Deborah Tobola has published her work in dozens of literary journals and anthologies, most recently: Poetry Cafe, Pigs 'n Poets, Trains and Rain: Poems of Lust(Rust)and Obsession, Eclectica, The Periodic Table of Poetry, and Clean Sheets. Work is forthcoming in Zuzu's Petals and Poetry Motel. Awards include Academy of American Poets, three Pushcart nominations, Alaska State Council on the Arts fellowship in literature, Arts Council of Kern and Writers of Kern. Co-founder of the Arts Coalition of Tehachapi and formerly its executive director, she now divides her time between California and Alaska, where she works as an Arts & Media consultant.
for Barry
Out beyond the ideas of right thinking or
wrong thinking is a field. I'll meet you there.
--Rumi
What you know will be in this poem before you read it:
letting go, your new shoes that aren't new, the Caribbean,
caribou stew, a compass, a clock, a closet, a calendar,
the cultural impact of being raised by Swedish people, prison,
a steak sandwich, synchronicity, shape-shifting, the difference between
liberation and deliberation, something about Scorpios,
an itinerary, the color red, what William Blake said about time,
a town in Kern County, a discussion of soul,
your cousin Frank, sex & death & rebirth,
The War, Wal-Mart, what if
what if we kept missing each other,
working at the same places
but not at the same times? Imagine eating at the Meat Market
with another woman. Say it was 1997.
You order your steak sandwich medium,
ranch dressing on your salad, deliberating upon
the best month to travel on a motorcycle down the Alaska Highway.
And she, this other woman,
orders her steak medium rare, like me, too red for you,
but she doesn't say, What's the difference between liberation
and deliberation? This woman is content to discuss
itinerary, asks you, Have you ever been to the Caribbean?
She never asks you, Sometimes,
do you just know things before they happen?
So you don't have to stop chewing for half-a-minute,
look at her, and search for a clock, knowing in advance
the restaurant doesn't keep time that way. Neither does Frank,
your cousin, who has this innate clock that tells him when to move on
and when to stay. You wish you had it, but you don't.
You have only the calendar, which begins and ends at The War.
You never have to ask this other woman, What do you mean?
or fear some discussion of soul, which implies letting go.
She won't talk about Viet Nam
by quoting Blake: Time is the mercy of Eternity.
You can eat lunch on your Harley in your mind, heading
toward a safe horizon, no map, no compass, no lunch partner saying,
Oh, I don't know, maybe it's a Scorpio thing.
That's shorthand for sex & death & rebirth--coming
out of whatever closet you've been hiding in. Jungian synchronicity
would put you and this woman in the restaurant
outside White's Motel in Mojave. Did she notice?
You ask her, Have you ever had caribou stew?
and impress her with that. Not the real stew,
but the idea of it. You understand how
you can transcend illusions of time and space
by using your imagination. We know (but she doesn't)
how people in prison do that. Some call it shape-shifting,
some call it art. For example, if I said you know the enveloping
smell of onions and earth on a warm night
driving through Wasco? would you be able to smell that, for a split-
second? The other woman says, I like your new shoes,
and you reply, with a straight face, They're not new.
I bought them at Wal-Mart. Because she is unfamiliar
with the cultural shorthand of Swedish people, she says, Oh.
a smart camera obscura scrub
of the windy community
with its windmills & magazine ranches,
its love of the arresting & the arrested
that's culture--fax it
who asks me how many times I'm going to reinvent myself:
In a brilliant local fever, Coyote calls me from
I'm on the road, the red road to Barstow,
I see the dots and lines of my past, untamed rivers of light,
relief map of the real world. But I must venture into the blue heart
of the book, where I put glitter on the bad red cow,
sacrifice my ideas about love
for conversations with women on the road.
the imagination world, pulls me from sleep with his radio voice.
Say no to visible archaeologists, the trickster tells me.
The last taboo is falling: elephants weep, cedars talk,
random divinity dances, burners on fragrant snow.
crying widow's tears. There's light above everything,
wild glitter glittering in the real world. In the stormy house
of lush skin, Zoe wants most objects of adoration now.
The last taboo is falling. The snow is falling.
All text and images in The Central California Poetry Journal are copyrighted. Copyright by © by Scott Galloway 1999. All rights are reserved. See main Journal page for
copyright information.
Authors and poets submitting original materials to this journal retain all rights to their
original work, except those rights specifically assigned in writing to Solo Publications including the right to publish the submitted work in The Central California Poetry Journal. The poems on this page are copyrighted by the author. Copyright © Deborah Tobola 1999.
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