Live Gauges for Ten Thousand Scapes A Confucian

Transcription

spork
2.1 (AUTUMN 2002)
spork |thesafehousequarterly
is published twice a year
__________________________
ADVISOR
Timothy C. Hayek
EDITORIAL
Richard Siken
Jason Ott
Robert Hepworth
Drew Burk
PRODUCTION
Drew Burk
TECHNICAL
Aaron Triplett
__________________________
Single issues of spork are not as
expensive as they look. Available
at select bookstores worldwide
(check website for current list),
at our not-so-secret headquarters:
4024 East Speedway Boulevard,
Tucson, Arizona 85712
or online at www.sporkmag.com.
Please address all correspondence,
business and editorial, to spork,
4024 East Speedway Boulevard,
Tucson, Arizona 85712
or to [email protected].
Submissions read year-round.
No manuscripts can be returned
nor any query answered unless
accompanied by a self-addressed,
stamped envelope. Spork also
welcome electronic submissions.
Bookplate: This Is Your Bookplate
by Mike Micropolous, 2002.
Artwork by Tom Walbank
appearing on pages 443–450:
W. C. Handy, 1997.
brush, india ink, and
ballpoint pen, 9” x 12”
Little Marion Walter Jacobs, 1993.
brush, india ink, and
ballpoint pen, 9” x 12”
Tommy McClennan, 1995.
india ink and stick, 9” x 12”
Robert Nighthawk, 1996.
brush and india ink, 9” x 12”
Charlie Patton, 1992. brush, india ink,
and correctional fluid, 9” x 12”
Mahalia Jackson, 1996.
Bukka White 1992.
Mance Lipscomb 1993.
A map is a thing and a rooster is
a thing and a spork is two things
at the same time the way a
hammer is a hammer is a tool.
Materials published in spork
may not be reprinted, in whole
or in part, without the written
permission of the editors.
Copyright © 2002 by spork
All rights revert to the author
upon publication.
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ny system open to freedom is also open to degeneracy. Create a
place for things to happen and inevitably they will. There were
mistakes. There was drift. There was mind-changing in subtle and
grand ways and things broke forever, or broke and got mended, and we
broke some things on purpose and felt sorry about it later or didn’t. We
wanted five issues a year and ended up with three and a radio play. We
designed colorful covers and the t-shirt shop went out of business. We had
plans, made promises, pledged opulent things and spelled people’s names
wrong. I shouldn’t be surprised. I am, but I shouldn’t be. We love you with
a fierce and sloppy love, dear reader, but these things happen.
So here it is, Issue 2.1, either the fourth spork or the fifth, depending on
how you’re counting. To thicken the gravy further, we’ve decided to have
only two print issues a year—Autumn & Spring—to give us more time for
live events. Notice the new binding? Expect it to change every year. Please
also put your attention to the page number we’re starting with—it’s 355.
This should indicate at least two things: 1) We’re committed to continuous
page numbers for the duration, even if—should we be so lucky—we end
up with numbers in the tens of thousands; and 2) We lost a page. Okay, we
didn’t lose it, but we ended on an odd page last time and we needed to start
on an odd page this time. Perhaps we can consider the radio play the
missing page. Then again, we may just take missing page 354 and jam it in
somewhere, sometime in the future.
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./")01(#)$(&)2/1%3)14)53)
ou have been watched from a distance for some time now and now
you are being watched from even farther away. Anyway, you’d like
to believe it’s true. Who wouldn’t? Just because a thing’s invisible
doesn’t mean it don’t exist, you think to yourself, but still, there is no valid
way to test it. And then one day you fall asleep on the train on the way
home but you get home anyway. You close your eyes and nothing happens.
You close your eyes every now and then, just to test the waters, and find
you’re still moving, being moved, walking through the tunnel with your eyes
closed, held up and carried along by the crowd. Not love or joy in any
traditional sense, but a gentle kind of peaceful rocking that gathers together
the single flowers to make a garland.
The lights flicker and the wheels clack. No one on the train can tell
who’s driving, so you let go of the imaginary wheel. You lean back in your
plastic seat and let your shoulders relax. In the seat across from you, a man
is reading a newspaper. His ears look familiar. And the woman standing by
the automatic doors—her wrists, how she moves her wrists strikes a chord
deep inside you. Look at the teeth in the mouth of that little boy in the
parka! You know those teeth! You’ve seen those teeth in somebody else’s
mouth! All these parts trying to assemble themselves in front of you, as if to
say Let me in, I’m still here, hello hello, you know me, you know…
Here I am in a rabbit run, here I am in a valley of pine, waiting for you
to find me. I could pretend I’m speaking to everyone—assume a middle
distance and transcend myself—but I’m taking to you and you know it.
There was one time, we were on the subway then, and I had just gone
somewhere inside my head—Where did you just go? you said—and I had come
here (buzz buzz) and didn’t need no static offa you. It doesn’t always matter
where we are but here I am and I say hello, sitting next to you this time, just
pretend I’m sitting next to you this time. You would like it here. Maybe you
would like it here. I think that maybe you would like it here.
I work my jobs, I take my pills. Knot the tie and go to work, unknot the
tie and go to sleep. I sleep. I dream. I wake. I sing. I get out the hammer
and start knocking in the wooden pegs that affix the meaning to the
landscape, the inner life to the body, the names to the things. I float too
much to wander, like you, in the real world. I envy it but that’s the dealio—
you’re a train and I’m a trainstation and when I try to guess your trajectory I
end up telling my own story.
But you are my nomad and I love you sideways daily. Sideways because
I have to beam my love in all directions, hoping it bounces off something
and eventually finds you. You and all the other secret agents caroming
underneath the radar, sending your documents back to Mission Control—
which is me, I guess, because I have a permanent address.
I’ve been rereading your story. I think it’s about me in a way that might
not be flattering, but that’s okay. We dream and dream of being seen as we
really are and then finally someone looks at us and sees us truly and we fail
to measure up. Anyway: story received, story included. You looked at me
long enough to see something mysterioso under all the gruff and bluster.
Thanks. Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other
side of them.
So here we are again: me being here and you being off the map and me
sending it out across the wires and being overheard. You’re making me
work for this—the whisper system—and that’s okay, too. I was shooting
my mouth off and you called me on it and yes, it’s been the plan all along,
my great invention, a place for all these voices to land, the airport of
someone else’s listening.
The question for this issue was Do you have a human soul and can you prove
it? And, of course, there was no definitive answer. A robot can do the
math. A robot can spit out an answer. People, they make it up as they go
along. They find connections between things where there aren’t any. They
get moody, they refuse things, they take it deep inside themselves and fold
it into something unrecognizable and then they set it down on the table.
I had a tape recorder. I poked and prodded. I said your reports on my
desk now, moles. I give you permission, I give you immunity. I give you
these freedoms—even if freedom means animal spirit guides and probation
officers. I wound them up and broke their mainsprings. There are limit-
ations and there are protocols and I’ve been warned that I’m not supposed
to threaten or beg for pieces of someone’s soul. Theme issues are creepy
anyway. Drew said pick something easier, so we ended up going with long
poems and short short stories.
You said if people wanted to change the world, they would. You said
most people like it this way. Too bad for them, I say. I want something
else. But you know how I am. I push too hard. I get ahead of myself. I keep
ruining everything I touch by turning it into gold. But I’m learning how to
be gentle. Even to the vampires, poor little things. Save me save me love me love
me there’s a hole in my bucket etcetera. They don’t know what they want but I
give it to them anyway because why the hell not? Love, love, go ahead and
have another plate of it, it doesn’t run out.
Of course, I wonder if they love me back, which is, really, besides the
point. I don’t do it to be adored, I do it because my love keeps getting
bigger and that’s what happens.
So here we are again, words on a page, the voice that wants to be a
hand, the bridge with no opposite side. Of all the people reading this, are
you one of them? I have to believe you are. Sure, we invent each other. We
agreed to that a long time ago. Train and trainstation, force and field. We do
what we do and what I do is put the pies on the windowsill.
So here you are, reading this, expecting something. A story perhaps, or
someone singing themself to sleep. You’re ready and I’m ready too. Have
you been waiting long? I’ve frankensteined it for you, bundled it all up,
because it’s nice to put pictures inside people’s heads, like frogs and ronin
and Cleveland and Deloreses. Here is a place for it to happen. A place
where I can love you. The letter delivered, the year decembered, the river
swum.
—Richard Siken
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*
I am called Episode 12 now.
The scars on my torso are intercoms.
What they sing back of your sentence is deadpan
& covers the emergency light in the bathroom.
When we first make love I refuse to remove my shirt.
Two girls have walked off the set
to drive to a location lit brightly with grief.
Episode 11 is still crashing around inside you.
The lights of room 50 of the Deportation Motel
have begun their chronic flickering.
I come on at 11am & again at 8pm.
I last an immense hour & watching myself
gives me amnesia. I lose your jawline
at laughter killing the smell of rain.
After lovemaking on invisible terms
don’t be surprised if you get a full clearance
& a headache when you ask to alter my memory of you.
Your short hair becomes a red wig.
The quiet face starts talking a lover out of time.
I sing the last part of what you say.
You are called Episode 13 now.
When I stop glowing you can’t believe you got undressed.
______
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*
We park on Friday night at the strip of ocean that is unmonitored.
She listens for friends on the dead city radio.
This dark beach is not the transmitter she wants, not the hushing—
Her friends waiting upside down from fire escapes
for lightning to return the salt to their mouths.
The secret we don’t know is a no-show & we’re too big
for the ocean. Someone’s floating white clothes
tremble & tighten around us.
We’ve found a chamber in the low tide.
Our impulse is to start
our own galaxy for the voices she does pick-up.
The salvation we offer is three bedrooms wide,
it is unamplified, we can only offer her dead
lovemaking they’ll want to memorize.
They won’t want to be strangers when they dance
to Lightning Dream & cannot stop.
Her list: 1. He would paint with his empathy, tell me
to help him put a nervous system into the future,
so it could feel us coming.
The storm she says conquers our airwaves.
Do we choose to laugh at the unformed sky along the water?
Throw a beer can at it?
Or turn our backs & mix into the telepathic & burning metropolis?
Either side is a drug.
______
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2. She would make me an offshoot of her driving:
confuse me with destination.
Now she wants to take off her jeans
& oscillate her legs in the surf.
How will you tune in your voices?
They cause a nervous system I can’t locate.
Then she tunes into me saying field of blood
into her hair, into her list,
which I make believe is a symmetry
of non-stop gazes into the details. The details
of the bodies: lipsticked heads,
shaved heads, with or without
the Future Dream in their faces.
3. She would pick up the doll from the saguaro.
4. He got impatient with things going loose.
I pull up a white shirt
by its sleeve, heavy with water like lifting
a body’s left arm, & throw it up the beach.
This pulls from the dark heart girl a vast laugh.
She knows the lightning has hit the city at last.
The underwear is too hard to catch.
She wonders if someone naked or transparent will appear,
wonders what the bodies we can’t see do
when they want to be bright like inside a doll.
The lifeguard tower is our spot to inferno our senses—
her leg touched by headlights.
But this lovemaking is staged
for her to tell me her destroyed names.
______
!"-
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I have none. I watch lightning because holy lights
shock my city alive, divide my city
into double galaxies. I’m swinging my arms in both.
5. The insomniac I drove the mesa with at night—
6. The guitarist who took films of me—
But is she only this list? Does her skin,
when it touches mine,
feel which side of living I’m holding her in?
She’s putting this nervous system around my neck.
Why are her lips becoming difficult to kiss?
Why is a chaos of droplets the future she wants me in?
These dead shouldn’t have let her shake them into me—
They shouldn’t have let me get to the following song—
______
!".
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B
eing nineteen and fearless. About to lap-dance the trickster who’d
unzipped in the dark. Jumping off the rude guy and then clocking
him in the jaw. Shoving stale popcorn in his face as he grabbed.
Bouncer Tom come to my rescue, come to lift him out, chair and all before
he could zip it in. All the men laughing as the fool hung out of his trousers.
All the girls cheering as he tumbled out the doors. Free beers on the house and
noone try that again with my girls. But you, said the owner all dressed in black
with a comb-over, I know you’re 36-26-36 but you make too much trouble. Go cool
your troublemaker heels at my other place down the road.
Dancing at the joint down the road where the dj nicknamed me Brick
House. Bribing the dj to play Brick House. The spotlight shimmering off the
red sequined strip. Owning the room while sporting that red sequined strip.
The flannel and boot crowd fumbling pocket change under the strip, rough
fingers and no finesse. Loving the moves and hating the men, loving the
men and hating the moves, hating the moves for making me hate the men,
who love the moves and probably hate me, but jump back into their cold
Cleveland cars to love themselves handily before returning home.
And trying to keep it simple trying to keep it simple trying to keep it
simple and If you can’t, said the dj, try one of these little blue buddies instead.
That place was called Brown’s. That rough bar gone rougher come the
deep freeze of winter. Come the deep freeze of winter in northern Ohio.
The stink of fry-pit perch from the bar buffet, fry-pit smokestack greasing
the icy sky. Boy shot sandbags open with his BB gun, poured sand to help
cars grip the endless ice. Sundown by mid-afternoon throwing night down
too early.
One Friday night when the heat pipes froze I wouldn’t take it all off.
Glass of beer flying at my crotch from a table of bad bored. Cold beer
white skin goosebumps hopping down malt-stained thighs. Next night
dancing naked with the fever caught from dancing wet the night before.
______
!"/#
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Next day home under blankets in the ramshackle on Morgan Lane, red
sequins still glued on and glinting under the covers like embers in a dieddown fire.
Cleveland rock n’ roll Cleveland. Fifteen-mile shiver in a gasket-blasted
Pacer. Fifteen miles down the balky break-down-anytime road between
Brown’s and the ramshackle on Morgan Lane. Fifteen shiver miles singing
the chorus to Brick House to stay warm. Night road the dark outstretched
arm of a big sorry man. Pointing thataway girlie, seven more miles to go
and it’s Hello Cleveland All-nude and All-u-can-eat same place same time
same price.
Me on a bender. Hump-dancing a man’s wife onstage, me on the
bender, she on a dare. Making more money pretending to fuck her than any
other night. That night’s tips bought another month in the ramshackle on
Morgan Lane. Wondered if I should give her some money as she turned
away from the cheers suddenly pale and sick with shame.
Me in a rut. Me in a rut on another sub-zero night-time afternoon.
Seven sad men in the bar and me trying to dance to Bob Seger the spiteful
sad barmaid’s insisted-on favorite. Bob Seger the worst unfunky. Can’t do
any moves but white-girl herky jerky. Seven men watching from scattered
seats around the room. Seeing the bearded landlord of that ramshackle
house on Morgan Lane in the scattered shadowy seats of the seven men
watching. My landlord sitting there watching like a sin professor, chewing
the fat cud of what-a-surprise.
Landlord come to my side door next morning and scratched his flaky
beard onto the side door steps and gave me the up-and-down with wet-lips
and eyes. I smack the side door spring-shut right in his face. His phone call
ten minutes later, his deep breaths between the words I’ll need an increase or
else if you know what I mean is that anyway to treat your landlord as the morning
toast burnt in the fiery-wire toaster. Deep breath and hell-bent nerves firing
and telling him that if he tried to kick me out I’d tell his wife everything and
I wouldn’t mince words and who do you think she’ll believe? Taste of burnt
toast conjuring up the sound of a landlord breathing. Taste of burnt toast
forever ruined by the landlord who made himself a regular at Brown’s and
outstayed me there by his whole life.
New city five years later. Twenty-four and hungry in the new city under
the sunbelt sun. Twenty-four and hungry in a city of toupee-white-beltpowder-blue-leisure suits. All bad tippers getting their Sanka from career
______
!,4
1/2*3*4$&*5(%"6*
waitresses who’ll never leave their jobs. Job cross-off after job cross-off.
Walking jobless down the road to the big magenta sign. White girl in a top
hat hip-cocked and grinning on the big magenta sign.
Falling back on a skill because it pays easy money. Forgetting it’s not
easy, sometimes not even money. Losing the tips in my T-strap to a swift
fingered frat boy in the new city. A big roach crawling in my wig in the
dressing room of the new bar. Tables of thin beer and boat shoes and
cheap tropical shirts. Shorts so thin you could get a disease doing a lapdance.
And one day a lady in a headband, a prim lady with hair the color of
corn, swept back from her powdered brow in a velvet headband. Prim
headband lady walks in with a shaft of rude sun and says she wants to
dance. Wants to audition and dance for the men. Wants to meet all the girls
and see what it’s all about. Show me how to dance for the men show me how to do it
what else do you do? All questions no legwork no waist no chest no good. They
say you can’t take it all off but don’t you take it all off? Prying like a little sister
only asking to get you in trouble, surprise over dinner when she tells your
parents what you said.
Don’t tell me you can’t make more money after you dance, don’t you make the real
money that way? I won’t tell, don’t you think I could do it too? Girls pawing the
floor in their fishnets like a wary herd. Girls looking for exits. What girl you
know comes to strip in a headband said the old blondie wiping oil into her chest
as the lady took her headband back out the door and down the road.
Hours crawling towards night. Rank sunset coughing up a sallow
moon. Glasses clanking onto shelves barmaid setting up cigarettes stubbed
down. Moths swarming in the headlights as cars pulled up too close, high
beams swimming the floor through the windows. Car doors chuffing shut
too loud, too same-time, too many car doors shutting too loud and all at the
same time.
Headlights flashlights front door badge glints men shout. Waiting a
split second too long. Waiting a split second too long before the bolt.
Whole herd of girls in flimsy this and that trying to beat it to the bathroom
to the window out the back. Headband lady giving the megaphone a
blowjob. Big lady officer in grey and blue with a piece. The Mama Sarge of
the whole shebang. Girls with stories, girls with memories tucked under
their supposedly impervious animal-thick skin, with gut radar, antennae
firing and legs jolted to move. Mascara panic running. Heels clomping,
______
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shoes flicked off to stocking feet. Making it halfway down the back hallway
which was making it absolutely nowhere at all.
Line of sass girls led out into the headlight glare. Line of sass girls
fuming in Flexi cuffs, handcuffed by the new city’s PD. Flap of more vicebadge wallets like show-off card tricks. Hand on my head pressing me into
a back seat, cop climbing in too, squad car door chuffing shut. What’s the
difference between vice and vise. Choke-meat smell of burgers just eaten in
the back seat. Chortle and click of radio set on low. Wrappers and cuffs and
tangle of more flexis in the back seat. Vinyl gaining grip on the bare skin of
my back leg.
Officer Somebody Big Man making cowboy talk in the back seat.
Making quick clumsy fondle. Making dig for the goods. Mustache crumbed
with lunch, flexi-cuffs keeping blood from hands, vinyl bite at skin shift.
Scratch of trouser leg and bigfoot black shoe and Say my name. Biting lips to
not do not say. Thigh muscle lockdown. Grim stare. Count to ten knees
locked shut. Dancing means muscles. Dancing muscles saved the dancing
girl.
Twenty-four and hungry in the stationhouse chair in the empty belly of
the profitless night. Twenty-four staring at powdered donuts on the
stationhouse donut table. Cup of sour coffee, quiet stretch of soremuscle
legs. Blondie walking in behind the Mama Sarge walking out behind the
Mama Sarge. Blondie’s chest still shining with oil a grit-tooth swallow
running down her old throat, her beach-witch hair falling dankly down.
Fingers pressed to inkpad, fingers bumped to paper. Officer Somebody like
it’s post-roundup on the chaparral talking post-game with Mama Sarge.
Being booked by the new city’s PD for soliciting Officer Somebody. She
insisted, I swear. She wanted me.
The seersucker-suited whiskey-breath sour-gut lawyer come in after his
breakfast summoned by a phone call. Grabbed a jelly donut and said Here’s
the drill. Seersucker-suited whiskey-breath sour-gut lawyer with sugar on his
grizzle who got me off and then got off. I signing for my effects in the
stationhouse, ziplock bag and wanting to fake my name. Sunblast outside
the terrible shine of the squad cars lined up in their stalls.
Shrug and change and shower and get back to work. Shrug and work
and shower and change and work. Going back to work and just dancing,
stretching sore legs against the pole. Thirst come on like a virus. Needing a
water pitcher onstage or I panic. Endlessly parched and desert-stranded
______
!,6
1/2*3*4$&*5(%"6*
thirsty and not knowing why. Gulping water after water and careless about
anything giving hands a wide berth. Stray dollars grabbed instead of let
under elastic, a barren stretch of girlskin and few tips and I didn’t care.
Water pitchers filled and emptied, gulping from the spout. A night and
another night and still thirsty and then a drunk calling me a whore.
You gonna shake it for your Daddy or what
Stopping mid-dip just staring under lights. Arms fall down from the
wings of a shimmy. Looking for the face, red screwed up drunk face, long
face hollowed out luckless and raw.
Can’t stand these uppity attitude types stand there like we wanna watch them think
Stopped mid-dip just staring out at the voice in the room. Stopped and
let myself think. Amazed under lights. Thinking, there it is. What I’ve been
missing. My launchpad, my gatecard, my carkey, my doorbell. A reason to
fight. Disco ball is a siren swirl before my eyes. Drunk standing up back,
puffed out chest a blessed idiot messenger come all this way from nowhere,
just for me, all riled up now just for me
Why you stop dancing you stupid girl get the lead out
Just him, just me. He the bum-rushed downluck fool in the chair and
me the not-so-young meat onstage. Him the doubledare do your job know
your place and me the sudden thinker. Thinking, I know why I’ve been
thirsty. All the pieces falling into place like sequins on the red strip. This is
the green light, his face, I’ve got the motor gunning no brakes down that
black arm of the road. I’m a grip on pitcher handle, heft it up the big cool
belly of the water pitcher newly refilled. Draw back shoulder like a bow and
arrow. There’s an Amazon in me. Recoil, ready with a big arc, a cascade of
water, a perfect sprung arc off the stage and right into that red standing
face, a full pitcher of water in perfect delivery landing smack dab on the
man’s mean face.
Glorious wave and splash and filigree of beading on eyelashes and open
red mouth. Glorious record skip as the bar cuts the music and the girls
come to watch. Glorious perfect legs moving springing off the stage,
glorious manager heading consternatedly my way as the glorious agendas of
all the losers in the world collide in the ruined interchange a jumble of cars
about to crash. Glorious hands out and ready waiting for a man’s naked silly
neck and yelling This one’s for Cleveland.
______
!,!
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1.
I have sacrificed almost the whole race of frogs.
(Marcello Malpighi, physician, 1628-1694)
INSINUATED
The past tense becomes our subtle undertaking as we rummage through bureaus
and boxes of the dead’s things: a life pithed
and particular to a time and a place. One
century as the logical conclusion to twenty.
Among the photographs and false teeth,
the cigarette cases, prosthetics, and beaded
hairpins, Grandmother’s homework is revealed.
Exposed, she wrote, a preserved specimen of frog
was examined, the external structures noted,
a drawing was made. Then graded and stuffed,
parched as dull wheat, in a pine desk drawer.
Her proof her drawing—the empirical moment—
a well-preserved tucked-under secret.
2.
LESSONS LEARNED. THEN LEARNED AGAIN.
Phylum:
Sub-Phylum:
Class:
Chordata
Vertebrata
Amphibia
______
!,7#
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3.
THE DARKER DORSAL SIDE
With scalpel-edged delicacy from sternum to pubis, I dissect my frog.
Record in colored pencils on loose leaf. Private school children get
fetal pigs
and felt tip markers. They are encouraged to label fried chicken—
its external structure
as well as its smooth and elastic musculature—but the frog in formaldehyde
democratizes us.
Let the frog stand for coming of age and common experience.
We are Descartes searching south of lung, behind kidney for the pure frog,
the Platonic ideal. But we can’t shut up, can’t stop repeating. We little
surgeons
carve cadavers with little histories. We carve up the past as though it were
only present.
Russian spies and astronauts dropped among us, run-aways, dope fiends,
Indians, agitators,
prisoners of war—all. Because Phylum: Humanitas: Sub-Phylum: Class.
Because exposed and splayed out they speak a thousand languages of
extinction
and happenstance, are vague remnants of familiarity who read us Kipling,
were killed
quietly by the phylum, have died forgetting our names.
4.
IRONIC TAXONOMIES
Let the frog stand for these
a madness, a prophecy
a rain of them
______
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(after Giordano’s painting, “The Massacre of Niobe,” ca 1680)
(
the things he chooses to leave out. But not Giordano. At least two hundred
times I’ve seen his mythical subject with that abrupt bottom-of-a-foot dead
center of the enormous canvas resting on a bearded corpse next to a
mask—a fabric lion face furled and frayed around the edges. I come to this
particular museum often because it is not the Prado and is down the street
in my hometown in the South and so has as its permanent collection what
the more illustrious museums either did not want or could not want or
would not fit. Each of the times I visit—and without baroque hyperbole—
this (expressionist, yes) mask takes me by surprise and to tell you the truth,
I’m quite certain that brother Giordano meant to paint shoulder armor with
epaulets because that would be appropriate to the confounding tension
between (the thin line between) the upward pull of the Baroque and the
vast epic space of the Modern poised for Progress and expansion. No,
Giordano probably did not intend the implied treason, the affront to popes
and princes—why, to suggest that their regality were somehow false and
flimsy—well—you have to think about the expectation of art in the 17th
century; the twinning ideas of mastery and perfection. What it might mean
to be… human. Nothing less at stake here than the very plinth of Western
civilization being articulated in pictures. You have to think about how the
image enters the world of the viewer (how the thing is lit, for example, how
its heft of shadow presses on or grazes over the eye—all it sees and so on):
you have to think about Poussin—eternal presence, Sabine rape—and how
Giordano must have compared himself to Caravaggio’s theatre, to Rubens’
pinkpinks, to Velázguez for Christ’s sake. But consider the frame they
inhabit, the lines and folds. Consider that, perhaps, Giordano’s art was a
freer art and, perhaps, he painted that mask or the idea of that mask on
purpose as if to say in 1680/now:
the stage has been set, the canvas
empty
What a real surprise then… a mask (a mask!) in the midst of this
______
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massacre surrounded by hard stares, taut horse bits and circled mouths of
horror and extreme angels or gods who sit on figured clouds and shoot
imperfect arrows into the backs of citizen slaves or mothers (but this is not the
age of revolution—you hear no Goya scream at the back of your throat yet just
the soft incredulity of mythical footsteps running away across damp leaves)
______
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My mother has gone to view the dead body of my aunt and to bury her. It is
very important she insists for people to see the body dead, to make that break with life.
This is something she will keep on doing whether I like it or not. I suppose
if we don’t see these dead bodies, the dead would just go right on living,
causing all sorts of trouble. My husband’s grandfather, for example, visits
his wife every night, crawls right out of his grave, climbs her walls, demands
pork chops, wants to have sex. I have a few dead friends back in Tucson
who remain very much alive to me; distance renders such notions possible.
If you stay in one place long enough and a virus or a war moves through
you could even lose count of your dead as they go on about the solitary
business of each day: washing the chinaberry stains from their cars,
stripping down for a nap under a hot sun on an especially cool afternoon,
hanging clothes like banners on a makeshift line that cuts the throat of the
sun, listening to cicadas scream and drone, still waiting for remission, ceasefire, or cure. I have seen many dying but not dead. Is it fair to keep the dead
alive? I have another dead friend for whom I wrote a memorial poem. I
never saw his body either, but as I wrote, surrounded by memory
surrounded by finality’s fine point, there he was: shrouded in every syllable
as I placed each in its own inky coffin. He is dead every day.
______
!,.#
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____________________________________________________________
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*
When it was found that ejecta blankets not only occur on the moon, but
also in some humans, it was a new day for science. Convinced that this
phenomena was confined to meteor impacts and other astronomical
anomalies it was of vast import when scientists found a young man who,
among other things, had experienced a “covering-up” effect after a
traumatic moment in early childhood. Although he would not specify what
exactly had happened, he described the aftereffects in this way: “Fogginess.
A not so clear thought process. The misinterpretation of happiness.” After
countless therapists and self-medication, it was out of desperation that he
enrolled at the local Community College. There, classes were cheaper than
at the State University and less crowded. Astronomy 119 was offered on
Tuesday and Thursday just after his meetings with Dr. M—. And it was at
these classes that he first saw through a telescope the pocked surface of the
moon. As he passed over the impact craters and their surrounding debris,
he forgot about his bedtime for the first time in years, and made eye contact
with a girl who, only inches from his face, had made progress earlier in the
semester, there was first a slight numbness and then his tightened fist
uncurled and lay motionless on his bare knee.
______
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____________________________________________________________
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*
Like most Deloreses, Delores was a bartender. Her apartment on 32nd
Street—west of Charlie’s Bagels—had a cupboard full of eggs and a
husband named Jasper who made her days away from the East Sixty more
than alive. “Have you had many breakfasts, honey?” Jasper sometimes
joked with her before going to the Chairman’s meetings. They had a dog,
Innisfree. He could eat sixteen mice per year. But last March Trombone the
cat outdid the dog—seventeen round ones. “I haven’t forgotten the last
time you swept the porch, dear,” Delores occasionally said to her husband
on her way to the bar. She sported a fine camelhair jacket every Wednesday.
On the back of the jacket, a yellow Post-it dated February 16th, read: “Don’t
forget the peas.” She always forgot the peas. She hadn’t turned around in
weeks.
______
!-4#
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____________________________________________________________
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*
He received his honorary juror badge in the mail the other day, along with
some incorrectly addressed envelopes that should’ve been delivered, as
usual, to the local record store. Somehow, though, it seemed pertinent to
immediately pin the badge onto his sleeveless shirt, strap his gun over his
shoulder, and make a beeline for the mall. He proudly wore the small
square piece of official paper, brandishing it to most passersby. It read:
“You are juror # [and then a bar code]” He liked that. He needed to be
scanned and identified every now and again because he often confused his
nom de plumes for his Christian name, making it almost impossible to be
notified of pending catastrophes or—as was the most recent mix up—class
reunions. Luckily though, he knew the mall had such devices, scanning
ones, and it was all he could do to contain himself—the clothes and other
products that filled the mall also excited him. And as he did every time he
found out who he was or had been, he would treat himself to some sweet
smelling cologne and a pair of leather pants. Unless, of course, it turned out
his name was Ivan or Moloch, then he would buy earmuffs or something.
______
!-5#
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____________________________________________________________
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*
Alexander the Great always took his pens and pencils wherever he traveled,
mostly because he wanted people to think he was writing things down, but
in reality he just liked the way they looked behind his ears. Different from
the yellow pencils we now know, his were black like thick lead rods, and his
pens, although very similar to 20th century pens, were never used for
writing. Even though some speculate that Alexander enjoyed his pencils in
his right ear and his pens on his left because of an early reading disability,
no one knows why the boy never quite felt comfortable fashioning both at
the same time. Specialists have even falsely compared Emily Dickinson to
Alexander because of her pens and pencils. Emily did in fact wear pencils—
the number depending on her mood—twisted into her wiry hair as she
wrote. But not Alexander. It may have seemed to his soldiers, countrymen,
and sometimes even his lovers that, like Emily Dickinson, he had been
writing when he showed up in a foul mood wearing either instrument, but
in actuality it was in different cities that he would decide between pencil and
pen. If Alexander were feeling down for example—usually after a battle that
took longer than it should or if a friend was killed—he would wear seized
gold or foreign perfumes and never write a thing about it. And alternately,
when he was in Asia Minor ruining entire populations, Alexander felt
wonderful—he wore pens the color of the Mediterranean protruding from
his brown curls, and unlike the pencils, they reminded him of beaches,
running naked, and always neglecting to write home.
______
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*
While half the group tried to recall the importance of history, and the other
half just tried to memorize their lines, Albert—the instructor—remembered
being a child and all the other children he knew who grew up to be
alcoholics. One specific memory from a night of partying in a Super 8
motel was like a poorly illustrated comic strip. All the principle cartoons—
Albert’s friends—laughed at nothing in particular as Albert himself—the
protagonist—was drawn savagely into the motel room’s double bed. He
had several inches of the chartreuse comforter tucked beneath his hollow
chin with a blurb bubbling up from his head—the broken-off kind
indicating a thought. The other illustrations sitting around the table (cell
#19) turned toward Albert after hearing a small metallic sound coming
from his brain. Even Camile, who rarely read Albert’s mind, made to
indulge whatever it was Albert was thinking. The group paused as the
thought, which was filled with scribbles, a few words, and a blurred
silhouette, slowly stopped its vibrating. Camile and the others found this
less than entertaining and returned to their intrepid game of cribbage,
leaving Albert’s memory to remain not what it used to be.
______
!-!#
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1. Us concoction, sweetly of Lucy, derivative for how many long, need
(for the rest at all, and love & pep) an illustration.
2. Octopus teeth in a ring and elongated tentacles: things have their center
and their branches—ideas of first buds and then the elderly tops falling
back because of night frost, frog debris, wind and too much rain at the
petals. She influenced us, the amazing student. God! knowledge like that of
what is first, last, of offshoots and where and what the pith is and is going
to be.
3. A mind tracing beginnings beneath the branches, so seeing the cervical
gap from liver pressure and urine tricklets, estrogen florets, and watching
the fetus dwarfing back to fragilely gripping the wall, and moist enterings
lucid at the tip. Maybe compare that to goals met from intellection after you
installed shimmers in the objects you studied, deliberation from your first
virtuous curiosity—for sure, a kind of birth.
4. France absorbed Joan’s program starting with herself in Domremy.
Hello, center. I feel in June here sincerity considering His sun, on my face,
that shall refract to cousins and farthest mobs, extend in a delta toward
frayed men in Orleans and farther. The Colorado was rafted. Whales
squeeze for stretches of air-block. Coast, falcon. Migrate, sand. What else
should extend is mentioned in Live Gauges for Ten Thousand Scapes.
5. Traced out, extensions flourished—emotions imitating them. Maybe
burnt green, one extension, a palm frond canting so that shade will rot a
seed enough to drop down. Maybe sonorous, footed in a line by the whited,
warped trim of the wharf, cormorants sounding, extending out. Individual,
our imaginations were sincere, real greens, real whites. Sincerity oozed
______
!"#$
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JONATHAN VANBALLENBERGHE
____________________________________________________________
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tranquility. Maybe spans even of contaminated river, with mucus and eel
warts, but opening and opening starting points and examples.
6. So extension from whatever is all: from mole-rat, King, or dust-mite,
flaky growth, or you, or bear, protozoan on his claw.
7. The attention all times will almost depart us, splatter from a bough with
reachers, doze, paddle seaward, flit, sag dangling from the top, probe
(almost) for the center that wandered.
______
!-"
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____________________________________________________________
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COMMENTARY I. 1. About King: “His charisma’s clear.”
2. About Bach: “His ritornello woodwinds his Kyrie.”
—Reporter
—Reviewer
3. About You: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
—William James
4. —Said into space towards members of an ear. Deliberately!
Deliberately word by the word for room for thought that rest liberates. Or
else spun by eyesight into font on paper. Whichever, each an illustration of
sweet attention, for whom who knows? until the meaning is likened in turn
to some relevant thing, like a film or a paintable flower. Do you know Cat
On A Hot Tin Roof or Simple Men? Have you watered the hyacinth?
5. Fine. And yet illustrations can be other than comparisons.
______
!-,
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C.II. 1. What? fingering the rubber-band that way, illustrating anxiety.
“This, here, who, how?” your forehead saying. And so we think your
opposite is a squirrel’s calling mouth, a thing that hears the gauge it goes by,
sincere, aware, and thus sincerely hearing.
2. “Whoever reflects on what passes in his own Mind, cannot miss it: and
if he does not reflect, all the Words in the World, cannot make him have
any notion of it.”
—John Locke
3. It, perception, and others: are they as though of silt? Vague ways we’ve
ridden, or fogged-over hypotheses stuck with terms? A perception, a hillview together with bulbs of spill-spark, stuttering lights amid clouding
mountains: the image of (for us) friendliness between us. And the meaning
there perhaps very simple. Bulbs meeting glasses with bubbles, that image
constellating with rain hitting all directions. It is the Fourth of July! But
heard, all that, named, felt clumsy. We would do that until we found a gauge
for it all, demystifying the meaning.
______
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C. III. With a whacker gut the branches away and down, down there must
be inhabitable, a world that (to be at all a world) must allow stuffing. One
says, “I am the self inside myself.” But why, since things equally are inside,
Dürer’s paintings, geometry maybe, (what else?) and blue diary handwriting
about a divorce, (what else?) Bertrand Russell’s caricature, canyons and deer
in them we saw, (what else?) and the odor of cormorant and illustrations
using mole-rats? You are of (not among) them, those, these, all this.
______
./0
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C. IV. VIDEO POKER
1. Bells of wired rows contaminating my
version of heaven, loudly for winning hands, for nothing quietly, hefting
lids of the eyes upon a straight or straight flush, Augustinic and Vivaldic
rotations in spans of one bite... newest coins, fingers’ push, queen’s & king’s
face, and departures thrice, past the fleck-sparrow’s nest on the sign, via
dried drool pools atop keys of the bank machine.
2. To do self-made tests!
3. The elderly woman’s chest-sweat nudges through cotton, the bells
tintinnabular to her more than a younger lover. To not play at all; rather, to
watch others losing and winning as a self test!
4. The low ceiling somehow not preventing this watching of myself from
a pagoda, high up, imagined with dragons etched in the posts, and orangebordered characters.
5. These impromptu documentaries of ourselves, which we project onto
foreign magnificent zones. FOUND: Basho doing it, translated as The
Skinny Path to Oku:
______
!-/
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C. V. 1. Days & moons are hikers though eternity, and the years
passing are travelers of that sort too. Other wanderers: folks counting time
on a boat or going by moments walking a horse home by the bit, those
whose journey itself is home. Many from history fell dead right on the road.
Yet I couldn’t repress wanderlust, drawn by pulled clouds, again & again me
dawdling alone up the seacoast. So I swept cobwebs last fall inside the
riverside hut and soon spring skies returned, mists floating, so I wanted
Shirakawa Barrier as a traveling space, the spirit Dosojin’s voice
unconcentrating me during every boring thing. Barely got through fixing my
raggy pants, doctoring my rain & sun bamboo hat, the Matasushima moon
rising to mind the instant I treated my sore shins with burnt moxa. Leaving
for Sampu’s cottage I gave up my place,
2.
family’s presence—
old hut of mine: transformation
into a doll’s house
3. That part of a haiku chain left tacked by me on a post.
______
!.4
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C. VI. 1. We eye-balled the road to Nambu, a wrinkle in the distance,
and held over at Iwade, and rode then along Ogauro’s bank past sulfur hotspring steam. Forward to the Shitomae Barrier without seeing other human
travelers, only the guards keeping us almost from walking through: maybe
we were hobos & assassins. Sun fallen behind the mountain when we
trekked to the very top, where we slept in the open-air shelter, a
watchman’s. A few variables there giving us suffering: three days of rain
yelling in irritable winds:
2.
the horse pissing!
by the lice! &
fleas! on my pillow.
______
!.5
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-(G"*4'=."8*D$%*F")*F/$=8')6*H9'#"8*
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C. VII. 1. MAKING THE THOUGHTS SINCERE means spying from
a pagoda, hearing the morning with eardrums of night watch... Imagination
like this will have to do: eye of six cavernous miles back, at least six, a
poised eye surveying the underneath frowsy sienna lot, an arena; and a plash
like dripping haunts the rotting boundary fence. But one panting jump out
the shadows, a traffic of beings in constant florescence, cellular, observable
beings. Thus a world. It will have to do.
2. It and the eye that knows it constitutes you; things have their center
and their branches.
3. The extreme hypothesis of palm readers seem more accurate than
“inside” and “outside” seem.
4. On the old trolley our raincoats touched and we noticed. So to inhabit
a world and to watch it does not mean identifying with the afterlife of
mosquitoes forced recumbent in amber.
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R
ecoiling from a blow that never came, his eyes rolling to one side,
his head following, swiveling only a second after, pulled by the eyes,
a corner of his mouth turning but stopping short; couldn’t—no,
don’t want to show this much, but it’s too late now, I’ve already shown
everything. She’s seen it; it’s obvious, she’s shifting in her seat, her eyes
moving down. Yes, there’s the floor. “Should I go?”
No, he says, it’s just… it’s… Don’t go. But already she’s pulling things
to her. He can see the muscles in one leg tensing, preparing and then
followed by the other and she stands. And so he stands and without
ceremony walks to the door and holds it open for her; she’s right behind
him, she slips out, muttering a goodbye without looking back. That wasn’t
how I wanted it… The door, closed now, presents bland uniformity—he can’t
remember why he’s standing there. He must be going somewhere, yes that’s
it; his hand on the knob, the latch slightly disengaged… he opens the door
and deposits himself outside. He locks the door and sees her in a car,
driving past him. Hello, he calls out, waving. She slows a moment, then
drives away. His hand still in the air—he pulls it back and it folds against his
chest; his heart’s still beating.
There’s chrome everywhere, stars on the asphalt, constellations
reorganizing themselves every minute or so—so they’re satellites. Here the
constellation Ford, there the almost extinguished Plymouth; he knows their
mythology. Nazis and Indians. But no, not constellations, if satellites, then
not constellations; but it’s the asphalt that fixes it, solid and immobile—so
not satellites at all. Space is void, so the stars are the fixed points; the
asphalt is solid, so the stars must move. His sign is Nissan; he was born
under Datsun, but things change.
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!"#$%%#&' (")%
Over by Harley Major he looks for the tree. He feels for his glasses—I
don’t wear glasses—he thinks that maybe if he wore glasses, then he would
have dropped them by the tree, but the tree isn’t there today, though it
should be. Oh, he says, Harley Major moved, the tree’s now just south of
Nissan. He wonders if it’s a fortuitous convergence, having the tree in
Nissan; walking toward the tree he thinks again: I don’t wear glasses. And then:
Maybe I should. He walks past the tree, around Nissan, surreptitiously
brushing Harley Major with the hand not folded against his chest. Still
beating. Harley Major is burning especially bright today, it must be the
hour, bright Harley is always a good omen. His hand drops, finds his pocket
and he walks on.
According to the Bible, only the artists go to Heaven. Not all of them,
only the good ones. It’s not that God’s all that fond of art, but he definitely
dislikes bad art. God hates commercial art, social commentary, massproduced regional art-products. God likes Matisse, He probably owns a
couple of Picassos—or at least has them on loan. Only good artists go to
Heaven. And a few scientists. That’s what it says in the Bible anyway.
Pasquale, Hobbes, Voltaire… he’s reading the comics. At a café now,
forever in cafés; he ran into someone from the hospital on the street. She
said hello, he said hello and waited for her to say more. She asked about
medication and he told her that he left it with his glasses. He said, How are
you, are you still insane? and she got mad and so he told her, You’re still
not twenty years younger, I thought you would be by now. She kept saying
that in the hospital, that if she were twenty years younger… He thought she
would do it when she got out. He wished her luck and walked on. But now
at the café he doesn’t remember her and he puts the comics back in the pile
of papers, No news today… He asks for tea. Transient stars shine on the wall,
rushing over the bad paintings, unwilling to light them; the sun and the
lamps do it enough already, too much he thinks. Figures and colors,
backgrounds and signatures: a nude, a portrait, a still life; one of them is still
wet. A star paused a moment and caught his attention, the painting
glimmered and almost glowed; he had to touch it. The paint came away on
his fingers. He’s looking at them now, blue and yellow, oils that won’t come
off easily. His tea arrives.
“What was up with that earlier?” It’s Michelle, she’s back, maybe she
didn’t leave after all. Hello, Mick, he says. She hates it when he calls her
that. “Don’t go, ok?” he says to her, “just stay a little.” He smiles and
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touches her hip. Michelle asks again and he tells her that he hadn’t meant
what she’d thought, he just didn’t finish the expression; it was going the
wrong way, he says, so I stopped it. I meant something else.
What was that? she asks.
“Your sign is Honda,” he answers the wrong question, “isn’t that
strange that we should both be born under signs of Japan?” She’s familiar
with his cosmogony, she knows that she’s a Honda. She doesn’t know what
it means, but she knows at least that much. “I’m a Nissan-once-Datsun, and
you’re a Honda… that’s why we don’t get along with the Domestics.”
She laughs, needing it to be a joke. She’s actually a Virgo, or Scorpio,
depending on who you talk to, no one’s too certain on the matter, so she’s
O.K. with being a Honda—it’s only one; one is enough.
Yellow hair, blue eyes. She’s on his fingers. His hand reaches under his
shirt, he paints her over his heart. “I’ve been thinking…” she’s saying.
______
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*
*
O
nce upon a time a hen went with a rooster to the nuthouse, and
they agreed that whoever found a way to escape would tell the
other one.
Soon enough, the hen found a very large hole underneath one of the
sinks in the bathroom, but she kept quiet about it because, although she
had an honest face and nice manners, she was often given to irrational
moods and fears. So, one night, while the doctors and the guards were
drinking beer and playing cards, the hen went into the bathroom, climbed
through the hole underneath the sink, and ran away.
It wasn’t very long before she encountered a large stone well at the top
of a hill from which she heard a tremendous crying and groaning. The hen
was filled with a strange curiosity and peered over the edge of the well, but
she lost her footing and fell into the water. Down at the bottom of the well
was a hunchbacked devil, who said, “Now I’ve got you, and now you shall work
hard for me.” And he took her away with him.
The devil gave the hen the most difficult jobs in his kitchen. She was
made to bake bread all day long, and at night she was in charge of
slaughtering the beasts and preparing their meat for the table, while all she
ever got to eat were dumplings that were hard as rocks. “If you do not do as I
wish,” the devil said, “you shall become a black poodle and wear a golden chain
around your neck, and you shall eat live coals until the flames come spewing from your
throat!”
The poor hen had never felt worse or been more tired, not even in the
nuthouse. She made bread all day, and at night she salted the meats for the
table with her own tears. It got so bad that finally an enchanted talking ham
decided to take pity on the poor hen and try to comfort her.
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F/"*K/(9A")*')6*&/"*L'0*
“It seems to me,” said the ham, “that both of us have fallen upon a great
misfortune. I am a handsome prince that has been turned into a honey-glazed ham by a
wicked enchantress, and you are obviously a beautiful princess who has suffered a similar
fate at the hands of someone just as evil.”
“I am not a beautiful princess,” replied the hen. “I am simply a chicken that
escaped from the nuthouse and fell down a deep well.”
“Regardless,” said the talking ham, trying not to get too flustered, “I have
a plan that I think we both can profit from.”
The ham told the hen the secrets of the hunchbacked devil: that he had
three hearts, and that each one gave him a different special power. She need
only cut off a little bit of the magic ham and put it in the devil’s supper and
he would fall into a deep sleep that night. She would then be able to slip
into the devil’s bedroom and cut out one of his hearts. If she was able to
swallow the devil’s heart whole, she would command the powers that that
heart contained.
There was no way to know ahead of time which heart contained which
powers, but the ham and the hen were feeling lucky, so the hen cut a little
piece out of the ham’s side and insinuated it into the devil’s soup.
That night, as expected, when the hen slipped into the devil’s bedroom
he was sound asleep and breathing noisily through his mouth, as devils
often do. The hen then cut the devil open, took out one of the three small
hearts, and swallowed it whole. Before stitching the devil up again, she put
one of her eggs in the place where the heart had been, in hopes that the
devil wouldn’t notice that something funny had happened while he was
sleeping.
The next morning everyone was feeling somewhat out of sorts. The
ham had a pain in his side, the hen had a stomach ache, and the devil
seemed more sluggish than usual. “I don’t feel like breakfast today,” the devil
said to the hen, “but make me something special for my dinner.” And with that, the
devil was off for his morning walk.
Despite their discomfort, the ham and the hen were excited, for they
were still unsure as to what powers the hen now had. The hen tried to wish
the ham back into the prince he claimed he was, but nothing happened. The
hen tried wishing the both of them out of the devil’s castle, but nothing
happened. All morning they tried wishing for different things but nothing
seemed to be happening. “Fat lot of good this heart will do us,” said the hen, “if
we can’t figure out how to use it.”
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Glumly, the hen quit trying to work the magic heart, and she settled
down to make a butterscotch cake for the devil’s dinner. As she worked,
she bemoaned her fate, and she kept thinking of all the things she missed
from the nuthouse: the paintpots and the board games, the wooden blocks
and plastic toys she used to play with.
That evening, as she was sitting down to eat her dumplings, the hen
heard a great ruckus coming from the dining hall.
“What’s this paintpot doing in my cake?” Roared the devil. “And these board
games, and these wooden blocks and plastic toys?”
“Why, they’re presents for you, dear devil, sir. This is the special surprise you asked
for,” replied the hen, for although she was many things, being slow on her
feet was not one of them.
The devil was so pleased with his presents that he didn’t even notice
that the hen had run back into the kitchen to talk to her honey-glazed
friend.
“It seems that you have the power to make things appear in the breads you bake,”
the ham said.
“Big deal,” said the hen, rolling her eyes.
“True,” agreed the ham. “Perhaps you should try swallowing another one of his
hearts.”
TWO
“Chicken cordon bleu for me?” screamed the devil in falsetto as the hen pushed
forward another steaming dish of poisoned food.
“But of course, dear sir. It seems you have acquired a taste for my special ham,”
said the hen.
“Yummanghuuhhgriffthnegig,” said the devil, as he shoveled the food into
his mouth.
“This better work,” said the hen to the ham when she returned to the
kitchen.
“You’re telling me,” said the ham, surveying the growing hole in his side.
The ham and the hen spent the rest of the evening digging through the
hen’s special breads for presents until they were sure it was late enough to
try sneaking into the devil’s bedroom.
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As before, the hen stole into the devil’s bedroom, pulled down the
covers, opened his pajama top, and began sawing away at the devil’s flesh.
“I’m beginning to get a taste for these,” said the hen as she swallowed down
the devil’s second heart.
The clock was just beginning to strike fifteen as the hen returned to the
kitchen, covered in blood, and tossed the butcher’s knife into the metal sink
with a clang.
“Did everything go all right?” asked the ham.
“Yeah, whatever,” said the hen.
“Did you replace the heart with another egg?” asked the ham.
“Yes,” said the hen.
“Do you know what powers you have now?” asked the ham.
“Shut up, I’m tired,” said the hen. And she crawled into her nest of straw
between the molasses and the scouring pads without even washing the
blood off her feathers.
In the morning, one of the devil’s hand-servants arrived in the kitchen
to announce that the devil would not be leaving his bed this morning, and
would like to have his meals sent up to his room.
“We’ll get to it when we’re ready,” said the hen. “Until then, you need to get the
hell out of my kitchen.”
The hand-servant stared at the hen for a minute, realizing that she was
covered with dried blood, and then scurried away.
“Now let’s see what these god-damned hearts can do!” said the hen.
“Are you sure you’re feeling okay?” asked the ham.
“I’m fine,” said the hen. “Now let’s see if we can get ourselves out of here.”
So the hen wished the both of them out of the castle, and poof, they
were out of the castle, sitting on a high grassy hill, looking down on the
castle which was miles away.
And then the hen wished for piles of gold, and poof, they were
surrounded by heaping piles of coins and jewelry.
And then the hen wished the ham back into a prince, and poof, the
ham was still a ham.
“Are you lying to me about this prince business?” asked the hen.
“I am a prince, I really am,” said the ham as he began to cry.
“I suppose you want me to kill the devil and swallow his last heart,” said the hen.
“But I am a prince, I really am. I’m a really really handsome prince,” blubbered
the ham.
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“Shut up,” said the hen. “Just shut the fuck up.”
Back in the kitchen, the hen started sawing away at the ham’s side
again.
“Ow! That hurts!” screamed the ham.
“Can’t have it both ways, you little shit,” said the hen.
“Just hurry,” said the ham. “I’m sure that the devil’s beginning to get suspicious,
and you shouldn’t have yelled at his servant. Who knows what he’s up to now.”
“Don’t worry,” said the hen. “In less than an hour you’ll be back to normal, and
we’ll be miles away, richer than we could hope for in our wildest dreams.”
But, in truth, the hen was hatching other plans. For if the devil died,
and she had acquired all his powers, then there wasn’t any good reason to
leave this huge and gorgeous castle. In fact, she thought, it wouldn’t be such
a bad life to have my own bedroom and a house full of servants catering to
my every whim. Suddenly, it occurred to her that the only thing standing in
the way of her new and glorious life was the talking ham himself, and his
knowledge of the secret power of the hearts.
“I’m going to take this to the devil myself,” said the hen, and she left the
kitchen with a silver tray of ham and eggs and began to climb the stairs to
the devil’s bedroom.
The poor sad devil had never looked so frail. He was propped up with
several pillows trying to do the crossword in the newspaper.
“Here’s your breakfast,” said the hen.
“I don’t think I’m very hungry today,” said the devil.
“I think you are,” said the hen. And with one deft move she took the
hamsteak from the silver platter and shoved it, and her entire fist, down the
devil’s throat.
THREE
The hen gave a little shiver as she swallowed down the last of the devil’s
hearts whole. And, because she was gaining a certain sick pride at a job well
done, she replaced the last heart with another egg and carefully stitched the
devil’s chest back up, even though she was sure that the devil was now
completely dead and would only be thrown into a hole in the garden before
the day was over. The hen then took a long hot bath in the devil’s marble
bathtub, dressed herself in one of the devil’s terrycloth bathrobes, and
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F/"*K/(9A")*')6*&/"*L'0*
walked back down into the kitchen to deal with the last loose end—her
honey-glazed former friend.
“I was beginning to get worried,” said the ham.
“You’re getting smarter, then,” said the hen.
“Isn’t it time we got going?” asked the ham, beginning to tremble just the
slightest bit at his friend’s new attitude and appearance.
“We’re not going anywhere,” said the hen. “Why should I leave, when I have all
these powers and all this wealth?”
“But I don’t have any powers, and I’m still a ham!” exclaimed the ham.
“Well, I’ll turn you back into a prince,” said the hen, “but I’m afraid I can’t let
you go free, for how can I trust that you won’t tell the next poor slob who comes along
about the secret of my powers.”
“But I won’t, I swear,” said the ham.
“Why not?” asked the hen. “You betrayed the devil, didn’t you?”
The ham just stared at the hen in terrified silence.
“I will keep my promise and turn you back into a prince, but then you will be
banished to the dungeon to live out the rest of your days,” said the hen. And she
closed her eyes and began to chant the transformation spell that the last
heart had taught her, all the while jumping up and down and flapping her
wings in the air.
It wasn’t long before the kitchen filled with a thick, cloying smoke and
everyone in the castle began to hear an otherworldly screaming.
“What have you done to me?,” screamed the former ham, flailing his arms
about.
“I turned you back into a prince,” said the hen, staring into the face of a
handsome prince.
“But what about the rest of me?” squealed the former ham.
The hen was about to ask the prince what he was talking about, but as
the smoke cleared she realized that she wasn’t looking at a handsome prince
standing in front of her, she was looking at the top half of a handsome
prince that was resting on a wooden cutting board.
“Maybe your bottom half materialized inside the devil?” suggested the hen,
now feeling strangely uneasy. “We did feed an awful lot of you to him, didn’t we?”
The half-prince could only gurgle in disbelief.
“I’ll just have to go back upstairs, cut your other half out of the devil’s belly, and
sew your two parts together,” said the hen, trying to make the best of a suddenly
complicated situation.
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But, as it turns out, she never got the chance. For just as she was
reaching for the butcher’s knife in the sink, the not-nearly-as-dead-asanyone-had-thought devil entered the kitchen.
“What’s going on in here?” roared the devil.
“She’s trying to destroy us both!” yelled the half-prince.
“And I’ve swallowed all three of your hearts, you fucker,” screamed the hen. “So
there’s nothing either one of you can do to stop me.”
And the hen rose up to twice her height, and her eyes began spinning
like pinwheels, and her feathers started shooting sparks, and she was about
to banish both the half-prince and the devil to the depths of Hell when
suddenly the most amazing thing happened.
You see, unbeknownst to all of them, the eggs in the devil’s chest had
been incubating, and just as the hen was about to work her dirty magic,
three small chicks began to peck their way out of the devil’s chest. The sight
of these three unexpected children suddenly poking out of the devil’s
pajama top startled the hen so badly that she vomited up all three of the
magic hearts and they landed on the floor in front of everyone.
The room fell silent for a single shining moment. And then the chicks
started screaming as everyone dove for the floor, punching and clawing,
trying to swallow as many of the hearts as they could.
FOUR
Meanwhile, the rooster had finally found the hole underneath the sink and
escaped from the nuthouse.
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F/'&*.%("G$=8*D,2().*&/().*.$)"*/$G"%().*
*
What will she sing, now that his mouth
has fallen slack? She casts needles
beneath purer grace
notes and elided sibilants, the slide
of glass on wound steel. You hear
a bird on the record, accidental,
waking the dog, who kicks. Imagine
some feathers, worm heads, the precariousness
of claws on sills. Imagine Tennessee and sixguns
on backroads. You hear me, that hum,
but too what’s under
it all, steadiness, thrum. Fineness
in shadow. I’m running my hands. Parson,
plowman, what ideal runs
over this pale boy in gaudy suit,
emmylou this hickory into
that one and only cadence, the boom
of flung torsos, one which collides
and one a bird beneath tire treads, or
wingless, or pitching sheeps
into noon like dumpster donuts,
always a small gift, always unexpected.
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____________________________________________________________
@",$M*&/"*N"6*
*
Where I am. Forgot the specific angle and wattage
of recurring red light (spinning
police siren / neon sputter / siren again). Lost the fiction,
the canvassed location (this or that motel). A name
inverted, to mean something else. My own:
slim gogo agent. You were. And that matters. Kissing me
with chocolate in your mouth, or tequila, stutters
of small redemption, sidewalk cracks which maybe hold
what we lose. What’s valuable. I held. You, hanging.
I have sat here with this same chipped cup for years,
never stopped being thirsty or started
to articulate your going missing. There is a crime scene
photograph I’ll never see; spattered head-on-wall-onfilm. Millimeter and motion caught there, left
wanting, thinking motel. Thinking, one small finger in my cunt.
My own. To get rid of. It’s Wichita, nine days straight. It’s
a blackout. It’s the feel of bleached sheets
beneath me. It’s hideous, your eye long exploded, the blackness
of the blown pupil which seemed only to see sorrow. And music,
pop song, stupid radio song. Your funny eye and crushed
cheekbone and the AM mono from the side of the vibrating
bed. Kansas. Arizona. The lover who is not a lover. The lover
who has shot the best of his head out. That I should
need that line. Again. But under this vanished man, beneath
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this breaking and delicate skull, below the violent end
is something that pulls me closer, hand over
candle flame, five years later. Did you pose before
the metal hand which reached for you? Which took
you out? (Incident or performance/middle eight
which leads back / makes headlines / makes chorus makes
resolution.) Kansas wilts and scorches. I will not.
*
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1#%#?#?#'#(###?#9#)#=#3#9#&#
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K$)&'()0")&*
*
What you wanted—a place for the disparate, severed
but replete with a something (a wanting?), object:
physique d’ephemer, a shutter blown back. Scattered furniture.
A cobbled street, something still beneath smoke
and water. You too could fracture into malleability,
into mere agitation. You are a spark, he a mirror.
There was Philadelphia, two days of a steady
rain. Cornell’s boxes at the museum, glasses of something,
a tumble into the street, all shame and stockings
torn at the knee. Is it what we don’t speak
that we can’t forget? And your sherry eyes
whiskey the sidewalk. You are sparks, mirrored,
god a dog who wants to be stroked. To see one’s self
dreaming is terrible and endless, refracting mirror
after mirror after mirror. You only wanted
a soft bed, a place to put these things
that wouldn’t fit. These very things
are what you love, parceled: feather, letter,
small doorframe. Then birds fly out of the box,
dreams scattering half across Italy in fog.
______
!/,#
K$)&'()0")&*
You want to be happy? There are more
important things. What you love only seems locked
into his handsome face—vanished and vanishing.
His green eyes. Before his mirror you know he never
wanted you here, brushing your teeth in his sink,
all these boring bits of you and of him, only separate
and thus sadder. (A fear of endings
is a crisis of faith, enigma of glass cubes, ephemera
of silica, dust, penny arcade.) His arm
betrays him by leaving the small of your back,
then his back by turning to you on the train
through Jersey. This is how things get known
and broken (bewilderment at the disappeared
pattern). Once, he came to you, then left
without spark or mirror, headed north, a collection
of pieces, faceted glass. His dream walks the remnants
of your own. He is present here too, as something
still. He writes upon waking, she burned the thing
that stopped her going back. He is resonance itself
as you are distance, what you never wanted,
accumulations of useless, haunted things (chosen)
in your apartment, in his (as boxes), scatterings.
*
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D%$0*&/"*6(.(&',*?$=%)',*
*
February 12th and winter an empty
threat. Summer greened us in, convertible
tops, lime. At ideological retread
seminars, day campers peed
their short sets and we changed them
into anonymous poly blends.
There is nothing slower than turning
from you, from them. Car wheels
on gravel mixed with snow, the outer
borders of the state and its rehabilitations.
May you never leave what you are about
to love. The city smells again of sulfur
from the outposts, and I’ve been waiting for
that song to enter the tubes of the jerryrigged
radio, for that tex-mex AM revolution
of this-is-how-it-goes. Your uniform never
more handsome than in a heap
on the dashboard I imagine carries you
past the checkpoint. Inside somewhere,
the children wait for the rain to stop.
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&
A battalion of blondes and their hairless
captain of desperation take the wrong trail
in a sold-out nightmare,
gasping for light,
sharpening gray bayonets and eating
breakfast out of half pint-sized cans.
In the sand near the water,
amid the melange of lorry tracks,
cracked spectacles, roots and thorns,
a tender worm migrates
through this movie of absolution.
Focus on the detour past a pair
of shabby, tightly-laced jungle boots.
No wings anywhere.
Something must be waiting
under the rocks at the gate,
Scratching words in the universe:
never never never never
arrive.
______
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$#%#&#&#'###(#)#*#*#)#+#,#-#
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!"#$%&'()*"
"
Why can’t I be cleansed?
By cleansed I mean something more important
happening to me.
John the Baptist could cleanse me
but they cut his head off just for fun.
and going to Jesus is exhausting.
Must I be touched
by the hands of an innocent,
whose life is indescribable,
before I can no longer feel
the hole in my vessel?
I don’t see the difference
between restitution and renewal.
Bright orange gulags
inherit the swag.
Can love cleanse?
The right kind.
Can other people be your salvation?
Maybe.
I see these old couples on TV
(my only contact with the aged).
The woman is in a hospital bed,
eyes closed, the picture of serenity,
hooked up to the dying machine.
The doctor pronounces the words:
“There’s nothing we can do.”
The man begins to cry.
It’s been forty years since he last cried.
______
!""#
!"#$%&'()*"
He confesses he’s not ready
for her to go yet.
The cockatoo will keep saying her name.
The doctor’s eyes move.
“There is one other option.
A new procedure, very experimental.
We could attach you both
to the dying machine.”
The old man keeps saying her name
but he isn’t looking at her
or listening to the doctor.
What was her name?
Something that sounds like rise or lies.
They’d been taking long walks
when the sun was about to come up.
They hardly slept.
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4$$6*:(P%'&($)8*
*
There was the propeller
and there was the bowl of acid.
They both had black hair
and I tried to ravish them,
they looked so graceful and inviting.
There was the Amazon breast nailed to the front door,
blood dripping onto the welcome mat.
She must have hit star-69.
If I was ever going to rise up, something yellow has to happen.
Is it possible to ridicule beauty?
A dead crow lay in the parking lot,
flat as a no from god,
one suspicious wing aflutter in the breeze.
An old friend stopped by for coffee.
Coming up for air, he said,
and there were tears in his eyes from the smell.
This was by no means a normal Saturday afternoon.
My lungs weren’t dipped in boiling copper.
I didn’t sit on the couch in my underwear
cleaning the shotgun and watching cartoons.
I sipped my harmless coffee, made goo-goo eyes at eternity,
waited for night to pull up to the gate
and honk its horn.
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@%""6().*')6*5""6().*
*
I would just as soon not eat. It’s a pain in the ass. I wish I could take a jar of
paste three times a day like a good astronaut and get all the nutrition I need.
Maybe that’s where we’ll end up, but for now I eat the regular stuff. Peanut
butter, broccoli, milk, tongue, crackers, black beans. I feel like I’m feeding.
It’s disgusting, I eat so fast. My ex-girlfriend used to say—we’d be sitting at
the table—“Did you even taste it?” She’d give me the you’ve-got-tochange-this-behavior look. Right through my eyes to the back of my skull. I
had to get out of that relationship. Sometimes I dine with people, they look
up, I’ve cleaned my plate, I’m sipping my water (I love water). They say,
“What the hell?” I know, I eat fast, it’s disgusting. They’ve barely had time
to spread their butter and bug the waitress for more syrup. I can’t help it. I
want to get it over with and go on with my life. Am I afraid the food will
abandon me? When I was a kid my father would take the whole family out
to Ponderosa Steak House. I was named after the owner, who was a man
my father admired. We’d go through the line, order number four or number
six, sit down to eat. He’d always start in on everyone else’s dinner when he
finished his own. That hairy forearm coming across the table like a missile.
We had to sit there and take it. My mother said, “Dave, why don’t you leave
them kids’ food alone?” “We’ll get ‘em another one,” he grunted. Which
never happened. The trick was to shove the steak and French fries down
your neck before he could get his mitts on them. That’s why I eat faster
than a slot machine. But I’m clean. Don’t let anyone tell you different. If
you sat me down to lunch with my namesake and the ex-girlfriend, I
wouldn’t spill a thing. She could tell him how long I’ve been waiting to
meet him. How proud I am to be named after a steak house baron. He’ll
pick up the check. Pay off all my student loans. On the way home the exgirlfriend whispers in my ear. Soft. Inhuman. She’ll try to end the famine in
my blood. Somebody bless her. Before she opens her eyes.
*
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*
*
*
D
ozens of people walking down Bishop Street one morning, if they
looked at all skyward in their busy scuttles, would have seen a
naked man dangling from a window ledge. But they did not have
to be especially observant, as the man, one Dan Redomsky, began to yell
for help and kick his spindly legs about, striking his knees inadvertently
against the cold, hard granite façade. Letting out little yelps and intermittent
ouches, Dan was soon drawing attention to himself, so much so that a
crowd began to gather eighty feet below him, at street level. Some shouted
up to him, “Jump!” and then laughed with their friends at their cleverness,
not noticing that their suggestion was impossible, for Dan had nothing to
jump from, since his feet were swishing around in the air and not planted
on a ledge; and one woman was heard to say, perhaps not as quietly as she’d
have liked, “Mm, cute buns.” Seeing that she was overheard, she covered
her mouth with a hand and scurried off down the street, the only person on
Bishop that January morning with a red face.
“Help!” Dan called out, bringing the attention back to him.
Unfortunately, the security for the building was very tight, and none of the
passersby who stopped to see the naked man hanging from a building was
allowed inside to go up and save him. The security pointed out that in order
to get inside one needed to have a badge.
“Do you have a badge?” they asked the group.
“No,” the group admitted, and then gloomily turned away.
Dan’s fingers were surely tiring; ditto his arms and shoulders. The
weight of his, let’s face it, chubby body would before long be too much. He
could now be seen to be trying to hoist himself up back to the window, his
arms shivering with effort and futility. No one could say how long he had
been hanging that way, but it must not have been long, since he wasn’t yet a
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splat on the pavement. Hearing the effort in his grunts and the weariness
that seemed to be ever increasing, fretful pedestrians once again asked the
security if there was not something that could be done. Perhaps they, the
security, could go help? Or maybe they could call someone?
“Now, now, now,” the security said, adjusting the hats on their heads,
which were in danger of being blown off by the wind. “What good would
that do? By the time we get up there, he’ll be back inside and tying the laces
on his shoes. It’s just a prank, and the only way to stop a prankster is to not
give him the attention he’s after. Right?”
The crowd all agreed that, yes, that was so. “But all the same,” one said,
“would it not be a good idea to have someone pull the man up, just in case
he’s not joking?”
The security, curling up their fingers in theatrical frustration, yelled,
“That’s just what he wants us to do!” They then turned around, went back
inside the revolving doors, and sat in their big comfy chairs to sip coffee
and talk of important matters, leaving the crowd, collectively, alone.
One of the old ladies in the crowd (there were many) turned to the
group and said, “Does anybody know how to scale walls?” They all
admitted that, no, they could not scale walls, at least not without some
ropes and safety helmets. So then they were left there pondering other
alternatives, whilst Dan Redomsky continued to kick and flail and lose his
grip.
One new man passing along the street, Pirro Soporo, the only man in
the entire city to be actually wearing a fedora, a man whose adjectival
description could only in all honesty be the word “mysterious,” stopped
and asked what the hubbub was. Apprised of the nude gentleman clutching
onto a windowsill for dear life and of the insufficient help of the security,
Mr. Soporo tossed his parcels and fedora aside, spat in his palms, rubbed
his hands together, and sprinted toward the wall. Coming within three feet
of the wall he then jumped, sailed the rest of the distance to the building’s
front, and made a mad scratch for the niches wherein the granite blocks
were adhered to one another with cement. It was no good. His fingers were
too stubby and the nooks were too small. He gave up within a few
moments, reclaimed his hat and parcels, and promised to write a letter to
the company on behalf of the nude man, regarding the poorness of the
wall’s climbability.
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As Pirro Soporo walked off into the horizon, the crowd returned their
gazes to Dan Redomsky, who had, at some point during the moments since
they’d last looked, managed to get his feet into a crevice and take some of
the weight off of his arms. He perched there, his body at a bizarre sixtydegree angle, his hairy end sticking out like a figurehead, swaying back and
forth as he got into the most comfortable position possible. The throng let
out relieved sighs, hoping that this turn of events would somehow buy Dan
Redomsky more time to find a way back inside, or for them to get up there
and rescue him.
The matter at hand, it seemed to them, was to somehow find a way up
there without alerting the security of their presence. Perhaps, one suggested,
they could find a fire escape round back that would let them in. But no,
everyone agreed, most buildings of this size do not have rickety metal
structures connected to the windows a hundred feet up. So then one
suggested that maybe they should go across the street and call the police;
and that perhaps the police could override the security and save the day.
Sadly though, there were many escaped convicts and uncaught criminals in
the group, and no one was too keen on calling the coppers.
Snapping his fingers and bulging his eyes, one of the shorter men in the
back cried out, “Why don’t we just charge through the door, all of us, and
force our way past the security?” Everyone thought a moment, trying to
come up with a reason why that was a such a stupid idea and why did he
even say it, but none could be found; and so, grouped together like a flock
of birds, old and frail Missus Cosima Ne the head duck, they burst through
the doorway, toppled over the security in their Barco Loungers, and
stormed the elevator. Once inside the elevator, after admiring its sepulcherlike ornamentation, Cosima asked, not unwisely, “Which floor is he hanging
from?” Everyone inside the elevator wheezed; no one knew. No one
except, that is, Fabrizio Goodman, who fortunately enough possessed a
photographic memory and was able to recount that it was the one, two,
three, four, five, sixth flight up; to which Cosima replied by pressing the
nice round 6 halfway up the list on the elevator panel.
In spite of that, the helpful pedestrians on their way to save Dan
Redomsky were not out of the woodwork yet. During their time counting
floors in their head and remembering from which window up Dan was
hanging, the security had roused and sneakily placed their hands over the
elevator’s doors, rendering them uncloseable. The fiends, with their
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espressos’ brown stains still sending up wisps of steam into their eyes,
chortled to each other and grabbed, forcefully, bodily, reprehensibly, poor
frail old spinster Cosima Ne right by the neck of her argyle sweater. No
amount of haymakers from her heavy horsehide purse was able to get their
brawny grips to loosen or, much less, give way.
“Go on without me!” she importuned. “I’ll only get in the way. I’ve had
a good long life, I’ve seen as many presidents and Olympics as I need.
What’s another four years? Nothing. Go ahead. Go.” Oh, but Gordon
Wisteria, a sandhog by trade, refused to vouchsafe the old woman to the
security. Rolling up the wet sleeves of his worn cotton flannel shirt, baring
his brown crooked teeth, he tackled the security with his arms spread out
and his feet pointed together, like a horizontal high-dive, bringing them
down hard, chipping one of his own eyeteeth as they all three crumpled on
the cool marble floor, Cosima Ne standing disoriented, clutching onto her
purse as if it were a teddy bear. The security was out cold, their mouths in
pouts, their arms and legs touching each other on interdicted places.
Cosima Ne, with her jib now concluded, scurried back to the elevator,
waving Gordon Wisteria in alongside her, and pressed the loopty-loop of a
6 again, this time bringing the doors to a close with a ping of servitude.
Once closed, the sovereignty of the elevator was usurped uncontested by
Iain Kozumplik, who was by far the tallest person in the group at 7´1˝ and
who solely could identify the Muzak dinking in the elevator as the
synthesizer’s imitation of traffic noises, intended of course to coax and
acclimate jumpy commuters as they made the adjustment to corporate
interaction. Once knowing this, the group happily sang along with the
chorus, “Honk, honk,” until the composition was cut short by another ping
and they found themselves, sadly, already to the sixth floor. Iain suggested
that they consult a directory in the hopes of finding which office belonged
to Dan Redomsky, whom they knew exclusively as the Naked Man Hanging
From a Window. When it was pointed out to Iain that they did not know
the man’s name, he paused, rubbed the black bristles of his chin stubble,
and remarked that perhaps they should inquire into this manner with
someone on the floor, most preferably a receptionist. “Executive
Assistant,” corrected a voice from the back. Iain apologized for the gaffe to
the space in front of him, peopled with office plants and breakaway walls,
and pointed ahead to a woman with a black set of earphones and a
microphone thereon attached, which had been bent in such a way to curve
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around her cheek and rest opposite her lips. Her burnt-orange chemise
matched the color of her hair, which was conspicuously dyed within the
past few days or so, the color stains on her forehead and around her ears
giving her away.
To her Iain said, “Quick, where’s the naked man’s office?”
“Whose?”
“I haven’t time for repetition. The man, naked, hanging out a window:
which room is it? We’ve come to save him.”
“Hmm. I wasn’t aware of any nude persons dangling from a window.
Let me check.” She pressed a hand to her earphone and dialed up a number
on her out-of-date phone. “Florence? It’s Alice. Are there any naked men
hanging from a window?” A pause. “Yes, I think it’s this floor. Hold on.”
She covered the mouthpiece and leaned toward Iain and the group.
“Yes it’s this floor!” Iain yelled.
“Please don’t listen in on my conversations.” She uncovered the
mouthpiece. “Yes, the sixth floor. Uh-huh. O.K. All right. Well, you don’t
say? And how old was he? Ha, the same thing happened to my Harold
when he was two. Yes, it was just a few months before he got out of it;
don’t worry. All right, dear. O.K. All right.” She pressed a button on her
phone and looked back to Iain. “Seventh floor.” Everyone in the band gave
Fabrizio Goodman dirty looks, and it was all he could do not to cry.
Displaying the decisive action that earned him his leadership, Iain
Kozumplik made a scramble for the nearest window, flung it open, and
stuck out his head. From there he could see Dan Redomsky, nude and
turning blue from the cold, hanging on with his last bit of strength, his fat
undulating in his rear and belly, his toes wiggling as a stretch from being
strained against the wall for so long. “Do not despair!” Iain yelled up to
him. “We’re on our way. Which office is it?”
Dan cried down to Iain, “734: Dan Redomsky. Hurry!”
Iain threw the window closed, turned around with his jacket fluttering
behind him like a superhero’s cape, and strode to his compatriots,
elucidating them with his newfound knowledge of Dan Redomsky.
And they were to the stairs in a moment, fighting over whom would be
first up the stairway. Iain and Cosima began to scuffle, grabbing each
other’s eyeglasses and trying to pry them off the other’s head. Cosima’s
horn-rimmed glasses, Iain’s wire-oval frames: both flew into the air and
twirled like a gyroscope until they came down and splintered against the
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cement of the stairwell. As everyone watched this transpire, mouths agape,
young Billy Wisse, eleven, climbed over the awestruck clan and bounded up
the stairs. Seeing him, the followers of Dan Redomsky scampered up the
stairs, a throng of voyeurs, and came at last to room 734, whose oak slab
door was shut and decorated with cutouts from the Funnies taped to it.
There they found Dan Redomsky, eyes bright and a piano-key smile
across his face, fully dressed in a lavender suit, putting the finishing touches
on his outfit by tying the laces of his soft leather shoes. Later, over a round
of drinks, they all agreed that it was for the best, that had they come into his
office and found him holding onto the windowsill, flung out there into the
cold, naked, they would not have wanted very much to pull him in anyway.
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*
clew: 1. A ball of yarn or thread. 2. Greek Mythology The ball of thread used
by Theseus to find his way out of the labyrinth. 3. clews The cords by
which a hammock is suspended. 4. also Nautical a. One of the two lower
corners of a square sail. b. The lower aft corner of a fore-and-aft sail. c. A
metal loop attached to the lower corner of a sail.
1:
This time zone is sleeping.
Shhh. the light comes.
6:
Sissy Spacek moves towards us
Through the wheat fields, wearing
A backpack, listening to cassettes.
She gestures up. The Kevin Kline we know from
Film is one dark dash below the parachute.
They are ready to take on the roles of Mom and Dad.
7:
A child walks into a whale
With eyes that light up red
In a museum featuring
Biblical scenes: Jonah, leprosy, spirits
Of demons pulled right out of pigs.
9:
Where did you expect me
To be going? The firehouses all
Lit up in neon, the kittens
Demanding only the best crystal
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Litter. We are underwater
Now, you and I.
In the air, it is said, we can breathe.
It is projected we will be able to but
The necessary
Is it
I see you bend your finger.
How do you do that. No, really,
Hello, how do you do.
12:
The plumber shoves this box to reach the pipes.
13:
Dad is watching Mom make dinner.
She has a wooden spoon in her hand. Her hand is on her hip.
The peppers sizzle in the skillet. The ground
Meat, a heap in the green bowl on the counter.
They have had that green bowl since they were married.
The bowl is eighteen years old.
14:
Here we are on the bumpy caravan
Riding past the people with arms growing
Out of their stomachs, the harpies and the wrens
With their wren-size lion heads. This is a place with
A Priest named John. This is his kingdom.
There are giants in the mountains and talking pigs
That know where the cherries grow
With heavy pits of gold.
15:
Behind her back, Dad
Fills the dishwasher and squeezes in the lemony goo.
Mom mashes olives with a fork to saltines
That she feeds Dad from the TV table. His cold is worse
Tonight. The sparrows snap their heads from left to right
And bite the pillbugs. Mom draws a bath. Dad finishes
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It off and wipes his mouth. The flowers in the window
Give fragrance. A washcloth. The rabbit paw fern shudders
As the heat kicks on. I come into the room from far
Away and touch one of these tendrils, the gray fur of
The rhizome reaching at its own speed into the room.
20:
There’s a bear standing in the road
Watching us approach.
Mom tells him to get in the car
And please keep quiet so
She can concentrate.
22:
You may taste three of the flavors.
And then you may go forth
And discuss the ones you neglected
To select. Dad will be on his throne
As Father to hear what you say to
Mom as Mother. You are the first
To witness your own life. There’s nothing
But physics when you get down to it.
Speed and the amount of it in the light.
24:
Mom washes your face.
She holds your forehead
As you lose your lunch. She is
Hovering above the whole house in a recline
Of nervous glamour. Dad mulches the
Yew branches and comes
Inside for a glass of lemonade.
You lie on the chicken
Pox couch, as Lily Tomlin,
Covered in calamine lotion.
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26:
Reader, let’s sit in the mud for a moment
And look for miniature snail shells.
Discarded, they are the cups
Of tiny people who live in the backyard
In moss and grass. They are genuinely small.
About the size of one eighth of your finger.
Their bones are like shark’s, the skeleton
Is actually cartilage, so they only bend
When you step on them. Before Dad
Does the mowing, though, I like to give
Them a warning.
27:
The Christmas lights blink segments in the trees.
28:
Who you knew was interested in more than
Just a getting to know you session. Who was
In over his head, who was up in arms. How can you
Confirm that you are being held. You can’t.
29:
I walk up the street with
Your hand in mine. We are now lovers.
It’s excellent. Unhitched gate
To a gallery behind the gentleman’s club.
All the landscapes we’ve only imagined take off their
Frames and call birds to them. Badlands bellows
“Robin, come rest in my mountainside!
Come move among my humps!”
Painted Desert calls:
“Canadian geese, I’ll stroke your neck with
My petrified wood!”
And then Grand Tetons whispers
To the sparrows who tentatively arrive
In the summer wind.
The sparrows hover above the yard, waiting.
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Your hand hovers in mine waiting.
My mind hovers over your hand.
“Okay” I say. “Okay.”
30:
In the sun is an animal with seven French
Horns, a personal acupuncturist, and enough
Torpedoes to take out Venus. We learn
This from the Bible, and immediately the Today show
Sends a Crew. They row fastest and get the scoop.
When the animal decides to make its move, we get
The first step on film. We get the second step on film
As well, and the rowers wipe their mouths.
Mom brings us another bag of chips in the backyard.
And Kool Aid, tropical — we watch the show
through publicists, pinholes.
33:
Some shows had bright color
That would pull into a comet —
Naugahyde-upholstered seat
Round like a mitt, with a silver
Coated, three pronged, base
Oiled for maximum spin.
The spin was silent. The room was beige
With a carpet of burning
Colors hung on wall.
And the center of gravity
In me somersaulting
And ratcheting me up like a car in heat
One loose leg to kick the rug to kick to kick
Around faster and around and faster.
I could hear their kind voices
In the fizz of rectangular light.
34:
Place Deborah Norville’s career
In a field of purple wildflowers.
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36:
Two mentioned
Were lovers. The same two continue
To keep secrets from you, reader, and hide
In the bushes, front yard. Watch the shadows as
The Christmas lights begin blinking.
The magicians will arrive in their magic
Cars that run on hope and they will
Point away. Agatha Christie
Combs brambles from the silky
Coats of her yappy little dogs,
Lifts her head, and smiles at you.
37:
Reader, I propose that you had or have
A front and backyard as we all do on television.
With hollyberry bearing trees,
Yewberry bearing trees, landscaping,
Textured mulch pound bags, a driveway, a car.
This is the meter and anything else is
Measured more or less.
I mean America empirically.
The building you lived in,
Your first kiss folds into the story
And reminds you of a movie.
Think about your collarbone
Feel it there a solid thing that
With its citrus, antennae, buckyballs, prairie dogs,
Diane Sawyer on her raft and the grand river’s expanse.
Its suggestion of graced flow
For flow’s sake alone through
The remarkable random slopes and gullies
Of America and its shirt of embracing intentions.
Remember the glacier and what it did
To the marigolds?
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39:
This is Mom as a City or Town.
This is Dad as his own Register of Deeds.
The town council draws maps
And unveils a new Wendy’s franchise.
The citizens go bananas and plant so many
Celebratory bulbs—
The municipality is illuminated like
The whole place is on fire.
41:
Jane Pauley in a pool filling with the light of dusk
One arm rests on the rocking, transparent raft.
She kicks her way to the ladder, breathing.
45:
Dead Dad will be played by Disneyworld’s
Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Those first spins
Take you by surprise, but
I see Mr. Toad checking his pocket watch
From the corner of my eye.
Mom is climbing that big silver
Ball that stands for EPCOT.
Get down we cry to her.
Get down right now.
Mom stands next to us silently
And I see she bought a keychain
Depiction of Mr. Toad’s jalopy.
46:
Never you mind. I have a button
That pushed whispers
You to sleep, holds you,
Pulls the string of your words
Loose, fastens it
From your mouth to
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48:
The way the pencil sharpener smelled.
The way the vote turns on feelings.
The way a crutch feels in your armpit and how it lets you fly.
50:
Sometimes there is something not human
In the middle, like a dog that sees things
Differently. Here’s a personal story:
When I took “Old Yeller” out
Of the Cherry Hill public library in elementary school,
There was a paper inside that said if
I wanted a blow job I could call this number
And ask for one. Did I. No.
51:
Behind her back, he
Fills the dishwasher and squeezes in.
Kelly butters saltines. She feeds him
The TV table. Kevin’s cold is worse
And bite the rabbit. The fern shudders.
The heat kicks.
52:
It’s all okay, the whole time,
Betty White was frying up bologna
In the center square
Keeping it warm there and safe with provisions.
You can visit the Museum of Television and Radio.
You can watch it happen again.
57:
Mom stands by
As the stranger shakes upside-down
In the elevator. He coughs up
The cherry-flavor gummy fish
That was choking him.
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61:
His cold is worse
Their small heads fit in your mind.
The rabbit shudders
As the heat kicks San Francisco into pieces,
Into the wide Sargasso Sea.
62:
Let your hair down, Katherine Hepburn,
Let us climb in
To your Connecticut mansion
Where the fireplaces
Are confidently burning.
Here she comes with another armload of logs.
Reader, rest here awhile,
On the carpet, your hands to the flames.
The stilled frames from
The African Queen
And Bringing Up Baby
Are themselves tonight, as it is night.
Here, behind the sofa,
One shy cinematographer
Places a purple
Lens over the room.
64:
The pool is getting up
Out of its in-ground concrete surroundings,
It’s moving like a grand ghost, silver
Slippered around the backyard. Touching
The pine trees, their viscous sap
The ivy, the pool is standing blind
To the baby rabbits running at it
In ecstatic madness, nosing it, the squirrels
Too they are thirsty they are thirsty
Mom under the table is thinking about the bills.
The ducks and their bills in their sky are diving down
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And flying through in bursts.
The boys that I will kiss are in the water.
The cooled voices of the anchors
Are holding the water to the ground.
The pool stands still and shudders against the voices.
It stands still and Mom is still.
Come reader let’s swim. If buoyancy
Is still here then we can float in this.
We can swim in the pool as it gets to know the yard
And readies to explore the town. We can
Ride the crest. Shots were fired. The eagle has landed
In your hair and is lifting us up
To the tops of the waters.
67:
North of the pools is a six-sided pavilion.
From the television she gazes at herself with
Compassion, intention and contemplative joy. The story is a harsh one.
The boy and his brother were beaten down with sticks.
The gum would never wash out. The chickens in the
Processing plant had not come to know kindness
Or been in the audience of love. The brothers
Eventually triumph and the chickens make them stronger.
69:
When the barn doors open, and mom and dad leave.
When the barn doors open and the cats leave
And the cows leave, and their calves, and the trees too leave as they
Do in spring, when they become what they could only be
Now that heat allows the sap up. From the TV room,
Dad listens to Mom
Put the dishes away.
70:
Joan and Stan
Were their names in my case.
Like arbitrary noun genders in another language.
I would like to learn yours.
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To unlearn my Joan and Stan
And see another pair
For what they accidentally are.
I will be
Your lover
If you let me
Up from my chair.
Please let me stand and let me
Put down this newspaper held
Between us. All you can see of me so far
Is a silhouette.
Please don’t be frightened
When you see I am only
72:
The kids run to catch their buses.
Mom as Moonstruck’s Cher,
Stands in the corner of the room
Holding a cool wet washcloth
Which itself holds
The curve of Dad’s forehead.
78:
Mom and Dad hold their kids to the sun.
The kids hold sheets
Of black paper with pinholes
And through, on white, a point of light.
Now, under the magnifying glass,
The sun finally begins to burn.
The sun is not your friend.
The sun is not your mother your father your lover.
The sun will explode and take everything and not even know it.
80:
Dad’s cold is worse tonight. The role of love
Takes a spoon to the ice cream and opens his hand.
Mom kisses him.
Dad tries to lift his head to her.
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85:
Prickly heat on your neck in the summer when you
Have been sitting in the humidity, when Mom was
Standing by the tree, when the tiki torches lit
Themselves. There’s Mom crying. What can we do
For her to make her feel better.
What can the pool do for her.
What can the grocery store do but offer itself
Up. One child descends and puts
The laundry in the hamper.
Let Mom be played by Candace Bergen.
Let Mom be played by Mom.
86:
And those aren’t kisses. Who gets their obituary
Big. Like a fruit, like the expansion of space.
Dad what are you doing here? I thought
Your audition was over.
89:
The marigolds shed their parasol seeds and the magic happens
Again with water, the roots rocket down the fist of new leaf punches up.
91:
Breathing underwater now.
Relax, this is how the anemones
Do it, through the skin.
92:
The stain on her professorial blouse, probably coffee.
The papers strewn by me on
The floor I dropped them by his desk
To look up to sneak up
The sleeve of his loose t-shirt
His warm buttered bicep and further up and under
Curlicue of jet black hair smoky goodness.
I put the papers in a stack. I got an “A.”
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93:
There isn’t a door. One body against yours. It is one
Body and yours is another. Fingers tap together
The way organs play together.
Harmonize, allow a life.
94:
There isn’t a keyhole.
There isn’t a door.
97:
Here is a roll of quarters for the arcade.
98:
Are you able
To break love down into its constituent parts.
A cradle. A pinwheel. A basket. A cargo ship.
A plastic lemon on the end of a tether.
An anchor lodged in the mud.
99:
I mean America empirically everywhere including all over the body.
You can’t.
Your collarbone.
100:
The role of love will be played by
Dad wrestling his two sons up
Into the air which will be played by water,
Which will be played by Mom’s tears
Not even aware of themselves still inside
Her when she was a girl
Like her adult teeth and the eggs that would become
My brother and me. The atoms move around
Like skee balls thrown with all Dad’s skill
On the boardwalk up the lane up
Into the fifty-point hole, one after another.
The night owls hoot in all the forests of the earth,
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Turning their heads almost all the way
Around. They fly
Into the fifty-point hole to take a look around.
The kids are starting to spin
In their spinning chairs and they are laughing and dizzy.
The tickets are starting to spit
Out of the arms of dad’s waiting room chair.
Throw hard with care.
Let the ball go up and roll right on in and
Dim the electric light.
You have enough tickets to get on before
The best part is over. With the explosion,
The plants shudder, less, then less, then less.
There is stillness.
Their stillness is horror.
Dad’s hand’s stillness is horror.
Take your tickets and hurry on in.
The role of love will be played by your entrance.
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____________________________________________________________
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*
*
*
F
irst there was a girl sitting on a stump. Her father said wait here, so
she waited in a patch of sun at the forest’s edge while the thickets
darkened. Now we can say there had to be things eventually, but
back then there weren’t any things. There was no stuff. They did have a
number of specifics: flint, bone, brother, hunk of meat, rat. And they had
not-a-thing. They had missing tooth. They had hole. The girl demonstrated this
by poking the mud over and over with a stick. While she perforated the
ground she was thinking about how much the gods must want to fuck her.
She thought about how intensely the gods must love her, to send her such a
warm day, with lusty breezes that swirled around her body like hands. She
touched her chest. God I’m stacked, she thought.
The girl bent down and started to squish the warm mud between her
fingers. She mashed it around and picked pebbles out of it until it turned
into a springy dough that she could thumb into different shapes. After a
while it started to resemble her—although with a blobby head and bigger
boobs than she actually possessed, plus a swollen butt. She turned it over in
her hands. It reminded her of a very small baby. On second thought, it was
more like something that had come out of her ear.
The girl almost loved it, but it bothered her. The more she stared at it,
eyeless and brown, with a light tack, the more she thought it must have
something inside it. Something very good or else wrong. This gave her a
weird feeling, like someone was watching her pee.
Anyway, she put the thingy on the rock and leaned back to soak up the
last delicious drops of the afternoon. But when she let her mind drift, she
found that instead of thinking about how much the gods wanted to fuck
her, she thought about how much they wanted to give it to the voluptuous
little figurine instead. They were all hot for that mud tart! Under these
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circumstances, it seemed obvious that the best thing to do was to squish it
back into the ground. Bye bye, she muttered (acidly), her fist raised, but at
that exact second her father walked up and snatched the figurine away.
“Holy moly!” he said. His big jaw sagged in shock. “I almost thought of
this once! This is like one of those things you almost think about—like
when you’re looking for something for so long, you forget you’re even
looking for it. That’s just so weird.”
Then the father strode off in the direction of the encampment,
marveling at the little figure in his hands.
The girl began to scream with rage. Ahhh! She grabbed another lump
of clay from the earth and set out to make a second figurine—the same
globes for breasts, the same ripe and clefted butt, the same football-shaped
head. Immediately upon finishing it she destroyed it. She punched it, and
kept punching it until her knuckles bled and swelled, but she was still
sobbing and she still had a feeling that she could never get rid of it, like
some bug from a dream you can never permanently kill.
When the girl returned to the encampment, she wasn’t all that surprised
to see that the other members of her tribe had started to model their own
mud figures. There were a half dozen voluptuous dolls on display in front
of tents. It was like an infectious disease. And with each figurine she
discovered, the girl felt a bit of herself devoured. Each was a piece of her
that had been kidnapped and then reduced to a form both simpler and
stronger than she was.
“This is gonna make me pregnant,” bragged one lady, a mean aunt
without teeth who the girl didn’t like the smell of.
“It’s only dirt,” the girl pointed out, choking back snot.
“But,” said the aunt, “she looks fertile. She’s mine. She’s going to make
me have a baby.”
The girl wandered from tent to tent, making sure. Yeah, they were
everywhere. Then she crumpled in the middle of the camp and wept. By
now she was covered in mud and dust and had begun to resemble the clay
figurine herself, but it didn’t matter, she wasn’t one. She couldn’t be turned
over or owned or clutch some nugget of magic inside the way the clay girl
could. She could never be both so complete and so mute. Now the question
wasn’t when the gods would descend from the heavens and fuck her silly,
but if, given the competition, they’d bother to do it all.
Probably not.
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=3%:(8#2':;3(2#
TWO
Later there was a different cave girl who didn’t have any parents. They had
been trampled in a hunting accident when she was a baby. She lived with a
heartless crone who made her sweep out the cave everyday, and chew hides,
and collect armloads of spider-infested wood. All this in order to earn her
keep. The crone was silent and ugly and fed the girl half-rotting meat. She
didn’t love the girl. No one did.
One day when the cave girl was gathering roots on the plain, she
happened upon a handsome young cave man with beautiful, strong arms.
He was hunting giant ground sloth with a spear. He had a half-wild dog
named Flower who helped him hunt, and when Flower saw the cave girl he
barked and barked until the handsome cave man told him to shut up. When
the dog wouldn’t stop, the cave man kicked him.
He told the girl he was real sorry about that and touched her hand.
Then he stared off into the distance while he asked for her address.
The cave girl was elated because the hunter was ruggedly handsome.
When she looked at his arms, so lumpy with muscles they were like snakes
digesting rodents, her mouth started to water and her mind became
absolutely empty.
Once she was back home with the crone, all she could think about was
the hunter. She stood at the lip of the cave, scanning the horizon, possessed
of the clear and certain knowledge that at any moment he was going to
come over the rise, and walk into the cave, and crush her against his chest
while the crone huddled in the corner because that mean dog Flower would
be slavering and growling at her. The cave girl knew this was going to
happen, even though day after day, it kept not happening. It was
depressing. Finally she decided to do this new thing she’d thought up
earlier, during the long, boring days when she sat in the back of the cave
chewing on stinking hides. It was a very powerful and scary thing, but she
decided to do it anyway because she had one of those crushes on the hunter
where she couldn’t stop thinking of him.
So she made the world on the wall of the cave with charcoal, ground
rock dust, and the powdered husks of beetles. She made horses and rivers
and foxes and trees. She made the birds that sing. It wasn’t their full shapes
she made, but the shadows they’d cast at dawn or sunset—just the basics,
just the soul of the thing. She made the hunter with arms and legs bulging
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with muscle tissue, and beside him a little dog with his snout open, barking.
She put him in the center of the world. Then she made herself, comely and
reaching towards him.
It took her an entire day. She had to grind up the pigments in her
mouth, so she went hungry while she did it.
Meanwhile the vicious crone was visiting friends, and smoking a pipe,
and eating fresh meats rubbed with fat and herbs. When she returned in the
evening, the crone saw the world the girl had made. The bright animals,
illuminated by the light of the fire, seemed to prance upon the rock wall.
The trees of the plain seemed to sway in the wind. The crone panicked.
She’d never seen a representation of anything. No one had. She quivered
with fear in the corner. She was particularly afraid of the picture of the dog,
with her gleaming fangs. But in essence she was afraid of all the things the
cave girl had drawn on the rock. They weren’t real, but they weren’t fake
either—they inhabited some phantom realm in between that had the power
of the invisible on it.
The cave girl was overjoyed. She had made the world! Yes! The next
day the hunter came to see her and they played a game with bones on the
floor of the cave and groomed each other shyly. The cave girl was so happy
that it took her a while to notice that she was still dissatisfied. Because she
was more fond of the likeness of the hunter than she was of the man
himself.
THREE
In the morning the servant girl woke up, pulled on a sackcloth dress, and
limped into the kitchen. The girl was known in the village as “La Putrella”
because she was homely, and one of her legs was shorter than the other.
Even so, she was good-tempered and faced the disappointments of her life
with a bright smile. She put the kettle on and wiped the soles of her feet
with a rag. She could see that the weather was going to turn warm, and she
thanked God in heaven for sending the world such a beautiful day.
One by one, the other servants joined her in the kitchen. La Putrella
cringed when the scullery maid known as Gina sauntered in, straightening
her little bonnet. Gina was a pretty girl with fine, strong limbs and white
teeth. It was obvious that her greatest pleasure in life was to taunt La Putrella.
______
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Every day Gina reminded the servant girl how stupid she found her, how
overwhelmingly insignificant. “The way you cut bread,” Gina pointed out
(in Italian), “is remarkably awkward. You are disgraceful!” Then Gina
limped heavily around the kitchen, with her thick hair swinging behind her,
in an impression of La Putrella. The others laughed.
La Putrella sawed away at the loaf, and said nothing.
Later they carried sacks of linens to the river and started plunging dirty
sheets into the water. La Putrella tried to situate herself far from the sharptongued Gina. There beside the river, La Putrella found herself
overwhelmed with the beauty of the day, despite the insults of her
comrades. She thought (in Italian): Oh, but it’s lovely! Someone should
bottle this and seal it with a cork, like wine!
Even so, it wasn’t enough. Though God had made the day, and tossed
it to her like a jewel, her instincts told her that something was lacking. Now
we might say that La Putrella felt that such loveliness needed to be recorded
in some way. It needed a vantage point from which to be seen. But at the
time she just thought (in Italian): This day could use a little something extra.
“Look at her,” Gina said. “She’s so stupid she can’t even keep her mind
on something as simple as the washing. She stares up into the heavens like
an imbecile.”
La Putrella renewed her fervently held hope that Gina would be
discovered stealing vegetables from the master’s larder. She would be lashed
to the wheel and dismembered while everyone jeered.
“Stupid slut! You’re doing it wrong!” Gina shrieked. She grabbed the
linen from La Putrella’s hands and slapped her across the check with the
wet fabric.
It was outrageous! Yet no one stood up for her; none of the other girls
so much as blinked at her. The only one who cared for her was God.
With tears in her eyes, La Putrella limped away from the river, towards
a small chapel. The church was closed, as the Bishop was having it redone,
but on such a beautiful day the workmen had naturally flung open the door
to admit the breeze.
Once inside, she could only make out a few dim forms: a cross, the
altar, the workmen standing on scaffolding daubing pigments on wet
plaster. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she found herself faced with a
dazzling sight: the plaster was soaked with colors so bright and true they
seemed lit from within. The pictures themselves were an amazement—it
______
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was as though windows had been cut into the walls of the church, little
frames of space and light with the Holy Family crouching inside like
chipmunks on a ledge. She’d never seen anything like it.
She drew closer. Wherever she looked it was as though she was at the
center of it, looking in—like she was the divine eye that sees all, even Gina
being a bitch. La Putrella felt that if she were to stretch out her arms toward
a picture, she’d be within it.
She reached towards a fresco of Jesus, naked and bleeding on the cross.
Behind him were beautiful hills studded with olive trees. Within, the sun
was bright. Her arms disappeared inside, smeared with pigment, and the
rest of her body followed. There was a dizziness. And then the world lacked
nothing.
FOUR
A college girl sat in her seat during the Art History lecture. Slides of Gothic
cathedrals leapt up on the screen. She wasn’t paying attention. She had just
cut out a picture from a magazine of a famous actor whom she wanted to
be her boyfriend. He was rich, famous, and good-looking but a little
ravaged, like his face had been sandblasted by his bad-boy ways. If he really
knew her, she thought, he’d probably love her, and she could clean his
stylish apartment and prepare food for him while he was off making movies
during the day. (No! I won’t tolerate a maid in here! she’d protest.) Then,
without exactly knowing why, she took her scissors and cut off his head.
Something clawed at the pit of her stomach then, some sharpened sense of
dread. She felt guilty, as though she had really beheaded him. Now he’d
never love her.
______
76/
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____________________________________________________________
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When you get very angry, what do you want to do?
a) Take tango lessons.
b) Eat a polish sausage.
c) Pick someone else’s nose with oversized pliers.
d) Pee in a glass half full of water.
Which statement do you feel is most true about eating a hotdog?
a) It takes too long to accomplish.
b) It is a heartbreaking task.
c) It gives you greasy thighs.
d) It tastes nothing like a hotdog.
What do you associate with the phrase “pocket diversions”?
a) The letter P of the letter V.
b) Collapse and survival.
c) A handmade, handsomely bound 4½” x 7”? book of epitaphs.
d) A roadmap to Hell.
How do you feel about the sex act?
a) It is overrated.
b) It is undervalued.
c) It is like picking someone else’s nose with a kielbasa.
d) It is necessarily complicated.
______
!"#$
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Which image is closest to the first image that comes to mind in picturing
your significant other fornicating with a person other than yourself?
a) An agitated bag of fish and chips.
b) A white stallion with purpled, flared nostrils.
c) Your mother stuffing an impossibly small kielbasa.
d) A used toothpick.
How many slices of bread reside in a standard-issue loaf?
a) 22.
b) 11.
c) Depends on the size of the rolling pin.
d) What the fuck is this?
Which kind of strategy do you prefer in times of war?
a) Lemonade stand-offish.
b) Hospital duplicity.
c) Electric Amish.
d) Fashion.
How do you feel right now?
a) Gypped, but in good stead in the eyes of the law.
b) Stymied, frazzled, and gaseous.
c) Like a conscientious objector in the battle of the sexes.
d) Hyper-gendered and old.
*
______
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BLUE: Like a newly found bruise, one that recurs, not exactly all the time,
more than sometimes, never fully. Slightly less than licit: a length of time
that lasts a lifetime, your lifetime, hardly like anybody else’s.
BRILLIANT: Sharp or dull, often liable, the speaking likeness of a pain or
wound. The imitation of cranes, something that draws a new red line or
illustrates the unwillingness to budge formally or fashionably.
ENIGMA: The game of games, something misunderstood, ill-understood,
or not understandable, but engaged in nevertheless like mourning morning.
A mistake made like a knot for someone else to undo.
GARDEN: A place for sinners in the holy city. A kiss swollen shut, a heavy
door that crushes a left foot, a space in which to hide a ridiculous paranoia,
panic, or pair of cold feet.
LOOP: The impossibility of guessing how many pebbles fill the washed-out
grape jelly jar. Looking outside for a guarantee, a last-minute hook-up, a last
stay against the forces of wish evaporation.
PASSPORT: To travel on a divan, lying down, watching the land, people,
cities, and ruins passing by. Low energies wiped across large distances for
the purpose of identification and, if necessary, intercourse.
RESTRAINT: Cross-hatched salt grass, mettle of nettles, metal against
metal, how to open a strongbox, how to play with a thimble. A pressure put
upon a single moment, a way of loving that moment too much or not ever
enough.
TOMATO: Smaller than a watermelon, larger than an olive, the color of
fresh blood: the mitochondria of the salad. Strong, carnal, the right red in
______
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tender. The tin can kind permissible in a pinch. In house wars, the object
thrown or un-thrown or simply resting on the kitchen table waiting to be
consumed at any cost.
UNCERTAINTY: A heavenly mana transformed into a mantra: “Zero is
my hero.”
VARIATION: A pattern of alternating currents especially the type zapped
through a hand glazed with cloudy bath water. The vibration between chill
and crunch, maintained by a lot of pleading. A fatal while.
WALK: A path of undetermined length and stride ending in a make-up, a
fight, or a draw. Never neutral, always inviolable, always in the way of
something else of equal importance, e.g. sitting, sipping tea, screwing,
screaming.
YOGURT: The color of fair confidence, akin to free ice cream during a
depression. A semi-solid food, soured but succulent, often enhanced
unnecessarily with honey, fruit, or spices.
______
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acromegaly: n. abnormal enlargement of the head and the extremities due to
dysfunction of the pituitary gland.
barchan: n. a sand dune formed in the shape of a crescent, with the ends
pointing away from the direction of the wind.
blue-sky law: n. a security law protecting citizens from fly-by-night schemes,
which have no more basis than so many feet of blue sky.
decahedron: n. a solid with 10 faces.
ébauche: n. a basic watch movement made without jewels, case, etc.
ensilage: n. fodder stored in a silo.
festina lente: Latin. make haste slowly.
hexarchy: n. a group of six states, each with its own ruler.
interdigitate: n. to interlock, like the fingers of both hands when clasped.
isopag: n. a line on a map linking all points where winter ice exists at
approximately the same time.
leishmaniasis: n. infection by a certain flagellate protozoan.
______
7!7#
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microelectrophoresis: n. a technique used in chemistry for examining under
a microscope the migration of minute surface particles under the influence
of an electric field.
ossicle: n. a small bone.
pseudoparalysis: n. a state which is not true paralysis but in which a person
is unable to move a part of the body because of pain, shock, etc.
pteridology: n. the scientific study of ferns, horsetails, clubmosses, etc.
raphe: n., pl. a seam-like joining between two halves of an organ, as of the
tongue.
retrobular: adj. behind the eyeball.
runcible spoon: n. a sharp-edged fork with three broad curved prongs.
sic transit gloria mundi: Latin. thus passes away earthly glory.
seta: n. a bristle or bristle-like process.
sextan: adj. of a fever recurring every fifth day.
test-ban: n. an agreement between nations not to test nuclear weapons or to
test them only under certain prescribed conditions.
thaumatrope: n. a card with a different picture on each side, which when
rotated swiftly causes the two pictures to appear combined as one.
wurst: n. sausage, esp. in combination as liverwurst, bratwurst.
yegg: n. (in colloquial usage) a traveling petty burglar; a vicious ruffian.
yellow-dog contract: n. a contract by which an employer agrees to employ a
worker who in return agrees to leave or remain outside a union.
______
7!"
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zarf: n. a decorative, usually metal, holder used in the Levant for handling
coffee cups made without handles.
zugzwang: n. a situation in a game of chess where all the moves open to one
player will cause damage to that player’s position.
______
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3) You’re in the woods and you’re lost. You’ve just panicked your way
through setting up your tent, and the sun’s setting, and you keep telling
yourself I’ll wake up with the sun tomorrow, and I’ll walk due some-direction, and I
won’t vary or veer and sooner than later I’ll hit a road or trail or something
the sun’s kissing the horizon
and I won’t panic ‘til then, or at all, and this’ll be a dumb story I tell someday, about
how I went solo hiking near Witch Lake, WVa, with the maps for Witch Lake, IL
and ha, ha, ha…
and the sun is gone, and the sky is fading from liquidy blue to loam black.
You turn in, zipping the screen, the nylon window, your sleeping bag.
You wake up because a baby is crying. You’re so far out from anything, it’s
so dark, that for a while you just lie in your sleeping bag, trying to get your
bearings. It feels like you’re spinning, spinning in a witch’s cradle your mind
pipes up, and you curse yourself for being a silly ass.
Your watch says it’s 3:03 am. You sit up, unzip your bag, and listen.
Somewhere, not far off, there is a baby crying. Its sobs are ragged and
desperate, tracing through the dark like witch’s whistles, or jet-black bottle
rockets with no reports. The sound arcs up out of the night, flat and
echoless and angry.
How close to the tent is it? Not so close, but is it quiet because the babe is
far off, or because it is near but small and weak? It’s not closer than a yard,
but a yard is so near, even within your mostly-dead flashlight’s meek beam.
______
7!-#
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Or is it only quiet because it chooses to be quiet?
What the hell are you thinking?
But how’d a baby get out here? You have this picture in your head, inexplicable,
ridiculous, but chilling, of an infant with awful, spindly 12-foot limbs and a
baby’s body, a baby’s crumbled, squeezed, panicked gourd of a face. You
imagine it lumbering towards the tent’s animal warmth on its knobby,
extruded limbs. Babies cry when they’re lonely. Or hungry.
Or angry.
You shudder and force that mess of limbs out of your head: It’s ridiculous,
if for no other reason than that it is quite clear that the crying isn’t moving.
You imagine a baby lying in the coarse tall-grass, ineffectually kicking,
crying itself breathless, then gulping in a deep sob only to cry more,
fruitlessly. The sobs dig at you; you want to unzip the tent’s door and hunt
out into the woods, find the little fella and gather him into your arms, take
him into the tent, care for him. You want to believe that you have a little
steel in you, when push comes to shove, that you’re principally a creature of
compassion.
But you can’t. How does a baby get out here into the woods, so far from
anything, from even light? How does it end up out here and stay quiet until
3:03 am, and only then start to fuss? How is it that a crying baby is alone?
You think of gypsies and drifters, of Indians with their babies swaddled to
buckboards to keep them from fussing and queering a hunt
Or an ambush.
Your body feels like Saran Wrap, tight and crinkling.
In elementary school Mrs. Bachman told you about mimics and actors: fish
that dangled food-looking bait in front of their gapping, needle-toothed
mouths; birds that pretended to be injured so as to draw out would-be
predators; cuckoos leaving their eggs in others’ nests; wasps implanting
their brood under the living flesh of caterpillars. Something vicious and
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hungry and wily playing at being weak and needy, things that seem one way,
but really are another altogether.
So you just sit there, knowing that your heart will break if you find a blue
little frost-trimmed baby out in the meadow tomorrow morning, or that it
will burst with terror if you go out and cast back and forth across the
moonless field, feeling eyes crawl over you, searching for the source of the
cries—
which have suddenly stopped.
Has it left? Has he died? Is it drawing in for the kill? Your chest tightens
into knots-- is the silence good or bad? Perhaps it feels better but worse,
but the crying begins again, maybe a little softer, certainly neither closer nor
farther off. Your watch says it’s 3:08 am.
Questions:
a) Why have we stranded you in the dark, in the cold, in a field?
b) Why are we willing to risk a baby’s life to prove this point?
c) Or is it really not a baby at all?
d) And what, exactly, are we driving at with this exercise, anyway?
4) You’re taking a shower late at night and suddenly go blind, completely
stone blind. Your shower is one of those deep, old, bathtub-&-curtain
arrangements. You’re also running out of warm water.
After several minutes you’ve positively, undeniably confirmed that your are,
indeed, blind, that it isn’t some sort of power outage or momentary
hysterical dysfunction. You cannot see, and there is no reason to believe
that you will be seeing anything anytime soon.
The water is now lukewarm, quickly heading toward ice-cold.
What do you do? How do you begin to address this situation?
As those first dizzy moments pass, you hear glass break, the bolt thrown on
your front door, heavy boots on your stairs.
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The bathroom door has no lock.
Question:
a) What do you do? What can you do?
5) Your phone is ringing. It is very early in the morning and your phone is
ringing and it wakes you up. On the phone is a very good friend of yours—
your best friend, even. She’s hysterical, crying almost too hard to speak. She
says that something has happened, that she needs help very badly. That it’s
unpleasant, but she needs help.
You say you’ll be right over.
You arrive, and your friend is still hysterical. There is a naked female
corpse—maybe 30-something, maybe younger—crumpled at the bottom of
her cellar stairs. You’ve never seen a dead person before, not even at a wake
or funeral. She looks a lot worse than you thought she would—not that
there’s anything gory, just that you didn’t realize how disturbing it would be
to see a woman crumpled like a discarded doll.
Your friend, your best friend, says: We’ve gotta get rid of it.
(It?, you think)
She says: There’s a pipe saw in the garage.
(Garage?)
She says: What’s wrong?
(Wrong?)
Questions:
a) There are several obvious questions in a situation like this,
vis a vis survival. Answer them below:
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I
spent a year in art school and found that I was being taught how to
give a pretentious description of my work rather than being taught how
to paint. It is what it is and I strongly suggest you treat yourself to the
listening pleasures of the blues artists herein. As Sam Phillips said, when he
first heard Howlin’ Wolf: This is where the soul of a man never dies.
—Tom Walbank
W. C. Handy (1997)
Little Marion Walter Jacobs (1993)
Tommy McClennan (1995)
Robert Nighthawk (1996)
Charlie Patton (1992)
Mahalia Jackson (1996)
Bukka White (1992)
Mance Lipscomb (1993)
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I. Note to the Translator
This is what I have to tell you, but nothing is certain.
It begins, it ends. It’s how the air unfolds, coming in
from the sea: two hundred miles of rain-clothed windows.
The geography of a room rising into the crumpled water,
between the salted air and the black swans sleeping on the Desna.
I am worried, not of the swans, but of the river, and of this:
Have I said what I meant to say? Will you believe
that the river is now only a frozen trickle of what it was?
I tell myself that belief comes with instructions
to be read closely by candlelight in a small upstairs room,
Mother playing her violin in the kitchen over a sack
of postcards from Budapest. Beautiful city, beautiful city.
Is this enough? Will you know that when I say speak
I mean speak, that when I sleep I cannot face the window...
There is more to say, of course, but I can go no further tonight.
The porcelain stove under a whistle of steam.
The nurses in the janitor’s bed.
Did I say that the Black Sea is folding itself into a napkin,
that a woman is asleep in the next room,
paraffin lamp shining into the garden’s blue walls?
I would like to turn it off, and talk with her
about a field of stubborn wheat beyond the city.
How it does not move, even with the wind.
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II. Drinking the Wing: St. Moritz Hospital for Children and the Insane
Beyond the patient’s backs scrubbed raw and shining
in the candle-washed rooms, there is a street,
then an alley. Winter is over. The rain will not end.
At the top of the staircase, there is a window painted shut.
From here, I can only see the tops of birches, their leaves
spiraling into what resembles a city, the slow beginning of silence.
The doctors tell me this is Switzerland, and I would like it
to be. It seems that if it were true, there would not be so many moths.
I count them out on the sill and paste their wings
onto the window with my spit. The shapes of mouths,
of butter-and-eggs, lily of the valley. What else is there to do?
They think the mouths talk to me, but they are wrong.
It is me that speaks to the mouths. Wings don’t speak.
Silly questioners, silly hounds-tongue, gill-over-the-ground.
My mother could never play the violin. She dug in her garden
between the blue stone walls, plucking away the roots of dandelion,
and she never said much, only rubbed my legs (ah, those legs!)
after rehearsal with cod oil and whistled to the mocking bird
asleep on his branch, to the faraway sea, the long road there.
There is something I remember her telling me though,
about the trees near the sea,
how the wind molds them into shapes of what they were
under the soil, before they became what they became, a web of roots,
the nothingness that holds them:
a spoon beside a cup: a spoon drinks the wing.
It’s time we talked about the sea, you and I, the cold edge
of this window sill, the connected dance of wave, of sand.
Or, the memory of what I was, of what can never be opened.
The victory of breath over weight is in these legs,
white, uncallused, and closed-in
under the mothy starch of sheets. I sound so pathetic.
What sort of victory is this, my translator, my mother,
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my peach-leaved willow?
My head shaved to keep away the lice.
You know, I was a ship once. I could sail across a room.
Now, I’m only a mapmaker and I will draw a map
from me to you but the crumpled water will change
and erase what I set out to become. It’s the waves,
the bishop’s foamy cap, taking away the land.
I will draw a map of this room, a wall rising
into what is left of the stars. Where the wall
meets the floor there are the heads of moths, a pile of dust.
And what comes from the dust is the need to be swept away,
a garden grown over with frost. The need to be.
I will draw a line here, so you can know that what comes
from this
is not the meeting of wall and floor, of sea and air, but a swatch of light
against the skin, a long red welt across the back.
III. An Evening Sonata
It begins, it always ends. A full moon. The drying onions,
white over the hospital stove, make it almost untellable, make the tears.
The slightly open mouth repeats it, lets it fall, lets it sink.
You may ask what exactly is beginning? and I can only tell you
that a dirge, dusty and rising from the Cossack’s barracks
in the half-light of dusk fills me, and the nested furrows of pigeons
about the church’s doors fill me, and the slight grate of the doors
is a hymn, and it may fill me, but to know when the beginning begins
(the sleep, the very thirst of that moment)
is to ask for a thimble of water, drink it, and say it is enough.
Onions netted and shelved, the linen of their cupped hands:
I keep them with me. A rainstorm over the mountains?
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Yes, that is with me. The browned photograph of Stanislav,
his eyes the eyes of a sheep nudging open the gate
of mother’s carrot-rows, radish tips between each hoof: I keep it,
although we are not allowed to keep anything here, in this house
inside a house. I hide the onions under my bed, next to the sleepy rooms
of Stanislav, my brother, my notebook of sky, my thieving little saint.
The day the organ grinder came, window open, a swallow’s nest
napping in the eaves, and you, four years old, watching the monkey
take coins from the grinder. I would have liked to have been there
when you fell, your white face dropping as faces do, from balcony
to balcony, the harp of your chest plinking a song, a raspy one-note sonata
of brick and bone and the simple closing of light that comes before evening.
It would have been easier if you died.
IV. The City of 400 Churches
Back to you I come, Kiev. Mother of blue-shelled domes,
garden of sodded ghosts, you have painted the old house yellow
and my father is not where I left him, beyond the morning, but before
the fields of poppy. I come back to you, empty of what I left with.
There are fewer trees, trunks bathed in the cobbles of your breath.
By paving the stalks of bulrush and violets, the river can finally park
its great weight of moon, nuzzle under the boats, and sleep.
***
Translator: choose a tongue that wants this city.
Translation: where can the living be?
(Here, on the landscape of sky, a meadow of roofs,
the elms of chimneys, the graceful movement
of air between us as powerful as it is effortless?)
***
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I am speaking to you, Kiev, under the elms
of the elementary school. Elm? School?
Yes, speak. Whatever you say, it will not
rise into me, but will rise into what I will become,
into the shallows of Vlata Creek, into the swell of unnamed sea.
***
The hospital walls are losing their nails. I wanted the tiny ones to pin
the map of myself to my self, to consider the width of days,
the long walks through fields of poppies. (My father carries a basket
of pears under each arm. There is a wasp for each pear, and so on.
This is the last time I will see him.)
***
Kiev, you are a small red ribbon in the hair
of my mother, asleep in the pantry, mice
in her pockets. I will walk with her to the river
tonight, and pass the moujiks in their carved
wooden huts, their stalks of grain boiling
on the sides of the road. Black pots of tanning seeds,
their faces flushed and alive under each pot.
It has happened before. It will happen, and I will look
as I always do, to the sheep coming up from the washing,
bright against the horizon. They are not clouds.
They are not of clouds.
***
It is darker tonight, this night. You are my nurse.
Speak to me, Kiev. Tell me that there is enough oil
for the lamps, that behind the church’s doors,
(those dark houses of our childhood) there is a field
within a field, the sorrow that comes with autumn.
Yesterday, I began to think
that even though I cannot dance here,
in this hospital of closed doors and onion skin,
that I would like to walk down the hall and turn my head
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quickly, back and forth, as if the blur of beds and steel racks
of cups would help me remember how it was to rise
above the sitting figures in the theaters,
to answer the question and not have to worry
that the answer would not be enough.
The fields are newly cleaved. The sky is clear.
The newspapers are full of dying words,
and I will never come back.
There is no turning back.
V. How Summer Suits Are Washed
I can only tell you that in the fields, the peasants wash with sand
and if one owned a suit it would be used as a seed bag,
a red milk-sack dyed red for the sake of their eyes,
who only see shades of red during cock fights and on
the Cossack’s arms. They need color, these peasants, blackened
and grayed. I know this because I lived with them, for a month, or two.
An aunt, an uncle, roosters fighting in the haymow...
I can’t remember the time, only the color.
Color, when I was a child, meant something was going to happen.
A sunset: night. A mountain: shadow.
A dance: sunrise. And things did happen, whether I wanted them to
or not: whether that mountain’s shadow slowly closed in on me
or if I closed in on myself.
There in the haymow, I was too small to understand
the rooster as it came at me, its desire to cut faces,
any face, with its beak. Through the blood
I could see the bird, waiting for its handful of breadcrumbs,
knowing that what it had done was right.
The peasants, bearded and dull but glowing a faint red, were beautiful,
and they danced for me in that barn, under the lanterns,
under the dim knowledge of pain, and what comes after pain,
which is nothing I could ever say: Which is everything.
And they washed my tiny suit in milk and in sand,
and I will wear it until the lanterns die and the dance ends.
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VI. Good Morning, Sea
The ability to lose
the abundance of loss
That is all really
The two are puddles
linked by a child’s footprint
in a field of wheat
a black swan lifting
into the day
Is more needed?
Yes, there is something
my mother told me
How the sea is simply
light in an empty room
and what came before
the sea is a photograph
of an open window
in the room next to it
the tremble of a shade
a lamp turned on
I am afraid
this isn’t quite right
This fear This ache
It is nothing new
I don’t like
the morning anymore
the way
the rain covers it
The room
is losing
its color
It has lost
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KELLY HELLWORTH
P
rincess would have to make sure everything was just right, all the
pieces in place. Whatever a man could do for Joe, he did; nothing
would ever be too much for Joe, whatever it might be, however large
or small. He did, he wanted to go to the funeral; Horse-Face’s grandson
even called, making sure Princess knew there was a place for him, but
Princess had to say no. Little Peter said he understood and hung up. He
called back two days later and gave him an IP address and a series of
passwords so he could watch from home. Princess wrote everything down,
though his memory was better than it had been even in his twenties, at the
height of his much acclaimed photographic memory—and he didn’t tell
anyone, he didn’t tell them it wasn’t photographic, he just made sure to not
keep too much in his head, didn’t keep anything unnecessary so he always
had room for the important things, like IP addresses and endless series of
passwords. “You want to make sure you have a recent browser,” Peter said,
“5 or better.” Princess said O.K., he said No problem, and he said Thank
you Peter. They said their goodbyes, running through the respective litanies
of regards to be given and thoughts to be conveyed to whomever was
wherever they were, and they hung up.
He would need a suit, didn’t matter that no one would see him to know
if he wasn’t dressed appropriately, but Joe would know, he always knew—
and that wasn’t even the point anyway, you did what you were supposed to
do, and no, that wasn’t the point either. Not a supposed to do thing, not a
requirement, it was more, deeper. Princess’ heart beat, he breathed. He
would wear a suit. A nice suit. His last suit was at least ten years too small,
he kept it in a little closet shrine with all the other suits from all the years, all
the men he’d been from decade to decade. And you can see them, and they
are worth saving. Woolen or linen or silk works of art, each one. You,
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bound with a coarse rope that only hurts if you struggle, the knots expert
and intricate but not fussy or excessive. Princess tied them slowly, he let
you watch and explained the origins and typical uses of each as he pulled
them, and you with them, tight and locked. You are his last job.
The thing nobody knows is that the world ended in 1968. A slow
grinding, some skipping, fits and hiccups, everything wore down. It took
about a year and by the time it flipped to 1969 everything was done, the
world was over. Funny how it didn’t change anything, the world ending and
all that. And nobody knew. Princess knew, but no one else. He never told.
Probably Joe knew it too, and that’s why he left when he did, in ’68, but
Princess never talked to him about it, and Joe never let on like he knew and
so it didn’t matter anyway.
The thing that everybody knows was it was Joe that caused him to be
Princess, Joe the reason his mother, God rest her sainted stupid soul,
named him Princess. She was deaf in one ear, and no one, not one person
ever ever asked Joe to repeat himself. Joe wouldn’t have minded if someone
had, but you know how it is. Your heart beats, you put on the suit, you
breathe, you get it the first time Joe says it… She was 9 months, fit to burst,
ready to drop any minute. Joe, his hands on her belly, smack out to here, he
turns to watch this little slip on ten-foot heels with a rack enough for him
to stretch out full upon, and he says, on the poor half-deaf lady’s deaf side:
“If the child should be a girl,” and here he paused to watch the slip, honey
hair and eyes so blue Joe thought he was looking right through her head
into the sky, a sky that heaven meant for him to see, and the slip smiled,
and Joe smiled at the girl. Northern, Joe was thinking, did he know her
family? He would find her out, he would bring her home, he would
introduce her and her family to his own and they would share in the
kingdom, this girl of honey and heaven with her mouth all smile and her
hand coming up now to pull her hair out of her face… “If she should be a
girl,” he said again, so softly, then turned full to the pregnant woman, “I
desire that the child be named Princess.” And that was that. Three days
later, after thirty-eight hours of near impossible labor and a last minute
caesarian to get the baby out, a boy was hauled blue and twisted and neardead from the depths of his rapidly deteriorating mother—multiple
hemorrhages—and he was made to breathe, made to cry, and they put him
to her breast, to emphasize to her that she should make it, that she should
live and care for this new boy. And she said, this dying woman said, “This is
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Princess. I name my son Princess.” She looked to her own mother, there by
her side, in this room too dark and too brown now; it had seemed yesterday
so homey and warm, but now the walls more like clotted blood than
chocolate or soil, the sheets torn and roped like intestines around her legs,
and the woman’s own entrails poking from behind her uterus still on her
stomach, the knobs of them shining like teeth in death’s mouth, the hole
just south of her bellybutton, Princess’ umbilicus still trailing into the
uterus, and his left foot kicking the incision, dipping his toes as if into an
inkwell and signing his name on the bed, on her ribs… “Tell Joe,” she said,
so low she wouldn’t have heard herself, “Mama, you tell Joe I have given
him his Princess.”
Not one person in all of Princess’ sixty five years has ever once said a
thing about his name. Not even you. You didn’t say a word.
Princess opens the closet and crouches down next to you. His eyes
small and tender, his hands gentle and calloused. “Do you need anything
right now? I have to go see the tailor about a suit. Do you need maybe to
go to the bathroom, since it has been a while, shall I take you to the
bathroom before I go?” He lifts you from the cushion he has provided for
you, and he leads you by the knots between your wrists toward the
bathroom. You expected to be bound with your hands behind your back,
but Princess is kind, and besides, you can’t get the knots undone, so it
doesn’t matter that you can see them, or that you can reach the ones by
your feet. He tied you so you can shuffle down the hall, shuffle around the
kitchen when it’s time for meals, but not so you can do anything else. If
you’re quiet, he doesn’t bother to gag you. It hurts him to have to go to
what he terms ‘unnecessary lengths’ and so he would rather to not have to
gag you, if you don’t mind cooperating on this little bit. You are given the
courtesy of some perfunctory sort of privacy, in that he doesn’t stare at you
while you do what you have to do, but he is in the room, but you
understand: “You understand this is necessary, right?” and you do.
Princess pushes the plunger on the soap for you, squirts it into your
palms. “Don’t get the ropes wet, that’ll make them get too tight, and I’m
going to be out for a while so I won’t know if you’re uncomfortable.” You
are careful. Princess takes you back to the closet, asks do you need anything
else, since he is going to be gone for a while, he wants you to understand
that it could be several hours. You decline, you thank him and he brings
you a book and then another book. You were expecting Puzo, but that’s
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because you’re insensitive, you’re ignorant, and you’re a racist. He gave you
Flaubert and Cormac McCarthy, turned on the little light near the corner,
and closed the door. Locked it. Sealed it. Locked it on the other side, by the
hinges. Princess takes his job seriously.
Princess checked the stove, made sure all the faucets were off, then
turned the lock on the knob of the front door on his way out of his
apartment. His apartment is by the Park, has a really nice view of it from
the fifth floor, and he liked to sit and watch young couples walk slowly
along the trails and over the bridge right there. Less interesting were the
joggers, the rollerbladers, the people on bicycles or the homeless working
their way past, though the homeless knew enough not to set up camp or
shop in this area. It was understood that you did not sully the view from
this building. Princess took a deep breath of the park, then waited for the
trucks to pass and then took another breath, this one tinged a little with
exhaust, but still good air. His tailor was a few blocks down, a few blocks
over, and normally he’d walk, but he’s getting older and the heat’s up with
the humidity today and he’s got Joe on his mind, so he hails a cab. He gets
the first one. He always does.
It’s Jimmy Falcon that picks him up. “Shame about Joe,” Jimmy Falcon
says, “it’s like the world’s ending, you know, Joe gone now…”
“No, not like that at all,” Princess says, “but I am sad.” He wants to tell
Jimmy the world’s been over for almost 34 years, but he doesn’t say
anything. He just looks out the window, wondering again why it all stayed
the same even though it was done. He doesn’t care, not really, he just
thought there would be something, some kind of signal or marker,
something to let people know, and that there wasn’t made him sad for
everyone. Maybe it should have made him doubt that it was over, but it
never did. He knew it, and that was all he needed to know. And it didn’t
matter anyway.
“So you’ll be going to the funeral, huh Princess?” Jimmy’s looking in
the mirror.
“I can’t go,” Princess says, folding his hands in his lap, “but I talked to
Little Peter.”
“Horse-Face’s grandson?”
“Yeah, the same one. He’s going to hook me up so I can be there, so I
don’t have to miss it.”
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“Joe would want you there, but I know he’d understand, you were
always special to him.”
Princess says nothing.
“Hey, I’m driving you around but I don’t know where I’m driving you.
Where you going?”
Princess tells him to go to Fante’s. Jimmy makes an immediate right.
Drops him a few minutes later at Fante’s and Princess gives him a hundred.
Jimmy hadn’t even started the meter. No one ever did.
The air’s thick here, so Princess breathes shallow until he gets inside,
then breathes deep the scent of woolens and silks, all the best from all over
the world. Princess apprenticed for Fante’s father, just a twelve-year old boy
carrying the bolts and needles for old Fante, learning everything he could
about all the things that made a suit not just right, not just great, but
perfect. How to dart invisibly, how to tuck without trace. Learning so he
would always be perfect himself. Fante’s still carried hats, but Princess
stopped wearing them when the world ended, his small nod to change,
baring his head to a sun that didn’t shine anymore, for a God that just
wasn’t around, not now. Not since ’68. He thought, back in 1960, that it
was ending, the world, but that was just a little cough, a hint. Right after
Camus crashed he felt it. It got Princess’ attention, he watched and waited.
He knew it was coming. And then, of course, it did. If he could have asked
for anything from it, he would have requested that it give him a date, a time
that it finished, since he really liked that sort of thing, but there wasn’t a
spot he could point at and say: That is when it happened, that is when it all
stopped happening. He let it go. It wasn’t important.
Fante says he misses his father. Joe dying makes him miss him. For
Fante there wasn’t really a Joe except in how he related to his father and the
suits he would help him make for Joe. “I hear they’re going to bury him in
one of mine,” he says, and he starts to cry. “I’m honored you know, it’s a
great honor that he will wear the clothes I made for him, but I wish it was
one of Pop’s. They understood each other, you know. Pop knew Joe and
would always dress him right, better than my best ever was. But still, I am
honored. I want to be proud, but all I am really is sad.”
“I’m sad too, Fante.” Princess puts a hand on the man’s shoulder.
Fante is younger than Princess by ten years, but looks much older. Only
fifty five but walks like he’s seventy, though his hands are younger than
that, much younger than Fante himself, still strong and stable, sure of
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themselves no matter how Fante might feel. Princess actually taught him
about making suits, passing the older Fante’s teachings on to the younger.
Despite the difference in their age, they had always been good friends,
brothers, Princess always protected him, and Fante loved him for that. That
and so much else. Fante wanted to die before Princess, he said he wasn’t
strong.
Princess told him that he needed a suit, and that he, Fante, needed to
make it quickly. Fante understood, “Yes, for the funeral. I will have it ready
and it will be the finest I’ve ever made. If I cannot do it for Joe, I can at
least do it for you, you who are so special to him, even now, even though
he’s gone.” Fante’s arms up, his measuring tape trailing like an impasto
ribbon or banner between the Raphaelite palms, a leftover message from
God, God telling Fante exactly where to put the little soap marks. God used
to tell him, Princess, God used to show his hands where to go, where to
cut, where to hide the little knots so they’d never be felt or seen; angels and
saints hiding the seams and matching the grains and, and… but then in
’68… and what was the point anymore of dressing people? He was
conscientious: he finished the suit in progress, but every other order was
cancelled, or transferred if Fante thought he could handle it. Princess told
the Fantes that day, in ’68, that he was going to get a new job. He didn’t
explain why, but the older Fante didn’t question him—no one ever did, and
Princess pretty much always knew what he was doing, so even if someone
didn’t know to keep their trap shut, they wouldn’t have any reason anyway
to say anything—he said the younger Fante would just have to step up and
do his teachers proud; wouldn’t want to dishonor Princess by tailoring
badly. Fante the younger, always too tender, bit right through his tongue
trying to keep his jaw from trembling, cracked a molar and blew all the
effort with a braying sob when he tried to thank Princess for both his
efforts over the years and his faith in him now. Princess wanted to tell him
that it just didn’t matter anymore, but there really wasn’t a reason to say
anything about it.
Dominic P. set it up for him later that day, his new job. First job was
the next day and Princess found it easier than he thought it would be. In
light of the world having ground down, it seemed more productive. Made
more sense to subtract now, now that things had gone into negative
numbers.
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Everything’s getting a little too heavy for Princess, everyone so
melancholy. But at least they’re clear about what it is they mourn. Not Joe,
he was old, lived more lives than anyone had a right to. Everyone clearly
and openly mourned themselves, what their life meant now, since Joe
wasn’t there to define it any longer. But still, Princess wanted a break,
needed a break. He closed his eyes and watched the light pink through the
fleshy folds of his eyelids, listened to the whisper and rasp of the tape on
his shoulders, around his chest, Fante all business now, Fante forgotten
about Joe for the moment, lost in the suit. “All night,” Fante said.
“I don’t need it until Friday,” Princess said.
“You will have it tomorrow.”
“Thank you, Fante.” And Princess left. Johnny Falcon still at the curb.
Princess waves him on. He’s going to walk.
He turns in to the Starbucks on the corner, tells the pretty girl he’d like
an iced americano. She smiles, she flushes, caught up in the thing. She
knows what Princess is, even though she doesn’t know him, or even about
him. A person grows up in this area, that person recognizes it when it walks
into the shop. An eager boy from L.A. asks Princess does he maybe want a
frosty blended something or other, and the corner of Princess’ mouth dips,
just a little. This followed by the boy hitting the floor, near unconscious.
The pretty girl, pushing her hair out of her eyes, putting the dented thermos
bottle on the counter, turns back to Princess, “I’m so sorry about him. He’s
new. I’ll make your drink now, sir.” Princess wants to marry this girl… or
adopt her. He’s not sure.
“You’re special to him too,” you are told. Princess lights some candles, as
he always does, for dinner. Tonight he’s made a light chilled cucumber soup
with a little mint and lemon zest. Then it’s some broiled salmon crusted
with crushed almonds and pepper served on angel hair with crisp
vegetables. You don’t like fish—well, not salmon, but this is pretty damn
good. And you’re not in a position to complain anyway. You did like the
soup, and you tell Princess. You might be his job, but that doesn’t mean
you shouldn’t be polite.
“I’m glad you like it. I wasn’t sure about the almonds with the salmon,
but I think it worked out pretty well.” He grabs a magazine from the
counter, hands it to you, open. “She suggested the soup.” It’s Martha
Stewart. Suddenly you’re crying.
______
7,7
O',,8*
*
Princess hands you a clean napkin. He says you shouldn’t get yourself
worked up. He says not to worry, and that it won’t be long now. A few
days, no more. You aren’t reassured. You thought since they were all on
HBO now, you thought everyone was safe. Thought no one would dare
embody the cliché, but it doesn’t seem quite the anachronism you expected
it to be. You lamented at first that he wasn’t more like that French guy in
that movie, but now you’re glad. The French guy didn’t look like he could
cook, and, well, Princess can.
But this isn’t about you.
Fante calls in the morning, he says the suit is ready, and that his son will be
at the shop all day if Princess wants to pick it up. Princess says thanks, pulls
on his shoes. It’s not so hot yet that he needs to take a cab, so he thinks
he’ll walk to the Starbucks and see if maybe his girl is there. She made a nice
americano. Princess won’t let anyone tell him that the corporatization of
coffee makes for consistent quality that not even the dirtiest coffee-hating
nazi bastard could screw up, he knows that even if the machines do most of
the work, still it takes a pure soul and a strong heart—not to mention
family—to be the sort of person that can give a good americano. This girl,
not only was she sensitive to the structure of her world, this little world of
just a few several blocks that had cradled Princess his entire life, but her
eyes they were deep espresso, almost black, and her teeth weren’t
straightened, but instead she let them gap just a little and cross just so; she
doesn’t even know they needed work. Not that Princess is saying they did.
He asks you do you need anything, and takes you to the bathroom.
He’s rushing just a little, he’s a little distracted. He forgets to turn on the
light in the closet when he leaves, but then he comes back, apologizes and
lights the little lamp, locks you in, then leaves again. You hear the three
solid clicks of the locks on the closet, and then a second or two later the
softer grinding turn of the simpler lock on the knob on the door, and you’re
alone again.
Princess doesn’t notice Johnny Falcon pull up next to him and pace
him for half a block. Johnny finally calls out, asking does Princess need a
ride, in such a hurry as he is, apparently, this morning? Princess waves him
on. “Hey Princess, you got you a date or something?” Johnny asks,
laughing. And Princess realizes how inappropriate it might appear, him so
giddy on the way to pick up the funeral clothes, and he slows his pace
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some, takes the spring a little out of his step. He pulls down the smile and
lowers his eyes. He waves Johnny on again and Johnny shrugs and pulls out
into traffic. When the cab is out of sight, Princess feels light again, and
turns his head to the sky, scanning the tops of the trees in the Park for
young birds.
He knows someday he’ll look up and there won’t be anything any more.
This is all just the little shudders and clicks of a car cooling down; it’s been
off, abandoned on some cosmic back road, and one day or another it’ll all
stop. But he doesn’t care today. And he doesn’t care that he doesn’t care.
He’s got a new suit, and there’s a girl just around the corner with thick
black hair too heavy to hold a ponytail, whose shine makes it fall like olive
oil over itself, each strand a slippery molecule sliding under its own weight
to rest perfectly next to the others… he doesn’t want to think of her in
terms of food. It’s strange. He tries thinking of it less organically, then just
gives up, smiling about his suit and his coffee. It doesn’t matter the reason
for the suit. It is always a good thing, a new one.
And she is there, at Starbucks, and she smiles the second he walks in.
Princess smiles back, nods, and this girl, this wonderful girl who
understands this small world, she moves immediately to the machine and
begins to pull her perfect miracle for him. Princess looks around, behind
the counter, at the tables. The girl says, “Oh, the boy? From yesterday?”
Princess nods. “He’s fired. He’s going back to L.A.” She hands him his
americano, iced, glorious.
Princess wonders does maybe she have a name, but not aloud, and then
decides that maybe it’s best that she remain as is. She didn’t ask his. He left
it alone. Princess puts ten dollars in the tip glass. He wanted to put a
hundred, since that’s how things are done, but he thought it might be
misinterpreted here, while the ten would convey the same meaning without
drawing attention. The hundreds that get passed around, they don’t get
spent, only exchanged now and then for newer bills. They’re like tokens.
This girl, she needs the money, and were Princess to give her the hundred
she’d have to spend it. He doesn’t want to put her in that position. He says,
Thank you. He nods and she smiles and he leaves.
Salvador, Fante’s son, is skating outside the shop when Princess arrives.
“What’s up, P?” he says, flipping his board and falling on his ass.
Princess takes Salvador’s board. He walks into the shop.
______
7,,
O',,8*
*
Salvador rushes in behind him, “I’ll get your suit. You got a minute, to
try it on?” Princess says he does. Salvador ducks into the back, returns eight
seconds later with the suit, black.
No such thing as double-breasted for Princess, he never liked the boxy,
big look, though he did understand the utility it offered when one had to
carry certain tools with them. Before ’68 that wasn’t an issue, so Princess
was always single-breasting himself, alternating between two and three
buttons on the jacket, depending on his mood, no break on the cuff of the
pants, pleats making their appearance as the years went by. The lines were
always simple; though he could have dandied himself, he’d been handsome
enough to pull it off without looking like a puff. He kept everything
straight, thinking himself like a tower, a slender tree, always reaching up;
Princess never needed to look solid, never wanted to project the imposing
appearance the other guys sought. Fante had graduated Princess to four
buttons with this suit—they’d played with five, six, even eight buttons back
in the day, for the boys who were too thin to pull off the double, who were
more concerned with style than tradition, though they invariably dropped
the number of buttons as they matured, every last one of them bulking up
on pasta and sidearms until they had to go for boxy. This one, Fante’s
created an architectural masterpiece worthy of the runways, but understated
enough for a sixty five-year old man to wear without looking ridiculous. A
single vent in the back of the jacket, a single pleat on the pants, a straight
line from the chest to the waist and the lining of the pants working with
hidden seams to provide the intrinsic structure necessary to carry the line all
the way to the cuff; Princess stepped into the fitting room and changed.
Fante had forgotten to take into account the slight irregularity in Princess’
shoulders, how the right dipped just a centimeter lower than the left, which
caused the right lapel to push out just a little. Princess understood, it wasn’t
a big deal. He’d move the buttons later, maybe half a centimeter. It would
make the bottom a bit uneven, but not so much that anyone except Fante
would notice. The bulge in the lapel would make him look like he was
carrying, and he didn’t want that. He didn’t carry his gun like that. Princess
had always favored a special holster that placed his gun, a gift from
Dominic P. after his first job, in the small of his back. It made him stand
straighter and that always made the suits hang the way they were meant to,
and though he wasn’t a man with many pretensions, he did like the
antiquated idealized look of the man of industry, head up, eyes to the
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future. It did not matter to the suit that there wasn’t anything to look
toward anymore.
“All cool, P?” Salvador asked through the door. Princess stepped into
his shoes, stepped out of the room, holding his shoulders even to make the
suit hang straight. “Shit man, that’s tight. Turn around now… yeah, that’s
the shit."
“Thank you, Salvador,” Princess said. “And thank your father for me.”
“Dad plies him a mean trade. Get you all the girls in that rig.”
Princess stepped back into the fitting room and changed. Salvador
called through the door, “Next one you let me make it, O.K.?” Princess
said he would. He didn’t know when he would need another, but a new one
is always a good thing. Wouldn’t hurt to have more.
“I’ll come in next week,” Princess said. He asked Salvador to wrap the
suit for him.
Peter called the night before the funeral. Princess was making dinner while
you sat at the table, trying to do a crossword in the paper. The ropes made
it difficult to see what you were doing, and Princess was sympathetic to
your trouble, but you didn’t ask him for anything. He’d come by and give
you answers every few minutes, lifting your hands by the rope between your
wrists, say, “38 down is malign,” then, “55 across is never on a Sunday—
one word,” and then drop your hands back on the table. Princess looks at
you once while he’s talking to Peter, and you know this has something to
do with you. You haven’t bothered to try to figure out what your
significance is here, what exactly any of this has to do with you. You just
know that it does. Now you know that it has something to do with Peter,
with Chicago maybe, though that doesn’t help any, you still don’t know
anything.
“12 down is agrarian,” Princess isn’t on the phone anymore. He goes
back to the kitchen and finishes preparing the salads. You’re having big
Caesar salads tonight, and Princess picked up some Gelato on the way
home, and a movie. You read The Stranger today, Princess gave it to you
before he went out, and you thought maybe he was saying something with
it. You’d read it in high school and you liked it. You didn’t expect to, but
you liked it again today.
______
7,.
O',,8*
*
After dinner Princess washes the dishes. You offer to help, just kidding
of course, but Princess thanks you and hands you a towel, reminding you to
be careful to not get the ropes wet.
You eat gelato on the couch and watch “The African Queen.” There’s
no symbolism here, this is not a metaphor for anything, no one’s trying to
tell you anything. Princess just wants to see it, and you’re watching it with him.
Princess lets you sleep in the next morning. You don’t have any sense of
time in the closet, so you don’t know how long you slept until Princess
opens the door and you can tell by the light in the apartment that it’s late
morning. You have only a few hours before the funeral, so you figure this is
all going to be over soon. Confusion has resigned you, Camus has
confirmed you; there’s something about certainty and unavoidability that
makes you placid. You tell Princess you don’t need breakfast, you’d just like
to finish this, if he doesn’t mind. You’re tired, you’re bored, and though
Princess has been more than kind, the most genial of hosts, even if you did
spend the last week bound in a closet, you’re ready to have this done with.
“You are coming with me to the funeral,” Princess says, making a small
adjustment on something on the table.
And suddenly, it’s all clear. Sort of. Princess’ job is to bring you to the
funeral. You don’t know why it’s important, why you have to be there—
someone could have just called and you would have been on a plane within
an hour, they didn’t have to go this route. You don’t pretend to understand
the way things work, but still, they could have just called you. You say you
don’t have anything to wear, and Princess tells you that’s not a problem, he
has suits enough. One of them will fit you. You like this idea. Those suits
are nice.
Princess pulls one of them out, a simple, charcoal gray three-button
affair that looks about your size. You ask how you’re supposed to get
dressed with the ropes and all, but even as you’re asking Princess starts to
untie you. He indicates the bathroom, tells you there are fresh towels and
you go happily in, steaming a week’s worth of your own odors off your
body. You shave, you find some pomade, you make yourself good enough
for the suit.
You walk into the living room, wearing the boxers and tee shirt
Princess left by the sink. Princess approaches you, holding some kind of
belt with a small black box in the middle, the thing he’d been messing with
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on the table. “A simple precaution,” he explains, “not something I want to
do, but necessary, you understand.” He shows you how it works, how the
box is a tazer with electrodes that will rest on either side of your spine, and
he holds out a small remote, presses the button and demonstrates for you
that it is more than sufficient to immobilize you—should that be required.
You assure him that you’ll be good—you’re almost giddy, but you do a
good job of suppressing it—and strap the thing on yourself with a smile
and small flourish, turning around to show him how well it fits. Princess
smiles and makes some small adjustments to make sure it’s placed right and
then hands you the suit. The shirt’s white, the tie a predominantly blue
pattern. You look good. Probably not as good as Princess did when he
wore this, but it’s better than anything you own. Your shoes will do. They
need a shine; Princess gives you the means and spreads some newspaper on
the floor, asking you to be careful of the suit.
Princess hails a cab out in front of the apartment. It’s not Johnny that
stops. He’s at the funeral. Everyone’s at the funeral. Johnny couldn’t afford
the time off or the plane fare, but arrangements were made, as they were
for everyone, and so he’s there instead of in the front seat of the cab that
you and Princess climb into, looking nothing at all like what you are, and
only a little like a couple of guys on their way to a funeral, on their way to
view a funeral anyway, if not to make a physical appearance.
“Intended destination?” the driver inquires, not turning around, just
looking a little in the mirror.
“52nd and Madison,” Princess says. This tells you nothing. The driver
launches himself into traffic, a little heavy right now, honking and swerving.
“We have time to spare,” Princess tells the driver. And part of you knows
that normally this would have no effect on your average cabbie, but you’ve
just spent the last week in this man’s closet, and so you’re not surprised
when the driver immediately slows down and begins to drive sensibly. You
try to pinpoint the why of it, the what of the communication between
Princess and this man who does not know him. You don’t know, you’re so
used to the idea of Princess as what he is, you don’t know how anyone else
might see him.
It’s a good day. Bright, clear, not hot. Birds and happy people.
Unhappy people too, sure, but they’re not in the way, and so their
unhappiness doesn’t matter. Some of them might be dying even, on the way
______
7-4
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*
to see their oncologists or surgeons, but nobody’s dying right now. No one
is going to die today. That much you know. That whole death thing is on
hold at the moment, out of deference to Joe.
Princess pays the driver, tips him well, and you get out of the cab.
Princess steers you toward a Kinko’s, and you’re about to ask questions,
you’re about to say at least five stupid things, but you hold back and wait
for the answers, since they’re coming. You don’t need to ask anything,
everything’s taken care of already. Princess holds the door to Kinko’s open,
and you almost do it, you almost ask questions, but again you have the
good sense to keep your mouth shut. You are left by a register while
Princess talks to a boy over by the computers. The boy nods, says
something about the last one finishing up a simple print job right now, but
yes it’ll be clear in under five minutes. Princess thanks him and comes back
to retrieve you. You had a full minute there, you suddenly realize. You
could have left. Princess wasn’t watching you at all, and the range on your
belt thing probably didn’t even reach to the door, you could have gone. It’s
the suit that held you. Princess might not care about you, but he would
have hunted you down to get the suit back, you’re certain of that. But the
moment’s gone, the chance past, and really, it would have negated the last
week in the closet. Your curiosity unsated and you would have never
known for sure what this was all about. It might be enough to know that
for some unknown reason someone had arranged for your presence at a
copy shop to sit with this old hit man and watch them lay Joe to rest, but
you’re not too sure about that.
Princess motions you to follow, using a small gesture, his hands clear of
the pocket holding the trigger. No coercion, no threat, just a simple request.
You comply and follow Princess to the computers. They’ve cleared it out
for you. It’s just you and Princess, and you realize they’re emptying out the
whole shop. The doors are locked and the clerks disappear into the back.
You can see a security camera. You wonder if they’re watching. You
wonder what there will be to see.
On top of the monitor of one of the Macs is a little orb-shaped camera.
Princess goes to that computer, and you follow him, waiting for an
invitation to sit or speak or play dead or something. You stop waiting, pull
up a chair and watch Princess open up a browser, type in an IP address,
then mess with some settings on the site that comes up. After a brief lapse
where the computer looks to have locked up, a small scene emerges.
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7-5
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Strange textured gray, some kind of jiggly abstractionist painting, you’re not
sure. It shifts and you see a lever, a handle of some kind, and then it pans
up and you’re seeing the back of a car seat. A ding from the computer’s
speakers and then someone’s voice says, “Hey, he’s on. It’s Princess…” and
then the view swings crazy and someone’s nose and mouth fill the screen.
“Hey Princess! Howareya?”
Princess laughs, a little, the first laugh you think you’ve heard. “You’re
too close.” A pause while the camera swings again. “You need your teeth
cleaned.” He didn’t even laugh during the movie last night, he was so
serious about it.
The screen shows the back seat of a car. A Lincoln, you think. Maybe a
BMW. Not that they’re similar, but it really could be either. You see a
couple of people, one with a laptop, the other with his arm in some kind of
exploded perspective: he must be holding the camera. You try to figure out
what kind of hookup they’ve got here, satellite phone? Would a cell phone
be able to handle this kind of transmission? They answer it for you:
“Wireless T1, baby, you like it?”
Princess smiles, asks how their families are, how everyone’s holding up.
The men in the car turn serious, somber, suit themselves to the occasion.
“We’ll be at Peter and Paul in a minute, most everyone’s there already.
Shame you couldn’t be here, but you got your responsibilities.”
“I’m there enough,” Princess says, “you just keep the connection open.
You got full batteries?”
One of the men in the car snorts and says something about batteries,
the other looks at the screen of the laptop. “Says we’ve got 98 percent here.
Should be good for the duration, but we got an extra in case we got to
switch. In such case, we’ll do it on the way to the cemetery, O.K.?”
Princess tells them it doesn’t matter too much to him. He says car rides
aren’t all that interesting to him anyway, and as long as they do the switch
then, it doesn’t make any difference. You hear the car stop, doors open, and
then the perspective swings crazy again and the screen bounces for a few
seconds. You can make out brick and other masonry, some desert-looking
plants, and then it slows down and the guy with the camera pans it right
then left, then up and down, slowly showing you the façade of the church,
some people milling out front. “We’re going in now,” one of them says.
Then dark for a second, and then you can make out the interior of the
______
7-6
O',,8*
*
church. The men move to the front and you get a panoramic shot of the
back of a pew and then the altar as they move the camera into place.
“We’ve still got some time,” Princess tells you. You settle in for the
wait. You want to say surreal, but that sounds stupid. You want to turn to
someone, nudge them, share their popcorn or something. You don’t know
what to think of this, this unprecedented thing, but it doesn’t really matter
what you think, since this isn’t about you anyway. But still, you want to
commentate, you want to editorialize, you want to have something to say
and someone to say it to… you’ll tell your mother, you’ll tell your friends,
they’ve all got to be wondering where you’ve been these last several days,
and even though no one will believe you, they’re going to love the story
nonetheless. They’ll say you should write it down, and maybe you will.
Maybe you’ll submit it to Esquire or GQ. They’d so go for this kind of
thing. You’ll have to play up the locked in a closet in the apartment of an
old hit man part, make it more… something. The reality there wouldn’t
translate well, you’ll have to find some peripheral tale there, some long dark
closet of the soul angle to play upon it.
People are moving past the camera, everyone stopping and saying hello,
everyone wishing he could be there, it’s been so long, but everyone
understanding. You wonder do they see you. You wonder if it matters to
them. Probably not. They probably don’t know anything about you, and
that’s probably best. Definitely best if none of these people see you. One
story for Esquire or GQ is quite enough, thank you.
The ceremony starts, the camera is pointed toward the back of the
church, and follows the progress of the casket and its entourage up the aisle
to the front of the church. There are only five pallbearers. You wonder
what this means. You look at Princess and you think you understand.
Princess was supposed to be there. Princess was the sixth, but he’s here
with you, doing this stupid job.
It’s a good Catholic ceremony. You’ve always kind of liked how every
ceremony is just a mass with other stuff going on. Follows the same
progression, the same steps taken every time, and you’re not surprised one
bit when Princess stands at the beginning—you stand with him, you know
when to do everything too—and waits for the opening bit to finish before
he sits. An Alleluia, some this, some that, and then you’re on your knees
just like Princess, just like everyone at the church. Profession of Faith,
Mysteries of Faith, Homily, Offertory… it’s all there. You don’t recognize
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the scripture, but you’re sure you’ve heard it before. Then the funereal bits
are pieced in, and the Cardinal says something and then Bishop says
something, then a whole bunch of other people in beautiful suits, though
none as beautiful as yours; Princess’ outshines your own and you wish for
him that he could have been there, the Mafioso fashion event of the decade.
Shame to waste such a suit on Kinko’s. Communion comes after the
Offertory, and you are surprised when Princess pulls from his pocket a
small gold container, opens it to reveal that he’s brought the Host with him.
He turns to you: “The body of Christ.”
“Amen,” you say, accepting the Lord into your mouth.
Princess takes his own, and then you’re both on your knees again. For
like twenty minutes this time, they’re silent so long. And then Princess
touches your shoulder, you zoned out a little, and you stand with him while
the ceremony is concluded. The camera follows the casket back down the
aisle and out the shining mouth of the church, brilliant the way you imagine
the gates of Heaven must be, and you know that you and Princess are the
only ones to have this perspective, to see the Ascension of Joe.
And then everyone files out, then the camera crew moves back to the car.
“Beautiful ceremony,” you say.
Princess agrees, then asks you to be quiet for a while, until this is done.
The guys in the car come back on screen, “Hey, we’re going to shut
down and switch, all right? We’re going to go into standby, so we don’t
have to reboot. I don’t know if that’ll work, but it’s worth a shot.”
Princess says he’ll be there, he’ll see them in a minute.
You think that standby only works if there’s a battery in, but who
knows? You try to figure out how that all works, if the state of the
computer is saved onto the drive, or if it just remains in RAM, but it
doesn’t matter, since they’re back almost immediately, congratulating
themselves. “Bobby got a damn fine piece of machinery here,” you are
informed. And you agree.
The majority of the ride is spent watching the knee and the edge of the
screen of the laptop. Despite their momentary joviality with the laptop
thing, they’re still pretty serious, still a little beat up by the day. You wonder
how much a wireless T1 runs these days, where you get one anyway, what
the limitations and capabilities are… is it in the trunk, is there a truck
following the car and they’ve got a wireless router and wireless network
card and…
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7-7
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*
The car arrives at the cemetery. Must not have been too far. You’re
used to endless processions from one side of town to the other, taking
hours sometimes. But then, nobody’s ever been Joe in the lead car before.
And they’re not here, so it may very well be a short ride… but considering
everything else you’ve seen in the last week, they probably just bulldozed a
straight line from the church to the cemetery. In your little sense of what
absurd really means anymore, that doesn’t really fall within the definition.
That’ll sound good in the article, the metaphor, whatever it might be, the
straight and narrow line of destruction created to take this man to paradise.
You’re thinking that kind of thing is more Esquire’s style.
The colors on the screen are washed out by the bright sunlight. God
himself made an appearance at the interment, you write on a little powerbook in
your head. Nobody talks, except the priest, and he’s brief. Then they let fly
the doves, a nice touch, you think, however cliché. And then it’s done. One
of the guys with the laptop, his voice hoarse, whispers that they’re going to
shut down now, and they’ll see Princess in a couple of days. Princess says
thank you to them, says goodbye and closes the browser.
“Thank you for attending this with me,” he says to you, and stands.
You stand and follow Princess out of the shop. He hails a cab and gives
an address not his. He explains that he’d like to walk the last couple of blocks.
It’s a nice walk through the park back to his apartment. No homeless
people, just happy people, happy and alive and free. You’re betting that the
infinitely considerate Princess has somehow arranged to have your clothes
laundered, ironed, perfumed, folded… that they’ll be ready for you when
you get back upstairs. You’ll step out a hundred times better than you
stepped in, cleaner and smelling better, a whole new man ready for a night
on the town.
You enter the building and take the stairs. Princess behind you, you’re
taking the steps two, three at a time. You’re giddy and you can’t wait to start
writing. Should you see some people first, test the story on a couple of
audiences, get some style and flow going before you try to type it out? That
seems the best bet.
Princess is attaching a silencer to his gun. You don’t know this.
There are two men waiting in Princess’ apartment. You do not know
this either.
______
7-"
<())8##;())A923;#
You reach the door and Princess puts a bullet in your head. The door
opens and the men step out and take care of you. See, this wasn’t about
you. This was never about you.
“He can keep the suit,” Princess tells them. “Fante made it for him. It’s his.”
“Nice suit,” one of the men says.
“Fante does good work,” the other agrees, “That’s his on you, too, isn’t it?”
Princess says it is. “I’ll leave you gentlemen to it, then,” he says and
goes back downstairs. He wants some espresso.
Looking at the park, something catches Princess’ eye. Above the trees,
off to his right, the paper of the sky looks to be peeling, its old adhesive
gummy and stringy, not the sort of stuff one would use for something
meant to last forever. It held long enough, longer than it was needed.
Princess turns away and walks, not hiding the spring in his step this time, to
Starbucks. He smiles, he even whistles a little.
“Well, hello Mister President!” the girl says when he walks in. Princess
bows and asks her would she like to dance.
______
7-,
%#%#2#9#&###3#2#'#G#)#(#3#3#
____________________________________________________________
*
*
*
F/%""*K%(&(9',*H&"#8*&$**
V##"%*+')'."0")&*H=99"88*
G
ummi Zinc Butts were an answer to a crisis. Radical marketing
placed Ludens’ Cherry Drops with a whopping thirty percent of
market share last quarter in the lucrative ‘guilt candy’ segment.
Stimulated, yes I was, that faithful think-tank Tuesday morning. Candy
inspired by the shape of, well, peaches and fueled by good ol’ American-style
guilt. Gummi Zinc Butts showed me the path to success. Only ten months
on the shelf and we had sixty percent of market share. And it wasn’t my
strong ideas that got us there. It was my raw gut instinct fueled by pure
carnal need.
Secrets to Management Through Controlling the Chi states that only one thing
need come after a brilliant idea: another brilliant idea.
That’s the chapter I got lost on.
“What Would Jeremy Do?” reads a banner in the break room. On a
slow afternoon skinny freckly four foot Jeremy used to talk some big smack
about kicking EVERYBODY’S ass on ToughMan.
I found the redheaded stepchild’s dissertation in the university annals.
So sinister a plot I quickly found that money bought shitface the paper that
won him a hotel management/food service degree. I tear out a page or two
and quote it back during Tuesday’s meetings. It works. I’ve demonstrated
rapid success into a private office with my own phone line. Imitation is the
highest form of flattery.
Tuesdays are Chief Director’s ‘New Ideas in Marketing’ meetings. He’s a
dolt. I’d like to think that his underage girlfriend is owed some credit for my
one good idea. Whole meetings waste away while I check out her fine flag
corps ass.
______
7--#
%%29&##32'G)(33#
The meetings take place in the basement. Maybe a year or so ago
Corporate took on a new strategy. My new peer associates balance
perilously on the edges of their chairs, in crouched prone position, brutal
gut instinct. I decidedly dress inappropriately; Van Heusen shirt and a tie.
“By God, we’ll one dot five the quota this week boys or it’s no conjugal
time-outs for the staff!” Spits Chief Director. I huddle dazed waiting for the
old man to keel over, listening to his hearing-aid scream. Dickhead son
Jeremy rocks back and forth in the corner drooling. Daddy sees the coup
and doesn’t care alzheimer’s viagra money. Marry the girlfriend.
Daddy Chief Director gone suddenly fangs appear. My peer staff are
demure villains; larval predators await the sale. Indie convenience stores are
our most recent target. ‘C-Store ninnies’ we like to call ‘em.
Behind the mask of candy I can be whatever character satisfies their
needs; I stroll don’t stalk the aisles of endless cubicles.
The associates rush the manager’s quadrant snarling, hiking legs and
pissing off their territories. I must enjoy the ride, I always wait in line.
Annabelle would sleep with me tonight and that means something.
She’s way too hot for me all the staff wants her. I’m distant, I don’t
reciprocate: there’s the attraction. Eight hours a day in a chair I’ve grown
quite the belly and what self esteem I have left!
She kinda got me my job. Letter of reference so maybe I’d put out.
Suddenly I spy a little C-Store money come in the door. Predatory
instinct staff all pick up her scent, rush Ms. Money, encircle and begin
good-cop bad-cop routine. All the beta males growl and spit but back
down; silverback gets first cut.
“Honeybaby I know exactly the candy your store needs.” I show her
the limited circular tins. I need this sell for the rent. Out of nowhere pops
up shitforbrains.
“Looky over here sugarpants. I gotta value packs.”
“Honeybutt why don’t you come over to my store and do an analysis?”
says Ms. C-Store Money.
I won’t can’t take a supervisor referral, not from fuckpants.
Something come over me terrible. Can’t control it slapped Jeremy hard.
Hard like ToughMan prelims didn’t know it was coming. Stupid looked at
me all silly on the way to the floor, half grinning like he wanted it. I got up
on top of him and started slap punching his cockhole. ‘I didn’t draw first
______
7-.
F/%""*K%(&(9',*H&"#8*&$*V##"%*+')'."0")&*H=99"88*
blood’ would later be my losing argument to the judge. Felt good to break
the next in line.
Ms. C-Store Money ran out the door.
Anabelle finally pulled me off. There goes ‘Employee of the Month.’
Please not the lecture about co-dependant upsell.
Jeremy tooth-dangling smile up at me. It hurt him but not like
unemployment hurts. Dr. Laura tears of guilt stream down my face.
______
7-/
%#&#$#2#(#A###(#2#=#<#'#&#(####H#9#=#3#(#2#
____________________________________________________________
3)*'*N$$0*
*
Doom like room
utters and alters
change, like range.
*
There
is my clock,
mark it
on the map.
*
Very fast for two voices,
confusing together—
split duet.
*
A door’s melody
is in its keyhole.
______
7.4#
%#&#$#2#(#A###(#2#=#<#'#&#(####H#9#=#3#(#2#
____________________________________________________________
U$=*L"'%*BG"%*U$=%*>'%#("9"*
*
“You should see an itsy
wooden door. Do you? Okay.
The door
opens into
a gymnasium. Go in. There is a door
out of
the gym, on the left-hand-side wall.
On the left.
Good. It’s a magnetic-bolted door.
Open it—
the combination is 5-5-6-4-9-4.
Hurry!
I’m in here!”
______
7.5#
%$&$'$($)$*$$$)$($+$,$-$&$)$$$$.$/$+$0$)$($
____________________________________________________________
!"#$%
%
Fabric of eels and cobras and a
network of slippery nerves on and in an
all-American girl, who is pushing and
cursing the two-faced crowd around her fractured car.
I touched the squirming needlework which we
photoed, wrote up, drooled over, and drew.
The engagement—
“Show me your ring.
Yikes! Can we call this a rock?
Get a bank box.
Who’s paying?
Lock it in your bottom drawer. Or mine.
Is—is it fake or mined?”
The wedding—
vacuuming sewing machines free of fluff,
sharpening needles. Soon we’ll be filming in slo-mo
me at my most unsportsmanlike: I’ll toss
this soon-sewn queen-sized quilt
of so soft fox from behind round the nude bride.
When I do you’ll see the guests exhale, and a few stir.
And then
achy nooky fellow fie falling—
killing her her son burst
from her lips, hacking he brought
up spittle, throat clear he brayed,
you have spoiled your death with me—
Icky Nicky falafel foray.
______
!"#$
+'%2*
*
My ex,
Mary? Her skull was an urn.
She was fixated on Phoenix, AZ—a
real phoenix of an idée fixe.
She scrambled eggs without milk.
But I don’t want to walk and talk about Mary,
I just want to see our son.
______
7.!
%#&#$#2#(#A###(#2#=#<#'#&#(####H#9#=#3#(#2#
____________________________________________________________
F/"*c$=%)"2*
*
A thing with a quality meandered before its desire
to cross the stream occurred to it…
its meandering found focus during the crossing…
after the stream more wheat-tangled fields
jigsawn by streams stretched on the other side.
The thing with a quality ran miles
crossing fields and streams. It came to a city
where two small things ran in a sunny alley
between the two buildings that concern
us here: the thing hoped to catch
the two things before their coming
friend, a third thing, arrived, as it
would, seconds before the thing caught
the two things. The thing caught three things.
It asked them to hum tones
before all four ran into the sunny alley.
All things began to hum and then run.
The three ran on their way out of the alley,
The thing entered a door in the alley after
considering, as it ran, letting, or not,
the little things go. It let them go and entered
a building through its alley door. What was
in the building? The thing. And others,
less active. But growing. Sensitive vegetable things
in an indoor forest. Bewildered, pleased, the thing
enjoyed the pleasure of an indoor forest.
It sprinted, weaving and dexterous, among
the things, planning to meet the stream it met
as it halted suddenly because of this stream.
Now the stream boiled with salmon,
now the vegetable things grew in straight rows
______
7.7#
F/"*c$=%)"2*
planted by humans, now they
clumped in radiating colonies,
now the stream seemed as much debating with
as flowing forth in its chosen direction.
Then it absolutely flowed in its desired direction.
The thing waded in, adjusting, paddling,
warning itself about the waterfall it
would begin to suspect was ahead as it lurched
along with the current. The stream became
the waterfall, through a hole
in a wall that, granite and solid, marked a
boundary of the forest. Through and over
went the thing, falling inside falling water,
now it knew, now it thought how
its accurate prophecy was spoken too late.
An effortless forward with a likely death
at its end—better than great labor
for a likely death as end—down, down
the thing went forward toward the bottom,
cloaked in a stream of water…
______
7."
1#(#)#'#=#=#%###%I###:#2#9#+#:#;#
____________________________________________________________
K$)G"%8'&($)*F/%$=./*'*1',,*
*
First a knocking.
Then, the lights open their eyes.
First man: Pumpkin moon tonight, with a river inside. A river, I swear it.
The Second man shakes his head and replies:
No, no. Paper-maiché—like a Japanese lantern. A lantern on the river. He makes a
slight motion with his hand. Up, then down. (Which, of course, the other
does not see.)
But now he is thinking of pumpkins. An open field of them, the taut hollow
beneath his fingers and the smooth skin against his palm.
A patch of pumpkins grows up out of the concrete
while the First man begins to feel the quiet lapping of waves on his naked
toes:
I saw a funeral once when I was stationed in ________. A whole family had been
killed in a raid and for each member they set a lantern on the water. Two went unlit
because they had no more candles.
The Second man sees the river beyond the pumpkin patch with fireflies’
shimmering gauze reflecting, and then:
They say when you die there is a light.
Each man falls silent.
In sleep they dream a river of pumpkins and lights.
______
7.,#
1#(#)#'#=#=#%###%I###:#2#9#+#:#;#
____________________________________________________________
O'8&*+$$%().*
*
i
Bone white of the seagull
against a storm dark sky.
ii
Salt-cracked,
this house
a long hollowed temple.
iii
Moth wings
loose in a drawer
cover
the folded letter,
a neck bent in sleep:
iv
When it comes to this—
you steal your own bones for soup.
v
Outside,
the continual bruising of the shore.
______
7.-#
J#%#8#8#+#1###0#9#;#&#=#9#&#
____________________________________________________________
F/"*5'&/"%,"88*!'=./&"%*
*
*
*
H
imayat had three daughters who were very beautiful. His wife had
three beautiful sisters whom he loved dearly. One night a terrible
storm blew in from the east and stayed for five days during which
the sun never once appeared and the roads were turned to rivers. The sixth
day arrived and the sun suddenly shone down upon the flooded neighborhood
and only those who lived underground with concrete walls, iron floors and
waterproof ceilings were able to safely return to their old ways of life.
During this time one of the sisters of Himayat’s wife lost her daughter
and husband in a fire and after weeping and wailing for hours she hobbled
to her sister’s home and set up lodging in the foyer. Wrapped up completely
in a dirty window curtain salvaged from the disaster, she moaned: “I have
lost everything and everything is lost! I certainly won’t go on.” Inside she
was beginning to harden and noticed the attentions her tears and hairpulling received from the man of the house. Especially the tears. Amid her
salty emissions, she shrewdly set about adopting another little girl to, as she
put it, “Replace my pure blind idealism with a tawny tidbit of tried and true
faith. When I find her I shall name her honestly, to reflect what I genuinely
feel.” With a stooped back and lowered head she secretly buried her
daughter, planting her favorite seeds in the fresh-turned soil.
The neighborhoods of the valley came together and decided that they
were going to pump the flooded town free with trucks and windmills. Of
course this involved a lot of cooperation and unguarded moments, and
after a few months of labor it was also agreed that the collected waters
should be made into a viable floating ocean as a symbol of their united
efforts to help one another. Plans called for a liquid oval of floodwaters to
be gathered, filtered, cleansed, perked-up, colored blues and yellows and
released into the valley. The people said: “You can go as far as those
______
7..#
F/"*5'&/"%,"88*!'=./&"%*
mountains, but you must not cross them or you will come undone.” The
ocean nodded knowingly in agreement at this, and even smiled when a tall
thin farmer warned him fiercely, saying: “We’re not above killing to get you
back.”
Life went on in the valley as in the days before the rains, only now
there regularly appeared a distant shadow of shimmering gold and radiant
blue which gradually transformed as it got closer into a well-rendered and
very believable floating ocean, moving slowly, disturbing nothing.
Life went on and on, full of light, sound and energy.
The once-bare neighborhood grew mellifluous and delightful as the years
progressed. Pear trees blossomed like generous friends over the rooftops:
they also housed reasonably-sized birds whose native sounds wove together
in the air with human voices to concoct charming sounds of rhythmic
living. Here and there an older dog would sidle from one shade to another
or lie unfettered in a bright block of sun as bicycle wheels mimicked their
slow canine rotations before coming to rest at their appropriate spot.
The adopted sister of the dead girl, named Faithless, but called the
Fatherless Daughter by enemies and friends, wrote poetry from inside a
colorless window in a secure house of iron and concrete. When she
composed she often thought, though without any real hope, that her longgone father and dead mother (for that sad woman never moved from the
foyer nor forsaken her pitiless grip upon the ripped and tear-spattered
window curtain) might receive her selfish thoughts and be mollified by her
willful self-absorption and be forced to return from beyond the grave.
Unlike the entire world, this girl refused to ever see the goodness in simple
things. Instead she fed constantly on drama, complexity and intrigues drawn
from her imagination. While alive, her trussed-up mother could only
manage to untangle herself long enough to ask: “Why are you so unhappy?”
before slipping away again, far from the hard eyes of her only living
daughter, into the mirrored atmosphere of her rather wicked and
duplicitous mind. One fine day the girl found a golden pipe lying in high
grass near a red fire hydrant. No one seemed to be around and there were
no footprints or depressions in the area. There were no clues at all as to
who might have dropped the golden pipe. “Someone must have dropped
this recently because it is still burning and smells like cherries and
woodsmoke,” she thought without thinking very hard. “How could this
happen without so much as a whisper of worry from the owner of such an
______
7./
J%88+1##09;&=9&#
expensive piece of work?
Because the sun was shining and because she had no where to be (she
was a pale duplicate of her ambitious burned sister, after all), the brownhaired girl sat down and began to think dreamy thoughts about the possible
owner of the golden pipe. As her thoughts were those of a poet and not of
a school teacher or blacksmith she soon found herself mouthing the words
to a song about swans and day-dreaming of riding aboard a white boat as it
trolled blithely toward a mysterious ethereal shore.
“I would do anything to know whose pipe this is,” the girl thought out
loud to herself. In a flash with a swift puff of wind the world came to an
immediate halt. Frozen like a mountain of ice. Nothing that had been
moving moved. No wrens or finches called in the still neighborhood. No
birds sang at all; not one sparrow, jay, crow or hawk; not one falcon, eagle
or petweet. Neither a stork nor a jabberer croaked a murmur. There was
also a distinct lack of singing and other human sounds in the wide, straight
canyons of the canopied suburb. No crickets or critters sounded. Much less
missed, though no less missing, were the noises of grass cutters, milk
delivery vehicles and public radio stations in the common weave of
rhythmic living.
Nothing moved and nothing sounded except the girl in the grass and a
voice which was very familiar. “Oh my youngest and only, the pipe belongs
to an alligator named Sidi Ahmed! It is his magic golden pipe which he
treasures very much!” the voice practically shouted. “But Mother where are
you?” the girl was highly doubtful that it was truly her since she knew her
mother was dead from falling asleep with her head in the black stove. “How
do I know who you are? You might be the Devil come to rob my raspberry,
simmer me slowly and eat me forever!” the Fatherless Daughter shouted to
the pregnant breeze, full of poetic gusto and rural bravery.
After that the air was still for a very long time.
Being easily bored and rather daring the precocious girl decided to take
a smoke off the pipe since nothing was moving and the voice of her mother
or the Devil seemed to have gone away. “Besides, I don’t care what
happens to me in this world! Let that dirty Sidi Ahmed come and try to take
my pipe!” She closed her brown eyes, drew from the pipe and held the hot
breath within her like a bite of cooked meat. Her innermost wish was to
know why things happen the way they do, so before opening her eyes, she
puffed up her cheeks and drew from the pipe again. The girl’s chest burned
______
7/4
F/"*5'&/"%,"88*!'=./&"%*
with hot air that tasted of cherries and woodsmoke, but still she held the
breath within her like a bite of burnt meat. Her heart began to beat a thick
trumpet that sounded like: rubble, rubble, burn, rubble, burn. The pipe in
the girl’s hand felt smooth and cool so she held it to her wrist to calm
down. She thought: “I’ve become a ghost and now I’ve found a magic pipe
and smoked from it. I think I shall wish for exactly what I want!”
The girl opened her eyes to the same world in which time was frozen
and began to consider how to phrase her wish. Gradually she became aware
that a distant flapping was now quite close to her and in no time the
smallest pigeon she had ever seen landed on the red fire hydrant in front of
her. Its eyes were tiny moist circles wrapped around an almost invisible
black dot in the center. The exhausted bird could not have been as wide as
the point of the Fatherless Daughter’s brown shoe and no taller than her
little toe. First it leaned to one side then lowered its head in the least likely
direction.
After a few moments the pigeon began to stutter out a warning in a
high choking soprano, paced by its own rapidly sucking breath: “Y-y-you’re
only a y-y-young g-girl. Y-y-you needn’t be un-ha-happy! W-why don’t yyou t-try swimm-m-mming?” The pigeon’s barely audible breath was
becoming more and more labored. “Dunk-king the b-body h-helps b-break
up t-the illusion of, of, of . . . permits!” At this last word the tiny bird made
no more sound but coughed and fell down into the high green grass, tiny
eyes open wide at last. A tiny blue dung beetle then crawled out of the
pigeon’s open mouth, moving with its head facing the bird’s beak, carrying
four pieces of rice. “It’s the rice which makes the bird voice and the beetle
which keeps the rice honest!” the Fatherless Daughter thought.
In a puff with a flash of wind the world continued to be frozen in a
timeless silence, though now the sky moved swiftly, manifesting all manner
of weather patterns and just as quickly dissipating them. At this time
nothing in the sky was exempt from incredible change. The Fatherless
Daughter was changing as well, instead of thinking only of the value of the
golden pipe, she also held it to her lips for its smooth shining coolness.
Rather than relish the selfish thought that she had a dangerous alligator’s
magic pipe, she simply forgot the origins of the pipe altogether. Although
she still could have wished for knowing why things happen the way they do,
she wished only for relief from the heat that was spreading through her
body as a result of the two smokes of roasted air.
______
7/5
J%88+1##09;&=9&#
The brown-haired girl momentarily forgot her painful family memories
in the viperous slow crawl of this new burning, and then she forgot about
the burning by concentrating on the night sky.
Nothing moved except the girl in the grass and the convex dome of
clouds and lightning and the stars’ immediate drifting. Somewhere,
something was stirring in its slumber as a result of all that silence and
stillness.
Years passed by both large and small, mostly in silence. Every day the
Fatherless Daughter would draw from the pipe and sooner or later an
exhausted pigeon would come and whisper the same short-of-breath
message perched atop the red fire hydrant. The message always ended with
the same warning about the illusion-of-something, then the bird would fall,
the eye looking skyward would glaze over and a blue dung beetle would
emerge backwards carrying four grains of rice. At first she only boiled and
ate the rice, but each time the girl smoked she felt larger and hungrier and
soon the rice was not enough. Then she began cooking the infinitesimal
pigeon slowly over a fire and eating it along with the rice. In no time at all
she was cracking the shell of the beetle by firelight and licking its insides as
well as boiling the rice and roasting the bird.
Years passed and the girl didn’t move or think of leaving because she
thought that everything was the same everywhere. She even believed that
the two sole changes in her world, the sky and the pigeon’s advice, were
simply complex parts of the same pattern, repeating itself over and over and
over again! In the midst of the motionless neighborhood landscape, the girl
one day remembered her stepmother and thought quietly and powerfully: “I
am not unhappy even though I am suffering greatly!” The Fatherless
Daughter had come to think of her body emanating straight lines. Hoping
that her dead parents might sense her expanding awareness and be moved
to send a message through the death curtain.
During this time the girl’s hair grew as fast as the polished sky changed
and soon it coiled and turned, integrated and individualized, under her like a
dense brown hedge almost twenty-nine feet tall. It grew a little in every
blink and half-second. When it grew to a hundred and seven feet a
shimmering gold and red ruby shadow inched over the treeline, a
resplendent and realistic watery blue oval! The floating ocean silently
approached, moving slowly, disturbing nothing.
The girl had long ceased to be a girl and no longer considered herself
______
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F/"*5'&/"%,"88*!'=./&"%*
The Fatherless Daughter when the moist shadow of the floating ocean
changed the unchanging scene. When the ocean was directly in front of the
girl on her pillar of hair, a small sea whorled aside and out came all the
sounds of the universe. There were clicks, snips pops, horns, hammers,
sneezes, streams, brooks, rivers and everything in-between. The sound was
both deafening and somehow not a whole lot different than the silence
which it had entered, somehow it was both highly musical and horrifying in
its expansive, swallowing blankness.
The sounds of the universe carried outward and rippled back toward
the clean dark hole in the ocean, and from this iris emerged an elephant. By
the way of introduction, the elephant offered to read the girl’s fortune. The
girl felt a thrill like smoke inch up her pillar of hair as she began
memorizing the elephant’s fine eyelashes and elegant deep-etched wrinkles.
“Why is your skin so gray and dusty?” she asked as she greedily
consumed the elephant’s gentle form with her brown eyes. “I am mourning
my dead because I cannot forget them,” the elephant replied. “I have a
weak stomach and little resistance to poachers but with these ears I can
hear all the sounds of the universe.”
The girl hadn’t had a helping of the golden pipe all day and she was
growing impatient with the ruminating of this dusty old elephant, so she
blurted out rudely: “Well how are you going to see my fortune? Tarot, IChing, runes, tea leaves? It better not be the bottle spin!” The sound of
breaking waves became the creaking of timber that resembled the deep
throbbing of stone. These universal sounds unified and became one
primary sound emerging from the black hole in the floating ocean, a sound
like: rubble, rubble, burn, rubble, burn. The elephant seemed to be listening
intently to something, but all that the girl heard was the way her heart beat
like a trumpet that sounded like all the destructive noise of the universe
combined.
One hundred and seven feet up in the air and all the girl wanted was a
smoke from the golden pipe. “All I want is to wish for exactly what I
want!” The girl’s voice was angry and sad and frightened that she had
forgotten what she wanted years ago. In the silence and the vanity of her
hair, and the pride she took in doing everything exactly as she had done the
day before, the girl had forgotten that in the face of unmitigated suffering
she was truly ignorant. In this disturbed state she reached for the coolness
of the golden pipe and took a deep draw and held the sparkling breath
______
7/!
J%88+1##09;&=9&#
within her like flesh on a hot coal. “Oh my only and youngest,” a longremembered voice shrilled, “You are drowning! You are drowning!” Behind
her closed eyelids, the girl could see an image of the sun from underwater
and suddenly into the image plunged four enormous squat thrashing limbs!
It was the dusty old elephant swimming in the floating ocean! And two
small brown legs and ten brown toes told the girl that someone was riding
the elephant!
As the girl opened her eyes, she held the cool pipe to her wrist. All she
could think of were those handsome brown feet! She saw Sidi Ahmed for
the fist time. The after-image of true love on her eyes was so powerful that
at first she didn’t recall the description of the original owner of the golden
pipe or recognize that it was manifest in front of her. The alligator was
peering over the edge of the pillar of hair at the girl, clearly comfortable
hanging on by his sizeable claws. Sidi Ahmed’s eyes were like extensions of
the row of yellow teeth cradling his boomerang mouth, he said: “For
stealing my pipe I am going to bite off your arms, legs and head. And
because they look to be in good condition I will swallow them without
gnawing them and you may live in my stomach and keep the place clean.”
Just then the elephant came floating over in a muddy sinkhole that had
separated from the very believable ocean made of floodwater. The alligator
and elephant were distant cousins and from past reunions the elephant
knew how much Sidi Ahmed loved a riddle, so he challenged him: “Why
don’t you take a smoke and tell us what the secret of the Fatherless
Daughter’s life is? Meanwhile I will read her fortune and get her ready for
your stomach.”
Sidi Ahmed’s breathing came slow and regular from his two-snubbed
nose and he was still for a long, long time, but his inky eyes had dark
comings and goings squirming within them. The elephant said: “If you
should find the meaning of her life, she will be janitor in your gullet. If she
discovers the truth first, you will be her guide in the hereafter.” Finally the
alligator growled evenly: “I will. I will. I will.” Sidi Ahmed’s wire sandals
yanked out tufts of brown hair as he snatched the golden pipe and went off
in search of fire and a quiet place to conduct his experiments.
When Sidi Ahmed disappeared behind a thick grape arbor the world
and the sky began to move in unison again. The elephant floated closer
than ever to the girl, so close that she could smell his musty breath and see
brown earth on his pink hidden lips. Laying down three cards, he said:
______
7/7
F/"*5'&/"%,"88*!'=./&"%*
“These cards represent dimension, space, and time.” The girl’s brown dress
was itching, and because the world was moving again, she suddenly felt
ashamed to be sitting atop a nest of ratty hair. Impatiently she asked: “Why
is dimension more important than shampoo?” “In your body there is a
silent memory, it is there prior to time, it is dimension and it is identical to
immortal love.” the elephant replied.
“Now now pretty, wrinkled peckinpah, don’t tell me you believe that
rubbish! I will certainly not!” the girl laughed loudly and harshly. But in
spite of her vehemence the girl was interested in her future, so she added:
“What does the goldenrod on the second card stand for?” The elephant
told her it was the only flower that grew on her charred sister’s grave in the
stony cemetery. “The flower is the conduit through which suffering and
experience influence your intuition. It thus represents space.”
The girl was trying to pay close attention to the elephant’s words, but
the demands of her body seemed to have accelerated since the world was
released from its glimmering torpor. As he spoke, the tunnel in the floating
ocean was becoming a smaller and smaller entranceway for the elephant to
squeeze though if he were to return to the heart of the misty floating seas.
With the sounds of the universe thinning out to become normal
neighborhood noise, the eloquent elephant scrutinized the emptiness of the
final card with his gentle envelope of attention. “What does the blankness
mean?” the girl practically shouted in a voice that she recognized to be the
Devil’s. “What does the final card mean?”
The elephant stepped through a very small hole in the well-rendered
ocean, that symbol of union and unguarded moments for a few brave
people. The opening closed until all that remained was the trunk of the
elephant on a gently waving blue and gold ocean surface, and through it
came one word: “Impermanence.”
Heading home to cut her hair, the girl paused to pull up her brown
bobby socks when a thunder clapped and a dark flapping cloud of tiny
pigeons blackened the sky and seemed to speak. In a thousand sing-song
voices that darted, wheeled, and turned as a singular music, they repeated
something like illusion of permanence illusion of permanence illusion of
permanence, over and over, again, and again. After the living and flapping
bird cloud passed, the girl who has been Faithless spied a necklace made of
sixty-one yellowed alligator teeth hanging suspended in the sky. It was
barely visible during the daytime but shone at night like a shining razor______
7/"
J%88+1##09;&=9&#
sharp guardian beneath the forever starlight.
Life went on and on, changing and unchanging. Memories of the days
of smoking the golden pipe and waiting for the sounds of the universe
faded, but the girl never forgot the lesson of impermanence, which she
carried with her until the day she died. And die she did.
______
7/,
1#%#2#<###A#8#&#&#
____________________________________________________________
*
*
*
F/"*H9%(#&*F/'&*I"G"%*L'##")"6*
W
hat comes first is the heavy weight of a signal. No. Scratch that.
It’s only the interpretation that makes it through. The signal itself
never came. Never made it all the way past the webs that lie for
perception. Never pierced the act of comprehension. Got turned around in
the ongoing arrangement of its composition. Got lost along the way like an
off-buried worm twisting away in the wrong direction.
It had an impact though. A slight of effect that carried over. A feint of
twitches and tics on Monday. A warm funny feeling down there today. And
tomorrow there’ll be a string of cuts and nicks from shaving when it subtly
bleeds through once again. But when it happened not a thing, not a thing at
all. No sense or reflex action, not even the slight turn of the head or raised
lift across the brow. And whatever it may cause by the way of aftershocks it
never becomes anything more than just that. Not now. Not yet. Like the
cicada it’ll need a great many years, perhaps the whole bloom of old age,
before it finds it’s way back into the fresh air and the ripening of fruit.
Coming back to him in a blossom full of wonder and ‘what was that’
surprise as some lost childhood toy found in a passed down family antique.
But by then, of course, it will all have been too late. He, having gone his
way. She hers. And it falling back to the floor like a stone of forgotten
melancholic regret.
They say it would never have happened anyway. That the odds were
too great in the first place. Greater then that of a chance pheromone
floating through the air, subject to all sorts of backdraft and current,
surviving every manner of humidity and contamination and finding its way
into just the right receptor. One upturned at just the right degree, hooked
over the incoming vector at just the right angle and synchronized in just the
right cycle of breath. And even then, on top of that, needing to land softly
______
7/-#
1%2<##A8&&#
on the nasal pit with only a hope that it holds the correct chemical key. The
component that connects and sends a signal able to bypass the cortex and
shoot straight into the hypothalamus with a rush. And not even that would
be enough. But also the taking of it up like the lost beads off a broken
string and much more then even that would have to be undertaken too.
Much more then any mere turn of the head, to some tickle in the lung and a
strange feeling, neither bad nor good, indeterminately felt everywhere.
And much more then even all of this according to those that speak on
things they have never seen. Much more then you could possibly imagine
they announce having not even witnessed the near miss. Not allowing their
own minds to view the potential of the crash. The possible quorum of
hurled bodies and fragmented mass, of smashed orbits cut up by broken
glass. Not having even seen the starting point of what might have been.
Having only turned their heads after the fact, at the hearing of an odd word,
or the sad sound of a slip somewhere far off. Never staying on until the end
when it will weigh in at its full measure. For them it is all uninvolved. The
signal an incommunicable anomaly, removed of any responsibility. Just one
more worthless addition to the trash.
Whatever was there that might have had any worth, universe raped and
looted long ago. The big bird of prey that is on the newborn the moment it
leaves its egg. Spreading its wings like a quick dark cloak. Drowning out
those first gasps and screams. Whatever you may have heard, actually made
out, just a sound garbled through the vocabulary of dreams and death. And
all that is left is an indeterminable mess, something best abandoned and
forgot, left with the rest to fade away by way of rot.
Never giving it the recognition it deserves. Not even the honor of a
drop that falls from the dry desert heavens and manages to find its way
through puddles, ponds, creeks and streams. All the way to the great rivers
as one of the few from afar that by luck and chance and days and months
makes its way to the sea beyond the beach and its wide lick of blue tongue.
Never rising in cheer at the grand feat it might have achieved, nor the grace
with which it skated the line. Ignoring it altogether how it kept thin between
the fat of subjects, never once going astray in the vagueness that we are. But
then again what can one say before such a broad reach of entropy. It
happens every day. Every entity reaching out in an arraignment of time that
keeps thinning and thinning in an attempt to encompass everything. What
hope can we have for the hope that will not die.
______
7/.
*
F/"*H9%(#&*&/'&*I"G"%*L'##")"6*
No more then the hope we have for all. The very same dream of the
original word that screamed its way into being. The one that made it
through and came out with a dance and a song. For every one such as that
there are a million more we fail to see. Every missed possibility of the
eternal that never came to be. It is for the sake of them that the one which
makes it sings.
It happens. It happens a lot.
______
7//
1#%#2#<###A#8#&#&#
____________________________________________________________
*
*
*
1(,,('0*1(,,*F",,*
W
illiam rubbed his hands over the scrub that the late day had made
of his face. His fingers passing over the lantern like jaw of a
hatchet that had long become just another feature in its place. A
mug which had put disgust in the others ever since he first could walk. The
strange shape of his head forgotten right now as he smears drool across his
sleeve and his chin. Forgotten along with why they had bothered to bathe
and shave him. Memories smeared like the snot on his shirt. The one which
told him why he was up on the hill. The one which had put a shovel in his
hand. Left alone to remember only what he liked. The warmth that the
thick hair gave his checks. The game of hide and seek with lost breakfast
crumbs and cake. How his fingers liked to play as they groomed over and
over what was no longer there. Left alone with only the hope it might grow
back by the time they ate.
He does what he can to lash the saddle back together with the scraps of his
pants. An effort that’s left him in only the shatters of cloth. With what little
left of his shirt now but a bloody bandoleer around his shoulder. Taking up
what comes from the wound where the bullet passed through. Leaving him
beat, bloody and nearly nude to weave up a strap that’s strong enough to
hold. Left alone in a land without features with a hurry coming under a fast
declining sun. The blood still slowly flowing though the pain has altogether
stopped. The bullet seems to have passed through without a shatter of a
bone. The prospect of it healing included a chance that he could live. But
none of this is a matter for him. The hope of such good fortune is not
counting in his concerns. Only his horse in the distance and the far off
target of revenge form the sum of every thought that’s left alive inside of
him.
______
"44#
1(,,('0*1(,,*F",,*
She stands in the window with her hands folded neatly as a pair of sleeping
birds. Perfect as a picture for the husband riding in over his vast and
endless lands. Still as the scene as she watches him come in, seeing that he
rides alone. Coming in with the dusk on his heels and the dirty work left
somewhere back on the road. Coming in alone to the loneliness of herself.
Coming in like the long hand of the night reaching out and taking
everything in with a crush of her breath. The shadow of a victor growing
long as he approaches his home. Watching everything he can now call his
own fall away with the light. The house and the fields, the shacks and the
hill, all the women and the men and their children covered in dirt. Every
inch of earth the horizon holds in. All of it his to loan and have others
work. But above all there is her. The one in the window, the one watching
him. His uncontested prize, his trophy and his wife. The reason he has just
taken another man’s life.
William liked the shovel. He liked they way it chopped through grass. He
hoped they would let him keep it. Keep it like the spoon that he curled up
with in his sleep. Not take it away at the end of the day. Like they always
take everything away. He liked it because it was strong. Stronger then his leg
like his spoon was stronger then his teeth. He wanted to hide it under his
bed. He liked the way it smelled like grass. But they will take it away. Just
like they take everything away. Even the hair on his face. They always did.
She doesn’t ask what happened. She doesn’t have to. It’s written all over his
face. It’s in the matter of fact confidence which slides off the air he strolls
in with. His posture and his pace saying it all without even a word. It’s
better that he doesn’t speak it. It wouldn’t matter if he did. She is already
well versed in all the lies. And all the truth that there is she already knows.
She knows it all as she watches him from the stairs. Is certain her love is
dead by the time he reaches the bar. Knows exactly what to do while he
measures out a glass of gin. Taking him in through the reflection the night
has made of the glass. Knowing how it happened doesn’t matter. If he had
hired men or done it with his own hands, it doesn’t matter. She is certain
that it’s been done. That it is over and that she is his. Trapped in a cage of
neverending land. Held in by an absence of anyone who cares. Barred from
any hope of rescue. She knows it is the end of every dream and that only
one escape is left.
______
"45
!"#$%&'((%
He reaches his horse just as the darkness completes. The beast busy grazing
stays still while it helps him with the saddle he no longer has to haul on his
own. Even seems to take up the weight of his wound as it rears him around.
Echoing forth a new hope with a neigh and a kick. Leaving the pain and the
cold behind with the sun as they ride off towards revenge that is now no
longer just a hope. But is something certain and in the open as if it was
somehow already planned out long ago. And all that’s left is the last action.
The why and the how coming down to a dim. Tightening into a tunnel with
only one end. The one he’s carried toward over the last of the land on the
last gasps of his breath.
No one cried today. Someone always cried when they held him down for a
shave. When they kept him still before the razor. He didn’t like the razor. It
meant someone went away. When they put a shovel in his hand and sent
him up the hill. Days when the dogs weren’t allowed to play. Days when it
smelled like rain. He liked days like today. Even when someone cried. Even
if it was him. He liked the hill and the rain. He liked the shovel. The shovel
is not his but it’s in his hand. He used it to walk. It was like a big spoon that
ate up the land. It was even stronger then his spoon. It went chunk as it
sunk and talked when it hit rocks. It liked the taste of dirt. Didn’t mind at
all the stones. It cut the green clean and whistled when he spun. It felt
smooth on his face. It smelt like grass.
She sits through dinner with her face held together by a feint of a smile.
The last ounce of her breeding holding on until the last. Not letting
weakness slip through the roots of all that is stoic and grace. Saying little.
Saying nothing. Knowing all that has ever been said is but the skeleton of a
story already heard. Not letting him in, not even feeling his touch on her
skin. Knowing she will never feel again, not even now as she moves
towards the end. Holding on to her strength through the moments with
sips of her soup and a slow chewing of her food. Noting the hint of glass
under wine, the metal taste of the spoon. Finding more in these things then
in any thing ever before. So absorbed that even when something is said,
that he was hunting or had gone on to town, she no longer hears. Forgets
whichever lie it may have been the moment it is said. It doesn’t matter. She
knows that he is dead. He may as well admit to the truth. May very well be
saying it now. But she is not listening any more. Hearing only a voice
______
)*+
!"##"$%&!"##&'(##&
coming in through a tube as she merely smiles and points out the ripeness
of the fruit. Aware of only them as they’re eaten. Seeing only the dead and
the candles in-between dripping down to their own dark end.
All the blood that’s left boiling over into a fury. Into a fever beating harder
then his heart. Harder then the heave of breath in his chest. Every thought
tossed off like ballasts of cement. Falling silent under the heavy tumult of
hooves. The man and his beast no longer two but hurling forward like a fist
through wind. Held together by a saddle held together by a thread.
Consumed with only the throat that lies ahead. The one he’s designed to
choke and rip open. Not worried about weapons or men. Left only with the
fury that will rage until one of them is dead. Until only one may lay claim to
the soft that is the tender of her flesh.
They ate late on days like this. On the days when the dogs didn’t play and
they gave him a shave. The hunger grew strong as he sat on a rock and
pulled out his spoon. He told it that it would have to wait. Pressed his
thumb on its tongue and enjoyed the smooth on his face. The only thing
they never took away. He looked at the shovel at his feet and dreamed that
he was big and used it to eat up the dirt. Laughed like a giant with no end to
his food. The hill but a big giant bowl of mush. Eating up the trees and
their roots while rivers ran straight down his throat. Until his stomach
growled and he remembered how he hated the days when they ate late.
The man and his wife ascend the stairs together in slow speechless steps.
The woman giving the girl a nod to turn out the lights and let herself out
the back as they go into their room. Undressing while her husband watches
from the bed. His eyes on her curves being slowly revealed in the dim. Hers
fixing on one dark corner to the next as she goes to him. Succumbing to his
strength with less resistance then he could have ever imagined. Growing
vain when she shows no fear and he knows that he has her. Shows her what
she already knows with his hands. Shows her hard that he is the only man
she’ll ever have. Regardless of how she is no longer even there. Her eyes
but mirrors of night reflecting glass. His seeing only what he physically
possessed. Never knowing what they might have learned. Never needing to
learn anyway. Never having to open up enough to let in the rest. He would
have only held her through his days like a toy until he grew bored or forgot
______
!"#
1%2<#A8&&#
how to play. Never knowing how to animate her with anything more then
the movement of his own life. Forever feigning an embrace with the
stiffness in her limbs. If he could find any joy in this she no longer knew.
For she is no longer there and it is all together too late. Not there to share
in his pleasure any more then he acknowledged her torture. Only aware of
her breath as she knows it is over. That the blood has ceased and that she is
falling asleep into the only dreams which ever let her be free.
Taken away by the sight of two birds at play. Lost in the small flights of
feathers and circles. Like a little dance in his heart they became the very
black of his eyes. Everything else rolling away and back down the hill. The
stings on his neck and the pain in his gut taken away in swirl of joy and
wonder. He reaches out for them. Tries to touch them. To grab on to the
song and the chirps with his ears. Dreams they are wings that carry him
away. Taking him up toward the sun and the bright light above all the rain
and the mud.
He came in through a window, one of the many, quiet and deadly. Silent
only until he found the cabinet with the gun. The last doubt shouting out
with a hand that smashed through glass and tore back with pieces of wood.
Finality sinking in as he embraced the rifle and slid in a shell. Slammed back
the chamber with it’s round and headed up the stairs without fear or a
sound. The tremble in his legs and his fingers from a weakness and a lack of
blood he could no longer feel. Taken over by fever and an anger that
burned feral. Darkness sweeping in on an omen of cold air. The last habit
of life a worry that a window had been left open somewhere. Death having
long ago set in before it set foot on the stairs. Coming up slowly worried of
a door bursting open, a report from another gun, the look of horror that is
murder when it finally comes. The pain creeping back in when all he crosses
is silence. Slipping into a world that ends on a knob. The one slowly turned
toward the open and the end. Pulling everything in toward the still sleeping
curves long poisoned and dead. Knowing it all as he closes in on what will
never move again. Taking up her hand before letting it fall back cold, heavy
and dead. Falling back on his knees with only the barrel holding up what’s
left of him. His head hung on the end which is as cold as his skin. Pausing
finally to breath before letting the night slip back in.
______
"47
1(,,('0*1(,,*F",,*
The runt rubs his tongue with a stone as he hears the hunger howl through
his bowels. Looks down at the people and the shacks underneath all the
murk. The big house where his mother works. Forgets why he’s here and
starts to run down. Gets halfway there before someone yells to turn around.
To get back up that hill. To pick up that shovel and not to forget there
needs to be three dug before he eats his fill.
______
"4"
1#%#2#<###A#8#&#&#
____________________________________________________________
*
*
*
F/"*H&$%2*F$,6*BG"%*
H
ow it happens is never clear. What it becomes is never certain.
Why it won’t ever stick around is just one more secret for the pile.
The whole event never even catching onto a name. It’s like a game
where only the parts and their players ever grace us with sounds bites and
tongues. Coming along in your everyday spoofs and spooks. The little trip
ups and the slips. The things that sum up rifts and fall back at once inept
and aloof. The traditional Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the classical
Shindindeleaub and his Catsalamahoo. You can pick whichever sticks and
paste them over whatever. Give one golden boots to trample down the
other through the mud. Make one young where the years are what’s hunted,
the other out at the end of age where the years are squirreled away. Dress
them in sex with a his and her. Throw them up in the air and mix them up
again. Turn them into a yeah and a nay, the this and the that, the one that
will come and the one already past. The trick is to get the ends to knot
together.
For now let’s leave them as the dumb and the dim. Playful labels which
never give you anything more then just a handle. Don’t worry which one is
which for if you manage to get one right you can be certain the other is
bound to pull a switch. They are merely the cock and bull story of what it’s
all about, the sum of every difference that never adds up in the abbreviated
list. Be careful trying to keep them together for they can take you for a ride,
driving all around town like the monkeys of no evil. The one with the eyes
shouting directions to the one behind the wheel who can’t get answers to
his questions while you’re stuck in the back with your hands holding a
scream.
Think of them as the soldier and the hunchback, the right and left arm
of a puppet ripping itself apart once it’s sewed itself back together. Always
______
"4,#
F/"*H&$%2*F$,6*BG"%*
starting over, again and again. The mighty and the weak agreeing to disagree
with an accolade to argue. Just rounding them up his hard enough. Like
jackals of chance and surprise they are two figures running along a
neverending sunrise. While you wonder what’s the point of chasing after
their taunts and hyena like cries. When all you get by getting them together
is a swirl of fur and bloody hides as you stand helplessly aside watching
them tear themselves limb from limb. They told you opposites attract, but
neglected to mention that they tend to explode.
They’ve worked out a way to their lives however. Regardless of how
everyone, including them, persists in getting their names wrong again and
again. They’ve found, as a matter of fact, an incompetent irregularity by
which they get along. Where Dim might run forward without heed or get
run and stuck up a tree. While Dumb slowly treads backwards, frequently
falling down or stumbling over the side. Coming back up in the role of a
bright and unforgettable sun while the other acts the shadow falling back,
slipping under rocks and getting sucked up by cracks before they ever
manage to touch. They run like two rivers through the future and the past.
One an acidic flood devouring everything in its path. The other following in
a quake of dust, obscuring every scar and filling the bottom back up. And
though they never meet, they share and steal the same tributaries and
eventually even empty into the very same sea.
It’s been held as a point of view by some that they never really part
company. Indeed that they share the very same quarters, fighting like kid
brothers over who gets the top bunk with an endless rock paper scissors or
tic-tac-toe. Oblivious to the actual act of their quarrel, much as we are
ignorant of the cracked glass of the now and then lens through which we
see them. Wholly unaware that there is an unsettled contest as we are at
often out of tune with the nonlocal or at odds with the notion that now is
always and forever. Those that hold this to be true claim they’ve even seen
them dance together. Like the can and the can’t going hand in hand toward
mutual doom and disintegration. All the way to the end with smiles full of
undeniable bliss. They never fail to point out however that the end is not
really the end. That it is just something moving in and out of view. And
you, merely a perspective passing by, are lucky to even catch it out of the
corner of your eye. That if your dare declare one to be wicked and the other
to be good, you’ll err with your conclusions and fall before ideas which are
______
"4-
1%2<#A8&&#
fixed. And that if you ever chance to see them again, through all the fuzzy
borders of sense, you’ll not be certain which one is which.
The key that keeps them glued is but the unsteady word of a truce.
Something garbled through the words. Lost in the static and upturned
volume. Nothing more then a familiar tone caught in a crowd that forever
shifts and turns around. The chance picture that pulls you in and leaves you
standing suddenly aware of what you are. The here and now being what it’s
all about. This is the moment when it comes, the very space in which you
can see them. When thought merges into feeling and feeling merges into
sense. When two ends of a smile fight over a frown and weave together a
singular drop. The one landing in your hand with all the limbs and ends
rolled up. The one racing away through your fingers like a fast flowing tear
and bleeding out every ounce of its momentum with a splash as they’re off
again.
Back to the bumps and the rough and tough stumbles with dim falling
over right of the bat and dumb tipping his hat like a drunk fresh on the
scene. The now having passed and the here well out of grasp. The face of
the divine having slipped back into the how, what and why of ever changing
masks. What hurt before now offers pleasure as dim gets back up donning
one a hell of a honker in a jig of fleet-footed jazz. And dumb, not to be
undone, grows out his ears and flies off on the large flappy wings of
Dumbo. It’s different every time. And they do it again and again. With a zig
to match the others zag they’re just two Swiss cheese bodies trying to puff
up for their friends. They do it over and over through the spasms of
beginnings and ends. Again and again. Never lumpen enough on their own
to fill in the whole but as mutable and unstable as timber put to fire.
______
"4.
)#'#=#%###?#)#+#=#<#'#&#
____________________________________________________________
Qdb^*
*
In my locker, shadow-books hovered behind the vents.
I pried one open; mirrors and hair gel.
Fourth period, the class solved for x. I studied
a boy’s neck, soft down and new scent.
Indian summer. Mown grass, peat dust,
fields cut to scrub and burn. The dust
blew into corners, between pages,
down the main hall and up the one mountain.
It covered everything. It was another thing.
I memorized theorems, I breathed through the vents.
I thought in sentences.
It settled shallow and broad, like water,
or like oil on water before you shake the jar.
______
"4/#
)#'#=#%###?#)#+#=#<#'#&#
____________________________________________________________
5%$0*F/")*
*
I woke to full code five, perfect iambic
in the upswell. That gift, the taste
of which we’re lucky enough
to know, if we’re lucky enough—
I should have written it down (I must have
written it down), but. When the earth
closed over I had old envelopes, I had
piles of scrawl. Little tearings at the edges.
The first time—like a secret—I was supposed
to be doing something else. What was supposed
to be my (fine) mind moved,
but crosswise—
a deep beneath days
of classroom, bedroom, lawn. The sound
folding in the rows and then
that one hum, low and sliding:
it felt
like grief (or what I thought grief
would feel like). Taste on my tongue,
turn in my gut. The burn and lurch of it.
And then it was again, or now,
gone (seeing as I hadn’t missed it
until). The world came back,
the dirty linoleum. One shoe squeaking
______
"54#
5%$0*F/")*
against the other. I had a new sweater,
a lunch break, a test. I had a sister
and a lock on the door.
I lived from then
for the next chance, straight shot of now
in the chatter. It opened up,
it held the pearl. I slipped back down
through a hole in the net.
______
"55
)#'#=#%###?#)#+#=#<#'#&#
____________________________________________________________
J#"%&$*
*
Apart? you asked reading the gold stencil
on the door. No, open, I translated
then you took my coat
and hung it on the wall and then
there was the business with the chair
both of us pulling it out at once and I wanted
your touch again on the small of my back
that hand-shaped spot reaching out, measuring
the exact distance to your hand
some unimaginable interval (like that arrow
approaching zero that keeps splitting the air
but never arrives)
you sat down
and we drank some water and ordered some wine
and the waitress came back
with the wine balancing the two red globes
just stood there while we negotiated
the spinach salad or the soup, and should I
have the fish (you always got the pasta)
and she stood there garnet light
levitating above her hands
and she said: are you two married
because if you’re not you should be
and in the silence I said
no we’re not even
dating and she said I’m sorry and
almost spilled the wine in your lap:
two red orbs with the light gone out.
______
"56#
)#'#=#%###?#)#+#=#<#'#&#
____________________________________________________________
:$(9"*-"88$)*
*
It was amazing how little came out,
and how much I wanted. Everything
piled up at the exit, leap and roll
escaping round the edges
until the song—that sad knowing hopeful
swing of the heart—lay deflated in my throat,
a silk stocking with the air gone out.
Breathe, she said, but by then
even speaking was strange, my body
(of which I was suddenly, embarrassingly
aware) forcing only a croak, a crack
from its instrument. The wet impression
of something removed. So we started again.
Consonants then vowels, down the register
and up. The discipline of tone, pushing air
in and out. Before lyric or rhyme, before
can’t carry a tune—at la and ma
and mum and bub, below even
word or world. Breathe,
she said. I breathed. Make some noise,
for once in your life.
______
"5!#
)#'#=#%###?#)#+#=#<#'#&#
____________________________________________________________
1"7%"*=8"6*e*P2*8M""&)"88*
—Kay Ryan
*
Use me then, take me
humming and buzzing
down into
hallelujah blankness—
bread, salt and oil,
hand on my back,
shape fit to a curve,
iris open past purple
to yellow. Pollen stains
on my hands,
my shirt.
Use me like the bow
uses the hunter: arrow
arm and eye, that one
moment of sweet forgiving
nothing-elseness. That thing
we’re made for.
______
"57#
%#&#$#(#2###1#9#&#=#9#&#
____________________________________________________________
*
JD&"%*1()&"%*+'&/*K$0"8**
H#%().*H$*!=P($=8*
What I have come to know after love or long white winter spent
inside the panes, swilling Triaminic:
ruddy guilt is kept up in brown cementlike tubs. It knows this story’s bent is parabolic—
the rubine scent of onions in the air, geometry
yielding no answer but line and plane, a kind of armistice.
Blood leaping to the snow below from newfound cuts in me,
my belly tender with the AM jabs of song. Is this
the refutation or the proof? The patch of lightning-white lichen
shifting in the night beneath the cedar’s toes,
the compost pile combusting, rhubarb in fruition; mica
slivers tucked away in burlap bags for later; monarchs caught and in the throes
of new jar death—meat-eater, beauty, poisonous to birds;
or viceroy, the corollary, mocker; there is no truth in words.
______
"5"#
%#&#$#(#2###1#9#&#=#9#&#
____________________________________________________________
-"'%)().*H/$%&/')6*
*
I was told that French was true
the only true that I could know
that television brought the news
through the snow across the lake in both languages
that static burns your skin like snow
that coeur and jouer are not pronounced the same
that creve is cleft and hearts are rent
in two along the borders of the states
that dotted line set out on maps
that crossing the International Bridge
like Orpheus in a hearse
my knowledge of mythology being slim
my efficiency on lyres unrenowned
the word seeming like it should have a k:
unreknowned or unrenowkned
or something Canadian like ice or amethyst
that k mobile like a buzzing phone
that lights up like a heart in a theatre
where The Waterboy is playing
dubbed into French and thusly
is not as funny.
Hearts are dim inside
when seen; they rarely pulse
or beat like in the films
or buzz like in Operation.
They sit there on your plate
when removed, like stars
years away and awful.
______
"5,#
%#&#$#(#2###1#9#&#=#9#&#
____________________________________________________________
V8","88*!('.)$8(8*
*
This poem
like you, my armless brother
is broken up and gold; its skin wet
with dreaming cysts
lines
that bust and bubble up from beneath
the milky epidermis, from some new and hidden
surly organ that, from the body’s basement, breathes.
Its skin displays the features of disease,
the controlled blood dots
scabs,
the sores and holes that lay
still open to the air
unresolved
like the failure of a rhyme
to click
the lack of stitch
that brings the meaning
to a close.
The faceless specialists
inform me of its gaps
deliver the sad prognosis
say I must give you up
my brother
my poem
that I must turn you over
to scans and white machines
analysis and anesthetic.
Meters will surround your bed
keeping tabs on your progression
but of course there’s nothing they can do.
It’s written in the words
those cords
so taut
that tie your ropy DNA
______
"5-#
%&$(2##19&=9&#
to mine
to our gasping grandfather
and the machine that kept him breathing
and to all the collecting dead
that line the family’s halls
like mourners cut in black
along an aisle
through which your flawless
armless body, brother,
slowly moves
in its march
down to the flame.
______
"5.
%#&#$#(#2###1#9#&#=#9#&#
____________________________________________________________
*
+2*J%0,"88*@%$&/"%78*O%'2"%*-(8&*
SI$&*()*B%6"%*$D*30#$%&')9"T*
Angel of Incidence
Angel of Dream Violence
Angel of Reflection
Angel of Ziebart Rustproofing
Angel of Huge Snow
Angel of Gasoline Stored in the Basement
Angel of Phosphorus Bits Found on the Tracks
Angel of Alum Poured over Pizza
Angel of Unbreakable Combs
Angel of Carob
Angel of Domestic Beer
Angel of Poorly Made Beds
Bruised Angel
Angel of Difficulty in Brushing Your Gums
Angel of Dream Logic
Angel of Stop Signs Set on Fire
Angel of Running Away
Angel of Plastique
Angel of Saltpeter and Vaseline
Angel of Crushed Trachea
Angel of Gas and Detergent
Angel of Bomb
Angel of Armlessness
Angel of Static
Angel of One Too Many Emergency Rooms
______
"5/#
%&$(2##19&=9&#
Sexy Nurse Angel Who Is Featured in Many Good Dreams
Angel of Clean Amputation
Angel of Asphalt
Angel of Structurally Unsound Decks through which One Might Fall
Angel of My Friend Corey Who Lost His Hearing
Angel of Ore
Angel of Irregular Retina
Angel of Black Remnants of Mining
Angel of Michigan
Angel of Words Half-Formed in the Throat
Angel of Turpentine
Angel of Submersion
Angel of Electric Garbage Disposal
Angel of Submission
Angel of Petty Vandalism
Angel Who Is Anatomically Correct Much to My Surprise
Angel of Arsenic
Angel of Abandoned Mineshafts
Angel of Steam Hoists
Angel of Angles, Acute and Obtuse
Angel of Bear Trap
Angel of Power Tool Accident
Angel of Cancer
Angel of Toilet Sabotage
Angel of Primary Colors
Angel of Returnable Cans Found in the Ditch
Angel of Polishing Stones
Angel of Urination in Public Bathrooms
Angel of Mineral Deposits
Angel of All the Sad Beasts
Angel of Big League Chew
Angel of Not Making the Cut
Angel of Crappy 70s Rock
______
"64
+2*J%0,"88*@%$&/"%78*O%'2"%*-(8&*
Angel of Sodomy
Angel of Pompeii
Angel of Careless Brothers
Angel of False Testimony Presented in Court
Angel of Snuff
Angel of Old Dust
Utility Angel
Angel of Gangrene
Angel of Pure Accident
Angel of Perfect Pitch
Angel of Bad Intonation
Angel of Getting It Right
Angel That Cannot Be Fucked With
Hairy And Terrifying Angel
Most Fearsome Angel Holding My Head In Its Fist
Angel That Impales Me in My Dreams Over and Over
Angel of What’s Left
Angel of X
Angel of Resisting Narration
Angel of Pie
______
"65
$#%#&#%#'###'#(#)#*#
____________________________________________________________
!"#$%&'
—for Motoko Vining
'
A
'
sada locks his car and turns away, leaving it parked on the shoulder
of the highway. He crosses the low ditch and begins climbing
upward, following a stream. It’s early autumn; these days, the sun
stays low and cool, rolling along the horizon for hours. Most of the leaves
on the ground are last year’s—dried and bleached out, the same dull white
as bones.
Walking under the trees, he breathes in, then exhales, the air cool in his
throat. He has a sweater tied around his waist, a canteen on his hip, an
energy bar in his pocket. In his hands, he carries only his fishing pole.
A year ago was the first, the only time that he’s been to this place. An
engineer where he works told him it resembled Japan, and that drew Asada
here, stirred his curiosity. His family had moved to the States when he was
fourteen, and now he is forty-four; while he doesn’t recognize the similarity
in this landscape, he hopes it might startle memories from inside him. He
has put off his return all spring, all summer. He had to come before his
hesitation stretched out into the first snowfall, before the trip was delayed
into next year.
His breathing is already coming faster; he slows, but does not stop.
This slope climbs for miles, even beyond the timberline, far beyond his
destination. He is hiking to where an old stone mill, gutted and abandoned,
sits beside the stream, where the remnants of a dam still collect a shallow
pool. The stillness there is only disturbed by the gentle slapping of leaves;
aspens circle the water.
The year before, standing beside the pool, he had seen what he believed
was a shadow on the stone wall of the mill. It folded, though, then spread,
and he could not see what might have cast it. Climbing along the wall,
twisting higher, the shadow moved as if it held weight and was expanding,
growing arms and legs. Asada’s chest had gone cold. He had fled down the
mountainside, stumbling, not looking back. This time, he won’t run. He’ll
______
!""#
H/'A")*
stay. He has not been surprised for a very long time, and he feels a desire to
be shaken.
The bank is rough and torn where, months ago, the swollen stream ran.
He crosses the stream, trying to follow the clearest path, and fish dart from
stone to stone, abandoning the shadows along the edges. Bending, he
tightens the laces of his leather boat shoes, the most casual footwear he
owns. He wonders if this would be easier with hiking boots, and whether
people often hike alone. Perhaps it’s usually done in groups, or in couples.
He tries to imagine a woman walking beside him.
There is a movement in his peripheral vision, to his right. A deer,
standing only twenty feet away, raises its head and stares. It’s a doe, slightly
darker than the the leaves on the ground, ears out like funnels, light
showing through them so Asada can see the red veins forking there. He can
smell her, also, sweet and rank, tight in his nostrils. Lifting his fishing pole,
he points it like a gun; the cork grip presses against his cheek as he sights
down the round, metal ferrules, straight at the deer. She only snorts at him,
unimpressed. She walks away slowly, her white tail switching back and
forth.
Asada also walks on, in the other direction. He is disappointed in the
deer, for not running, and of himself, somehow, for not making her afraid.
This is not a marked trail; he is probably the only person for miles. He
wonders how she became so accustomed to people.
Again, as he climbs, he thinks of women. At the computer company
where he works, there are several he’s friendly with, yet the ones he’s
pursued have rarely wanted to know him better. White women realize he’s
not as exotic as he looks, while Japanese women consider him slow to
assimilate, to adapt to life in the States. None of these women work in his
department, so they cannot understand, cannot know how it affects a
person, translating technical correspondence. He uses Japanese words that
most Japanese would not know, English words that Americans would never
encounter. Together, these two groups of words are like a third language—
one beset by redundancy, with two words for every single thing, with
almost no one to share it.
Tree branches cross like latticework overhead. He holds his fishing pole
in front of him, clearing spiderwebs. Today, he doesn’t mind being by
himself. He doesn’t want to explain his expectations to anyone and, besides,
he feels things are more likely to happen if he’s alone. The bushes thicken.
______
"6!
G(3(2##29:<#
Parting them with his hands, he looks down just in time to avoid stepping
on a dead bird. A crow or raven, its black feathers still shiny while its eyes
crawl. Asada holds his breath. After a moment, he hears a car on the
highway, distant now, somewhere below. He leaves the dead bird behind.
He has been walking under the trees, in the shadows, for over an hour
when he steps into the clearing. The side of the mill facing the pool is lit by
the sun. The white stone wall looks cold and bright; the three windows—
two low, one above—are squares of darkness. For a moment, it seems that
the mill has moved closer to the water, and then he realizes it’s the breadth
of the pool that’s changed.
The pool is all reflections. The tips of the aspens bend inward,
stretching there. Birds dart low across the surface, doubling in the water,
folding their wings to plummet, opening them to rise. Asada stands near the
low dam, where all the earth has been washed from between the white
stones. He looks into the mottled gray trunks of the aspens, at their bright
yellow leaves in the sun. Behind the mill, a broken fence stretches, wooden
rails down in some places; further along, a whole section has collapsed.
He notices that there’s no lure on the end of his line, not even a hook.
It doesn’t matter. He casts out his bare leader and the pool ripples and
settles. Little trout rise, curious, holding themselves steady in the clear
water. He watches until they lose interest, and then he reels in the line. A
breeze rolls down the mountain and the aspens’ round leaves slap and
clatter. Asada shivers, sweat drying inside his clothes. His legs and feet are
sore from the hike.
Then, it begins. Ten feet from where he stands, where the pool drops
off into slightly deeper water and he can no longer see the bottom. It’s as if
something is rising from below—an indistinct shape, its edges finding
clarity, different shades verging on colors. A round face, almost, a darker
body, flickering, trailing off. Asada’s heart accelerates, his scalp tightens. A
cloud’s reflection slides across the pool, blurring the surface, and the image
does not return. He looks up, then, toward the mill—it seems a dark shape
moves in one of the low windows, as if someone was standing there and
has slipped behind the wall, beyond where he can see.
Asada unties the sweater from his waist and sets it on the ground, in
case he has to move quickly. He reminds himself that he is more curious
than afraid. Attempting to appear calm, he again casts out his line; this time,
the trout don’t even bother to pretend they’re interested. He looks away
______
"67
H/'A")*
from the pool, squinting into the aspens, the shadows between them. What
he thought were natural marks are actually letters, he realizes, initials and
words that people have carved into the trunks. Between the stones at his
feet, he now notices cigarette butts; they don’t appear to be especially old.
The second time the figure rises, the reflection is in a different place—
across the pool, nearer the opposite bank, surfacing between the trunks of
trees. Asada looks away, at the mill. The lower windows are empty. He
looks up, to the window above.
It is the figure of a woman, standing thin and dark. Steady, unmoving,
hands held out in front. It is difficult to make out the face’s expression, to
tell if the features are Asian or otherwise. The long hair is tangled, hanging
across the face. The dress is loose, or perhaps it’s a kimono; it hangs as if
wet. The figure appears to have just climbed out of the water.
And then—it’s difficult to tell if the figure moved, or how, or which
direction—the window is empty. Asada almost calls out, but he does not.
There are rules, he feels; calling out might simplify the situation, and that is
not what he desires. Waiting, trying to remain patient, he wonders if
someone standing in the trees, somewhere further up the slope, might cast
their image into the pool so it was reflected upward, so it appeared in the
window. No, he decides—if that were the case, the figure would have been
upside down.
Asada sets his fishing pole on the ground. Wading, tripping through the
bushes, breaking low branches in his hands, he heads around the back of
the mill. The wooden door has a lock attached to it, but the hasp has been
torn from the wall. The bottom of the door is sunken into the ground; he
manages to bend the top enough to wedge his way through.
There is no one else inside. Above, there is the sky, no roof at all. There
is no remnant of a second floor, either—not even a ledge beneath the
upper window, twenty feet above. No place anyone could stand. Asada
steps over crushed, faded beer cans, over the ashes of an old fire. A trickle
of water enters under one wall, slips away beneath another. Standing at one
of the low windows, he looks out across the pond, to where his fishing pole
rests, next to his sweater, which is folded on the white stones. He bends his
neck and looks up the smooth wall, at the high window. If he wants the
figure to return, he decides, it would be best to return outside, to stand
where he had been, to concentrate on the pool’s reflections. He crosses to
the door and forces his way back through.
______
"6"
G(3(2##29:<#
The air has turned cooler. He puts on his sweater, eats the energy bar,
drinks water from his canteen. He holds his fishing pole like a sword, slicing
it through the air. Now it is dusk, and the spaces between the aspens are
difficult to see; above, the yellow leaves are pale, unlit. Shadows extend
darkly across the pond, threatening to seal off all reflection. He wants there
to be every chance, but soon he will be unable to see; he’ll have to follow
the stream through the darkness, its sound, all the way down to where his
car waits.
The black shape comes through the water like a seal, cutting smoothly
beneath and not quite breaking the surface. No reflections remain, only
shadows. Asada looks upward, toward the mill. The figure has returned, and
the face is now more distinct; the hair is thrown back, the features clearly
Asian. The arms are still held out. The edges of the shoulders begin to
shiver, as if the solidity cannot be maintained, as if the whole thing might
dissipate, blow away.
And then it begins to climb through the window. Asada expects it to
leap into the pool from that height, but it does not. And it does not swing a
leg over the sill, but slides through headfirst. As it comes, it changes,
turning fluid, seeping beyond itself. Shadowy, it twists like smoke, rolling
down the stone wall, leaving wet marks in its wake, loosing tentacles and
spinning them back to the center. At the bottom, the mass unfolds, never
settling; it slides across the ground, into the thick bushes.
Asada stands, holding his breath. He will not turn his back. He will not
run. His ribs flex inside his chest, their cage rattling its hinges. His senses of
taste and smell, his touch and hearing and sight, they are all whittled sharp.
In a moment, the head rises above the line of bushes, on the other side of
the pool, just visible against the dusk. Wavering, becoming solid, the body
appears in sections, as if ascending a hidden flight of stairs. Then, feet still
hidden in the underbrush, the figure starts up the slope. The legs seem to
move slowly, yet the body slides smoothly along, its speed increasing. As it
heads into the trees, the shadows thicken behind it.
Asada steps quickly, his feet kicking the white stones so they skitter
across each other and splash into the pool. When he reaches the aspens, he
hesitates, then begins running between them, up the slope, in the direction
the figure disappeared. His fishing pole rattles through low branches, snaps
in half across a tree trunk; he stumbles, drops it, the line tangling and
snapping, the whole thing dragging behind him and finally letting go.
______
"6,
H/'A")*
He arrives in a clearing, the ground still slanted, where trees have fallen.
Rotten and hollowed trunks cross each other; dried grass pokes up between
them. Asada feels that he is close. He breathes deeply, bending over, his
hands on his knees. And then, inside a round knothole of one of the fallen
trees, he sees what looks like fabric. Dark and wrinkled, yet not a shadow.
He steps closer, and pushes his finger gently through the knothole. As
soon as he touches the cloth, a high-pitched screaming sounds from the
fallen tree. Asada stumbles backward, falling to the ground. The quiet
returns, and yet, through it, there is the faint sound of scratching, of
movements within the log. Asada stands, and moves carefully to the hollow
end. He squints against the falling darkness.
In a moment, a tangle of black hair begins to emerge. It is a girl, he
realizes, a young woman. Loose bark falls from her hair; there’s dirt
smudged on the pale skin of her face. Her features are delicate, beautiful.
Slowly, she crawls from the log and stands, five feet from Asada. Her
kimono is soaking wet, and so long it hides her feet. She brushes her hair
from her face with long, pale fingers, and tries to smile; her expression is
frightened.
“Tadasu-san,” she says, her voice low and melodious. “Watashi ga
dareka wakaranai no ne?”
“No, I don’t recognize you,” he says.
“Tadasu-san ga nihon wo detekara 30-nen mo tatsu mono ne.”
“Thirty years?” Asada hesitates, realizing that he is answering her in
English. It is the language that comes first to him; she seems to understand.
“Why did you run away?” he says. “Who are you?”
“Sugu ni koe wo kakerare nakkatta,” she says. “Tadasu-san ni watashi
no iukoto ga wakatte moraenai to omotta no.”
“You were right,” he says. “I don’t understand.”
“Yumi yo,” she says. “Itoko no.”
“Why did you come to me?” he says, but she does not answer him, not
right away. Instead, she begins to tell him her story. It has been thirty years
since he’s seen his cousin, Yumi, and then she was a baby. That was in
Japan; she stayed behind, and she is still there, she tells him now. Her body
is there, but it is in a place where no one will ever find it. It is in a forest, far
from any town, where no one would expect her to be. She rests in a shallow
ravine, and leaves have settled on her, icy floodwaters have washed her
______
"6-
G(3(2##29:<#
clean. Over a year has passed since she died. Silt has thickened around her;
roots have taken hold, stretched straight through her. It is wonderful.
As she talks, Asada watches her carefully, trying to understand. Her
voice is like a song, surrounding him, like nothing he’s ever heard. He wants
to reach out and touch her, but he doesn’t dare; he fears she’ll sink into the
ground, or rise and dissipate through the trees’ branches. When he’d stuck
his finger through the knothole, her body felt solid. Pieces of bark still hang
from her hair.
She is saying that no one in Japan knows that she is missing. She had
fallen out of contact with her family—she is ashamed to tell him the details,
not that they matter. She is happy now.
“Why did you come to me?” he says again.
“Anata ga watashi ni tottemo aitagatteta kara,” she says.
Asada believes this—she has shown herself to him because he had
wanted to see her, had needed it, more than anyone else. And he does not
pull away when Yumi steps closer. As she leans against him, there is no
sound, no change in sensation. The only light is from the moon. Asada
turns a slow circle, his eyes searching in every direction. His arms close
around himself. He is alone.
______
"6.
3#2#(#>#'#=###;#+#3#=#(#)#)##
____________________________________________________________
N$)()*J#$9%2#/2*
*
Farewell / Is a word / That must be / Like a sword /
That has worn out / The scabbard.
—Frank Stanford
FRAGMENT ONE
Sensitive gyroscopes making awkward leaps bring me here, like a new sport,
a new dance, feeling intrigued but trying to bring you along. I’m inviting
you to meet a friend, who I wouldn’t recognize myself except the novel
road curves towards his home, circles it and does a little number engaging
his own qualities into their fullness. Akin to a sparring match, and actually,
that’s right. The one is engaged in combat, though only to illustrate a
handhold, or a sense of balance, the Wu Wei inside a fall, through the
mastery he possesses. Because the matter is a sword, a handle for us both,
to the battle, or closer cut to the bone, the one, my friend, who has
prepared to do battle.
FRAGMENT TWO
My friend is ronin, a creature of honor who no longer has agency to honor
or to be honored except in fear. At one time, in its time, to be ronin was
dishonor to a samurai but then, as the world died and the shoguns were lost
into the minds of the populous, all samurai were without place. Generations
later almost all samurai became ronin, wandering samurai, tacticians,
generals, executioners, uncontrolled. But you might already understand,
because you are close to me, just a few degrees off, and are alive in a time of
secret educations, and perhaps you have seen the samurai films of Akira
Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura. I watch for samurai who
have forgotten scars but not battles.
______
"6/#
32(>'=##;+3=())#
FRAGMENT THREE
Come to the center of the archetype, the temple. I am talking about the
place where myth overwhelms the most elegant features of histories,
recorded in books and films and uncovered in antiquity by scientific means,
to become a convincing, intriguing truth. Magic is the place where
complexity overcomes itself to become instantly comprehensible, simplicity
which shines, lantern in the briar, rosette in glass, clearly. No simple order is
magic like this until seen by the magical eye, the eye like Thich Nhat Hanh’s
which sees “a cloud floating in this sheet of paper.”
FRAGMENT FOUR
The samurai stands in the temple, stretched by many forces. Personal and
impersonal forces. I see many lives layered over his. I once had a woman in
my life who I called my samurai, once when she came out of her bathroom
in black geometric kimono. And she was unlike any other who I called
samurai, in private or in jest. My others were like the ronin, though feared
and lonely with lost companions, free and dignified by their own practice,
though they only chopped wood. She, tired and stiff, was still toiling under
a shogun. Her days with a camera to her eye, directing the battles of other
men, a gilded position with few moments of freedom. She needed to be
stroked, given everything without effort, but still strictured by obedience
and honor was her elastic and exalted skill. Fealty gave her art but the
canvases were rolled up and sold without being seen by her concubines and
peers.
FRAGMENT FIVE
Consider dignity and grace, in battle as in life, as the hallmarks of samurai in
a society of poor thieves and farmers. These honed skills wielding sword
and landscape in massed battle must have been like a jeweled cat fight,
faceted, shimmering ghosts, machines, swarming clockwork of genius. As
like a painting into life, like floods in slow motion.
______
"!4
N$)()*J#$9%2#/2*
FRAGMENT SIX
But modern history records a time when the elaborate gilded education of
strategy and war was cast aside. The hierarchy shifted and samurai were
seen amongst the common like blades without scabbards, ferocity without
meaning, agents bereft of agency. This means something to me just now.
Think of armies disbanding en mass after a cataclysmic war. Always, the
warriors return to villages and cities, becoming fishermen and bakers again,
grandmothers and stepfathers, disappearing with their scars. I believed the
empires destroyed many men, taking identities with their fall. But some lives
cannot hide inside work, a job, or lose the meaning of their discipline. The
lives of saints who cut their hair and build houses, who give credence with
their gravity to the invisible college, the mystical order of secrecy and
wisdom.
FRAGMENT SEVEN
My ronin pours me a complicated drink, hot when it reaches me, and
doesn’t waste a word on me in my observable mood. He serves as is
appropriate and graceful. Tact finds important work at every depth of
intimacy. No veil unpierced, I think. Remember the story of the ronin
shaving his head and wearing monks’ robes in a practiced act of deception.
He is not a sword so that when he attacks, the deceived doesn’t remember
to fight instead of bowing, and staggers out bent impaled on his own
plucking. No Sword. Not just snatching a sword from his opponent to then
cut him, but to fight as if a sword was not important. The knife sings when
there and when not. When the ronin returns we must act out the ritual of
ordering and eating to its end, like deep cover, then a second drink and he
joins me. I see all his knives laid out, which one he selects to discuss, clean.
Not to cut, and an education has begun. He eschews credentials and so
cannot bestow them, can receive no pledge, or very little at all, only
contracts with other loose blades for a renegade conflict, rush the fortress
again. Possibly just a trick to invite death.
______
"!5
32(>'=##;+3=())#
FRAGMENT EIGHT
When I die, the world that I lived in will continue as it was. I cannot take
anything from it, but I won’t be able to sustain any more attention to it. My
concerns will remain the same only less diffuse, like I’ve finished sweeping
up the endless shattering glass of my living and must begin to inspect the
pilings. To invite death all the way in, to the bedroom of the matter. When I
die I will run out of this world like melting ice, once so still for a lifetime.
What I remember is once Briar Rabbit and I, Briar Aspirin, were walking
past one of those freestanding kitchens out in the wood. They appear like a
multi-purpose stage set for homeless Baba Yaga. They stand empty, big
windows and a big bell at the doorway to announce dinner for anyone, for
Vassalissas carelessly wandering. Well, we notice this sound, quick high and
punctuated, whizzing inside. And so I say: “Well, well. Guess there’s
something for us to look into.” Rabbit hunched her shoulders and said, “I
can’t see anything.” That’s because it was the smallest thing you’d think to
look carefully for flying into a window over and over again, the little Briar
Hummingbird. Thing was smash smash smashing his self while I tried
waving it away. Those few snarls and arm-wavings made me ache with the
fear I suppose I was after. And it didn’t work either, Hummingbird was
frantic: some sad character in my life had left the door open and little
humming one-track mind got lost inside. Door was still open but he hadn’t
found the way out, which still makes sense if you’re not trying to think like
yr neighbor or yr humankind friend. Rabbit said around to me from inside
“Little chest on this bird, pounding hard. I’ve never been so close to one.
Or at least not where I had all the power and authority.” I needed to ask
what she meant. “Well, see, little little scared one doesn’t know how not to
die in here, and lords, if we can’t save him, we’re no better, but from here,
from now, I know all Hummingbird needs to know. The way out is over
there.” She had a point. We set about trapping the Briar Hummingbird, just
like you catch a spider, covering him with a basket, and sliding a firm
surface, as is recommended, under bird in question. Only we were awfully
clumsy, or I was, Rabbit calling caution, cause now Hummingbird was
inactive, not caring what happened to precious leg or feather. I was
frightened. Little thing’s heart is meant to be suspended in flight, like when
I’ve seen him, all precision and magical appearance and lack of concern
with the rest of us. This seemed dangerous, like a shark forgetting to swim
______
"!6
N$)()*J#$9%2#/2*
or a deep thing brought up to the surface too fast. We carried him out to
the little porch on the kitchen and uncovered him. Long whistle and low
blowing on Hummingbird but he doesn’t stir. Rabbit says, “I never
imagined hummingbirds could play dead.” And he was still, oooh, totally
still, and all I can think is I just met him, that if I just left him alone, there’d
be nothing for me to do now, now that he’s dead. Even when we see tiny
subtle eye movements and the pounding chest return, Hummingbird
wanted to do nothing but lie on his back. Should the Briar friends just leave
the little one alone now? Without an ending to the story? With tears almost
in my eyes, the pound pound pounding smash smashing mystery of loving
beauty and swiftness, so much to be hurt amongst the constant death and
forgetting of the sharp strange Briar world. And in an Aspirin way I just
wanted to knock him around, but the Briar Wind came to us first. These
two old friends made a quick arrangement, too quick for Rabbit or Aspirin
eyes and he was up and gone. Just waiting. Stuck on his back like Turtle but
free like anything without a terrible mind, in an instant. “Well,” Rabbit said,
“good job.” On the windowsill there was a single gray feather from that
battle. A willing sacrifice, playing dead to my heavy hands. “Amen,” said the
briar and the bog.
FRAGMENT NINE
I am only safe with samurai. Only the honed blade, the most apparently
dangerous can coexist with a person such as myself. Who will sit in the
glade of yellow flowers knowing brigands are coming over the hill in
moments, and peacefully weave a silent daisy chain of dreams with me. And
speak softly with me. I won’t rouse in time, too close to sleep, failing even
to boast or brag against old cruelty. Only ronin will sit long nights with a
fool, uninfected by dementia. Unangered by fantasy and obvious gullibility,
almost enthralled with fatal awe.
FRAGMENT TEN
How will I write something that will hold this magic together? (A story of
episodic partners) Brilliance binds these things but will you see the sun or
______
"!!
32(>'=##;+3=())#
just my shadowy objects? Most folk tales won’t try to convince you, they’re
just already true, at least how I’ve heard it.
FRAGMENT ELEVEN
I remember leaving the ronin, the one great and honorable ronin. It was
springtime though the desert only just barely showed it to me, then or now.
He saw another acolyte leaving for the wilderness, errant, another heedless
attempt to escape an ineffable lesson. I had listened though, to their stories
as he wove, where they gathered their armor and their manuscripts to risk
never coming back, or falling in love in a way that keeps the bow headed
for ever deeper seas. I thought I would always know the way back. He knew
that there was no risk: once gone, never coming back. The months forget
their names need telling, and the dangers are only kept to a distance with
watching, simple spelling, or staying.
FRAGMENT TWELVE
Throwing down your sword is also an art of war. If you have attained
master of swordlessness, you will never be without a sword. The
opponent’s sword is your sword. This is acting at the vanguard of
the moment…
…not to grasp (the opponent’s) attempt to keep hold (of the sword) is also
“swordlessness.”
—Yagyu Munenori
Before in our lives we have all gone down
to some river or another
and spoken with those who don’t often speak.
We tell them about the black fumes of our dreams
roots smoldering and asleep.
______
"!7
—Frank Stanford
;#+#?#;###=#3#(#'#&#*#(#2#?##
____________________________________________________________
!"G$&($)*
-1This is about devotion,
the eye that sees everything,
where I put my hands, how I walked
away from you. I heard your watch
ticking, my arms were numb.
I could count each of my steps;
when I looked back, it started raining.
You said, “Look at all those
beautiful clouds.” This is how air
turns into water, this is where
our prayers turned into conversations.
This is the silt on my shoes.
This is the pool
we are wading through,
this is the portion we are given.
It is dark as ink soaking into a paper napkin,
where I wrote my name and new address.
There is a fountain of tears boiling in the desert.
There is a plaza where I last saw you.
There is time for me to tell you this.
______
"!"#
;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
-2Who is lost, who
is drifting? I am, but
we hide behind what keeps us here. The world is ink,
I can’t tell you about it. So
who will listen to your matchstick
bones? Who won’t answer your questions?
Listen to me. Did God tell you to break all your dishes?
Did you know what to do?
Because I don’t like what I’m doing.
The beautiful God of the desert,
dark as ink, smooth as skin,
like a plum with a pit on a tree,
deaf as a stump and nothing but answers, that
God waves an arm: like fish caught in a net,
you, me and the dead are carried snapping aloft. The holy beasts stand
before us.
That’s what I’m told. It’s what I want to believe.
When I say words are mistaken,
worn-out, off-balance, irrelevant,
like God they turn against us and where we want to go,
I mean I’m not happy here,
and God evades me in this place.
We were in the yard, it was cold outside.
Did you look up at me?
I was speechless, I wanted to be carried
into the sky like a child.
You want to believe God will make everything clear. Instead
God tells you to breathe, so I’m
asking you to breathe;
be the breath for all these devotions,
let me know.
I ask this in your name.
______
"!,
!"G$&($)*
-3Hold still
for the barber of devotion,
try to forget about breathing,
listen to your ribcage.
God is shaving close
against your heart,
on the floor is a
nest of hair, everything
else you don’t need.
You look out the window
as if it were a waste of time,
but it’s not, it is as obvious as the alley
you have to walk through.
Devotion is a stranger
walking behind you;
devotion is a thief in your pocket,
a razor against your throat,
a man with a gun;
devotion is broken glass and grand larceny,
a puddle in the road, a shattered windshield;
it’s what you slip against,
what you’re pushed into;
look at the dead bird:
that is devotion,
and the holy people who get in your car:
they are laughing at you,
and when there is nothing you can do
against other people’s anger,
that stranger pulls you out,
rescues you. He says
God is between us.
We are always dancing.
What you can’t keep,
you will learn.
______
"!-
;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
-4It should be made out of ice.
It should melt inside us.
It’s what we want, where we should live the
rest of our lives; this
empire of blue,
we are shivering
to hold onto this place.
Let God fill my mouth:
I will give you my coat.
I will invent what I can’t keep.
I will be a stone building,
a penitential hotel
with gardens and fountains overflowing,
where you can stay for weeks
and nothing has to happen,
where all things are
necessary, they sing
in a language your heart
can listen to.
Listen
to me.
______
"!.
!"G$&($)*
-5Devotion is your house on fire.
It already knows how to burn.
It was burning because
everything waits, once you know this
you are in the revolutionary kingdom,
you are one step higher;
it’s the word that drives you away from your neighbors,
you don’t need them.
I am a torment of birds
against the throne of God.
I am on fire with love:
let me feed more paper into you.
The smoke will lift you up with me.
I will carry you on my shoulders.
I will feed you sandwiches.
When you can’t sleep,
when your voice collapses from singing,
I will drizzle honey down your throat.
I will build and build and build,
I must, I need to, I have no choice,
I have no time. I am
falling out of the sky,
and God says
devotion is so much air
it could smother us,
or allow us to burn one minute longer:
you know what you want.
It is as easy as breathing.
We have such crippled lungs.
______
"!/
;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
-6Forget about drift,
it doesn’t belong to you.
Listen to what
you say,
it follows you around.
You can’t remember
where you left it. Again and again.
You will find it,
you will swallow it whole,
it will walk all over you,
it will swim inside you,
this love, this love
we can barely stand;
we are bending to one side,
we are longing—
who cares if our words are mistaken, if
our arguments turn into prayers, like
bones and feathers on a dead bird, if
there is too much between us.
Open your mouth and sing.
______
"74
!"G$&($)*
-7Forget who is lost, who was left in
the desert, I will show you the
secret fountain, I will bathe your
feet in its waters, you will hear it
raining devotion, you will feel
God drifting around us; my friend,
even your bones are breathing,
a musician playing the flute of
your body.
In this city we move through
music, we do not know the words,
we are quick as raindrops,
evangelical, we break all the
dishes, shout nothing repeats that
isn’t reflecting God’s pattern: here
is the book of my right arm, the
thigh that knows everything about
dancing, you know what to do.
The God of the desert, that you
can’t remember, who was here
before there was a desert, who will
persist in the rain, that is
whirlwind and feather, breathing
hot glass, dark as smoke, a flock
of birds that fill up the sky, calling
your name, the dead, luminous
stars scattered among them,
over a pool reflecting love,
is here, is
here, is here,
is here!
______
"75
;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
-8What are you going
to do about
devotion,
evangelical
as a pen writing,
as a nest of hair?
You were having a dream.
There was something you knew
that you can’t remember.
You saw a storm of birds
darkening the sky,
God’s love reflected in a piece
of broken glass:
you picked it up
because it was yours.
You cut your hand.
You told me, you said,
“we want to go,
get out of this need,
just fall asleep,
carried out of the sky like angels.”
Devotion is
a fistful of broken pieces
I can’t put back together:
it cuts into my hands
the more I try
to hold onto you.
You said when God tells you to
invent what you can’t keep,
you discover
memory,
you tuck your limbs into
yourself,
you listen, you never hear.
______
"76
!"G$&($)*
-9About all this
breath, should it
come to a stop,
what will you do when
you have to answer for your devotion?
Will you blame it on the India ink,
the broken pen,
the airplanes that darkened the sky?
You forgot how to read, you think God is an abstraction,
you hear this voice,
you can feel the heat of
its breath on you,
it says
“there is no limit
to what I am singing,” that voice, it is terrible,
it is bending over us, a flexibility,
you live because you don’t deserve to live.
The only freedom
is the freedom from memory.
And you, in your bed, in your dreamy constellations,
you feel a kiss, rasping against your skin,
you’re hungry all the time: you imagine how beautiful
everything could be, you are told the secret of
turning broken glass into diamonds,
it calls for a lot of blood:
you wake up with your ears bleeding.
______
"7!
;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 10 We are here
out of need
we’ve been eating our anger
like soup, from a chipped bowl, on a crowded, dirty table,
leaning into God, who moves away,
touching the inside of this:
we want to know
who wrecked us,
who left us; what we want
to do is unresolved between
you and me,
all graceful and
slowly backwards, a storm
we watch approaching, breathing out and listening: in this world
that’s not going to be here much longer,
we are fish
longing for air,
even when it burns;
we’ve been learning how to swim for years.
______
"77
!"G$&($)*
- 11 About our longing for oxygen,
this is the heart that wobbles for you.
I don’t know what to do with my devotion.
I think about cooking with you last night,
the scent of pepper,
my two hands in the air,
the sink in the kitchen,
breathing, the bumps of your spine.
I want to say
we can lean against each other,
we can listen.
If it isn’t music, it could be steady enough
for dancing, it could be held in your hands, it could be
bread, an onion, a sharp knife, and
this could be what we are wading towards,
looking outside,
God is a car full of people
leaning out the windows, riding the sideboards.
There’s room for us
if we want to get in, there’s a place for us,
it will sustain us.
______
"7"
;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 12 Who was
in the desert with you,
who heard your watch ticking:
where were you
when it was raining up devotion?
It isn’t love that has you on
her teeth, up on a rail:
you listen to radio acrobats
but you’re not dancing.
And there was a plaza, there was a fountain.
I saw your bones breathing,
I was with you
like a pen writing against your skin;
we ate plums, waved our arms
between the sun and our eyes.
Donna, why do our conversations turn into prayers?
when God says words are mistaken,
who are we leaning against?
There is so much between us,
we can’t even reach the inside of it.
God tells us to be cornerstones.
God says all things are possible.
God grants us devotion like a handful of water,
but it has to be full of glass.
We wake up bleeding,
we ask, what
do we do with this?
______
"7,
!"#$%&$'(
- 13 She said
you rely on blood too much,
try living, try
the empirical kingdom,
try the chocolate cake,
it’s delicious,
or melt the candy angels,
you rely on
angels too much.
She said take my hands,
hold onto this:
you won’t remember
what you’re not allowed to keep;
the love of God is a word
that can be written underwater,
that you may write it and write it and write it,
so that it is indelible,
so that it is a tattoo,
a new language
that is impossible to lie with.
She said if you love me
you will write my name.
______
!"#
;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 14 So this is the second skin,
and we are need all over, we
talk to the dead, turn into prayers,
leaning over in places, into you and me:
I want to tell you everything about devotion,
the bowl of plums,
the saints off balance,
how your hands turn into birds,
the wineglass in a nest of feathers;
when I feel you near me,
I feel like the ocean,
fresh and floating in salt water,
the eye of a whale that
is the size of your fist;
when I see you I hold my breath,
I know in my chest,
in my lungs,
the plums are for us,
we sleep in the possible,
I want to give you
what I’m not allowed to keep.
______
"7.
!"G$&($)*
- 15 Listen
to the typewriter of devotion,
worn out, off-balance,
wobbling,
it will write on your heart
everything you can’t keep,
a new memory,
a cornerstone,
it will have weight,
but we are made out of tissue paper,
the ink soaks right through.
I want to be graceful.
I want to know where I’m going.
I want God to give me a new set of directions.
I want to know where to put my hands
as I feed more paper into the machine.
I want someone
to say, hold onto this, let me
fill your mouth with smoke,
I know what to do.
My ears could leap off
of my head I’m listening so hard.
I’m bending to one side.
I am trying to understand,
but all I hear is one watch ticking,
the sound of my bones thinning,
the sound of dirt.
______
"7/
;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 16 Says give yourself up to me.
Says you will see the glory of my throne.
Says the air turns into lightning.
Says the cars bending to one side.
Says the hurricane of my love.
Says you will see my name in words of fire.
Says you will know it, says it was written for you.
Says I need you, says I forgive you, says this is my body,
you are touching the inside of it, your hands stirring up everything.
Says breath and water. Says this is also devotion:
you will roll like a float in the sea,
in drift, here.
Says let this be an undertaking
between us, says
an open book, speaks in words of fire,
Says I am what
is yours, says I am helpless,
says my hands
are gentle
lies, cupping you.
______
""4
!"G$&($)*
- 17 We are need. So what.
We are moving, we are used to that.
We think we understand our world
as a collection of paper and letters,
piled high, growing larger,
leaning into you
and me, into the words we’re not
allowed to repeat, the holy name
worn-out in places;
we’re up to our waists, hungry,
bobbing in
waves that push us
off-balance gulping, or else so certain, we
forget how to swim, turn into frogs,
get used to everything,
turn up the heat, turn it up like a master.
We would be casual in it, it would be so easy,
we’d be good, we’d be quiet,
we will boil, like food,
gracefully.
______
""5
;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 18 This isn’t music, it repeats,
the same words in different orders,
evangelical, like an alarm clock,
a message on your machine:
There are some people God commands.
They look stupid.
You don’t see what they’re seeing.
Would you rather be innocent?
Would you pour honey
down my throat? Would you let me starve?
You argue, you know what to do,
will you do it?
Will you pay for what you want, even if you
don’t know you want it?
All the phone lines are dead.
The yard is full of bees.
You are trying so hard to believe,
you would pull out your tongue
to stop the lying, but it’s already fall.
There is too much between us,
we have nothing to talk about.
There are no miraculous airplanes of love,
no angels swooping down to save us,
no wise men looking out for us.
Just smoke rising from the burning leaves.
It’s not the words you want to hear
that you have to protect.
______
""6
!"G$&($)*
- 19 Devotion is a fist:
peel back the fingers.
Study hands,
the secret life
can be read into the palm,
the imprint of nails,
what is no longer remembered,
another body
left in the desert,
ants crawling all over.
Not certain anyone
is ever listening, not certain
about anything,
who will listen?
Who will put it to use? She says I
cannot keep it inside anymore. I
don’t care anymore.
I tuck it into myself,
but my hands stick out.
______
""!
;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 20 You know nothing,
you’re implicit,
you’re lost,
you’re sleeping:
I’m watching you breathe,
and nothing breaks
that doesn’t bring me
with it,
evangelical
as an eye reading
the book of your heart;
it will open, and God
will see the conversations
we wrote in there,
that grew out of need,
the grief that puts us
back where we belong.
______
""7
!"G$&($)*
- 21 Whether anything
happens, we are equal
in these cracking days: in
the teeth, the fish,
the trembling man
and the tiny sky....
If we are falling
out of the world,
like angels wobbling,
if we are so close together,
when we move we
aren’t dancing,
we want to, we want to.
We want to be graceful.
We hold onto this:
there is an ocean around us
reflecting God,
and we are going
to wade through it.
We are going to float
upon its surface.
We are going to be
weightless. We
are going to swim,
we don’t know
when, but we will.
It has been promised,
it belongs to us:
Let God
invent anchors,
we will be ships.
______
"""
;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 22 In all these years,
we were flying fish,
our mouths were hands, our
lips fingers, we were longing for air.
It was raining, the heavens smeared
in octopus ink, and I couldn’t stay.
Because if clouds were simply
water, if it had only lasted a second,
it was the sky full of cranes that made me
think this about you,
it was us in a car
and a feather floating down.
We were driving away, so
who is to say where we were?
We saw God dancing,
and now I don’t know
what to do with my hands.
If devotion is a net,
who do I let go?
______
"",
!"G$&($)*
- 23 Devotion is drifting
where you won’t listen:
I am always listening.
The sound of your watch keeps me awake,
The watch you found in the desert,
the one you placed on the headboard above me.
I wish this would stop.
I want to break all your dishes.
I smashed each of your glasses,
it didn’t help.
We are wading through what we don’t want to explain.
It doesn’t matter.
When I had a dream I was with you
in your kitchen, when you opened up a jar and showed
me a porcelain egg in a nest of hair,
when it turned into a snake,
when you said this is where
you get what you deserve,
I didn’t know what to do with my tears.
I woke up against you, and
there was so much between us,
all I could do was breathe.
______
""-
;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 24 Just look at my hands, the ink
under my fingernails;
I’m not a fountain, I forget this all the time.
I stretch my arms out and act like I’m bronze.
I can’t predict the future, but when it is raining
I can believe anything.
I can go for a walk and think my bones are full of devotion,
grace drifting and evangelical.
I can claim we are fish longing for air,
that we are moving from need. But here I am,
I’m stuck, I want to be
what I am writing, a fountain,
a storm of birds, a miraculous airplane,
but this is my arthritic mouth, and this is the hand
that clutches, this is what fell
out of the sky when I wasn’t looking,
the dead bird that shakes itself
and flies away.
This is devotion. I don’t have enough of it. I want to give it away.
I want it to live apart from me.
I want to talk to God about it, I want to compare notes,
I want to break out of language like God can, and be indefinite, and say
the right thing,
to be able to walk out on myself.
Like a new memory to learn, I will learn it, and I will
say it to you, so that it will always be with us,
in our weight, in the way we can move, in our limbs
when we sleep, when we are tucked into each other,
that we are possible even if we are wobbling,
and what you can’t keep, I will give away:
all there is, it will be enough.
______
"".
$#2#(#A###*#+#2#<#
____________________________________________________________
*
I$&"8*$)*K$)8&%=9&($)#
I
stopped at the intersection of Mountain and Glenn last night, on my
way home—there’s a stop sign there, so it’s nothing unusual. It’s been
torn up for a few months while the road people do the road things
they’re doing all over town, and that I don’t suppose they’re ever going to
finish—not that it matters much to me, only it takes a little longer to get
around town than it used to. The elderly lady in the boat to my right was
reluctant and nervous as she nosed out into the intersection, scraping her
undercarriage in the dirt and making the sorts of faces you would expect to
see. I lost interest in her progress and looked across the street at the car
opposite me, just in time to see the passenger door fly open and a kinda
cute chunky girl lurch toward the opening, only to fly backwards back into
the car and out of sight. I didn’t get it at first, but figured out the guy had
grabbed her hair and pulled her back inside. By the time that part was clear,
he’d already moved on to the next stage and was applying his elbow to her
face. He pushed her forward, smashing her forehead against the
dashboard—the elderly lady gunned it and obscured my view for a second,
and by the time she was across the door on the car I was watching was
swinging closed. The guy was yelling, but I couldn’t hear what he was
saying. I thought it was some elaborate joke. It had to be. He started across
the street and the girl went for the door again, yelling something else I
couldn’t hear, and the guy let go of the wheel with one of his hands and let
the other one drive while the first punched the girl repeatedly in the face.
The cars behind me started honking, annoyed that I wasn’t moving. So
I started across, turned the wheel, trying to get behind the guy so I could
pass him and cut him off when the road widened and then… I don’t know
what then, but something. I mean, right there at the intersection, right there
in front of everyone… something should be done. I could lecture him and
he could get out and kick my ass while the girl in the car yelled at me to
#
$2(A##*+2<#
mind my fucking business as she mopped her bleeding eye1. But the next
car across from me had already started, cutting me off and making me lose
those seconds I needed to catch up to the guy; people behind me screaming
out the window to get the hell out of the way, threatening me with a little of
their own violence—and usually I think it’s all just idle threats, but I wasn’t
so sure anymore. So I drove home.
1
The last time I saw something like this was in 1993, in San Diego. I was,
again, driving home and saw a group of about five kids playing in a yard. As I
neared them, a car screeched to a halt and one of the kids went a little wobbly
and kind of white. A big man jumped out of the car, yelling something, and went
for the whiting, wobbly kid. The big man stretched out his big arm and grabbed
the kid, who went immediately limp while the man started smacking the kid’s
poor little head around. I stopped my car in the middle of the road and ran across
the street, saying something really authoritative like, “Hey!” The man turned to
me, dropped the kid and punched me a few times while telling me to mind my
own goddamn business. I was pretty scrawny and weak, so I went down pretty
quick, and the guy gave me a couple of kicks to the stomach and ribs, but I took
them, thinking at least the kid’s getting away. I was wrong. When the kicking
stopped, I looked up right into the saucer-eyes of the kid, who had absolutely no
idea what I was doing there. Then the big man’s big arm eclipsed him and I
watched him take a couple more shots to his face before the big man dragged
him to the car, telling him how much worse it was going to be when he got
home, saying something about how his friends should stay out of it if they knew
what was good for them. Another halfhearted kick for me and they left. I knew,
as I got out of the car, that I was going to get a little damaged, but I knew also
that there was a reason for it, that the end result would be that the kid got away,
having run to an aunt’s house or something, and that would set into action a
whole string of events that would culminate in the kid going off to Kentucky or
Minnesota where he could be a kid—a disaffected, angry kid, sure—but one
away from at least this one horrible man.
I was so angry at that kid for weeks. Mad at him for negating my gesture.
Angry at him for making me make it worse for him. I thought that if the kid had
been good enough to just stay home and take his beatings there then nobody else
would have gotten hurt. He should have thought about the consequences for the
kids who had to watch it, for the people driving by that would have to see it and
end up feeling powerless and hopeless, and especially for the guy who was
going to try to help out and end up not just powerless and hopeless, but bruised
and cracked and bleeding…
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And then last night there was a big raid on the house across the street. I
mean, we’re just moving in, still in boxes and tripping over everything in the
house, asking each other, “Where’s the spatula?” and “Have you seen that
Love and Rockets cd?” and saying things like, “I could have sworn I put the
box cutter in this box… why’d you have to use so much tape on everything,
huh?” And so we’re kind of immersed in this and Trillian’s mad because we
won’t let her play with all the dangerous things in all the open boxes and
everything’s moving higher and higher out of reach and we’re telling
ourselves it’s just for the moment and we’ll go through the boxes after
Trillian’s in bed, and then suddenly it’s like twenty or a million blue and red
lights and yelling and pounding and we look out the window and everything
is cops everywhere, and they’re all swearing and nobody’s nice or explaining
everything because this isn’t on FOX. They drag someone out and after a
few hours it’s all calmed down again.
Tonight I was walking down the street, thinking I’d check out the park
about halfway down the block, thinking about how cool it’s going to be to
have a park right there for Trillian to play at… a big cream-colored Cadillac
something pulls up, met after a second by a gray Nissan something else, and
they do a very overt exchange. A pricey one, too, from the size of the
package the Nissan got. The gray car pulls away and I’m standing there in
the middle of the street, just a few feet away from them, and someone in
the Cadillac leans out and asks what I want. I say nothing. I mean, I tell
them that I don’t want anything. I use too many words to say it too, so I
guess I say a whole lot more than nothing. The guy gets mad and says all
sorts of mean things and threatens me and tells me to stay out of the
neighborhood if I’m not looking to purchase… I ask him if paying rent
counts. He doesn’t hear me, asks me what I said, asking in that threatening
manner, the one that says he doesn’t care what I said; the problem is that I
spoke at all. And then there’s a cop rounding the corner and the Cadillac
pulls away and the police-guy, still not on FOX, asks me if I’m stupid or
something. I say no and he tells me to get out of the street, tells me not to
loiter. Tells me I look suspicious. I tell him I live down the street and he
says he’s never seen me before. I say that’s because I just moved in, and he
asks where and I point and he thinks I mean the house across the street
from my house… so he doesn’t like me. See, he was there just last night,
and I found out today that the reason he was there was someone in that
house had beaten someone to death on 4th Avenue. I tell him, No, it’s the
$2(A##*+2<#
house across the street, but I can’t remember the address. I am suspicious. I
give him the phone number, ask him to call the number and ask the address
and ask my wife do I live in that house (we kept our phone number the
same so I wouldn’t have to learn a new one) and he tells me to get out of
there… he doesn’t let me walk toward my house, looking suspicious like I
do, and so I have to walk out of the neighborhood and around the block,
across Glenn, up Tucson and then over and down and back on to my
street, where I climb into the alley and crawl through the brush, poking my
head through the bushes every minute or so until I find my yard. Crawling
through the alley so as to not appear suspicious. I hop the fence and don’t
tell my mother-in-law, who hasn’t moved out yet, who leaves for Europe
forever in just a few days, who’s so caught up in packing she wouldn’t
understand a word I said anyway, and I go to bed. Am going to bed anyway.
In just a minute.
I’ve been in a bad mood for the past week or so. Not really grumbling or
mad at anyone, just unsettled. The neighborhood we left was worse than
the one we moved into—I thought so anyway—the houses here are nicer,
the families are families, there are fewer rentals (we’re not really paying rent
in our new house, it’s family and we just took over the mortgage, so the
only real rental is across the street where the murderers are starting to move
out), there aren’t any low-rider hot-rodders gunning it up and down the
street at two in the morning and threatening my wife when she asks them to
take their arguments out from in front of our house, or even out of our
driveway. And that neighborhood was still a billion times better than when
I lived in the apartment at MOCA, downtown, across from Pleasure World,
where transvestites with knives and guns would try to kill each other a few
times a week, where dwarves would offer their short services to me, not
believing that I lived in the building into which I was entering. Prostitutes
would try to follow me in at least once a week—but somehow that was at
least a little funny. Not much, but some. Then there was the interstitial
house where Andrea and I lived right after we got married, but before the
house with the hot-rodders, where crackheads would beat each other and
make up and make love (is that what it is? On crack? What is it?) and then
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beat each other again, yodeling strangely on the street corners and no one
would ever stop it. It’s just everywhere2,3.
2
It’s even in our public art—on it, anyway. Right there, a few weeks ago, on
Broadway and Aviation, where they put those photographic tile mural things, a
guy was hanging, dead, from the railing above one of the murals. A normallooking guy too, except for the whole dead-and-hanging-face-first-against-themural thing. I didn’t understand, I turned around and drove back just to make
sure that what I thought I saw was in fact what I saw. And it was. Five in the
morning, I was on my way to the studio to do some book stuff, and there was
this guy… I tried to find out something, anything, but none of the departments
or organizations you would expect to have that sort of information would give
me anything, or they just didn’t have anything at all. The problem I have here,
with this particular incident, isn’t the whole dead-guy thing, but that it’s so
commonplace, so trivial, so boring, not worth the time of the police or the
newspeople… Not that I want everybody’s business up in all our faces all the
time (like it’s not already), but this guy, he’d made it my business, and I wanted
to know why. I wanted to know why he felt he had to perpetuate himself in my
memory, and since he had done that, just who the hell was he anyway? Not that
he was dead, but that he made it my business.
3
Flash back to even earlier, when I was a little rockstar and everything was
great. I shared a house with my cousin T. (not really my cousin, we’d just
known each other so long that it was easier to say we were cousins—I had a
huge Puerto Rican cousin too, his name was P.R.), who would wake me up
every morning at 6 by blasting the Grateful Dead on his stereo; living there too
was rockabilly Dave and Brandi who did hair. We were watching a movie and
one of our neighbors came by, all drunk and sad and we told him to go home.
He came back later and told us we had to help him drink his big bottle of vodka.
So we poured it into a big glass and gave him the empty bottle and told him to
sleep it off. About an hour later it was all cops everywhere and an ambulance
and we figured the guy’d hurt himself. He’d actually hurt his roommate, stabbed
him in the throat. We stood outside, gawking, and a lady across the street
grabbed a cop and pointed a witchy finger at us and said it was all our fault. It
had to be.
The next day, across the street on the other side—we lived on the corner, so
we had lots of across the street neighbors—this guy Jimmy or Greg or
something was arguing in his front yard with his girlfriend. He was mad because
she always talked to other men. She said, “I’m a waitress, Jimmy or Greg, you
idiot, I have to talk to them.” He said she didn’t, she didn’t have to talk to them
at all, and she said he was being unreasonable. He said something else, and she
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Everything is horrible.
It was no better when I lived where Richard now lives, with the feeding
station across the street—not that I’m saying the feeding station is bad, that
feeding people is bad, but they’d spend the times between feedings coming
to my door and asking for stuff, and then when I gave this one lady a really
beautiful apple, an apple I was so happy to have and so looked forward to
pulled out her vocabulary, a pretty big one, and he took that as a threat and so he
defended himself, going two-fisted on her face and stomach. I immediately
dialed 911, told them what was going on, gave them the address and told them
it’s right across the street from where the stabbing was the previous night, in
case they needed any further direction. The operator asked a couple more
questions and then Jimmy or Greg picked the girl up and threw her over the
fence. “He just threw her over the fence,” I said.
I was told the police would be there soon, and I had no doubt as to that,
since they made a pretty regular patrol of the area anyway. But they didn’t show
up, even though the fight continued for another fifteen minutes. Eventually they
went inside, and later the girl went to work to go flirt with men about french
fries and sandwiches and coffee. And then after about two hours there was a
pounding on my door. I opened it and there was a cop, parked in my driveway,
standing on my porch, asking me was I the guy that made the call. I said I was,
and said that the incident wasn’t at my house, but at that one—I pointed. He said
that everything looked calm to him, and I said that if they’d fucking shown up
when the call was made instead of two fucking hours later, it wouldn’t have
been such a tranquil scene (while I was talking to the cop, the door of the house
of the previous night’s fun opened up and I saw my neighbor poke his head out,
smoking a cigarette, a huge bandage on his throat… I wondered if he could use
the incision, if he could smoke through it). The cop got mad at me and told me
to show some respect if I didn’t want to find myself going to jail. Then he
tramped across the street and talked to Jimmy or Greg for a while, leaving his
car in my driveway.
That night, after we’d all gone to bed, the side door of our house crashed in,
and I looked up to see Jimmy or Greg standing over my bed, drunk and really
really angry. I could hear Metallica—his favorite band—blasting from his big
stereo, his phallic substitute, his huge component system with which he defined
himself and defiled the tranquility of our long August evenings. He leaned in
and asked who called the cops. He knew it was someone in our house, since the
cop had parked in our driveway. I pointed at the wall, at T’s room. Jimmy or
Greg broke down T’s door and gave him something of a beating. And yeah, I
felt a little bad, but I didn’t hear the Grateful Dead that next morning.
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eating, she got mad and swore at me and threw the apple at a painting on
the wall, leaving a big dent in it that I’ve never been able to get back into
shape. I think she shit in my driveway too. Someone did anyway.
And everyone everywhere is so angry and that really is what it all comes
down to in the end. We’ve got grandparents slowly deteriorating, having
stroke after stroke after stroke, my grandfather in Massachusetts barely
holding on so he can see Trillian again. We’re going out there in a couple of
weeks, even though now’s the time I’m supposed to be making the sporks.
Somehow it doesn’t seem right to go making them right now. And while I
understand why we’re going there, and I want to go, I have the smallest hint
of doubt as to what the point is, really. There’s the family point, there’s the
Grandpa wants to see Trillian again point, but how long is that going to go
on? How much suffering does there have to be? Does seeing the little girl
really make the last year and a half worthwhile? Will it justify the next
however long? I can’t say. I mean, the functional reality here is that soon
he’ll be gone, followed in time by the rest of them and then by us and then
Trillian… whether we see each other or not really makes no difference,
doesn’t really change anything. I know that we do what we can to find
happiness, but the reality at work here is this: Life will be long and hard, all
our dreams will amount to nothing, and then we will die. That’s it. That’s
really it.
And yes, that’s the half-empty view. The all-empty view. But it’s the
one that’s there. It’s the one I’ve had in practice for a couple of weeks, had
in theory for most of my life. And so it’s with this mood I’ve started the
endgame work on this issue of spork. One of the authors makes mention of
Camus’ The Stranger, and while that might be cliché, I remembered it,
remembered what Camus said, and then remembered another of his books,
The Plague, and got to thinking about the both of them, and how the man
was saying the same thing I’ve been moaning about in the above
paragraphs. Of course, he said it much better than I have here, but it’s his
saying it that made me decide to keep my words rather than writing
something light and cheery, talking up what a great thing we’re doing here
and how we’re going to band with the artists and the Artists and the
musicians and everyone and we’re going to make some goofy army that will
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transform everything4. I’m not saying that, because that’s not what’s going
to happen. And not because we’re the wrong ones to do it, but because it’s
never going to happen no matter who does it. That’s not how it works. And
even if it could, there’s no reason to anyway. No reason to transform
everything. What Camus said was: Everything is pointless. All your dreams
will amount to nothing and then you will die. But he also said that it’s a
good thing. O.K. he didn’t come right out and say that, but that was the
point. He said you do these things, you help the sick, you paint your
pictures, you write your silly books because you want to. Not because you’re
going to save anyone or that you’ll change anything on even the least
fundamental level, but because you’re a doctor or painter or writer… You
do these things because you’ve chosen to be this or that and you choose to
act in accordance with your decision. This is far nobler. This is meaningful.
I have chosen to make sporks. I’ve chosen to make all kinds of books,
for no reason other than my desire to see these books be made.
What I’m saying is let’s dispense with all the overly pretentious illusions
about our rationale for our actions5. There is no reason to go about things
the way we do. But, as me and Albert and so many others are saying6, there
4
Clarification: I firmly believe that we are doing a great and important thing.
This does not change the fact that it is ultimately meaningless. And it does not
contradict my earlier statements (see Issue 1.2) about what I hope will be my
small effect upon my small bit of this small, meaningless world. That our
dreams will amount to nothing should never preclude our having them and
working our asses off to see that these things are ours.
5
I’m so rife with apparent contradictions here. Yes, keep your dreams,
understand why you do what you do. Just be concise, be clear. Have dreams.
Have real dreams. Don’t have the I’m gonna save the world ones when it’s
actually I’m gonna quit my job someday and write all the damn time. If you are
actually going to save the world, then I guess you should keep that dream. If you
are the twenty-third coming of whomever, then you may well have every right to
have the sorts of overly pretentious intentions that I’m scoffing at. In such case,
my apologies, I wasn’t writing this for you. But even you could use a little salt
with your intent.
6
What is usually said when this topic comes up: Yeah, yeah, we know, we’ve
heard this so many times already. And I know you’ve heard it, I know it’s been
said over and over, but it has to be said again and again until we start to
understand it. We hear it too early, when we don’t have the framework for
understanding that would allow for a useful integration of the idea. We hear it
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is no reason not to. The converse of our meaningless existence is: So What?
The opposite of pointlessness is pointlessness, but that doesn’t mean we
stop and wait to die, or that we end it all without the wait. Instead, we find
in exasperation and transience and pointlessness the justification to do
whatever the hell we want to do. Take any belief or course of action and arc
it out past its conclusion, take everything out past the end of time and it all
amounts to the same amount of nothing. The greatest and the least
equalized in the end, blended with everything in between… do not delude
yourself that you will make a difference, do not tell yourself you have to
have a great reason for your actions. Maybe you want to knit potholders
your whole life, maybe you want to cure cancer or AIDS. They amount to
the same thing—and cancer patients and AIDS patients, don’t they need
potholders, too?—so don’t choose one over the other because one’s going
to make more difference than the other, since they’re not.
Me, I do environmental work to pay the bills. In the rationalist,
meaningful-existence view, this is a good thing. But I don’t care. I do it
because they leave me alone and I enjoy the work. If I were destroying the
environment but they left me alone and I enjoyed the work, I’d still be
doing it. I want to pay my bills, I want to be able to buy the supplies I need
for spork when spork doesn’t have the money to buy them for itself. I get up
early in the morning and come to the studio because that’s what I want to
do. It makes me happy. The process of binding a book, or making one of
my bad paintings that no one sees, or writing one of my unreadable books
that make people smile and nod and say, “It was well written, I can see
that,” when they’re feeling generous, or, “I didn’t understand a word of
what you were saying, but don’t worry, I still like you anyway,” when they’re
when we’re teenagers and it becomes part of our teenage framework, the one we
abandon as we get over our pointless rebellion and ill-advised taste for stupid
clothes and bad music. Camus and early Depeche Mode are in no way
equivalent. We learn our philosophies at the wrong time and so they get lumped
in with all the things we grow out of… and since we’re all wise and grown up
now, when something or someone refers to those things, we toss them aside as
silly adolescent bullshit that we got over when we got some sense. If we truly
understood any of it, we would have much happier, less complicated existences,
unfettered by the constraints of our endless search for meaning and reason.
These things must be continually said, until we finally get a hold on what it all
really means.
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not so generous (other, far less generous things have been said about my
work, but I don’t feel any real need to list them here), the process involved
makes me happy. I feel good when my hands are doing the folding or
cutting—even when the glue shows through and ruins one of the books I’m
binding it doesn’t bother me all that much. I’ve lost my sense of meaning,
lost my yen for meaningfulness, tossed aside (I’m thinking) with my sense
of audience. Compacted, distilled, uncomplicated, this all comes down to
simple desire. I want to make sporks. But sometimes I want to play solitaire,
sometimes I want to watch “Smallville” over and over on my computer (I
downloaded the first season. I hated the show at first, but I’m thinking now
that Lex Luthor is the best character on TV to come around in a long, long
time). Sometimes I want to eat a big, rare steak. When I want to eat a steak,
I’m not making sporks, and when I want to watch “Smallville” I’m not
eating steak, though I guess I could do both at the same time7.
And when I’m not eating steak or watching “Smallville” or playing
solitaire, when I’m making the sporks, I do it differently than we did for the
first volume. This is in part because we didn’t want to do it the same way
forever, and part because Johnny and his brother sold the shop where we
did the silkscreening. I guess, if we wanted to keep on silkscreening, we
could have found some other people to sit down and speak our dreams and
intentions to, telling them about the great and vital role the could play in
the creation of this thing we do—or I could sit to the side and smoke a
bunch of cigarettes while Richard says the words that I can’t, since I don’t
believe them anymore, if I ever really believed them anyway8—we could,
but I think it’s time to change. It’ll be the same size, but I’m opting for
covers of bookboard and bookcloth instead of the “floppy” covers that
seemed to freak so many people out. And to you people who were so
freaked out by the “floppy” covers, I’m not changing this for you. As the
Camus-referencing author in this issue said, “This is not about you.” It’s
about me, wanting to keep this interesting for myself, wanting to up the
quality of the thing we make. The canvas covers were a necessity brought
7
Or golfing. Sometimes I golf with my dad. I’m really bad at my short game,
but I’m verging on Happy Gilmore with my drives—even if they do end up most
of the time on some other fairway or the freeway or Speedway. Got me some
distance, I do.
8
My favorite English teacher in high school used to call me Monsieur
Meurseault. She let me write a song in place of a term paper. She rocked.
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about by no money, by no tools to make a hardback book, no tools to do a
perfect-bound paperback book—and we certainly were not about to write
for grants or hold bake sales or car washes so we could get the funding
needed to pay someone to do this for us. I mean, what’s the point of going
to all the effort if all you’re going to do is send it off to the printer who will
send it to the binder and then they send you the thing that you’ll tell people
you “made”? See, if you didn’t make it, you didn’t make it. Maybe you
compiled it, maybe you wrote it, maybe you edited it. Sure, you did all those
things, but you didn’t make it. To me, that’s not enough. Nowhere near
enough. Maybe we’ll write for grants or have bake sales or car washes in the
future, but only to facilitate our continuing to make these things. Ourselves.
For me, that I made this, makes it better than most everything else9,10.
9
I keep writing to authors, or their intermediaries, or agents, or whatever contact
information I can find for them, I keep asking them please can I bind their
books, can I just make for them a small edition of these things they’ve written,
make something that’s equal to their work—I do make beautiful books. I should
keep them so in the unlikely event that someone comes to my studio I have
something to show them rather than the unfinished, failed things I keep around
as reminders of what to not do again, or ways to not bind a book… but I don’t
have any of them. The ones that were not commissioned were made specifically
for people and given to those specific people. I’m still doing exclusively
flatback, since I don’t know how to round and back a book yet, but when I go to
Boston in a couple of weeks, I’m going to corner that nice Robert Marshall over
at Harvard Book and Bindery and make him show me how easy it really is.
Strange that I have to go all the way across the country to learn something, but
he’s really the only one I know that does what I want to know. There aren’t any
binderies in Arizona. None that I can find anyway. There are small presses, there
are people that make books by hand, but they’re all nontraditional like me, and
they’re happy being that, while I am not. The people making the books here, as
far as I can tell, aren’t making books to last, or even to be handled. They’re
making art pieces—and that’s fine, but that’s not what I want to do. I can make a
crappy pretty book that’ll fall apart just as good as the next guy. No; I can do it
better, I’m a master of the crappy pretty book that’ll fall apart. I’ve done that,
I’ve got them under my belt, and they’re all disintegrating, not standing up to the
test of time. I see no reason to waste my efforts thus. The closest bindery where
I can learn anything is in San Diego, and while that is closer, they want all kinds
of money to show me how to do anything. Maybe I should understand that, but I
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don’t. I mean, Me. They want to charge Me for gracing them with my presence.
I’ll go East, thank you.
10
And perhaps I should qualify a bit here. I don’t want to, but I’m not really
trying to piss anyone off. Well, maybe a little… like those kids who just staple
their things together and call it a literary magazine. Sorry buddies, no go. That is
so crappy. Show some respect for your authors, for the idea of art or Art or
language… or anything. For yourselves. I would never produce such a piece of
shit and try to pass it off as a worthwhile thing. How do you sleep? Punks. (My
friend Tim makes a photocopied and stapled thing full of stuff, but he knows
exactly what it is, and he presents it as such. I really like it, like Tim too—even
though he just moved away. Punk.)
What I mean, what my qualifier is here: I understand how the industry
works. I understand that people are not all that interested in the binding of the
books they buy at Borders or Barnes and Noble, or wherever they go, they are
interested in what’s in them, and as long as the binding holds together long
enough for them to get through the book, they’re happy. I understand that it is
not cost-effective to make a well-made book, that most of them are just kindling
anyway. I’ll admit, right here in the small print, that my favorite kind of book is
the trade paperback, my favorite of those being the reinforced cloth ones from
Black Sparrow Press. I love the way they feel, the solidity and flex you don’t get
from commercially-produced hardbacks. Even Art books, the big coffee-table
ones, aren’t made as well as they used to be. And I understand that it is a good
thing that there is an industry devoted to getting the books out. Thank god for
them, even if they do produce 99 percent crap. There is always that one percent.
And when a friend is accepted by the industry, I’m genuinely happy for that
friend, and maybe even a little jealous—but jealous not of the publication, rather
I am jealous that they are able to write a thing that can be published. I am not
able to do that. I cannot not ramble. I cannot tell a coherent story. I love
coherent, well-written stories, but I cannot write them. And sure, you can toss up
Infinite Jest or House of Leaves and tell me that maybe there’s hope for me, but
if you’re one of the unfortunates who have read my book, you’re not going to be
one of the people telling me maybe there’s hope. I’m happiest doing things the
way I do, I don’t want to mess with that.
The books I want to make, the ones I really want to have, I see them used as
props on TV, flung carelessly around by actors who don’t really care what’s
inside them… did Tom Cruise in “Vanilla Sky” really care about those books?
No. Maybe he collects them, he the person and not the character from the movie,
but that’s not what I’m talking about. These awesome leather-bound things,
I$&"8*$)*K$)8&%=9&($)*
When you’re making a spork this way, you want to start with the covers.
Cut your bookboard to size and then cut the cloth so that you have an inch
allowance for the head, tail and fore-edge, leaving a good two inches at the
spine-edge, since that’s going to fold under and form the joint of the cover.
This cloth is what you would sew through to attach the covers to the book
block, and it’s a pretty tricky proposition, holding it all together while you
get that first push of the needle and cord through the cover and block, since
nothing’s holding them together at this point. But I’m getting ahead of
myself here. Once the boards and cloth are cut, use some wheat starch
paste (recommended) or PVA (Polyvinyl Acetate, not recommended for
covers, but it sets up more quickly and is permanent, where the paste can
be removed with water if you want) and glue the cloth to the board,
applying the glue to the surface of the board (not recommended, since it
could cause the board to warp—the way you’re supposed to do it is apply it
to the cloth and then stick that to the board; I have good reasons for doing
the opposite) and then stick it to the cloth. You then immediately spread a
little glue on the overhanging cloth at the head and tail and press them
down, not stretching the fabric (as this will also cause the board to warp).
Next, miter the corners, trimming some of the cloth away so as to not leave
a bulge, and glue the fore-edge. Put this in a press, or under some weight (a
few heavy books will suffice) and give it a couple of hours to dry.
When the covers are dry, apply the endpapers. For this step, you would
put a thin layer of glue on the endpapers themselves, thin to avoid bleeding
at the edges (wheat starch paste will not stain the cloth, so if you’re using
that, you don’t have to worry as much, but PVA will dry hard and clear and
too too visible), and then you carefully position the papers on the inside of
the cover and press them again. The drying time should not be so long for
this step, since you’ve used less glue (didn’t you?). The covers, after a while,
will be ready. Then you can do the sewing and all that. Oh, joy unbounded!
So, anyway. This thing I made, this thing I’m making: The binding is
Japanese, a simple four-hole punch binding, though I didn’t punch the
holes. I drilled them. I had Brian Arnold, the guy who helped me with the
sporkbox make me this crazy wonderful jig to hold the text block while I
drilled the holes. I’m drilling because it’s too thick to punch through. We’ve
exemplars of the craft, that’s what I want to make. I will, someday. You just
wait. Maybe I’ll let you have one. Or at least look at it.
$2(A##*+2<#
gone more than 200 pages this time… Traditionally, a Japanese-bound
book will have a paper or cloth cover, and the binding will go right through
it, but there is another way of doing it, and that’s what we’ve done here. As
you have already seen, the hardcover part of the cover extends only the
width of the book, with a little folded under onto the first and last pages.
Through that we have done the lacing. You start in the middle, one of the
middle holes, wrap around the spine, then toward the head (or tail,
depending on what end you started on), wrapping it over the top (or
bottom), then around the spine again, then back through the original hole,
to the next, then around the spine and then to the next and around the head
and then the spine and if you’ve done it right, you should have two loose
ends on the same side of the book ready to be tied off. You can play a lot
with where you want the tie-off to be. Maybe at the head, or on the spine.
That’s up to you. We’re hoping that I do it so the cord can be used as a
bookmark, meaning I’ve tied it near the head. I’m still writing this, meaning
I’m not binding it, so I can’t really say for certain what I’m going to do or
not do. I can speak only of intent.
Also, in a traditional Japanese punch binding, the book will be in sheets
rather than signatures. I like signatures. I love signatures, and I really like
the way they look on this issue. I’ll like them on the next one too, since
we’re doing it for at least the full run of Volume Two (which, as Richard
probably mentioned, consists of only two physical issues, the other two
being events or some other unbound thing. Whatever he might say to the
contrary, we’re still a quarterly). It’s easier for us to do things in signatures
anyway. That’s how we see the world, it’s how we do everything. And
maybe when I say “we” I really mean “me” but I’m going to act like I’m
including all of us in this one.
My goal here, in the binding arena of spork, is to eventually amass the
materials and equipment necessary for an honest-to-god, hot-damn!-I’ll-eata-horny-toad-if-that-ain’t-the-finest-thing-I-ever-saw kind of product. And
if you’re one of those afraid of change types, one of those nostalgic ones,
and you’re all sad the covers aren’t all floppy and awkward like something
outta yer grammy’s attic, and you want to pay… I’ve got canvas, I’ve got
ink. I’ve got glue and cord and a saw and you’re welcome to come on down
to the studio and I’ll show you how to do it. Or better yet, fill the void I’m
so cavalierly leaving with my abandoning of the tried-and-true, and put out
your own damn thing. Put out a good one. Make me jealous, make me
I$&"8*$)*K$)8&%=9&($)*
ashamed. Show me up. It’s not like there’s so much competition out
there… not like there’s any. Be nice to have some.
____________________________________________________________
+
!"#$%&'($"%)*+,"$-)+
KARL ADCOCK is a 20 year
old from California.
ANDREW ERSKINE FOSTER
comes from Vermont, and has
lived in Tucson for the past year.
He writes fiction and poetry. He
trivides his time between writing,
gun shows, and his apiary.
MICHAEL CRYER BROOKS
lives in Tempe, AZ and is a freelance writer. He first discovered
the spork while enjoying the now
extinct enchurrito (sic) at Taco
Bell in the early ‘80s. Michael
is very pleased to find that the
spork has evolved into a literarysized endeavor.
LISA GLUSKIN has worked as
a technical editor, gift wrapper,
film-studio gofer, and faux-Irish
cocktail waitress. She lives near
Lake Tahoe, where she is
attempting to grow tomatoes.
Last year, she won the James
Duval Phelan Award for From
Then, her manuscript in progress.
Lately she’s been writing poems
about theoretical cosmology and
junior high school.
DREW BURK accidentally killed
a bird with a golf ball the other
day. He’s doing small penance via
the sunburn he got while out
killing birds with balls. His score
is bad for both golf and bowling,
but he might be getting better.
MAGGIE GOLSTON lives
in Tucson with her two dogs,
Henry and Mister Bones. She
sings pretty songs to them.
She holds an MFA from the
University of Arizona, and
her work has most recently
appeared in Ploughshares. Come
visit her at her bookstore,
Biblio, on Congress Street.
[They have an extensive poetry
selection at Biblio. —the editors]
MELISSA A. CROUCH took
refuge in the study of poetry
after being turned down for
supporting roles in C.H.U.D.,
Evil Dead, Deep Red, Dead
Alive, and The Shining. With
her dreams of being covered
in fake blood and running
screaming through the woods
shattered, she is earning her
MFA in Memphis, TN.
!
!
KELLY HELLWORTH’s
daughter says, daily: tell me
a princess story, daddy.
TREVIS HUTSELL can spit
blood out of his eyes. He makes
pictures out of words. He does it
inside his head.
QAYYUM JOHNSON works
at The Franklin Mint, in the
Commemorative Civil War
Chess Set department.
DANIEL LABEAU lives in
Philadelphia. He acts in nonunion films, writes poetry &
a series of books about a boy
Vice President. He received an
MFA from the Iowa Writer’s
Workshop. His chapbook,
Codex Arizona, was published
by Love2 Press in 2000.
JANA MARTIN is swamped
with work. She is very very busy.
We are sure that her page proofs
and contributor’s note will arrive
soon. We wait patiently.
MARY MOLINARY was
born on the cusp of nuclear
apocalypse and TV trays. She
lives in Memphis, TN, where
she teaches and tends bar, armed
with only an anthropology degree
and a husband from Tucson.
ANDER MONSON is originally
from Upper Michigan and has
spent most of his life in the
Midwest and the Middle East.
He lives for the time being in
Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Recent
work can be found in Fence,
Quarterly West, Conduit, West
Branch, Alaska Quarterly Review,
and North American Review.
DAVID ERIK NELSON lives
in Ann Arbor, MI, where he
teaches high school English
and co-operates a small online
magazine, Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k)
(www.poormojo.org) He’d like
to thank our lord and savior,
Jesus Christ, without whom all
of this would have turned out
more or less the same.
JOSHUA POTEAT lives in
Richmond, Virginia, but
occasionally wants to live in
Tucson, among other places.
He was the 2001 summer poetin-residence at the University of
Arizona’s Poetry Center, and the
winner of a few other assorted
awards the last few years.
STACEY RICHTER has written
over fifty novels, including Desire
at the Double D Ranch and Dust,
Doubt, Desire. She is a member of
the Romance Writers of America.
+
PETER ROCK was born and
raised in Salt Lake City, Utah,
and is the author of the novels
The Ambidextrist, Carnival Wolves,
and This is the Place. He thrives
on humiliation. These days, he
lives in Portland, Oregon, with
his fierce wife.
RICHARD SIKEN has now
written four pieces of non-fiction
and feels he is getting better at
juggling the “saying something”
with the “being interesting.” His
dream job features robot dogs.
HUGH STEINBERG’s poetry
has most recently been published
in Crowd, VeRt, Volt and Spork.
An adjunct at California College
of Arts and Crafts, he is a
recipient of an NEA Creative
Writing Fellowship and of
much love and generosity from
his wife, friends and family.
The world keeps getting bigger
and bigger
BETH TOËNER is going to
stop this car right now. She
means it, no more messing
around. She’s going to turn it
right around and flash oncoming
traffic. She is currently finishing a
book that’s bigger than a novella,
but smaller than a novel. In this
in-between space, she’s just fine.
AARON TRIPLETT: at 29 and
a half, I am guaranteed that it’s a
third over, possibly half over.
The greatest trick the devil ever
played was convincing me that
I have all the time in the world.
I’ll never get the chance to relive
today, yet I continue to squander
it. Now I look to John Edwards
for hope.
SONJA ULSTERBOM is a
printmaker and pastry chef. She
lives in Seattle, WA, with her
long-time boyfriend. She tells
herself stories about devils and
farm animals while she works.
JONATHAN
VANBALLENBERGHE
teaches English and composition
at various levels. His poetry is
influenced by Basho’s travelogues, his fiction on Dutch
morality plays and his experience
growing up in Juneau, Alaska. He
likes watching Tucson geckos.
TOM WALBANK plays slide
guitar and harmonica in
traditional Delta and Chicago
styles. He hails from Devon,
England but has lived in the
states long enough to know
better. He has just finished a
children’s book called Robert’s
Sunny Day Dance.
!
JERRY WILLIAMS’ poetry
collection, Casino of the Sun, is
due out from Carnegie Mellon
University Press in October.
He is currently driving across
America. We believe our request
for a contributor’s note is on his
desk, hundreds of miles away.
MARK WYNN: take a potently
packed piece of prose and pop it
like a pill. A little piece of dirt
that unfolds in your throat and
leaves you with a short quick
choke. Cough it back up in an
embryo of your own phlegm.
Get rid of it with a flying hurl
of spit. Let it land in the gutter
with the sewage and the refuse
that is nothing more than the
runoff of dreams.
MARK YAKICH is a painter
and a preacher. He also thinks he
writes; he digs a hole. He wishes
that sweat beads would turn into
real beads.
JASON ZUZGA was a 20012002 Writing Fellow at the
Fine Arts Work Center in
Provincetown, MA, and is
currently enrolled in the
University of Arizona MFA
Poetry Program. His work
can be found in LIT, The Yale
Review, jubilat, and Fence.

Live Gauges for Ten Thousand Scapes A Confucian

Transcription

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