The Jack of Diamonds Goes to Silo-Land
Originally appeared in Heaven Bone, Issue #11, Spring 1994
1
The Jack of Diamonds goes to silo-land
To fill his grainery-juke box with horseradish
Passing chess figures of railroads
And electronic fields of wintergreen nostalgia
Where farms become passports to inter-dimensional play
He shakes his vest at maps of pink lightning
Parenthesis in a sermon of UFOs registered in Greece and the Texas panhandle
Here is Highway 54
Skirting the grasslands of Comanche thunder and horsewhipped flowers
Mimicking the dreamy smirk of choo-choos full of dairy schemes
The Jack booms like a hillside of bullhorns
Rattling suspenders in barbershop backrooms and splitting shutters in Mullinsville
His jangling chest nothing more than a bellows slung with harmonicas in crystal
His mincing eyeballs spangled with crayons and shards of geological passion
Auditing the inventory of towns in their hick-finery
In the name of his vermilion lordship's drive
To make cyclonic love to Kansas
2
Rouge silo
Silo of diamonds
Silo of tetrachords pleated with cherry lumber
Silo riddled with winds of fruit kisses and carpentry
Hugging its grain like a bed heaped with antique postcards
Telescoping the plains through peepholes of freckled amber
This is Jack's jeweled tower
His radar toy and homecoming transmitter
Station of barbecue dreams
Were carillons of tears are free to shine
His vehicle whirs with invisible ice
Freezing its wheel through his neon gloves
Jerking from ditch to crop and back again
To the rolling spine of Highway 54
Beaming fodder-in-the-shock through his library of memories
Hearts of alfalfa pulsing in carnation pages
Springing to caress his concertina face across the decades
Now the wheel manhandles his passion
Churning it by the bloody decibel
His hard-on no more than a ghost bucking reincarnation
His belly a blue juke box sputtering sequins and candles of burning wine
His eyes about to shatter into stained glass orchestras
No longer to monitor the crimson surge of prairie and silage
But he loves his terror
Remembering that life pole vaults to more life
Clacking the chapters into endless freight trains
Fear now boiling his corduroy skin at the stitches
His heartbeat about to lose itself in a crescendo of mellotrons
Set free in one galvanic thrust…
Oh rouge silo
Vermilion station
Kiss the hand of our transcendent Jack
3
After the crash
He drifts
A fuchsia doily of the hinterlands
Like a radiator of chiffon
Or crepe paper stencil graded for destiny
The sun is a set of watercolors bleeding in chalk
And with it goes the Great Plains
One more time he sees that green swell tickling with farms
Before falling through sound-novels
Past hints of galaxies
And classrooms of the dead
Somewhere Pike's Peak brushes an ocean with its buffalo
In turn colliding with a desert of dormitories
He knows the shift is not of Kansas or Colorado
That it was never a question of geography
Or even of once disparate planets
But of teleported capsules
Encoded with travel charts
A final guide to the frequencies
Looping him homeward
David Thomas Roberts (1990)
