Fauxhawk. Ben Doller
FAUXHAWK
BEN DOLLER
FAUXHAWK
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown, Connecticut
© 2015 Ben Doller
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill
Typeset in Sina
Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper.
The author extends appreciation and grateful acknowledgment to the editors and staff of the following publications in which poems from this book appeared, often in different forms and under alternative titles: Academy of American Poets Poem of the Day, Apartment, The Brooklyn Rail, The Boston Review, Fence, Jupiter 88, Poor Claudia (Phoneme), The LA Telephone Book, Mantis, Textsound: an Online Audio Publication, Vertebrae, and The Volta.
W. S. Merwin, “Your way,” translated from the Crow,
from Selected Translations 1948–2011.
Copyright © 2013 by W. S. Merwin.
Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions
Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press,
Doller, Ben.
[Poems. Selections]
Fauxhawk / Ben Doller.
pages cm. — (Wesleyan poetry series)
ISBN 978-0-8195-7586-9 (cloth : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-8195-7587-6 (ebook) I. Title.
PS3554.O97428A6 2015
811'.54—dc23 2015020799
5 4 3 2 1
This project is supported in part by an award
from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Cover images – (top) Google earth image © 2013 GeoEye, (bottom) Google earth image. Courtesy of Clement Valla.
for Alphabet
Your way
is turning bad
and nobody but you
is there
>>
from Crow Versions, “Plenty-hawk”
CONTENTS
FAUXHAWK
THE FAUXHAWK
don’t go squawk in the forceps shop
go (up) (get born) amok!
rundown your block in a toque or in a flock of spots all tigerlilylike
or just stop giving order
to don’t go get shot
you’re not and never
will be hawk
rather one of those delicious birds
who chooses walks
I taught I taw tis evening evening’s cotillion, thing-
craft as a comet complex, copper-cropt-cop buzzard, in its sliding
through the slipstream sonic boom booms the freon-drawn air, and wilding
right there, how it sang upon the scene a careening screaming
in its targeting! Then on, on on it flings
as its steel hurl rolls hard towards a compound: the remote eyeing
reset the map-scale. My flesh in writhing
groaned for a drone,—the R/C of, the detachment of the sling!
Bully booty and power and tact, oh, flair, guide, BOOM!, here
Rubble!