Selected Poems by Dick Gallup

By Dick Gallup

Relaxation

So gay on your lovely head
The hat cradles the specialty
Of the house brand new
And hedged with the flowers
Of the past we have somehow
Got through. If night
Should fold in on us
Here in the day dripping
Down the fire-escapes toward
The ground like poetry
In search of the common man
In all things, smoky and
Vapid insight coming near
To what I can't keep my eyes
Off, the fragile jaws
Of antique life, a fretful
Crowd of messages delivered
Long ago in the pouring rain

Then night would find us
As we are, bright lives
Dancing in the somber light
Of history, shiny pencils
At the edge of things.

Hey, Buster!

When I close my eyes I see a man in a brown suit
sitting in a hotel lobby in 1947 reading the morning
paper. His thoughts are private and probably
beside the point.

Many years later the clouds
still move from west to east and a hawk may
skim the tops of the trees far up the mountainside.

There is nothing to stop us from placing
objects on a table in the sunlight and painting
false shadows under them to confuse our friends,
if we have any—probably not, if we think that
much about confusing them.

Alas, in such terms
pronouns tend to lose their meaning; lack of
tension or current in between. Life becomes
all a dream, with a nasty kicker when we open
our eyes once more.

Above the Tree Line

It's a putrid kind of day
To be standing on a corner
Counting pigs
But that's where it's at
People going to work
Their faces still asleep
They look porky
Overfed and greedy
A few years ago
At 8:30 in the morning
I'd eat myself some grits and eggs
And feel like shit
The sun hurt my eyes
Hung over on methedrine

Don't take that stuff anymore
It'll turn your body into grits
And that's nowhere for a body
But all those swollen faces
Staring back at me
As if they were looking at themselves
In some reflexive mirror of dreams
Startled into early morning metabolism

I couldn't take them
Turned into pigs by Capitalism
And a clock
I felt like some ghostly '40's hipster
Wondering why everyone was fighting
Over a trough full of mush

I was just a kid
Thought I was out of it
But everyone
Even those sleepy faces
Was backing into a nightmare
And now that we're here
It seems perfectly natural
To watch the hard edges grow between people
To see everyone
Growling over the scraps of the meal
We've gorged ourselves on all these years

It doesn't matter if I turned away
From the feast
Tacking the hours of the night
When everyone was asleep
As my own
Digging the streets
With an empty stomach
And a typewriter in my head

In the end
It'll get you where you live
If the neighborhood folds
You can move
If the city turns nasty
You can leave
But if the country goes down
You'll know it

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