Poetry: Selections From Howie Good
Enigma Variations
1
They buried Poe on a cold, wet day
in a cheap coffin that lacked handles, a nameplate, cloth lining, or a cushion
for his head. A total of five people, all strangers to each other, attended the
burial. Given the poor turnout, the minister decided to forgo a eulogy. He
pocketed his fee and departed the graveside for Ryan’s Tavern. At dark a
watchman with a lame leg locked the cemetery gates. The rain had stopped.
Thunder rumbled in the distance. Puddles lined the road out front, some
prodigious enough to drown a small child.
2
There isn’t a single seagull in
sight. No boats either. Even out of season, it’s an odd enough occurrence that
I notice. The beach is emptier than empty – desolate. A foghorn sobs. After 30
rounds of radiation, I’m still vulnerable to a recurrence of cancer and must be
periodically blood-tested and scanned. Cancer just might be the scariest word
in the English language. A psychiatric social worker on my “care team”
recommends I download Calm, advertised as “the #1 app for meditation and
sleep.” Yeah, that’s not going to happen. No one knows the real me, including
me. My wife says I yelled “Run!” in my sleep last night. It woke her up. I
almost never remember my dreams. I’m lucky like that.
3
“Sono Adanti?”, the final aria in
Puccini’s opera La Bohéme, fills the apartment. My wife is an opera
freak. I prefer underground music – punk, grunge, garage rock – stuff that she
says sounds like the howls of a toddler who has missed his usual nap. The dying
consumptive Mimi is now asking her lover Rodolfo, “Am I still beautiful?”
Somehow she has found the lung power to sing with a sort of haunted
grandeur as she succumbs. I myself am uncomfortably close to the average age of
death for white American men, the ecstatic whee! whee! whee! of emergency vehicle
sirens. And then stars will swirl down like snowflakes
Under the Rubble
God the Father has been toppled, a
decayed artifact of the ancient future. The thoughts running through my head
don’t feel so much like mine as like the orphaned dreams of someone crushed to
death under the rubble. I should probably ignore the AI assistant when, polite
to the point of caricature, it asks, “What can I help you with today?” History
rests on a foundation of many things forgotten. The name of the girl with
mismatched eyes, one green, one blue, who sat behind me in homeroom.
Rite of Spring
I’m sitting quietly in a room
alone. Somewhere I have a cassette recording of an interview a cousin of mine
did with our zayde about the miserable little village in czarist Russia where
he grew up. “They killed plenty Jews,” I remember him grumbling on the tape in
his broken English. It’s early spring, just weeks before trees bud, and bombs
dropped from above are pulverizing cities and plowing up sacred ground. Death
never lacks for helpers. Julius Caesar once spared the crew of a captured
pirate ship the customary punishment for their crimes, the prolonged agony of
death by crucifixion. He personally cut their throats instead.
Howie Good is a widely published but
little-known poet whose latest poetry collection is True Crime from
Sacred Parasite in Berlin.