Lion and Gin

Dennis Hinrichsen25 April 09 http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_T911Z928dxU/Rdz_rJkgB8I/AAAAAAAAACo/Z6V9mqtMifk/s400/Lion

Hunter_e325.jpg

Lion and Gin

http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20653

I pet my father like some big cat a hunter has set on the ground,

though I am in Iowa now and not the Great Rift Valley

and what I sense as tent canvas flapping, thick with waterproofing,

is cheap cotton

choked with starch.

Still, he is a lion on the gurney.

I talk a little to make sure he's dead.

I have some memory of riding his shoulders

through the fragrant night. Three fish coiled in a creel. So many

butterflies

and gnats, it was two-thirds Kenya,

one-third Illinois.Continue……

And then home: the clink

of ice and gin.

And so I rub his hair, which is unwashed, and will

remain unwashed, for we will burn him.

I touch the blade of his chest.

Think of all those years I spent hovering beneath the scent of

Marlboros,

the mouthwash trace of booze; all that ice

cracking, going stale: crowned molars and mimic glaciers

fading to bled-out amber among the cuticles of lime.

Maybe that's why when he so blindly flies

on that exaltation of velocity and gas, http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20637

Continue……

Lion and Gin

he doesn't linger in this world awhile as word or song,

a density we might gather round—

an aquifer, or gushing spring, as pure as gin.

Instead, he departs

as vapor.

Fragments of tooth and bone in the swept-out mass I can

throw back to dirt, or spread—a child's sugared, grainy drink—

to water.

And now I wonder, where's the soul in this?

The agent of it?

If it un-tags, re-tags itself—a flexible, moveable,

graffiti—indelible for the time we have it,http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20637

Lion and Gin

Continue……

or if it sputters on some inward cycle toward a Rubbermaid

waste bucket, sink trap ringed with cocktail residue.

As on my returning, the trays of ice were reduced to spit.

I had a drink in my hand,

that memory of riding; the fragrant night.

How can I open the freezer now and not see the milky irises

of his passage;

the array of paw and pelt;

jaw wrenched so far open in that rictus of longing, gasping,

his living eyes could not help but tip and follow?

http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20637

Lion and Gin

Dennis Hinrichsen

DENNIS HINRICHSEN has published a number of books. His most recent, Cage of Water, appeared from the University of Akron Press in 2004. Recent poems of his have appeared in Hunger Mountain, Sou’wester and Willow Springs. He currently lives and teaches in Lansing, Michigan.

http://adirondackreview.homestead.com/hinrichsen2.html

http://specialcollections.lib.msu.edu/html/materials/collections/michcoll/images/hinrichsen_dennis.jpg

National Poetry Month is a month-long, national celebration of poetry established by the Academy of American Poets. The concept is to widen the attention of individuals and the media� to the art of poetry, to living poets, to our complex poetic heritage, and to poetry books and journals of wide aesthetic range and concern.

National Poetry Month

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