The Tongue of Allan Pinkerton
... in the end the law will follow the wrong-doer to a bitter fate ...
― Allan Pinkerton, Creator of Pinkerton Detective Agency
Dance, bully, burly belly,
beardy-boy, bandyleg.
It is 1884, you’re sixty-three,
tipsy on tangle-leg whiskey,
when you slip on a cow pie
& bite your tongue.
Gangrene means flesh eater.
As in: Allan Pinkerton,
gangrene of crime!
Meanwhile in your mouth
the plot thickens.
Concealed, perfidious.
You puff a cigarillo
with Abe Lincoln
while a dirty joke hides
in your face. (Not like you
to withhold a gag.)
Or is it a fever dream?
Your arms shrink,
the bones want out.
Your quicksilver tongue
a traitor. (Your wife Joan knows
something. Only Joan
can cause you pain by looking.)
Strikebreaker tongue.
Selfsame tongue
ordering steelworkers
crushed by bricks
& guns. Swollen, grotesque,
eating you whole,
bearing you off
like some fabled storybook
villain!
The Dismemberment of Philadelphia
—eyes, tongues, hearts—over land & river.
The simplest afternoons erode
like potholes on a tire.
You return from conversations
limping, bleeding, tufts of hair missing,
like my tomcat after a night
fighting. Like Joe Frazier
after Ali pummelled him in Manila.
A hairline crack visible in your optimism.
Every story traces love
& the slow agony of its destruction.
One day when I was small
my mom watched my dad drive away
in a 1965 Studebaker. The violent effect
doesn’t spoil the beauty of the scene.
It is the scene. It is the beauty. Every hero
is blown apart, the world rendered
from that body. “... sown,” says Paul,
“a natural body ... raised a spiritual body.”
Osiris rent asunder by his brother.
Isis, Osiris’ wife, collects each limb,
puts him together. We’re mulch
for loved ones. Soil of generations.
A flower, a resurrection, a bodhisattva
giving her arms. So Greeks applaud
the severed bull-god, Dionysus.
The miracle is not pretty. When Philly
bombed Osage in ’85, the city rebuilt it
badly. Isis consecrated every spot
she found her husband. Like the elegiac mood
of the bar mitzvah. Like the homeless dude
singing gibberish opera. Next day
my dad came home. So Frazier,
like Tiamat before him, was dismembered
but not undone.
John Wall Barger
John Wall Barger’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Rattle, The Awl, The Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Hotel Amerika, Pleiades, Poetry Ireland Review, Best of the Best Canadian Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. His poem, “Smog Mother,” was co-winner of the Malahat Review’s 2017 Long Poem Prize. He has twice received a Canada Council Creation Grant (mid-career). He lives in West Philly and teaches at La Salle University. (johnwallbarger.com)