A dead horned owl in the dirt
\nnear the fence that separates
\nme from you. Its beak <\/p>\n
dark as the blackboard on which
\nthe physicist chalks
\nlight’s equations. Think what you want
\nabout the rotting wing <\/p>\n
or the land you see. Blowing
\nsilence through my teeth, I make noises
\nthat awaken no one. Years ago <\/p>\n
I studied how Yonkers’ vagrants, leaning
\nagainst telephone poles, smoked cigarettes
\nwhile looking around. My father <\/p>\n
lowered his head
\nevery time he passed them. Not
\nas wise as he, I eyed them, thinking
\nfate could never
\ndo that to me. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
While listening to Sun Ra<\/strong> Some alone, all piano notes, like pedestrians sweltering day, zigzag ahead in spite a few steps formulate \u201cahead’s” meaning, thereby adding to it called progress forward doesn’t have: an attitude, one <\/p>\n that revels in how sized heart, in ruining about order, teach us that the melodious where is, right there, for instance, where <\/p>\n Catherine St. ends at 8th and goatherds in Afghanistan straight into Philly — I can hear it through my Creative Zen’s headphones now \u2013 <\/p>\n the piano man shows far more <\/p>\n Love Song for Brown <\/strong><\/p>\n At the Legion picnic as I listen to you babble and then you’re sliding I’d kiss you Brown <\/p>\n The old ones… after thinking about Ted Joans<\/strong><\/p>\n My teachers are gone. All of them.<\/p>\n I followed one past Volker’s farm, another Ssshh<\/em>, my mother used to say. <\/p>\n When I feel the need, I sometimes My hymn of praise The dead ones understand. Even It’s the end of the day now. Coolness A sad evening? Or joyful? In spite of not hearing the sound In a tiny city yard, I look up <\/p>\n Over the last 40 years, Bohm and his wife Suman have spent much time in India while keeping their primary residence in the U.S. He is currently completing What the Bird Tattoo Hides: The Belgaum Poems<\/em>, a book consisting of decades of writings composed mostly, but not exclusively, in the village of Vijaynagar outside the city of Belgaum in Karnataka. More information on Bohm’s work can be found at his blog Lethal Injections for the Conditioned Mind<\/a> and his Selections from Online Works (2006-2010)<\/a>. He can be contacted at rebsalerno (at) comcast.net <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I studied how Yonkers’ vagrants, leaning lowered his head By Robert Bohm<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nfor Mary Stricker<\/em><\/p>\n
\nin groups, others <\/p>\n
\nheading in their own
\nwillful directions, the <\/p>\n
\non the corner of 4th
\nand Market on a <\/p>\n
\nof the heat, sometimes taking <\/p>\n
\nback in order to re-<\/p>\n
\nsomething most so-<\/p>\n
\na clogged carotid artery or an under- <\/p>\n
\neverything we know <\/p>\n
\ndisharmony, regardless of
\nthe odds against it, is a
\nsignpost along the way to finding <\/p>\n
\n(everyone agrees)
\nit can’t be but nonetheless<\/p>\n
\nlooking around curiously
\nwander down from the Pamir mountains <\/p>\n
\nwhile the kids in the park across from your house stop playing
\nand gaze at them
\nas in the background <\/p>\n
\ndecades ago
\nhow by including notes known not to exist, the known disappears
\nreplaced by a <\/p>\n
\ncomplex music <\/p>\n
\ndrinking beer from a keg,
\nyou hobble with the has-beens
\non your one good leg<\/p>\n
\nhow below your stump
\nthe ghost-limb’s blood
\npulses and thumps <\/p>\n
\ndeep into a dream
\nwhere you walk through paddies
\nin which children scream.<\/p>\n
\nand drive away the pain
\nbut my lips were amputated
\nin the Indochinese rain.<\/p>\n
\nto the Cherry Island landfill’s
\nfar side, still another
\nto an empty room in Vancouver, the body
\ndecaying for days, the trumpet
\nlong gone, and then there was the time when . . . <\/p>\n
\nkneel before an altar
\nof fumigated grasshoppers
\nand white phosphorous
\nand pray.
\nIf there’s no holiness anymore, I’ll create it. <\/p>\n
\nfor the old ones is an unfinished road built by workcrews. After
\na hundred miles, and then
\njackhammering 30 more yards into a mountain of rock,
\nthey stopped.
\n\u201cThere’s a goddamn
\nMohawk burial ground ahead,” one worker noted wisely,
\n\u201cwe ain’t messing with that.”<\/p>\n
\nthe best art must tread cautiously, never
\nstarting campfires where the brush is too dry
\nor inviting
\nhighway engineers to ride giant mowers toward
\nthe Queen Ann’s Lace growing everywhere. <\/p>\n
\ncreeps into the shadows.
\nDeer stand alertly behind the old waterworks. <\/p>\n
\nA covert mood, hidden further west
\nnear hand pumps and silos, dominates everything.
\nWhile the card player and midwife fuck under a cottonwood
\nthe moon rises higher
\nalthough they don’t see it, but I do.
\nI’ll tell them about it later. <\/p>\n
\nof missiles in the distance, I know they’re there, soaring
\nlike words whose meanings, programmed
\nto explode on impact, will leave nothing alive
\nin villages where delinquents spraypaint messages
\nin banned vocabularies on the walls. <\/p>\n
\nyears ago
\nthrough clotheslines
\nat a lit apartment window, behind which
\nmy mother and her 5 sisters, crowded
\ninto grandma’s Cedar St. kitchen, make
\na soup out of ingredients scrounged
\nfrom the rubble found
\nwhere the church sexton’s root cellar once stood
\nin another country long before
\nany of them were born.<\/p>\n![\"photo_-_robert_bohm2\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/photo_-_robert_bohm2.jpg\")
\nABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong>
\nRobert Bohm<\/strong> is a poet and culture writer. He was born in Queens, New York. His poetry volume Closing the Hotel Kitchen<\/em> will be released by West End Press in Fall 2010. Other credits include two books, two chapbooks and individual pieces published in a variety of print and online publications. Bohm’s long antiwar poem Uz Um War Moan Ode<\/em> (Pudding House Publications, 2007) was praised by award-winning poet Sharon Doubiago for his capacity \u201cto unearth an underground vocabulary that can erupt up through the lava rock of dead language with the force of an explosion” and also for the overall \u201cquality and depth of his vision and work, its deeplived root in the world.” <\/p>\n![\"photo_-_robert_bohm1\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/photo_-_robert_bohm1-150x150.jpg\")
A dead horned owl in the dirt
\nnear the fence that separates
\nme from you… Blowing
\nsilence through my teeth, I make noises
\nthat awaken no one. Years ago <\/p>\n
\nagainst telephone poles, smoked cigarettes
\nwhile looking around. My father <\/p>\n
\nevery time he passed them. Not
\nas wise as he, I eyed them, thinking
\nfate could never
\ndo that to me. <\/p>\n