Two
poems from Matthew Thorburn's Like Luck
followed
by a note on the author
Woken
Each Morning by the Glad
Laughter of Birds
So long, skydivers.
Who jumps
out of a perfectly good plane,
even in a dream? Hello blackbirds,
are
you blackbirds, ringing in
my wake-up call – Konk-la-ree? Oke
ra-lay!
– but too quick on the wing,
like luck, to say for sure. Here
and gone,
unlike this afternoon’s
watered-down watercolors. They stay
all day.
Gosh, how beautifully
boring. Even the greeneries – well,
just green.
So rain falls. Things grow.
Big whoop. Does yoga stress you out too?
Too
much water in your watermelon?
Hang on, Lulu. I love seeing how,
arms full,
you close the car
door with your hip. You sexy problem
solver. But I should
be helping,
not seeing. I don’t want you to be
a symbol or an image.
Just be.
With me, please. And now? Let’s do
what we do best. The watusi,
the
shing-a-ling. I’m sorry if every poem
turns into a love poem, but
not
that sorry. And now I’m still talking
when I’m wanting to listen.
May my ear
be a dark room on a sunny day, cool
enough to draw you in. May
we be blessed
only with what we need, that slippery
something non-chemists
call chemistry.
Fred
Peg’s Didgeridoo
Not
the real deal – eucalyptus hollowed
by termites, scouted out
in the
outback, the aboriginal way, after a long
night
of tapping on trunks to find
the right kind of thick,
then de-barked,
cleaned and marked
and
tuned (who knows just how?) –
but a stretch of PVC tube
taller than
him, striped with duct tape,
he
hauled around like a prophet’s staff,
a liberated downspout.
“Bamboo
trumpet,” Webster’s says, getting it exactly
wrong
for once, even if Fred trumpeted
like an angry elephant, rolled out
a foghorn
drone to send me packing
or,
then again, lead me home. “My didge,”
Fred said, as if that explained
everything
– though even before he fit the name
to
the thing, the name itself was music
fit for my ears, and those of the first
man and woman,
so the story goes, back in the outback again,
to
conjure every beast and bird they’d need
to populate the world, that hum
going
on and on and on – all the animals
gathered
round, wide-eyed, like “Well,
now what?” With the right
puffs
of breath he might rouse
the
spirit of what moves us and leaves
no tracks. But not so fast –
it
takes months to get just the breathing right.
For
now, farts and grunts, a waspy buzz
awkward as a lost whale, immodest
as
a gassy kangaroo, some local yokel
rolling
over, groaning in bed, waking the wife.
Shh, it’s three a.m.
in West
Virginia. Even the standing cows
have
drifted off. Go back to sleep now,
dear, she says into the dark.
It’s
just a dream you’re dreaming.
©
Matthew
Thorburn is a native of Michigan and a graduate of the University of Michigan
and the MFA program at The New School. He is the author of Subject to Change
(New Issues, 2004), selected by Brenda Hillman for the New Issues Poetry Prize.
His poems have also appeared in the Paris Review, American Poetry Review,
Michigan Quarterly Review and other journals. In 2008, he was selected
by U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic for a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library
of Congress. Matthew Thorburn lives in New York City and writes about writing
at Now Then (www.matthewthorburn.blogspot.com).
"Woken
Each Morning by the Glad Laughter of Birds"
first appeared in Pool; "Fred Peg's Didgeridoo" first appeared
in Passages North. n
