David L. McNaron

Harvest

A shiver of steel guitar ran up my neck, silver plinks
of banjo, the thudding bass drum

in the reefer-sweet air: it felt as though the pulse beat
of space parted the walls — I was sixteen.

Neil Young’s voice came to me from somewhere else,
a filament from some well, inside.

Two years later, and Suzanne seventeen. We would park
to Steely Dan. My graduation checks would go to pay
the clinic that whisked away our little mistake.

Each note was a still-spreading circle
in the unrepeatable gold room of first times.
Those days the mind just blew, possibilities
scattering like dandelions.

Some time, I don’t know when, something
called "a life" took shape, began to harden.

Today the tide slubs against the seawall.
The sound it makes is water overlapping,
as if the past caught up to me.

You and I will spend this day / driving in my car
through the ruins of Sante Fe

Never mind the wind’s speech is rattling
pods, the reflections on the bay are long

with pine. Diamonds of many lives
make up the water’s black body. Old,
it glistens, is happy to be.

Then

Marlboro afternoons at Lee Water’s house. Bangs flipped like gutters, 16 in the eighth grade, he drove us to school in his SS 396. "Time of the Season" and "Crimson and Clover" on 45’s. My adolescence and rock ‘n roll’s: the progression I felt, inside and out, I couldn’t distinguish: each week a new hit, a new emotion. Over and over in my mind blew the crimson fields, the bloodstains on skirts Mother told me about.

It hurt when I saw the girls in the magazines at Jimmy’s News in Ft. Walton Beach —their cupcake curves — others’ good loving in between the sugar dunes of white sand. Reading "Pillow-Bed Girl," I remember, in True Confessions while the Fifth Dimension pumped ain’t that sweet eyed blindness good to me into my veins, the horns touching a place I’d never been.

First time picked up at The Hub Teen Club in Birmingham: everyone played "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" and "Sunshine of Your Love" to strobe lights. Black mascara in dream-bursts of sunflowers flickered in slow-motion ecstasy as we danced. Real patterns, time and people cut into segments. The Top Hatters looked tough with their canes, but there were badder boys: Mike Waldrop was an animal, and I mean sleek and lethal like a panther. He was no bully, just liked to punch. I slid between trouble on the dance floor.

When I dipped my fingers into that first girl she felt creamy as yogurt. She plucked chickens in Pinson and bought us beer, legal, wrote me love letters on panty-shaped stationary till my folks grew suspicious. Lee blew perfect smoke rings to the Zombies’ breathy click . . . ah.

We drank six-packs in the mile-deep woods this side the shopping center. Pressed to my ear in the dark, the empties sounded like shells. That hollow humming. Sex was rising like sap in the Southern pines. I thought time was a muddy field to run through, I thought beer tasted bad, but drank it, I thought music would always make me dizzy like menthol Kools.

Alice Cooper

You keep that doll baby wrapped
So tight in the boa’s great
Forearms — and it’s not feathers.
That first time I saw you at the old fairgrounds,

Your man’s voice, big as Montana,
Cut through livestock aroma, Mr.
90 Pounds. Satan come calling
To Tuscaloosa: you stood ground level,

Writhing. Black lashes
Like a dying sun. Were those crosses
In your eyes or dollar signs?
You must have won at death’s carnival,

Guessed the hang man’s weight. The bones
You roll. I’ve shucked down so much
Darkness here I half expect us both to rise,
Black and shiny, hoarse, like crows.

David grew up in Birmingham, AL. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the U of Miami and teaches at Nova Southeastern Univ. in Fort Lauderdale. Recently he has published poems in Tor House Newsletter and Red Booth Review. He is completing his MFA at Vermont College.