Nobody Gets Off the Bus:
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Poetry by Jane Teresa Tassi
- raze
- razz
- razzmatazz
- stop-it-bullet
- burr burn
- bomb balm
-
- Pebbles
- in the mouth
- of the moon
- Pebbles
Goddamnedvietnam Like Götterdämmerung
Racing eating roses
through lime trees
ceaseless sadnesses
and chinese trees--
I've come to a pond
of young animal. He is
fur and syrup and bullet--
A bomb. Sh, rush. Flute delicate
and warm; has eaten lunch the
size of a swan from the shoulders--
Embalm him with ineffables impalpables
snow, stones
Take him to the mountain bottom.
Leave him for food for the moon.
Ambush
We have these
winter light
watercress
delicate
photographs.
Face translucent
lotus leaf.
There's a
quaver in
each picture
and I wonder
that he
stood there
for such
shots.
I try to
sleep but the
moon is the
window like
a flashbulb
or a root
pulled out
white by
a child.
There is
still a
zero in me
because of
what happened
to you.
The Deathwright
he created hells with six little steel spits
from a stupid blackblue
stick-a-fierer
--touch here--
and all the boy blood
all duck whizzing autumns
skies of 'range red starry
and the heather-meadow-pudding bellying
--end here--
Ever Hitler
There cantilevered on a bough of time
a man who simmers murder stares the air.
A blau and bruise and brown, resembling wine
compose the breath of night, shake down a hair
of stars, then tail-yank evening from its lair.
He sits rippleless; uliginous he thrills
to gaze at, brainstopt all the gory hills
of interlocking dead: couples, kid, a girl,
that moment in a gentle, thriving dream
stopped blank as jolts of blood would cause a curl
to seep around a knife's quick tip and gleam
then cull a sleeping infant from his mien--
This done, the years contrive to seem to change.
Yet Goths, Pol Pot, Nero, a cave, a plain.
Interview with the Quail Hunter
LeRoy gave me eight cleaned quail
in a block of pinkish ice--and
told the story, square, paragraphic
of how with shot you fish birds
from their swing of sky:
"The land you find them on is rough.
Chaparral, sage, low mesquite,
cholla cactus, prickly pear.
Morning and night red air.
Chollas jump. Sticks afire.
You'd never shoot a bird on the ground.
Some do of course, and shoot from trucks
and drink and shoot.
You spy quail first by hearing them.
They group in the bush and together
make a Captain Queeg-steel-balls sound.
The solitariness. You are talking with
the walking; talking to yourself along
with the pace and blend of weather and
maybe seeing a snake and the weight
of the gun. There's also the smell
of shotgun after it's fired,
the chunky shells and their specific
heft. That clash and shing
sound when you load.
But this is what happens:
a roar up murmur when the covey flies
out of the ground cover. Hit one,
puff of feathers and it
sails down scudding into rocks or
brush making a dying flutter for
ten or fifteen seconds.
Occasionally there's a head shot.
I've seen it only two, three times.
It occurs every 500 or 1,000 kills.
The quail is hit and zips straight up,
higher than its flight in lifetime.
You do not believe your seeing
and the death goes on at such a height.
Then there's a lead drop to nothing.
No activity on the earth.
That's exactly what happens.
Exactly how you feel--"
Jane Teresa Tassi's poetry has been published in Rolling Stone "as well as other journals and rags/mags here there."