Buck

Within seconds the sun will rise and a day will begin

and I will be perhaps more kind or less kind

than I was the day before. They’re only ticks,

seconds, nervous habits, and four weeks ago my eye

was twitching to the tune, too—one, two, three,

but I’ve gotten better, or progressed into something

much worse. I read that the average human spends

nine seconds looking at the average piece of art

in the average museum. We are all so very average.

But nine seconds is nothing unless you are

an average person considering average art, wondering

where greatness has gone, where’s it hiding, looking up

to the drop-tile ceiling and just wanting to breathe

against whatever it is that’s on the other side. Darkness,

young Skywalker. Nine seconds. Which is only one

second more than eight, the amount of time it takes

to successfully ride a bull or bronc, to fight the buck

and reins and bounce and to take one short moment

to dance with another animal, to dance against it,

which in this instance are both the same thing.

Many of the riders never make it, and many that do

suffer terribly—ribs broken by a hoof or horn,

wrists, legs, and for the unfortunate: death. The darkness

surrounds us. Am I writing this out of pain, then?

Well, no, she said. And yes, too, and didn’t we possess

so many emotions, even when we couldn’t name

any of them. Eight seconds, nine seconds, ten seconds,

the list goes on capturing itself into these wonderful

and horrific moments of life, like rainfall, or not rainfall

but the rain itself, the drops, drips, dripping off

the roof where the gutter has gone out, the gutter

that needs to be replaced but will not, not today, I’ve got

other things on my mind, a small ball of water, which holds

together because by its own scientific definition it would

rather stay that way than let itself go, which it will

when it makes contact, which they all will, crashing, these

little memories coming down at a slight angle from the west,

getting heavier as the wind picks up and an indescribable grey covers

the sky, the canvas and time, the buck and the bull, I’m telling you

I could shake a story out of every wet thing right now.

Technique

The land stretches out. A good-morning call,

and “stretch” is perhaps not the best word

but I am on my way back from Oklahoma City,

drinking my first cup of coffee, I am not yet

witty on the day. I pass signs for various colleges,

where inside a classroom somewhere a teacher

looks down into a student’s story about the good

life, happy endings, and says In fiction it works better

when something bad happens. There is no other way

to put this. Characters change. People change.

And people change characters, too—they write them

new lives, new longings, new desires and fears.

For what is character, after all, if not some strange,

tense ball of both, bouncing through the dead grass

today, over a hill, on the highway, past the cows

that look up and agree: Now there goes somebody

worth reading about. I turn up the music and roll

the windows down. The song is unimportant.

The band is unimportant. The volume is, however,

important, as is the classic rock station, 107.7,

the last spot coming in on the FM band before

it all starts over again and moves back into public

broadcasting on the front end, talk radio, Republicans

bashing the liberals, liberals bashing the president,

and sometimes I bash my head just a bit

on the steering wheel, before looking up in time

for another curve ball coming around the bend.

So bend your knees, and hold your hands back.

Keep your eye on the ball, and when it comes just fucking swing.

A solo shot, and next up Journey’s “Loving, Touching, Squeezing,”

finishing off with a long refrain of “nah, nah, nah nah nah,”

a tease to some other, a tease teased out until it is

no longer spiteful but just sound, song, sung

as so many of us sing along. So sing along. There is no one

here to watch. Conflict, the writing teacher says.

Conflict, the music resolves. Conflict, the music returns to,

it has no way out so it escapes through its own,

it goes out the window, down the asphalt, it surrounds

the cattle, the blue dog in the driveway, the woman

in sweatpants screaming at her man in his car, his windows

up, rolled all the way, and in her reflection there you can sense

pain and longing, a long, long story breathed close to the glass,

where it becomes foggy, and warm, and clings to everything

even as he drives away, as he listens to the same songs

I am listening to, on my tail, close behind me, close enough

that I can see he is angry, sad, weary—beating out

the tempo of longing on his steering wheel, his hands

coming down with each thud of the bass drum, keeping time

as a violent and rhythmic and moving thing.