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JOHN MACKER
A Day In The Life Of An Altar Boy Christmas at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral for delinquent angels singing Away In The Manger a cappella with the choir, the crèche was alive & torpid with solemnity the church smelled like pine boughs. I didn’t realize my exile standing with tremble bone colt knees on the December deep freeze streets of Denver Sister Margaret Mary married to Jesus in numinous black laughing & waving at anything that moved that Christmas Eve & across Colfax a group of older kids held up hand made signs that bobbed like frosted windows looking out onto Armageddon, excoriating America for the bombing of Vietnam. I’m out in the churning wind of New Mexico, a cup of breakfast tea trembling in my hand, the latest war of the new century casts its Godzilla shadow across the frozen tarn. I want to tell the shadow of God I haven’t been a Catholic for years but I believe in Apache arrowheads, hiking across soaring mountain streams, Joe Strummer & The Clash, the changing seasons of work & peace, solstice dusks with two good dogs, a life lived softly on the edge bereft of rancor, Elegiac Feelings American a desert river. Blues For Pajarito Plateau I took a walk in the winter drizzle Los Alamos obscured by clouds the place to the west where Borges pulled his dream revolver & exultantly killed the gods- I can feel the presence of the secrets factory, its sullen modernity & starless shadow history beneath its face habitual bomb dreamers aflame underground, their deep toxic bones moistened by the heat & the last breath of El Nino. In my early twenties when a protest was still a protest- I listened with granola-hearted mothers to Corso read “Bomb” on mountain lawns of eternal light. When sitting on the railroad tracks of Rocky Flats was a privilege & necessity, shoulder to shoulder hair to hair with bohemian youth stars praying for spiritual guidance in the silvery handcuffed rains of a Colorado summer. Pajarito, Pajarito starstruck mesa in the clouds: someday you’ll be de-veined of your ticking arroyos & the ancient dissected Bandelier ash will forever be the earth within us, the earth beyond us. For Robert Creeley This morning, half moon translucent as rice paper in the blue sky, Cecil Taylor on the radio with an anarchy of imagery, a surrounding darkness to beat back, every day the words help to reduce this self- ness to a less obsessed inquiry, to a simple pale moon’s obsession with an objective brightness, “patient in time like a river”, music is a beautiful word to live in, to hang on the moon, to fervently guard, to point the way & will follow. John Macker’s most recent book is Adventures In The Gun Trade, (Las Vegas: Long Road/Temple of Man,2004). Previous books include The First Gangster and Burroughs At Santo Domingo. An “epic” poem, Wyoming Arcane will appear in the pages of mad blood #4 next spring. Lives in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico. |
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© 2005 Underground Voices |
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