Poems by William Olsen

Deer Traffic

Tonight's a night the frantic signatures
slip off the suicide notes,
it is a night that rips up
the standing warrants
for our arrests
till I imagine I can almost see my happiness
as clearly as I sorrow
for the others.
Like the guy who talks
to a gingko tree—
that living stick without one ruthless
entrepreneurial leaf
to scowl back at him—
adivising it not to join the army.
Or the woman whose beggarly hands
rev up like cars as she directs
the movie of an alien poverty
she never planned to star in;
or the suited buffoon in the phone booth
with a fat wallet to vomit
all the money in the world
and still no quarter,
kicking at the Plexiglass constructions
of the Republic's privacies and weeping
into the polygamous wives
of his two coat sleeves.
Bankrupt departures
and sad validated fares,
in our midwestern Amtrak stop of
group seizures, I want to cry
like a baby at my good station,
watching this orchard of a boulevard—
its ripe white streetlights don't fall—
till I can caterwaul my happiness,
I can see the traffic almost shine through it
bearing a harvest of deer, their tongues
unfurled almost upon
the salt-spray of the stars
and the salt-lick of the moon
and into our Holy Mission
of charities that don't exist for them—
carcasses strapped to pick-up trucks,
with such strange distances for faces
that even dead don't seem to want to die.

        —from Trouble Lights

A Fallen Bat

Little fanfare, mute echo with a shrunken head,
Shrewlike glider Linneaus lumped with the humans,

I do not for our big world know where life ends
But you should be up there swarming the stars.

Leaf-nosed hand wing, unheard-music screamer,
Flexogram, wall-sticker, scooper of linear bees,

Black bud not even the noon light can blow out,
Wherever life ends it doesn't have to end tonight.

It only gets worse, cave dweller, pollen carrier.
It simply will not do to play dead forever after.

Madame Midnight, St. Nick, Nostradamos, Nostferatu,
Death and Hell would be hard put to swallow you.

Little wet pill, please rise to wherever it is you rise.
Sceam back at your own ears if you have a choice.

It's now or never, moreover, and just as well,
Life or death, mercy or murder, care or fear.

Stunned umbrella, unfold the night, make it keen.
Before I die I want to be a ledge you can hang

For all your life to, long before I die I want to say
not yet.  Even if nobody asks, fanged voice.

Torment, blind necessity, break my eardrums,
Dearest ash, but not before our time has come.

—from Poetry

By a Railroad Crossing

One day our signatures will ascend from our wills
with all the rubbish of our little dusks.

We'll give up on redemption, for the time will have passed
for waiting around like abuse for angels to board us.

That instant after language and solitude
a page of the phonebook will blow away, with a few more.

And a last human voice will argue
the unconditionable terms of perpetual sadness.

The white face of the earth, streetlight off snow.
One street, one train, one stoplight to go green.

This shall be the last night of our very first lives,
and what this means shall pass like empty berths.

—from The Southern Review

 

Avenue of Vanishing
TriQuarterly, 2007



Trouble Lights
TriQuarterly, 2002