Tom O’Connor

            Tracks Out of Kansas

1.
My grandmother painted western yarrows
& plains larkspurs, sunsets & brush fires.
Every summer, she welcomed her neighbors
and extended family to barbecues as trains

crossed the horizon in her backyard. Year-round,

she wouldn’t let anyone help clean her farmhouse…
One spring, she slipped on the stairs and broke
her hip. And now, she draws in a room at a nursing home,
on the 7th floor, decorated with only a bed and TV.

2.
My father drove me to city league soccer games
every spring, till developers bulldozed the park to raise
our city’s new AA baseball stadium. By the time
the league found enough fields for the youth league,

I was too old. In Manhattan Ks., in the little apple

of the sunflower state, I punctured
my old soccer ball on a rusty
barbed-wire fence, so no future
son of mine would ever kick it to pieces.
.

3.
My best friend Charles had a Honda CR125
we raced summer days in the gullies behind his house.
We road for hours on dusty trails, till oilmen
set upon his property with heavy machinery.

His parents’ yard was a dump full of old cars,

snowmobiles, but oil reserves were spiked
there making them millionaires.
Charles forgot about the dirtbike. His family
dropped everything and moved to Key West.

4.
One summer, our elderly neighbors at the end
of our dirt rode told my sister and I we could fish
in their well-stocked cattle pond.
Mornings, before it was too hot, we carried

leaking buckets of large-mouth bass home

to gut and cook. Soon after, our neighbors
worried that we would fish their pond clean.
They told us to take our poles & hula poppers
to the Turtle Creek reservoir 30 miles away.

5.
After graduating high school, my first girlfriend
April and I used to smoke pot and watch a blue heron
fly to its nest at dusk in the river valley
by the viaduct. One evening, she said

“I’m moving to Kansas City,” then kissed

me adios. But every evening after, I stood
in that spot till the bird landed. Months later, she sent me
a postcard stating she was happier than ever before
working as an intern for KMBC TV.

            Aubade for a Bride
                                                  (for Mererid Puw Davies)

As if in love, husband, you rise early
and don’t notice me—watching from under

the covers. Hurrying each dawn, you’ve
outgrown this bedroom. You’re chasing

a strip tease on shaky tables. Hard books,
new shoes. The street girls with hoop

earrings and silver skirts—brushing past you.
Every day, buses exhaust Madison Avenue.

Meanwhile, I try on my old wedding
dress in front of our mirror,

remembering how, once, your eyes chased
my hips… But on our balcony: I just stare

(like you)
at girls in silver…                                                                                   

Electric Beauty
                                    (after the photograph by Horst)

Laid on the instrument table: eye-lash
curler, nail file, scissors lie in tweezer's reach.
She splashes one calf at a time in the metal tub:
then, the upward razor strokes.

One foot in water, she plugs in the hair-dryer.
The extension cord sways between her raised elbow
and collarbone, grazing her padded breasts.
Her gloved hand pins a heat wrap over

her face. Priming hair taut with pin curls:
she blows them out every morning, braving
electrocution. They’ll love her scrubbed-
over skin, she thinks, her body trimmed

with speed. Last week, a man couldn’t stop
staring: he drove into a ditch, flipped twice.
Yesterday, the guy setting up pin lights
saw her driving a Quattro Pro, and dropped

a bulb on another man’s head. Dabbing a last red
on her red parted lips in the rear-view,
she turns the key. The carburetor and manifold
system. Sparks pass the spark gap, explode

fuel and air in cylinders possessed. She takes
a right too sharp, cuts off a minivan that slams
into a sedan. She gets out of her car unscathed.
Puts one foot in that puddle at a time.