South × South. Charles Hood
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to shave those parts.
Do you know that you walk around
like a hut with legs?
Girl, Trees, Paper Balloons
1783: How quiet and still the people on the ground
seemed, said the first people to rise
in balloons. Quiet as milk. Somewhere the son
of the son of the son of the man who was the last person to let go
of the line so the first balloon could be free of us
is lighting a cigarette. Heaven is a movie—
even the audience smokes Lucky Strikes.
They have a box there for my memories and in case I burn up
in the light like a faulty meteor I have given them two or three things
to keep such as my mother’s saddle oxfords and the one about
the man described in the newspaper who was dead for three days
in the ocean but woke up, alive, and the one about when the snow in moonlight was whiter than washing machines behind the dump,
and the one playing now, the one
with woodwinds rising as maples seedpod
the tattoos on the slim shoulders of the girl
kissing me like my mouth is a parachute
just about to open.
Last Year’s Checklist
Where are the goggles that protect against magic?
Am I married? Do I have children?
They ask but I do not remember. Yes—
no. Sure. I am practicing how to spit penguins
out of my head like black seeds. Grappa
blurs the Chileans, not later at McMurdo
but before, Rey Jorge, where church is Mexican
blue shipping containers, three pews
and a plugged-in Mary.
Are you my mother
I want to ask the Russian soup
ladle woman with the gold front tooth.
Can you explain it? Oswaldo, laughing,
va va va-vooms his jacket off for her
and pushes his fingers through the cigarette
burns in the chest of his long johns.
He is a mountaineer and paints maps
so he must know why two burned-out Soviet
tanks mirror rust in the puddles of the airfield
but he jumps lenses and escapes just as the patriotic
tuba music of the Motherland fills the dining room
and my heart turns into a bundle
of sparrows and my hands push past
zippers trying to reach in and tuck them
all back into their red folds,
telling them just wait, people are watching,
we will fly around the room later.
I Take Good Notes, Getting Ready to Fly South
An airship or dirigible is a type of aerostat. An aerostat is a type of lighter-than-air aircraft. An aircraft is a kind of bowtie worn by the sky to piss off lakes and swamps, dirt, center-pivot-irrigation, forest fires. Aerostatic aircraft stay aloft by heating gas slowly, over a burner, then using a tube to blow it into shapes, a swan, even a unicorn, what girls like before they like the flammability of boys. The history of flight mostly has to do with blood and ice. No, the history of flight in Antarctica can’t be told just now, it is mostly too sad for this time of night, but for example there were once two pilots, I met them in a bar in McMurdo,
and the first one was telling the second one, shit, I had to turn back. The other one said, well what for. First one, well my hair was on fire. Second one said, I hate when that happens.
Scale Model
Maybe just marine-grade plywood with tar balls
and kerosene: if bursts of fire come in matchboxes,
what kind of holder does Antarctica come in?
Draw this abyss,
art school: make me
a mold of France—all of France—then cast it in white resin.
Set it beside a 1-to-1 replica of Greenland.
Only two hundred more pieces of the basement
railroad still to go.
Marble Point Refueling Station
It all comes at us so hard
to remember, beauty. At lunch
I study the fuel tech, how her face burned
clean by the wind matches her hands
outside of her folded work gloves,
hands like a kind of telegram
saying you would die for this.
I will sleep in the freezer
attached to a kind of pipe,
will pee in the funnel welded
onto the barrel, will try not
to explain at breakfast how
by being there she makes me
wince three or four times
a minute. I want to write to
somebody in charge, say, go easy,
we’re new. Later after dinner
I ask about the dog
star, what night here looks
like at night. She won’t
say, but when I ask
what she likes best about
being here, she smiles,
looks away, looks back—
the tilt.
The History of Luck
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