Three Poems by Barrett Warner

The Trouble with Poets

In the way that movies arrive

at the playhouse two years after releasing

Billy Collins came to our infinite town.

We were eight miles across the Mason-Dixon,

a lunch hour’s ride and back

to Gettysburg and other cemeteries.

First the fat sweaty mayor spoke—

he was pretty sure Billy was Republican,

a blue poet in the only county that had carried Bush!

After four hot days of hay-making someone said,

Why doesn’t he read his fucking poems?

At which point my wife kicked me.

She reminded me we were in church in spite

of the hand-made posters decorated with bears,

picnic tables, bullets, and zagged yellow lines.

Then Billy stood and delivered verses about death

and being isolated and feeling lost. We clapped

after each, his silky words impossible for us

not to feel even if we didn’t understand them.

Good one, my wife said to our neighbors,

the Harrisons, about Billy’s dead parents.

Afterwards, we were allowed to ask him anything.

Mr. Collins, would more people read poetry

If it had a rating system, like PG or R?

Mr. Collins, does Sarah Palin have a shot?

Raining Fish

I wanted to drive to the bridge mounts

between the dam and the first crossing.

Ed wanted to walk, that crazy fool,

swirling his canteen scotch for company.

So I yelled the gear into the pick-me-up—

our rods, packs, rice, bamboo rolling sleeves.

Ed disappeared into the Indian summer,

the stream full of cold and splash and air.

We wanted to hook our lunch and eat

sushi on the bank, chatting about Li Po.

If a fish weren’t clean enough to serve

raw why would you want it oiled and fried?

We’d heard the trout would jump

into your bucket like clowns.

When I got to the river I saw Ed leaning

on a boulder, praising the last ice age.

He offered me a Cuban. Hand-rolled

against the thigh of a virgin, he said.

Must be an import, I replied.

There aren’t any virgins around here.

Our snorts must have scared away the fish.

Next time, we’d remember to bring our tears.

Isn’t it true, trout love a good cry?

Sob, and they tumble out of the clouds like acid.

Balance

Driving, I love the feeling at the wheel

when one of my tires needs marriage counseling.

Maybe there’s a shimmy, an intermittent squeal,

like I’m always moving over rumble strips.

And how the pain worsens the slower I go,

and how the radio doesn’t quite hide the noise,

and even the wind rushing my face

doesn’t carry any mysteries,

only facts—

Tuesday she dyes her crotch green

to make it easier to find others’ pubic hairs

astray in the sheets. Friday he answers every question

with doubt—maybe, not sure, OK I guess—

Sunday she squints at the tweezered evidence

and curses, who belongs to this black coil?

Twice in my life I’ve driven the axle off the frame,

and it’s such a long dying fall, the bullet

coursing through the air like a drugged moth.

It seems so easy to ignore.

So petty.

And next month someone is shaving

whiskers off a dead man,

wiping grease off the dead man’s face,

more than one witness wondering

if he ever bothered to look in a side mirror

and spit on a comb to relax the beast

rooted in his skull.

Barrett Warner's poems have appeared in Cultural Weekly, Nude Beach, Industrial Decay, Little Patuxent Review, Berkley Poetry Review, Comstock Review, Quarter after Eight, and other places. He is associate editor of Free State Review and gets kicked around for a living at An Otherwise Perfect Farm.