Santa Fe Poetry Broadside: Gary LeBel: Derailed

Gary LeBel

Derailed

1.

He said his only impulse right then was to break something, anything handy, a lamp, a television set, someone's skull, a vow: to smash it utterly and completely, to pulverize it beyond all recognition. Funny ring to it, I thought, the word ‘pulverize’.

He wouldn't say why as I passed him the bottle: he swilled its last dregs in one deep swallow and hurled it against the brick wall where it shattered into the sparkling white teeth of echoes down the alleyway. He smiled pathetically, wiped his mouth on his sleeve and said, “Let's go.”

Still in his ears
that sound of a door
slamming shut
on thirty-one years
of marriage.

2.

She cuts me off knowingly, laughs, waves ‘bye-bye’ and smirks as if to say, “Tough luck.” Rage leaps into my bowels with snake boots—'I give her the finger and there it is, just that simple, just that quick: hate.

What a beautifully efficient ghastliness, the needle-thin waist that allows the paper wasp to hinge her abdomen to lay eggs or sting.

Night flows but something resists it. Bill Evans’ Peace Piece tries to mediate; rain hammering on the car roof draws thoughts like taffy into the long sticky strands of anxiety. Already another Fourth of July hangs its flapping dog-lips out the back window of time. On our three-day weekends, we Americans will try to overlook

the sour milk and bitter honey,
the intolerance and the xenophobia,
the wars over oil,
the wars over gods,
the secret surveillance rooms,
why Pound railed against the Federal Reserve,
the torture and the bullying and the slaughter
and tiptoe right past Goya’s Reason still sound asleep at his small wooden table.

Freight cars slam together in the rail yard: here in the rain-drummed car, in an artery of taillights, woven like a spider’s fly in a delicate tinkling of ivory, I scratch at infinity like a dog at the door of a dead man.