The Truth is
If I told you how worried
I get when I see lost spiders
wandering around
on the kitchen floor
or the fact that young women
who have never heard
a machine gun
are writing brilliant
war poetry, I wouldn't
be exagerating or
jealous of the way
poetry isn't about
war or savagery
or hunger anymore
than it is about love.
Poetry is about Poets.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Monday, August 30, 2010
In this lab
To witness such feats
based on half truth, lies
imaginations is a sore story,
a lonely lonely land.
The Divine is not hidden,
partial to the view
of only a few,
hidden away
in a blessed tomb,
organized in the angels.
We are fortunate
that the innermost
thoughts remain
well protected even
though the fanatical
escavations attempt
to reveal
this not that
and as such
reports on the all,
the meaningless phrase
of sight and sound
when the screen
beyond the lid
collects nothing
but shapes and imprints
in beds of gelatin:
such a delicate story
in molecular highs and lows,
the excitements of red
in quanta of blue.
Were not the guardians
there too and shielding
their eyes as I asked
please feel sorry for me,
find a way to vanish
this pop art
one more time,
polish the vernacular
of at least
my own memory:
to this engagement:
to this prize:
to this brave wisdom
which in some lands
can get you killed:
no God rises
once, no God
needs to rise
again. Fools.
To witness such feats
based on half truth, lies
imaginations is a sore story,
a lonely lonely land.
The Divine is not hidden,
partial to the view
of only a few,
hidden away
in a blessed tomb,
organized in the angels.
We are fortunate
that the innermost
thoughts remain
well protected even
though the fanatical
escavations attempt
to reveal
this not that
and as such
reports on the all,
the meaningless phrase
of sight and sound
when the screen
beyond the lid
collects nothing
but shapes and imprints
in beds of gelatin:
such a delicate story
in molecular highs and lows,
the excitements of red
in quanta of blue.
Were not the guardians
there too and shielding
their eyes as I asked
please feel sorry for me,
find a way to vanish
this pop art
one more time,
polish the vernacular
of at least
my own memory:
to this engagement:
to this prize:
to this brave wisdom
which in some lands
can get you killed:
no God rises
once, no God
needs to rise
again. Fools.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
Absolution For the 9/11 Mosque
All smokers and drinkers
inside, all plagiarists and heads
without bodies and hearts
consistent with the full fisted
containment and immense
inability to watch
what it is we want.
All fascists belong
to yesteryear and now
we only have ours.
Digging and praying
between the two lights
promising the night
with its excess and vigillantisms
to begin with the small
cheats, as if no larceny at all,
as if no savvy-eyed witness
might adjust the number
of executions as if
on a dial, parse
the misdemeanors,
the tragedy of the separation
of church and state
to the honest
economy of mankind
that uses a cruel wager
instead of weights
and measures, that
formulates a recipe
of your personal percentage
of daily requirements
in penalties of salt
and worship of fats,
that makes hallowed
ground out of thin air.
In the fond letter
addressed to the men
at the counters
of the world
a note about what he
should be doing
because it is all the same
and he might as well
do what it is he wants to
because he will end up
doing it anyway,
in another way.
The look on that face
the soon to be less so and less so
Christian, beguiling blue-eyed
bald contagiously clean
wanderer through the sun
was worth the ink.
To explain to him
the variations of theft,
the grades of dishonesty
and equality of such things
as adultery, murder, rape
and apply them
to his docket, relieve
him of at least
some of his illusions
in a laying on of hands
and more hands,
speak brother bring
up the pentacost,
Now! To watch him walk
again, the leader of the crippled
left whole townships gawking.
Half way between loves
rummaging our nests
with fire fingers and then
our screams in the trees
between each other
are circular economies,
no one accepts
the currency, that comparison
between evil this and evil that,
nor if the penny is better
off than the dime,
or which dove turned
on the day, upped the light,
knows the math, reckons
with the seed, in short
surrenders to the days
uncorrected mishaps
of which life is composed.
All smokers and drinkers
inside, all plagiarists and heads
without bodies and hearts
consistent with the full fisted
containment and immense
inability to watch
what it is we want.
All fascists belong
to yesteryear and now
we only have ours.
Digging and praying
between the two lights
promising the night
with its excess and vigillantisms
to begin with the small
cheats, as if no larceny at all,
as if no savvy-eyed witness
might adjust the number
of executions as if
on a dial, parse
the misdemeanors,
the tragedy of the separation
of church and state
to the honest
economy of mankind
that uses a cruel wager
instead of weights
and measures, that
formulates a recipe
of your personal percentage
of daily requirements
in penalties of salt
and worship of fats,
that makes hallowed
ground out of thin air.
I was repelled at Times Square in 2001.
In the fond letter
addressed to the men
at the counters
of the world
a note about what he
should be doing
because it is all the same
and he might as well
do what it is he wants to
because he will end up
doing it anyway,
in another way.
The look on that face
the soon to be less so and less so
Christian, beguiling blue-eyed
bald contagiously clean
wanderer through the sun
was worth the ink.
To explain to him
the variations of theft,
the grades of dishonesty
and equality of such things
as adultery, murder, rape
and apply them
to his docket, relieve
him of at least
some of his illusions
in a laying on of hands
and more hands,
speak brother bring
up the pentacost,
Now! To watch him walk
again, the leader of the crippled
left whole townships gawking.
Half way between loves
rummaging our nests
with fire fingers and then
our screams in the trees
between each other
are circular economies,
no one accepts
the currency, that comparison
between evil this and evil that,
nor if the penny is better
off than the dime,
or which dove turned
on the day, upped the light,
knows the math, reckons
with the seed, in short
surrenders to the days
uncorrected mishaps
of which life is composed.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Shark on Wheels
in the New Ice Age
If this strikes right
once or twice,
does the bright moon
circumambulate
the messenger moth and fly
to the fuel of the wood
in centuries of storage,
ruptured quantities
that are directly
relative to the deed
issued in intervals
and root lengths
to the one lucky acorn
dumb as a bloated fox,
getting ready to burn?
Messenger elephant
what has your neck
got to say
when you hide
yourself before you die,
have your tears ended
with the tsunami?
Do the pinstripes concur
with the shadow
of the tiger who yawns
immorally at his meal,
can the seal catch up
in time to save his skin?
The only truth is here
and to me
circumstantial
evidence abounds
in the crop of the bird
who could seed
an overthrow
in revolt to the gun
and the dog
whose happiest stance
is tongue and bone.
Weak weak mite,
tiny flea and local rat,
the safeguards play out
against your tiny wars,
one bite for a remember.
Fortuitous spring, blank
sleepy winter are in the field
and the sweet sweating
farmer bullies the sun
for some rest on a summer's
day. Messenger light
switch, are you out there,
is your timer on?
Without the wind or water
to navigate a path
toward the foreign shore
the voice would
spell SOS and drop
damp messages to mold
in the stagnant sea-haul
which failed to populate
the sky with specklets
and pock mark the ground
in arbitrary rows
the government intended,
our own blurry message
in the firefly's loan
of the night, nevermind the sea
belongs to no one,
least of all to me.
How long the earth waited
for the fish to fly, the satisfied
fish who quit happening
for a snapshot, so happy
their legs wore out
before the zoo fed
them all and cheered,
before they rolled
up into balls to get away
from the silly shrinking
teeth of the jumbo class
who apparently gave up
to write too much manifesto.
And how about glass,
why not gold or uranium?
Messenger lizard tail
tell me, do you know
why the phone solicitor
is surprised to hear
a new greeting today,
the one he's never heard
up close? His brain froze
but he kept on talking.
in the New Ice Age
If this strikes right
once or twice,
does the bright moon
circumambulate
the messenger moth and fly
to the fuel of the wood
in centuries of storage,
ruptured quantities
that are directly
relative to the deed
issued in intervals
and root lengths
to the one lucky acorn
dumb as a bloated fox,
getting ready to burn?
Messenger elephant
what has your neck
got to say
when you hide
yourself before you die,
have your tears ended
with the tsunami?
Do the pinstripes concur
with the shadow
of the tiger who yawns
immorally at his meal,
can the seal catch up
in time to save his skin?
The only truth is here
and to me
circumstantial
evidence abounds
in the crop of the bird
who could seed
an overthrow
in revolt to the gun
and the dog
whose happiest stance
is tongue and bone.
Weak weak mite,
tiny flea and local rat,
the safeguards play out
against your tiny wars,
one bite for a remember.
Fortuitous spring, blank
sleepy winter are in the field
and the sweet sweating
farmer bullies the sun
for some rest on a summer's
day. Messenger light
switch, are you out there,
is your timer on?
Without the wind or water
to navigate a path
toward the foreign shore
the voice would
spell SOS and drop
damp messages to mold
in the stagnant sea-haul
which failed to populate
the sky with specklets
and pock mark the ground
in arbitrary rows
the government intended,
our own blurry message
in the firefly's loan
of the night, nevermind the sea
belongs to no one,
least of all to me.
How long the earth waited
for the fish to fly, the satisfied
fish who quit happening
for a snapshot, so happy
their legs wore out
before the zoo fed
them all and cheered,
before they rolled
up into balls to get away
from the silly shrinking
teeth of the jumbo class
who apparently gave up
to write too much manifesto.
And how about glass,
why not gold or uranium?
Messenger lizard tail
tell me, do you know
why the phone solicitor
is surprised to hear
a new greeting today,
the one he's never heard
up close? His brain froze
but he kept on talking.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Touchback
In American football, a touchback is a ruling which is made and signaled by the referee when the ball crosses into or through the end zone not in control of the team which put it into play.
The weather hadn’t changed much. From year to year there were occasional droughts, lightning fires and some few and far between snowstorms which laid more than half a foot on the ground. People looked forward to gully washers not as floods but as cleansings and that had not changed over time. The flowers differed now and then, poppies one year and asters the next. Most of the dogs were pit-bulls and that was a significant change from a quarter century before when everyone had a hunting dog, usually a lab and they used them for their stated purpose to retrieve jack rabbit and whitetail deer, sometimes a few ducks. Darla called hers a Lavender Pit-bull because he had the purple tongue of a Labrador with a chest like a bull and symbolized something truly profound even if he wasn‘t a profound animal who did tricks or knew even a smidge of his own symbolic nature and breed. He came when called, sat when told to sit and looked like he knew how to shake hands but really he was just very, very tender and loving and his hand shakes were nearly constant when Darla was around. He‘d touch her hand incessantly and somehow, Darla knew he‘d die without her to wake up to or wait for at the end of a long day. If it weren’t for him, she’d just pack up and leave and be done with this old place, there was little left for her now, nothing to stick around for and hardly anyone had noticed her return in the first place, four years before. She kept to herself and held a part time job in a nursing home which barely paid the rent and left her just enough time to recover for the next shift and enough time to compose a poem or read a ridiculous best-selling romance. She discovered she didn’t have the gift to nurse people anymore but could maintain enough semblance of a nurse to do an adequate job. Luckily, Jake made enough over there to make up the difference between a full-time job that she hated and a part-time one that she merely disliked, but he was a stern accountant in financial matters, in all matters really. And he wanted her back, wanted her with him. That much she knew but could not bear the stress of having to explain the weight of her thoughts and her persistent inability to manage whatever it is that most people manage quite easily day to day.
She had married young and had disappeared with her Jake after a year of residence in the mining town where she was born and raised. He was roughly her age, lean, very handsome and the best salesman in the world, after Billie Mays of course. He’d proposed to her after a short courtship, six weeks to be exact, just after she got bailed out of jail and had her first abortion and she had accepted based on his pitch, “Life is a gamble and if it works great and if not, we get divorced, it‘s no big deal.” As he proposed he tapped a number 2 pencil on her hand. It wasn’t a flashy proposal but it made sense and there wasn’t anything to keep her around save for her ailing and aged parents for whom she had become a burden in more ways than one, the several dozen friends her age who hadn‘t made it out including the generous majority of those who‘d already started raising families by their senior year and the best job anyone could hope for would be assistant manager at the one convenience store or the Dairy Queen. She had no goals, not for marriage or an education really even though she could have finished with a scholarship to a state university but didn‘t because of the interference of it. She was usually the smartest girl in class if not the most attractive (or even close to it) and people liked to sit beside her to improve their grades and she knew this, accepted it as part of the deal called friendship.
Like every other girl in town, whether they knew it or not, the goal was simply to get out, to just get out and not look back. Make it up to Phoenix or Flagstaff maybe. Her best friend dreamed of becoming a dancer in Vegas, the kind who took their tops off and put on headdresses the size of small children or car fenders but she ended up never leaving even though all indicators said if anyone could do it, she could. Never come back or at least try not to, do everything in your power not to. And how impossible that always turns out to be. Although she was completely unaware of that motivation so lacking in motivations as she was as to hardly recognize one if she saw one, she dreamt long and hard of Marrakech and it likely figured into her agreement to marry a total stranger, a foreigner to boot although something told her she would never really make it there. Marrakech was a sacred thing, there in the rock song, it was a real place somewhere and it was there in the only Michener she’d ever read, The Drifters. She thought she knew all about it and it would suit her very well. She believed that Marrakech must be the final destination where everyone might hope to end up one day. There would be elephants there and what could be better than that! Lots of good drugs too and she’d wear tunics every day and lay around in the sun just staring out, not wanting for anything else. Her failure to tan wouldn’t matter, she’d be the only white girl there and a bit of an oddity but this wasn’t much of anything but an afterthought. It was the idea of Marrakech she wanted not the real thing and it certainly wasn‘t the idea of herself in Marrakech but instead just Marrakech itself. Afterall, people often run away to foreign lands when they really want to, why couldn’t she? It was akin to the love of her black velvet poster of a tiger which hung on her bedroom wall, a bit out of place in the old miner’s shack but a seriously enjoyable escape mechanism for a less than truly popular teenage girl born to middle aged parents smack in the middle of a cultural revolution that somehow had left her out for reasons quite inexplicable to anyone and especially to her, just not a real tiger.
Truth be told, the revolution was just outside her bedroom window and banging to get in. Which revolution gets there first though, that’s always the question and no doubt there were others like her in that border town where a person is as far away as someone can get from two places at once, la frontera. Things happen there in a kind of cultural silence on both sides of an imaginary line and in some cases, there are people who migrate to just such places to take advantage of exactly that sort of thinking and others who try to run as far away as possible and run into the exact same characters from which they ought to hide themselves. Of course, she had no idea of that then but certainly had learned through experience that her predicament now had as much to do with provincialism as it did chance or exploitation, as much to do with borders as it had to do with the lack of them. Destiny hadn’t occurred to her at fifteen, it was just a plaything used by much more sophisticated and deserving people to introduce simple young girls, Christian ones in particular to strange new delights and at bargain prices, no questions asked and such young girls are taught to be grateful for the chance to be considered somehow a part of the diffuse and elusive elite come to save them from such annoyingly poor circumstances. Michener may have been one such type of Pied Piper and like Sister Carrie in Dreiser, that girl is a concept that never outgrew the society in which it was born, if there was one which is to say, that agency of humankind seems utterly tireless and timeless and doesn‘t have an age, a frequency or a means for pinning it down to one cause or the other like television or drugs. It’s more about innocence, more about biology and less about the real forces that keep people together or drive them apart that can only be attributed to something like fate. They just don‘t teach many people though, not anymore, about the facts of the matter because it is too complex, somehow a part of religion and entirely too iffy.
She pulled up to the thrift store on Tuesday afternoon in the middle of August 2010 during one of several heat waves if you can call them that in the Sonora desert. A monsoon was preparing to dispense the afternoon rains again and inside of the shop, the nearly unbearable humidity was a serious threat to her hope of finding something interesting, something useful, something not too damaged to be ashamed of but not to new to be a source of guilt requiring a lengthy explanation to Jake. She liked old things anyway better than new ones that always had too many strings attached like having to throw them away in a hurry when you had to leave or sell them for a quarter of their real value, why not just give them away instead and Darla usually did but Jake didn‘t like that much. It had been an oddly beautiful day although she hadn’t really considered it as such until she opened the thrift shop door and walked in, then it became a necessary acknowledgement. Her senses had grown truly keen since her recovery, too keen and had even become a burden at times even if she was grateful to be done with the abstract principle of her old abuses, the cost of sobriety was sometimes too much to bear and she‘d hobble back to bed in the middle of the morning or when she was supposed to be doing the housework or even heading off to work.
Strange things kept happening that day beginning with a morning run-in with her homeless brother whom she hadn’t seen in over a year even though she heard about his affairs from this person or that one and he flitted about the town in broad daylight. Darla gave him a quick hug and motioned to Frank who was in the beat-up truck her brother had just hobbled out of in the gas station. He was looking like he was in the downward spiral instead of the less frequent upward one, the type that people described to her when she would ask, “How’d he look?” Frank had thrown away a lucrative career as an abstract painter who was showing at galleries in Europe in order to get back to what we were all used to and that was a love-of-your-life relationship with harmful chemicals, from airplane glue to liquid plumber. “We’re going to pick peaches in this old truck!” Frank said this as if we’d been visiting each other on a daily basis ever since the day he urinated on a house fire next to the elementary school when we were eleven years old and as if to say, if you want to come you are most welcome. No doubt my brother had been reminiscing about the old peaches and the old days when peaches meant something to us all and Frank thought it might be possible to strike up a friendship although I’d heard he’d come out of the closet the year before. It was pitiful to see him once again in such company but it was just as pitiful to see Frank in such company too. It was good at least to know that the two of them were alive and had some time to spend together picking or stealing peaches as the case may be. So many of us had already been interred at the town‘s only cemetery, death by overdose, heart failure and psirrhosis, from neglect and more importantly just plain old ignorance. She next ran into a patient she’d taken care of and filled her in on a few details of why she just happened to be in the court building that morning and how surprised they both were to run into each other so soon after the woman‘s discharge from the nursing facility and as if the meeting had been staged by someone other than Darla and the sickly older woman who would probably die from complications rather than from the cancer itself. She hooked her up with another acquaintance who worked there as if she was obligated to both of them, a woman she’d also run into unexpectedly a few minutes after the first one. She was also undergoing chemo and encouraged them to support one another in a follow the leader fashion, this way to your death or your survival sugar, here‘s how and only they can know how that‘s done Darla thought to herself but with a slight feeling of having intervened in other people‘s fate without an invitation.. She’d forgotten about the employee’s health when she quit her bureaucratic job the year before and felt miserable about that serious type of spiritual faux pas. This happened throughout the day, nearly imperceptible events and with each one Darla became conscious of that feeling again, the type in which two or three consecutive things of the same order occur one right after the other. By the time Darla noticed the third she always knew there was something to pay attention to, it was as if the omnipotent had a language of contact, knew how to reach her and that she would listen, maybe even take action if she had the psychic energy to do so.
As she stepped into the thrift store she noticed a slight woman sitting on a used couch that was covered in a natty gold brocade. She was wearing a giant wide-brimmed straw hat, just as she had worn so many years ago when Darla was first introduced to her while sitting on the concrete ledge just inside the Latent Image window. Her eyes were the size of golf balls, hyperthyroid she thought to herself, and colored all the way around in that habitual, deep charcoal liner and shadow that was her signature just like the blue mole she painted below her angular, fine and high cheekbones and meant to be a beauty mark and what a strange thing those are. The look was highly smudged like that of a drug addict on a binge and terrifically noticeable although it seemed she might have lightened it up just a bit or from the looks of her clothes, she was on a tight budget. There was no one in the world like her and it just had to be. It just had to be her with those lumps of coal and crystal blue gems embedded in the hollowed out sockets. The hat framed her pointed witch-like but eerily beautiful face and distributed a soft glow on it, disguising the thin lines above her lip and softening the effect nicely. She could be mistaken for a woman half her age which must be at least 65 by now, give or take a couple years. She had always been a vain woman or perhaps she liked to hide underneath the copious amounts of face paint and war pencil but for sure, she had not changed her style in all those years and could probably do herself up in absolute darkness and without a mirror with a bit of mud and a stick.
She looked up and caught Darla’s inquisitive look but looked down again and for a moment, Darla thought she might be mistaken. This happened to her all the time and was one of the reasons Darla seldom went anywhere except the post office and the thrift store, once a week to buy a gallon of milk, dog food and dog chews for the pooch and a frozen dinner for herself. She’d look at someone’s face and notice something and an entire volume of the story would burst into her head as if it were an uninvited solicitor or unpaid bill. It was a troubling feeling but somehow irresistible and kept trying to force her into telling itself to whomever would listen but the shame and anger it might ignite was just too hard to bear even though a quarter of a century separated her from it. It still hounded her if she was too bold and took too many chances like trying to paint kitchens. She reminded herself often of the anniversaries but as the years went by, she’d forget one on occasion until a week or two later. She’d startle and carry on with whatever task she was on that particular day albeit with a definite sense of melancholia, remorse or both. The feelings had improved a bit over time through self isolation and been replaced by new worries, by false successes and the never ending trauma of time as it delivers the constant barrage of normal life incidents and changes but it never really went away altogether. It just took longer and longer to get there and she entertained herself with the idea of a novel that included every moment of a person’s life and the fact that no one would ever be able to finish it. Why bother with it anymore and that would settle any notions she harbored about revealing the people she had known then, to themselves and in no uncertain terms. The result of such chronic suppression however took a high toll, almost high enough for Darla to consider checking herself in to a hospital on one occassion for a shot of Ativan or Valium and a pat on the back, come back-see you soon kind of thing. She knew people did that sometimes but for her, a hospital was just no place to go when you are feeling sick.
This took a heavy toll in other areas as well. She’d get a new job and work to become the best at what she did and end up quitting again at some imagined slight, this happened over and over and finally Jake accepted the fact that she just wasn’t quite right in the head. She started to paint the kitchen and by the time she got to replacing the last hinge on the last cabinet door, the freshly painted utility closet door was peeling again. She nearly broke her back fighting an incessant influx of weeds and planted a garden with her favorite Mexican gray squash, cherry tomatoes and German thyme and by the time the squash blooms burst, the deer attacked it all by night and left nothing but stubs and footprints. Nothing ever seemed to get completed, to come full circle or find itself a pleasant enough grave and fall right in. That in itself, the loss of a few beloved vegetables that she probably would never get around to eating, would throw her into a day-long battle with her obvious depression that she had come to accept as PTSD although she was confused as to which particular event was the cause of her anxious predicament. Was it that or this? Was it the war or the Louvres? Could it have been the wreck or was it the last job she had left? In any event, it didn’t matter, it was a result now, not a cause.
In American football, a touchback is a ruling which is made and signaled by the referee when the ball crosses into or through the end zone not in control of the team which put it into play.
The weather hadn’t changed much. From year to year there were occasional droughts, lightning fires and some few and far between snowstorms which laid more than half a foot on the ground. People looked forward to gully washers not as floods but as cleansings and that had not changed over time. The flowers differed now and then, poppies one year and asters the next. Most of the dogs were pit-bulls and that was a significant change from a quarter century before when everyone had a hunting dog, usually a lab and they used them for their stated purpose to retrieve jack rabbit and whitetail deer, sometimes a few ducks. Darla called hers a Lavender Pit-bull because he had the purple tongue of a Labrador with a chest like a bull and symbolized something truly profound even if he wasn‘t a profound animal who did tricks or knew even a smidge of his own symbolic nature and breed. He came when called, sat when told to sit and looked like he knew how to shake hands but really he was just very, very tender and loving and his hand shakes were nearly constant when Darla was around. He‘d touch her hand incessantly and somehow, Darla knew he‘d die without her to wake up to or wait for at the end of a long day. If it weren’t for him, she’d just pack up and leave and be done with this old place, there was little left for her now, nothing to stick around for and hardly anyone had noticed her return in the first place, four years before. She kept to herself and held a part time job in a nursing home which barely paid the rent and left her just enough time to recover for the next shift and enough time to compose a poem or read a ridiculous best-selling romance. She discovered she didn’t have the gift to nurse people anymore but could maintain enough semblance of a nurse to do an adequate job. Luckily, Jake made enough over there to make up the difference between a full-time job that she hated and a part-time one that she merely disliked, but he was a stern accountant in financial matters, in all matters really. And he wanted her back, wanted her with him. That much she knew but could not bear the stress of having to explain the weight of her thoughts and her persistent inability to manage whatever it is that most people manage quite easily day to day.
She had married young and had disappeared with her Jake after a year of residence in the mining town where she was born and raised. He was roughly her age, lean, very handsome and the best salesman in the world, after Billie Mays of course. He’d proposed to her after a short courtship, six weeks to be exact, just after she got bailed out of jail and had her first abortion and she had accepted based on his pitch, “Life is a gamble and if it works great and if not, we get divorced, it‘s no big deal.” As he proposed he tapped a number 2 pencil on her hand. It wasn’t a flashy proposal but it made sense and there wasn’t anything to keep her around save for her ailing and aged parents for whom she had become a burden in more ways than one, the several dozen friends her age who hadn‘t made it out including the generous majority of those who‘d already started raising families by their senior year and the best job anyone could hope for would be assistant manager at the one convenience store or the Dairy Queen. She had no goals, not for marriage or an education really even though she could have finished with a scholarship to a state university but didn‘t because of the interference of it. She was usually the smartest girl in class if not the most attractive (or even close to it) and people liked to sit beside her to improve their grades and she knew this, accepted it as part of the deal called friendship.
Like every other girl in town, whether they knew it or not, the goal was simply to get out, to just get out and not look back. Make it up to Phoenix or Flagstaff maybe. Her best friend dreamed of becoming a dancer in Vegas, the kind who took their tops off and put on headdresses the size of small children or car fenders but she ended up never leaving even though all indicators said if anyone could do it, she could. Never come back or at least try not to, do everything in your power not to. And how impossible that always turns out to be. Although she was completely unaware of that motivation so lacking in motivations as she was as to hardly recognize one if she saw one, she dreamt long and hard of Marrakech and it likely figured into her agreement to marry a total stranger, a foreigner to boot although something told her she would never really make it there. Marrakech was a sacred thing, there in the rock song, it was a real place somewhere and it was there in the only Michener she’d ever read, The Drifters. She thought she knew all about it and it would suit her very well. She believed that Marrakech must be the final destination where everyone might hope to end up one day. There would be elephants there and what could be better than that! Lots of good drugs too and she’d wear tunics every day and lay around in the sun just staring out, not wanting for anything else. Her failure to tan wouldn’t matter, she’d be the only white girl there and a bit of an oddity but this wasn’t much of anything but an afterthought. It was the idea of Marrakech she wanted not the real thing and it certainly wasn‘t the idea of herself in Marrakech but instead just Marrakech itself. Afterall, people often run away to foreign lands when they really want to, why couldn’t she? It was akin to the love of her black velvet poster of a tiger which hung on her bedroom wall, a bit out of place in the old miner’s shack but a seriously enjoyable escape mechanism for a less than truly popular teenage girl born to middle aged parents smack in the middle of a cultural revolution that somehow had left her out for reasons quite inexplicable to anyone and especially to her, just not a real tiger.
Truth be told, the revolution was just outside her bedroom window and banging to get in. Which revolution gets there first though, that’s always the question and no doubt there were others like her in that border town where a person is as far away as someone can get from two places at once, la frontera. Things happen there in a kind of cultural silence on both sides of an imaginary line and in some cases, there are people who migrate to just such places to take advantage of exactly that sort of thinking and others who try to run as far away as possible and run into the exact same characters from which they ought to hide themselves. Of course, she had no idea of that then but certainly had learned through experience that her predicament now had as much to do with provincialism as it did chance or exploitation, as much to do with borders as it had to do with the lack of them. Destiny hadn’t occurred to her at fifteen, it was just a plaything used by much more sophisticated and deserving people to introduce simple young girls, Christian ones in particular to strange new delights and at bargain prices, no questions asked and such young girls are taught to be grateful for the chance to be considered somehow a part of the diffuse and elusive elite come to save them from such annoyingly poor circumstances. Michener may have been one such type of Pied Piper and like Sister Carrie in Dreiser, that girl is a concept that never outgrew the society in which it was born, if there was one which is to say, that agency of humankind seems utterly tireless and timeless and doesn‘t have an age, a frequency or a means for pinning it down to one cause or the other like television or drugs. It’s more about innocence, more about biology and less about the real forces that keep people together or drive them apart that can only be attributed to something like fate. They just don‘t teach many people though, not anymore, about the facts of the matter because it is too complex, somehow a part of religion and entirely too iffy.
She pulled up to the thrift store on Tuesday afternoon in the middle of August 2010 during one of several heat waves if you can call them that in the Sonora desert. A monsoon was preparing to dispense the afternoon rains again and inside of the shop, the nearly unbearable humidity was a serious threat to her hope of finding something interesting, something useful, something not too damaged to be ashamed of but not to new to be a source of guilt requiring a lengthy explanation to Jake. She liked old things anyway better than new ones that always had too many strings attached like having to throw them away in a hurry when you had to leave or sell them for a quarter of their real value, why not just give them away instead and Darla usually did but Jake didn‘t like that much. It had been an oddly beautiful day although she hadn’t really considered it as such until she opened the thrift shop door and walked in, then it became a necessary acknowledgement. Her senses had grown truly keen since her recovery, too keen and had even become a burden at times even if she was grateful to be done with the abstract principle of her old abuses, the cost of sobriety was sometimes too much to bear and she‘d hobble back to bed in the middle of the morning or when she was supposed to be doing the housework or even heading off to work.
Strange things kept happening that day beginning with a morning run-in with her homeless brother whom she hadn’t seen in over a year even though she heard about his affairs from this person or that one and he flitted about the town in broad daylight. Darla gave him a quick hug and motioned to Frank who was in the beat-up truck her brother had just hobbled out of in the gas station. He was looking like he was in the downward spiral instead of the less frequent upward one, the type that people described to her when she would ask, “How’d he look?” Frank had thrown away a lucrative career as an abstract painter who was showing at galleries in Europe in order to get back to what we were all used to and that was a love-of-your-life relationship with harmful chemicals, from airplane glue to liquid plumber. “We’re going to pick peaches in this old truck!” Frank said this as if we’d been visiting each other on a daily basis ever since the day he urinated on a house fire next to the elementary school when we were eleven years old and as if to say, if you want to come you are most welcome. No doubt my brother had been reminiscing about the old peaches and the old days when peaches meant something to us all and Frank thought it might be possible to strike up a friendship although I’d heard he’d come out of the closet the year before. It was pitiful to see him once again in such company but it was just as pitiful to see Frank in such company too. It was good at least to know that the two of them were alive and had some time to spend together picking or stealing peaches as the case may be. So many of us had already been interred at the town‘s only cemetery, death by overdose, heart failure and psirrhosis, from neglect and more importantly just plain old ignorance. She next ran into a patient she’d taken care of and filled her in on a few details of why she just happened to be in the court building that morning and how surprised they both were to run into each other so soon after the woman‘s discharge from the nursing facility and as if the meeting had been staged by someone other than Darla and the sickly older woman who would probably die from complications rather than from the cancer itself. She hooked her up with another acquaintance who worked there as if she was obligated to both of them, a woman she’d also run into unexpectedly a few minutes after the first one. She was also undergoing chemo and encouraged them to support one another in a follow the leader fashion, this way to your death or your survival sugar, here‘s how and only they can know how that‘s done Darla thought to herself but with a slight feeling of having intervened in other people‘s fate without an invitation.. She’d forgotten about the employee’s health when she quit her bureaucratic job the year before and felt miserable about that serious type of spiritual faux pas. This happened throughout the day, nearly imperceptible events and with each one Darla became conscious of that feeling again, the type in which two or three consecutive things of the same order occur one right after the other. By the time Darla noticed the third she always knew there was something to pay attention to, it was as if the omnipotent had a language of contact, knew how to reach her and that she would listen, maybe even take action if she had the psychic energy to do so.
As she stepped into the thrift store she noticed a slight woman sitting on a used couch that was covered in a natty gold brocade. She was wearing a giant wide-brimmed straw hat, just as she had worn so many years ago when Darla was first introduced to her while sitting on the concrete ledge just inside the Latent Image window. Her eyes were the size of golf balls, hyperthyroid she thought to herself, and colored all the way around in that habitual, deep charcoal liner and shadow that was her signature just like the blue mole she painted below her angular, fine and high cheekbones and meant to be a beauty mark and what a strange thing those are. The look was highly smudged like that of a drug addict on a binge and terrifically noticeable although it seemed she might have lightened it up just a bit or from the looks of her clothes, she was on a tight budget. There was no one in the world like her and it just had to be. It just had to be her with those lumps of coal and crystal blue gems embedded in the hollowed out sockets. The hat framed her pointed witch-like but eerily beautiful face and distributed a soft glow on it, disguising the thin lines above her lip and softening the effect nicely. She could be mistaken for a woman half her age which must be at least 65 by now, give or take a couple years. She had always been a vain woman or perhaps she liked to hide underneath the copious amounts of face paint and war pencil but for sure, she had not changed her style in all those years and could probably do herself up in absolute darkness and without a mirror with a bit of mud and a stick.
She looked up and caught Darla’s inquisitive look but looked down again and for a moment, Darla thought she might be mistaken. This happened to her all the time and was one of the reasons Darla seldom went anywhere except the post office and the thrift store, once a week to buy a gallon of milk, dog food and dog chews for the pooch and a frozen dinner for herself. She’d look at someone’s face and notice something and an entire volume of the story would burst into her head as if it were an uninvited solicitor or unpaid bill. It was a troubling feeling but somehow irresistible and kept trying to force her into telling itself to whomever would listen but the shame and anger it might ignite was just too hard to bear even though a quarter of a century separated her from it. It still hounded her if she was too bold and took too many chances like trying to paint kitchens. She reminded herself often of the anniversaries but as the years went by, she’d forget one on occasion until a week or two later. She’d startle and carry on with whatever task she was on that particular day albeit with a definite sense of melancholia, remorse or both. The feelings had improved a bit over time through self isolation and been replaced by new worries, by false successes and the never ending trauma of time as it delivers the constant barrage of normal life incidents and changes but it never really went away altogether. It just took longer and longer to get there and she entertained herself with the idea of a novel that included every moment of a person’s life and the fact that no one would ever be able to finish it. Why bother with it anymore and that would settle any notions she harbored about revealing the people she had known then, to themselves and in no uncertain terms. The result of such chronic suppression however took a high toll, almost high enough for Darla to consider checking herself in to a hospital on one occassion for a shot of Ativan or Valium and a pat on the back, come back-see you soon kind of thing. She knew people did that sometimes but for her, a hospital was just no place to go when you are feeling sick.
This took a heavy toll in other areas as well. She’d get a new job and work to become the best at what she did and end up quitting again at some imagined slight, this happened over and over and finally Jake accepted the fact that she just wasn’t quite right in the head. She started to paint the kitchen and by the time she got to replacing the last hinge on the last cabinet door, the freshly painted utility closet door was peeling again. She nearly broke her back fighting an incessant influx of weeds and planted a garden with her favorite Mexican gray squash, cherry tomatoes and German thyme and by the time the squash blooms burst, the deer attacked it all by night and left nothing but stubs and footprints. Nothing ever seemed to get completed, to come full circle or find itself a pleasant enough grave and fall right in. That in itself, the loss of a few beloved vegetables that she probably would never get around to eating, would throw her into a day-long battle with her obvious depression that she had come to accept as PTSD although she was confused as to which particular event was the cause of her anxious predicament. Was it that or this? Was it the war or the Louvres? Could it have been the wreck or was it the last job she had left? In any event, it didn’t matter, it was a result now, not a cause.
When Armageddon Comes
I
She the powerful principle of shorthand and he the work ethic, the taste of pipes directly blessed poured
onto my head and inside, people appointed to speak on my behalf to renounce on my behalf
the right thing to appoint god-parents and never speak to them again had I already been to the moon or yet seen it born into the space canal the valley of the dolls false eyelashes there war was everywhere there was glitter on every occasion and the taste of pipes and the taste of teeth.
Nursed on canned vegetation and creamed wheat coffee from the age two in medicine cups or teaspoons
the clock in the kitchen wore out as everything broke down and used wind wings and dashboards used bench seats to bathe babies in kitchen sinks or sleep them in drawers pull them out and put them back in one at a time feeding them porridges and pot roasts renouncing for them grubs choosing for them roasts
instead of orchid choosing ruffle instead of pleat and center part instead of side, pork instead of lamb
turkey instead of goose. Greatness is a just assumption that lasts but an hour.
Horsey doggie chaplain good girl good boy bad, don’t bite don’t pick don’t suck then naps and shorthand books blue books yellow box spring loaded shotgun drinks of moth coffee can string apron
bar smell inside a cupboard Vienna sausages potted meat chipped beef the only can of oysters ball whack
dog chase bloody leg badger centipede sparrow ditch water tunnel big B little a big Z little o no piano tiny
teacup hospital jam plaid flannel old West sheet to vomit to cradle to hurry and park left with wind wings
open and wonder if no they will the lab the kitten the table leg peaches not apples, shorthand books are blue shorthand is blue thing box yellow dog black centipede bite soft overcooked squash limp green beans.
She the powerful principle of ashtray big veins big toes tall, he the work ethic and aftershave cold blooded
armies and bandages one brother too many an extra one they spoke about in whispers. Vietnam loaded the camping car, Vietnam spooked the fish, Vietnam tore up the Bible, Vietnam wasted our money, Vietnam changed the channels, Vietnam poured hands in the collection plate, Vietnam slept on the couch with the work ethic and Hitler Japs, Vietnam pushed pills in everyone’s throat, Vietnam named everyone Bob’s son, Vietnam killed all the deer and Vietnam remembered the name of Alaska.
Big letter K backwards e page turn over record scratchy skip scratch skip stuck on pokey dog fence rabbit farmer scared off pitchfork ant boat drinking wild hose water the taste of pipes throat lozenge lunch box milk money rabbit’s foot fish hook gone downtown up the hill across the street Big Chief fat pencil line up sing the country is fantastic holy ghost five and dime long face bill deposit mine blast monsters under there last time stand the corner paint licker stomach hurter stinky panty bad girl good girl curl in the middle of her forehead when she was she really really was and when she wasn’t she was horrid.
Raise your hand ask nicely go chalkboard go sing go auditorium for the measles nurse hat
red cross holy cross your heart and hope to die better lunch next time! they did Tupperware milk carton two teams substitute round the bases made of box tops and trash can lids fence posts parked car or take the stairs by twos faster stopper long way down to Phnom Pen newsman Bob’s son sent a letter married
a girl who had her hair done before bed each night transistor voice early morning Apollo eggs Apollo bacon Apollo salt white Apollo toast and butter make Apollo love not war make poppies in egg cartons on front porch steps dogs uphill bark in the background where whistle and doorslam nails it to the air pocket, dog talk and horsefly.
Loop loop pull, loop loop pull, once again, loop loop pull it works it really works now curtsy loop loop pull it works again! So proud of you, we all are. It’s summertime now. Summertime stretches forever in all directions with tennies on and burnt backs. Can’t get out of bed the pillows smell real good but its dust day, its birthday, its parade day, its all day. Dimes get pockets, dimes for ten penny candies, dimes on doorsteps two bottles for a dime, dime cokes, dime songs, dime calls, dime stops, dime store, dime time is what it is, it’s dime time and for one dime three jukes the same one three times but only to watch the record loader inside the most fantastic thing ever seen plays Billie don’t be a hero don’t be a fool with your life, Billie come back and make me your wife this is what people feel like singing about Yankie Doodle went to town with macaroni is his tri-cornered baseball hat and hit home runs for the home team with the home team disadvantage in home town Vietnam, there were no children there, just guys running all day long out of TV screens yelling or hurling themselves on top of each other and out of Huntley Brinkley‘s mouth and that was so, so comforting to know they‘d be there at the same time to talk to us about it even if dad forgot to and swore at it all night long between Bloody Marys and passing out.
It get’s better, strides. The family got hepatitis, tuberculosis, cirrhosis, trench mouth, wasp stung, broken boned, stitched up, fought with, drunk with, gully washed, frankincensed in hospital waiting rooms oxygen masks and new babies in labor kept baking under hot lights of the east wing, as they unloaded us from car trunks and back seats and etherized our wonderful way of walking in without a care in the world, without a new purse or single new thing, at least from my point of view. We were nobodies but somebodies and everybodies got the same thing but we didn’t know about it until later.
Aunt Peg threw me in her Chevy Nova and no one mentioned a thing about it next year. Cable was on the horizon but up there cartoons on weekdays were status quo. They were already keeping the young ones inside instead of outside with the doors locked until dinner. The roads all looked the same up there and there were parks. There were import stores. People didn’t know you and didn’t care about the haircut or the barbershop anymore. The city seemed to sleep outside of itself, outside of something that was going on and shouldn’t be disturbed while we waited inside of houses that had master plans for parents to come and pick us up and take us home. The bathtub there was very nice, built in with none of those dark places in which a portable commode ought to be kept for the next guy in line. Two bathrooms instead, two whole bathrooms and only a few people to make use of two showers, two sinks, two toilets, two bars of soap, two hand towels and no rags, no one there kept rags around to make sure the old man next door didn’t see you naked in the water, rags laid over the nipples and Y. The taste of pipes wasn’t the taste of pipes there, it was the taste of better water yet to come and on the way home we stopped in Tombstone and had to pee in someone‘s sink but I can‘t remember why or if I just did it to prevent something else from going wrong. This is the type of memory one ought to abhor but instead it comes up once in a while and feels right on time, somehow useful or fascinating as all get out. Some other kids were involved and they were blonde and maybe something was wrong at their house and every house after that had complexities of plumbing, medicine cabinets ,newspapers and Playboy magazines in between.
I saw those around. Naked pictures of girls who obviously got sun tanned a lot. I couldn’t tan but would try out on the sidewalk in a homemade two piece. Grandma sewed all my clothes out of old dresses my mom no longer wore but they still had some life left in them and drawers got full of ripped-out zippers, pockets for patches, snaps were even hoarded along with plastic bags, jars, lids because there was still a war going on, still pin up girls stood straddled a wide indifference to nudity because wars demand that type of thing, make it necessary. We just looked at the left overs, hid them in our pants if we got lucky and found some that someone else had thrown out in a hurry. There were whole months full of Saturdays and other months where people labeled panties for each day of the week, now that’s a bit odd don’t you think? Miss July, Miss September, Miss February, Miss Christmas, Miss and her twin Miss and the Miss of the Year Miss, each with a short autobiography likes surf likes boots likes dogs likes short bald gray.
This was our church, we were told what to do as we walked in, genuflect, holy water, say this and do that.
Sing if you know the words and shake hands with everyone you can reach. I liked that so much that sometimes when mother was tired I’d practice Catholicism on my own, walk right in and do the things as if they meant what it is they meant which is to say, I’m still not sure if they did. Altar boys would follow and at the end the cross would be carried out and the priest would wait to shake your hand too. People struggled in that affair, tried real hard to make him notice them and say something kind or familiar, just to feel his hand on their hand. The church gave out pamphlets explaining which sins would get you in real trouble like having sex alone or murder which were in the same basic category as limbo babies were to impure browsing. All those limbo babies waiting to go somewhere and mother prayed to get out of purgatory as soon as possible even though it seemed neither here nor there by definition. It was an article of faith she was used to and that‘s all that really is, something you get used to and have faith in, don‘t have to understand it and in fact you really don‘t deserve to know that much about it anyway, it‘s God..
Saturdays started running out and each one got shorter, school days got longer, division longer, history got longer everyone the same way every year, project Indian village, project popsicle stick, project chicken bone, project photosynthesis, project Thanksgiving, project letter writing, project typing, project wood shop, car shop, project baby pig, project diorama, project Halloween, project Christmas play, project cassette headphone reader series, project bean seeds, project frog stomach, project fitness test, project putting out a body fire, project paper fold, project zoo trip, project clock, project show and tell, project menstruation, project home ec, project eye screen but not once did we ever have a project about Vietnam but Vietnamese kids showed up anyway and needed a place to live in America after they saw how good we had it here, we must have for them to want it so bad they gave up and came over to our side.
In fifth grade, if the teacher got tired of talking, ran out of things to say, he’d put on a movie from 2 until closing time. It was real nice like that when he’d just stop talking for a moment and let us all relax a bit. I never fell asleep but some kids did if it was black and white which is to say, most of the time I liked to pay attention to everything even if no one else bothered. The projector would wind up and stop a few times, the teacher would go over and take off the reel and put it back on, flick it and tell someone to go turn off the lights again. By the third or fourth time it would go and there’d be astronauts, insects or factories on the fold up screen that usually stood just beside the flag until it was raised in front of the class so white and undisturbed one minute and the next, alive with busy places, calm voices and a countdown before each one, four three two one blastoff and you are in a group that wasn’t that different from a church where people concentrate together on the same thing for a while right before they go home and try to do something else that is inevitably more necessary to the standard of living they are accustomed to because the movie said so but in not so many words or so succinctly. This is what everyone else is doing, they do it on time and soon it will be your turn to do these things if you play your cards right.
That wasn’t the problem though. There were too many kids by then and most of them lived too far from Horace Mann junior high which looked a bit like an orphanage and a bit like a capitol building on a hilltop. So they opened up a big school down and more central to every part of town and rumors spread about the kids ruining their lives down there, getting drunk at lunchtime and getting into all sorts of trouble. Mom made up her mind and enrolled me in a private school, St. Pats which is to say, it was a real cheap private school and you had to wear a uniform. It cost $12.50 a month to go there which is a hell of a lot to pay to torture your own child. The first day was knee socks and there too early, meaner kids than I was used to and a church schedule of once a week plus catechism. After that though it was special hot lunch on Wednesday made by Mexican women with charitable souls, First Fridays and mass confessions in a proto-type of the drive through window banks that were just around the corner once we figured out where to put them since the alleys weren’t designed as much for efficiency as they were for just getting there and parking real close in order to do so. European style some say.
I fell in love in sixth grade with my first teacher, he was blond and married with some kids. He looked a bit like John Denver and the Beatles. I knew he loved me too or sort of. It was a great year if not for making friends, then for watching him at the front of the class trying not to piss off the Catholic in us or violate any of the commandments. I’ve little doubt he only got the job because there weren’t many nuns left and one of them even turned up a lesbian in the bowling alley. Watching Mr. Ashby can only be equated with going to your first Denny’s for breakfast. It only happens once and then it becomes par for the course. It almost made it possible to rotate through the seventh grade teacher’s boiling hot lessons of the hellfire, the damnation and cruel punishments of her type of faith-based core curriculum for second and fifth period. Mr. Ashby made it all right and Sister Helen in eighth grade home-room bat clean-up, expunged the grime out of both points of view by being kind, looking right and taking special care of special kids like me by sitting us up-front so we could pass out the papers. So you appoint her to renounce for you the second time, to witness for your commitment to the cause of religion even if you don’t really understand why. Not even sure if the devil might show up and stop her in her tracks because it seems if the devil is all that powerful, he’d know when his side is in danger and shoves her type out of the way using some of his dirty tricks and lightning fast cloven foot fox trots, like Cassius Clay beats up a Sugar Ray without no ska or bloodspill, just an eternity‘s worth of temptation in an internment camp. I was the last one to sign up though, seems everyone wanted her to renounce for them but she made an exception.
Delete McCarthy, delete King, delete Watergate, delete Nixon, and enter, Puff the Magic Dragon who lives by the sea and frolics. It was raining. The pills were in a storm drain. Narcs if you only knew who they were. Dragnet gave way to FBI gave way to McMillan and Wife, created from a rib. From Huntley Brinkley to sneaky magic neighbors in the Air Force and Serpico. Dark times, hot pants. Me and you and a dog named Boo so it seems there was internal migration and refugee status for all, travelin‘ and livin‘ off the land made for you and me. Hippy dippy and dad don’t mix, no dads mixed but some of them traded wives like eskimoes. Last Tango in Paris or a Turkish jail with Michener and a notebook called O‘Toole. Foreshadow backstreet limo Arab getting out with his model. This is history my way, machine gun kelly maxi-maxi mini skirt, barefoot, polka-dot, halter-top. Hoop skirt burqa bop, bikini burqa stop, smiling bad burqa, face off burqa face. Gaucho pants, go-go boots, bell-bottoms, hip huggers, windbreakers, high heels, flats. High street London Milan New York Madrid Beirut water burqa, dress burqa, work out burqa. No bra, eighteen hour bra, training bra. Shift, pancho, tunic, rain gear. Bronco burqa, Beelzebub burqa, banjo burqa. Lederhosen, kimono, streaking napalm go-go girl. Have a burqa and a smile, a glut of beards to go. G-Men, GI Joe Men, G-String Men. We all get dressed to go.
We wanted our sexy bodies to be sexier by using our clothes. All the guys thought so and stood in line to watch us walk in our tight pants and tube tops. Where you going sweet thing fat thing ugly thing my thing his thing? You wanna dance baby girl? First handshake first love note first kiss first date first dance firsts all around everything was the first time you drove a car bought a drug got an F stayed out too late got drunk knew a combination ditched a class, the first time you got loved or thought you did by a chain smoking older man twice divorced and getting ready to bugger you with a training video and a smack of butter but Cat Stevens held out hope anyway, it’s a wild wild world and I’ll always remember you like a child girl thinkin’ about the good times to come dreaming about the peace train, take this country and shove it in. Shove it all in, morning has just broken and it‘s Russia, it is China, it is Hanoi,
it is an unusual Six Day War and we know so because the title said this in no uncertain terms.
In retrospect there is a page for circus, peach and house fire. A page for each lake we went to. A page for police sirens. A page for the rotary telephone. A page for Stevie Hope. A page for two p.m. to a quarter to three. A page for postage stamps. A page for C&H sugar and gas prices. A page for social studies. A page for cigarettes. A page for power outages. A page for motor lodge. A page for W. T. Grant‘s department store. A page for cheerleader outfits. A page for June bugs. A page for the fragrance of votives. A page for California. A page for barefeet versus new shoes. A page for broken windows. A page for oxygen and one for medicine. A page for Volkswagon. A page for venison. A page for Cleopatra, Ben Hur and John Wayne. For some reason there are two pages of Patty Hearst and only one for the St. Francis Hotel. Page after page of Rod Serling and Burl Ives summoning the ancestors in the voice of Leonard Nimoy. A page for the calculator.
II
College starts with Crimson and Clover, over and over and somehow like we wish you a merry Christmas. There’s 101 and 102. Everyone is so old now and chasing us around the classroom for a pinch. Nice guys creepy guys and foreign guys but no more movies. They try to dance and pull out their wallets like old men do. Then you run into the best friend, he’s always better, knows how to make you laugh, understands the crying, won‘t beat you up or cheat on you so you let him try. Oops, married how did that happen, totally unprepared or rather, unimproved from the last one. No trousseau in no coach waiting no day frock. Fast talking Arab says life’s a gamble lets throw some dice whaddya say? I’m in, sounds nice but the car won’t start and there’s rent to pay for our baby is on her way. She came through the protesters walking on two feet and ten feet behind her father. Redux back play. We met and married each other of our own free wills which, I didn’t know I had one and if I had, I’d have done it anyway because folly is impossible and we could always borrow money from my mother. Not raised as such but figured out that some people spend their luck too late.
It was Iran then as it is now. Hostage drama and reality TV was just a bomb’s throw away. Didn’t make much sense, no more than Vietnam did or the Falklands did or the Sandanistas did or Angola did or the raid at Entebbe did, America was brainstorming and barnstorming for the big bang. The old joke, Arab guy walks into a CW bar and the bouncer says, “You I-rain-ian?” so he goes back home to find out and there’s a big sigh of relief. There was the skinny one who played pin-ball incessantly, a pipe smoker, a Libyan spy (they all were), a Druze and a captain in the Bahrainian army who went through money like a house on fire. He tried to dance and talk like an American which is very annoying. Mom was getting sick now and dad died the year after he tied my husband’s cravat. He was smiling as if he knew something we didn’t, he seemed genuinely happy about it and mom baked a Betty Crocker and put brown frosting with pink letters all over it, something she was prone to do. That’s when the warnings took on a far more serious cover you up lasso you with his concubine’s hair quality in both tone and pitch.
We ate at Pizza Hut a lot. Not sure what they all had about a Pizza Hut but they did like the flatness of pizza, the hot way it went into the mouth and most importantly, it was the only fast food in town. Everything was Lionel Ritchie and scoop neck. We rented an apartment with one bedroom and I threw his shorts out the window where they hung on the telephone wire all winter long until we found a jimmied lottery ticket as we were making calls on credit card numbers the Arab‘s passed around. This wasn’t going to be easy and by the time I gave him a bloody nose with my pocket-book his brother was already on the Greyhound down below getting out of town, it was too much for him and as I grabbed his leg to beg him to stay, the driver looked truly perplexed. Lover’s quarrel it seemed to him but not at all what he thought, just a matter of Nasser, Lisa Halaby and for some reason, Trotsky. Our early conversations about it were coke equals imperialism, you don’t want to know and this is my brother, another son of my mother. Not much to go on but I kept trying. I stopped everyone I met and asked them about numerology., noticed no one took the church seriously anymore and that doves qul qul qul but roll their r’s and trill their q’s. I wrote the glue song, dove’s midrash began taking shape and Bosque pears.
Soon we were done with the hometown community college and went up to live by a swimming pool in Phoenix. I went to work at Sambos after lying to my employer about my experience. You don’t want to do that when it comes to waitressing. My feet hurt all the time, bars should never close and maple syrup is not good with tobasco. It’s even worse with a cigarette in it and you’re pregnant. But the milk’s good and you get it for free. The manager was named Shaheen and the same people I sat with at the student union were the same ones I came to work with. One of them was a refugee from the Ayatollah. We had great conversations and they told me sperm made babies so I signed up for that one because I‘d paid attention in church and biology. They told me that some lies had been told and naturally I ditto’d that assumption because I’d figured out where the sound came from when the priests were blessing the crackers, my brother was ringing a bell behind the altar. It appeared to be a case of Wizard of Oz, logic and nice looking boys with flat stomachs who had no reason to lie because I was already taken and lacked a formal education so the truth would be just as good as a lie. It is a lot like intuition.
I
She the powerful principle of shorthand and he the work ethic, the taste of pipes directly blessed poured
onto my head and inside, people appointed to speak on my behalf to renounce on my behalf
the right thing to appoint god-parents and never speak to them again had I already been to the moon or yet seen it born into the space canal the valley of the dolls false eyelashes there war was everywhere there was glitter on every occasion and the taste of pipes and the taste of teeth.
Nursed on canned vegetation and creamed wheat coffee from the age two in medicine cups or teaspoons
the clock in the kitchen wore out as everything broke down and used wind wings and dashboards used bench seats to bathe babies in kitchen sinks or sleep them in drawers pull them out and put them back in one at a time feeding them porridges and pot roasts renouncing for them grubs choosing for them roasts
instead of orchid choosing ruffle instead of pleat and center part instead of side, pork instead of lamb
turkey instead of goose. Greatness is a just assumption that lasts but an hour.
Horsey doggie chaplain good girl good boy bad, don’t bite don’t pick don’t suck then naps and shorthand books blue books yellow box spring loaded shotgun drinks of moth coffee can string apron
bar smell inside a cupboard Vienna sausages potted meat chipped beef the only can of oysters ball whack
dog chase bloody leg badger centipede sparrow ditch water tunnel big B little a big Z little o no piano tiny
teacup hospital jam plaid flannel old West sheet to vomit to cradle to hurry and park left with wind wings
open and wonder if no they will the lab the kitten the table leg peaches not apples, shorthand books are blue shorthand is blue thing box yellow dog black centipede bite soft overcooked squash limp green beans.
She the powerful principle of ashtray big veins big toes tall, he the work ethic and aftershave cold blooded
armies and bandages one brother too many an extra one they spoke about in whispers. Vietnam loaded the camping car, Vietnam spooked the fish, Vietnam tore up the Bible, Vietnam wasted our money, Vietnam changed the channels, Vietnam poured hands in the collection plate, Vietnam slept on the couch with the work ethic and Hitler Japs, Vietnam pushed pills in everyone’s throat, Vietnam named everyone Bob’s son, Vietnam killed all the deer and Vietnam remembered the name of Alaska.
Big letter K backwards e page turn over record scratchy skip scratch skip stuck on pokey dog fence rabbit farmer scared off pitchfork ant boat drinking wild hose water the taste of pipes throat lozenge lunch box milk money rabbit’s foot fish hook gone downtown up the hill across the street Big Chief fat pencil line up sing the country is fantastic holy ghost five and dime long face bill deposit mine blast monsters under there last time stand the corner paint licker stomach hurter stinky panty bad girl good girl curl in the middle of her forehead when she was she really really was and when she wasn’t she was horrid.
Raise your hand ask nicely go chalkboard go sing go auditorium for the measles nurse hat
red cross holy cross your heart and hope to die better lunch next time! they did Tupperware milk carton two teams substitute round the bases made of box tops and trash can lids fence posts parked car or take the stairs by twos faster stopper long way down to Phnom Pen newsman Bob’s son sent a letter married
a girl who had her hair done before bed each night transistor voice early morning Apollo eggs Apollo bacon Apollo salt white Apollo toast and butter make Apollo love not war make poppies in egg cartons on front porch steps dogs uphill bark in the background where whistle and doorslam nails it to the air pocket, dog talk and horsefly.
Loop loop pull, loop loop pull, once again, loop loop pull it works it really works now curtsy loop loop pull it works again! So proud of you, we all are. It’s summertime now. Summertime stretches forever in all directions with tennies on and burnt backs. Can’t get out of bed the pillows smell real good but its dust day, its birthday, its parade day, its all day. Dimes get pockets, dimes for ten penny candies, dimes on doorsteps two bottles for a dime, dime cokes, dime songs, dime calls, dime stops, dime store, dime time is what it is, it’s dime time and for one dime three jukes the same one three times but only to watch the record loader inside the most fantastic thing ever seen plays Billie don’t be a hero don’t be a fool with your life, Billie come back and make me your wife this is what people feel like singing about Yankie Doodle went to town with macaroni is his tri-cornered baseball hat and hit home runs for the home team with the home team disadvantage in home town Vietnam, there were no children there, just guys running all day long out of TV screens yelling or hurling themselves on top of each other and out of Huntley Brinkley‘s mouth and that was so, so comforting to know they‘d be there at the same time to talk to us about it even if dad forgot to and swore at it all night long between Bloody Marys and passing out.
It get’s better, strides. The family got hepatitis, tuberculosis, cirrhosis, trench mouth, wasp stung, broken boned, stitched up, fought with, drunk with, gully washed, frankincensed in hospital waiting rooms oxygen masks and new babies in labor kept baking under hot lights of the east wing, as they unloaded us from car trunks and back seats and etherized our wonderful way of walking in without a care in the world, without a new purse or single new thing, at least from my point of view. We were nobodies but somebodies and everybodies got the same thing but we didn’t know about it until later.
Aunt Peg threw me in her Chevy Nova and no one mentioned a thing about it next year. Cable was on the horizon but up there cartoons on weekdays were status quo. They were already keeping the young ones inside instead of outside with the doors locked until dinner. The roads all looked the same up there and there were parks. There were import stores. People didn’t know you and didn’t care about the haircut or the barbershop anymore. The city seemed to sleep outside of itself, outside of something that was going on and shouldn’t be disturbed while we waited inside of houses that had master plans for parents to come and pick us up and take us home. The bathtub there was very nice, built in with none of those dark places in which a portable commode ought to be kept for the next guy in line. Two bathrooms instead, two whole bathrooms and only a few people to make use of two showers, two sinks, two toilets, two bars of soap, two hand towels and no rags, no one there kept rags around to make sure the old man next door didn’t see you naked in the water, rags laid over the nipples and Y. The taste of pipes wasn’t the taste of pipes there, it was the taste of better water yet to come and on the way home we stopped in Tombstone and had to pee in someone‘s sink but I can‘t remember why or if I just did it to prevent something else from going wrong. This is the type of memory one ought to abhor but instead it comes up once in a while and feels right on time, somehow useful or fascinating as all get out. Some other kids were involved and they were blonde and maybe something was wrong at their house and every house after that had complexities of plumbing, medicine cabinets ,newspapers and Playboy magazines in between.
I saw those around. Naked pictures of girls who obviously got sun tanned a lot. I couldn’t tan but would try out on the sidewalk in a homemade two piece. Grandma sewed all my clothes out of old dresses my mom no longer wore but they still had some life left in them and drawers got full of ripped-out zippers, pockets for patches, snaps were even hoarded along with plastic bags, jars, lids because there was still a war going on, still pin up girls stood straddled a wide indifference to nudity because wars demand that type of thing, make it necessary. We just looked at the left overs, hid them in our pants if we got lucky and found some that someone else had thrown out in a hurry. There were whole months full of Saturdays and other months where people labeled panties for each day of the week, now that’s a bit odd don’t you think? Miss July, Miss September, Miss February, Miss Christmas, Miss and her twin Miss and the Miss of the Year Miss, each with a short autobiography likes surf likes boots likes dogs likes short bald gray.
This was our church, we were told what to do as we walked in, genuflect, holy water, say this and do that.
Sing if you know the words and shake hands with everyone you can reach. I liked that so much that sometimes when mother was tired I’d practice Catholicism on my own, walk right in and do the things as if they meant what it is they meant which is to say, I’m still not sure if they did. Altar boys would follow and at the end the cross would be carried out and the priest would wait to shake your hand too. People struggled in that affair, tried real hard to make him notice them and say something kind or familiar, just to feel his hand on their hand. The church gave out pamphlets explaining which sins would get you in real trouble like having sex alone or murder which were in the same basic category as limbo babies were to impure browsing. All those limbo babies waiting to go somewhere and mother prayed to get out of purgatory as soon as possible even though it seemed neither here nor there by definition. It was an article of faith she was used to and that‘s all that really is, something you get used to and have faith in, don‘t have to understand it and in fact you really don‘t deserve to know that much about it anyway, it‘s God..
Saturdays started running out and each one got shorter, school days got longer, division longer, history got longer everyone the same way every year, project Indian village, project popsicle stick, project chicken bone, project photosynthesis, project Thanksgiving, project letter writing, project typing, project wood shop, car shop, project baby pig, project diorama, project Halloween, project Christmas play, project cassette headphone reader series, project bean seeds, project frog stomach, project fitness test, project putting out a body fire, project paper fold, project zoo trip, project clock, project show and tell, project menstruation, project home ec, project eye screen but not once did we ever have a project about Vietnam but Vietnamese kids showed up anyway and needed a place to live in America after they saw how good we had it here, we must have for them to want it so bad they gave up and came over to our side.
In fifth grade, if the teacher got tired of talking, ran out of things to say, he’d put on a movie from 2 until closing time. It was real nice like that when he’d just stop talking for a moment and let us all relax a bit. I never fell asleep but some kids did if it was black and white which is to say, most of the time I liked to pay attention to everything even if no one else bothered. The projector would wind up and stop a few times, the teacher would go over and take off the reel and put it back on, flick it and tell someone to go turn off the lights again. By the third or fourth time it would go and there’d be astronauts, insects or factories on the fold up screen that usually stood just beside the flag until it was raised in front of the class so white and undisturbed one minute and the next, alive with busy places, calm voices and a countdown before each one, four three two one blastoff and you are in a group that wasn’t that different from a church where people concentrate together on the same thing for a while right before they go home and try to do something else that is inevitably more necessary to the standard of living they are accustomed to because the movie said so but in not so many words or so succinctly. This is what everyone else is doing, they do it on time and soon it will be your turn to do these things if you play your cards right.
That wasn’t the problem though. There were too many kids by then and most of them lived too far from Horace Mann junior high which looked a bit like an orphanage and a bit like a capitol building on a hilltop. So they opened up a big school down and more central to every part of town and rumors spread about the kids ruining their lives down there, getting drunk at lunchtime and getting into all sorts of trouble. Mom made up her mind and enrolled me in a private school, St. Pats which is to say, it was a real cheap private school and you had to wear a uniform. It cost $12.50 a month to go there which is a hell of a lot to pay to torture your own child. The first day was knee socks and there too early, meaner kids than I was used to and a church schedule of once a week plus catechism. After that though it was special hot lunch on Wednesday made by Mexican women with charitable souls, First Fridays and mass confessions in a proto-type of the drive through window banks that were just around the corner once we figured out where to put them since the alleys weren’t designed as much for efficiency as they were for just getting there and parking real close in order to do so. European style some say.
I fell in love in sixth grade with my first teacher, he was blond and married with some kids. He looked a bit like John Denver and the Beatles. I knew he loved me too or sort of. It was a great year if not for making friends, then for watching him at the front of the class trying not to piss off the Catholic in us or violate any of the commandments. I’ve little doubt he only got the job because there weren’t many nuns left and one of them even turned up a lesbian in the bowling alley. Watching Mr. Ashby can only be equated with going to your first Denny’s for breakfast. It only happens once and then it becomes par for the course. It almost made it possible to rotate through the seventh grade teacher’s boiling hot lessons of the hellfire, the damnation and cruel punishments of her type of faith-based core curriculum for second and fifth period. Mr. Ashby made it all right and Sister Helen in eighth grade home-room bat clean-up, expunged the grime out of both points of view by being kind, looking right and taking special care of special kids like me by sitting us up-front so we could pass out the papers. So you appoint her to renounce for you the second time, to witness for your commitment to the cause of religion even if you don’t really understand why. Not even sure if the devil might show up and stop her in her tracks because it seems if the devil is all that powerful, he’d know when his side is in danger and shoves her type out of the way using some of his dirty tricks and lightning fast cloven foot fox trots, like Cassius Clay beats up a Sugar Ray without no ska or bloodspill, just an eternity‘s worth of temptation in an internment camp. I was the last one to sign up though, seems everyone wanted her to renounce for them but she made an exception.
Delete McCarthy, delete King, delete Watergate, delete Nixon, and enter, Puff the Magic Dragon who lives by the sea and frolics. It was raining. The pills were in a storm drain. Narcs if you only knew who they were. Dragnet gave way to FBI gave way to McMillan and Wife, created from a rib. From Huntley Brinkley to sneaky magic neighbors in the Air Force and Serpico. Dark times, hot pants. Me and you and a dog named Boo so it seems there was internal migration and refugee status for all, travelin‘ and livin‘ off the land made for you and me. Hippy dippy and dad don’t mix, no dads mixed but some of them traded wives like eskimoes. Last Tango in Paris or a Turkish jail with Michener and a notebook called O‘Toole. Foreshadow backstreet limo Arab getting out with his model. This is history my way, machine gun kelly maxi-maxi mini skirt, barefoot, polka-dot, halter-top. Hoop skirt burqa bop, bikini burqa stop, smiling bad burqa, face off burqa face. Gaucho pants, go-go boots, bell-bottoms, hip huggers, windbreakers, high heels, flats. High street London Milan New York Madrid Beirut water burqa, dress burqa, work out burqa. No bra, eighteen hour bra, training bra. Shift, pancho, tunic, rain gear. Bronco burqa, Beelzebub burqa, banjo burqa. Lederhosen, kimono, streaking napalm go-go girl. Have a burqa and a smile, a glut of beards to go. G-Men, GI Joe Men, G-String Men. We all get dressed to go.
We wanted our sexy bodies to be sexier by using our clothes. All the guys thought so and stood in line to watch us walk in our tight pants and tube tops. Where you going sweet thing fat thing ugly thing my thing his thing? You wanna dance baby girl? First handshake first love note first kiss first date first dance firsts all around everything was the first time you drove a car bought a drug got an F stayed out too late got drunk knew a combination ditched a class, the first time you got loved or thought you did by a chain smoking older man twice divorced and getting ready to bugger you with a training video and a smack of butter but Cat Stevens held out hope anyway, it’s a wild wild world and I’ll always remember you like a child girl thinkin’ about the good times to come dreaming about the peace train, take this country and shove it in. Shove it all in, morning has just broken and it‘s Russia, it is China, it is Hanoi,
it is an unusual Six Day War and we know so because the title said this in no uncertain terms.
In retrospect there is a page for circus, peach and house fire. A page for each lake we went to. A page for police sirens. A page for the rotary telephone. A page for Stevie Hope. A page for two p.m. to a quarter to three. A page for postage stamps. A page for C&H sugar and gas prices. A page for social studies. A page for cigarettes. A page for power outages. A page for motor lodge. A page for W. T. Grant‘s department store. A page for cheerleader outfits. A page for June bugs. A page for the fragrance of votives. A page for California. A page for barefeet versus new shoes. A page for broken windows. A page for oxygen and one for medicine. A page for Volkswagon. A page for venison. A page for Cleopatra, Ben Hur and John Wayne. For some reason there are two pages of Patty Hearst and only one for the St. Francis Hotel. Page after page of Rod Serling and Burl Ives summoning the ancestors in the voice of Leonard Nimoy. A page for the calculator.
II
College starts with Crimson and Clover, over and over and somehow like we wish you a merry Christmas. There’s 101 and 102. Everyone is so old now and chasing us around the classroom for a pinch. Nice guys creepy guys and foreign guys but no more movies. They try to dance and pull out their wallets like old men do. Then you run into the best friend, he’s always better, knows how to make you laugh, understands the crying, won‘t beat you up or cheat on you so you let him try. Oops, married how did that happen, totally unprepared or rather, unimproved from the last one. No trousseau in no coach waiting no day frock. Fast talking Arab says life’s a gamble lets throw some dice whaddya say? I’m in, sounds nice but the car won’t start and there’s rent to pay for our baby is on her way. She came through the protesters walking on two feet and ten feet behind her father. Redux back play. We met and married each other of our own free wills which, I didn’t know I had one and if I had, I’d have done it anyway because folly is impossible and we could always borrow money from my mother. Not raised as such but figured out that some people spend their luck too late.
It was Iran then as it is now. Hostage drama and reality TV was just a bomb’s throw away. Didn’t make much sense, no more than Vietnam did or the Falklands did or the Sandanistas did or Angola did or the raid at Entebbe did, America was brainstorming and barnstorming for the big bang. The old joke, Arab guy walks into a CW bar and the bouncer says, “You I-rain-ian?” so he goes back home to find out and there’s a big sigh of relief. There was the skinny one who played pin-ball incessantly, a pipe smoker, a Libyan spy (they all were), a Druze and a captain in the Bahrainian army who went through money like a house on fire. He tried to dance and talk like an American which is very annoying. Mom was getting sick now and dad died the year after he tied my husband’s cravat. He was smiling as if he knew something we didn’t, he seemed genuinely happy about it and mom baked a Betty Crocker and put brown frosting with pink letters all over it, something she was prone to do. That’s when the warnings took on a far more serious cover you up lasso you with his concubine’s hair quality in both tone and pitch.
We ate at Pizza Hut a lot. Not sure what they all had about a Pizza Hut but they did like the flatness of pizza, the hot way it went into the mouth and most importantly, it was the only fast food in town. Everything was Lionel Ritchie and scoop neck. We rented an apartment with one bedroom and I threw his shorts out the window where they hung on the telephone wire all winter long until we found a jimmied lottery ticket as we were making calls on credit card numbers the Arab‘s passed around. This wasn’t going to be easy and by the time I gave him a bloody nose with my pocket-book his brother was already on the Greyhound down below getting out of town, it was too much for him and as I grabbed his leg to beg him to stay, the driver looked truly perplexed. Lover’s quarrel it seemed to him but not at all what he thought, just a matter of Nasser, Lisa Halaby and for some reason, Trotsky. Our early conversations about it were coke equals imperialism, you don’t want to know and this is my brother, another son of my mother. Not much to go on but I kept trying. I stopped everyone I met and asked them about numerology., noticed no one took the church seriously anymore and that doves qul qul qul but roll their r’s and trill their q’s. I wrote the glue song, dove’s midrash began taking shape and Bosque pears.
Soon we were done with the hometown community college and went up to live by a swimming pool in Phoenix. I went to work at Sambos after lying to my employer about my experience. You don’t want to do that when it comes to waitressing. My feet hurt all the time, bars should never close and maple syrup is not good with tobasco. It’s even worse with a cigarette in it and you’re pregnant. But the milk’s good and you get it for free. The manager was named Shaheen and the same people I sat with at the student union were the same ones I came to work with. One of them was a refugee from the Ayatollah. We had great conversations and they told me sperm made babies so I signed up for that one because I‘d paid attention in church and biology. They told me that some lies had been told and naturally I ditto’d that assumption because I’d figured out where the sound came from when the priests were blessing the crackers, my brother was ringing a bell behind the altar. It appeared to be a case of Wizard of Oz, logic and nice looking boys with flat stomachs who had no reason to lie because I was already taken and lacked a formal education so the truth would be just as good as a lie. It is a lot like intuition.
Monday, August 9, 2010
The Legislation
Allah taught me
had the yellow bird with black
trims never come
neither would the desire
come to see such a yellow bird
again. How many neglected
homes did he not visit today?
The dove doves qul qul
with rolled rs and thrills
and what else is done
for the residents
to believe barb-wire
and baby-fruit, the faint
bioacoustic that birds
trade in short public
lecture to us again.
So time is artifice
in branches of light
to open and bloom
the genuine and real
against us sans
hint of permission
or request and the wind
as if by chance
settles property
about the place,
wire-taps the bride to
scatter privy and probate
in exact measure:
this much bird
with the temperature
of this much cricket,
this much heat
with this much precision-
driven speechless form,
the brave and honorable gnat
and sonic no-see-ums
turn this much breeze
and rain-timing
of the kûd-dûkan
who lately predicts
the tremendous
achievements of fall
as fall quits talking
and slips into the age-
old guise of winter-
mute cant of snow:
how else to bear
the grunt and squint
of promethea
as it melts and builds
the drowsy hydraulic
inside trusty
woolen quarters:
leaf shroud, wood pajama
taste of silk and salt,
how tenacious
the dreams are there
in the subtle darkness
of the hostage
the remarkable prison
of dynastic tradition
squandered there.
This much fidelity
and candor as the storm
stalls overhead and hands
out the legible
squall of the sky,
the uncanny suspension
of the sea-haul there
in the swell attraction
and pains-taking blabber
of the earth as she builds
a rebuttal and wins.
The lie does surround and contain
the grass as it rises, limits the silence
as it speaks, frees the yellow bird
with black trims
as he appears to wander
from ledge to limb,
from choice to whim
and when this fly
lays down a generation
within my skin,
does not the spider
query the corpse
as she spin?
In this inesscapable this
rests the dominion.
Allah taught me
had the yellow bird with black
trims never come
neither would the desire
come to see such a yellow bird
again. How many neglected
homes did he not visit today?
The dove doves qul qul
with rolled rs and thrills
and what else is done
for the residents
to believe barb-wire
and baby-fruit, the faint
bioacoustic that birds
trade in short public
lecture to us again.
So time is artifice
in branches of light
to open and bloom
the genuine and real
against us sans
hint of permission
or request and the wind
as if by chance
settles property
about the place,
wire-taps the bride to
scatter privy and probate
in exact measure:
this much bird
with the temperature
of this much cricket,
this much heat
with this much precision-
driven speechless form,
the brave and honorable gnat
and sonic no-see-ums
turn this much breeze
and rain-timing
of the kûd-dûkan
who lately predicts
the tremendous
achievements of fall
as fall quits talking
and slips into the age-
old guise of winter-
mute cant of snow:
how else to bear
the grunt and squint
of promethea
as it melts and builds
the drowsy hydraulic
inside trusty
woolen quarters:
leaf shroud, wood pajama
taste of silk and salt,
how tenacious
the dreams are there
in the subtle darkness
of the hostage
the remarkable prison
of dynastic tradition
squandered there.
This much fidelity
and candor as the storm
stalls overhead and hands
out the legible
squall of the sky,
the uncanny suspension
of the sea-haul there
in the swell attraction
and pains-taking blabber
of the earth as she builds
a rebuttal and wins.
The lie does surround and contain
the grass as it rises, limits the silence
as it speaks, frees the yellow bird
with black trims
as he appears to wander
from ledge to limb,
from choice to whim
and when this fly
lays down a generation
within my skin,
does not the spider
query the corpse
as she spin?
In this inesscapable this
rests the dominion.
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