stained glass

  telling how a tree rose up from Jesse’s loins whose

  flower was Jesus staring longhaired from our bathroom wall

  where I wanted to ask if this was how he looked for real,

  slender, neurasthenic, itching for privacy

  as the work went on century after century.

  2

  Fog in cherry trees, deer strapped

  to bumpers, fresh snow marked

  by dog piss shining frozen in the day made

  a parallel cathedral unseen but intuited

  by eyes that took it in and went on to the next

  thing and the next as if unbuilding

  a cathedral was the work

  that really mattered—not knocking

  it down, which was easy—

  but taking it apart stone

  by stone until all

  that’s left is the cathedral’s

  outline coming in and out of limbo

  in the winter sun.

  3

  All through childhood on eternal sick-day afternoons,

  I lived true to my name, piling dominoes

  into towers, fingering the white dots like the carpenter Thomas

  putting fingertips into the nail-holes of his master’s hands.

  A builder and a doubter. Patron saint of all believers

  in what’s really there every time you look:

  black-scabbed cherry trees unleafed in winter,

  the irrigation ditch that overflows at the back

  of the house, chainlink of the schoolyard

  where frozen footsteps in the snow

  criss-cross and doubleback. And now the shroud falls away

  and the wound under his nipple seeps fresh blood.

  And when Jesus says, Whither I go you know,

  Thomas says, We know not … how can we know the way?

  Songs for the Cold War

  1/ BOOMERANG

  The sidelong whiplash of his arm sent the boomerang

  soaring, pushing the sky to the horizon

  until the blade just hung there, a black slash on the sun

  so far away it seemed not to move at all

  before it came whirling back larger and larger:

  would it hit him, would he die—and you ducked down,

  terrified, clinging to his thigh, its deathspin

  slowing as it coptered softly down and he snatched it

  from the air. How you loved that rush of fear,

  both wanting and not wanting him to feel how hard

  you clung, just the same as when he’d float you

  weightless across the pond while waves slapped

  and shushed and bickered, his breath loud in your ear …

  and after he dried you off, he’d lift you onto his shoulders

  and help you shove your head through a hole in the sky.

  2/ BIKE

  The first time I let loose the handlebars

  and the bike steered itself, fat tires balancing

  on their spinning hubs, the sky came closer

  to the ground, the mountain slope receding

  at the far end of the street was an exercise

  in three-point perspective. One point was the bike

  carrrying me along through an infinitely

  narrowing alley of shrinking box elder trees,

  the second was a bird’s eye foreshortening the slope,

  while the third loomed way up high where blinking

  satellites passed by, some shadowy sky-presence

  that knew depth and height together,

  knew my knees pumping the pedals and my hands

  down at my sides countering the breeze in the now

  now now now of my swaying in the balance.

  3/ BOMB SHELTER

  There was a Bay, there was a Pig, there was a Missile.

  There was a Screen, there was a Beard talking loud talk

  in Spanish, there was the Screen in English calling him Dictator.

  There was the floor of the room, a checkerboard

  of brown and white squares, there were Moves

  that were the right ones, and Moves that meant War.

  There was a Bomb Shelter rumored to have been built

  by a church elder across town. There was Radiation

  that let you see the bones of your foot in the shoestore.

  There was a Hot War at school where mean kids beat up

  Weegee Johnson’s brother, and there was a Cold War

  that meant everyone would die. The cat kneaded

  your mother’s lap. The dog let loose a growling sigh.

  The Pig kept squealing in the Bay, the Missile sweated,

  the Screen counted down to zero and turned static.

  4/ DUST RAG

  What was Jesus writing in the dust? The magic hand

  of Jesus writing something down? Maybe what would happen next

  to you and her as she sat there beside you on the naugahyde

  and cried and Jesus kept on writing until a great stone

  rolled down on him from Heaven and crushed him?

  The Bible didn’t tell you so but Jesus was the stone, Jesus

  was the President riding in the car, Jesus was the holes

  in the President’s throat and head, Jesus was the television

  floating down from out of Heaven that brought to you

  the bullets and the horses dragging the coffin

  to be buried in the red letters of Jesus’ words

  bleeding on the black and white skull of the President.

  She cried on the
couch and you sat there watching

  Jesus writing in the dust like the dust you wrote

  your name in before the dust rag came along and wiped it out.

  5/ MARBLES

  “Elephant stomp” meant you stomped your marble

  with your heel until it was buried level with the earth.

  If you felt brave enough you played for “keepsies,”

  if you doubted your concentration you called

  “quitsies” and if you wanted to come close

  or get away you called “giant steps.” Contingency

  dictated “bombsies” when you stood up straight

  and from the level of your eye looking right down

  to your target you called out “bombs away.”

  No one liked to lose a “clearie” or a “steelie”

  and nothing teachers said about fair play

  reduced the sting and shame and anger:

  your bag’s size waxed and waned, adrenaline

  pumped all recess, you were acquisitive,

  sharp-eyed, pitting vision against gain and loss.

  6/ SHOOTER

  “Upsy elbows and straights” meant you had to keep

  your arm straight and with your shooting hand

  snug against the inside of your elbow you’d cock

  your thumb, shooter gritty with dirt, and take aim

  at your opponent’s marble. Calculations went on

  that made time and space purely malleable,

  sudden vectors of intention taking over

  from the sun so you were seeing it as if

  foreknown, though the sharp little click glass on glass

  put to the test Zeno’s paradox: in the just

  before not quite yet never to be realized

  consummation, you grew a long white beard,

  you outlived the earth and all the stars and never

  would you die as long as you kept measuring

  the space between the cat’s eye and your eye.

  The Craze

  What could I say, a laborer, to the overseas geniuses?

  That my father fought their war against the Japanese?