The Ignored Fresco
The future of this valley has faced off against the Depression
and it has won the finished product of an education.
A man holds up a black sphere to teach its music
and hints within it is a bomb to blow up all ignorance.
Two pause in the opening and turn to go down to the river
where a new life is blossoming from a cherished ideal.
Men are working the earth in a manner that measures purpose.
The shirtless one stares into the distance, shaping his imagination.
The bulldozer whines in rhythm to signal its symphony
every phrase a mandate to meet the siren of a new century.
How this mural rings out its dream and makes its appeal to dignity.
Each shining moment of effort carries a doctrine forward.
This is the way God said society would be made in that age
but now the majority’s credo is to make oneself useful for pay
and the working class doesn’t matter unless it grumbles in the gray
of evening as its after-image fades from the battery of screens.
The nobility in these scenes of industry, stagecraft, and aviation
hides in the dark, embarrassed that we have failed its vision.
It is locked away to keep its value from being diminished
but its champions strangely neglect its worth as beacon.
Its lost visitors wander around in search of spirit and principle
half-broken by the notion their skills will need some replacement.
So they turn to the ignored fresco in the few minutes the dawn can
spare them and tease out the ideal that is appealing to them.
When they land it, they will carry its burden forward a bit
in spite of the empty headspace they are expected to tend.
Grow that garden into its issue, a harvest of dead reward.
The ignored fresco is locked in its stasis, occupying its hard stare.
_____
The Grand Electric Carnival, 1895
That night a man could stand in the foothills and see
the capitol lit up on the valley floor like a glint reflecting of
a glass lens. The city sparkled; it shimmered.
Sixteen brass bands played from end to end.
The detachment from Battery B fired its
two field pieces to announce the arrival of the light.
Electric floats from the Southern Pacific ran
along the streetcar tracks with names like
“Hive of Industry,” “The Cupola,” “Electric Fountain.”
“Advancement of Light.” They displayed clear progress
from the candle to kerosene to the gaslight lamp.
After that, Grass Valley’s National Guard, the Third
Brigade of the Signal Corps and the marching letter
carriers of the Sacramento Post Office,
all assembled to take part in the struggle between
darkness and light. They gave praise to
the mysterious current, wherever it was leading
them, maybe insinuating an information age
when boys would ache in their cubicles
and girls who once might have played
the part of angels on floats would be
left to their lonely streaming of movies.
Mass market romances would begin to
flare up in them. The night would single them out
as they wandered through the city
fearless and fascinated with their handheld screens.
One moment they would be bouncing
along the boulevard, footloose and free,
and the next would land them in peril
like those codling moths and black water beetles of
yesteryear which miraculously began to
disappear the instant the switch was flipped.
_____
The Value of Specimens
I walk past rocks and never dare
imagine what they bear beneath their dress.
Their repose is not a posture I seek.
I have no habit of asking them
Can you keep company with an old man
like myself? as Bai Juyi did near the end.
I can barely guess at whether rocks might
want to spend more time with humans
to cradle their sentient affections, to serve as
landings for their merciless discernments
that fill up their days. Men write treatises
dedicated to their nuances — the holes,
the wrinkles, the cracks, the upright stance,
the veins of space running inside them
accessible only through the imagination.
It’s along that path that a family arrives at
Bidwell’s Monkey Face and climbs the layers of
upthrust basalt to reach the top. The bold
students make love on the level below.
At the upper reach the father spits off
the edge, turns to the son and says,
Maybe it’ll hit the river in a hundred years
or so. By then the son has spent decades
decomposing. The place names have been
maligned. Populations scatter and rearrange.
The currencies have all changed their names.
The vastness of the world has been
compressed, sculpted, shaped by a patient
force. We are the only animals left
who dream and the only animals who gaze
at rocks with wonder at what’s inside them
and sort through their refinement.
_____
Dance of the Heather
The heather sways and arranges
its wild headdress ornate with light
and the glory from its years
of private truth its sacrifice
of movement always entering
entering
its protected dance
from the childhood it
remembered
and then turned back
how little has come to it
from the eyes of the church
from its argument with books
its simple whipping arms
on the stage of its ground
learning its lessons
beneath the theater of the sun
to love
to love
and to worship only the wind
see how it has been cut down
the darkness touching
the ragged spines the broken
center of its frame
the heat spilling out
of its camouflaged origin
it grows over the wounds
pink and filling itself with tears
by the river it has known
forever
filling itself with daring
and believing in the promise
of intimate blessing
_____
Natural Instinct
Fools rush in where the glaciers tread
and mark a ragged wash they now call
the Markley Gorge, a valley buried under
sediment a mile deep. Then came the great
quakes heaving the earth to suddenly heap
like it was bred by a beating heart.
The rains came from beyond the imagination
and the soil flattened the hard cloth
with the little buildings embroidered along
the river fringe. The city faced its first
test of the elements, a wall of water
washing away any human source with
a vengeance. Sick men were floating on cots;
the trapped were drowned in their beds.
Cattle and deer gathered on the highest points.
The large iron house lifted into the street
and overturned. Merchandise on the Embarcadero
was swept away by the black hand of the current.
The Dutchman went down with his poke.
Then the deluge stopped, but just as
the levee tenders had dammed up the sloughs,
the hazards of chimney waste preyed on
the drying roofs. The hotel named
Home of the Badger burned, as did the Eagle
and Galena. Every splendid edifice that fell
cried out for Hook and Ladder No. 1 to come
and save its skin. But they dropped to ash;
then they were rebuilt by a contagious
confidence in the power of the future
profits to be realized. They couldn’t hear
the critics in Frisco who claimed they were
doomed. They summoned their stubborn
and strapped themselves down to see
which natural instinct would prevail.
_____
BIO
Tim Kahl is the author of Possessing Yourself (CW Books, 2009), The Century of Travel (CW Books, 2012) The String of Islands (Dink, 2015) and Omnishambles (Bald Trickster, 2019). His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Drunken Boat, Mad Hatters’ Review, Indiana Review, Metazen, Ninth Letter, Sein und Werden, Notre Dame Review, The Really System, Konundrum Engine Literary Magazine, The Journal, The Volta, Parthenon West Review, Caliban and many other journals in the U.S. He is also editor of Clade Song (www.cladesong(dot)com). He is the vice president and events coordinator of The Sacramento Poetry Alliance. He also has a public installation in Sacramento {In Scarcity We Bare The Teeth}. He plays flutes, guitars, ukuleles, charangos and cavaquinhos. He currently teaches at California State University, Sacramento, where he sings lieder while walking on campus between classes. Website: www.timkahl(dot)com.
