Omaha

Harrison S. Montgomery

Omaha Affirmation Crash Portrait of Earthworms Slicks Reliquary The Hunt Door

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How can Omaha be two places where men die? I can't cast the sand from the beach head to the space between towers, so what alchemy can spread so thin butter for blood,

because I can't hold you in Omaha or Omaha, I can't kill you in Omaha in Omaha, you don't exist in all the cracked concrete where you don't fit anyway. And on the beach at Omaha I can't check your pulse for the throbbing of wine, the sweet looks like rock candy the color of lakes; I can't marry you in Omaha Omaha.

If this were a shipwreck, spaced out somewhere in the Pacific, I'd call it Omaha, and lay you down. Ultramarine, beyond the saltwater, beyond the rocks below beyond the bleak ocean of killing creatures beyond sweating with fear I'd kiss you in Omaha, because the deep is polar and I am freezing on the other end of Omaha.

This is just a game, and my eyes are high antennae, and you are in a streetcar far below. Am I Omaha?

But you arent in my cracks you arent behind the skyscraper shadows, and you arent under my white face as I look down at Omaha, where it is dark and the footprints were not made by your toes. Am I the moon? Am I Omaha?

Am I now Omaha where your feet will never touch the gutters? Am I now the moon, ivory with limbs you cant reach? Am I now calcite in caves? Do I cling to the walls and drip uninhabitableYour own thousand year Omaha. Your thousand year moon.

I am lost in the waves beaten into driftwood deadwood, and moon-pale. A thousand years old, I wash up in Omahathe gutter you never stepped in.

Is this my Omaha, where we made love past coral and the pressure of black night water? Is this where my blood boiled, my Omaha? The one I claimed, the palace forever sinking into canyons?

Or am I Omaha to watch you with my eyeballs? Something less than pronged antennae? I am trapped like a leper in the city-cave in the wave of the reeds in the passing of lovers under fluorescent lit streets in the halls and lockers empty in the blasted bunker space in the median blossoms in the shells piled on my back, I am trapped in Omaha!

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Can you break the moon without a hammer? Will it crack into stardust not just scintillation over Omaha, but broken in all the mirrors all the placid lakes all the graveyards?

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Can you check the pining moon in two places for a pulse of wine or is the distance between the jade and its reflection too far, two far, the sand cast, uncaught by the wind?

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Will I die in Omaha? Will I die as Omaha, Will we dieOmaha?

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Affirmation This is post-prayer fording, canoe on my back, This is a cradle made from the north star I found cutting Beach logs. This is post-confession because if God were wood, I would have split my sins Because this is a compass and This is a chanson that points back to the sojourn across rivers that won't bend before I wither.

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Crash Everything was graphite; ready to break like glass, or dusk obsidian. And I imagined the digital clock had tiny gears, smashed already and flinging: me encapsulated and every last penny between the seats, into desperate collision. The amber report of the hood crumpling for ages in a concise night of bleak distance, caught in its stickiness: the hollows of mud daubers and the last ball suspended above a jugglers hand.
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Portrait of A city: caldera, granite infernos, iron foundries shimmer, Manufacture: little bits and pieces - cog work fingersthat rise on, angelic, Paradiso.

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Earthworms Earthworms climb up To moon-jade tears, In spring rain And pavement. Concrete cannot hold Their unbroken skin, And the dirt Is too sopping wet. Hiding in leaf blades, Among bulb shoots, And hollows, spiders Burrow in amber. Wriggle in the mud Or tunnel down dry. Pebbles above us And crushed seeds below;

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I will wade ring-deep, In the rain water, And sloppily avoid The hooks of little boys.

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Slicks Life is white wine: with white capped ice shipwrecked on the rim of tear glass. Stretching, cool streams congeal and rest in writhing slicks of water unsolved pure under honey. This is where love and sin meet, where junipers stand withered by fire where reaches seedling to newly found sun.
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Yeast boils in bread batter, and wine is oil to fire-water.

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Reliquary His coffin was carved from hickory, a wood he pared down with a cracking maul, splitting the stumps between two feet.

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The Hunt Door Cats will chatter sighting finches too bound by porch screens too dazed by reflections. They will gnaw gums at the windows, waiting claws curled and uncurled with peridot eyes as the door swings or the frayed rope that is tender flower buds is cracked by a cool wind or an open rose a dangling jewel stained rose stained white jade.

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