Lucas Farrell

Crabgrass

If I wasn't suicidal,
I'd ask her to come over and play.
Crabgrass is always brilliant
green. Dark wonder, then, why
it appears drenched in pine shadow
around the edge of the yard.
I could say more, would tell you why
and how and what it feels like to
sprinkle the salts of death come summer,
but I don't know whether she'll come,
whether the front porch banisters I've
refinished will glisten in the morning sun.
I've always been bad at this.
The roof needs sweeping,
even minor fixing, the brown needles
and crackling leaves, all
on their way out, or in.

It pains me that I whisper
softly, that each morning the driveway
smells of dusk, that I can't seem to
wash the filth off my gums.
I've learned to wait patiently,
flora and neutrinos
relax my restless routine.
Inch-by-inch they enter in,
my tangled cupid-cumbered heart.
I'll sit for hours daydreaming,
waiting for her to arrive at the fencepost,
sweat pants stemmed,
white petal hands, dripping dew
between the legs I demand,
as I've always done, to come and soothe
my tongue. Soak up my words.

I sometimes squint my eyes.
I'd rather not trim the yard, strip
the steps, rake the cocky veins
into my calloused hands,
spilling like silt on ocean
floors or crustal summits, depending
on your scientific stance.
I think we'd all agree,
perspective varies lonesomely.

I make irrational statements.
I steal the beauty from the flowers.
I should be cut down before I take up
any more space in this world.
If I knew her inclinations, perhaps
I'd take her down with me.
I say this because it makes it
easier come summer, when
my polymeric soul rises up
at last and makes a pass
at death. Come play, complain
as I kneel on all fours snipping
away at strangers I often mistake
for myself.

Red Brick River

(we sat by the river

of old brick reflections
& counted the birds -

up & flying now,
their three circle
cycle -

because doing so
would keep
our thoughts to
ourselves, our fingers

far

from the table cloth curls

that scrape the morning's
birch bark frost
from our eyes.

my soul needs a tower to
rest itself in - fifty or
a hundred feet tall - an
old abandoned incinerator

where to take a breath

is like rolling down the
window & letting
silver birds in,

wings

dipped in orange skies

& breadcrumb cries.

they may never notice
their reflections in the water,
but I do.

i sit for hours with a girl
who notices,
too.

a girl who once pointed out
that the sun rose from the west
so there's nothing

to worry about.

i like to think she saw
the small bird that won't

return from its most recent
outing,
like to think it makes her smile

inside.

she drinks pineapple juice through a straw.
i tell her it makes sense to me.

i tell her to stop having
nightmares when she sleeps.

i tell her to lie with me
on the ceiling
& watch the stars
sparkle like biotite

when the lights go out
& the world wins.

the world, i suspect,

is the ice in the glass
that she stirs with her
finger & melts with
her tears. i told her,

i said, what time did
you get here?

sorry i left you there.

she said i kissed her lips
despite my drunken stupor.

ha, i told myself,
i like her the way
rivers like secrets,

the way swing-sets
like evenings,

the way red likes blue

when the sun stretches
its shine
& makes
every
image

slow down

time.

the same way
the puddle in her hand
was an old brick tower

we never
made love in

one

february morning
when we) were still young.

such small hands, she said,
so I held them in mine.

If in Patagonia (Write a Letter to Your Mother)

Dear Mother:

It resembles
            in certain ways
Calvino's charade,
the long bus rides
   splintered      by morning frost,
            afternoon gray,
            the Southern Cross,
the passengers at once absent &

there,

landscape of the (learned,
young traveler),
depths of the earth,
above/
below.

All around, incipit beginnings.
Something to make proud
a lover.
Securing eyes with the "other,"
initial sensations,
gateway to the end
of that old
beginning,

Dear Mother:
autumn in the southlands.
"El Fin del Mundo."
Break up the parts, do re me fa so.
But all at once, ilogico.
The damned intrigue
of hearing in Ushuaia

that the world is just a handkerchief.

Back pocket, kiddo,
for the wiping up of streams
& such.

"If I were only a hand,
a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes..."
sounds too much like Mike Tyson's claim
that if you don't watch out,
you'll
"fade into Bolivian."

Even here in
southern Chile,
& the circumstances surrounding
the fog of Lago Grey, Torres Del Paine,
the circle of us standing
    with our cans of Austral,
despite the disappointment,
                                                            "Salud."
The little traveler is the narrator.
The materials prove top-of-the-line,
glacial moraine pick-me-ups,
the German boys,
the British couple,
the Egyptian Catholic bred in Canada.
Couldn't take my mind
off
        the skipping stones at my toes,

round & smooth

            the circle we formed
on the lookout point, the collective gaze
at the mountainous label held up high,
            filling in the blanks
                   of the sky.

Mountains and Rivers Without End
& Gary Snyder's little traveler
(the Reader in parentheses),
& is it that little speck in the scroll
that concerns me so?
The humbling,
quote,
towering Andes,
the wrinkles of adaptation
that scar these heights,

lost

in the Calafate,

handfuls of gneiss.
All around,     winds
                                        levitate the mind,
the roots of the borderline-Argentine,
the    in between
always to be left unmentioned.
The "interdependence,"
repeat chapter 8,
between the unwritten word
& the sill on the page,
not unlike - once recognized - the South Seas
                                        somewhere
in the distance,
                        in that               (over there) direction.
"Oh, my life," the underlying currents,
such diabolic urges give it its reputation
as a dangerous route, &
            yet what not to think about ever
            but insignificance?
Within the depths of the tightly rolled scroll
we manage to still perceive/
imagine
                                the speck as still a speck
& the sky as still the shawl
spread laterally atop our lives
& the     in between, at once unmentioned,
at once endless - go on,
then, mountains -
repeat repeat, then,
                                          rivers.

Kilometer 17
brings to mind that second child -
                was I a second child? -
of Zeno, & whose to say
human influences don't fill
these empty seats, these buses
through the new frontier,
preventing - as opposed to the safe home pact -
                 (the Homestead Act)
this bus   from ever quite making it
around the next bend -
weighed down
by: the ways of the authors, the land.
"Oh," the Canadian laughed.
"You are fucked," he says.
"Caught the bug." Perhaps, I answer(ed),
I'll die the same death as Ireneo Funes did in 1889,

"of congestion of the lungs."

& the girl smiled,
second floor pub, repeated:
"El mundo es como un pañuelo."
Is that the shawl of the mind?
Is that where - back pocket -
rests all the words
we'll ever find?

The constancy of lap to window,
& what is it I read/see anyway,
this long ride south?

Perhaps the words
of the range - old American West -
evoke the centripetal force
(it being, a century later,
still time to write,
still time to claim words,
to make one's way, finally,

away.)

The faster we dig, dig it,
the farther we remain from the source.
By which I mean, he said,

            you take the root,
            the shaved bark, wrap it in tinfoil
            bury underneath the ground
            & then, after a month,
            something sprouts inside you akin
            to an hallucinogen.

            Then you see, he said,
            whatever it is wasn't
            there before.

What is it then, little traveler?
Humbled, lost in the pages
of dawn, the spines
of summits, & how if you make
the

left

turn

at the end of the stretch,
here,
you leave all other options in the depths of

there,

petrified

by the solidity of what's next.
Kilometer 17,
the handkerchief apostrophe
dangling from the rear-view
catching light,
the salts of the red(blue) moon,
the peppered stars,
think
                          back a ways,
       yesterdays,
how when the road got you
down,
you closed your eyes
& awoke in                  Comodora Rivadavia
discussing oil & monthly wages
with a 19 year-old native,
nodding like the queen
at the edge of the board,
longing for participation.

It's times like this stimulus plays
an active role in indecision.
The overwhelm of crickets,
southern creek,
sunrise in sight,
haven't slept in weeks.
I miss the sensation derived from comfort
+ family - the ache of aversion,
the closing of the book, the crust of the eyes,
destination in the works.
One more, por favor,
then I promise I'll go to bed.

& he said this: the foreignness
of what you no longer are
or no longer possess
lies awake for you
in foreign, unpossessed places.

Solitude sensed the gaucho,
& the King of the Wild Things
was hardly untried,
even James Wright's
ruptured night watchman
pointed leather fingertips
at saddled skies,

dreaming of heroes

the purr of the Pampas
etching rivulets of literary unrest,
& generational change,
& the never-ending

bedtime story,

too often these days, swallowing sand.

how I'll never forgive the ampersand.

Nothing so glamorous
is the lonely book in the bag,
the weight of travel
for a modern traveler,
to open up and read along
the contours

waiting to take shape
               next bend
                  in the
            road,
Magellan's Strait.
Always named after "the other's"
                                                            break,
always onward,
                                    above/
                                    below.

Through the window,
I see something in the night sky.
Always have, mother said.
She says, your kids
ever come to you crying
about eternity & the boredom
of the Kingdom of God
and, well,
you'll crave parental reprieve.
Hard to believe
the goddamn intrigue
of late nights when the bugs
bite right and the sheets at
the toe of the bed.

it's about lessons learned

ahead.

The End being the same
as its always been:

count to ten,

then pretend.