Just Between Us

David McElroy

• Publisher: University of Alaska Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781602233508
• eBook ISBN:
  9781602233515
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Just Between Us is a celebration of the vivid human connections that occur when traveling through some of the world's most stirring landscapes. David McElroy, a former pilot in the far north, transports us from the Arctic to the tropics, over rural and urban lands, and even into the landscape of dreams. Throughout his verse is a sense of longing and the desire for intimacy, showing that despite our diverse lives, we are all driven to share our existences with one another.
 

Woven Zigzag with Lightning

Cheyenne Mountain Zoo

The breeding program is successful,

and nineteen giraffes mill in a stately dance

by our tall perch, save for the stud

in a separate paddock who vacations alone.

It’s hard to imagine them surviving

on thorn trees. We place hardtack crackers

on their quivering, long blue tongues as cold mountain

shadow dims developments spreading east.

My nearly brother brother-in-law, my son,

his arm-in-arm sweetheart on school break,

and I, today’s little family troop, enter

the warmth and sadness of the primate house.

Nearly feeding time, the gibbons are restless.

Baby clings, and mother brachiates, landing

three-handed on the glass for a closer look

at the strange way we have of walking away.

An orangutan preens a partner’s genitals.

Through cement walls we hear the lion roar

for his forty pounds of meat. Outside, we see him

on his rock with full dark mane and four spotted cubs—

yes, majestic, damn it, in our cliché.

Next door the Mexican wolves, three brothers,

trot day and night among their penned aspen.

One howls, and we pause in our walk to the car

to better catch the resonant theme and silence

after or maybe answer. So far nothing, and we pass

the tiger, silent Siberian, pacing the prison pines,

then hippos in the hippo house full of potential

standing like propane tanks eating their hay.

Soon enough, love and custom, habits

and hungers, and our successful ways of increase

will bring us home to supper with our kind.

Cruising the Baltic

That sea has no tide,

and barely brackish, few herring,

little salt. Our ship is so big,

twelve stories up you don’t reach

a hand for a taste test. Industrial

travel makes waves, but no sound

lapping on the hull can rise this high.

We’re so American,

from here streaks

of algae look like oil.

But just like home,

the midnight sun comes up at two,

and the Gulf of Finland

lies flat as a platitude.

Europe lies low to left and right.

Reaching out in six or eight

languages, our city guides

are well-spoken. Living so closely,

they teach war as tides flooding over.

Ironical and right, smallest

countries have the most to say.

Look, sensible cars, smart

and small. The young and old

and ministers of government, slim,

and half of them women, on bikes

in bike lanes riding to work.

Even farmers go to school. Look,

art and flowers and ice cream.

We’re heading east, and those birch

on shore are friends of mine,

countrymen who stand together

and don’t reach out.

Fireweed blooms familiar,

derelict and magenta on a rusting

freighter listing on a jetty.

Now come cranes, dented

containers, rolls of steel, ingots

of aluminum. Awash at a pier,

a sub is gasping for air.

Nosing in at four, we spot

the lone rower in a tiny boat

pulling hard for Tallinn.

Russia at last

and the town that Peter built.

We see the bear, soiled cub

with a muzzle, held at bay

tied behind a can for coins.

We crowd Catherine’s house

scuffing her floral parquet.

Boris, brusque and so Russian,

recites endurance of heroes

of the great city under siege.

Before I can hate him for pushing us

too fast, he soulfully quotes Pushkin

about the Neva wild in flood, lost love,

and the man it drove crazy.

We end up rushed through Peter’s

summer palace, a fine place for picnics

and wedding pics documenting union:

groom a little drunk, bride laughing,

fountains spouting, statues posing,

and Samson, crazy man so big and gold,

yanking a lion’s jaws apart.

Sabrina Bort

The door slides open, and she leans

into our compartment in car eleven

as we roll through small towns and green fields

of formerly East German hay.

“Just checking,” she says and hands out

water and lunches in paper sacks.

No clickety-clack, the rails are smooth,

and the hell is gone from sixty years

and thirty years and fifteen years back

for grandparents, parents, and herself

as a kid, prime recruit as a child spy

I imagine for ratting them out to the Stasi.

She does her best to make us couples

into comfortable and organized travelers,

but she...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Waiting for You
• Woven Zigzag with Lightning
• In Your Dreams
• I Got a Sawzall
• Against Indifference
• About the Author