Like Night Catching Jackrabbits in Its Barbed Wire

American Poetry Review, The, Mar/Apr 2008 by Skoog, Ed

It's my thirty-fifth birthday and some old friends

are visiting. We drive up to Pioneertown's

one bar and (separate) bowling alley

where the singer who calls herself Cat Power

has left her scoresheet on the wall.

We bowl better in her glow and original

pinks and greens of 1951 the alley's saved.

Back in our civilian footwear we walk

sand to Pappy and Harriet's Pioneer Palace

and drink our beers, play Quiddler with a fresh

deck as the band begins its roadhouse fight songs.

A marine with shaved head and band aid

on his nose plops down and steals my wife's beer.

She snatches it back, looks to me, my words

forming in my hand: The soldier's buddy

apologizes, says he's just returned

from the sandbox that afternoon, forty Iraq weeks

and they're getting him drunk. An officer,

my age, in slacks and burton down, leans in

from the table behind, says he's watching,

not to worry. I've been here before, in dark

on a side road of my little town beside the army base.

I remember how beating felt, how good

in cold to smile at ways they beat me.

I'd always been hungry to be touched, and bread

they fed me was sweet. All things that happen bad

are soft to lay down on later. Once comfort

I hoped for was gone, what was sharp and bitter

was my mother. That was first Gulf War.

Back in the roadhouse we finish our game,

the bar closes, our wives go back to motel

and we still thirsty drive into town twenty miles

through summer's forest fire to Joshua Tree

Saloon, downroad from where Gram Parsons

died twice in 1974, overdosing on heroin.

The first time, his hooker expertly shoved

a cube from the ice bucket up his ass,

brought him back to life, yet he knew enough

of life to shoot up again an hour later,

when she stepped out for a cheeseburger.

It's hard to save your own life, to take

such extreme measures alone. The woman

at the saloon, heavy with heavy curls

collects drinks and asks are you a marine?

as I bruise past to the bar's blue ATM,

and I do feel underwater, undersea

five thousand feet above its level.

And when I wake from my drowning,

outside motel window the mountains

are still deciding what gown to wear.

Quail know the story. Between bushes

they sing it. A hawk listens from the arm

the Joshua tree waves with. My wife pours

orange juice into a green glass on kitchenette

beside black crumbs of birthday cake.

ED SKOOG was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1971. His poems have appeared recently in Poetry, Ploughshares, The New Republic, New Orleans Review, The Canary, Fourteen Hills, Practice, and NO: ajournai of the arts. He has been a scholar at the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers Conferences, and won the 2005 William Faulkner Award in Poetry from the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society. He teaches poetry at Idyllwild Arts Academy in southern California. His first book, Mister Skylight, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2009.