Canopy
Dan Encarnacion
The bleak of Bela Tarr, the spare of Supersilent, the spike of quad-lattes palpitates Dan Encarnacion’s palpus in Portland, Oregon. A recipient of an MFA in Writing from the California College of the Arts, he has been published in MARGIE, Eleven Eleven, Berkeley Poetry Review, Exquisite Corpse, among others. His poem “Aposiopesis” was recently nominated for the 2014 Pushcart Prize. Imbibe the air, inebriate your cells, incubate the spores, insufflate the page.
What does he see?
Blackjack Poppa wonders, relentlessly wonders about what Little Rhumba sees.
What can he find with a dilated eye.
Blackjack Poppa’s querulous Queen Anne creaks and groans.
Through expanding joints, contracting armatures, snapping seams, skewing joists, the wind
seeps in.
Blackjack Poppa’s centenarian Queen Anne-styled home airs aeolian moans.
The mass-manufactured Victorian filigree festoons frown lines and crow’s feet on it’s well-
fenestrated face.
Unblinking, wide-paned eyes kept most moist by the San Francisco fog monitor days as if re
strained seconds.
Winkless paned-eyes stick.
Blackjack Poppa lies.
Alone in bed.
Blackjack Poppa’s centenarian Queen Anne sighs—a knot in her stomach as if hungry for human
life to feed her.
Alone, Blackjack Poppa gazes up into the mirror’d coffer’d ceiling of his heavy canopied bed.
The Queen Anne inhales.
More space.
The yellow-fingered sun her tonic.
The yellow-fingered sun thrums.
Having flicked away the fleece of the morning fog, the yellow-fingered sun pulls aside the edges
of Blackjack Poppa’s thick velvet burgundy drapes, peering through as if an amateur.
An amateur before a well-seasoned audience.
Blackjack Poppa wonders.
If he lives with me, will things happen?
Wind seeps through, around contorted studs, warping further sticking windows, cracking
cataracts in aged panes.
Inhales, the centenarian Queen Anne.
Peers, the amateuring yellow-fingered sun.
Into, under Blackjack Poppa’s canopy.
Blackjack Poppa decides to have.
Have to have.
Blackjack Poppa decides he will have to have the windows replaced before overhauling the
kitchen.
© Dan Encarnacion
