Damon Hubbs

It was the year someone vandalized the city councilman’s car.    
The paper said deer piss. Everyone is an informer in the end.   
If flight paths link heaven and earth, the angels   
have a web of aliases.   
Burrr lin burrr lin burrr lin. Hark—

the irony of birdsong is as finely tuned  
as false teeth on a dirty whistle.   
There’s a warbler dressed like a Shakespearean actor.   
And another like a wall creeper at a lunatic asylum.   
The world is stranger than the world you know.

Burrr lin burrr lin burrr lin.
Well, hell. I’ve never been.   
Out of sync with the times, I see,   
like a fantaisie for flute and theremin—  
Wipe out the disguises, life & contacts.  

After that hippie wedding in Maine   
all the birds seduced the Pope. It’s better   
than suicide. The bride, Nell, doesn’t like me at all.   
She’s from Connecticut. State bird: American Robin.   
It’s sobering, really. I hope to sleep with her

and sing my soul to rest.  
Leave proof that we were here,   
soaring and elliptical before the bardo.   
Put a hat on that baby, mid-dash   
to the emergency exit.   

The last Great Auk was killed   
on Eldey Island, Iceland in  
1844, which means you’re not   
going to have a Big Year unless   
you’re listing in the Lower 48.   
When I was in Iceland I watched   
a woman step into a geothermal   
field so her husband could get   
a better photo of her with The   
Great Geysir. 

The name Geysir is derived   
from the Icelandic verb geysa
—“to go quickly forward.”  
There were storm clouds like   
a nervy flash of pubic hair. The   
husband got the shot. The woman   
didn’t slip into extinction through   
the earth’s spidery volcanic systems.   
It’s the gravitas of the chronicle,   
as Artaud would say.

My ideal and fictional self thinks   
that things worked out well for the woman   
and her husband.   
They made love.   
They went to the cinema.   
They had a fluency of feeling.   
I suppose there was milk and woolens and laughter.   
They heard trains on an island where there are no trains.    
Everything went somewhere.   
The fisherman’s boot didn’t crush the last egg.

	—after Joe Brainard

I remember my mother singing Hold Me Now
by the Thompson Twins   
and then looking at the universe for a response.   
I remember the song peaked at number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1984.   
I remember blue popsicles and stationery from Love of Pete.   
I remember Boris. He lived next door but claimed to have lived on Mars   
in his past life. His favorite TV show was Land of the Lost.  
I remember looking a gift horse in the mouth and saying, “I’m more gifted  
than you.”   
              I remember sitting in my crib and watching my mobile   
and seeing two airplanes crash into the Twin Towers.   
I remember telling my Montessori teacher that Leipzig was the new Berlin   
and that Hitler thought the world was made of ice.   
I remember reading Dune when I was five and identifying as a Bene Gesserit.   
I remember how my tongue was like a floppy disc every time I ate   
mint chocolate chip ice cream.    
I remember riding through a decadent urban world like a lonely cab driver. It was a nameless hour and the streetlights circled like a pack of wolves.   
I remember using my brainstem as an oar to navigate the limbic tides   
while other children played soccer and Little League and had birthday parties at expensive waterparks.    
                  I remember meditating like Marcus Aurelius   
and feeling sorry for kids whose mothers wore Lululemon.   
I remember eating reality sandwiches and declaring them unreal.   
I remember how my Aunt had an allergy to dark blue and green with purple shades.    
I remember playing three-card monte with God.   
I remember swimming in a gene pool without goggles.   
I remember planting star seeds in my father’s garden next to the Brandywine   
and Speckled Roman tomatoes.   
                                    I remember using Saturn as a makeshift punching bag.   
I remember death squads and the right-wing swing of two-piece skirt suits.   
I remember how every kid got their finger slammed in a car door simultaneously.   
I remember reading the rhyme of the flying bomb and predicting the smart-to-hot economy.   
I remember the doctor’s office —always eugenics!    
I remember how my parents named our dog Goldberry because my father spent three days   
at Woodstock and my mother had a Tolkien fetish.   
I remember hating Tolkien.   
I remember how loud the animals were when they talked outside my bedroom window.   
I remember toast that was far too full of bread.   
I remember how my eyes were massive blue slabs   
of Gnomen stone uniting humanity with a living new language.   
I remember how my sister went to the Winter Glow Dance with a boy   
with sideburns like a Tibetan prayer rug.   
I remember how everyone thought my sister and I were twins.   
I remember fate in a pleasant mood and secrets of the sun.   
I remember bending over the hologram on a Saturday night.    
I remember the militarized arm.   
I remember single tap commands and superimposition.  
I remember how sex felt like lilacs in brine and metal chimney vents.   
I remember whipping the horse of Turin   
and listening to Nietzsche’s last words —“Mutter, ich bin dumm.”  
I remember the right hand being bigger than the head, in a convex mirror, in the aero aesthetics of the Bristol-Myers Squibb Offices in Prague.   
I remember the intended meaning of the message.   
I remember how I discovered a cure for AIDS. It was a bright, sunny day and there were robins at the bird feeder.   
                           I remember being poles apart.   
I remember having a birthmark the color of overripe mulberries. I remember not liking mulberries. I remember how my mother   
never sang nursery rhymes like Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.  
I remember knowing the unknowable.   
I remember harnessing energy from “The Lightning Field” in New Mexico. Four hundred silver rods blinking against the sky’s blue black flesh synching my DNA to the heavens.   
I REMEMBER THE WIDER MORAL PANIC.   
I remember seeing dead people      like the kid in that movie.       
I remember the lyric shift     archival sources     commentary on the text       
notes on process     leisurely disaster.       
I remember snorting Adderall laid out like the Nazca lines. The next day I pulled   
hummingbirds   
and astronauts   
and trees   
and whales from my nose.   
I remember reading Joe Brainard’s I Remember   
and thinking   
MOTHERFUCKER… I’m an Indigo child I can do better than that.

I spell it large: Gloucester. It was her decade of love  
and mine, Le Beauport to Magnolia Pier, lending itself to the long poem  
pregnancy, polis, divorce, the Cut…   
Keith and his shittier-than-thou lobster boat   
and that time you took Dave’s car for a joyride;   
sitting on the steps at 28 Fort Square to read the Maximus Poems,   
Olson, to us, like Lycidas to Milton —pastoral, in that regard 

and watching the dance moms at the YMCA, after squash,   
the tattle-bogle rigging of bodies: pilates, barre,   
then that poor high school basketball coach   
who slipped on the ice and died six feet from home.   
No, I couldn’t manage the swimming. Bought a raft.  
Ate prime rib at The Patio. It’s good to see you, Finny.   
It’s good to be seen. 

The tulpas come alive at night, sing and crowd the dock,   
once more caulk their shallops down at Rocky Neck.   
The sky’s terminal stare, orange moon, gray beach;    
it’s the hot debate. The postman knows it well —why a grown   
ass man collects feathers    
instead of taking a night boat to hell.  
It’s good to see you, Finny. It’s good to be seen.   
Six months and my squash game will be legendary. 

Trivia Night. Two by two, Reed’s lunchboxes   
dent our heads. (Is there amaretto in that?   
“The recipe’s from Edna’s,” Reed said.)   
And you of all people missing the question  
about America’s first poet, swapping Anne for Emily like   
a key party on Shore Rd. What a jolt, growing all those organs.  
We can hear the storm’s slobbering snout  
but we cannot find the door to Noah’s ark.  

When I first met the girl with Laurel Canyon eyes   
the conclave had just elected a new pope   
and the Fiddlehead Wars   
were taking place in Montpelier.   
Stories were contained in a single paragraph.   
Aroldis Chapman threw a 103.8 mph heater  
the fastest in Red Sox history, and Jiří was going on   
and on about the Czech avant-garde   
and how Zdenka had been a Young Pioneer   
back in the ‘80s. 

When I first met the girl with Laurel Canyon eyes   
she tied me to a tree and impaled me with arrows.   
Afterwards she said, “Baby, the world’s fucked up.”   
Remember that time you were palace intrigue   
and I was an aquarium of tiddlers?   
What’s up with all these Ivy League kids reading YA,   
anyway? Find my lazy eye, love.   
Pretty my party.   
When Pier Paolo Pasolini ate human flesh   
he quivered with joy. 

When I first met the girl with Laurel Canyon eyes  
I wrote Tumblr poems on her tits   
with titles like “Tiara” and “Cake” and “Pop.”   
She said, “Although it’s cold,   
Elizabeth Bishop leaves me colder.”   
I bought her a shawl made of afternoon angels.    
We talked about trout fishing in Vermont   
and whether or not Emily’s Bridge is really haunted,   
about the time she pretended to be a diary   
and gave me the key, 

she said when she was a kid   
her parents took her to Italy   
and she ate a piece of the Sistine Chapel.   
It made her stomach feel funny  
like jumping out of a car on a breathless highway.