Zulauf & Doyle-Gillespie – May 2017

Edward Doyle-Gillespie and Mychael Zulauf traded words and music. Mychael shared this piece of music, entitled “Frail Forms,” with Edward:

In response, Edward wrote this poem:

Wrecker’s Cove

You drove us there so that you could show me the bones.
This was where your childhood spent itself-
where your mother broke the spell and told you
the story of the stolen whale.
This was where they dragged the leviathan in from the sea
a century ago, its body pierced like St. Sebastian’s with a hundred
harpoons.
This was where your great grandfather stood for a photo
with the other men,
to show how it dwarfed them
even in death.
This was where they carved their stories into Its skull,
its vertebrae, its ulna.
You drove us there so that I could see that its massive ribs
formed arches around the door of city hall,
and the Wreckers’ Cove Men’s Association,
and a place that you called Jacob’s –
the last dockside watering hole that creaked and moaned
with the incoming tide.
This was where we drank whiskey.
This was where you unraveled your hair, letting it fall across
the thick mariner’s sweater that you wore for two days during
our stay there, and told me that the monster that gave up its bones
and fat had actually washed away from a Boston whaler that foundered
in rough seas.
They pulled it ashore, these second-hand Queeques of your village.
They thanked the sea for its largess,
for the bones,
for the smoking try pots,
and for a myth that was written in scrimshaw.

* * * * *

Edward shared this poem with Mychael:

Socorro Prophesy

Finally, you will leave Albuquerque,
taking with you the Old Glory bandana
that still holds the tea tree scent of her neck.
You will take Route 25 south through
the narcolepsy of a dreamtime desert,
past the wooden cross arms shadows
of three powerline poles
on their hilltop perch.
You will pass the shattered back
of a barbed-wire fence,
and the rag-pile bones of a drifting Navajo
who died in the scrub-brush-shoulder of that road
during last year’s snow.
And you will drink that night at Socorro Springs,
asking the caramel bar woman about each of her tattoos.
Kokopelli’s crooked back, she will tell you, does not keep him
from filling wombs with the music of his flute.
And no matter how many times trickster Coyote dies,
she will tell you, he always come back to steal fire
for the people.
And, finally, she will close out your tab,
because it is late,
she has told you all she could,
and it is time to send you back into the desert.

In response, Mychael made this song, entitled “he returns with fire”: