Steven Leyva
—
Ramblin’ Man :: Navel :: Buttoned Up
Silo after silo lining the gut
of route 20. A sheer
glint that telescopes
down the unbent road:
any vagabond can see
from Cedar Rapids all
the way to Sioux City.
::
The kaleidoscope of milkweed holds
color like a thief gripping a fistful of cash. Spring’s victrola
notched in a groove. What grain
has supposed the inner life
of silos? What rats are happy
as pigs there, undiscovered?
::
If you, safe on a shoreline,
cannot imagine the clouds unhinging
themselves from sky’s clothesline,
fog will be
your small
clothes
making lint
at the navel
of America. Or
the silo of a mid-
western tornado:
homespun.
::
Or perhaps
each silo
is an umbilical
hernia – here
there be giants! –
these children
of wheat and steel.
::
I am not a wind
from nowhere – despite
all the heartbreaker
I hold tucked in a wry
grin. Raised in a silhouette:
half my family
from Tatums; the other
from Homer (OK, OK, OK). I’ve lived
a knockout backwards. Ben-
jamin buttoned up and down
the whole panhandle. Flung
my windswept voice along the cattle
ranch fences of Kansas, among
the cornsilk Iowa strings to violins.
And I know everyone waits
for the black-ice of laconic cuss
to melt, and I am late to speak
but here I am, not wandering,
but ramblin’ on, about the same islands
of clouds, the same state surveyors
will shape like a half-crafted pot
to cook us all. And on the map
another black-eyed pea, another century.
Sly work to give the land a semblance
of Babel’s tower and fill it with feed.
Antiphonal
And true every chant begins by repeating silence
And the unsalted road has an ear of snow
And the cardinal mocks the barren maple oak
And another ounce of sage is burned
And Memphis – how many rifles are sold
on the 3rd Monday in January?
Sing in an atonal time
Sing against the hush in the morgue
Sing as the janitor does into the tipped mic of a mop
Sing in me, Muse, of that man of many troubles
Sing Sing – let Tartarus hold its tongue while Ossining, NY
speaks lockjaw and sirens.
Or not. America barrels. America guns it to
OR after OR. Triage – yes proforma
or otherwise routine. Please
or pleading, America fits, America spasms back.
Or maybe its ordinary ignorant bliss:
magma under the ink of the 2nd amendment
Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans and raised in Houston, Texas. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of Low Parish (a chapbook) and the collection The Understudy’s Handbook, which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.
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