TODD ROBINSON
THE GIDDY CENTAUR
I am so giddy
I am a centaur
Says the facebook quiz
Give me a kiss
I tell the apple
And the hay bale
Breaks in my teeth
In the grassiest manner
Give me a kiss
I tell the hay bale
They pepper the fields
I canter a parking lot
And my halter falls off
It can’t be stopped
I am so giddy
The library approaches
It would like to shade me
But I am shivering already
My satchel is full of papers
Not business papers
Just piles of poems
I pass the library
I am galloping
With my four hooves
I trample a scrap of lawn
And become a rehab
Joke: stay off the grass
I am so giddy
I am giggling
Shivering always
I am easily persuaded
By a bare leg, some hair
There goes my mind
You are a dryad
I want to tell everyone
But my satchel is full of papers
As if I were a mail-centaur
I keep shivering
I am so giddy
Everywhere I look colts
Clatter their hooves clatter
for Heather Christle
*** ** ***
A FRIEND OF BILL’S TAKES MORAL INVENTORY
At the House of No Hangovers, the bartender pours only coffee,
serenades me with the Isley Brothers every Sunday morning,
air-bass held high and funky, cooling me out for the sake of love.
So many stories and thought-lines in these rooms, the plate
of Christmas morning cocaine conjured again and again for
the sake of sobriety, or that Bemis benefit where two patronesses
got in a bidding war over a macaroni-and-cheese-box swastika.
One was married to me, drunk on Veuve Clicquot while a vape
idled in my tuxedo pocket. Now we’ve got some forgetting to do.
Over another saltless dinner I think of vegetarian Hitler and his
flavorless meals. He loved dogs and mountain air, like everybody.
I shudder to ponder a thousand nights, tube blaring, head lolling,
glass of scotch empty as a habit. When I was a kid I ogled comic
books featuring super dogs in red capes, their red houses sturdy
on asteroids, waiting for a whistle only they could hear. Manhattans
were like that for me, the crash of amber on ice turning my bones
to jelly. I sometimes feel life is a Tijuana bible, each page a four-color
kaleidoscope of human folly. B. bought two hundred Oxycontin
from his neighbor the widow. V. taught her little sister how to huff.
T. remodeled his heart, scar tissue filling those lonely chambers.
Next year will be summery as a clothesline full of winding sheets.
One speaker tells us she cannot bring herself to admit she’s a drunk.
Another wants a face full of gunpowder to silence his keening. My
sponsor is so tender with cheer and rue I am afraid he will be rent
by a passing Higgs boson. At the end of every session, the same
chant. Everything is of course nameless, and form an illusion,
and language slips on a foundation of rose petals, but I already
said that. I can’t wait until the next meeting, so I can say it again.
*** ** ***
CUNNING/BAFFLING/POWERFUL
The girl on the addiction show has hair like a baby bird’s
and everyone can see her underwear when she falls down
all over the place in her wrinkled skirts. The ugly sidewalk
pitches like the deck of a ship on a Monday night in Missoula,
and the camera crew is surely complicit in my schadenfreude
a thousand miles south of ground zero, easy chair popped
back, a handful of popcorn uneaten, for once, in my palm.
She’s a real jewel-eyed weirdo, sort of smart under all that
mascara and molly, goofy in the right ways, artsy, fartsy,
easy, giggly, just like Angie, my crazy cousin from Kearney,
the one who sells trees to pizza delivery boys and only does
the hard stuff on New Year’s and Saturdays. So I’m sitting
here sixteen months past my last dose, mouth dusted with salt,
my lady petting her iSlab on the couch, wondering what’s right
in a world where camera crews tag along for some child’s wild
ride while I want to wrap her in a towel and drop her off at the
orphanage. At the intervention in the shitty hotel meeting room
everyone is crying and I think you poor little bird you have
broken a lot of fucking hearts and I’m crying (just a little) too
and remembering bowls and pills and bottles I’ve poured into
my own emptiness so when she agrees to go to rehab and gets
on the plane to tender music and jets over clouds piled up like
marshmallows and mushrooms I have a surge of hope and no
longer want to break another day’s boring light into rainbows
with mirrors and smoke but the dark on the television at the
windows in my brain and everywhere will always whisper—
*** ** ***
ICE CREAM HEADACHE
Real nirvana in grandmother’s forgetting.
That farmstead with the shelterbelt run riot,
caravans of cars, all their chatter, drivers
humming, passengers’ little games of
why didn’t I leave there earlier, any
sunrise a new language to learn.
Real illusion, fire, suffering in the
withered barn. Corn crib rotting.
What do you think she feels in there?
Real spittle at the corner of her mouth,
real eczema, real head droop in the new
wheelchair, Delores and Margaret
also failing to rationalize their way
out. Reality pinches at the hip bone.
Real ice cream in the visitor’s room,
real statue of Calvary, wingbacks
and dark drapes. Real buzzard, real buzzkill.
*** ** ***
LINES WRITTEN ON A POSTCARD OF CRISTO VELATO
–for Pete Miller
Slap it down like a toothache. All these fakers begging for numbness,
yet we all know a body zipped into itself, the itself collapsing invisibly
toward? Wake us to pre-dawn gloom with lampshade hangovers, some
translucent bell lowering itself—mazy arrangement of wires, blood wine
in a clay jar, a beatific retirement in the cloud condo. Given enough
breaths, you will go noir in the afternoon, nap to death, though nerve
endings may register the hard click of a casket lid. To paint sky blue,
I was taught, one must listen at the window, but apoptosis may undo
your patient ears and soon you will be plucking glass slivers from God’s
clock face. When (oh when), my friend, shall we jettison the façade
of hospital gown surety to drink some slugs of real nepenthe?
*** ** ***
LANDSCAPE, STILL LIFE, PORTRAIT
October here
with its golden
cold and nostalgia
cracking its weight
against my hips,
the black dog
of what I once
dared to say
tagging me
through shifting
grass, crows
worrying fence
posts, you
coming home,
your pillow
redolent of
something
greener than
your eyes.
I search for
a purple marker
in an empty
drawer. I want
to draw a daylily
on your back,
write forgive me
in Palatino,
scrawl a ghazal
wherever you’ll
have it, but the
marker is gone,
and my fingers
have forgotten
their Arabic.
The garage door
moans open.
Your feet call
my name up
the stairs,
another dress
whispers itself
to the floor.
I study your
vellum, words
forgotten, the
poem about
to happen.
TODD ROBINSON
Todd Robinson’s work has perplexed the pages of Sugar House Review, Prairie Schooner, Chiron Review, burntdistrict, Arc Poetry Magazine, Midwest Review, Margie, Southeast Review, Natural Bridge, great weather for MEDIA, and other venues. For the last decade he has taught in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and in various local arts organizations. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he won an Academy of American Poets prize. His first collection of poems, Note at Heart Rock, was published by Main Street Rag Press in 2012. He is a founding member of the Seven Doctors Project, served for a time as vice president of the board of the Backwaters Press, and was recently awarded a residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
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A Dozen Nothing 