Jason Ryberg

The Peacock and the Whip-or-Will   

Why

can’t

it be

“pearls before

swans?” he said to which

I replied with isn’t a McGuffin

just a second cousin to the Deus X Machina?,

whereupon, he responded with and what about

     the peacock and the whip-or-will, do

you suppose they’ll ever settle their differences?

    Or, we might consider the moon, for example,

    he added, does each of their faces

have a different and distinctive personality?

     And yes, yes, yes, that’s all

very fascinating, but what I need to know is

whether Jerry Reed was the James

Brown of country or

the Foghorn

Leghorn

of

funk.

Just Beneath the Surface

There

is

a wasp

sniffing and

tapping around for

something that must be hidden just

beneath the surface of this weathered old deck table,

maybe some splotch of wine or beer or whiskey,

even, that splashed over the rim of its

glass one afternoon or evening, who knows how long

ago and soaked into it, or

am I thinking of

his distant

cousin,

the

bee?

A Certain Cloud

Who

would

have thought

that a bike

left standing next to

a tree in the woods, who knows how

many decades ago, would now find itself wrapped-up

and encased in its trunk, twenty some-odd feet

off the ground, as if grasped by some woodland

giant and held up to the sky as a sort of prize

in its attempt to win-over

a certain cloud it’s

had its eye

and mind

on

for

a

while?

Still-Life of Songbird and Time Machine

That

a

songbird

arrived in

a time machine on

the pre-dawn phenomena

of a bridge spanning a river, between the naked

moon and the sun (wearing its red dress and thereby

     immune from prosecution) with no

pronouncements of truth (like arrows from the spotlights of

dusk and dawn), was more than a bit

disappointing for

those of us

hoping

for

a

bit

more

bang for

our money.

At This Very Moment

At this very moment

there are glittering super-strings

of Mardi-gras beads and necklaces

made of eagle’s claws and shark’s teeth

hanging from the rear-view mirror

of someone’s brand new Humvee,

clickity-clicking in the cool autumn breeze,

and a flock of geese honking high overhead,

and a freight train warily signaling its approach.

At this very moment

there is a single eagle feather

lilting across the prairie

on the wings of that same autumn breeze,

that’s still rolling out to us, in wave after wave,

down from the Rockies and over the plains

(or maybe even from across

the Great Spiral Arm),

ringing wind-chimes, rattling paper lanterns

and delivering random dreams like love letters

or tufts of milkweed pods all along the way.

At this very moment

a royal flush is surfacing

from a marathon card-game in Kansas City, MO

and someone is saying “NOW THAT’S

WHAT I’M TALKIN’ ‘BOUT!”

And a fallen angel, with mismatched shoes

and a tattooed tear, is miraculously found

on a street corner somewhere across town,

speaking the living truth

in strange, archaic tongues,

scaring the hell out of the locals.

At this very moment

the sun’s gold bullion

and chests of plundered doubloons

are safely tucked away in a Swiss bank vault,

(while the moon’s family silver

is being traded openly on the Night’s black market

for precious units of sleep).

At this very moment

the ocean’s thundering hooves

are stirring an old woman from her sleep

in an old refrigerator box, under a bridge

in East St. Louis, Illinois,

and, just twenty miles to the south of her

a heifer marked for slaughter

is snuffling, peacefully, through the clover.

At this very moment

a lone gunman with a head full of boogeymen

(and a belly full of snakes) is mounting the stairs

of a bell-tower, somewhere,

and some damn fool is pissing

in God’s prize-winning rose bushes,

and spiders are dropping from the trees

into Reason’s troubled sleep.

At this very moment

a temple bell in Kyoto

is gonging and gonging and gonging,

crickets and arrowheads and pint bottles

sitting on fence posts are channeling the tiny,

crystalline music of the spheres,

and a group of killer whales,

washed up on a beach resort

in the Gulf of Mexico

is just about to be found

by a group of hired killers

(currently in a transitional period

and considering a new line of work).

At this very moment

an army of one is being picked away

one by one by one,

A pizza-delivery driver

with a bomb locked around his neck,

is pleading with the police

please, hurry, I don’t have much time.

And a haggard old boy in a Cub’s jersey,

with an I-V rig in-tow,

is shuffling his way across 39th street,

towards Mia’s Discount Liquor Store,

hell-bent on a six-pack of High Life

and a pack of Lucky Strikes.

At this very moment

a pool-hall putsch is smoldering, world-wide,

in the bellies of bar-stool philosophers

and secret-lovers of life who want nothing less

than a world soaked through

with something approximating truth,

something very, nearly close to beauty

(if they themselves cannot be beautiful,

cannot unravel themselves, completely,

from the snares and coils

of convenient, but, life-affirming lies).

At this very moment

a bus full of nuns and orphans

is tumbling, end over end,

through a tear in the space/time continuum,

and cops and killers and rich men’s whores

are all out circling our ever-diminishing perimeter

(in their concentric, tragic-comic trajectories),

each one hungrily sniffing

for that one red feather of blood

on the Night’s hot, black breath.

At this very moment

stars and moonflowers are starting to open,

a black dog (blind in one eye)

is barking and barking far off on the horizon,

a ’62 purple Impala suddenly takes flight

out on 69 Highway (giving the slip

to enemy agents in hot pursuit),

And, an aging satellite,

its aching back loaded down with Uranium 238,

is finally being put to pasture,

finally being sent out on its last, great vision quest

into the turbulent, swirling surface of Jupiter

(and only a 2% chance ,

they say, of Jupiter

going nuclear). 

Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and countless love letters, never sent. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is “Fence Post Blues (River Dog Press, 2023).” He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.