YELLOW HAIR
With that lime green hairnet
commonly used by butterfly dispatchers--
something your aunt might have commandeered
to put her hair up donkey's years ago,
I unjarred the bottle of air &
with a pair of forceps
tried to wrangle the life juices
from a Polyphemeus[1] in a manner akin to Ulysses
in that cave three millenia ago;
his gentle bleating like the whine
of the net across the gelatin fabric
of air or the flash of a tomahawk gliding
across Custer's golden hair.
[1] Large buff silk-moth with two eyespots on the hind wings named for
the giant Polyphemeus in the Odyssey. Ulysses had the giant blinded
with a sharpened pole.
[46]
PILTDOWN MAN
Popping out of the dark
reddish "Merry Christmas" haze
twinking blinking land of Nod (or
rather it's Ned, the hefty trucker);
eyes, steel-belted radials,
in a rig big like Santa Claus;
a Stegosaurus
swinging sabre-toothed tail
& flexing padded paws
to gobble night.
Loads so dreary-weary their chrome-plated
swamps are debris after a tank battle
for troglodyte trilobites &
chocolate coloured ooze
belching brown down funnel flaps
to carve deep bellows inside earth.
Such energetic slaves
to cough & sound their
wheezing sandy blasts make for
breaks in a clearing
for I see our trucker,
eons from now,
wedded to sentiment and rock
perfectly preserved (to the dismay
of future inhabitants), a fossilized
remnant complete with
steering wheel embedded in his chest
(forlorn and anatomically correct much as
dolls used in assault cases).
In a vision,
envisage his life
replete to the last Raggetty-Anne detail
--straw-coloured hair, for one,
looms like binder-twine or
horse-hair thread tugged from a dirty mattress
which props a toque or baseball cap,
tobacco staining the resident
gum chewing Neanderthal
with tartan lumberjack shirt.
Contact with Piltdown Man,
soggy Homo Erectus
given to gunning engines,
churning rubber as cavemen
might in the
La Brera tarpits.
Consider a farmer
brief centuries ago
stumbling onto a similar scene
pocketing no cloverleafs
of his own pasture's making
but concrete expressways
looming thru the fog
& damp, then
coming to his senses,
hard-pressed as I.
[47]