Lance Larsen

Book of Salt 

I wanted to walk all over art, so I drove 
      to Spiral Jetty.  I wanted company, 
            so I took a book of poems, First Course 
      in Turbulence, which promptly slipped 

from my hand into the Great Salt Lake.  
      I grabbed it before it sank, but it wrinkled 
            badly, like a botched self-help book.
      Seven times saltier than the sea—

a fascicle of tears.  A few weeks later, 
      at a signing, I passed that book 
             to its author, who looked me over, 
      as if I’d tortured his first-born daughter 

and wanted absolution.  “I have felt,” 
      he wrote, “like this book looks.”  
            His inscription was now the newest poem 
      in the collection.  A backdoor jumping-off

point on how books are like people: 
      moody, quick, perishable, frazzled 
            at the edges!  Not to mention salty.  
      So salty in fact, that I now keep 

these poems in my spice rack.  
      If a recipe calls for sea salt, I just rub 
            the pages briskly, and—voila!—
      Nature weeps into my chowder.  

Lake Bonneville served up in a tureen. 
      Which makes me an organic cook, 
            a prophet of the sea.  Also a docent 
      of love.  Why? I took more than a book 

of poems to Spiral Jetty that morning.  
      I took my beloved.  And kissed her 
            where the jetty ends, one hand holding 
      wet poems, the other stroking the small 

of her back.  Vectors, vertigo, vortex.  
      We settled into holding hands 
            and greeted other pilgrims drawing 
      near.  In the end, aren’t we all odes 

in search of other odes? Devotees 
      drawn to mysteries that turn in 
            on themselves, like a good treble clef, 
      leaving us stranded, wet to the ankle, 

in the middle of where we began.  

(For Dean Young)

For I Will Consider the Lone Crow at Angels Landing

For she rides updrafts with scalloped hands, interrogating air.
For in the kingdom of lift, she has few peers. 
For she bullies the hawk and drops stones on a snapping fox.
For her trickster ways coalesce into spirals.
For I pine for a Muse so wild with wind.
For she counts murderous drop-offs as nothing.
For my quicksilver thoughts cling to her, like spume on a wave.
For she disdains the safety chains we grasped to climb here—           
            but not the shimmer of my Yankees cap.
For her blackness kindles blue fire. 
For if only she would mistake my arm for a branch.
For I can freeze her feathers on film but not their glow.
For she shrugs off myths like a singer shedding stale arias.
For she offers no elegy to those who slip—not even a caw.
For her errands of air map the sky with longing.
For she hops towards me now, part beggar, part Baryshnikov.
For she puts up with berries and nuts but prefers pastrami.
For she snaps the heads off locusts.
For she fills her craw with gravel and chews the world twice.
For if only I could relax into knowing.
For she rubs herself with crushed ants to keep off parasites.
For she flies straight into the oculus of What if?
For I will call her Mischief Girl, or Odin.
For she jeers at prayer and says I am my own Zion.
For darkness is no more to her than dust on her wings.  

                                                            (After Christopher Smart)   

Compost

I sing the dreck we make a feculent muck 
of saving the kingdom come of clipped 

grass whirligig leaves and deadheaded 
daylilies Parrot Moon kissing Primal Scream 

all mixed with the god forbid of kitchen scraps 
corn cobs like the chewed legs of pigs 

tomatoes sluicy with vegetal roe the mosh-pit 
hair of pineapples topped and here a scatter 

of artichoke leaves like a dismembered 
armadillo fortune cookies minus the fortune 

enough cat kibble to punctuate Ezekiel 
sumpy cantaloupes ripe as betrayal 

not to mention spent tissues sopped 
in sneezes and nosebleeds Sunday papers fat 

with want ads and exposés here an au pair  
who tutors trig and scrubs bidets here a hung 

jury jiggered by bribes all of it layered 
with bales of peat trucked from Alberta bogs 

each week I turn it each week I lift my pitchfork
to decay the ripeness almost intestinal 

I’m making a bed for Osiris all things reeky 
folded together stars falling nightly 

from myth into loam in the shaded heat 
of this plot a pair of salamanders twining 

striped with fire moist as adultery 
steam rising with what is buried like plumes 

of heat escaping the dead how do I channel 
such desire and now I kneel and now 

I warm my hands in this funk solstice 
and dross offal and equinox if only 

this sweet god of rot would hold her breath 
if only she’d stop panting my name 

Americana

I found her yard strewn with garbage—a confetti

of junk mail and potato peels, trash can
knocked over—and Old Lady Kuhni herself
in a purple kimono thing trying to clean up.
“Wild dogs done this,” she said, followed by complaints 
about her Jack, “damn him, he gone up
the mountain to shoot him another deer, and could you,
please . . .” Who was I to turn her down?
I was a paper boy on foot, thrower of bad news.
So I stooped and gathered—charred toast,
wallets of dryer lint, bloodied wads of t.p.,
grapefruit rinds like speckled snakes.
When she handed me a badminton racquet,
I thought, “A gift? Why not, I’ve earned it.”
Then she motioned me to the fence
and pointed. Lying in a bed of scraggly mums,
a deer head. Prim as a handbag, but chewed,
one eye missing, the other staring across frosted lawn.

She knew boys like me were brave in stupid ways
and wouldn’t mind using a racquet 
as a spatula. So I scooped up
that face and carried its soft ears and final 
grimace across the yard. Carried it.
We’re always auditioning for something.
Old Lady Kuhni: a little respect.
That partitioned deer: a blind date with eternity.
Me: paper boy of the decade, plus tips.

Which is why I carried its face like a torch.
“Not in the trash,” she said, “that would bring
the dogs again.” I followed her into the garage
instead, to the freezer, which gasped
in white, a cauldron filled with dry ice.
I settled that face atop a bed of frozen peas,
and she closed the lid. We traded then.
I handed her the racquet, handle first,
and she buried me in thank-yous. Then I trudged

back into that cold masquerading as Sunday
morning. What I didn’t know
hung everywhere. Tricky Dick Nixon
and the price of bananas from my shoulders,
secret lives from lit windows.
I was a carrier, worth 87 cents a day,
plus rubber bands, right arm two inches 
longer than my left. I looked back
then and saw in the side yard the rest of the doe—

upside down, in an apple tree, tied in place
with a blue jump rope,
rib cage stuck open with kindling.
What I breathed out was only breath
but felt like moths.
Moths that climbed and dissolved,
climbed and dissolved, till I too circled
that exquisite scarecrow of hanging
meat, weddings and want ads banging my thighs.