30
CARMODY: I am exactly like a helium balloon. I swell up or shrink down depending on the surrounding pressure.
BLIGHT: [Indicating CARMODY.] Massive in the rarer atmospheres. [Pause.] Unable to descend, as it were, without disfigurement.
As a part of our WWII play soldiering and war, my brother and I would tie pieces of string to the corners of cloth squares cut from old bed sheets, and then tie the ends of the strings to large hex nuts. We would fold cloth, strings, and iron tightly and shoot it high in the air with a slingshot made from inner tubes. At its apogee, the parcel would unfold, the cloth fill with air, and the whole thing float slowly to the ground.
take everything
away that sounds concocted
what do her eyes
say? Such haughtiness is feigned
she’s afraid she’ll blow away
High Mass, ”sung mass”
the Eucharist to music
brings the Bishop
to the parish, much pomp
and tips for the altar boys
long linear
gradient that his career
was following
before he blew himself up
refueling the lawnmower
*Charles D. Tarlton is a retired American college professor living in California. In retirement he has returned to his youthful passion for poetry and is now devoted to helping make tanka prose part of mainstream American poetry.