<div class="line">No telling him</div>
<div class="line">he looks ridiculous.</div>
<div class="line">This banty rooster—</div>
<div class="line">all 8 inches of him—</div>
<div class="line">puffs up and</div>
<div class="line">struts his maleness</div>
<div class="line">dwarfed by the full-sized hens.</div>
<div class="line">Icky’s crow is an</div>
<div class="line">octave too high and it</div>
<div class="line">falters at the end to a</div>
<div class="line">squeak, and we laugh,</div>
<div class="line">but fondly.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/HartIchabod.mp3"></audio></figure>

Hooters

The Space Traveler’s Crush

Ichabod

<p>It’s uncanny how often<br />when I sit on this bench<br />by the bakery someone really<br />screws up parallel parking<br />in the space next to me.<br />It’s uncanny how this space<br />is often empty while all<br />other spots are filled.</p>
<p>Is it cursed? The drivers<br />are always female, which<br />is not PC of me to notice,<br />and young—this is a<br />college town. I watch them<br />hit the curb, go up onto it,<br />or end up so far from the curb<br />they need a drawbridge.</p>
<p>They jockey forward and<br />backward, ending up<br />no closer, start over again<br />in traffic, end no better.<br />They notice me watching,<br />which in this frustration<br />produces inevitably<br />an embarrassed smile.</p>
<p>I compound the problem,<br />but I return the smile<br />in empathy and bemusement<br />and just a slight edge<br />of flirtation. I feel better<br />and go about my day,<br />thinking about how our<br />incompetence connects us.</p><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/HartIncompetence.mp3"></audio></figure><p></p>

A Sloth First Hears Its Name

Ommateum (with Doxology) by A.R. Ammons

Incompetence

<p style="padding-left: 0px;">At the base of cream-colored cabinets,<br />
the milk of his newborn face gazing<br />
toward the kitchen, the brown rug<br />
of his body shivering on the linoleum,<br />
unlicked and slick with the balm<br />
of his intrauterine life, the abandoned calf,<br />
legs bent and untried beneath him,<br />
lay at the feet of the very utility sink where,<br />
after the fall butchering,<br />
cold cow hearts would be soaking in a pail.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">I imagined Dad in coveralls<br />
carrying the calf in his arms from the barnyard<br />
just like the plaster shepherd<br />
in the Christmas crib scene.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">We kids dabbed him dry with towels,<br />
eager for the feel of him. We mixed<br />
warm water with formula and fed him<br />
from a bucket with a huge latex nipple<br />
protruding from its side, his throat<br />
greedily sucking and swallowing.<br />
The rose bush behind the house<br />
scratched on the window pane<br />
buffeted by a cold March wind.</p>


My People

Watching The Wizard of Oz, Summer 1988

The Calf in the Pantry

<p>Flames incinerate our years of studied play.<br />
It had been an old pig barn, and we squealed<br />
to have it as our own, mopped it out,<br />
washed the windows, drug into it desks, chairs,<br />
and a couch resembling Freud’s that now<br />
lights into smoke and flame and<br />
vanishes like a dream, unrecoverable by analysis.<br />
Labs with colored chemicals whose rows of jars<br />
beckon like crayons to idle minds exploring a<br />
Middle Earth between innocence and adulthood<br />
fall and shatter as tables and shelves give way beneath them.<br />
Posters, calendars, remnants of the haunted house<br />
for Halloween flower into flame, we watch them go,<br />
watch flames lick the rough boards, hungry,<br />
inside because we lit the match<br />
until heat drives us out and we stand back<br />
bright-eyed, flames crawling out the rafters,<br />
running up the roof, leaping, roaring,<br />
bestial, eating out the blackening core<br />
more swiftly than we had guessed.<br />
Arsonists of our childhood,<br />
privy to the plans to burn it anyway,<br />
we seize the chance to fire this final rocket,<br />
to send something of our intensity skyward,<br />
adrenal, no hope of recovery, we want to see<br />
the deep death latent in all things, play with it,<br />
welcome it, fill our ignorance of it,<br />
let the structure collapse<br />
and its matter and time implode into<br />
the black holes of our eyes.</p>


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September 23, 2014IchabodMark D. Hart

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September 23, 2014IchabodMark D. Hart

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