Two Poems
by Adrian Matejka
- Sounds of Earth
- In 1976, Voyager’s Golden Records were lathing up & some
- egghead forgot Roland Kirk’s “Spirits Up Above”
- between Bach, the crickets chirping, & the Pygmy girls’ initiation
- song. The same way somebody forgot to warn the boy walking
- his 10-speed along that Indiana road about the hooptie that almost
- ran him down as the driver leaned to the passenger side to yell
- nigger. The sounds of Earth: dragging tailpipes, gravel
- scratching pavement like the g-force subjugating the middle
- of a hateful word. A blind man playing 3 horns at the same
- time, then dying from too much circular breathing in an Indiana town
- 20 minutes away from the original Klan headquarters. After that,
- evening’s easy spiral sent the boy trucking inside before dark.
- No more constellations connecting the dots. No more crickets
- or country headlights like stars shadowboxing their orbits.
- The same sounds etched in copper & plated in gold for the long ride
- out brought the boy to his bike & the racist to his Datsun: a universe
- spinning so aggressively, we lose parts of our dignity between noises.
- Countdown
- Coltrane & the bell of his sax, the belle of the ball & her long line
- of suitors wrapping the dancehall’s marble entrance
- like a feathered boa dropped during the mad dash to midnight.
- The dashes between those numbers look like wrong-shaped
- letters in the flat light. Mathematicis mathematica
- scribunter since we look alike with plus signs for hands
- & minuses where our eyes should be. That late night on the Mercer
- Island Expressway when the Jetta spun out in the misting & flipped
- right in front of us, its tires spun in the air like a dog pawing
- for a belly rub. There was gas dripping & visions of explosions
- while we tried to get the driver out. The whole time,
- “Countdown” riffed from the one speaker that still worked:
- past trim mountains, the Pacific sounding somewhere
- behind us, a Cadillac 8-tracking slick fabulousness past us without
- stopping to help. On a raining highway in the middle of the night,
- eyes can’t tell math from honey & every number equals
- Coltrane counting it down from an upside-down car.
