HoboEye Poetry:
Joe Fletcher, North Carolina, USA




The Tomb of Uri Geller

He was born with his eyes closed, serene, listening inward down the red rivers of the womb.

All the coins in Tel Aviv softened as a lone raindrop slanted from the hot blue sky and struck the dozing brow of a merchant.

As he grew, events bent towards him.

At night by his window he gently stroked the moon until the sea tilted in its salty socket, spraying in marine gluts over thundercolored rocks.

His parents found him scraped and dazed beside his twisted bicycle.

They stuffed his quivering hands into lead-lined mittens and pushed him teetering from their door, then anxiously turned to consult the pages of the Pentateuch.

Entranced before a throng of disciples, he was said—though sitting absolutely still—to be moving at astonishing speeds.

Humming gently, he touched wild birds in the Hungarian wilderness.

By suspending his hand in the air of the cockpit, he piloted aircrafts above trenches where buried mineral rivers flowed.

A maroon wart formed on his brow.

He called it his antenna.

He dressed ostentatiously, appearing on television bathed in a blend of ointments.

He stood like someone trying to stand so others wouldn’t think he wasn’t standing like them.

A magician, shaking with indignation, accused him of fraud and was found that night on the tiles of his hotel bathroom, ravaged by bouts of nausea.

A twisted bronze staple was discovered in his vomit.

Uri Geller ate only vegetables.

He drank from puddles, on his hands and knees, with the concentration of a cat.

When excited he would rise a few inches from the earth, whereupon his embarrassed companions would discreetly place their hands on his shoulders, lowering him.

Why did he become so nervous?

His face was constantly twitching, as if being pelted by an invisible hailstorm.

Nights he fled weeping through the empty rooms of his mansions.

He left us no children.

He didn’t die so much as disintegrate, pulled apart by the magnetic forces overwhelming him, like a flock of starlings scattering in slow motion.

A wind blows where his voice was.

His empty tomb is held underwater by the president’s assistants, who report a tingling in the stone.




Atchafalaya

In the South you see
honeysuckle-scented women
strangled on the seagull-studded
slopes of landfills.
Two children grab each heel
and drag her away at noon,
measured by the shadow absent
from the base of the Pentacostal steeple,
watched by a truant protected
from sunburn by a blond beard,
stroking his black plaster
Christ replica as Squeaky’s
vendor cart full of pink shrimp
dead on beds of chopped ice
rattles past on the frontage road.
Squeaky himself draws his trade
behind his high bicycle (the wheels:
solid disks of sanded walnut),
muttering a Creole hymn
in the green shade of his visor.

On Sundays in the silent chicken
processing plants a fermented
specter weaves through the guano-
pungent coops and the steel forklift
blades scald the palm of the peasant.

When the president tours
the provinces he sits in a closed
Norfolk Southern freight car,
throwing dice with crouching
migrants by the light of an
acetylene torch, while a Dixieland
swing bursts from speakers
mounted on the peach caboose.

If you leave a word hanging
in the air too long at dusk,
it sprouts obscene tubers
twining toward unintended
connotations, and you are
pegged as a foreigner,
and the women deny you
their sweet gaze, and you
roam beneath a sweaty moon
with a crotch rash and a head
torn by the bronze shrapnel
of bourbon. But there are
mothers down here with
breasts as wide as deltas
and sometimes they tangle
you in embraces, their breath
smelling of chicory and
reptiles, nodding in time
with the riverside chorus
of insects and the more
distant surfbreak of the
creeping ocean.




Hoopoe Balm

The roots of hoopoe balm twist through chalky Tyrolean peninsulas where the black skeletons of spice convoys whisper of unrecorded empires. The blossom is the color of jaguar blood, and when a breeze springs from the tropics a cluster of bloom scintillates like champagne poured at the feast of the Queen of Sheba. In its fragrance mingles lavender and myrrh, coreopsis and jasmine, with an acrid undertone, like the spittle of a tubercular child. The petals of hoopoe balm—slender and leathery lashes—are rubbed to the lips of epileptics or ground to a yellow gruel to be spoonfed to muttering albinos.

In midsummer you see, in forests, pygmy children plunging their arms in harvests of its nectar, chasing through the gardens the flocks of lime butterflies, which are pausing from their migration to Barbados to sip from golden hoopoe fruit fallen, fermented, split open. The traveler, dusted with hoopoe pollen, blinks awake to glimpse the moon strangled by clambering tendrils.

During the Siberian solstice, the blossoms and buds exhibit negative heliotropicity, burrowing beneath the tundra crust while the bald pink roots burst like bouquets of vipers toward the dim sun. Pilgrims and sealskin traders kneel in the shade of the root canopies, chanting softly.

In the year of the Great Plague the tributaries were clogged with the pale stalks of dead hoopoe balm. The waters tasted acidic and the riverboat pilots wandered the decks of their moored vessels with bloodshot eyes. From the crushed fields rose the drone of Japanese beetles that had decimated the population and filled the air with their iridescent green flight. Those that then touched a drooping leaf or stood in a wind in which infected pollen was caught later fell victim to blistering rashes which twisted creeper-like up appendages to coil in a death-grip about the victim’s neck. In this manner did Don Carlos of Ecuador meet his death. Black bells were
installed in the temples and a stinking phosphorescent moss crept over the balustrades of pavilions. Women dreamt of giving birth to dead catfish and rain-wet dogs gorged themselves on the corpses of antelope that had grazed in the hoopoe meadows. But after the famine and the rains and the echoes of war, a small tuber shot forth from Indonesian sands…

In the notebooks of Hippocrates, one finds hoopoe balm designated as Artemisia hydrastis, indicating its origin as a hybrid of wormwood and golden seal. Robert Fludd
concocted a tincture from crushed hoopoe stamens for the purpose of dissolving saltpeter. Carthaginian soldiers placed wet leaves of the plant beneath their helmets and, sweating in the desert, received visions of crystal palaces built on the sun-gilded plains of cirrocumulus, from which swooped gargantuan birds with beast-headed prophets mounted on their backs.

In the Mesopotamian basin, after the season’s last fruits have been plucked, great fires are lit from the dried vines, stems, stalks and leaves. And barefoot farmers prepare the fields for the next crop in the dew-sprinkled hours before dawn, when the winds have retreated to their caverns behind the stars and the infant, wide-eyed in his cradle, can hear the rim of the world slicing through the ether.



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