By Gus Iversen

I found a tobacco "Movie Star" card from the 1920s in a flea market. The entertainer was named Snub Pollard. He looked like the lost Marx Brother. His mustache was not to be believed. For years I kept the ancient cardboard portrait behind my driver’s license in my wallet.

This book is a quilt, woven to conjure the feeling of one of Hollywood's brilliant silent comics. It was early for us but it was right on time for Snub Pollard. There is not a name you can think of that will not someday be completely forgotten.

Snub on Snub:

i was born at the edge of a busted bubble
in the rubble of the great kulin nation
below all the stage of western trouble
i rose in a car made of magnets

the men busied themselves with the paper
which no longer mentioned instant fortune
the banks wept
their tears fell on plows which then rusted

squizzy taylor was the new man with a vision
and the dockies were lining his track
now it all feels like someone else’s life
don’t know if i’m glad that i never went back

mine is a line of dreamers and schemers
to dream you must get lots of sleep
mother and father played the scratchers
and i pretended to be a drunk russian
putting on my coat and hopping on a boat
in the lot of fun telling lies for a living

my california high times you may not recall
but i was top of the pops in the pictures
if your ancestors were alive they’d know
but time was not kind and my act fell behind
now i’m catching gene kelly’s umbrella

the beauty that devours explicitly
the denominator more basic than graves
the shape of empirical truth in geometry
the occasional quote from god
no matter what galileo has to say about it
i’m fluttering my eyebrows
in the middle of the fireworks

at seventy years old
you could find me hunched over
in a make believe dive bar
sewing the almighty zeotrope of hilarity
in the flicker of a foreign language
for a pair of legs in fishnet stockings
who cues the credits
for a film that will dissolve
for a brain without a memory

i’m telling you now
i was wildly infused with music
these old eyelids were like fishing rods
in a match with the loch ness monster
fluttering from the ankles
wobbling around love
and all the other human scales
fluttering with a rarified genius
out of my mind for everyone