Away From
When the world is no more
a beach for faithful children
I will find you, Oklahoma.
Away from home—Hawaii—
I must seek the flat, the
dry, the expanse of sky
not mirrored in ocean. Give me
the honest red-to-purple stain
of man-made lake or cow pond
set in stunning brocade of
green grass & furtive brown
cow patties. Give me a
home, temporary, where
the buffalo, not brahs, roam,
kay den? Let me marvel & tourist
there in a place few claim as
paradise & the ocean left
long ago. O, Oklahoma,
you are so far
away from home.
(Written
for a patron from Hawaii during the 2014 Short Order Poems season; first
published in the August SOP chapbook.)
Turner Turnpike
The Infant Jesus of Prague
sleeps soundly as lighted
semis and horse trailers
pass through the dark on
the same auto vein by which I
return to you
my family of lighted semi love,
animal-driven.
I’ve swapped lives
with another
for an existence
that belies who I was
becoming once
despite who I am?
When you sweep
the floor there’s enough
dirt to start a garden, enough
hair to knit a sweater.
And no one bothers to
sweep much.
Still I call it home and
entering in am
acknowledged
by others, human seeds,
sometimes kind, sometimes
surly, sometimes indifferent
but acknowledging
me as a part of it.
Families split, into two or
three, or shatter on
the ground like
a plate dropped by a child
moving too fast. But this one
holds so far, or rather,
it’s glued well
together of broken
pieces. A bit of dirt,
a bit of hair adheres
but the plate is
sound, serves to hold
a meal, to keep
the food off our laps.
The whole human is
a myth, the whole family
a myth too. Somehow
we survive, are not
destroyed, are “isolate flecks”
of living.
And the Infant Jesus of Prague
sleeps soundly in his bed
not far from
the Best Western Stroud
Motor Lodge
16 feet 5 inches beneath
the overpass above.
Triweekly
Cimarron River Report, May 17th
to
August 28th
High
and tumultuous, medium and running, dulce et decorum
nella sulla bankula,
ethereal and brown, murky but clearer
than
the Arkansas, Cimarron red, frothy and shimmering,
vaguely
blue, silvery and verdant, pensively dark green, aquasienna,
milk
teeth blue, frothy and stringy red, khaki, pimento
and
bass, greyhound green, crimson but given to viridescence,
lapis
lazuli, steel brown, interstate blue, shimmering taupe,
recycled
white glass, slate, macadam, invisible, tree bark, shivering
liver, café au lait, minnow,
chiffon, raspberry margarita,
month-old
caramel apple, lady of the lake green and silver,
manure,
milky vermeil, catfish belly and roiling, invisible,
brick
house, Serengeti red, gravy spleen, cattle, basalt.
(Previously
published in ecopoetics 06/07 and Nomads with Samsonite.)
Transformers
It’s on, now
happening
here, God, or Nature,
the cows in the field, uniform
and coloring.
A Transformer is both
a jet and a robot, a car
and a robot. Some are called
decepticons, but they really should be
called
realityicons.
Everything is
something and something else then
something else. You are still
you
sort of, your body transformed
but we’re glad you’re still
in it. And you are you as we learn
who you are. And four comes
before five most of the time.
On the growth chart, who’s to say
what height you should be at
when you are god, or nature.
Everything all at once
streaming out of the
goddess’s
yoni. The boy said over
dinner,
“I like to call
people twats
because it’s not so
offensive.”
(He meant
twits.)
God, or nature, is shining
down
upon us, and is making
a road to drive on and is
driving the
atmosphere
round. Trees stand by, are
good for
many things. Their puissance is
enormous and deceptive. We
breathe in it.
 |
| Self-portrait of the poet as southern plains commuter. |
As a longtime resident of Oklahoma City, I’ve spent a
lot of time on I-35. It was a prime route to hockey games to the north and
bicycle road races to the south during my childhood and teen years. From 2000
to 2005, I did my PhD studies at Oklahoma State University, some sixty miles
northeast via I-35, and many years later, after one year at the University of
Tulsa, accessed via I-35 and the Turner Turnpike, I started working at Oklahoma
State University and doing the same sixty mile commute.
This is my third year of it, and I’d be lying if I
said I love it.
But I have a great commuting partner, and I manage to get a
fair amount of work done. I’ve also listened to some long novels, including Moby Dick and Roberto Bolano’s 2666. And I’ve also recorded a lot of
poems and drafts of poems. My car = one of my various offices.
Currently, we live in the country, three miles east
of I-35, so it serves as our main route for getting into OKC, too, where my
wife works and my sons go to school. In fact, later this evening, I’ll use it
to drive most of the fifteen miles into the city to pick up my fifteen-year-old
son at the end of his shift at Rocktown, a rock climbing gym in an old grain
silo with a psychedelic, plains-themed mural on its side.
 |
| Photo by Rick Sennett |
I wish I spent less
time on I-35 with its herds of pickups and semis hauling ag and oil equipment, all
of us burning copious fossil fuels as part of a system that looks to be
disastrous for our future, and I’m looking for a job closer to home. But as long
as we’re living where we live, I-35 will be a quotidian experience for us, and
I will try to witness its strange, troubling, and sometimes beautiful
existence.
Timothy Bradford is the author of the poetry collection Nomads with
Samsonite (BlazeVOX [books],
2011) and the introduction to Sadhus (Cuerpos
Pintados, 2003), a photography book on the ascetics of South Asia. Recent work
has appeared in Atticus
Review/Boo’s Hollow, Art Focus Oklahoma, This Land, The Oklahoma Review, and Upstairs
at Duroc. He cofounded Short Order Poems in 2014 and is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State
University.
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