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[Poetry]


BLAZING ARROWS
by Dan Pinkerton

Why’d the stages keep rumbling along the canyon floors?
Hadn’t they viewed the instructional films? 
What did anyone have worth bleeding over?  Gladly

I’d have surrendered my bankrupt skivvies,
my mail-order hat and bride.  Yet I wake with a head
zeroed in on ore-rich plats to be got

for a pittance, fortunes to be won on faro hands. 
Always I’ve been nudged toward the cactusy
boomtown I would’ve died in.  The blacksmith/dentist would

have tried to excise my molar without
a starter course of laudanum, the gun would’ve yapped
in my hand like an alligator jaw,

the streams I panned would’ve silted shut.  You spend some dread
mornings nursing anachronistic wounds,
thick with reconstituted bones, a piffling godhead

of what can’t be brought back.  Somewhere out west
were famous cowhands with lead in their spines, and I longed
to be among them, famous or maybe

just dead.  These days all anyone dreams of is wayward
sex.  I’m guilty too, but those visions are
dwarfed by these others, of preterit times where I would

have been devoured by a psychopathic
drunk or at least one of the upstairs girls.  Now that our
country’s vast machinery of commerce

is rusting in its cogs, let’s place bets on the next big
sacrifice.  Big cars?  Big coffees?  Just look
at what’s already extinct.  Big promise.  Big danger.

In the old days you moseyed out to your
backyard to perceive there was no such thing as backyards
or even garden gnomes, just a third-world

country adrift in the borders of your own, Russian
doll-like, war-torn, diseased, but finally
a stagecoach set ablaze with arrows of wonderment.

  

  

THANATOS IN XANADU 

Chekhov is said to have written a tale
so good it caused him to soil his jockstrap.
This may or may not be apocryphal.
I am just now putting the finishing
touches on my missile defense system.
Sometimes around sunset I polish it

while the police drive by with erections.
I keep meaning to write some more hate mail
to the chair of the local pacifist
club, Wimps Against War or something like that,

but recently I’ve been preoccupied
by the missile defense thing.  Lately Jill 
has been taking the kids to the town pool
each night after dinner.  I used to love
the pool in the evenings, the glassy
water, the calm light, a polyhedron

of muffled squeals and disembodied limbs.
Then the school dimwit appeared, disturbing
the placid waterscape with his hijinks,
jostling and holding me underwater.

This may or may not be apocryphal.
If only I could get the wiring right
on the missile defense deal, it might cause
me to soil my jockstrap.  Anymore,
beauty can be quantified by its fang-
length and the macho girth of its warheads.

  

  

Dan Pinkerton's poetry and fiction have appeared in Boston Review, Pleiades, and the 2008 edition of Best New American voices, among many other places. He is the recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes and an AWP Intro Journals award. 

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