Two
poems from Nick Lantz's Asymptote
followed
by a note on the author
The
Year We Blew Up the Whale – Florence, Oregon
In that same
year, after Lefty Watson missed
his third straight place kick against Salem
High,
we rushed the field. Lefty’s father, in a black
and orange track
suit, shimmied up the goal posts
and, beating the air with his fists, incited
what
the Umpqua Register would later call
a riot. But the Salem team walked
off the field
unharmed, if a bit confused, as we stayed behind
to rip out
every inch of turf. In that same year,
when the single-vessel fleet of the
Devil Ray
Fishing Company returned with an empty hold,
the owner took a
five-pound sledge to the keel
and let the ship sink. In that same year, when
Pamela
Reese learned she would never have
children, she stopped throwing anything
away,
and slowly her house filled up with garbage,
distended bags of it
clotting the hallways, bags
sagging the attic beams, bags overflowing
through
the windows onto the reeking lawn.
In that same year, when Ambrose Hecklin’s
only
son was run over by a pickup truck, Ambrose drove
all the way to Lincoln
City, walked up to the first
car salesman he could find, and shot him
in
the face. In that same year, when Nell Barrett,
last speaker of the Siuslaw
language, died alone
in her two-room bungalow, her estranged son
showed
up at the county clinic the next morning
with a mouth full of blood, and though
outsiders
would later claim he’d accidentally bitten off
his own tongue
in a drunken fit, we knew
the truth before the doctor found the filet knife
in
his coat pocket. So when the dead whale
washed up on our beach, of course we
tried
to blow it up. The newscasters, who’d come
from as far as Portland
when they heard our plan,
were shocked when the blast only carved out
a
u-shaped hole in the animal’s stomach.
The out-of-towners, who had come
to gawk
and jeer, ran for cover as basketball-sized chunks
of whale rained
on the parking lot a hundred yards
away. But we were not in the least bit shaken.
If
we have learned anything from this, said
our city engineers, standing on the
beach in their
gory parkas, it is that we need more dynamite.
Love
Letter from Zion National Park, Utah
We can
only enter
the
park through a tunnel. At the entrance, the rangers tell the
biggest RVs to
turn back – they are too large to enter the promised land.
We see
the burning faces of the spurned travelers as they swirl up dust in
the turnaround,
how they will not meet our eyes as they drive away. The
eye of the needle –
we remember, oh lord, how few pass through it. And
we are our own camels, our
high-tech backpacks sloshing their bladders of
bitter water as we ascend the
paved switchbacks towards
who
knows what. We have seen your wonders of stone, oh lord:
the Sentinel, the
Court of the Patriarchs, the Great White Throne, the slim
Virgin River that
carved them. From the top of Angel’s Landing, the park
unfolds like some
messiah’s dirt-red robe. Below, the fearless deer stroll
through our campsites,
dipping their delicate necks into the trash cans and
unattended coolers. We
can just make out the lonely blue nipple of our
tent, the drip of cars winding
into the park. We cannot see
the
places we’ve been: Provo, West Jordan, Devil’s Slide, Moab,
Providence,
Goshen, Moroni, Jerusalem, Enoch, or even Salt Lake City
where, in the mall,
an eight-foot fiberglass Christ belted out beatitudes
from a tinny speaker
hidden somewhere in his body. He said so much we
knew already. But he said
nothing about those turned back at the gates of
paradise. What compass point
do they follow as their looming caravans
roar through the desert? What land
of milk and honey
awaits
them,
oh
lord?
©
Nick
Lantz is the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow (2007–2008) at the University
of Wisconsin–Madison. He received his MFA from the
University of Wisconsin
in 2005. His work has appeared in MARGIE, Mid-American Review, and
Southern Review and is forthcoming in Prairie
Schooner.
