Frederick Wilbur

​The Visitor 
 
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
Hebrews 13:2 (KJV)
  
The sharp shot of brass knocker searches room to room—not an echo but a bullet. As I leave my chair, it ricochets again with unsettling vehemence, a swearing. And opening the door, there, in blinding sunlight, is a face with the familiarity of the actress to whom I’m sexually attracted.  I hesitate to invite a scammer or proselytizer into my home, but that is exactly what I do. We sit in the living room just off the entry, but she declines my offer of tea with a women’s-college graciousness. A satchel of business gray disguises its spiritual contents. She talks in aphorisms while retrieving coloured folders from its darkness. I am ready for her spiel, but she pleasantly chastises me for my many failings. She seems bitter. Pleading ignorance, I squirm, ask questions to tie connotation to her words like bundling insurance to save money. She handles my cleverness with ease, countering with a few metaphors I don’t quite catch. Only a few minutes later, she rises to go like a retired school teacher. The air between us glows. We are un-bullied friends by now and we shake hands to prove it. She says that I owe her with a measure of meaning, a compelling art, and leaves one sample on the coffee table. It is a collection of poems I could have written; covers frayed, marginalia smudged. After she has smiled, the door closes; I flip through the pages with a thumb. A love-letter flutters to the floor. I can’t recall her name now, but my signature wrote itself neatly in the space provided like an alcoholic unaware he’s in a liquor store buying death for himself and others.
 
**
 
 Mischief
 
Somebody has taken the fork in the road— the stainless steel one noticed on my walk two days ago, lying brash between yellow lines dividing northbound from southbound, ignored by the coming and going of eastern promise and western regret. Yet, not meant to confuse by its accident, but amuse I suppose, the ordinary thing made special by odd context. Now in an absent choice, the sense of loss is profound. Someone saw no humor in leaving it: trash is trash and took it.
 
**
  
Images in Aggregate
 
Sabbe samkāra dukkha. (All conditioned things are unsatisfactory/suffering.) 
The Dhammapada  #278
  
Unweathered replacement boards in the junkyard’s grungy gray fence read like a bar-code for the sun to scan—parallels that will never meet. White Thanksgiving turkeys crammed four to a cage, stacked onto tractor-trailers litter feathers for many miles— sacrificed to tradition. Dozens of pelts or fish hang in old black and white photographs, buffalo bones piled saloon high—abundance bragged to extinction. Behind vinyl siding, houses rot the way politicians barter their integrity— secrets reside in black redactions. Cynicism cannot be our only hope. Coffee-soaked, layered with mascarpone, lady fingers are placed side by side for the tiramisu of our hunger—decadence divorced from suffering. Discarded Christmas trees are laid at the landfill’s edge like stacked bodies of a genocide, alternated stumps to stars— innocence drying out. 
 
**
 
No Boots for Arizona
 
but I must go. She called me near midnight, EST. I packed some heavy consequence a few lessons in grief. The internet has unbelievable pics of gold-pink and lonesome cumulous. She is a destination which needs no map, no GPS required. I could tell by her voice it was all westward horizons after blue mountains, blue grass. The only blue is the ink that rambles the contours. It all seems the same except for the cacti begging. I recall she said there would be three dusty arroyos on the left: Go far enough. Don’t question where you are, the men in those crusty towns wont know. I started early; it took too long. My anticipation felt guilty; in every mirage I saw a body to die for. The roads become less complicated, a few curves like nearing the end of an I-pad brain-teaser. A wand of second sunrise zipped through the slot canyon of hotel curtains, lit a Curtis photograph of Walpi, a Hopi village. I arrived in Flagstaff, unusually warm for evening, ponderosa, aspen, the train had come and gone, its bullion of history unloaded tar-smelling sleepers; gamblers with six shots at scoring. I hardly recognized her but I was her prayers answered like spirits down from the San Francisco Peaks, a vision perhaps, a cowboy smile Buddha could put on. The stars could not have been brighter, the moon was rolling on the tracks pissing itself out. We played poker and drank our joy sneaking into pockets of dark alleys. She showed me her art, gave me her penciled doodles: we’d buy boots tomorrow so I could kick them off before bed.
 
**
 
Stealing Away 
 
She sews patches on argument, places buttons along the edges like hubcaps, highway found and hung from barbed wire fences: a vengeance only the passing of miles can soften. He burns evening fields as if in anger, splashing flares across the cold winter sky. Starlings congregate, recite a subversive homily. Man and wife recede into complicated sleeps. At dream-break, he sneaks through night-fallen snow to let out the smell-spooked dogs, to free the chickens into the genius of their fox; goats that believe in a garden of delights somewhere else: she will not need the bother of them. Inside, she fabricates a pungent-hissing breakfast, hashes leftovers, bakes butter-soaked biscuits. Her monologue is peppered, with small forgivenesses, but apologies, like sheds, collapse now in storm. He ventures into no man’s land where tracks vanish without trace. Unchained, she slips back into the dust of a farmhouse hell; his last sigh escapes from the envelope she opens at the kitchen table.
 
**
 
Appearance at Everson’s Creek
 
Brian, the neighbour’s boy, found the body lounging by the swimming hole—no sign of struggle, no mark of pain, as peaceful as a stranger could be. Sheriff and deputy showed up with guns  and a betting humour, reluctantly poking the man as if there were danger in his lifelessness. No one admitted seeing the man around town though the boy’s mother turned her face to sob, fearing he would have nightmares for the rest of his life. The ambulance brought coloured carnival lights, the urgency of crackling radios, and the state police to make death official. The boy wanted the man to have a son who didn’t need him anymore: the zip of the body bag lengthening his spine.
 
**
 
Neighbours
 
One has sunken to his comfort level with wife number four, fifteen years younger. Across the street, Mr. Hernandez has filled-in his swimming pool to tend tomatoes and morning glories. Two doors down, dogs bark at the kids coming home from church as if at strangers. On Dogwood Lane, Mrs. Jane Dough bakes Jesus into every pastry, pie, every prayer. Her husband, Jack, of laughing stock, is proud to be a redneck in the post-pejorative sense. His sport is a cock-fighting humour. Over triple garages of the corner house, a copy-center banner droops--Don’t dump your damage on us--in snide black and white. Mr. Leo Nardo is offended, roars constantly, writes vituperative letters to the editor. Miss Jones, of woman’s college degree, talks in thread count using sterling vowels, maintains her green roof immaculately, but is horrified that trees suck her up each spring in their rebirth, sweet as she may be. Twyford James plays horseshoes with himself on moonless nights, his pitch lit by halogens that pollute the heavens. He forgets for a moment his son, a suicide. It’s a wonder that angels don’t hang out with us much anymore, giggling like silly teenagers, harmonizing with snippets of song, openly talking about sex. They don’t decorate urns or obelisks, advocate for remembrance much anymore.
 
**
 
Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and Conjugation of Perhaps.  His work has appeared in The Comstock Review, Green Mountains Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Lyric, New Verse News, One Art: a journal of poetry, Shenandoah. He is co-editor of poetry for Streetlight Magazine.