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| Tropical Rain 40 x 50 cm acrylic/oil pastel on paper |
ILIAD
Weirdness draped
over the family tree.
All the way
down to the roots is my guess.
The
Confederate general sipping tea
in his
frilly parlor, handing his sword through
the window
to the Union commander waiting
for it on
the front porch. I wouldn’t be surprised
if he was
whistling Dixie. Buffing his nails on gray wool.
The second
cousin who thought her poodle
could
understand 342 English words. Paternal
grandmother
who kept a ragamuffin pooch
bound and
gagged beneath her escritoire. For like twelve years.
Her son who
wept every time he heard a 1915 recording
of Caruso
singing an aria from La Boheme. Frank O’ Hara
once wrote
that pissing in the wind on a New York City fire
escape was
the male equivalent of a good cry. But Frank
would never
have taught me, as dad did, how to disable
a man with
a solar plexus sucker punch so devastating
if it fails
to destroy your opponent you had better run.
He
cultivated his own garden, got high on part of its yield,
choking
back the burning weed, reading “The Day Of The Jackal,”
dipping into
the “Iliad,” while In the middle of his garage floor a heap
of birds
poached from some farmer’s land in the bitter hour just after dawn.
