The Language of Vultures Byron Kerr

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FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

THE LANGUAGE OF VULTURES

BYRON KERR

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Summer Semester 2008

The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Byron Kerr defended on April 11, 2008

______David Kirby Professor Directing Dissertation

______Juan Carlos Galeano Outside Committee Member

______James Kimbrell Committee Member

______Nancy Warren Committee Member

Approved:

______Ralph Berry, Chair, Department of English

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

For Sydney

I promise I won’t tell anyone about the anteater.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Dr. David Kirby once again for his insight, wisdom, and excellent direction. Thanks to Dr. James Kimbrell, whose expert advice is, I hope, reflected in many of these poems. Thanks to Dr. Juan Galeano, who kindly let me drag him off the streets (very literally) to seek his opinions and support for this work. My apologies and thanks to Dr. Nancy Warren—remember, any resemblance is coincidental and…well, you ended up in a poem; sorry. Special thanks to Kim Barber, who helped me navigate the superstructure. Teresa, I don’t know how you get on with me; huge thanks for that one.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract vi

I. The Opposite of Light 1

The Metallurgy of Light 2 Sirius Matters 4 Love of Heat 6 Hypothetical Paranoia 7 Observations on Bastille Day, 1992 9 Average Warfare 12 Love 13 Fundamentals for Poets 15 Moon Tides 16 An Urban Nocturne 18

II. The Language of Vultures 20

Vector-born Affection s 21 The Octopus’s Wife 22 The Language of Vultures 24 Lament of the Passing of the Epic 28 Lucky Wren 29 Aquatic Hamsters 31 Regretting Rabbits 33 Anteater 35

III. The Way Around Immortality 37

Creation 38 Time Depressed 39 A Pious Kitchen 41 Moonshine 42 Vertical Living 44

v Director’s Cut 46 What Became of de Lelenta? 48 Fault Line 49 My Car is a Target, Statistically 51 Blood 53 Kali, My Wife, Flies 56

Biographical Sketch 58

vi ABSTRACT

Dr. Carol Tratchy once theorized that eventually we would need to reevaluate our nomenclatures regarding our most recent artistic eras. For instance, the “Modern Era” came into use nearly one hundred years ago; it is hardly an accurate description any longer. Dr. Tratchy thought that the term “Age of Anxiety” would be a better term for the time period from after WWI to present. I like it—it is descriptive, timeless, and conveniently works to my ends! The Language of Vultures is a collection of poems broken into three parts. The subject matter for this collection primarily deals with the anxieties of our age. Although some are more serious than others, I try to take small problems in my life and let them explode into major anxiety attacks (such as auto insurance or flying). I often use humor as a means of making the mundane entertaining and, I hope, poetic. The characters who roam about this collection are taken from life, but are exaggerated and modified to work in a world where vultures might have something to say. I hope the reader will find these as entertaining to read as I did to write them.

vii

THE OPPOSITE OF LIGHT

1 The Metallurgy of Light

“Poetry is the window to the soul of the people” Gaetano Cipolla

Stained glass has an odor of madness surrounding its reds and golds and greens, bordering the shapes of herons, fairies and Christs. It is the sort of scent one notices gradually, only after the body becomes ill, taking with it the mind, slowly, toward the ranting calamity that only lead can accomplish.

I’m pretty sure that fat old Bishop Sugar had no idea a metaphor of light for God would not only separate the faithful from the faith, trapping a lofty deity insanely high in gothic rafters, but also would keep the parishioners apart.

After years of melting lead against lead jointing pieces of glass stained itself by metals, artisans would become choleric from achy joints and sour stomachs and, due to their endless bickering and high-pitched inappropriate laughter, were asked to sit in the back of the church so they and their unruly children would not disturb the light-infused sermon.

At least that would make a lot of sense to me; my stepmother worked the stained glass circuits and could clear out a raucous bar with her twittering wit and nervous, sob-wrenching breakdowns. I pity her now but at the time I had no idea that her art caused the madness and not the other way around. Quite frankly, I hated her ability to destroy a perfectly good night out. You see, the modern cottage industry is industrially advanced; between the glass, lead seams have been replaced with copper, tin solder, acetones for cleaning, patinas and particulate, inhaleable glass

2 kicked up by keening table-top grinders, poisons which will not leave her bones, nor mine, for a couple of decades to come.

It’s amazing how many children are involved in this production. Every stained glass shop seems to have at least one kid in its chaos either dusting glass or crimping copper smooth over edges, which I know from experience will end up in their mouths, sucking the tangy metallic scent off their fingers. And the metal will find its way to their bones and brains

the way poetry seeps through the skin and pores of my daughter, who now on a small blackboard drafts her first poem about white herons she saw startled from their rookery which took to sudden flight across the everglades, and she writes about how the light from the moon took to their wings like the fairy dust which she knows, for a fact, exists in our world.

I had hoped that my daughter would not come to love the sound of words and their cadences, probably as my stepmother feared I would be drawn to colored glass, but in my house poetry is literally on the walls and on the floor she walks upon, and there is no hope now that she has drafted

her first piece. She too stares out our stained glass window as light filters around the metal edges, hammering out in her mind the color, sound, and metaphors of birds, flight, and of children, like herself, already lost to the craft.

3 Sirius Matters

I try to point out Canis Major to my wife following Sirius along a celestial curve

to what might be a leg, but I can see only a handful of the stars necessary to complete Orion’s hound, in fact, sad few

of them are still even visible due to diffused light that has polluted the sky so that small towns now blaze enough to obfuscate

the classic constellations that once led sailors safely back to bustling ports. The Dog Star once stabbed

brightly, a beacon in the scattered, sparkling night, but instead the whelp whimpers through a shroud of light that muddles the dark until it is a joke of Egypt’s understandable belief, long ago, that Sirius added fire to scorch the summer days. So magnificent, it was thought to heat the earth when the sun set in the west, causing life for the farmers, priests, and pharaohs to be equally miserable, sweating and swatting at mosquitoes, each hoping that the seventh month would hurry up and dissolve into a merciful autumn.

The world wobbles and now Sirius is in August and the Dog Days have been pushed up over a month, and my wife tells me that in Rantoul, Kansas, during hot summer days, they would shoot down

4 stray dogs in the streets and alleys of that small town, because the mutts would go crazy from the sun and killed chickens, mauled children. I want to tell her that hunting strays is to keep them from dying during harsh winters, but at least superstitions still pay respect to the stars, the stars we no longer see as brightly as even a generation ago; they knew something of fear in the dark.

Now we halogen our streets to guard us from crime and auto accidents and vagrancy, we arm ourselves brightly against a vast universe, the hearths of our dead diminish, the peepholes for angels muted. We shield ourselves until we forge a muted, slack-jawed, and monotonous night that hides us from the galactic ocean, a glowing curtain that snuffs out the candles on the dark ceiling of our lives.

Love of Heat

On a hot day my daughter is a metronome, swinging under a tree, keeping time in a concaved arc, and she sings something about branches and leaves and how the sun needs to go home to its parents out in the stars. I try to tell her that Solaris joining its distant cousins in a far off suburb of the galaxy might not be the best thing, but a squirrel squawks twice, in rhythm on the down beat, and my daughter yells at it to “be quiet, damn it” and the squirrel is happy to oblige in this August heat, the kind of heat that claws at my chest like it’s angry that something as small as me would block its wavelengths, angry because all it wants to do is get back into space, angry because it remembers me in the Mojave Desert driving across in an un-air-conditioned Toyota pickup in questionable repair, on a little-used road, and I thought, at that time, the journey was romantic, a rite of passage few young men do in these days of climate-controlled airliners. I was the only person there, there to tame its desolation with my presence, but the heat wouldn’t let go and buried itself in my head until I was puking on the side of the road from heat exhaustion. After the dry heaving stopped I realized that I could die out here; I didn’t bring enough water, the car could blow a gasket, or I could start hallucinating and turn off the road, head east for the shimmering ponds that were exactly the opposite of water—I understood right then the only thing that keeps us alive is luck, lucky the car didn’t break down, lucky I met the right girl, lucky there is more night in the sky than stars, lucky the sun doesn’t drift off and go home to its parents, leaving us cold. I’m happy that the heat with its angry, simmering wavelengths, bounces off my chest like a song made up on the spot by a singing girl dropping dangerously through an arc, a song radiating back out into voids of the cosmos warming some frozen, far distant planet with its voice.

Hypothetical Paranoia

On a whim I purchase a bouquet of purple flowers, but when I hand them over with a flourish to my wife she crosses her arms, and looks at me with the who are you seeing/ what have you done/are they poisonous kind of expression and I stammer about how I just got them because I love her and thought they were nice, and fragrant, and... but the damage has been done. My innocence

is as suspect as my next door neighbors who don’t exist; the house was bought, power turned on, security lighting installed, and aside from this, nobody lives there. I don’t normally care about my neighbors’ activities, but this lack of activity has now been a point of discussion with my wife for months now. I’ve even gone so far as to check the tax records to see if they are homestead exempt, which they are. I’ve gone to a lot of trouble,

considering they’re quiet neighbors, but I just don’t like the fact they are completely missing from an otherwise neat equation. I have rationalized that they are rich politicians from the Northeast who have declared Florida their home for tax reasons. Or, just as likely, by criminals who may need a safe place to hide if the Feds find them out, or it is owned by the Feds themselves, covertly, as a safe house for mob stoolies and political dissidents from North Korea; or it has been acquired by aliens who need a place to crash when they finally arrive for the invasion and require vinyl siding for their attempts to subjugate the people of earth— which I’m pretty sure was what made the night shattering screech from over their fence after my wife threw the bouquet over it, and so we slowly back into our house, listening hard for the clawing noise from that unknown place, turning every light on in the house, locking all the windows, and barricading the doors with furniture, and we swear we will never leave the our terror shielded confines again, protecting ourselves against hypothetical monsters that lurk under the beds of our terrifying imagination.

7 Observations on Bastille Day, 1992

1. Mars’s Halo

A fifteen-year-old boy walks with one of the Legionnaires to a red-and-white recruitment trailer parked near the Ecole-Militaire and my wife wonders out loud what crime he committed that send him straight to the Legion; what evil forced his hand? But maybe it’s a matter of principle, the need to belong to the best, like joining an elite university, or trying out for the football team, or dating the cutest girl or whatever it takes to rise above mediocrity, to rise above the din and rabble, have one’s self haloed in majesty, that radiance we rarely encounter in other people, much less in ourselves.

And perhaps this boy has found his way to the service. My wife then points out a woman talking to a bearded Legionnaire with one eye and a nasty scar who in turn points out the trailer and she is off like a battleship, creating a wake among the soldier’s smoke as they mill about, slamming the door as she enters and comes out with the boy by the arm, and slaps him up side the head as they descend the stairs, and the Legionnaire steps aside respectfully not willing to get in the way of a higher power.

2. Flotilla

8 I wonder what it would take for me to join, what circumstances to betray my civility, to join the mighty French Foreign Legion who are conveniently recruiting picnickers on the Champs de Mars before the insanity which marks Bastille Day?

“The French remember revolution as war,” my wife said, as we lined up on the avenue for the parade which is nothing like the States where we watch papier-mâché floats cruise down main street, armed only with clichés and pretty girls dressed for a barnyard dance.

The French still brandish tanks, armored transports, mobile missile launchers, generals in full regalia and the President is out there saluting in the back of his car exposed, prepared to be assassinated by the people crowded on the rue side, a bravery our leaders refuse to consider after JFK found convertibles intolerable.

3. Patriots

Under the Eiffel Tower is no man’s land, something straight out of World War I where the only light comes from ordinance randomly blasting craters between the latticed legs which are like trunks of a jungle tree covered in vines, witnessing the rages of war beneath its metal canopy.

This show of force is in the brief calm after the fireworks display the French are proud of on Bastille Day, where Place de la Concord gushes fire waterfalls and the sky lights up with window-breaking bursts and screaming aircraft, all of which is pretty pompous compared to the violent ritual where young men throw M-80s, launch bottle rockets, and lob flash grenades at each other until they create a demonic wasteland. Watching spectators whoop and holler on the edge of this preemptive and impromptu battle

I’ve come this conclusion:

9 the French are basically rednecks regardless of their wine and proposed civility. For one day they let down their disdain and if they could they would drive pickups with Bomb Vietnam bumper stickers, God Bless the Blue, White and Red tee-shirts, drink Wild Turkey and Sprite chasers with their brie, sport gun racks in the rear window of diesel Peugeots; and in a city known for its cafes, art, and poise let a troglodyte emerge from its collective den to run civilization for a brutish time in the dark.

10 Average Warfare

I’ve never understood what is wrong with being average— sure it’s ho-hum, but generally okay, and so when my students freak out over a C on their papers and come storming into my office with parents on their cell phones, I try to explain that being in the middle is

like being at the earth’s equator during the equinox when the sun splits the sky in to equal parts, and day and night spend the same time in the sky with us, an equation for an elusive perfection;

furthermore, some of the best beaches and weather are near the equator and surely someone could helicopter in a decent daiquiri if paradise became a little unbearable. So being average is good and besides if it weren’t for the Vietnam draft which sent failing students to rot in sultry jungles with bullet holes in their sides, if it weren’t for General Giap with all his tenacity and nerve, and all the little rivers clotted with blood, and if the progressive, slightly peace-loving professors of that era refused to fail anyone to keep student’s untimely deaths off their consciences and if such evil never happened then their inflated score would have fewer curves in it, like the letter F. They pretty much shut up after that.

11 Love

Numbers rule the universe. -- Pythagoras

My wife, pen in hand, is mumbling to herself in French, and snarls to me that I don’t take the budget seriously, that the household finances are in shambles and threatens to open a second bank account and cut me off if I don’t stop spending money on frivolous things, like weed whackers and cigarettes. She points to the zeros at the bottom of the tally sheet and mumbles something else that sounds terribly like “love,” which is a nil score in tennis. This makes losing sound romantic somehow, that not scoring points is beautiful, respectful, even caressing as one is getting smeared all over the court.

And zeros are fairly new anyway, at least to the west, thanks to a good solid sacking of the library at Alexandria, and a general distaste for anything Arabic during the early middle ages. And even after the circular digits appeared in twelfth century Italy the pope made them illegal because God created the world and did not create voids, so a number for nothing was unthinkable, which was nice, because everyone had something, but the folks that mattered, the merchants, forced it on the world and after years of algebra, physics, and geometry, or maybe because of them, we still distrust nihility in our mind until we don’t mention zero out loud, omitting it almost entirely from out vocabulary, and we only mutter “oh.”

I suggest to my wife that the zeros are an expression of the highest order, that by breaking the bank, I’m participating in a great cosmic scheme to show my appreciation for her, that the numbers at the bottom of the page are divine

12 which gets me smacked up side the head, and she tells me that she said l’oeuf, not love, and we are out, unable to make omelets in the morning.

Fundamentals for Poets

Never, ever, no matter how tempted, write what you see out your window and for sure don’t glue metaphors to flowers or plants because this is a surefire way to bore a reader to death. Don’t use clichés and please avoid finishing your lines with prepositions and articles. Rhymed lines must flow fluidly and definitely should flex their musical muscles with care. For example, don’t end a line just for the sake of sound. Or meter for that matter. A poem should be a natural creature like lantana flowering in my garden dew-covered, unruly, and forgotten.

14 Moon Tides

They’ve encased the display in such a manner that I can’t get my head in to taste the ancient grey hardness of a thumbnail sliver of moon rock. In fact the exhibit is woefully unimpressive, sitting off to the side without even a notation on the museum map. The rock is as alone as it once was just half a century ago and a quarter of a million miles away, firmly in orbit and embedded in ageless mystery

spinning above us as stories were crafted about passion and loss and most recently about how the moon pulls the tides and sets the mood for love and murder. Perhaps there is some truth in that story; as sea tides wax forward so too do our saltwater bodies lean toward one another, swelling passions until our biological alarm clocks ring and the need to taste the sweat of our partners overcome sensibilities and I reach for my wife under the moonlight and lick her neck just as another smaller bio-timepiece opens the door to the bedroom and asks for a glass of water and to sleep with us because she’s scared of the dark.

I’m not entirely certain how humans will survive if my daughter is a common example of our species. I would like to know, for instance, how people in other countries, where the majority of the population live with extended families in a single room shack, manage to make more than one baby. How do the Irish or the Vietnamese manage to find the time to rise to the moon’s persuasion in households filled with thirsty, night-fearing children?

The answer, of course, is slowly and softly

15 answering to the gravitational tug as quietly as humanly possible, bodies shifting in the night with sighs and swallowed gasps, silently as I am now, caressing and stroking this small piece of stone that has traveled ridiculously far but still draws me closer until my head is pressed against the bullet-proof glass, my eyes closed, and my daughter tugging on my sleeve asking for a soda.

An Urban Nocturne

The police pulled a midnight raid on the house across the street in what was previously perceived as a quiet, nice, Norman Rockwell neighborhood. I slept through it.

I didn’t find out about the eight cars lit up in my yard and the Kevlar vested officers going commando behind my very un-bullet-proof sedan and mailbox until morning when I was out tinkering the truck back to life and my friends next door said that they would be a little late for our planned cookout so they could get the sleep they missed for all the racket caused by the cops who apparently were less than subtle when it comes to domestic, gun-waving violence. It would appear that motion detection lights suggested for safety interferes with stealth and silence. “Fuck! what was that?” they swore every time the bulbs above the garage popped on them; they dove for cover over and over, and I slept right through. Not surprising, after all insomnia is not one of my strong points. The opposite is the case and I have a solid theory as to why; I am lucid more so in my dreams than awake. This is going to be handy for my daughter in a few years when it is time to sneak out windows for boys, or sneak them in.

17 And it is probably for the best that I missed out on all the action the other night; I probably would have thought it all a dream and tried to shoo the cops off with a broom, thinking alligators had come up on the porch again and I was just dreaming they were police. I can and have slept through a hurricane and in the back of my mind

I hope that if the world’s end is sudden (say, by meteor or drifting nukes) it is at night, while I dream undisturbed, so that the next day I can go outside and wonder where my truck is, and why the shadows of people on my lawn.

II.

THE LANGUAGE OF VULTURES

Vector-born Affections

My daughter is a preschool vector carrying home with her viruses and bacteria like a tsetse fly that’s lost its temper, spreading fever, diarrhea, rashes, and sleeplessness that only Congolese populations could survive, and I’m surprised that the CDC hasn’t descended, insisting on an explanation, eradication, or at least a quarantine, swooping through town in unmarked vans decked out with the latest negative-pressure tents and those snazzy self-contained environmental suits, or at least put her name down for a plague nomenclature, which would be nice, but the world has moved away from naming the small that kill us and instead insists on abbreviations: AIDS/HIV, STD, SARS, SIDS, until the deadly look like anagrams for something far less lethal. There used to be a familiarity with our ailments both of fear and love; we used to celebrate chickenpox with slumber parties, admired the man returned from distant continents with intricate tribal masks and yellow fever, malaria sounds exotic, mad cow is funny, the plague is carried by fuzzy animals, leprosy falls off the tongue, Lou Gehrig is athletic, Alzheimer seems venerable, and even African sleeping sickness sounds relaxing and so maybe we can begin changing our diseases with monikers: Toxic Shock Syndrome becomes Tampon Fever, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome becomes Tipsy-Tipsy, Gingivitis could be Black Breath, STD—Sack, SARS—Flu with Attitude, AIDS—Sack and Stash. As for my own domestic vector wiping her nose on the sofa cushions she feverishly scattered all over the house, I can only hope the CDC won’t ask me what to call this latest virus as she sits in my lap and strokes the stubble on my chin because, regrettably, heartworm is already taken.

The Octopus’s Wife

The octopus is one smart mollusk, with eight separate nervous systems, one for each leg, and my dad tells

this story where an octopus at the Scripps Institute near La Jolla would escape its aquarium and devour fish

dozing peacefully in unwatched tanks. The missing fish left caretakers baffled until one night someone worked overtime

and saw a satiated tentacle hanging over a pail of chum, motioning for the check. This octopus knew to leave its

all-you-can-eat buffet each morning and squirm back to its glass tank, keeping a good scam running for awhile.

But even for its eight little brains, the one big brain running the show isn’t all that great, just clever. So

squishy sea monsters stay monsters, only taking on mythic sensibilities in Japanese folk lore and anime sex videos.

We’re really no better, though. Our overrated ape minds still try to multitask our way through the day,

driving in traffic while reading the paper, setting up for a golf swing, thinking, “hit the little white ball

before the big green ball” while swinging independently of any notable volition. We’re often a bureaucracy where

the head person is ignorant of the action of the people furiously pushing papers around them. Things just work

themselves out without any problems, usually. Unless I’m drunk and reduced to a monosyllabic gastropod, trying

to crawl into the car with half a bottle of Jim Beam while my wife is yelling that under no circumstances

will I take the car in my condition and suddenly my hand flies through the air and gives her the middle finger before

21 the thought has crossed a single synapse, which should make me reasonably guiltless of the crime, but my wife doesn’t see it that way at all and starts pummeling me with her fist, then with the bottle I dropped, until my ears ring with blood and my neurons desperately spread their tentacles to form interesting ideas like “cover head,” but instead I slide under her blows and land a wet one on her lips, endearing and clever as an octopus keeping a good thing going. For a time.

22 The Language of Vultures

The university I now work for just spent forty thousand dollars trying to eradicate black vultures from the administration building. I had the impression that vultures hovering the overhead was somehow appropriate,

but the vice-presidents obviously disagreed and not for the reasons they imagine. They said it was because guano dropping on passersby’s heads was unappealing, especially if those people were thinking about giving the school money by admitting their precious snowflakes.

But I am of the opinion it has nothing to do with that; rather they were deeply and psychologically afraid. What does it tell the kids studiously avoiding school that “lo, there on the bust, hulking and hissing at you, is death’s minion.”

Although I’m pretty sure that administration wasn’t thinking “lo” any more than the freshmen were, but if they were to think about it they do have that image in their heads— swooping above them and lurking over coffee stands are dark, voiceless, eaters of the dead.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around spending forty big ones

23 to get rid of an uneducated cliché embedded in our collective conscience just because people are a bunch of nancies when it comes to highly evolved waste disposal systems.

And I mean no offence to anyone named Nancy; I’ve known a couple of good ones in my time, even though one of them effectively made it impossible to watch a Camelot-inspired movie without thinking that Arthur was a schmuck who had serious mental issues and a weak shield arm.

And, of course, I can’t say “knight” properly any more either, which makes for some interesting back-and-forths with my daughter’s English teacher.

How is it that words end up with negative connotations? I’m not talking about the bomb words like shit and fuck, which are just terms from a disenfranchised language, but words like Nancy: what about Edna or Beatrix? For instance, “that Edna was beatrixing about.”

And “nit-picking” is one that I am particularly baffled by. If I have lice, I want the best nit-picking Nancy I can find. In fact, if we had more nit-picking people patiently sitting in uncomfortable chairs carefully pulling at each strand of data then we might not be

24 in a useless desert war which is making more food for animals like vultures—

a word and animal that has taken a particularly bad beating in the English language. Vulturing is a person gliding over the landscape, studying the minute curve of the earth until a spot looks as if it might come open in a Wal-Mart parking lot close to the swishing glass doors they come to a complete and sudden stop…then wait, wait, then cut in sharp, nearly running over a four-year-old so they can grab that space before anyone else. In many ways, this is the opposite of vulturing.

Vultures would not kill a four-year-old; in fact, in Egypt vultures were considered to be the most caring of creatures, so much so that the syllabic hieroglyph for compassion, and mothers and lovers, and rulers all contained the image of the Nubian vulture because of all the other birds along the Nile, these raised their young properly.

Which is really why the university wanted to get rid of the birds, before the students got wise to the fact that the birds launching themselves off the roof

25 of the tallest building were somehow tied to mothers and they all went flying back home,

or lovers and they become forlorn for that girl they left behind in a small west Texas town, or worse, students figure out that vultures are flying metaphors for rulers, which their high school commencement ceremony said they could be one day, and they quit hovering around the coffee cart and actually take wing and do something important, or worse than that, they gain a sense of patience, vulturing around and around in the thermals, learning to speak in foreign, forgotten tongues, nit-picking and nancying about, until they fly to the head of the line of death’s early spoils.

26 Lament for the Passing of the Epic

A call and response across fourteen lines became the standard, the bread and butter of poets for seven hundred years. Fine, but how in a court of peacock feathers and elephant entourage did this length become elegance and poise? The letters, quick philosophies and architectures of love became trapped in its cage, gilded to be certain, but stuffed nevertheless sideways in a heart-shaped box. O how I miss the epics—the epicurean rulers, the heroes and mixed up deities and poets large enough to put it down to memory, limitless and unrhymed.

27 Lucky Wren

With all the withering oak, pine, and juniper in my backyard it isn’t uncommon to find a baby bird fallen from its nest, like this wren, mouth agape, a silent scream in the grass

for its mother who dive bombs me ferociously then flops on the ground fanatically whirling in the weeds then off back in the air for another pass sending earth into the sky

as if trying to coax gravity, that cruel mistress, to give back her chick or else spin time in reverse for one more chance

to set the rim of her nest just a little higher which would hem in this pall of pin feathers helpless among giants and voracious ants.

I cannot count the times I have walked away from a wooded backyard catastrophe like this because I was admonished, as a boy, that if I so much as breathed on a fallen newborn chick, let alone place it back in its nest, its mother would smell my human concern and abandon her hatchling, and leave it to starve in its well-tended home of twigs, down feathers, and lucklessness.

Better to leave it to die.

28 And how often have I let circular logic dictate decisions? If I fight with my wife because I stayed out too late, I storm off to decompress and stay out until morning which means that I’m going to fight again, or when I scream at my daughter because she is crying, or drink to relieve a hangover, or go to war for the promise of peace, or leave this infant bird with its neck straining for food and life, because if I touch it, it dies even though it will die if I do not touch it.

But I know, too, that birds have a lousy sense of smell and, regardless of what I was told as a boy, this mother wouldn’t know if I cared for its young, nor would remember, if I lifted it back into its nest in the cross-hatch branches, she wouldn’t know how lucky she is that I’ve gone against my own well-conditioned gravity while my wife sleeps in the shade and my daughter watches me from her lap.

29 Aquatic Hamsters

Lying in the grass, I watch clouds drift toward the ocean and I’m disturbed that I can’t make animals materialize out of the diaphanous sky as I could so easily as a kid.

But after I finish my third tumbler of bourbon I see an aquatic hamster climb out of a large thunderhead, its little stubby tail like a rudder to steer through the current, its small webbed feet powerful enough to swim upstream, its whiskerless face smooth, elongated, and hydrodynamic, and a proboscis protruding out of its head like a snorkel.

The carnie in me sees dollar signs, so I run inside and call my wife who is a grants administrator for the Institute and I say in my best middle-class Central African accent

“`Ello, this is Butros Butros Idi Embeke and I need a grant for the study of underwater aquatic Congolese hamsters and would like to thank you in advance for the scuba gear.”

But instead of a “yeah sure here is a bunch of NOAA money” I get from my wife, “Byron is that you? You sound like a drunk Tito Fuente, look I’m really busy, bye” and—click.

Shit, whatever happened for paying folks to hunt down the exotic, dangerous monsters that used to populate the outskirts of humanity?— The hippogriffs, griffons, and harpies? Where are the Argonauts to satisfy the curiosities of alchemists in their leather smocks who would pay thousands for unicorn and centaur hooves?

We no longer hear, or care to hear, ghosts in the chilling night, the wraiths rising out of deadly swamps, banshees singing us from the path, the un-dead staggering around for brains.

All that’s left is the smallness that the white-clad scientists tell us to fear. Knowing we are impotent against invisible beasts, we cower from the monsters created in our own, now tiny, image—

30 radiation seeping from the vaults underground, prions evading our microscopic immune system, mutation-strengthened bacteria, and genetically modified pollen that sticks to the slimy walls of my nostrils, so I sneeze and blow my nose on an antiseptic tissue, wash my hands with cleanser, cover my microwave with tin foil, and, remembering a public toilet experience, wipe my butt with bleach, then I put on sunglasses and some SPF 2000 sun block (with aloe!) before I step outside, which is awash in ancient cosmic radiation. I look up to find my hamster, but it, like the rest has been vanquished, morphing into a safer animal—a dachshund-like dog with floppy ears— who meanders off to the sea wagging its tail against the wind, wagging it because it is on fire, setting the expansive sky ablaze.

31 Regretting Rabbits

When the rabbit was offered as a gift I should have looked, my wife and daughter in their eyes, and said “no, there are no new animals in the house” a standing rule, a maxim, a commandment of sanity, but I, slightly drunk, said “okay”— one little word, one lag in judgment which segued into arguments which escalated into fights that spiraled out of control like rabbits across my domestic countryside. And how often does regret stem from the tiniest indiscretions?

The cheap rug thrown away without permission, the guy who has just one more drink, the diplomat who screwed up and set off a war, the fortuneteller who ends a marriage with a mis-drawn card: all take us down a history of our own making knowing that if we could we’d do it all over again, and again, and again, until we got it right, correcting our failures into a predictable, rabbitless, utopia where hearts are never damaged, keys are never lost, words never hop from our mouths that could cause disaster and discontent until we’re

32 sitting around always aware of ramification for action and phrase and, really, how fucking boring is that?

So I tell my daughter who is petting Pink to quit messing with her food because I am thinking of stew for winter: braised rabbit with portabella mushrooms in a Brittany wine sauce, which is precisely the wrong thing to say and I sit back to watch a small forgotten history unfurl itself without regret.

33 Anteater

My daughter is an anteater today sashaying around the house, on enormous paws dragging behind a bristled tail, her tongue darting from pursed lips phthth, phthth, phthth, licking up Cheerios one by one off the carpet. This is perfectly normal; yesterday she was a monkey scratching her armpits and preening my hair, eating imaginary mites and fleas.

This will soon pass: the ability to see what isn’t there, to be replaced, sadly, with the ability not to see what is obvious.

For instance, in Victorian England people observed the fossilized remains of fish, clams, nautilus, and sea monsters in mine shafts or embedded in quarry walls and as these animals only live in oceans discovering sea urchin skeletons fused to old stone lead to the obvious, logical, conclusion: God put them there to confuse people and have a bit of a joke.

A joke Will Smith, the father of modern geology, did not find funny at all. He reasoned them to be fossilized remains of a sea floor that teemed with life under Paleozoic waves, dodging dangers, eating, reproducing, and dying; in short, unromantically grinding out a life just as Smith had to do one hundred years ago, before my daughter becomes an anteater in a living room covered in round, vitamin-fortified, ants.

And maybe in a couple thousand years

34 when future archeologists unearth my home they will see things that no one else before could fathom; a zoo of imaginary animals, elephants, cows, lemurs, and geckos, frozen in dust and shadows— shadows of my daughter cast once long ago by an ancient and forgotten sun.

III.

THE WAY AROUND IMMORTALITY

36 Creation

So simple, a sonnet can contain this: you lounge next to me and the distance is charged with excited, ionized air just before an afternoon thunderstorm; the space is the opposite of empty.

Even when scientists bury a vacuum deep beneath a Japanese mountain to insulate and observe what nature abhors—pop! there it is…something unnamed yet there nevertheless, too real to be ignored. There is no such thing as nothing. Simple enough for a sonnet, simple as the air between us, loving something we want to believe was not there before.

37 Time Depressed

I read in a catalogue about a watch that keeps precise time by receiving radio updates from the atom clock at the Institute of Time and Measurements in beautiful Boulder, Colorado.

I’m not sure what the mountainous beauty of Boulder has to do with the vibrations of cesium atoms, but it seemed important to the writers of the advertisement because maybe beauty is timeless. Or something. Or maybe they were in blabbering awe at time so accurate that there would no longer be any error in the decision to be fashionably late or that the amount of time wasted in traffic can now be quantified to the exact millisecond making people terribly depressed and realize right then and there that time is too precious and decide to move to Boulder, Colorado, which they had read some place is quite beautiful.

But a time theorist who lives in a 300 year-old house says that all of this is nonsense, that time does not exist at all, that every moment of our lives exist for infinity, that time itself is less than human perception—it is something that is just not there. This makes quantum theorists and relativity scientists a little nervous, but I like the idea that I am immortal, that my birth and death and all the details in between are just going through the motions of a predetermined sequence, and subsequently, I can goof off because it really doesn’t matter anyway. We can slow down and enjoy every moment of every moment in our lives, because they will be with us for ever. But then again, every hangover, stupid come-on line, botched interview, sloppy kiss, suicidal thought, thrown-up burrito, fall in public, cigarette smoked,

38 every animal I’ve killed and worst of all, high school prevails for eternity, and the notion there is no escape from each second of out eternal life means even death makes no real sense, like glancing anxiously at my broken watch while stuck in traffic knowing that it keeps precise time only twice daily.

39 A Pious Kitchen

Even after Auschwitz and Dachau, after the millions baked into cinders, I own an oven with the Jewish still in mind.

The instruction manual informs me that there is a Sabbath setting which disables it from un-Kosher cooking.

I haven’t the faintest idea what a Kosher kitchen should do, but I suspect it is a good, pious, and righteous way to manage my dining preparations. Imagine how sacred my kitchen could become if I owned a Mormon sink: for example, it could send my dishes knocking on a Southern Baptist dishwasher where they would be berated, then baptized with anti-spotting sacrilege remover, reborn and sent packing back to my grungy cabinets. And Tupperware fits nicely in a Scientology microwave oven, blasting the evil out of a pot pie with the latest and very expensive radioactive technology. An Islamic fridge could lock out bacon, beer, and cigarettes, keeping my temple body pure. I would need, of coarse, a Zen tile floor to maintain some balance: no splatter, no floor, no tile, an unencumbered plane of wisdom. In this culinary cathedral

I could make whatever tempts my palate and never have to worry about sin found in a double-chocolate German cheese cake.

40 Moon Shine

My uncle tells me that he owns as far as the eye can see, his domain consisting of a stove-top still, a window, some cow-patterned curtains, and a fence fifty feet away— a joke, probably, in that he owns precisely that space to the fence behind the dog kennel, but I can see a crescent moon waxing through the trees and, Christ, he owns the moon, or, at least, the best part, the kind that looks like a Phoenician ship gliding though the Mediterranean, taut as a bow strung tight and ready to be fired by an invisible archer straight into the sea, right into Aquaman’s lung, a superhero I longed to become, willing myself until my head ached, so that I could speak with my shih tzu, which was unfortunate, because I was really hoping for conversations with humpbacked whales and vicious squids: besides, speaking silently with a small runny-eyed dog offers very little comfort for a boy seeking something beyond the latch-keyed neglect I tried to rise above, letting my ego create new religions, one where a Chinese lapdog’s silent musings held ineluctable truths, truths that could be shared with a ten-year-old boy, and isn’t this how all religions are started? Looking around for mystic intercessions and then— pow!—there it was the whole time, a star, a mountain, a river, an ocean a common bird that holds the keys to destiny, but flies away over the rivers, mountains, oceans, and over the stars until we are forced to look back toward ourselves

41 and become heroes speaking with the animals, or altering rivers, or destroying mountains and eventually making moonshine under the stars over a gas stove and understanding, truly, we own as far as the eye can see.

42 Vertical Living

“The nail that protrudes shall be hammered down” Old pessimistic saying.

I am organized horizontally. I patiently level out my daily duties till I fall down drunken flat, which is my idea of communing

with the universe— like an atomic particle striving in earnest for its lowest energy state bonding for stability, not unlike my DVD collection un-stacked on the carpet, all of them slipping in cascades, forming jewel case floor tiles, so that everyday I might step over reviews opining “a lot of heart,” “the best yet,” and “exceeds expectations.”

Even my clothes form a shell around the laundry hamper like a miniature ziggurat, only Dante like, where the steps lead downward closer and closer to the center of the earth which completely pisses off my wife who thinks I’m just being lazy. Her life is as vertical as a file in which shards of information can be pulled up in a paper cut of time— our lives marked by its warranties, receipts, and

43 repair information standing stiffly upright in fractured and re-fractured rows like slivers of gold on the edges of a gilded book which my wife fingers through effortlessly, glimmering aside dates and time to find our daughter’s birth certificate which we need for her first year of school where they will teach her to be vertical like my wife and to grow up straight like a pine tree in a paper farm to be cut down one day where she may fall next to me, where I’ve been waiting horizontally all those years.

44 Director’s Cut

I buy movies so I can watch them a thousand times with bagged popcorn, to relive the cinematic experience just as I remember it in the theater, but the bastards who edit these things for home viewing decide that I need more, or maybe less, and alter the film for that special edition: the director’s redux, deluxe gold-plated platinum version that deletes Deckard’s overdubs or omits the scene where bug-hunting space marines expend ordinance uselessly. They’re messing with my memories, like a Phillip K. Dick character that just realizes that life is a construct of some alien mind and the knowledge is disastrous for mankind.

Just as I don’t need to know that da Vinci had some other idea in mind, something boneheaded and wrong, and canceled it out with the Mona Lisa, who, although a little green, is a masterpiece. I don’t need X-rays to tell me that Leonardo had second thoughts, scrapped them and sold out. Thankfully, no one at the movie studios has purchased the rights to his works, because they would rub out the green to see if the cuts could sell better, to see if the product from a week before could attract interest. And of course it would because this is something we’re all attracted to— the bloopers, gaffes, falls, and mistakes are all part of what we need to make the brilliant seem dimmer, that all masterworks somehow need tweaking, a revision of some sort, so that our enormous egos remain intact, so that under the evening sky we see stars and not the immense distance light travels, bending though the cosmos so that pinpricks of infinity flicker in the night safely muted as background, so we can snuggle down to a bowl

45 of microwaved popcorn and forget what the original might have looked like, until we feel a comfortable distance from the fiery turbulence of the beginning until the thumbprint of God is finally edited out.

46 What Became of de Lentini?

Giacomo de Lentini is credited with the creation of the sonnet in the mid- thirteenth century. It would be another eighty years or so before this poetic form catches on.

First of the privileged professionals, how sweet life must have been under Freddy the second. The renaissance resonates in your writing, little songs lamenting love’s lost desires, maybe toss in a dove metaphor for something (whatever suits the fancy of the court) and you were set for life. How did you understand that fourteen was the magic number for poetry?

But unfortunately for you the world was not finished with its medieval dream and left the literati without jobs, scouring the time’s help wanted pages, leaving sonnets for a father to find.

47 Fault Line

It’s the gavel’s shift and crunch that says farewell on a journey as simple as the first day of school, amidst crying parents and sniffling kids hands gripped tight about waists and wrists. My daughter’s lips tremble just a bit as she wills herself not to cry so I suck down my throat, clear it and give her a quick kiss and a “do good” and send her shoulders squarely off to class. This is what she will remember— not a father forlorn, broken, but that little kiss of gone, goodbye, see ya later a touch of skin and the physical rift.

Geologists recently uncovered one of those well-no-duh-kind of scientific discoveries; when a fault breaks and kicks up a tremor it also causes adjacent plates to become wounded— an unfortunate image, but that’s pretty much it; the scabs on the planet keep reopening, causing others to separate, their healing interrupted— the ground scaring itself to scar itself. And my daughter (learning about earthquakes) wants to know why— which at her age is a kind of urgent phone tag: a persistence for information that seems just out of reach, so I tell her that quakes happen when big chucks of earth rub up against each other like the cat — why— well...plates are floating on a sea of magma and—why— it’s like metaphors, I tell her, sliding around making tremors with words until they snap, like when a kiss, out the door is too short, a fraction of a moment, just a peck rather than a kiss and jealousy sticks to the mind like platelets congealing on an open cut a scab ready to be peeled away when liquor and the scent of

48 an unfamiliar perfume against my neck creates unnecessary culpability and the idea of love is questioned and my daughter is just looking at me with that well...no...duh kind of look because she understands that the kiss farewell is that healing kind of kiss on a scar— a separation of striking hearts against each other like stones that never quite cease to unfold their unending dynamics of tremendous events just below the surface.

49 My Car is a Target, Statistically

In a cold pasture the sky falls around us in a storm from a passing comet and we are freezing. But the fireballs and fainter cousins keep us gaping at a show only the galaxy can provide, and I wonder if my car is safe from falling chunks of rock and ice. Unlike most,

I have read the conditions of my auto insurance and it clearly points out that my car is definitely not protected in the event a meteorite crashes though its body or is the cause of an accident. The odds

of this are so minute that I have to wonder why it’s even a clause in the contract, but an actuary somewhere has decided that it was a risk the company was unwilling to underwrite. So clearly they have information I don’t. Maybe they’re in cahoots with NASA,

which has some investment in the universe, and their satellites maybe picked up a catastrophe in orbit, just waiting to plunge though our atmosphere and smack into my car. This would imply some order in the universe, and that it was out to get me,

that the odds were stacked against my endeavors, and I might as well stay inside with a blanket shield and await my demise. In fact, it is said, the chances of my winning a big lottery jackpot are sixteen times more remote than my dying in an accident driving to the store to buy my dollar’s worth of hope.

And on that note, because I have cheated on my wife, I have an 85% likelihood of a sexually transmitted disease; a 37% increase in depression due to winter for moving north; 42% that I own a gun;

and there is a even fair chance

50 I may be shot at home with my own gun, and those numbers go up to just over 100% if my wife finds out I’ve been unfaithful.

I could even be killed by a volcano, which is something my insurance company doesn’t cover as well. So if a meteor causes an eruption that spills lava over the road and I have an accident, then I probably owe them money; after all, we’re just betting on the outcome of any of this anyway.

So in a chilly, pre-dawn field I drive my car in circles, spinning doughnuts, frightening my friends— I figure a moving target is harder to hit and that I’d better find a nice parking space somewhere far from this hostile cosmos seriously bent on my destruction.

51 Blood

I’ve never used blood as a metaphor because I’m terrified of the stuff to the point it’s embarrassing; for instance, in high school during a bussed in-blood drive, I tried to do my civic duty and signed up but I was nervous and kept pumping the little red ball they gave me and I kept watching the sterile bag fill up in little spurts with what was in my veins, did not like what I saw and proceeded to black out, which is the macho way of saying I fainted at the sight of my own blood.

Even writing this now is making me sweat and feel a little woozy, constantly reaching for the glass of water to my right. And it isn’t really blood that I have a problem with; for instance, if I were to watch one of those shows on television where there is a warning about the graphic images which they’re about diligently capture on video with all the fluids gushing out of a patient, I’m basically okay—uncomfortable, but still on my feet.

The problem I have is with the architectural design of our bodies. You see, our muscles, organs, and bones are protected only by the thinnest layer of dermis and a bit of hair. I suspect my issue on the subject is something more like agoraphobia; these people aren’t so much afraid of open spaces, but rather understand more keenly than others that the population on Earth is alive only for a few miles of atmosphere, forming its own membrane around the planet keeping all the air in where it is of some use.

It’s the same for me and skin. Our bodies can die from the smallest scratch, something just big enough to invite a bacterium or virus

52 which will use the vascular system like a subway, moving from point to point multiplying in their infectious ways, until we succumb to fever or organ failure. We are as water balloons ready to burst out of our lives and die.

I’m not alone here: there are religions out there that believe if you operate on a person, cut the derma, the spirit is released and will not find heaven without an intact body to go with it. And so, mangle the flesh and they are damned to wander as ghosts forever. Which is why a friend of my family for decades kept the ears of Vietcong soldiers; he cut them off his dead and strung together a grizzly accessory to his fatigues, a necklace of their souls to wear in the jungle, an intentional act of barbarism, which is ironic considering he plays classical piano, favoring French composers like Debussy. Most do not know how to play piano nor own a butcher’s broach for a Kali barbeque, but the idea that someone could be so cold has become romantic. Like vampires are sexy in novels found in airport booksellers, serial killers are intelligent, witty, and even funny for the summer block busters, even the surgeon on TV who, walking down an elm-lined boulevard, hears a branch crack over head and thinks of snapping ribs before bypass surgery where she’ll find a heart that looks just like all the others, capable of beating the same blood of Hitler, Stalin, or me, who are more similar genetically to me than I’d like to know so I’ve grown wary and phobic of the substance in my own veins, panic when it wells above the surface from a cut

53 and pools on the floor for every one to see.

54 Kali, My Wife, Flies

At thirty thousand feet, Kali wants to kill me, and it doesn’t have anything to do with me but my daughter, who is a holy terror on an airplane, the kind of three-year-old everybody hates; she kicks, screams, runs the length of the plane, takes ten minutes to use the bathroom,

and

I’m really having a great time watching her, I admire her energy, how little she cares that we are at a lethal altitude, and that that my wife is about to explode, sending fragments of plane, people, peanuts, all of it scattering over Texas.

Normally, I wouldn’t care, Kali has been vindicating violence for sometime now, but I don’t want my girl to lose her innocence just yet, I don’t want her to see what can happen when her mother gets to work and the clouds below cease to be funny alligators or puppies but become skulls stacked like poker chips in Cambodia, carbonized corpses on a highway out of Baghdad, napalm-drenched children, staggering through inferno,

55 in short, death.

Unfortunately, my daughter sees her mother’s glare, and stops running, puts a hand on my wife’s arm and kicks her hard in the shin and it’s too late for me to stop her, my wife detonates, reducing us to debris,

and I can hear my daughter laughing in approval of this fiery Rorschach against the sky.

56 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Byron Kerr received his B.A. from the University of Central Florida and his M.A in English from Florida State University. For his poetry he has won the Cypress Dome poetry contest and two John Mackay Shaw Academy of American Poets Awards. He lives with his wife and daughter in Wimberley, Texas.