WHERE I COME FROM WE DO NOT RUN
No man is a hero to his valet.
—Mlle. Aisse, Lettres
Super Dan: Where I come from we
do not run
with crosswind. You did once
at the wildlife park, with the she-lion.
Hope was the two of you were bonding
from either side of the sixteen-foot
chain-link fence. When she stopped, you
stopped, when
she pivoted, you pivoted. When she silently
settled
into pounce-mode your memory
flipped back to twenty years
of housecats. The dilated eyes, two black
saucers.
The shoulder muscles under fur, tense with the
exactitude of hard labor. The rubbing of her shoulder
blades a private encouraging undertone.
In you the blood fell to your feet
as an avalanche. Meat. But—
she harbored no spite, no jealousy, no
predetermined
disgust, didn’t favor your jeweled rings or
lust
for your husband. You were merely
close enough to matter some.
But for that fence.
Or rather the four feet of it
she could not leap.
Just
look at this human predilection for daredevil stunts—
motorcycle
jumping over quarter-mile-wide canyons!
Or
the enormous dirt arena
and
the gigantic slapdash pile of junked cars,
and
barreling smack into that pile
another
souped-up junk car dragging
a
hay truck on fire!
Never
will be the day
when
one hermit crab says to the other
hermit
crab, “Hey Joey, light my
shell
on fire
and
I’ll run into the sea.”
Super Dan receives hot
chocolate
in a
large steaming cup, then pours into it quite a bit
of a new
superdelicious beverage not
available
on his planet, something
creating
a fondness in him, they call it Kahlùa—
At my home we accept we live until we don’t.
Even with what creeps us. Look at your world’s
Komodo
Dragon with its man-dropping saliva, the brown
recluse violin-coifed spider, the primordial
scorpion, siren of hurt in its curved blond
tail. The tail
itself a marvel of grotesque, agile as one human
index finger, the flexion, the extension, but—
for all their misgivings, they’re not out
calculatedly
picking the lock of your home. A delicacy
set upon a silver platter
to them would be absurd excess. Eat
or
protect. Unadorned
as
the trundling, snuffling brown bear
on
the pine hilltop, making the most
of
the furrow in front of him.
It
is not the bear on the hill with servant bears.
///
Originally published in The Los Angeles Review, 2013
Winner of the 2012 Red Hen Press Poetry Award
Judge: Jericho Brown
originally titled "Super Dan Comics Question Box Series #18"
