South × South. Charles Hood

to shave those parts.

      Do you know that you walk around

      like a hut with legs?

      Girl, Trees, Paper Balloons

      1783: How quiet and still the people on the ground

      seemed, said the first people to rise

      in balloons. Quiet as milk. Somewhere the son

      of the son of the son of the man who was the last person to let go

      of the line so the first balloon could be free of us

      is lighting a cigarette. Heaven is a movie—

      even the audience smokes Lucky Strikes.

      They have a box there for my memories and in case I burn up

      in the light like a faulty meteor I have given them two or three things

      to keep such as my mother’s saddle oxfords and the one about

      the man described in the newspaper who was dead for three days

      in the ocean but woke up, alive, and the one about when the snow in moonlight was whiter than washing machines behind the dump,

      and the one playing now, the one

      with woodwinds rising as maples seedpod

      the tattoos on the slim shoulders of the girl

      kissing me like my mouth is a parachute

      just about to open.

      Last Year’s Checklist

      Where are the goggles that protect against magic?

      Am I married? Do I have children?

      They ask but I do not remember. Yes—

      no. Sure. I am practicing how to spit penguins

      out of my head like black seeds. Grappa

      blurs the Chileans, not later at McMurdo

      but before, Rey Jorge, where church is Mexican

      blue shipping containers, three pews

      and a plugged-in Mary.

      Are you my mother

      I want to ask the Russian soup

      ladle woman with the gold front tooth.

      Can you explain it? Oswaldo, laughing,

      va va va-vooms his jacket off for her

      and pushes his fingers through the cigarette

      burns in the chest of his long johns.

      He is a mountaineer and paints maps

      so he must know why two burned-out Soviet

      tanks mirror rust in the puddles of the airfield

      but he jumps lenses and escapes just as the patriotic

      tuba music of the Motherland fills the dining room

      and my heart turns into a bundle

      of sparrows and my hands push past

      zippers trying to reach in and tuck them

      all back into their red folds,

      telling them just wait, people are watching,

      we will fly around the room later.

      I Take Good Notes, Getting Ready to Fly South

      An airship or dirigible is a type of aerostat. An aerostat is a type of lighter-than-air aircraft. An aircraft is a kind of bowtie worn by the sky to piss off lakes and swamps, dirt, center-pivot-irrigation, forest fires. Aerostatic aircraft stay aloft by heating gas slowly, over a burner, then using a tube to blow it into shapes, a swan, even a unicorn, what girls like before they like the flammability of boys. The history of flight mostly has to do with blood and ice. No, the history of flight in Antarctica can’t be told just now, it is mostly too sad for this time of night, but for example there were once two pilots, I met them in a bar in McMurdo,

      and the first one was telling the second one, shit, I had to turn back. The other one said, well what for. First one, well my hair was on fire. Second one said, I hate when that happens.

      Scale Model

      Maybe just marine-grade plywood with tar balls

      and kerosene: if bursts of fire come in matchboxes,

      what kind of holder does Antarctica come in?

      Draw this abyss,

      art school: make me

      a mold of France—all of France—then cast it in white resin.

      Set it beside a 1-to-1 replica of Greenland.

      Only two hundred more pieces of the basement

      railroad still to go.

      Marble Point Refueling Station

      It all comes at us so hard

      to remember, beauty. At lunch

      I study the fuel tech, how her face burned

      clean by the wind matches her hands

      outside of her folded work gloves,

      hands like a kind of telegram

      saying you would die for this.

      I will sleep in the freezer

      attached to a kind of pipe,

      will pee in the funnel welded

      onto the barrel, will try not

      to explain at breakfast how

      by being there she makes me

      wince three or four times

      a minute. I want to write to

      somebody in charge, say, go easy,

      we’re new. Later after dinner

      I ask about the dog

      star, what night here looks

      like at night. She won’t

      say, but when I ask

      what she likes best about

      being here, she smiles,

      looks away, looks back—

      the tilt.

      The History of Luck