#234: Three Poems by Scott Dalgarno

~These poems were selected by assistant editor Clara Jane Hallar.

~This poem previously appeared in The Yale Review (2007).

JESUS TURNS UP IN VAN NUYS, BUT HIS NUMBER IS STILL UNLISTED

I was raptured, temporarily, then recalled

due to a clerical error. There was the office

generated apology, of course, with a cc to God.

Des Moines looks so different to me now. Not nearly

so plural. Apparently I wasn’t missed, but then,

I’ve always been the penguin in the red muffler.

Sure, I want you to notice me, but I still want you

to have to look. Like the rest of the half-wit

world, I beat my gong with a spent cucumber.

We’re all of us faking it, right? Only the young

don’t know that . . . . which makes them young.

Everything shifts over time. Now they’re saying

filthy is the new dirty. Don’t get me wrong,

I welcome the chance to come clean about my hiccup

with Jesus, but my people have always adored their

secrets, hording the unstutterable, holding their cards

under the table. My grandmother was a Shaker

all her life. She had teeth made from old mah

jongg tiles. Even her husband didn’t know. What

must Jesus think of the news that all these years

he’s been married; his wife, a rehabilitated Bible

whore? Hell, we don’t even know what he looked like.

Maybe dark short, with splayed feet and an eye that

wanders. Christus Domesticus. See them commuting. 

“Pick a lane,” he says, “Any lane, I don’t care”

(Mary likes to take her half out of the middle). Afraid

of being left behind, she’s forever offering

to drive, while Jesus leans into the tragic like some reckless

geek magician. Profiled in PEOPLE, they’re

like rock stars on holiday; see them walk, A-framed,

purling their way down Sepulveda, that Picasso body

of hers moving like a crab. He could fix that,

but likes her crooked, pink, & halting.

*****

~This poem previously appeared in The Antioch Review (2006).

Mea Culpa Mea 

Here it is, only September first

and already it’s as cold as yesterday’s

Gazpacho, and I’m wondering

was it something I said? The market

took a dive this morning. There was

no sign of it coming, so, being

conscientious, I decided to have

my white count checked. Okay, I know

I worry, but take the latest “war “− there’s no

end in sight, and I have reason to believe 

(God will not be mocked!) it has everything 

to do with that deduction I took this year

for my eyelift. Things in this world go south

so regularly, and inevitably it comes round

to being (I know) my fault. Sure, I could

have been a better husband, a way-better  

father. My own father said I had the kind

of brain to cure cancer, and here I sit,

considering how to assign blame for

all there is that disappoints. My mother

wrote to ask if I planned to call her

sometime, you know, before she died,

and it made me sad again for John Keats

and his poor Fanny and all the children

neither born to them nor neglected by his

obsession with art. Better dead at

twenty-six, I suppose, than leave a serpentine

trail of wreckage like Shelley, or Byron,

but I can’t stop thinking about Sylvia

who tried calling me that cold February

morning when I was just too lazy to roll out

of bed and pick up. I know, I know, it’s true –

I should be shot. I’d do it myself, except      

           

who blames the victim anymore? 

*****

 

~This poem previously appeared in The Yale Review (2009).

TMI

I grew up with a scar on my cheek,

a perfect arrow aimed at my left eye. 

My right is glass, so the arrow pointed

to the good one, as if to say, “Look here,

this window’s open.” Playing for change

on the street, I welcomed a touch

of the grotesque. Kids and dogs would stop

and stare, which made other people gape.

One of them had a neck like bamboo

with Japanese characters along her vertebrae. 

She said my scar looked like Okinawa, in relief.

 

I’d take her fingers in mine and we’d close

our eyes and go there. The beaches were

wonderful, and, like sex, it was a cheap vacation.

When I stopped looking like a freak to her

she claimed she wanted a more practical life,

so I sold the Gibson and registered for night

classes. The week I spoke of marriage she moved in

with a one-legged biker we’d met at Burning Man.

I rebounded big, letting a surgeon make a playground

of my cheek, sanding it, like I was a sailboat

or a sake pot. Now I show up regularly in the pages

of New Beauty, but, yes, I confess I miss being huge

with first graders and your stray Lab mix.

*****

THE STORY BEHIND THE POEMS:

"Jesus Turns Up In Van Nuys . . . " was inspired by research scholars have done in "the historical Jesus."  That is to say, Jesus, the Palestinian peasant who lived in the region of the Galilee from 4 B.C.E. to 30 A.D. (a scholarly estimation), not the Jesus of Christian tradition.  I took the portrait of him I picked up from those academic studies and mused about what his life would be like if he were transported to Southern California today.  I had as much fun with it as possible, including in it the idea, made popular at the time in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalen. 

“Mea Culpa Mea” is a total romp.  I set myself the task of writing a first person narrative poem from the point of view of an over-the-top narcissist. The narcissist I voice here happens to have a knowledge of poetic history. 

“TMI” came about after reading an account in SUN Magazine of a woman's emotional attachment to a facial scar her father forced her to have removed when she was young.  The story moved me quite a lot and the poem came out of that. 

*****

ABOUT SCOTT DALGARNO

Scott Dalgarno has also published poems in APR, America Magazine, The Merton Seasonal, and the Bellevue Literary Review.  He currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.