fallen angel heads: the archive

SHARON AUBERLE

ABBEY'S SOUL

"Disappear, from everyone, myself included,
down in the grandest canyons of the soul."
- Edward Abbey, Earth Apples

Once I thought the soul was a small thing,
a namecard, maybe, pinned inside, saying if
I was hell or heaven bound, the tiny,
two ounce weight (I read) that leaves the body
at death and can be accounted for
no other way. But now, Abbey's poetry in hand,
words leap from his book--thundering words,
like tonight's storm, sweeping aspen leaves before it
as Abbey's words sweep away my old notions of soul.
Words that sing like that great bull elk
in lightning-lit trees behind my house,
the grandest canyons of the soul!

Now I feel this once-tiny soul, this wild
stormy soul growing immense, rising up,
singing like wapiti, the elk, making up for all those years
so tightly packed into two ounces. Hell? Or Heaven bound?
HELL, IT DOESN'T MATTER Abbey would probably roar.
Just live it all now--the thunder and lightning of your life,
the poetry, elk, aspen and rain. Then disappear one day,
become like him--a pulsing of air in sweet canyon light


GRACELAND

"I've a reason to believe we all will be
received in Graceland." - Paul Simon

Sara, have you forgiven yet
that lean-faced man of the fifties
with his short, harsh hair and those
nicotine-stained fingers?

Does he still come to you
on windless nights, in dreams
full of hanging smoke and ask you why
his Hail Marys full of grace brought him none?

Sometimes, you say, you hear his ghost
crunching through those shattered
bottles where he found his grace,
while all you could do was pray, Sara,
and listen to Elvis-songs
drowning out those whiskey words,

till you escaped one day to a soft-haired man
of the sixties whose grace would implode
in those same bottles and then you began
praying to Elvis and a hot summer moon
riding over the lake, glittering in the glass
you held, and I watched while you dreamed
and sang Love Me Tender and made excuses
for your life.

I never saw you cry, Sara, not once,
you laughed instead, saying you dreamed
of rivers--lazy, warm rivers carrying the debris
of your life away, bearing you to a new home
where grace lived and then you left us
on a night when that hot yellow moon crashed
in the lake, to rise again on the Mississippi,
that old, slow river flowing into Graceland...
Sara, does Elvis still sing you to sleep on nights
when you can't help remembering a lean-faced man
with nicotine-stained fingers and what he did to you?

fallen angel heads: the archive

NORBERT BLEI

Finders Keepers

Find me in the desk drawer near the loose paper clips, broken pencils, illegible notebooks, old knives, dead fountain pens, wooden matches, faded love letters, and holy cards of the Blessed Mother...In Loving Memory of (mother) Passed Away: Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; ...he said. Find me in the back pocket with the loose button of the gray woolen pants on the bent hanger in the closet. The glove compartment with the water-stained yellow receipt for new brakes, faded road maps of Wisconsin, and the photograph torn in half under the seat of the white van stripped of engine parts and licence plates near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. In the coal bin of my father's basement and the wooden hand-painted black and red tool chest belonging to a great uncle who tuned pianos in Chicago at the turn of the century and saw visions of saints on fire flying round the parlor ceiling at night. In the hole of the prairie earth dug with boyish hands, covered with weeds and sticks to trap WWII Germans and Japs in the heart of the old neighborhood; and the package of Lucky Strike cigarettes stashed near the roots of a catalpa tree, under the rock the size and shape of a man's head. In the black leather pocketbook hanging forever from the wrist of the grandmother-who-sewed...buttons,seeds, hair pins, string, folded dollar bills, pennies, peppermint candy, a lace white handkerchief with a fancy letter K embroidered in red. The cellar of the northern farmhouse with shelves of preserves and Babi's glass egg wrapped in a paisley babushka. The bucket in back of the garage holding a chisel, glass doorknobs, broken hacksaw blade, spool of wire, lock washers, a Wisconsin license plate 1939, the split handle of a screw driver. The scented pillowcase beneath the woman's sleeping head, her pills, a pearl-handled knife, a gold band, a rosary, a pair of black stockings, a torn photograph of an uncertain lover...the other half of him.

Todd Moore

laredo showed

me all the
bullet holes
in the side
of the
barn sd
this is
where i
tried to
write my
name in
gunfire
the little
holes were
the old 22
the big
ones came
from the
44-40
from the
looks of
it i didn't
spell so
good but
i liked the
way she
bucked

bruce

hands crossed on her lap
right scratching left
in slow circles, absently
her clean white lines: like
a lily in a long-necked vase

"The Wild, The Innocent & The E-Street Shuffle"

This album reminds me of the rootless days
when, young and uneasy, in shapeless cheap
jeans and ragged trainers, I shambled aimless
through all those warm or tepid summers,
dreaming of love and of writing glory
and not quite making either one.
I'm sentimental for them now, wish my mind
could be as free again, not encumbered
with all the useless luggage that I make
it carry. Then even old was new--my
weariness with everything a novel journey
and not one more outworn attitude, cold
as stale porridge in a bowl beside the couch.
I wore vests like the younger Springsteen
and tried to make Wellingborough
another Asbury Park, the romantically
unpromising old town that made me Me,
and all the girls in Wimpy uniforms
and all the dowdy shopfronts were pictures
of a Beat adventure straight out of Bruce,
albeit one that even then in bouts of
hopelessness I knew I'd never consummate.