SHALL WE HAVE SOME TEA?

The Speaker, now next in line, strikes a match on the side of the iron stove. She inserts the flame under the carefully prepared layers of kindling and seasoned oak. As the fire springs to life, she spreads open her coat to absorb its warmth.
Then she notices the quivering spider web, a corner attached to the stove, where its host is inching away from the heat. Out loud, the Speaker asks the creature, “Do you know if Kamala made it out of town?” When the spider does not reply, she sighs, and opens the backpack she was given before the evacuation. She extracts the radio, and turns the dial from end to end, seeking any station still broadcasting. There is nothing but static.
The pack also contains a Beretta M9. An agent had shown her how to rack it by jamming the front sight against a tabletop, and forcing the slide back by pushing down on the gun with all her weight. Struggling with the technique, she apologized to the agent: “I’m sorry, sir, the only weight on me is in my boobs.”

He replied, “Then you need to use them both, Madame Speaker. Keep trying. Your life may depend on this.”
It is a tricky maneuver that would be even more difficult if she were threatened, so she goes ahead and chambers a round, with nothing but the spider to spoil her concentration. Soon they will come searching for the copter that did not return. They will find it with the assassin who had been planted among her security guards--all of them lying together in the clearing, after the shoot-out she has narrowly escaped.
Among the other contents of the pack--two changes of underwear, a bar of soap, and a dozen MRE’s--is the code to launch a nuclear attack. That, and a carton of tea bags.
Very likely, it will be only a short time before she is President of the former United States. Unless, of course, they have already gotten to Harris. She removes the launch code from the pack and shoves it into the stove.
Across the room she notices a five gallon carboy on a dispensing stand. Over it is a shelf with dishes, mugs, and some cookware. She selects a small saucepan, fills it with water, and places it on the stove. Then, turning back to the spider, the Speaker asks it, “Well now, shall we have some tea?”

All Lovers Are Fools

My friend Doc taught me this poem:

Shall I wasting in despair

Die because a woman's fair?

Or make pale my cheeks with care

'Cause another's rosy are?

Be she fairer than the day,

Or the flow'ry meads in May—

If she be not so to me,

What care I how fair she be?

We were in his ‘55 Ford, late on Saturday night, parked across from the home of some girl he liked. He wanted to discover who she was dating.

This was during my senior year in high school. I was taking Comparative Literature, and Battleaxe Biggs had us arrange our chairs in a circle. Directly opposite from my seat was Linda Talbott.

I barely knew her. But when a classmate had asked me, out of the blue, who do you think is the most beautiful girl in school, I had replied without hesitation, Linda Talbott. She was a folksinger with a voice that was clear and strong, and a delicate touch on the strings. From way down the hall you’d recognize her, with her cheap nylon string guitar slung over her shoulder.

To express my feelings, I mailed Linda that verse, anonymously, day by day, one line at a time. But she gave no indication of acknowledgement. Not to me, at any rate. 

In our studies of 17th poetry, the Fates assigned me George Wither’s wistful verses to present to the class. Seats were rearranged to face the dais, which I mounted with two classmates with similar assignments. For some inexplicable reason, I held a blank sheet paper while I recited his lines, speaking as though there were no one else in the room but Linda Talbott. But again, she betrayed no acknowledgement. She just stared at her lap, twiddling a pencil. (And not a soul in the class even cracked a smile, when I said that this poem should not be mistaken for Shall I Wither In Despair, by George Wasting.) 

Don’t ask me how the ice finally broke. It wasn’t that winter, with a storm predicted the next day, and I slipped Linda a note asking her--if classes were not cancelled the next day--to stay home and meet me at the corner near her home. The snow was light, and school remained open. I cut class, and waited for her, shivering, my shoes soaked through, but she had either misunderstood the message or ignored it--and gone off to school.

Not long after, she disappeared from classes. I learned that she had gone to live with relatives in the next county, and was finishing up at the local high school. Did I write her? Did I call her? The answer is lost to time. But she invited me to take her to her prom.

Ed Talbott, Linda’s father, was a troubled man. He had been a promising young pianist, but war intervened. Ed was among the Marines that waded across the reef at Tarawa, as the entrenched defenders wiped out half of his comrades with concentrated machine gun fire. After the war acquired a job with the phone company, a wife, and three kids. His experiences cast a long deep shadow over his family. Even so, his talent remained--I recall him sitting down at a piano, banging out a rolicking rendition of Chopin’s Polonaise, ice cold, from memory.

The evening of the prom, Ed gave me a demonstration of the clutch and shifter of his Beetle. Then he handed me the key. Linda wore a long white, backless gown, and had her hair pulled straight back. She appeared to float across the room.  Every now and then I will pass a teenage girl or young woman wearing the same perfume, and I am transported back 55 years. We danced a few dances, and left to find a shadowy space to park, somewhere along a country lane. I traced the letters I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U on her bare back with my finger. She understood by the time I reached the V. By the U, she was mine.

After graduation, Linda returned to her parent’s home. By October, she was pregnant. Ed Talbott told us in words so subtle that I cannot begin to recall them, that this problem could go away. Mortified, I refused the offer. My father threw me out of the house. Linda and I exchanged dime store rings and moved into a studio apartment for married students. I think the rent was 35 bucks a month.

Linda miscarried, but not long after, Amy was born. Linda and I became subsumed by the social destabilization of flower power and distrust of 30 year-olds. After three years of marriage, Linda had moved in with David, a Vietnam vet, and I began wandering from coast to coast, and from woman to woman. Without fail, I would forsake the good ones, and commit to the ones who were as troubled as I was. 

Linda did her own wandering, and plenty of it. It was even more varied and less successful than my own. Late in life, David, broken down in body, and Linda, nearly broken in spirit, reconnected. David died first. At long last, I began a healing relationship. Tonight, I will trace those same 8 letters on her naked back.

*    *    *

Great or good, or kind or fair,

I will ne'er the more despair:

If she love me, this believe,

I will die ere she shall grieve;

If she slight me when I woo,

I can scorn and let her go;

For if she be not for me,

What care I for whom she be?

Uneasy Rider

CHAPTER ONE

A trucker with a load of produce found Billy by the roadside, supine, arms spread, eyes wide open, staring into the sun. He pulled aside the jacket and saw the 12 bloody holes in Billy’s shirt. Billy had bled out. Even if help had arrived sooner, he wouldn’t have wanted to live: his C3 was crushed, and at best he would have been a parapalegic.

Wyatt survived, however. The tumble down the blacktop shook him up, sure enough, and a few pellets caused flesh wounds to his left thigh. But most of the shot was absorbed by the Harley’s top end--including the pellet that hit the carburetor and caused the explosion.

And it could have been a lot worse if he were not wearing leather pants. Even so, he suffered burns to his genitals that effectively unmanned him.

There was a silver lining to this darkest of clouds: Billy had been holding the marijuana, but Wyatt had the cash.

You might have thought, but the money was in the gas tank, and went up in flames. Not so. Needing to pay for breakfast that morning, Wyatt had pulled the tube that the money was stashed in out of the gas tank. After paying he put the tube in his pocket, not wanting to replace it in the diner’s parking lot. He meant to re-stash somewhere down the road, but events intervened.

That money--ten times more than Wyatt had earned in all his scuffling days, as jack leg carpenter, iron worker, apple picker, and that stint in the Merchant Marine--would not restore the one thing that he relied on without even thinking. But it just might help him get even.

Frozen in Wyatt’s memory was that blue ‘55 chevy, the barrel of the 12 gauge--and the whale-like man in the white shirt; his fleshy face, his beady eyes beneath thick brows--in that split second before the blast. Captain America would find him, if he had to search to the ends of the earth.

Bullet

In repose—sleek form, disc and stepped cylinder, perfect tapering cone— lovely lethal latency. one peck at the shell—blast expels, metal kestrel— propels—harsh helical tunnel—birth canal— ballistic birth canal of briefest life— and sudden death. Rupture the tranquil air, it does— imperceptibly arc, it will. The mildest breeze, a caress upon your cheek, deceives its gyroscopic flight— a wobble, it induces, thence a tumble, and atumble does its quarry strike, parting fur and hide. To layered flesh and ordered membrane— imparting churning chaos—until— against some reluctant bone— it finds repose.

into the brink

While wand'ring through the desert long ago,
I reached a barren canyon wide and deep--
beyond the fearful edge the slope fell steep;
no path I found to lead me down below.

I scanned the jagged line where plain met void
to right and left as far as I could see--
but saw no likely way that would avoid
a scramble down its harsh declivity.

The choices left to me were all too clear--
how easy would it be: submit to fear--
to turn and leave my journey incomplete,
and retrace the fresh imprint of timid feet...

...or plunge ahead, and give my boots no time to think--
so gravity be damned, I leapt into the brink!

As The Crow Flies

As the crow flies
on wings so flimsy for its size
tracing paths across the skies
that no human eyes
can discern

As the crow flies

from limb to line to chimney pot 

exclaiming measured monoglot 

Whot whot whot! 

what thought behind these lusty cries

no human ear can learn

Needing Bread

Needing bread--

measure by measure

I place in a bowl of clay

water, for flux

flour, gift of the fecund earth

salt, from a sea of tears

and a dram of frothing yeast--

the genii that breathes the breath of life

into my bread.

Kneading bread--

in waltz time, to the rhythm of my breath

mashing, lifting and turning, folding--

until it springs to life in my hands

breathing on its own

needing no nerve or pulse to rise and form.

Heating bread--

the hungry oven swallows the swollen loaf

rise once more it tries

only to split and admit

the flavor of the flame.

Eating bread--

At last the sated oven spits its treasure--

singing softly, the loaf awaits my knife

and my pleasure--
needing bread.