Two Poems

by Caroline Brooks DuBois

PORCHSONG

Squawk and chirp of frenetic bird 
join rhythm section’s creaking swing, 
while idling clunker adds twang 
and thump, and upright dog offers 
pant and scratch — strum and bow.  
Solo, you can hold this languid pause, 
hear ancient choirs of mosquitos,  
rouse handclaps to thigh or neck, 
as city sirens wail somewhere  
and dusk crescendos in one more beer,  
bottle neck slide into summertime, 
in concert with melancholy, its lonely  
arena of longing, lit with fireflies. 

DEAR TOM WAITS

Thank you for the poem-songs, the fiction, the gut and grit, the blood and lust. Pour me another absinthe and holy water, take me with you; I’m strapped in and catching up. Thank you for the round trip to the strip club and church, funeral parlor and bar, for remembering our sons just home from war. For echoing my grandfather, a preacher, a long-lost lover, a Victrola, the choke and smoke of gravel in the throat, the blues and gospel hour, the sugar-tongued-coffin-salesman of love. I crave your percussive thump, your bull horn, your bag o’ tricks, the slap-of-toilet-seat instrument, the marching band glockenspiel, your broken guitar, your pump organ. Don your top hat and plume, let’s waltz again into ghost lands, into holy lands. Hold my hand. Lean me against the jukebox, feed it pills. Let’s sway to the sax, fall timeless like an armless clock, with the tick and tock and shock of cuckoos. Let’s galavant into your carnival of souls, into spidering webs of moonlight, with the needle in the groove at the wrong speed. Let’s dig through memories or pockets for a photograph or locket of someone once loved. Keep rummaging, keep churning lyrics from thick air — inspired by the drunk with the tattoo of an eyeball on his head, buying shots for the amputee in love with the vampire-turned-Christian for the sake of his mother-in-law. Until someone croaks Last call. Or was it Time waits for no one? Or was it Tom Waits for no one? Wait for me, I’m mesmerized and listening, hypnotized by your half-truths, your half-lies. Until the velvet curtain swings shut, until the sun cranks itself back up, until next time.

Caroline Brooks DuBois is an award-winning teacher, author, and poet. She is the author of The Places We Sleep, an NCTE Notable Book in Poetry and A Bank Street Best Children’s Book of the Year, and Ode to a Nobody, which received Starred Reviews from Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal and is a nominee for the Tennessee Volunteer State Book Award. Caroline directs the Literary Arts Conservatory at Nashville School of the Arts, where she’s been recognized for her dedication to her students and as a Blue Ribbon Teacher, a Teacher of the Year, and a semifinalist for High School Teacher of the Year for her district.

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