Jack Turner

GREENHEART WITH SCARLET RUNNER

The tobacco-stained air, the damp smell
	of books in the open stall, the long white hair
of the leather-skinned man who spouts poetry
	as if it were the weather report--his accent
mahogany Jamaican. "Take this book!
	he suddenly says to a stranger. "It's yours.
Please take it--for free--now! I love it
	too well. So it must go. Thank you, sir!
Thank you." The stranger smiles crookedly
	and goes on his way, glancing at Wordsworth.

"Now I can be happy for a while," Leatherman
	says. "I'll go back to reading trashy novels.
Poetry I should never read. Don't know why
	I ever do. It's like the greenheart tree with
the scarlet runner. Used to grow right here,"
	and he points to a flat, round, weeded stump.
"Its beauty--the deep, green-brown wood with the
	thick, curving vine growing up it, and the
bursting red flowers like mouths of flame--its
	beauty made me cry. Naturally it had to go."

Glancing furtively around, he whisks out a flask,
	unscrews the top, takes a deep swallow, and
offers you some. "It's homemade rum," he says.
	You take a sip, and the sweet, dark bite stays
in your mouth as the fire hits your throat.
	Your eyes water and you cough and laugh.
"It's...good," you say, handing back the silver flask.
	"Naw," he grins. "She ain't good. She bad.
Heh, heh. This here demon rum, she is bigtime bad."
	His rheumy eyes begin to purple with the sunset.

The little coal of rum glows in your belly
	and makes you feel strangely at home here.
You can imagine how the greenheart must have
	looked, shading over this shabby wooden stall
with its hundreds of rotting books and new, glossy
	magazines and stacked pulpy papers weighted
down with flat stones. The scarlet runner
	would've had fleshy, pregnant pods of seeds
that would've spilled out for the birds to eat
	as they chirped in the steamy, sunny mornings.

LOST PLANES

There is the plane of the spirit, of course,
	but that is another story and best told
by the clergy. Amelia's Cat's Paw heel,
	a flattened sheet of metal with a certain
rivet pattern--now we're getting a little closer
	to reality. The ocean is never your friend.

It is just an expanse of green, the shadows
	of clouds oiling the millions of ripples,
the rounded-off horizon at the top of the
	mountain of water as it rolls into the
deep, wide sky, the blunt silver nose of the
	plane--all a whining, buzzing, frozen tableau,

like seeing the world before creation, before 
	the stages were constructed and the marionettes
took over the news, with their struttings
	and spoutings of love, their shocking
vanity and talk of peace, the startling
	idiocy of it all. You lose track of time

when you're flying; you wish it could last
	forever. Looking at your watch is a duty
that the sergeant in your brain demands of you.
	Your plans and meticulous charts do not
show this shining, endless green, this dazzling,
	enameled sky, the reality of being lost.









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