Chris Green

April 2, 2024

“My Brother Buries His Dog” by Chris GreenPosted by

Chris Green

MY BROTHER BURIES HIS DOG

He moves furniture for a living, oversized bureaus and beds for the rich. He is big now and dumb with love that animals sense—cats, dogs, squirrels, birds, his pygmy turtles and rabbits, tree frogs—they all take him in, nuzzle his childhood scars, forgive his bad jobs and girlfriends. The middle child who grew up telling us all to fuck off—now a grown man, calls me crying, Why my puppy! (His Great Dane is dead.) He sobs, and I remember how we beat him—Mom, Dad, nuns, coaches, teachers—I know I did. And like animals before a storm, he has premonitions—this time a dream of me crying over Nina’s corpse. He says, I want you to think about that. He says it because I’m the godless eldest son who knows everything. So we carry his huge dead dog from the vet to his truck to his backyard. He digs a hole all day then lays her black body in the dark. Weeping, he seals her in with a last block of sod, and between the kiddy pool and the garage we embrace. He whispers, I love you. And in that moment I knew what animals know.

—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004

__________

Chris Green: “I began writing poetry without knowing it. I feared poems my whole life, until I spent six months after graduate school writing a horrible essay about my grandfather. I read and reread trying to see what went wrong—then I realized there were poems embedded in the prose. I soon learned that poetry was in me, and bad essays can make great poetry.” (web)

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September 19, 2016

“Inventing the Dolphin” by Chris GreenPosted by

Chris Green

INVENTING THE DOLPHIN

In a blue-painted pool sponsored by Corona & Sol,
It’s hard to see the larger ocean. Picture a lonely dolphin
Waiting to get paid. His forced smile, his blowhole opening
For coins. They call him Chuy, a Mexican nickname for Jesus.
He takes his fish lazily from the trainer, & you know,
If he could walk backwards from here to the sea, he would.
We are his 2:30.

Standing in life vests, all grouped in the shallow end like Baptists,
We’re told to stroke him, but carefully. We’re warned to avoid
His pinhole ears that hear what we cannot, also his blowhole,
A second mouth that speaks an ocean tongue of shrieks & clicks.
I can see by the trainer’s caution, our innocence is dangerous.
He says if Chuy takes a hand in his mouth, sometimes he’s curious,
We should not pull, but let him release us. Also, it’s a myth
Dolphins push drowning swimmers to shore. To a dolphin,
All humans look to be drowning. Besides, their instinct would be
To push us out to sea, to safety.

Looking close, I see in his wet grey eyes a child’s knowing buoyancy.
I feel an intimacy, like he might turn to me in some small café & say,
“I think there is something you should know.”
He’s not as slippery as I thought. And his skin, just like the moon
Shining back, that still silver, is cool to the touch, the exact temperature
Of the water. We take turns in a strange communion touching
His forehead, laying small bloodless fish on a big blue tongue.
We are educated people, but I sense among us a competition
For whom Chuy likes best. We command cheap tricks & he jumps—
First circling, gaining inhuman momentum. He fears for his job.
He works. His back bent as to a desk holding his breath.

Suddenly he leaps—pure muscle, no bones—Jesus the way we wish him
To be, nosing a blue-green ball, his fins not quite fingers or feet.

—from Rattle #52, Summer 2016

__________

Chris Green: “Frost said that actuality and intimacy is the greatest aim an artist can have. My intimate and actual experience swimming with a dolphin in Mexico seemed like a poem from beginning to end. I hope I conveyed at least a bit of the art that I felt.” (web)

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December 21, 2013

“Christmas Canner” by Chris GreenPosted by

Chris Green

CHRISTMAS CANNER

I sat somewhere in the ’70s
at a mall booth between Hot Dog on a Stick
and Spencer Gifts. Instead of boxing presents,
I canned them: the packaging equivalent of a poem.

For most bourgeois hearts, I would press
a rugby shirt or bell bottom
jumpsuit or elephant pants
into a coffee can.
Nothing epic until a man asked me
to condense a fur coat for his wife.

I was so fourteen years old,
a boy performing something utterly weird
without irony,
cramming against unforgivingness, the weighing
down and dull
balling into a depression.
It is how one troubles one’s way through puberty alone,
boy to man, all those tried-on selves like
thirty-five former minks
reshaped into a gallon. I miss

my childhood’s
burnt-orange room with bamboo beads—
the happy sound of rain
every time I’d enter or leave.

—from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

__________

Chris Green: “It is winter. My daughter refuses sleep. Looking out her window, she says, ‘The night is dark and shabby.’ Age four, the poet pondering the ways of melancholy. My kids wake me every day with their bright poems, and I do my best with my older, lower wisdom.”

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September 22, 2011

“Where Poems Go” by Chris GreenPosted by

Chris Green

WHERE POEMS GO

In Tampa, Florida, Irene Ledbetter
sits at her desk to write to me.
She holds the magazine with my poem
about my brother and his dead dog.
She has two dogs herself and admits
she has the habit of rescuing baby rabbits,
baby birds…even unhatched eggs.
She writes to me as a friend in long
merry sentences, great streams of herself
and uses words like kisses and hugs.
She says her father is a big man
who grew up without a puppy. She tells
me everything. She says Lizzy was
her long-time pet chameleon she saved
from a tree. She swears Lizzy knew her name
and came when called to eat. She fed her
meal worms and water from a leaf.
Lizzy died, possibly from too much to eat.
In your poem, it says, ‘In that moment
I knew what animals know.’ I still talk to
Lizzy today, and when I see lizards outside
of my house that look like her, I know
it’s her telling me that she’s o.k.
Irene has written every paragraph in a
different color ink, and there are stickers
in the corners of cartoon bears holding
hearts and stepping over rainbows.
She sighs and drinks some Diet Coke as she
seals the envelope. Now it is dark. Tomorrow,
she goes back to high school, and I
consider my odd lifespan, and how I taught
students like Irene, girls in their prison blue
Catholic school uniforms. Not one now
remembers my name, not one recalls
my lecture on the rabbits in Of Mice and Men
—so poetic, I actually teared myself up,
when I overheard a girl in the front row
turn and ask her friend, “Are my lips chapped?”
The evenings in Florida are cold,
grapefruit trees hold tight to their heavy fruit
and the winds shake the heavy green
and buggy land. Weather there has teeth—
I once saw a man on a golf course killed
by lightning from a blue sky.
There is a hint of the sea in every suburb,
and instead of dirt, you find sand and shells
outside your door. Irene’s hopes mingle
with the scent of ocean and orange groves.
Of her fears for puppies and the future,
I cry. Oh I cry. I’ve got to continue to live.
When I read the letter again today, I feel blessed
to be drifting and deathless, bearing up like Irene.

—from Rattle #26, Winter 2006

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