Robert L. Dean, Jr.
Robert L. Dean, Jr. is the author of Pulp (Finishing Line Press, 2022); The Aerialist Will not be Performing: ekphrastic poems and short fictions to the art of Steven Schroeder (Turning Plow Press, 2020); At the Lake with Heisenberg (Spartan Press, 2018); and the forthcoming Ekphrastic collaboration with Jason Baldinger titled “The Night Window.” He is a multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Dean has been a professional musician and worked at The Dallas Morning News. He is a member of The Writers Place and Kansas Authors Club. He lives in Augusta, Kansas.
The Dao of Too Late and Too Early
After Zhuangzi
A white wall of fists
punches up into morning-blue sky.
No explanation why, or where from,
or what sage breathed them out,
though we can deduce
tears will be forthcoming.
I deduce from my alarm clock
I will be late for my appointment,
though the clock on the wall when I get there
says I am an hour early. It was now when I left
and it is now when I arrive. It will be now later,
when it rains. I write these words which are not
words in the place of no arrival and I am not
the writer of no words in the place where I am.
You are not the reader of that which cannot be read,
spontaneity leaping as you turn pages of mist and cobweb,
my words buzzing like gnats at the holes of your brain.
The Way from me to you is the Way of the Clouds
and we know not when we will condense and fall,
but it will be now and the earth we quench will be us.
We are secrets, and we keep our secret ways and we flood
the Ten Thousand Things, which cannot weep without us.
Even the alarm keeps to its Way, bedazzling me
in my search for an oar to steer the deluge.
I do not tell the psychologist any of this.
She would think I am crazy.
For her, makers make,
clouds move,
has been to will be.
Shadow Catcher
After an alleged photograph of Lakota war leader Crazy Horse
I.
The man in the photograph is not
the man in the photograph, is not
who we need him to be:
warrior of visions, prophecy,
shutter-eluding saint of the
invisible spectrum,
slipping back and forth,
shadow to reality to shadow,
shedding and donning worlds
like skins,
conjurer of spells,
confounder of
the aperture of history,
fugitive from
the jailhouse negative of time,
the only one of us who
never surrenders.
II.
Vision Quest:
horseback warrior rides out of lake, horse
floats
dances
bullets
arrows all around
lightning
hail
warrior escapes
untouched
it’s Crazy Horse medicine
and we want it,
need it
like when
Thetis
holds her son by the heel
and dips him in the river Styx
it takes
an arrow
well placed
by Paris
to do him in
a bayonet
from a guardhouse soldier
to do in
Crazy Horse
plus
one of his own
to hold him back
as had been foretold
prophesies
are like that they
have a way
of being fulfilled
especially if
we believe them
III
Crazy Horse and Plato have a dialogue about shadows
in a cave. It is during the Custer fight. Few people
know this. The real world punches
a hole
into the shadow world and grabs Custer by
the throat, tells Crazy Horse to take the credit.
Crazy Horse declines, but Plato says “No one listens
to dead Greeks anymore,” and Crazy Horse smokes
the pipe
and Plato smokes
the pipe
and someone takes a picture
of an Indian who never existed and someone nails
St. Peter
upside down to a cross because in those days it was a requirement
to become the first Pope, we all wanted a martyred Papa.
This is how we like our heroes, never sunny-side-up, never
miracle-less. We cheer
for the lions in the amphitheater. Only a millennium later do we
pray to relics or the shadows
of relics, missing entirely
the world
behind
the world
the reflection of
the warrior
we could have been.
Or maybe Crazy Horse stopped, posed, and forfeited
his shadow
in hopes we would pull our fingers
from our ears
when our visions speak,
never surrender.
Fuck the prophesies.
