Five poems by John Gorski

Mash-Up: Mary Shelley’s Letters / Nightmares Across the Centuries

From the bustle of Pimlico, Mary writes

to Jefferson -- “My baby is dead.”

Then, I recall a dream late in the next century

of three translucent babes,

with broken teeth and crooked smiles,

chewing on my wrist

as I awoke before dawn

in a wintry bed in Ohio.

“The sun is set in the dark”

like a tarnished gold coin

tossed by a giant

into the vast March night

where its glinting dies by moments.

“Shelley calls to me from another room;

I shudder to think of him in London.”

There attorneys have placed spies

coldly whispering of his debts

among mendacious crowds teeming in the streets.

Mary and Shelley escape

by crossing the gray-green seizures

of the Channel’s waters.

Outside of Paris, they stop

at a moon-faced hotel

white as a mirage of Mt. Blanc;

there her sleep pictures green champagne

sparkling in Lake Geneva.

Another night they stay in Les Rousses

at a squalid inn

of blown-out candles and unmade beds

where she sees herself

high in the Alps with Shelley and Byron

writing paranormal fables

on an evening of pelting rain

and thunderous omens.

Two hundred years in the future,

I wake to a nine-foot ghost

like an inflated circus clown

severed from an old parade.

He looms over me,

an off-white presence that disappears

in seconds into a filmy, 3 a.m. vacuum.

The Green Chair and The Miller High Life Glass

“I hope no one kamikaze strafes your apartment.

It’s so dreary,” my girlfriend groused.

She had wanted to go to Vito’s for dinner

but we were both on SSI and mendicants

of the food stamp culture in 1977

when I first lived in Seattle; so, I was wary of expense.

Later, we headed into the March wind

on Madison St. toward downtown

and the ragged, yellow banner

of Burchfield twilight blowing above Elliot Bay.

“The photo on your Metro pass makes

you look like you just got off

the swing-shift at a concentration camp,”

she remarked as we waited at 2^nd

and Union for her bus to Tukwila.

Perusing that picture years later, I would say

it made my unshaven face -- gaunt on Elavil -- appear

like an apprentice to an anorexic werewolf.

Back in my kitchen, I reached for

the Miller High Life glass

but fumbled it and watched that vessel

from Woolworth’s shatter at my feet.

Then I went into the main room

and listened to my portable GE radio

while reclining in the green upholstered

easy chair I bought the August before.

A few weeks earlier, my girlfriend nodded off

on her anti-seizure medicine and burned

a hole in the arm rest with her cigarette.

The soft-rock station was playing Barry Manilow’s

“Trying to Get the Feeling Again” – soothing me

with its plaintive flute intro I had heard on

air plane headphones when I flew out here.

After my girlfriend and I broke up,

we swept aside the shards

of our downbeat time together by telephone.

Other friends from the day treatment program,

we were both in, would visit then

and we’d talk about Pink Floyd and paranoia.

Sometimes when I hear that Manilow song

unexpectedly, I see her and other faces

I knew when I first roamed these streets

under long, gray clouds like apparitions

above the forty-seventh parallel.                                             

Turning Up the Debussy

My mother was heart drunk

with the Impressionists

with the Afternoon of the Faun

and the musicality of W.H. Auden

when he walked out one evening

into the Time haunted streets of Birmingham.

My father, on the other hand,

was inebriated with the Brooklyn Dodgers

and the cheers of Ebbets Field

that faded into history.

Then he rooted for every team

in the different cities we lived

and sat in a trance

before the televised play by play –

not noticing when mother slammed

an adjoining door

and turned up the Debussy.

Daydream and Shadow

After the Pledge of Allegiance,

the class sang “O’ Maryland, My Maryland,” –

our state anthem of hackneyed praise

set to the tune of “Oh, Tannebaum.”

And then we sat down to arithmetic

but I thought of peanut-butter cookies

waiting in the cafeteria

and my mind flew off

with the balmy, September sky

pouring through the windows

with a sun-lit haze of ADD

that scrambled the numbers of the lesson.

But my slightly taller shadow

whispered incognito: “follow

the instructions and finish;

that’s how you get along.”

Sometimes, a cold wind blew

down the coast from Sheep’s Head Bay

to the Chesapeake with rainy syllables

hectoring on Saturday mornings

when my father checked my math assignment

like an East Prussian pedagogue

in General Electric light.

Then I wanted to bolt

to the fair-weather recess fields

of Glendale Elementary

where I could play baseball

with my friends or go further

to a silent, vacant place

under the halcyon vault

that was the absence of my parents

and sing an epiphany of notes.

But then, my shadow-self arose

like voices from open windows

in a thousand Brooklyn apartment buildings

that chorused: “Your parents are looking for you.”

On a street corner, a pay phone rang.

I picked it up and heard:

“This is your father; your mother and I

have been worried sick about you.”

Ball Park Frankenstein

Maybe you’ve seen him in left field

during batting practice

shagging would be homers –

lumbering toward the white spheres

flashing out at him like lasers.

He likes it best when shadows

fall long and cool upon

the manicured green

to provide a peaceful haven

where his dread visage can’t be seen.

Made as he was from the cold flesh

of the dead, he will come

alive when the scoreboard

charges his brain with the electric

message that his team is ahead.

He used to work in concessions

carrying metal trays

of peanuts and root beer

but beneath a long-billed cap

his face always inspired fear.

He likes the rainy evenings

he spends on the ground crew,

rolling the tarpaulin

like a heavy shroud on base paths

under the liquid gray heavens.

For love of the game, he stays on

in this loud stadium –

a continual fright --

and can be an icon only

on Halloween bobble-head night.

See him far out in the bleachers

under a bucket hat,

drinking cheap red wine –

ball park Frankenstein.