Mark Dunbar
Selected Poems
Mark Dunbar
The Calling of
St. Matthew
Caravaggio
Oil on canvas
323 x 343 cm
You want to know who’s asking
for Levi the tax collector, what barefoot
fool and his bagman wagging a fat finger,
and whether he knows the bone-cutting zeal
with which your boy sharpens his jaunty sword.
Who is it staring like a zombie
complete with outstretched arm
in the counting den
holding out his hand
as if he wants a dance,
because no sane person comes looking for you
when there’s business at hand.
So who is this marionette with your name on his lips
and why shouldn’t you shake him down
to show him how a real crew works,
and how does he know your name anyway
the one who seems to summon light
with a ghostly move
and throw it in your face as if
to reconsider the wisdom
of picking a dandy tax thug
to serve the poor,
as if to catalyze your wretched soul
and watch you glean
as in the lifting of a dream.
Mark Dunbar
Short an Inch
We’re headed into the storm.
It’s all there is on the radio—
how menacing, don’t go—
but we climb up
because there’s a plane to catch
and trust that grit or luck
or tire chains
will get us to O’Hare.
At the autostore the guy says yeah somewhere,
comes back with the goods
that pass under the counter as if that’s
what it takes in Dayton, Ohio, in 1972
to make your bones
in the bearing-down dark,
in the year of snow in a day.
My dad jacks the car up,
crawls under and calls for the chains.
But hope expires—
they’re an inch short.
Spin outs and jack-knives
in the ditch. In Indy,
dark forms in the median
rock the stranded lot.
Tires spin and whine,
some crippled herald
maligning the night.
A semi has struck the overpass and exploded,
lies crumpled against the bridge,
a spider’s nest of shattered glass
that manifests the heart of a night in extremis
behind the burning one
hot as Venus
and the fuel line bleeds out
and the ashes of logbooks float
in the glare of flames licking
rebar suddenly scraping
the air.
We pass and stare, too numb
for fear of what we’ve dodged.
In Gary, the stench of steel mills like
smelling salts
breaks the stupor.
The years are at me, dad, and I’m trying
not to extrapolate about how that night
sent us on, how
that bite-sized apocalypse
somehow scrambled the bearings,
fate’s mirror a twisted wreck,
some Gorgon on a lark.
I’m soft in the head.
Of course we were charmed.
What’s a bit of bad luck—
how you flew back too late
to be by the child’s side,
to save her from herself,
how you lost your wife
and the other child sent
behind cold stones that cried
in their circle
squared by law.
It’s said that one should accept fate
the way that fire consumes its path,
the shameless hoarding,
the blind wrath mysteriously
turned to dancing,
that a wound’s a gift.
The saints have figured it.
I’m still working out the math.
Didn’t we make it—one-trick ponies
prancing through holidays,
turning absence inside out
to see if it had sprouted spangles
yet, casually adding up alibis,
wondering really
shouldn’t scars shine in the dark?
Unless it’s the wrong dark.
Mark Dunbar lives outside Chicago. His work has appeared in Rogue Agent, Corvus Review, Bicoastal Review, and the Ekphrastic Review, among others. He attended Kenyon College where he was the recipient of the American Academy of Poets Award.
Featured in:
Red Rock Review
Issue 53