Charles Leggett
This Happens
1
This is the evening sky of many statues.
Of dim, white archipelagos. Of floating
Rorschach tests. Of ghosts out on a haunt,
drifting in formation with a menace
that passes just as they do. Of we sleepers
in fishbowls of our mild yet urgent tide
of dreams. Elongating and thinning; fading,
some, from white to pallid gray. And those
directly overhead, like island nations,
caricatures of kings' heads on old coins,
or etchings of a withered Pantalone.
Behind them, curtain of a solemn, silty
middling blue that's punctuated by
a dozen outmatched stars and morning birdcall.
2
The news collapses in upon itself.
Headlines falling into ornery stacks
like floors of a disaster movie's star
collapsing skyscraper. Instead of billboards,
thumbtacks; numbing, numberless. One's own
hips balking at the weight they bear. A dark
thrilling, these failures. Wet farts foisted into
a cavernous, old toilet in an other-
wise silent if not restive building. Vivid
faces reassembling their details
as if in a collage. The wet-dream cock tug
of a cigarette's first drag. And pounding
and adumbrating and accelerating,
until the life's a wilding and slow-motion
crescendo of wet footsteps, honking horns,
squealing tires, take-downs, ownings, bleated
algorithms, strident belches into
a deep aquamarine that's scarred by stars.
A woman, unperturbed, October 1st,
who rocks a Santa coat and beanie on
a Light Rail car. How will it ever end?
October gray as uniforms of war.
A gray evincing bones, bent over, as
cloud-cover blanket. Under footsteps, whitened
swirls all round, and wails across the flashings
of red-and-blue. The clouds arranged like large
dogs on the pewter carpet of a living
room floor, awaiting what involves them next
with varying amounts of patience. Looming,
as with purpose – the odd satellite
or star conveying its disarming distance
before it disappears behind the hounds'
flanks – with intimacy of these living
room floors. And are there samples of such blue?
These cryptic mirrors have been teaching us
for centuries... O thick, white pelts, blues, grays,
what have we learned, whatever have we learned?
3
The sky, with many distant fires, growls.
Is this moon ripped in half by light, or darkness?
4
This happens, and we shiver, the demotic
conflux of living now foregone, sensations
spread before us like a mural – they
inhabit us, we don't inhabit them.
And held close, each, as though the sky had gone
clear, or what was going to happen that
would let one turn a page had happened and
the words gone sweeping by, returned to dark.
Layover: Empress Hotel
outside Kuala Lumpur
This building rises nakedly up
from rows of yellow three-story flats
like an elegant wart from the crown
of a dentist's hovering knuckle.
Lurching half-hour's drive from the airport;
lobby and halls suffused in prayer
chants piped in through a subtle PA
system. "Help in Time of Need” leads off
the Gideons' list of "Suggested
Readings" from the worn Bible they've "Placed"
– next, as it happens, to The Teachings
of Buddha – in what I'll call the drawer
of need. Now, techno dance beats debouch
from a stoop below, across the street,
next door to Naeshan Trading, where men
in T-shirts are hunched at card tables
under a naked bulb's margarine light.
An equivocal phrase, "drawer of need";
need drawn as baths are drawn – immersion;
or sketched, in lines of a face – mundane,
sweet, straining to become familiar
in a nakedness dressed to the nines.
This piece was first published in Scarlet Leaf Review, Toronto, January 2016.
Charles Leggett is a professional actor based in Seattle, WA, and a 2022 Lunt-Fontanne Fellow. Recent/forthcoming publications include KINPAURAK, THE ENGINE(IDLING, Beach Chair Press, ELLIE MAGAZINE, APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, and Anomaly Poetry's latest RITUALS anthology; his chapbook HARD LISTENING appears in the latest Ravenna Press “Triple” series edition, No. 25. Charles’s co-adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s THE LOWER DEPTHS premiered in 2024 at Intiman Theatre with The Seagull Project, and his poetry film short TO FONDLE NOTHING has screened as an Official Selection at film festivals in the US, the UK (Scotland and England), Portugal, Serbia, Italy, and Austria.
