Willis Haviland Carrier is Dead
by Brendan Byrne
That slut of a moon, eye
of God looking down on
us the lovemaking non-
believers, the exhibitionists
hoping for the first time
that there be no Voyeur.
In this new, warm, foreign
dark, I lean over and ask if
you’re sleeping, knowing
that I’ll wake you, and then
if you know that the man who
invented air conditioning
is from one of the coldest
places on earth, or at least
the coldest that I’ve been–
and really, what’s the difference?
I spent 60 dollars on gas
at a Buc-ee’s in Georgia
and it was so cold inside
that I think I might have
dreamt you up there.
There, or after the bad-beer
bar where I insisted that
we stay because I liked the way
the bartender looked at
me looking at you looking
at our two headless beers.
If I get a speeding ticket
on my way out of Savannah,
I’d ride right back down here
just to plead guilty in the flesh,
to take the Chatham County
Sheriff to that same bad-beer bar
to see how I look at you. He’d
be so moved that he’d pay my
ticket himself, pay all my
tickets, all my debts and lost
tithes, buy me a drink, even
fall in love with me; all these
dreams in the minute before
I wake you, touching the small
of your back, stopping there
since you said talking and sex
are essentially the same and I’d
much rather talk than have sex,
and hoping that when I tell you
Willis Haviland Carrier is dead
you rejoice like I did when I first
learned that fact seeded deep
in the free-love card-carrying
Bible Communist cultlands
of northern New York from
which him and I both hail,
this the creator of one of my
most minor discomforts, this
the savior of millions in the
spanish moss ridden small
of this country’s back,
which I now say goodbye in
for the first time of many.