Teaching My Turnips to Call Out for Love:
Delicious Militia Poetry and Fiction

Phillip Levine's Last Midget Poem

Blaine Greteman

My wife told me
that I best stop putting midgets in my poems.
'But baby,' I said, 'But baby,
I make them very human. I don't exploit
my midgets.'
And she told me I was exploiting them,
making them as twisted and symbolic
as myself.
'Besides,' she said,
'Besides, who made you the little people's
savior anyway?'
And I knew we weren't talking about
poetics anymore. We were talking about everything
I've tried to save, I guess,
and everything I've killed trying to save it.

* * * *

Blind Spaces

Blaine Greteman

Again in the cradle of light bulbs,
I am wondering why, in this room,
I never cast a shadow. I am thinking
about the little slivers of my time,
remembering every moment I've panted,
and wondering what happened to those
breaths, what hemisphere they invest
with parts of myself now cold.
I am disturbed to think my pencil
will outlast me, that my fingernails will
grow after I'm dead, asserting their
primacy, emphasizing that my life
was only one small part of myself.

I remember the time in Oklahoma
when a black-haired girl told me she
was leaving, then hunched her feet into the floor,
waiting for me to stop her.

I wanted to throw myself at her like a wasp.

Something seemed familiar in the situation.

The pause, when even the leaky toilet hushed,
was a suspension of space I have
felt since childhood, since I first began to dream.

Now I dream that
my fingernails will be buried with her hair,
that they will grow together in obscure
underground places, forming
tangled nests that will shelter
all the ugly creatures.

At least that would comfort
the part of me that is obssessed with
old men, that asks to trace their gums with
my fingers, to grip their wrists and listen to
the tired blood as it slushes stories
of being young in Oklahoma, filling
in gaps with nonesense about
love, cattle, and chaos.

I am a long way from the girl's black hair,
and even farther from her eyes,
that I traced with hard fingers
to find some vision of myself. I am a long way
from the many fish whose eyes I squeezed out
as a child, whose eyes I rolled on my palm,
flicked on my tongue, mounted on the wall
of a barn so they would fix me in their
gaze, hold me in multiple reflections
of myself.

Children never do anything for permanance,
and I remember well the day those eyes
began dropping from the wall like small
worlds, plinking the floor with second sight.

I remember thinking about the empty heads,
at the lake's center, calling those
eyes back
and getting no answer.

I try not to imagine the
blank sockets, grey and slick
as the moon.
But every time
I see pictures of myself I find them
again, the gaze moving absently
out of the picture and beyond myself,
to some point in the room
I have not yet determined. Every time I see that
picture of myself, standing in water
with the black-haired girl, I want to
go back to Arizona, where the sand
on my skin chewed inside until I felt
real, where the wind blew so hard
one night that I began prophesying
to the girl, touching her and panting,
began crying for the eyeless creatures
who would not see the world
collapse like a spent lover,
who would not see the earth laid bare
as we clawed deep into each other,
imprinting each others' bodies
into the ground, making deep cut shadows of
near-violent passion.

Those shadows held water for a time.

But now they have gone the way of all dust,
and this room is too clean to admit them.
Now I find myself dressing and undressing
alone, wondering why I bother,
wondering, like a voyeristic
moth,
if the sky is flesh or flame.

* * * *

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PREDICTING SOONER WEATHER

(Doug Martin)

It came about first with sparrows and maps.
Men discovering the horses icebearded
over with sin, when dancing was illegal.
Someone rightfully took the snowbright dawn
to be an epiphany of trees, and then entered
the locked tavern. Another one decided
to remember only the color blue.
All over the town of Chickasaw, Oklahoma
from the all-night-sex of constellations,
a song never played before was entering
the sea. Those meteorologists with telescopes
for the new year heard nothing of it.
They hired a northern woman
to find the appropriate word,
the one who realized that the best is always the same
between any new storm and another.
She knew that a town not on the map
places a certain responsibility
on the elite ones from somewhere else.
She came by train. She set out
with the forecast--a snowflake,
some breakfast, before she swore death
to all weather coming on schedule.
She went with a dog
into the streets of Chickasaw, Oklahoma
and said if you don't like the weather,
wait twenty minutes and it will change.
She was right, but no one believed her.
They were so afraid of the snow on the prairie
they wrote her out of the farmer's almanac.
They were so afraid of the snow and the truth.
In Oklahoma, what was taught in school
was not the truth--
the lies of history books
and those concerning the bedlining of clouds
were one and the same thing.

Turnip Love and the Lockjaw Redemption

Blaine Greteman

In a supermarket downtown
the crazy child laughs in imagined corners,
where once I thought I would become
earth, turning my life inside
until it sprouted dark seeds,
turning to every black-haired woman
with questions of divinity,
answering those questions myself,
answering that divinity
rests in the pupils, asking again and
again if I could lick anyone's eyes.

But now I am teaching my turnips
to call out for love.
They wait in the ground
like teeth scattered by time,
scattered by the extremeties that
pierce pigeons to the heart,
causing them to fall like pine cones
across America, causing them to lie
dazed and press themselves into fevered
feet, to redeem the lost with gray-headed
feathers.

Every night I plant my gardens,
harvest my feathers,
make torn mouths of my poetry,
and carry bundles of flesh to market,
calling for buyers.
Every night I remember myself as a child,
drawing life from decayed farm machines,
carving out existences
as my grandfather's cotton trailers,
every year, sunk deeper into the ground,
victims of stasis and blowing dust.

Every night I remember the story of my Aunt,
victim of a rusty nail,
whose mouth locked into a grimmace,
whose teeth welded shut until she could
only grunt pig-talk, and die pig silent.

I remember fear of that silence, before
I learned that it creates the threat which
keeps us alive, keeps us screaming
into the wind like fire,
burning holes in the night
with our breath.

* * * *

MOON TIME: THE COUNTRY BORN IN NOVEMBER

(selections from a 300 page poem by Doug Martin)

1.

Still in the hemisphere of dogs
where the wind numbers its own breeze,
the trees, still, stay in the same place
and ask of the day, What color?
What newborn circumstance explaining
the age is left for you to breathe?
The bluejays have no warming,
but only warning.
And a distant train stretches out the chords of its song
as it
leaves the city, the grey-haired light
transparent along the branches,
so much so that you are in a different
century, watching it, and the bluejays who essentially don't care.
The hedgerow
a house away, and still, it has never lived on a hill.
In fact, the short-short genre of a life gives way
to the trees and breeze,
both of which will outlast it.
To live in this hell is more than idea.
Once, a train you were on had a window
for duration, and you looked out of it.
Downstream, beyond your own honeymoon,
you thought you could make out the ghosts
of Indiana armchairs fixed to life by a porchlight, the suggestopedia
of a long winter's night
when your father sat down
in one of them, smoked a Lucky Strike
and told you real men do not dance.
Even though it was cold as hell,
even though if it was a lie you lived with
for several years, a strange bird
in the aftermath of a strange war,
there is no telling what that sky
did to you, no savior of breath
after your divorce, and that was only half of it,
the way the moon told no stories,
the way a second woman pregnant with
your best friend's child dove
into the lake drunk, broke her neck
and killed the child that did not belong to you,
and with no one there to witness,
to drive the antique Studebaker
to the emergency room
of the Ponca City Hospital.
Now, you are lost in the wind
because of nature.
Trees blow over everywhere and are blythed.
Each sound of axe on oak is ash, and the color of wheat,
though there are no axes, only in your mind.
In your left hand is the watch your ex-wife gave you.
Who knows if you and it will make it
past the sky as the last bed, giving up its life into morning.
Understanding the other side of the bridge,
your body speaking the ordinary in a song,
you take to the forest
to imagine a new wife.
Her hair is a red bird
shot through with extremities.
Inside the little box she has decided to live in,
out of circumstance
is the dead knee
of a cricket and the wind.
You know her insides
have undercurrents, as we all do.
And that something of the farmer's daughter's clothes
is in her eyes.
But the red haired girl is a ghost from childhood,
when you were out in the uplifting wind another time,
trying to figure out the season.
Your father was inside the shed.
He was ironing clothes
to wear to the pre-honeymoon
of a friend who had died twelve years before.
Your father was losing his mind and insisted
on the divinity of acorns.
Each night when the moon swooped down
and took names, he was out bagging the nuts
to prove God exists, begging the trees to
drop more. In the wee-hours of morning, he'd wake
you kids from your bunkbeds
and hold the acorns in your hands.
In the afternoon, he'd make acorn milk
for the goats. So, at seven o'clock,
that day and that year when you were a kid,
they closed down all the radio stations
because of snow.
You were lost and had to build
a snowtent out of broken glass.
Your mother was dying.
A helping of bread and butter
in the last day of a life
was not what she had expected, nor you,
who didn't know what to expect.
Whole cities had given up their bird to the world,
you thought,
but you managed to make it to her bedside,
still thinking of the red haired girl.

2.

You come back to yourself in the blue light of December Oklahoma dusk,
as if a place inside you
went on thinking up words.

The moon slides onto an ankle of sky.
A ping of AM radio,
second nature with the wind.

A place inside you does.

Fog gives up its hold on the morning and disappears.

A stubble of grass rising up from the hogpens is what you remember of Indiana,
and beard-mouthed sheep, one of themselves, clopping off into woods.

So what if it was the year of root-frozen trees
and frost-bite. It was better.
The trees shuddered a second chance of wind.
Or maybe the trees gave the wind
a second chance at shuddering.
It just depends who was looking at it, at them, the trees, the wind, even the sheep.

Now, it is the obligation of cloud to sky,
and things could and will be worse.
You walk around inside of the redhead's body as you walk
in the kitchen. Nothing
shapes
like a foot.

You were so in love with her your body folded in upon itself.
But that night was last night, the big walk, as if you were hitchhiking
back to Ohio where your wife lives, and you used to.

I told you to take everything.
You thought the sky was a hammonk which would drop
down to you
and pick you up again.

The wind shovelled stories from the leaves.

You are so lonely with yourself you should be a star.

Yet in memory, you are back home again in Indiana.
Suddenly snow is the moment.
It smoothes the leaves in wind repeating the sound of birds,
and with the year lost from this morning's returning,
it rouses all of what you are.
But in memory, every flake figures a mile, a snowy quietude of land.
And when you start adding up what is inside you, a loss comes like a tainted snowscape,
a soul,
and there is this veering out of sight of the heroic,
in a cold day that nothing can leave out,
in a literal day so far away from you, yet still here,
in a life that no one else ever even wanted.

3.

So the last grasp of the impossible condoning the immediate arithmetic
of minds is the same story that the Eskimos have,
think not that you are leaving another world for the next one,
a world where the pillows have no dust, the dusty bottom-ups
of carpets and trees have no message,
nowhere the gate and guywire can manage to forget themselves of New Year's Eve.
The next impossible breath is song. The sawdust is fine for
that time of year, and in Indiana virgins no longer exist.
Think, for instance, that thirsting is a new song,
that spring brings back more than a blind man pushing on
the streetcorner a Bible, more than snap-branches deciding
against the moment of true epiphany when all is still possible
and the ruminating young lady with red hair who has read
of the afterlife in real novels
still wants the peace-rally, and only it,
inside of her head.

I hate to tell you the truth.

I hate to lie.

In long December, which means sun for the Eskimos,
a couple might be walking into or out of the world,
who actually live in a state where jimseed grows,
who live actually already in life and the afterlife,
where the new birds have blessings in their breasts and beer for imports,
a couple after twenty some months of marriage
still in love with each other, and themselves.

But forget them.

They will only make you depressed.

Instead,
think of the old man
who is true to the fact
that the afterlife of a man or woman
is the fact of dying.

As he is walking out in his pajamas with a bottle of mountain rhine wine under one arm and a version of the Farmer's Almanac in the other, carrying one left leg behind him in a limp because this is an election year, and his kids have deserted him, the mud filled with only the thoughts of mud and no afterthought, the birds all sleeping in the hidden pasture, all insane to the man walking out in ice wishing he were in Iceland where the real poets are and get respect, the man knowing that this winter is no longer than the best and the worst of winters, knowing that he of all people has a No. 2 pencil in his overall's top pocket and that his checkbook is safely in the house, and that if he could exist inside of a story it would not be a story that a Britain would have written, nor an American for that matter, nor a story which has no arms and legs, for the man walking out in his pajamas has the moon and wine and the earth on his side, unlike the time he was thirty, your age, and snakes were trying to weed their way through Indiana, when Alkaseltzer was in vogue and Bogus Vogus Magazine, the man who has forgotten to eat breakfast because his son and daughter are not here, and facing the east during that dire time realized that song is the only way to salvation, a twisted refrain, a love-unattuned, and as he walks out on what he feels is the darkest night of the year, and should be, he pauses, looks up into the willow branch and decides that it is more a man than he, even in the time-frame when he was counting and carrying logs, and sometimes burning them, when the woman he loved and still loves was sleeping with an ugly man in another state that once tried to leave the Union, so the man decides to stop, to pass the wine into himself and the ground, spilling the only story that is left in himself among the weeds.

But you don't want to think of the old man, either.

You want to think how you are in Oklahoma,

and how women kept forcing the meteorologist to enter your dream.

Last night, after your long walk, for example,
one of them entered as the long song of the open road.
Lying on the bed, your arms outstretched,
you were moving down the miles and miles
of highway yellow lines.
Your body was a car and you were booking it.
In the radio of your head, the weatherman appeared:

There is one harvest song
which survives the millennium of birds
which was discovered several years after Bob Wills' birth
in the back of a Dodge truck, somewhere north of Claremont.
The harvest song was found in a prehistoric cassette-like container.
The vehicle was not four-wheel drive and therefore not held liable
for homicide, and least not that of the above mentioned birds.
To some, it seems the birds did not bring it here.
Mothers carrying babies, opening shawls for the harvest,
were the responsible factors who never had the opportunity,
on their long trail of corn, to walk into any of the various history books
concerning our beloved state.
Still, several historians who were henceforth undecided
in the big bird shawl women debate
joined one camp or another,
and found that the hemisphere of clouds
on any given day was more than the music capable of completion.
Nobody held it as an aside, or begged to differ,
except, of course, the minister's wife who,
we all found out later through certain textual emendations,
was addicted to methamphetamine.
Therefore, of course, the marketing of birds
is illegal in dreams today in Oklahoma.
In other words, to lose bird-location in a song
is considered it obsolete, cliches of clouds
will not be permitted. Nor the calling
into British radio stations during snow.
The only appropriate response, we may point out,
is the calling into country and western stations nationally here,
afterwords on line giving a theme of winks and wings
that has influenced your lives, and ours alike.
A husband you met at a sockhop, for instance,
years ago, is appropriate, who was dating your best friend,
and while dancing solved the whole problem of the future in a wink,
and it was toward you.
Acceptable as well is a cardinal having an insidious argument with itself
via an image in an outside mirror
leaning up against an old barn.
All occurrences must be footnoted, undoubtedly,
if we are to continue singing.
So please keep in mind that to silence the song out of itself
and the terrible situation of lying down
is only a reversal,
since the hours of the new beginning of the final end are already over.

A CASE AGAINST THE MOSQUITO NETS IN STILLWATER, OKLAHOMA

(Doug Martin)

Of course, the funny thing about it is the mosquito nets. As early as it is, they are hanging from trees, and this is not a good thing for a town of three-hundred. Yesterday, the farmer�s daughter spotted two of them over the heads of a blond in a double-shot advertisement on black hip huggers in her Frederick�s of Hollywood catalog sitting on an antique table. Then, Bill down at Earl�s Drugs saw two or three of them over the bodies of ghosts trying to make copies of illegal keys from the Stillwater College behind his back when he wasn�t looking. It is an epidemic not common to our state. We all just can�t go around seeing camouflaged mosquito nets everywhere in December. Work needs to be done. Many people are taping pennies to their eyes to rid themselves of the sight. The dumpster men have gone on strike wanting more money for an exposure to such green. The dumpster men keep the town clean, and we of Stillwater, Oklahoma can�t function properly without them. Quite frankly, if I were to pose a solution to the whole mosquito net thing, I would say leave town. Things will only grow worse in snow.

If I were to speculate the case of the mosquito nets in our town I would have no answer to the perpetrator. The postal workers seem likely candidates since they are prone to madness. A few years ago, a Hispanic one shotgunned up the Edmond office, then pulled the gun on himself. But that seems too cliched of a solution. Postal carriers would not want to encounter mosquito nets in trees and on Christmas yard decorations on each block daily as they went out on their route. The mosquito nets are camouflaged on top where a person�s head fits into it, right on the scalp. The rest of them are green nets only. As far as I know, no one from one of those peace movements lives in our town. Once, there was a nut who was arrested for rallying in Washington during the sixties, but he burned himself out and never returned to our state. My cocker spaniel has not been out lately and has therefore reported nothing strange back to me through yelps.

No, I don�t think it is the postal workers. They are too predictable for such crimes. If the postal workers are hanging mosquito nets from the trees and from the roof of porches across town they would have nowhere to carry the mail. The bags I have seen weight only a few pounds. There is no room for excessive baggage. And if the postal workers are trying to make a statement opposing the federal government or against Christmas and back-pay, they would take a different path. Drinking Old Crow in my lazy boy each afternoon when they arrive with my one or no letters, you think I would hear them up to no good, if that is what they are up to. My brother, who is a mail carrier, has not mentioned a word over the phone. He lives in another city, but no such disturbance has occurred elsewhere, as far as my knowledge.

In front of my house on West Dodge, there are mosquito nets in all the trees, including my own. There is a mosquito net on Mrs. Eberson�s mailbox, and another one on Mr. Robert�s car antenna, a vehicle which hasn�t been moved since Mr. Robert�s had the stroke. We have written editorials to the newspapers, posted reward money fliers down at the farmer�s market, and the post-office, and several of them duplicated for the Walmart in Stillwater have been circulated. Dr. Owens, a professor at Stillwater College who lives in the brick house four houses down from me, has sent a man in a black coat to investigate the ROTC on his campus. After hearing about what they have done to the female cadets in South Carolina, it doesn�t seem beyond them. Dr. Owens has threatened to e-mail the Congress a note concerning this dilemma if it is not soon solved. But why would the ROTC of Stillwater College waste so much money on hanging camouflaged mosquito nets in the trees of our home town, when they might be so needed in time of war? They already have a WW I airplane suspended on poles outside of their headquarters at Thatcher Hall.

Betsy at the Dime and Shine this morning asked me if I thought it was the Farmer Militia. �The Oklahoma Militia?� I asked. �Why would they want to take over our neighborhood with mosquito nets falling out of the sky?� In fact, two days ago, when I was bourboned up, I had a vision of Govt. Keating sending in the Oklahoma National Guard to stop this madness. A whole troop of them were shooting up my front yard with kamikazes. It was not a pretty sight.

There are 300 people in this town, and there are 156 houses, 38 of them condemned. None of our folks belong to the Oklahoma Militia. Mr. Yayer is the webworm controller, but as a Korean veteran he has his strange ideas. Mr. Yayer believes the webworms have invaded the Tinker Air Force Base in Norman and are using the mosquito nets as a way for their species to survive. Never mind the fact that the webworms own nets are much stronger than the mosquito nets invading our town, and are Skoal-tobacco spit proof. Mr. Yayer still insists his theory is correct.

More likely is the way our town was constructed. Back in the 1800�s, after the Cherokee Land Drive, there was an insurgence movement that wanted the ghost of Thomas Paine to become mayor. Thomas Paine went against the federal government and settled Stillwater before the whities were even allowed into Indian territory.

Now we have the mosquito nets. Now we have the mosquito nets. Now we have the moquito nets.

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