I was sent to a church camp down past the end of a long dirt road
where on Sundays the boys walked through the trees to get to the chapel
while the awakening birds and the morning light played with the shadows,
and the stink of what we’d left behind pressed its holy book into me;
later when we sang hymns in the amphitheater after fidgeting wildly
in the pews, the nature of our cracked voices rising through the woods
like a single phantom began its plague of me… the monk.
THE SHADOW CATCHER
When I was becoming a man say twenty-one or twenty-two
I affixed to the walls of my various abodes a reproduction
of the Kutenai duck hunter captured in an Edward Curtis photograph
as he sits toward the back of his canoe at the edge of the reeds
under a cloud-filled sky in the Pacific Northwest gazing quietly
across the water and waiting for waterfowl to come within range—
a scene entitled The Shadow Catcher by some clever ad campaign deep
into the Twentieth Century and the phrase along with the sepia tones
and the shadows on the water but also the brutal events that would
come for this man and all his people worked in my young brain until
the image stuck like an arrow and stayed there as I continued to grow
ambivalently through dumb jobs and the search for friends and the
meaningful books and that glorious nature available just beyond
the freeways or deep within my own body where I was hiding from
television and poisonous foods and algorithms that keep flooding over
the rise like hordes of Indians in the culture’s frightened imagination
and so on the dim water spotted by an old imperfect albumen and in
that spectral body inside its magnificent canoe I resolved to become
a shadow man living in a world of waterfowl with hunters of fowl
who finally in their dying would come to know me as one of their own.
DISCONNECTED
Dave was cycling up the mountain
when suddenly his phone went dead
so he was able to return to his youth
when phones were on the wall
and you had to go to one to get connected
except not really for connected
meant a long hike through dense pines
then up the sides of a sparse ridge
to talk to the vast soul draped over us
like a blanket or rain or the principles
handed down by those we revered
who are long gone yet still yammering
in the soft blue quiet of their light
as if looking for a phone to dial the living
who might hear them
as if coming together like a search party
to seek out the lost among us.
STOPPING FOR FUEL
We pulled into the gas station
the pumps were no longer working
the war had been on for years
which explained the dangerous highway
starlings fluttering near the surface
attempting to restore the human;
the windows of the office were broken
so we climbed in
found old men beside themselves
adrift in their tools and cans;
we nursed them then returned to the dark
clanking like machines;
I suggested a distant corner of the macadam
where the vetch was coming through
the way hair grows off of the dead
although we were not inside the van
our stories trailed like exhaust
as the road took us further
without the usual stars in the window
but there were other stars.
AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
It was dusk by the time I left the faulty car
to stumble down the embankment
and out across the open plain
where sparse vegetation danced
like the wispy scalp hairs on a centenarian
or the throat murmurings of a Mongolian
I had abandoned everything so there was no we
only the original alone inducing birth and sky
with that thin smell of the final hospital room
I was weeping and exiting and furious
at no one save the daemon
who’d been rooting in my belly for years
which is why I plowed through the sage
and the mullein until the tears paused
and light re-broke over the distant mesa
I’d been dreaming toward for years
and suddenly I was able to exit more than the car
more than the body more than the gloom
that had been clinging to me like static
as if waiting for the bones to settle
so I could grow into nothing
and then it began to rain though only on this side
of the absorbing plain so soft and nourishing
as the drops on my lips tasted
like what I had been weeping for transfigured
by that orange light still arcing over the mesa
and I began to grow again
with visions of the fortitude that grew a nation
here where the word nation no longer exists.
THE GRINGO
The gringo with the Panama hat insists 95% of people are stupid
everywhere, and that democracy is absolutely on its way out,
which is a good thing, for the forces of efficiency can then crush,
absolutely crush idiocy and waste and chicanery-loving predators,
who should all be taken out to the central square and shot, or hung;
yes! Franco had it right, rescued Spain, as have five, count ‘em: five!
financial geniuses, yes geniuses! five men in New York who arranged
the bailout of Bear Stearns and saved the world from Armageddon!
absolutely! he says as he takes a brief break from his 60-hour a week
work as a financial advisor all wired to the world from a retirement
community in San Miguel de Allende; he’s on his fifth career and can’t
shut up about the gringos reinventing themselves, though 95% of them
are fools! renegades! scam artists! don’t know what they’re talking about!
absolute idiots! absolutely! he insists as the hot sun descends, soon
sinks behind his private compound’s concrete walls in his struggling
country, all draped with trellised roses and flourishing bougainvillea.
Eliot Schain’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review and Santa
Monica Review, among others, as well as in a number of anthologies including America,
We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience and The Place That Inhabits
Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed. His most recent book is The Distant
Sound, published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2018, and selections have been released as
an album in collaboration with guitarist Harrison Flynn, available on Apple Music and
Spotify. A newer release Drive, They Said, also with Harrison Flynn, is available on
Apple and Spotify, as well. More details can be found at his website: eliotschain.com .
