POETRY

Poem in Which Kurt Cobain Appears

By Ross White     VOLUME 57 No. 1

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Thin-limbed mural painters on scaffolding
celebrate their most elegant shade of yellow
with a couple tallboys. Endless terra cotta figures
lined up, thumbs drawn like swords, to protect the emperor
in death. Even stoned skaters kick up
their boards to stand at the building’s edge, awestruck.

It’s maybe half a year before Kurt Cobain
kicks over his amp on stage in Spokane
and kids in the pit pin a young girl to the barricade
so hard the air is flattened right out of her.
She’ll black out. She’d suffocate if not for six feet six
of bicep and neck in a blue SECURITY tee
pulling her into the breathable moat separating stage
from chaos. Kurt will jokingly tickle Krist Novoselic
as they exit the stage. It’s maybe nine months
before a 20-gauge broods two days
on the dead singer’s chest.

But art is timeless,
so terra cotta warriors pose as perfect metaphors.
A couple college kids, drunk by three fifteen,
snicker at the soldiers’ padded leather armor, their long
grimaces, their stern eyes. One muralist tosses
an empty at the drunk kids. They’re noble soldiers,
you fucks, he bellows, protecting the emperor
in the afterlife. The other lazily regards the shade
between dandelion and butterscotch,
a haze between the warriors.

It’s about four months
before Nirvana plays Veterans Memorial Coliseum
in Phoenix and more than a hundred skinny kids
scream at Kurt Cobain with every fiber,
every pimple of their being, You’re better
than Jesus, Kurt. And Cobain replies, I am Jesus.

Every so often a prophet sings a note so shrill
it drives the masses to near extinction.
But after they fish his body from a Seattle apartment,
the late emperor rests unguarded by the eight thousand
sentries, the horses and cavalry that attend
Qin Shi Huang in the mural two painters
have just completed in an alley that’ll be repainted
when a new town council is elected
and votes on a proposal for something more American.

An alley you have to hurry through in the dark--
this is the alley, gauzy with steam, we all walk
on the way to adulthood, where we are tested
with visions of messiahs we venerated briefly
then discarded at the exits of awkward temples.

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ROSS WHITE is the author of Charm Offensive, winner of the Sexton Poetry Prize, and three chapbooks. He is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and the host of The Chapbook. He teaches creative writing and grammar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.


VOLUME 57 No. 1