Poetry: Selections From Howie Good

MRI

The worst thing about an MRI isn’t the claustrophobia you experience being enclosed in a narrow tube. It’s the terrible racket that accompanies the claustrophobia, roughly equal to the combined noise of chainsaws, barking dogs, Chinese gongs, and a 1000cc motorcycle without a muffler. The worst thing about undergoing a CT scan with contrast is the bottle of foul-tasting radioactive dye they make you drink beforehand. A shadow on a scan can indicate the imminence of cancer. Maybe you have noticed at the beach that when a wave withdraws, pinholes open in the sand. I avoid looking too closely. The only things under the surface are the kind of things at home in the dark.

August Evening

We sat at the picnic table on our deck after the heat of day had dissipated. The dogs playfully wrestled under the table while we finished the wine. There was a shimmer to the air that seemed to come from another time, a lost golden age, when I was a boy catching fireflies in a jar. You smiled as if you had never heard the story before. Birds returning to the neighboring marsh for the night whistled like arrows across the dimming sky. But even as the darkness thickened around us, it was possible to believe in the indefinite postponement of anything sad or negative. This was world peace and why I love you.

 

 

 

No Horseplay

His followers referred to Jesus as “Rabbi,” a Hebrew term meaning “teacher” or “sage”; the term “workaholic” hadn’t been invented yet. The followers, both male and female, dressed identically, like museum guards, in black suits, white shirts, and thin black ties. History was deep in the midst of evolving new crimes and incongruities. There was no obvious narrative order to events, no clear throughline, only a sign warning “No Horseplay in the Pool.” The second shooter, weapon in hand, crouched behind the grassy knoll, watching the president’s limousine approach. Any moment now  might bring further upheaval, a hunger without a mouth. 

 

 

 

Sightlines

1

Overnight someone drew a big question mark in white chalk on the blacktop of the walking path. I examine it as if it were personally meant for me. My 4-year-old granddaughter, eager to get on with our walk, pulls at my sleeve. I wonder about the intent of the artist, what it is I’m being encouraged to ask. Birds can see colors in nature that humans can’t. What else can’t we see? 

2

My dad saw it when he was a kid. He was down by the bridge. A man at the homeless encampment, a Hooverville, was trying to shave, scraping at his stubbly cheeks with a shard of glass, and even as blood bubbled and dribbled from the numerous cuts on his torn face, the man kept scraping at his beard, scraping, scraping, a terrible sight, like something out of Goya’s Disasters of War or a manual of truly inventive tortures. 

3

You hear the whee! whee! whee! of sirens. Conditions are such that sounds carry unusually far. Once cancer touches you, you belong to it, you’re marked with its brand. Pallbearers, creased, stained, stoop-shouldered, enter. All good stories, they agree, end in death. The person you love will be somewhere, maybe questioning things or seeing your face in a cloud.

 

 

 

Boys

We shot at the birds on the wires with bb guns, broke a few windows. We got into fistfights at school. We aspired to the leathery toughness of the men we saw on TV and in the movies, men whose eyes were as cold and hard and empty as the tundra, whose self-containment was a challenge or taunt to others, a standing proposal of violence. We played a game called “Chicken” involving a jackknife. We made a Bic plastic lighter into a flamethrower by bending the flame with a burst from an aerosol can of mom’s hairspray. What we were doing seemed normal in a society where it’s war all the time and anyone can become a casualty, the corpse found in the woods with his pockets turned out.

 

 

 

Your Destination Is on the Right

A statue of the Virgin Mary in a Gothic cathedral in Linz, Austria, goes into premature labor. Light travels outward in straight lines in all directions. The only real monsters are human. My brother-in-law, an octogenarian, is in the hospital on life support, a rusted car up on blocks. The next day the one-eyed fish are biting. “These are really nice, for what they are,” Wilson observes somewhat snidely. Already it’s sweater weather at night. All living things are programmed to wither and die and be replaced by facsimiles. In an imagined distant future, the discovery by remote descendants that we referred to Earth as “Mother” comes as a surprise. 

 

 

 

The Trouble With Being Born

It was called Oak-something – Oakwood? Oakdale? – Diner. Waitresses, dressed as for mourning in all black, moved through the maze of tables and booths with the dull resignation of fish in an aquarium. Mom was sitting across from me, looking unusually happy. I felt kind of happy myself. Our waitress, a tarnished blonde with a nose ring and tattoos creeping up both arms, came over to refill our cups. She sloshed some coffee on the table as she poured. Mom rolled her eyes. Then I noticed the smell and her skin hanging down in strips like peeling wallpaper, and I realized I was screaming and that she was 20 years dead.

 

 

 

 

 

Howie Good's latest poetry collection, True Crime, was published by Sacred Parasite in Berlin this year.