Six Poems
by Fred Ragsdale
A STORY OF LOSS IN THREE ACTS
My third time in Bangkok,
bamboo flute flat to lips,
I was blowing a broken raga
squatting curbside
and catching wisps of a cool opulence
coming quick in pneumatic bursts
from a Japanese branded convenience store.
Her thin-soled clip-clops crossed
the eyeline of my squinted lids.
And I looked up.
Fresh from the Himalayas,
hair knotted in unwashed locks,
I was wearing a skirt
like some gaunt hero pirouetting
in dark balladry against the wide arc of fate.
I traced a dim suggestion from our meet cute,
one-year earlier,
when pink-skinned and raw
to the Orient,
I had followed her home
against the protestations
of her Scottish paramour.
That next morning, as the cocks cleared
the milky light of a blue dawn,
I stumbled through a warren of tin sheds
and morning-break laundry.
Just to escape…
When next we succumbed to all reckoning,
I was back from the islands
fish-line lean
and smelling of sea-salt.
She was offering joss sticks to gods
and ghosts who sleep at the crossroads
and promised to take me shopping for new jeans
if I would only take her dancing.
Instead, I waited in her room above the bar reading
Dostoyevsky until she returned kitten-quiet
and dripping of sweat
and stale beer…
And now, beneath the pale mottling
of a Bangkok sun, malevolent and halitotic,
as the pneumatic-whish
whooshed in some poetic susurration
and all else was silent
save a boy
lost to the wild
tugging at the bedlamite
from beneath his ribcage
and a girl
hungering for the heart center,
she stopped and
she looked down.
After a moment,
amidst the cackle
of tropical morning jackdaws
and street-side vendors;
amidst the steady ticking
of tuk-tuk tires upon concrete,
she walked on.
WILSHIRE BOULEVARD AS THE DAY WARMS
Beneath a sky quiet and weather free
something iridescent like mica-wings
caught quick the inches off my eye-line.
Two rail-thin office workers
wincing blackly against the glare
of a violent noon-day sun
take turns kicking a shadow
as green ooze leaks and puddles.
Two oily men slowly melting
at their edges, shimmying in this heat wave
like the nystagmus twitch of those fanatics
who bunch and gather
along the concrete wall
longing for respite.
Gleaming like lard rendered.
For they too have leant on other men
and offered salutary hoots and bellows.
They too have clasped hands in communion
asking of the duck-belly white sky for offerings
to drop from the heavens
like pinkened sakhura flowers
on us all.
HOLLYWOOD AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
As though some cosmic thyroidectomy drained colored pus
from the great goiter that is our evening drawn star:
The waning light of Los Angeles.
Not the sterile flash of Lowell’s rain-shrouded
New York, street-side halogen lamps laying fluorescent
squares on chalk-lined boulevards,
but a gossamer-like dusting the tangy zest
of orange groves and coastal groundswell
kicked up by crate-packed Packards
hauling the Lord’s citrus
from down in the valley
up into our hills.
THOUGHTS ON MORTALITY
Men in the sky at a stoplight in Silver Lake
drawing all eyes to the divine
laying unglazed terra-cotta
tiles on the belfry of a Catholic church.
Men spider-crawling along scaffolding
and rat-a-tat Spanish
like squabbling
tribes of river fishes,
until one takes a tumble…
The second of three death knells rings out.
The force of his fall, his foolish fate,
shatters the spongey core of his bones,
disconnecting tissue and glandular co-operators,
jettisoning skin and orifices in a
a shockwave supernova
while graciously providing bonemeal and phosphorus
for future churchyard flowerings.
Nine days later, watch as his carnal
wraps the widow in marigold and whispered kisses
(for the bereaved)
while parasitic fingers like fungi
probe the softness beneath folds of her mourning grasses
peppered with wild daisies, once fecund,
though now lay fallow
for just one season come the false resistance
to stress
and decay.
‘til one day this carnal
(and the widow, as well) will lie beneath lilies grown in cowshit
and bloom against all pull and tension of
our inevitable antipodes--
birth and the dust.
All the while, festooned in between,
hang the living
dangling along a string of colored bulbs
that offer a single paradox
spelled out in their flickering:
Beyond the performance
and without ploy,
we simply giggle in the dying.
HOLLYWOOD GOTHIC
Perched on his plinth, gargoyle of a copper sky,
small are these hands pulling threads from a cloud’s filthy under-lining.
High above the boon of glass and metal and wind-currents,
warm salt air mingled with sour coffee and orange peels.
In the dawn of the monsoon’s second day,
a boy, no longer afraid of his father’ shadow,
hides deep to his collars and
rides the downslope of turkey-tower cloudspread
while narrowing his indoctrinations with
lines and angles and arcane geometric depths
he has precipitously thumb-smudged on a ledger
now saturated in rendered fat. To remember.
His eyes cut clean like the grey of a half-cracked walnut hull.
His lips drecked with the grease of ancestorial legends devoured.
He lies in wait hidden in wild grass give way to
brambles and sparse brush
watching Wednesday screenwriters
churning in their marrow like winch lines turn on a drum.
Ba da boom.
ba Da boom.
ba da BOOM.
Life in these hills, these creosote-scrubbed Hollywood Hills,
is all pathos and yearning for rain slurries.
He hunches beneath sulfur-stained awnings
fattening himself on the dark and easily peeled
husks of men, women, and even the children
sacrificed freely. Oh, these heavenly creatures!
These loitering heirs of the jimmycrack gang
growing horned toes and quite calloused from the grind.
An aria of whisper-music interrupts his thoughts:
The strings that set the strumming grasses a’fire;
the inward braiding of our memories;
the tiny spaces closed off to others...
And the surprises that keep him young.
THE TREES WEEP IN AUTUMNAL ANGUISH
Beneath the blind cut-out
of an afternoon spent
in misdirection,
a retro-reflection
kicks sideways
off a tricycle
tossed haphazardly
between a rosemary bush
and a leafless acacia tree.
That is until,
a bum in a felt-frayed flat cap
knocked knees
scraping the dust
pedals away and away and away
outrunning
even the softest sun that promises never to hurt,
nor lay blame. And in the blind shade
of the hidden and the gaggle
and perhaps even the squawk,
now the anguish over events
hangs loosely, yet
means very little.
BIO: Fred Ragsdale is a poet and a dad, a wanderer and a lover of movies, books, jazz, and Los Angeles.