Two Poems

Intravenous

I go visit my brother in the graveyard across from the oil field.
There he sits, under one scraggly tree, not minding the heat.
Despite the months gone by, I can still see the needle marks,

the dime-sized bruises between his fingers,
imagine them other places—behind the knee, in the crook
of his elbow, that borderline between countries.

You were heroin before heroin was chic, I say. You should have waited.
You could be a rock star in rehab by now. We laugh. I don't say:
I heard your veins collapsed like Roman catacombs.

Why'd you let them bury me here? He glares at me. Now I'm part
of the sludge, the Miocene shale. I can tell he's just pissed he died
in a listless zone, our parents' cookie-cutter house.

After he'd gone, I found a medical book in his room.
It said to numb the skin with ice before injecting to reduce
the sting. Tilt the syringe. The air will float to the other end.

Ode to Oscar Levant

Always in a tux, sidekick to Astaire
in classic black-and-white, pal to Gershwin (his best
interpreter or his imitator, critics disagreed),
you maintained your basset-hound face
through the silliest movie songs, smile jerky
as if on strings, hiding the pills, the razors,
the straightjacket "vacations," the handwashing,
weeks without sleep. I celebrate
your odd-man-outness, your OCD symphony.

As a kid, when I found your memoirs
in the library, I was afraid
I was you, both of us counting everything:
turns of a doorknob, steps in a stairway,
sidewalk cracks, always tip-toeing around—
minds on a raceway, gathering
talismans against someone else's spotlight
(my brother the rock singer, my Astaire).

Oscar, I tried to compose this stanza
in eighty-eight syllables. For the keyboard
you loved or the cuts on your wrist, that fine line
between genius and insanity. I have erased
this line, you said. Fifty-three. Stop counting.
Fifty-nine. Stop, begin again: friend of George,
your own crazy self. Seventy-four, seventy
. . . . stop, don't think, rest, don't think,
There—we made it.

Candace Pearson's poems concern themselves with the reliability of memory, accountability and the natural world. Her work has appeared in literary venues nationwide, including Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, Cimarron Review, Cider Press Review, Kalliope, Natural Bridge, Rattle, RUNES and 5 AM. She lives in the Los Angeles hills, where she is working on a full-length manuscript.

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