Landis Everson

Lemon Tree

A tree that grew in the Garden of Eden
a tree of innocence called
the Tree of Good and Evil. It was harmless

as opposites are in balance. It was also
tasteless,
the taste of innocence before it is betrayed.
When God removed the wall

he gave the lemon thorns and bitterness because it had
no hostility.
It is a taste we want most to subdue. It asks
to be left alone.
We use it with fish and tea. We sugar it.

Look out the window. It stands with a donkey's
stance, hoping the day will pass.
Its scent through the curtains
cuts through
mustiness, sharp
with sweet blossoms. It hides the smell
of new babies.

Death is a Hole

Death is a hole, or a gap
in the hole. The radio talks Texan,
the plain outside is shabby.

A false desert lost in its own dream.
I think of the forsaken rabbits, hope
they come back to me. I was a sex slave

near Tecate in the Casa Grande Hotel
spread-legged on the dining room table
the man called me Mable

no rabbits were available. Insanity
not an option, was not a remedy anyway
but the song down the throat

of death did sound beautiful, like rain
over a dry place sucking for air as with
a knife in my teeth I descend the stair.

It was a border town called Gates of Hell.
You know it, too? Filled with rabbits that
forsake you when you need them the most.

They were bygone days that should not have come
on a phantom planet that death controlled
always around, damn it, like static on the radio.

---

Landis Everson was born in 1926 in Coronado, California, and now lives in San Luis Obispo, CA. He was a member of the Berkeley Renaissance of the late 1940s, with his friends Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser. His poems appeared in Poetry, Locus Solus, Kenyon Review, Hudson Review, Quarterly Review of Literature, and Occident between 1948 and 1962. Everson's new poems are now appearing in Poetry, The New Republic, Fulcrum, Harvard Review, Chicago Review, Seneca Review, Jacket (where he is interviewed by Kevin Killian), Washington Square, PN Review, Fence, LIT, and other periodicals. He is the first winner of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. A volume of new and collected poems, Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005, edited by Ben Mazer, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press. contents | next