I am a hoarder of small things with plain stories to tell
if you look closely enough. How that one lone yellow die,
buried in the dirt—its lost mates, long gone—
still hankered for the darkness of the leather liar’s cup
that tumped down on the mahogany bar like a fist
at Speck McAuliffe‘s Lagunitas Lodge. He rolled the dice.
The long mahogany bar was my runway, sticky as flypaper,
where I could crawl and observe the adults up close.
My aunts, thirsty after picking berries in the creek,
amid sizzling crickets and relentless summer heat,
nursed tall Tom Collinses garnished with lime, while I
was thinking of the pies that my grandmother would make.
And Old Pete, the last real cowboy, a mule skinner,
perched on a stool at the end of the bar that no one dared use,
rolled his cigarettes one-handed, and lived out back
in a Slipstream, with his strawberry roan in a makeshift corral.
And Speck wiping down the bar with a threadbare rag,
told stories punctuated by a nasal Boston drone
by way of the Mission, like a politician or petty king.
Those ivory dice decided the transitory fate of so many,
from who was going to buy the next round, calling out
from snake eyes to boxcars, was there enough time
to knock back another one, or to leave the wife behind?
After all, it was midday. In the cavernous darkness of that bar,
time itself was suspended. On leave. But no one ever turned
down the politics of a free boilermaker or a whiskey neat.
I listened to their unfinished stories that bled like old wounds,
ate the odd snack of stick matches or cigarette butts, seeds
that even Pete’s mean old green parrot, rejected.
He swore like a sailor every time that liar’s cup hit the bar,
and churlishly rejected my childish offerings,
no matter how carefully I tried to disguise them
amid the hulls of sunflower seeds. His baleful yellow eyes
like small suns followed me as he edged closer
to grab my finger, his black leathery tongue
and cruel beak seeking revenge on all humankind.
8/10 Write On! Susie Terence
- See part 1, The collector
