A Dense Little Poem For the Family

Painting and Poem by Rick Mobbs


A Dense Little Poem For the Family

Father swings through the trees, he wrestles crocodiles, white men,
personal demons. I see a small jewel,green hills and blue ocean,
rotating inside the compass of heaven. Fine silver threads
in circles and spirals, fractured pinpoints of gold, ruby and emerald
hang in a canopy of velvet. The absence of light does not equal darkness,
sight shatters on far-away anvils and leaves hammer shards, finally silent.

Through transparent eyelids I watch as a sandstorm covers the sun.
Twilight rides not on light but whips around from darkness, a rude wind
marshaling vast killing wings. Between sight and knowing are clear
jelly curtains and outside, the mean blur of teeth.

The wind is an iron-framed plow; it is a rusty, steaming, oil -flecked stallion
with shoes of blue steel, throwing up sand, clacking, spitting and clattering.
It is a torn accordion, wheezing and whistling, entropy compressed
and then tortured through ripped leather fittings.

The wind hits the dunes with cutting fists of diamond. It is here
that my mother nurses her husband. She waits down the wind,
the triumph of darkness, the blowing sand peeling skin, carving bones.
The wind grinds the rocks down. Mother swings Father onto the wind
and leaps on behind him. She seizes a good night not to go gentle in
and leans to the stallion’s ear hissing: is this the worst you can do, evil thing?

A maniac riding a maniac wind, heels hard in its ribcage, fists in its mane,
holding a man who is dying. She drives her heels in and spurs the wind on,
into the well of souls that they come from. The wind sends it’s unrest,
it’s hornets and locusts but nothing remains here to kill or consume
except death, and death is dying.

Time has unrolled to it’s end over nothing and no new myth comes.
No milk streams through space from her breasts, no planets or galaxies
spring from her forehead or crown and he’s just crazy, with crazy thoughts,
like: the boy beside the elephant is so small, yet the elephant obeys him.
Higher now than she has ever been, she holds her husband through the driest time.

The black wings of another wind sweep down around them. The ground turns upside down and vanishes and. The stars take their place in the sand. Silence and stillness replace sound and movementand now the unteaching, in earnest, begins.

Rick Mobbs January 2008