Crow
Nothing murderous about this one, no, though you know it can pull flesh from a carcass—
sharp beak not the only tool for tearing, ripping. Useful, too, to crack open nuts, the meat of them
so delicious. It doesn’t know fight or flight, just lofts aside before returning to yellow-line
carrion. Dark harbinger, feathers oily as a pompadour, black as a nighttime jacket,
it caws & clicks, shakes a rattle in its throat, like the hitchhiker you’ve been taught not to stop for.
Heat
In the book about Mississippi, the humidity sticks paper to fingertips so that the pages themselves seem to perspire the way a horse trotting in a pasture sweats,
a woman I used to know in that way men know women when they’re both young & yearning & willing to give in to impulsiveness, that woman riding
away from me, not at a gallop but still riding away. Like in a film adaptation, I want to see this whole scene in sepia tones or else in technicolor, but to say either
would be a lie. Low ceiling of cumulo- nimbus let us know what loomed, the whole day damp, overbearing. Only earlier she’d been reading Faulkner,
those long sentences like bandages being unrolled, & I, weary of such complicated syntax, threw pebbles into a stagnant pool, then tried counting
the ever-expanding rings—a lesson in mindfulness, or so I said. There were enough untruths that another one either way didn’t matter, & I didn’t want
to explain that I found it simply reassuring: the cause & effect of actions. Ripple shimmery. The horse—it wasn’t hers but she had permission to take it out—
had been named Liberty Belle because to ride was to inhale scents of freedom, to be part of some uniquely American mystique. It’s how I wished
love would feel. I could watch, she offered, confident in both her ability to handle the mare & that I’d like the way she looked in the saddle,
those tight jeans she wore, the boots. Sweat on her neck, viscous sexy. All that afternoon she was either riding or reading, every sentence closer
to the novel’s end. Every sentence difficult to navigate, & I’ll admit I’d been content with my observer role, simultaneously distant & present,
though I knew a last chapter had already been written. Sheet lightning rippled the western horizon. Kudzu on the trees like feathered boas.
The Appaloosa left to graze by itself for awhile turned its flank to us, & I envied its disinterest, its antipathy. Faulkner understood the limitless
opportunities of the English sentence, & what secrets of desire or betrayal might be hidden among its clauses. Mosquitoes fiddled their small harmonies
all around me—ubiquitous & vicious. Sometimes I’d swat one on my sweaty arm & it’d explode in a petite splatter of what was my own blood.
Merseybeat
a style of pop music which was created and played by a number of groups from Liverpool in the first half of the 1960s.
For years I misunderstood, thought it was mercy beat, as if the music might provide some solace, some forgiveness, some peace,
which, of course, it could those long nights of pre-adolescence, those desirous nights spent sweating even through winter dark, some
classmate keeping me awake, the way she looked, the way she looked at me in the dreams I hoped to return to
but couldn’t. Remember the nuns who taught us, how they seemed like our mothers oscillating between excited bride
& embittered wife, our fathers all aloof, laughing at our trespasses, our raucous fumbling hormonal selves.
So many of those songs beseeching: Please, Please Me; Love Me do, Don’t Start Running Away. Sometimes, back then, I liked to claim
I’d been christened after the Pacemakers’ front man & why not? It sounded cooler than being named for St. Gerard,
that patron of mothers-to-be. Who wanted to think of pregnancy back when we were most alive solely in our bodies, & me
like all of us, hungry— did we even know what for? How do you do what you do to me, their first hit asked.
I admit, I kept wondering that for years. The Mersey is a river splitting Liverpool, but mercy is what we sought those long months,
mercy & the touch of a hand on ours or on a cheek, just the electric possibility of longing, of loving reciprocated, that other person
on the far shore of what we couldn’t comprehend. Isn’t that what the music expressed? A whole class of us suffering
through a year of social studies & math & our own biology, & after us another, then another still… What a banal & carnal struggle
innocence becomes. Some afternoons I’d get home from school & play the Kinks, You Really Got Me for whatever girl held me rapt
without even knowing, but other days I wanted nothing so rock-n-roll, just Gerry Marsden singing, Don’t let the sun catch you crying,
insisting we save our tears for nightfall, its benevolent darkness, the very same that hid our ignorance & shame, the very hunger
those clean-cut lads of 1963 already’d left behind. They wore suits & ties not too unlike our Catholic uniforms. In bed after curfew, the radio
finally silent, I’d listen instead to the boulevard traffic, so like a river current we’d have to cross, & prayed for reprieve, prayed for sleep.
Gerry LaFemina is the author of over 20 books including After the War for Independence (poems, 2023, SFA U Press) and The Pursuit: A Meditation on Happiness (cnf, 2021, Madville), and the editor or co-editor of numerous anthologies. He teaches at Frostburg State University and in the MFA program at Carlow University. He is also the principal songwriter and frontman of The Downstrokes.