2 by John Wall Barger

2 poems by John Wall Barger

Greyhound Fables

                                  What’re ya reading?

A bio of Samuel Beckett. What’s yer favorite part?

Where he gets knifed by a pimp. What

is going on with yar nose there? It’s bleeding.

Why?

          I stand, wobbly, rummage in my luggage

for vestiges of rum.

                               I wake in the small hours

inside a bus adrift across Ontario,

my cheek flat upon the broad shoal

of a neck, Hilda’s, a nurse with Confucian eyes

who journeys to Thunder Bay

to lay her murdered daughter underground.

                               A crow spotlit in dusty headlights

arches its wings,

dies. Mr Beckett didn’t die,

but he did die.

           Sings the bus, Trochee, trochee . . .

 Satellite dishes query

 the dawn. Children wave, 

 hurl rocks. A mother on a trailer porch

 cradles her newborn,

 her head cocked as if the baby

 whispered a fable about

 the dark lake across the road,

 as if she herself

 were being held.

Beckett, stilt straight, visited

the gaoled Pandarus

to ask why. Iron bars between them

moist as hardwood trunks.

I ask Hilda, Why?

Monsieur, said the pimp, je n’ai aucune idée.

A Start

Waste the morning. Squander money

on tickets going nowhere. Curse the internet.

Swallow the bile. Down a fourth

mug of coffee. Sit thunderbolt upright.

There. A new personal record. Two hours awake

to hit bottom.

          Now, light a cigar.

Climb on the scooter. Gun it uphill

the unknown way, up the winding mountain path

away from the city. Say

nothing. Do not even scream. At each fork,

take the strange road through palm trees & orange groves

till you’re off the map. Then go further

uphill, past the big black dog wailing for blood,

till the pass is impassable,

                                         till the past is beneath you,

a green ravine slashed by the nails of the world.