Two Poems
Doppelganger Spring
Got a head start on being an old fart,
driving around with a dog-turd cigar
listening to AM radio. Cloudy and forty.
Pushing fifty and waiting for spring,
I watch brown ditches stretch.
Winter’s sucked back into the woods,
though last week we had thunder snow—
fluorescent flicker in a blizzard
followed by a muffled crackle.
Happens when the moon turns blue.
Arthritis the last couple years,
just enough to bitch about.
Raising gravel dust I chant
enough to raise my chakras,
listening to Coast To Coast:
…occultist Ben Pierce is our guest.
We’ll be discussing bilocation
and doppelgangers, after this.
I start to drift. Some days, a light trance.
Either enlightenment or my prostate meds.
Goethe met himself outside Alsace.
I feel like I’m trying to steer from the passenger side.
Two weeks before he drowned
a phantom Shelley asked the poet
How long do you mean to be content?
Showing You Around
A lion tamer lives just down the road.
He’s eighty. Flaming hoops blaze daily;
whip in hand, he waves. Next stop
is the fiberglass badger squatting on
the roof of Uncle Bob’s Exotic Dancers.
You agree, it’s all I said it would be
as we skirt an Air Force base, abandoned
since the seventies, surrounded by woods
no one hunts in. My cousin saw a UFO
there once, parked in the starry night air.
Lightning always strikes behind the house.
I think a flying saucer’s buried there.
Mom used to blame the lightning on
that patch of clover by the water pump.
Some of them have seven leaves. She told me
all that luck draws heaven’s jealousy.
—Mike Kriesel, Aniwa, WI
