~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Barbara Hamby, Featured Poet

Ode to My Unquiet Mind in the Bowling Alley of My Soul

Chatterbox, pickpocket, Cracker Jack box

            with no prize inside, pink carnation

in the cup of the skull, karaoke night at the roller derby,

            all crash and Beatles covers—O mind, how I need

a seamstress to mend the couches in your bowling

            alley while I gutter over and over until I reach

the Underworld, and Persephone says, “Girlfriend,

            you need to try another sport, maybe archery

or speed walking,” and I see how her mind is working,

            because I’d be planning my escape

from Danksville if I were her, too, but there’s Spring,

            and Mommy’s waiting with daffodils

and fresh bread, though Hades is a hunk, if kind of stinky,

            you know, like a pole cat died nearby

or he sat by a bonfire all night smoking spliffs

            while a Dylan wannabe droned on about death,

and there are lots of fires in hell, but house parties, too,

            popping up with homemade hooch can knock

you into next Tuesday, where you, my mind, are waiting

            for me to straighten my skirt and put on

some lipstick and face the banshee, who is growing

            warts by the minute, and I think of Hamlet,

about whom someone says, “O what a noble mind

            is here o’erthrown,” oh, right, it’s Ophelia,

who had her own problems in this area, but don’t we all,

            though some of us corral those wild horses better

than others, and maybe the banshee wants to be Wendy

            with her gaggle of lost boys or a Tri-Delt with Trey

and Kyle vying for her diacritical kink, but it’s hard to know

            what anyone wants as we sit alone in front of the TV

of everything that’s happened so far, looking for a new

            show, starring our beautiful hideous selves.

                        Ode on Conversation

O how I love to talk to someone whose mind is a swift boat

            on the rushing tumult of the moment, dipping my hand

into the water of another’s river, diving into their stream

            as they dive into mine, and the best are like a tagine,

with maybe the meat of poetry, the spices of gossip, the salt

            of family stories, and the carrots and potatoes of politics,

and a few surprises like the cinnamon that you can taste

            for a few seconds and then moves on as you jump

from the present scandal to the recipe for pizza dough

            to why Shakespeare didn’t call Julius Caesar

Brutus since he’s the main character or Omar in The Wire

            saying about Ares and Mars, “same dude, different

name,” because the caverns of the mind go deep, the present

            consorting with all the gods of the past as when

in a taxi in Florence “Layla” comes on, and I ask the driver

            to crank it up, and he says, “Questa musica non finirà mai,”

which means this music will never end, though I would have

            said, “die,” but what is death but a change in topic

in an already rushing tumult, and love always ends,

            as it did for Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd,

or as Mycroft Holmes says to Sherlock, “All lives end.

            All hearts are broken. Caring is not an advantage,”

and yet we do care, but why, and “why” seems to be

            the word that rises like an orca off the coast

of Iberia capsizing sailboats, and why wouldn’t they

            since the waters have been theirs since the ancients

began to venture into the deep, and I remember seeing

            Albert King at a concert at the old Wrestling Arena

in Honolulu, and he was on a bill with the Paul Butterfield Blues

            Band with Elvin Bishop and Michael Bloomfield though

I hardly knew what the blues were then, but that conversation

            was jumpstarted when King began to play “Born

under a Bad Sign,” because who wasn’t, especially Duane

            Allman, who a year after he translated King’s guitar

on “As the Years Go Passing By” into the initial chords

            of “Layla,” died on his motorcycle, and aren’t we

all looking for signs, like the Etruscans translating

            the flight of birds into omens, or when Calpurnia saw

Caesar’s death in a dream, which didn’t stop the blood

            from flowing, and did you know that Brutus

may have been Caesar’s son by the beautiful Servilla,         

            which throws a spanner in the works, a phrase

I probably picked up from the English mystery novels

            I’d read to cool my brain after something

gnarly like The Possessed, which is a better title than

            The Devils, but my Russian is almost nonexistent,

though I could ask my friends Marina and Olga to weigh in,

            and wouldn’t that be a conversation to have,

and then there’s the Bengali word “adda,” free-floating talk

            that can last for hours but with tea and snacks,

 though I’d prefer a cocktail called Off with Her Head, a heady mix

            of gin, Crème de Violette, and lime juice, but sometimes

I feel like Caesar when he said, “Et tu, Brute,” because betrayal

            is in the air, but maybe he was remembering

the moment as a young man when Brutus was conceived,

            and in that moment of pleasure, he was putting in motion

 his own death, a moment the French call la petite mort,

            and they are entirely correct, as are the Italians

with their dolce far niente, though who would want to do nothing

            all the time, for then the sweetness would turn to boredom,

and God knows what mayhem might ensue, spearheaded by Ares

            who disguised as Mars is at loose on the world,

and if only Aphrodite could sweettalk him into substituting

            the little death for the big one, we could all stop talking

and head home through the steaming streets of Kolkata

            caring about everything and nothing in the same breath.

Ode to My Brother Who I Haven’t Spoken to in Thirteen Years

My brother who everyone says is so charming,

            which is true, until he isn’t, and then he becomes

a black bird in the dark night on the slopes

            of a live volcano that is rumbling and filling

the room with the sulfur of his untamed mind.

My brother who lost twenty years the way I lose my keys.

My brother who lived in Paris with a violinist who kicked

            him out of the apartment for five hours every day

while she practiced so she could play bluegrass in Tex-Mex

            restos that were dotting the city like jalapenos. 

My brother who loves Peugeots and has bought seven

            I know about and is restoring one now in Chicago

where he moved after he left Paris.

My brother with the broken violin of his heart,

            with the five-alarm fire in his brain, who painted

a portrait of our mother wearing our father’s glasses

            that she filled with her prescription after he died.

My brother with the crooked fingers, with his buzz-saw

            tongue, with his hair like Rasputin, with his French-

aristocrat goatee, with his penchant for decapitation.

O guillotine in the center of every room. O shipwreck

            off the coast of Patagonia. O Papillion

on Devil’s Island with the rats and mosquitoes.

Where is the baby I held in the black-and-white photograph

            in New Orleans? Where is the boy who went with me

to see Jimi Hendrix play The Star-Spangled Banner on his knees

            backwards over his head and die the next year in London?

Where is the boy on the top bunk in Honolulu, listening

            to the radio as if it were playing a message from God?

                        Ode to the Radio

Anarchy incarnate, are you sending out signals

            from Alpha Centauri or from the dumpster

            behind the Sugar Shack with its banana skins,

            forgotten fries, and balled up greasy wrappers?

Bop king of the divided night, wherefore art thou

            dark prince of the blues? Oh, right there, hanging out

            smoking cigarettes in cars, rolling out the zeitgeist

            of late sixties cool on the waves of teenage angst.

Carnivorous crabdaddy of the cantankerous street, every car

            has your little engine of annihilation on its dashboard,

            cranking out doo-wop on top of disco, country twang

            canoodling with bosa nova, rattling out

Delirious arias, as when the Queen of the Night rises up

            like a Valkyrie and out-shouts every Brunhilde

            on the planet. Oh, baby, you’ve been there,

            felt its rhythms on your cranial drum, taken

Elocution lessons from Sinatra, notes on sorrow from Joni

            Mitchell, because all you really want to do is live

            from moment to moment on the river of song,

            the stake-through-your-heart blues vernacular,

            or, let’s face it, the carnivalesque fun-house

Freak-out on the dance floor that not only shakes

            your booty but flips your switch, makes you swoon

            as the harpoon pierces your lungs, that vampire

            moment you’ve been waiting for your whole life,

            when you are nobody at last,

Going nowhere on the vast ocean of C minor. O Mozart,

            you’ve got me on my knees in the dungeon

            with all the Time Lords’ dark thoughts,

Hades’ hacked shades, his remoulade of prayer and lust,

            that busker whose god you’ve lost and found,

            ground into the dust of every word you’ve read,

            the Dead Sea Scroll of your body’s cave or your arctic

Ice queen heart that doesn’t even begin to care, stares

            into the blasted eyes of your mother and all the women

            who’ve pumped on the brakes at Stop signs, followed

            the rules, put new spark plugs in their decrepit

Jalopies only to learn that rust never sleeps, keeps spinning

            out its dead red crust no matter how hard you scrub,

            while the lazy sluts dream of their most dismal

Kinks, while others scheme of doing nothing but float

            through the day, and read Russian novels all night,

            Lady Day crooning on her island of lost

Love so it’s autumn in New York no matter where you are,

            and though you ask, “How free am I anyway?”

            you still run after it, like a groupie after a guitar god

            because no matter how lost you are

Music is a ladder that will help you climb from the darkest

            cavern, and when the spondulicks run out or love,                           

            there’s someone out there who explains you to yourself,

            the eternal winter that’s spreading through the land and every

“No!” out of the mouth of doom, because as the Buddha says,

            you can’t get no satisfaction, and though you try to tamp down

            the oompah band in your heart, it just keeps on beating

            its worn-out bongo drums like Bozo the Clown

On amphetamines, and now someone is singing, “Get Down,”

            and could that possibly be James Brown,

            Mr. Super Bad, Mr. I’m-So-Bad-I’m Good,

            Mr. Let’s-Wreck-the-Whole-Damn-Planet

Playing now on the chaos station, that is W-MESS,

            where you dream of being the only white girl

            in the back-up singers behind Leonard Cohen in London,

            because when you sing in the shower, you are right there

            in the spotlight, with Kiri Te Kanawa, Tina Turner, and

Queen, belting out the arias that are the soundtrack

            of all our heartbreaks and lousy choices, the lazy ones, too,

            that turn on you like a broken theme-park ride and all

            you can do is scream into the toxic night

Return to sender or Why don’t we do it in the road,

            and you are the radio, sending your song

            into the wrung-out world, and it’s hard to tell

            when all your love’s in vain, or that pagan dream girl

Sappho would have never had to beg Aphrodite for a leg up

            or Horace ask the same goddess to flick Chloe

            on her hoity-toity ass, and I’m telling you there’s a voice,

            coming out of a little box in my heart, that is translating

            Beethoven into bebop, Schubert into Coltrane, so spin your

Turntable into the terrible night, with bombs flashing over Kyiv,

            buildings crumbling in Turkey, children screaming in Gaza,

            because we are all drowning in a sea of misinformation,

Underwater and out of air, or maybe we are walking out

            to St. Audrey’s fair with all the cheap tawdry trash

            that flows through our lives like a river of noise,

            and was it Jesus or maybe Dylan who said,

Verily, I say unto you, the servant is not greater than his lord,

            but who is the servant and who is the lord, because I’ve

            been the scullery maid and the queen, and both have

            their pluses, though the serving wench can slip out

            of the castle and dance the night away

While Her Majesty has to stay home and polish her diamonds,

            maybe waltz around the ballroom with the German

            ambassador, an ally now, but who knows tomorrow

            when the footservant brings in the mail, and she screams,

“Existentialist telegrams be damned, I’m going to the beach,”

            and there she is swimming out to sea, gray clouds

            banking on the horizon, as far as you can see, because

You and everyone else have figured out the end is coming,

            so do you swim out to meet it or build a fortress

             to keep it at bay or pray to one of those errant

            numbskull gods—Apollo, Athena, you know,

Zeus and his motley crew—and what’s playing

            on the radio as they pull you up to Mt. Olympus

            by your hair, screaming There must be some way

            out of here, because there is and there isn’t,

            but whatever you do, don’t look back.

                        Ode on Junk

When I landed at Wai’anae Elementary School, I learned

            that “junk” meant so much more than the metal

detritus of cars and trucks that were piled in junk yards,

            for one thing the game of Paper, Rock, Scissors

was called “Junk and a Po,” and as you were swinging

            your fist, you’d sing, “Junk An’a Po, I Canna Show,”

which I didn’t know came from the Japanese “Jan Ken Po,

            Ai Kono Sho,” but there was so much I didn’t know,

and I was avid to learn, as in “That pencil is junk” or “That

            movie is junk,” which meant “no good” or “boring,”

and then there was the Chinese boat used to navigate rivers

            and carry cargo or boating parties, which appealed

to me, because drifting down a river on a boat with red sails

            would be an Alice in Wonderland dream, especially

with a picnic of cucumber sandwiches and tea and maybe

            a cherry tartlet for dessert, just to work in a Knave

of Hearts, and I sometimes think that my life’s ambition

            might be organizing the perfect picnic,

with cold champagne and potato chips, my two current

            favorites, and just thinking about such an outing

starting out on a junk with magenta sails is enough to trigger

            the dopamine center of my brain, though “junk”

can also mean heroin, which is also a dopamine wizard

            but with much different results, and junk

can also refer to male genitalia, which I was thinking

            about while watching Chernobyl on television,

and after the meltdown, hunters were sent to shoot

            the radioactive pets and wild animals in villages

and farms in the contaminated zone, and the men fashioned

            lead coverings to protect their junk, though they’d

probably die of cancer before it even mattered, and the dogs

            would run up to them because they trusted humans,

which is really junk, as is a nuclear meltdown, though you

            might have to term that a mega-junk event,

and I often think that though I’ve never tried heroin,

            it might be perfect for the last month or so of life’s

picnic, sailing down the river of forgetfulness, with cheese

            crackers, and maybe a glass of Sancerre, leaning

into the wind, as the azure sails of your little boat carry

            you into your last trip to that other world.