Read More: A Q&A with T. R. Poulson
In Heaven
God serves the best burgers, beer and wings
where fans watch games on windless afternoons
among smoky suns on Sundays. My cousin
Ken strums a harp that glows, silver. It’s strings
warm his fingers as he belts out rap songs
by Eminem, remembered karaoke tunes
we sang once, broke and drunk. He’s still tone
deaf, even dead. He’s still so fit, so young.
He sets his harp on a maple bench. Looks down
at storms and games below the heaven room, finds
me playing pick-up hoops off Arlington
Street. Curves of shots and takes. Walter Payton
joins Ken. They exchange names, shake hands,
shoot the shit. Walter’s harp looks like one
from a claw machine. Plastic, orange and green
with rubber bands. Ken says, Your poster hangs
tattered over my cousin’s bed. Still, you run
in her dreams. They bet my game, and the scene
breaks down. I can’t say who picks me to win
and who bets the other team. I’ve found every fan,
Walter says. I’ve watched your cousin train
on hills she named for me. I’ve seen her unwind
when losing. She loses you in storms and drains
eddied in ice. I’ve seen her work, and cry. Again,
again we play in angled light, wet with wound
and want. I don’t know which dead man will win
the harp bet. One ghost will have two, and one
will have none. It doesn’t matter, for in heaven
harpstands abound. A harp can be chosen tuned
for queens, or strung with phantom pain, preowned
or new. Some are sublime, beautiful, and cleaned
by satin rags. Others have been strummed and worn
until their silver strings dangle frayed and stained
by hands that couldn’t stop playing, broken
from their own songs, their fingers stripped to bone.
Treasure
Tractor tire tracks like unbroken arrows
flanked the dull drag mark in parallel
lines along the lane we’d named Lake Road.
My favorite cow, dead. My grandma, dead
vaulted in a neat rectangle. At the service
I’d asked where the dirt for her came from.
I followed the arrow tracks—my first
time riding my yellow bike to the bleached
bones scattered in a gully like story drafts.
Twoee was flesh, dark among the stray
alfalfa plants and thistles that purpled
her resting place. Dandelions like toy suns.
She lay on her side, hips angled as though
still in pain, her tail’s black and white
tassel curved and tangled in bright briars.
Her head heavied one eye to dust. Her other
eye socket gaped upward, black. Her ear
with tag 32 pointed to the sky. Bugs glinted.
I twisted the tag from her, took it home
and paper toweled it clean. Kept it inside
my jewelry box with Grandma’s gold locket.
Everyday after school I held a warm bottle
for Twoee’s orphan heifer. Listened. Buried
my face in her fur to feel her life.
Why was life not enough? I returned to watch
the wreck of flesh. Beyond her, whitecaps
slapped dirt cliffs and ravaged everything.
Star of Wonder, Star of Night
I, too, have tried so many times, to save,
have slicked my hand inside a cow, the first
to touch her calf, unborn and breech. I wrestled
with the push of womb. Unbent the legs
for birth.
I left my cows to scrub my feet
with city. Now I wind my way through redwoods
and pasture hills. The winter solstice sunset
pinks the ocean, rusts the clouds. The crests
of waves glitter like sparks. Two planets seem
to touch, though far apart in space.
I stop
outside a gate. Inside, a cow lifts her head
and lows. She’s not mine, but still I know
that sound. Her soft moo meant for only
one. Her calf appears among shadows, slips
beneath her belly. She bends her neck to smell
him. The close planets, gold as crowns. The blood
of sky darkens the break. The wind snakes
damp as bitter perfume.
I once believed three kings
chased a distant star or blend of worlds,
believed a pregnant virgin rode past field
and fountain. Bore her son among the breaths
of beasts. The lick, the scratch of tongue
anointed his hair.
In the beginning was naming.
Figs and falling light. Mouth and breast
and everything woman. But the first death
might have been a cow, her skin taken to cover
female flesh in toil. Only God would dare
conceive a world made breech, one that gathers
life in breaths of gloom.
Before my first
communion, I bore away the dead
offspring of my favorite cow, still wet
with birth. I watched her paw the earth, and cry.
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