Far-Fetched Read online

  Hawk and starling sport

  through all this rigging

  of blocks and lines

  counterweights and arbors

  the street

  a theater set for storms

  *

  A chunk of sycamore

  adorns the telephone line

  branch and trunk long gone

  stump a faint impression

  just that cylinder

  faintly nautical

  hung in a crown of air

  *

  Triple your chances to win

  Take it at twenty-to-one

  No money down

  No faith in desire

  *

  Cashing out

  the bartender croons

  If you see me getting smaller

  Trobar clus

  Closing time

  *

  Two boys lug

  a Samsonite

  full of leaves

  across the lawn

  *

  A starling whets

  her thorn of beak

  and song gives way

  to sunlight on concrete

  LEAVING HOME

  after Eudora Welty

  One beech within a winter wood

  glowed with a crown of leaves

  and slid behind the bare trees,

  a little evening sun.

  It traveled with you awhile

  in ghostly fashion,

  your own crown of hair

  in faint reflection,

  here and gone.

  COME AND SEE

  A Sunday in Saint Louis,

  the avenues

  quiet as country lanes.

  Cabbage whites

  ride a current of air.

  Sycamores lean

  and scrape the sky

  like schooners

  not yet under sail,

  their leaves in tatters.

  A soft rustle,

  a nautical creak.

  More faintly still,

  sticks clatter

  on the playing field

  behind Our Lady of Sorrows.

  You’ve lived here

  thirty, forty years.

  Suddenly a Clydesdale

  with no tack or rider

  clip-clops around the corner

  and trots along

  the yellow lines.

  A marvel of

  the Pleistocene,

  creature of grass and dung,

  it must have wandered far

  to reach us,

  through all hours

  and seasons,

  trampling the dust

  of every kingdom.

  From dark recesses

  residents

  step out to watch,

  stepping away

  from busy lives,

  something on the stove,

  a bath drawn,

  the phone covered

  like an astonished mouth.

  SMALL TRIUMPHS

  Along the freight yard, a cop

  waved me to the side.

  Windows down, engine off,

  I heard the clink of chains

  and steady brush of pads

  before a pair of elephants

  entered my left mirror.

  *

  A lyrebird at noon!—

  fossicking for worms.

  No song, no éventail plissé

  of filaments and plumes.

  Regardless, clear as day—

  a lyrebird at noon!

  *

  You talk with animation

  of what you’ve seen, and where—

  proud to have been so lucky,

  amused to feel so proud.

  IN SEARCH OF MULLOWAY

  for Bob Adamson

  The fisherman makes an appointment

  by map and tidal chart

  unfolded across the bare floor.

  Sorting through his gear,

  he ties a knot and talks of jewies,

  not jew- but jewelfish

  for the otolith within its ear,

  a bob for equilibrium

  like the bubble of a spirit level.

  According to lore, a traveler shines

  from weeks on the open sea,

  cold sluicing along its flanks

  and buffing its soft scales to chrome,

  crossing Lord Howe Rise,

  who knows why,

  then home past Lion Island’s head

  with a worm inhaled en route

  writhing in its gut.

  All the while, a resident

  turns to bronze and tarnishes

  at the mouth of Mooney Creek,

  wolfish yet asleep

  in the shadow of a pile.

  Motionless, the monster steeps

  in its own ammonia tang.

  Traveler and resident,

  both taste about the same.

  SAILING UNDER STORM

  after Horace

  This heavy weather drives you out

  to sea once more, old sloop.

  What can you do but lie ahull

  or run off under bare poles

  while trailing lines astern?

  Don’t you feel your steering fail

  and hear your cracked mast groan

  in another gust of spindrift,

  the night sea full of foam,

  and wonder how your hull

  could ever survive the coming wave?

  You have no seam unsplit, nor God

  to call upon in such misfortune.

  Though you were built from live oak

  and longleaf Georgia pine,

  and proudly christened A-OK,

  the frightened sailor finds

  no comfort in a name.

  Take care, or you’ll become

  the laughingstock of wind.

  Source of all my drudgery

  and now my deep concern:

  stay well clear of the hidden reef

  from which no ships return.

  SILVER

  I am the warper

  caught in a weir

  like a muscular tongue

  against the teeth

  or stuck with a spear

  or reeled from the dark

  to writhe on a hook

  and make no sound

  though sometimes heard

  to whistle off-key

  in a ruffled sound

  or estuary

  I am the warper

  sniffing the air

  and sliding across

  rough wood and root

  en route to pools

  of Ira-waru

  or branching streams

  of Batasuna

  though never at home

  in the Pyrenees

  preferring the deep

  and rolling seas

  I am the warper

  pickled in brine

  a cable wrapped

  in gutta-percha

  walloping north

  as a spring unwinds

  its subtle ribbon

  beneath the keel

  in a warp of murky

  light and water

  here and gone

  a silver eel

  TING

  A whipbird calls through fog

  Its whistle sustains and clarifies

  until a crack

  taut and metallic

  punctuates the morning

  Across the estuary

  an inlet of the Tasman Sea

  bellbirds swing their heads

  to ventriloquize

  a lip of glass

  By channels of coolness

  the echoes are calling

  each call a drop of water

  or tap on glazed ceramic

  or tink of sonar

  to sound the empty space

  and test how long

  how far

  tink tink-ting

  tink tink-ting

  Think of Ming brushwork

 
and how each island

  has its ting

  open to all weather

  a pavilion in which to pause

  among eroded rocks

  and cataracts of moss

  along a river

  still unscrolling

  Just so the tink of bellbirds

  unchanging yet arrhythmic

  cool yet intimate

  gathers fog around it

  to sound the hush

  and make it ring

  SCAVENGER

  A rail, buff-banded rail,

  weaves among the legs

  of picnickers who loll at ease

  on the buttress roots of fig trees.

  It queries fallen fruit

  with manners so refined

  as to be indeterminate,

  its herringbone immaculate.

  Aloof though underfoot,

  the rail extracts a crust

  of pie from picnic residue—

  no seediness, no trace

  of table-scrap solicitude

  for any human hand or face.

  SATIN BOWERBIRD

  Devout in your compulsion,

  you weave a bower of endless night

  from something old and something new,

  collecting bits of broken glass

  from a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin,

  a single curl of dyed wool,

  parrot feathers, and filaments

  from your own electric eye.

  Behind a palisade of twigs,

  you squeeze cobalt straight from the tube

  and smear it with a palette knife:

  blue teapot with two white cups attending.

  Your feathers brush the night sky

  with ultramarine straight from the tube,

  or else, mixed with a medium

  of charcoal, spit, and masticated pulp.

  Ratcheting left and right,

  you strike a Blue Tip match on chert

  and fulminate—burnt, flagrant, phlegm.

  Alert in your devotion,

  unseen by any human eye,

  you weave a bower of endless night

  and pause within, head cocked

  to nudge one azure bead

  until magnetically aligned,

  fussing over vestiges of sky.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  These poems have previously appeared in The Australian, Australian Poetry Journal, Grey, Jubilat, Literary Imagination, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Plume, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and Stolen Island, and on www.poets.org. “Saturday Morning” was published as a broadside by All Along Press. An earlier version of “Owl-Eyed” appeared in Telepathy (Paper Bark Press, 2001).

  A few echoes may warrant attribution: “A Fly from the Early Anglers” draws on Gervase Markham and Izaak Walton, among others. “Bright Thorn” quotes excrucior from poem 85 of Catullus. “Night and Day” borrows some phrases from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colors. “Ting” quotes a line from Henry Kendall’s poem “Bell-Birds”: “By channels of coolness the echoes are calling.” “Satin Bowerbird” adapts a line from William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”: “Weaves a Bower in endless Night.”

  ALSO BY DEVIN JOHNSTON

  POETRY

  Traveler

  Sources

  Aversions

  Telepathy

  PROSE

  Creaturely and Other Essays

  Precipitations: Contemporary American

  Poetry as Occult Practice

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2015 by Devin Johnston

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2015

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  eISBN 9780374714086

  First eBook edition: February 2015