Number 286
September October 2000

Poetry
Copyright © 2000 Poetry Flash

The Sweltering Sky
MARK TERRILL

From If He Had
GARY YOUNG

MARK TERRILL

The copper-colored '67 Ford Mustang
with four-on-the-floor
and the fake white leather interior
is heading out of Tangier

Paul Bowles is riding shotgun
his driver's at the wheel
I'm sitting in the back
the curious and complacent visitor

The gritty Moroccan landscape
is flashing by outside
held in abeyance by a
searing North African sun

We're on a lonely stretch of road
leading down to the coast
when suddenly out of nowhere
this kid appears and waves

Bowles tells the driver to stop
and from the kid he buys a
little plastic bag of pine nuts
which we soon find out are stale

We stop at the cliffs and we're
wandering around in some rocks
when Bowles picks a blade of grass,
licks it, and starts poking it in a hole

This is how you catch scorpions,
he tells us, down on his knees, now,
his sunglasses still on, looking
more adolescent than octogenarian

But all he manages to catch is a
big black beetle, which he shows us,
letting it crawl over his hands as he
stands there and smiles serenely

And I'm so caught up in the image
that I forget to take a picture
while the sun hammers down and
makes couscous out of my brain.

A participant in the late Paul Bowles's writing workshop in Tangier, Morocco, Mark Terrill is a native of Berkeley, California; he has been in Germany since 1984. Terrill's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ends & Beginnings (City Lights Review #6), Partisan Review, Split Shift, Seattle Review, and elsewhere. Also forthcoming are Love-Hate Continuum (Green Bean Press), Kid With Gray Eyes, (Cedar Hill Publications), and Like a Pilot, Selected Poems 1963&endash;1970, his translations of the late German writer Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, (Sulphur River Review Press).

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GARY YOUNG

I am not an incidental thought of God's. Last night I had a dream. My
wife and I were making love when I turned, and discovered our son had
hanged himself from a beam in the corner of the room. I woke with my
arms stretched out to lift the boy's limp body from the rafters; I could
still feel the weight of his body in my arms. I am not an incidental
thought of God's. I offer God what happens in time.

Gary Young is the author of Hands, and The Dream of a Moral Life. His most recent book, If He Had, forthcoming from Creative Arts, is the third book in the series beginning with Days, and Braver Deeds. Young is also a printer and book artist. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Nation, and many other journals.