Two Poems By Vance Couperus
Post-Life Determinate Growth
It’s fall in the garden. I have been watering all year
And composting, and mulching and braiding
Flat river rocks into stepping stones so that
I don’t trod on spouts or sink with my
Ungainly feet, causing damage to the root structures.
I have increased my balance and proprioception
By tumbling into fragile things that I am supposed
To nourish. I have unearthed exhaustion.
Every day there is too much to harvest and eat
And no one else is involved in this conscripted privacy.
Each leaf and nut takes in eerily heavy water and my effort
To assemble component materials on mismatched plates.
I have dreams of barking windstorms
That leave vast drapes of art behind them:
Aspen trunks in schizophrenic herringbones,
Faces in the arborized root ball’s upturn.
What does the preparation of a last meal presage? (life)
What does abscission previse? (listening)
Maybe I would just like to lie there twisted
In the yellowing plants of autumn
Without comprehending living, without
The pregnancy of fruit that we harvest.
I have gathered no seeds for next spring.
I am bereft of neighbors.
We are waiting to feel decent.
Pastoral Noir
I. Seeds
I am distrustful of simplicity and grace, and the purple corn keeps growing in regardless ubiquity, interfering with the windows. This purple is the past. Stubble forests the sink. This bare black is the future. The soup du jour is the quotidian flush of maturity. Gleaming hair and Hitchcock and morning glories wake and fling the vines onwards, ensnarl the corn stalks, blue oats of sky propulsed from the earth. Rising blue. That same morning-glory blue color that I ministrate heaven or a stillborn to be: an ice sky at times of perfect hibernation or warm moon nights, air tantamount to the tepid soil beneath bare feet. Relation to any spectrum is recursive. And seeds are odd things. I always think they won’t develop; I am always inaccurate. My breath holds me with the presupposition of failure. I’m an indoor/outdoor cat, fat with an undulating belly and feeling the onset of contractions. The seeds have their way and locate violence. What are these partitions? I had a cat, Sugar, at least half-Siamese, who took to attacking dogs: arctic-blue eyes, rime fur, short hair and black tips on her ears and paws. Seeds are like that. Whenever Sugar would have kittens, she’d leave her cardboard box and sop-rags and spill the kittens on my lap half en caul. I couldn’t say no. Things of that awkward a degree are abutted to necessity, share a thin bunk wall with murder, a reality that is always closer than love. Even if I put her back in the box, Sugar’d fang up a fresh-born kitten by the nape, slick with the biolatex of it, and bring it along, lapping it for my consideration. A seed is a comrade in telnyashkas on самоволка. When a neighbor's cur snapped back at my Sugar during combat and broke her spine, I, a child of eight, sat with her, and both of us were dismissed by my mother. Seeds are. I’ve dried and ground heavenly blue morning glory seeds in abundance, eaten them. No hallucinations came, no wisdom, no more a lantern or panacea than apocrypha or placenta. The Anarchist’s Cookbook might have been written by a Calvinist. That’s the rumor. The ingredients are desperate. I hear the sad, vindicated laughter. Sugar mewed in endless repetition too, a stale engine, hours of the glug. And for the first time in my life, I learned to wander absent an ocean, forest, or a river, while she learned to expire. Sugar lay under the eaves of our house among the purple tulips someone ancient had planted, which are gone now, an old adobe with faded green plaster that used to be a church in Ojo Feliz before we moved in.
II. Evolution
I’ve been drinking since I was eleven seconds old. Mother’s tits were always sore. I was born with natal teeth, and her nipples and areolas were mangled as a Matterhorn I was too embittered to leave. Army ants, we all die on a woman’s chest, misappropriating an alp for the argot of thieves’ cant. The peach had fuzz; it dripped blood. There’s the lockpick of mnemonics in children’s songs. The dark sweet under the conifers refused bowdlerization. I drank tumblers of pink rage to start with, and now my partner’s sister, Amber, tells me that I need to man up. Amber has valleys under her tits, she has valleys under her eyes. Only half her face works. Her jigcut-melon smile. I might have made her up, but it’s a fact that Amber’s father accidentally ran over her skull when she was a tender five years with a purported Dodge truck, blue as arroyo lupine: no one dares mention the year. I’m mostly a failed lesbian, just like Amber, but people suck and simper. We don’t like to give credit to the spinning rudder, used rubbers, or goatheads. O my boat, I’ve slept with men, but I’m no good at that either. Nor is anyone else. I am certain that we all need to woman up. I don’t know what this means, but I know it’s a cold tarn with a serene undercarriage that might be named Morphy Lake up in Monte Aplanado. On shrooms at night, the moon tilts its face. The breasts come out, Amber cracks, fissures leak lunar regolith. It falls into the lake. I forgot my mother. The doctor said she hadn’t had regular spinal baths in her brain, that’s why she forgot me. Buildup of protein, something akin to meat. Science means more flesh. I envy her that one unrememberance. The German browns jump and shriek at midnight. They are stock fish, B-roll. As we nourish, so do we weep. Cauliflower hearing and the jaws to match. I’m innocent, which means glittering snow and subnivean naivety. My whole life, I’ve had trouble defecating on planes, or in other people’s houses, or in those public drug stalls at Tonk bars. It’s tinged with blood. Blood floats, seems momentarily hydrophobic: is that the secret, to keep above the last drop? To be the last drop out, moving just ahead of coagulation?
III. Sleep
I could have slept for another hour. For another week, another year. When I was young, I could routinely sleep for ten hours. When I was young, I tried to pierce my scrotum with a sewing needle, ice and a cork board. I was anxious to be sexy; I was anxious to be wine. It worked, but I couldn’t keep it in. The darting reversal of impermanence. Unsuture the cheatgrass on the gray mat. There were always kittens in my house. You know this. They slept under my blankets and purred. When I was young, my overseers turned my fish tank over in the acequia of the acequia, not the toilet. The 5-gallon rectangle was green with slime, had a thousand snails, and two tropical fish—one with a red stripe and one with a blue stripe—that my father had purchased for me in Taos off of Paseo del Pueblo Sur and NM-240 E. There was violence he was repenting; the store is gone now. Everything moves on. I could have slept for much longer. My mother got dementia from not sleeping. A punching bag, workhorse, and a flat Dutch girl who fancied denim skirts; men were as cruel and broken to her as the women. My mother’s lover, Liz, took me to go skiing regularly, and her son had a game system. It was hard to tell where the purple came from. We did mandatory human-services therapy with my father, did Tai chi ch'üan in Melody Park with Liz. My mother loved me more than her other four and has forgotten most of my siblings more than me. I’ve taken all my piercings out due to awkward tugs. Bodies of emotion only look wonderful in pictures, or as statues, or in voyeuristic relief. Maybe my mother was never beautiful at all. You might meet me and never know it. My father is dead in a creek of ass cancer in West Forks, but before that he was a bona fide meteorite hunter. My sister lost her left tit before her life, but she used to manage a cult, and my junkie brother practices urban camping in Arizona, yet he’s really not particular about geographies. He survived lymphoma, alas, but his mind is as wormy as the fecund garden I’ve planted too thickly. Stunted abundance of beauty. Too many morning glories rising blue above the fentanyl. Cancer and love are the light of distant stars in reverse. Like a pale Dodge truck in reverse. Like a kindle of kittens crawling back into the womb. I could have slept for another year. My hands are always grimy and filled with lust. Kalene and Chris beat my mother for two decades. They will die in church. I’ve done nothing with life if not read books, watch films, and ricochet. I could have slept for another hour. I need a Maduro cigar. What did Freud say about cigars? I’ve always felt that I needed more than one dick. My pockets and brains are empty. Not even a match. There’s that old Walmart Bonsai still dryly holding on. I am the victim of home school. I’m still sleeping now. Black coal is just black coal; a mine is just a mind overgrazed.
About the Author
Vance Couperus' work has been published by *Poetry, The Harvard Advocate, The Missouri Review, The Cincinnati Review*, and *The Florida Review*, amongst others. Vance graduated summa cum laude from CU Denver with a BA in Theater, Film, & Television and was awarded a Master's degree with distinction in Creative Writing from Durham University in the UK. Raised in the rural mountains of northern New Mexico, Vance currently resides between the Rio Grande and the River Tyne. https://twitter.com/VanceCouperus - https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61562338414009 - vancecouperus@gmail.com