by David Koehn
The wild yarrow surprises me. The hard-to-hear palm trees
Talk about the man-made lake behind the “No Fishing
No Swimming No Boating” sign. The cat, underneath
The mailbox, ignores me.
You’ll need to know this: my girlfriend and the mother
Of my child has been married to her husband for 27 years.
At the end of the street
Where the houses have not been built yet, fishermen
Have parked their cars or teenagers have parked to do
What teenagers do at the end of empty streets,
A path walks away from the neighborhood.
If they are fishermen, I know the rocky point
Where they have cast their lines. If they are teenagers
I know the altitude they ascend to and the distance
They will fall. Night fishing here is illegal.
We ate McDonald’s for dinner
Because we are not better than anyone else
Even if we bear the mindfulness of the convenience
Death brings with its lawn service. What I hear
Is that the recently dead are temporarily contracted
To do death’s work. 1099’s I’m told. I’m told
The barking of dogs occupy most of the local backyards —
Where watering the lawn comes with a kind of guilt
And complicity and indulgence the need for an HOA
Requires. The cats I had as pets rarely moved
With me. When I moved I left them behind.
I do not want to be in the business of the profound…
I do not want to kowtow to the affiliate network…
I want to explain why my success does not matter to me…
I am writing this poem for four people: Bay, Rusty, Scott, and you…
You will be interrupted three times while reading this poem…
My son asks me, “What is your favorite crustacean?”
He pauses, inspects me, knowing that if I have an answer
My shoulders will open, and my ear will tilt. He says,
“Mine is the Mantis Shrimp, also called a Rainbow Shrimp,
A fierce predator that sees color not in three color receptor
Types, red, green, blue like us. Sixteen. The rainbow shrimp
Sees in sixteen colors.” He pauses for effect. His eyes
Go wide, his mouth drops open in surprise. His hands
At the end of the twigs of his arms open towards me
As if hesitantly catching a ball. He wants the idea to land
And work its magic into our conversation. The way grounds
Turn water into coffee. The way steam softens asparagus.
The way the sun repeatedly pulls the monkey plant
In the corner of the living room toward the window. The way
Resentment looks like it might have been present
In a Schiele painting but has leaked away to be replaced
By something more congruent, something in the same
Family as anger. “Dad, it also has two claws that shoot
Out of its face into prey. The claws are faster than a bullet.”
Bay’s mom walks into the room, she taps away on her phone,
She never lifts her head and announces she
Is taking her kids, “her kids,” to the parking lot of the church
In Byron to drop them off with her husband. I notice
“Answering Machine” by The Replacements in the air on Spotify.
Buried fears linger like the carpet’s wet dog, days after the pipe broke.
Not entirely unpleasant, noticeable at first, noticeable
To folks who visit the house, but an aroma that eventually
Fades into things. Allergies aside. “Sonoluminescence,”
Bay says. “The Rainbow Shrimp swishes its legs so fast
That the result are these bursts of light, like tiny photon
Torpedos.” He pauses, smiles, “These photons demolish
Their prey.” I think of how every guitar string ever strummed
Sounds slightly different than the one before. I think
Of how that strumming sounds the same by musician
As much as by model of guitar. You and I cannot play a string
On the same guitar the same way. Not really.
And I think of my son walking along the street
Of the incomplete subdivision back from the wreckage
Of the Central Slough and the few sparse trees and what
We call pickleweed amok over the wet spring earth. We
Call it pickleweed because we have not found it in a reference
Book but see its tangled lines as the defining shape
Of where we live and feel the need to give it a name.
I imagine he is thinking about what the Rainbow Shrimp
Sees in those thirteen additional photoreceptors. How
Does the imagination imagine colors that can’t be seen?
I suppose he reaches into some marsupial pocket
Available to him — I assume mine has grown shut
From lack of use. A photo box
Found at an Atherton estate sale, in the bottom there is a set
Of negatives. He holds them to the light and they trigger
Not only what the light shows in the frame but what the image
On the negative would have been or could have been.
I used to see things this way — in sepia
Desire leaks into color the lawn, the roof,
The blue Ford Maverick rusting in the driveway. Aquariums
Don’t keep rainbow shrimp. They dismember their colleagues.
Keep them alone and they take on the aquarium glass.
I’m told, the Monterey Bay Aquarium used to keep one,
Alone, in a tank with thick glass. At night
In the dark, the watchman would hear the tap
Against the glass. All night growing louder still
When the watchman watched. He would turn his light
On the tank and thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack.
I thought about wild yarrow before. Drank yarrow tea.
My girlfriend walks into the room in a short white dress.
“What do you think?” she asks. “Will this work for tonight?”
Off in the dark of the cul de sac car windows steam over.
Beyond them, a rocky point where a fisherman catches nothing.
David Koehn’s first full-length manuscript, Twine (Bauhan Publishing), won the 2013 May Sarton Poetry Prize. His second full-length collection, Scatterplot, is due out from Omnidawn Publishing in 2020, and he is the co-editor of Compendium, a collection of Donald Justice’s thoughts on prosody. Koehn’s poems appear in Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere.