Peter Jay Shippy
SELDOM MUCH COP
During a trans-Erie flight, a steward
who looks like James Coburn announces
"'People, if any surgeons are on board,
please make yourselves known." I whoa my
Lipizzaner. Partly because I'm no
MD but mostly so as not to end
as zebra-mussel food down in Gitmo.
Next morning I'm sipping hop-toad tea
on a tatami mat in that old part
of Shinjuku they call Lackawanna,
a Seneca word that means knucklehead.
As a boy, my Step sat me down and said,
You may have a pretty good brainpan
for a certain species of inquiry,
but as a scion of Scotch convicts—
plan to mechanic and hurl, softly.
At eleven I had a procedure
to remove Ben Day from my eyes. After
I no longer saw embedded images
of a pa-figure copping oral
signals from a school-crossing sentinel
in Step's off-street motorik repair shop.
In the afternoon I depart the blocked
arterial skyways of Mexico City.
I pass Trotsky's Tacqueria and Kahlo's
House of Azures. My driver wishes to discuss
the fecund Aztec jazz of '34.
I politely decline as I've been asked
to lecture on fabulist porridges
at the Southern Norway School of Runes.
The kindly engineer halts the steam tram
so I may stretch my elastics with a stroll
around Lapp Dancer Park that surrounds
Oslo's Royal Palace. This place card
strangles one's enthusiasm for history.
Are you blank enough to recall bleatniks?
We were the loud ones at the wadi.
Never forget your map to the green fields
where your CAT scans run feral. According
to insect activity my body
left this planet thirty-seven years back,
vamoosed for alter orbis, an other world.
I am invisible among the lowing
towers of downtown Chicago. As I exit
Sandburg Station I walk north, toward
the lake, through a modest neighborhood
of brownstones dashed to the ethics
of gangbusters. I'm off to the clinic
to have a seismic blowhole blasted
into my stomach wall. Does that make me
a whale? No, just an American who was
extremely well-received at the tableau
of corrupted youth. A species exam
will reveal my wounds to be post-mortice.
A cursory glance at the cursor will
deprive the pilot of her faculties
so that we may move around. Save for
minor foxing in the wings, this plane
conducts me like I'm a third-rate timpanist,
a phylum of drummer, as hybrid kids
run the aisles, carrying-on with carrions
into the ultraviolet regions
of the electromagnetic spectrum.
When one faces one's sonorities, the pall
can be brisk. Are those Chinese dragon boats
sailing over Niagara Falls?
That's my signal to Geronimo. Who takes
a parachute when your shoes have wings?
The air is flaked with sensei. We'll meet
in the sandtrap. You bring the bamboo rake.