CHRISTIAN PEET

[b]Angle of Repose[/b]

In the red light of highway protocol
All traffic stalled

A burnished wreck for sunset
Time to pause, as the book says, time to reflect.

Words come so easy till we know their source
And find it wanting-

In need of sympathy or recompense
Say, a fat check

For the fat man stricken in the road
Now out of body, now at the plastic faux pearl gates

Never having seen the equally fat toad
That sits in loam and gravel

Under the guardrail.
Sits. And waits.

Waits for the green light
Of understanding-nothing-being

The toad’s just a toad
And the fat man is dead.

[b]The Story[/b]

Mixed in some celestial silver bowl
the dark meat of our psychic turkeys
and the bowels of our cow souls

doled out cold in dollops dropped
about the land and sea and no one
knows, not even He, which plops

will rot, which plops will grow.
Or so it was explained to me
however many years ago, this recipe

for immortality, a la Voodoo Nanny
while I rocked on her bony knee
pondering the wrinkles of her breasts,

her Virginia Slims, the way she blew
the smoke over her shoulder, out of
harm’s way, took a sip of coffee and

always wiped her lips before she spoke
again, repeating the story just for me
Dark meat . . . silver bowl . . .

[b]Fifteen Minutes[/b]

until it’s time to leave for work.
I need to shower and shave
but won’t do either, though today’s the day
the boss makes her appearance and I’ll feel forced
to tell her “I know my face looks rough
right now, but in a week it won’t.
I’m growing my beard out for a while.”
She’ll understand. Last week she understood
my hesitation with the piss-test
surprised as I was
to be asked to drive the company van
to the clinic come 10:30 a.m.
So I took a couple of minutes
and rang up an orange juice, if she didn’t mind
and was off. Just about a half hour
to Bellingham Occupational Health wherein
I sat at least two and a half hours, reading
about the exploits of our CIA-
darling gone awry, Osama Bin Laden
my bladder swelling, ready to explode.

by Christian Peet (c)2002
([email]ranchproductions [at] hotmail [dot] com[/email])

[b]Author’s Notes:[/b]
Christian Peet is a Bennington graduate, winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a semester away from a Goddard MFA. Thus he has worked as a dishwasher/prepcook, carpenter’s apprentice, sheetmetal fabricator, hired hand on a goat farm, maintenance man, landscaper, and convenience store clerk. His screenplay for the short film Jack & Cat was just produced by 257 Films, and recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Dazzling Mica, Spent Angel, Eclectica, and The Adirondack Review. Christian lives in northwest Washington.

You Think YOU’RE Demoralized!

We had this big old Chinese elm tree by our patio taken out last year. Now a two hundred square foot area next to the patio is nothing but dirt, which my two ninety-mile-per-hour Australian shepherds are constantly tracking onto the patio. So my wife wants me to lay flagstones over the whole area to keep the patio clean. It will take about a ton of stone, which runs around twenty cents a pound, for a total cost of about four hundred dollars. I figure I’m getting off cheap; she could have insisted on extending the concrete patio slab, which would cost a couple of grand.

So Sunday morning I start leveling out the dirt by the patio, and I immediately hit the stump of the Chinese elm, which the guys we paid to take the tree out the year before only ground down to about an inch below ground level. This is too high to lay flagstones over and too low to do anything decorative with, so I get out my ax and start chopping, figuring to lower the level of the stump just enough so I can lay the stones over it. But I hit a live PVC water pipe, which is charged with about 60 lbs of water pressure, but has no shut off valve. What kind of an idiot lays a live plastic water pipe with no shut-off valve, four inches below the surface, for the next idiot to come along and chop through?

Instant geyser.

So the yard is now mud and the patio is flooded, which seriously ticks my wife off. I shut down the main water valve, which interrupts her laundry and ticks her off even more. I dig up the pipe and find three more pipes, all tangled around the roots where the Chinese elm gradually screwed them up over its 25-year life span. Now I have to dig a trench a couple of feet over, paralleling the original pipes, in order to re-route them away from the stump. I break two more pipes in the process. There are huge piles of dirt all over the lawn.

I go to Orchard Supply Hardware and buy the various pipes and fittings and cans of PVC glue and stuff that I need to repair the pipes but that I naturally don’t have in the huge collection of pipe and sprinkler fittings that I have accumulated over twenty years of repairing my lawn sprinklers.

I manage to cap off the live pipe (the other pipes are connected to the sprinklers and have proper valves and timers at their seminal ends, so they don’t have water perpetually flowing through them with no way to cut them off if by chance they get dinged by a shovel-wielding ignoramus) and I turn the water back on. Now my wife can finish washing my clothes and my daughter can take one of her frequent and interminable showers, but not before I have to make another trip to Orchard to buy another 14-cent fitting that I didn’t realize I didn’t have, but which is absolutely essential to the undertaking.

Now it’s nightfall, so I say to hell with it and I quit for the night, leaving great piles of mud, shovels, pickaxes, pliers, wrenches, broken bits of pipe, debris, and miscellaneous PVC fittings all over the lawn for the dogs to run off with and hide. I track mud into the house and all over the kitchen floor, and get dirt all over my wife’s new throw rug, which ticks her off all over again.

So Monday night, I get off work and go back out there, leaving the wife to go to the daughter’s open-house at school without me, which ticks them BOTH off. I finish re-routing the pipes, cover them up with the dirt from the piles on the lawn, get all the roots, broken pipe pieces, and trash picked up and tossed, get all the tools put away, and now it’s o-dark-hundred hours again. So I quit for the night. And now I’m right back where I was when I first started the project.

Today I’m going to see if I can rent a stump grinder to finish the job that the tree people got paid $1600 a year ago to not finish.

My wife says she doesn’t understand how I can make things so complicated. All she wanted was a few flagstones to keep the dogs from dragging dirt onto the patio.

Americana

sitting on the front porch
I listen to the nuclear family
across the street meltdown

it’s Chernobyl, Rolling Hills Dr.
Wichita Kansas where life
moves like wheat in a high wind

a woman walking her dog
stops to witness the madness
as a man bursts from the house

he lugs a tattered tote bag
which he tosses into the trunk
of 1970’s vintage Americana

the broker from next door
steps outside drinking a beer
and shakes his head disgusted

we are all spectators

the man’s wife, carrying a child
runs out pleading to him
as he drives away, backfiring

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