THE GORILLA STORY 

Around ten, the phone rang. We were all in bed. I was two.
“Joe,” he heard the voice slur, “there’s a fellow with a gorilla 

down here. Says he’ll pay a hundred bucks to anybody
who goes five minutes with his monkey and walks out

under his own steam.” Daddy said, “Where is he?”
into the black receiver, heavy enough itself to be a weapon.

Between bed and the bazaar, he drank a fifth of liquor
and then had to pay fifty cents more to be foolish.

Daddy wore a coat and tie when he wasn’t playing golf—
even to fight gorillas. The gorilla caught him

by the necktie.  Dragged him through peanut hulls,
banana peels, slides of excrement, then tossed Daddy

to the back of the cage and rattled the bars
to scare onlookers and earn his pay. But daddy

came to and leaped onto the gorilla’s back and grabbed
the bars just beyond all that hair and muscle. Pinned him

to his own cage. Daddy held on until he walked out under his own steam. He held out his hand for the hundred, but the carney wasn’t having it.

“You had an illegal hold on my gorilla!” the man barked.
“How,” my daddy from that night until the day he died,

“can a man have an illegal hold on something with four hands?”
Forty years later, I met a boxing chimpanzee named Congo,

a champion in ‘57. He’d retired to Tarpon Springs. Someone wrote a book  about him, The Gorilla Show. I have this poem. He out lived Daddy

by at least twenty years. Congo never talked about that night in Martinsville,
ashamed to have been beaten. Not even to me. My daddy on the other hand

won years of telling this story. He taught me to tell it, that it’s a story
worth believing, even with no proof but the story itself.

IMAGINARY ART
                        —after Lisel Mueller

1 - HOW I WOULD SCULPT IMAGINATION

It would be a child’s body, clothed,
seen from the sides and rear. She would
peer into the granite block
she is made from, her face still
part of the monolith she looks into
to see all the women she might become,
all the directions she might take
when she backs away and steps
down from the white pedestal
and walks past the red velvet ropes.

2 HOW I WOULD SCULPT ART 

Grey walls with a hint of olive
or eggplant, a dark plain palm
holding vivid marbles in bright
rectangles glistening with days
and weeks, all the Crayola swirls
of living in an instant, a raindrop
of blood, a snowflake of breath,
a bleat, a blink, a snap, a snatch, a snare.

3 HOW I WOULD SCULPT BEAUTY

A figure of a woman at a small sink
in the only bathroom of a house
on Chestnut Street. She would stare,
open-mouthed, into the medicine
chest mirror, rubbing her spit
with the small black brush
into the tar of Maybelline mascara,
one set of eyelashes already done,
her lips already scarlet, the mole
near the crease of her smile
already brushed black, marking
her loveliness. It would be
my mother in marble,
before her real troubles,
frozen in her mid-thirties, when she
still looked like a star.

4 HOW I WOULD SCULPT IDEA

Pieces of crinkled copper pages
in different stages of wadding
beside a stainless steel trashcan
overflowing with wadded, crinkled
copper paper, one open on the stone
pedestal floor, having missed its target,
cupping its contents like the hand
of someone asleep, the fingers
of the page still curved up and holding,
still hiding E=mc2, or perhaps
a draft of this poem.

5 HOW I WOULD SCULPT SUPPER 

A pine table covered by a white cotton
tablecloth, dotted with petals from spring
flowers, the vase maybe sea green, the petals
sapphire. Old white china veined in fine grey
cracks, polished silver-plated flatware, something
ornate, cut milk-glass goblets, one chipped.
The plates full of perfectly sliced meatloaf,
pebbles of spring peas, and a cloud
of whipped potatoes—all of it lovely
and too delicious to eat.

TWO IN THE MORNING

You open the window to the cool night.
A chill rides my arm like a train
pushing cross country, the Red Eye.

There is no moon, no stars, no hint
of a window in the pitch black. Rain
is on its way. I smell it coming as I lie

here awake, listening for the long bright
howl of the coyote who haunts lane
and vale in this hill country. He spies

the weakness in any situation. Light
or dark, early or late, he’s the same,
looking for the prey that will cool

his hungry belly. His step is light,
his eyes shiv-sharp. A lame deer,
a slow calf, a weak foal, a loose pup.

I fall asleep between fear and the tight
whine of a distant car piercing my dream
of you, some wild dog, a blinding light.

• These three poems were published in the collection Galaxie Wagon: Poems, LSU Press, 2016.