Spork Spotlight
spork 2.1 (AUTUMN 2002)
spork | thesafehousequarterly Bookplate: This Is Your Bookplate is published twice a year by Mike Micropolous, 2002.
______Artwork by Tom Walbank ADVISOR appearing on pages 443–450: Timothy C. Hayek W. C. Handy, 1997. EDITORIAL brush, india ink, and Richard Siken ballpoint pen, 9” x 12”
Jason Ott Little Marion Walter Jacobs, 1993. Robert Hepworth brush, india ink, and Drew Burk ballpoint pen, 9” x 12”
PRODUCTION Tommy McClennan, 1995. Drew Burk india ink and stick, 9” x 12”
TECHNICAL Robert Nighthawk, 1996. Aaron Triplett brush and india ink, 9” x 12”
______Charlie Patton, 1992. brush, india ink, and correctional fluid, 9” x 12” Single issues of spork are not as expensive as they look. Available Mahalia Jackson, 1996. at select bookstores worldwide brush and india ink, 9” x 12”
(check website for current list), Bukka White 1992. at our not-so-secret headquarters: brush and india ink, 9” x 12”
4024 East Speedway Boulevard, Mance Lipscomb 1993. Tucson, Arizona 85712 brush and india ink, 12” x 9” or online at www.sporkmag.com. A map is a thing and a rooster is Please address all correspondence, a thing and a spork is two things business and editorial, to spork, at the same time the way a 4024 East Speedway Boulevard, hammer is a hammer is a tool. Tucson, Arizona 85712 or to [email protected]. Materials published in spork may not be reprinted, in whole Submissions read year-round. or in part, without the written No manuscripts can be returned permission of the editors. nor any query answered unless Copyright © 2002 by spork accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Spork also All rights revert to the author welcome electronic submissions. upon publication. !""#""$""%""&""$""%""'""
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!! ______
!"#$%&'(#)*+,-"%) ) ) ) ny system open to freedom is also open to degeneracy. Create a place for things to happen and inevitably they will. There were A mistakes. There was drift. There was mind-changing in subtle and grand ways and things broke forever, or broke and got mended, and we broke some things on purpose and felt sorry about it later or didn’t. We wanted five issues a year and ended up with three and a radio play. We designed colorful covers and the t-shirt shop went out of business. We had plans, made promises, pledged opulent things and spelled people’s names wrong. I shouldn’t be surprised. I am, but I shouldn’t be. We love you with a fierce and sloppy love, dear reader, but these things happen. So here it is, Issue 2.1, either the fourth spork or the fifth, depending on how you’re counting. To thicken the gravy further, we’ve decided to have only two print issues a year—Autumn & Spring—to give us more time for live events. Notice the new binding? Expect it to change every year. Please also put your attention to the page number we’re starting with—it’s 355. This should indicate at least two things: 1) We’re committed to continuous page numbers for the duration, even if—should we be so lucky—we end up with numbers in the tens of thousands; and 2) We lost a page. Okay, we didn’t lose it, but we ended on an odd page last time and we needed to start on an odd page this time. Perhaps we can consider the radio play the missing page. Then again, we may just take missing page 354 and jam it in somewhere, sometime in the future.
"!#!$%!&!'!()!!!*!+!,!"!)! ______
./")01(#)$(&)2/1%3)14)53) ) ) ) ou have been watched from a distance for some time now and now you are being watched from even farther away. Anyway, you’d like Y to believe it’s true. Who wouldn’t? Just because a thing’s invisible doesn’t mean it don’t exist, you think to yourself, but still, there is no valid way to test it. And then one day you fall asleep on the train on the way home but you get home anyway. You close your eyes and nothing happens. You close your eyes every now and then, just to test the waters, and find you’re still moving, being moved, walking through the tunnel with your eyes closed, held up and carried along by the crowd. Not love or joy in any traditional sense, but a gentle kind of peaceful rocking that gathers together the single flowers to make a garland. The lights flicker and the wheels clack. No one on the train can tell who’s driving, so you let go of the imaginary wheel. You lean back in your plastic seat and let your shoulders relax. In the seat across from you, a man is reading a newspaper. His ears look familiar. And the woman standing by the automatic doors—her wrists, how she moves her wrists strikes a chord deep inside you. Look at the teeth in the mouth of that little boy in the parka! You know those teeth! You’ve seen those teeth in somebody else’s mouth! All these parts trying to assemble themselves in front of you, as if to say Let me in, I’m still here, hello hello, you know me, you know… Here I am in a rabbit run, here I am in a valley of pine, waiting for you to find me. I could pretend I’m speaking to everyone—assume a middle distance and transcend myself—but I’m taking to you and you know it. There was one time, we were on the subway then, and I had just gone somewhere inside my head—Where did you just go? you said—and I had come here (buzz buzz) and didn’t need no static offa you. It doesn’t always matter where we are but here I am and I say hello, sitting next to you this time, just pretend I’m sitting next to you this time. You would like it here. Maybe you would like it here. I think that maybe you would like it here. I work my jobs, I take my pills. Knot the tie and go to work, unknot the tie and go to sleep. I sleep. I dream. I wake. I sing. I get out the hammer and start knocking in the wooden pegs that affix the meaning to the landscape, the inner life to the body, the names to the things. I float too much to wander, like you, in the real world. I envy it but that’s the dealio— you’re a train and I’m a trainstation and when I try to guess your trajectory I end up telling my own story. But you are my nomad and I love you sideways daily. Sideways because I have to beam my love in all directions, hoping it bounces off something and eventually finds you. You and all the other secret agents caroming underneath the radar, sending your documents back to Mission Control— which is me, I guess, because I have a permanent address. I’ve been rereading your story. I think it’s about me in a way that might not be flattering, but that’s okay. We dream and dream of being seen as we really are and then finally someone looks at us and sees us truly and we fail to measure up. Anyway: story received, story included. You looked at me long enough to see something mysterioso under all the gruff and bluster. Thanks. Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them. So here we are again: me being here and you being off the map and me sending it out across the wires and being overheard. You’re making me work for this—the whisper system—and that’s okay, too. I was shooting my mouth off and you called me on it and yes, it’s been the plan all along, my great invention, a place for all these voices to land, the airport of someone else’s listening. The question for this issue was Do you have a human soul and can you prove it? And, of course, there was no definitive answer. A robot can do the math. A robot can spit out an answer. People, they make it up as they go along. They find connections between things where there aren’t any. They get moody, they refuse things, they take it deep inside themselves and fold it into something unrecognizable and then they set it down on the table. I had a tape recorder. I poked and prodded. I said your reports on my desk now, moles. I give you permission, I give you immunity. I give you these freedoms—even if freedom means animal spirit guides and probation officers. I wound them up and broke their mainsprings. There are limit- ations and there are protocols and I’ve been warned that I’m not supposed to threaten or beg for pieces of someone’s soul. Theme issues are creepy anyway. Drew said pick something easier, so we ended up going with long poems and short short stories. You said if people wanted to change the world, they would. You said most people like it this way. Too bad for them, I say. I want something else. But you know how I am. I push too hard. I get ahead of myself. I keep ruining everything I touch by turning it into gold. But I’m learning how to be gentle. Even to the vampires, poor little things. Save me save me love me love me there’s a hole in my bucket etcetera. They don’t know what they want but I give it to them anyway because why the hell not? Love, love, go ahead and have another plate of it, it doesn’t run out. Of course, I wonder if they love me back, which is, really, besides the point. I don’t do it to be adored, I do it because my love keeps getting bigger and that’s what happens. So here we are again, words on a page, the voice that wants to be a hand, the bridge with no opposite side. Of all the people reading this, are you one of them? I have to believe you are. Sure, we invent each other. We agreed to that a long time ago. Train and trainstation, force and field. We do what we do and what I do is put the pies on the windowsill. So here you are, reading this, expecting something. A story perhaps, or someone singing themself to sleep. You’re ready and I’m ready too. Have you been waiting long? I’ve frankensteined it for you, bundled it all up, because it’s nice to put pictures inside people’s heads, like frogs and ronin and Cleveland and Deloreses. Here is a place for it to happen. A place where I can love you. The letter delivered, the year decembered, the river swum.
—Richard Siken
$#%#&#'#(#)###)#%#*#(#%#+# ______
!"#$%&'&($)*+$&",* * I am called Episode 12 now.
The scars on my torso are intercoms. What they sing back of your sentence is deadpan & covers the emergency light in the bathroom.
When we first make love I refuse to remove my shirt. Two girls have walked off the set to drive to a location lit brightly with grief.
Episode 11 is still crashing around inside you. The lights of room 50 of the Deportation Motel have begun their chronic flickering.
I come on at 11am & again at 8pm. I last an immense hour & watching myself gives me amnesia. I lose your jawline at laughter killing the smell of rain.
After lovemaking on invisible terms don’t be surprised if you get a full clearance & a headache when you ask to alter my memory of you. Your short hair becomes a red wig. The quiet face starts talking a lover out of time.
I sing the last part of what you say. You are called Episode 13 now. When I stop glowing you can’t believe you got undressed.
______!""# $#%#&#'#(#)###)#%#*#(#%#+# ______
-'&"%*-(./&)().*!%"'0* * We park on Friday night at the strip of ocean that is unmonitored.
She listens for friends on the dead city radio. This dark beach is not the transmitter she wants, not the hushing—
Her friends waiting upside down from fire escapes for lightning to return the salt to their mouths.
The secret we don’t know is a no-show & we’re too big for the ocean. Someone’s floating white clothes tremble & tighten around us. We’ve found a chamber in the low tide. Our impulse is to start our own galaxy for the voices she does pick-up. The salvation we offer is three bedrooms wide, it is unamplified, we can only offer her dead lovemaking they’ll want to memorize. They won’t want to be strangers when they dance to Lightning Dream & cannot stop.
Her list: 1. He would paint with his empathy, tell me to help him put a nervous system into the future, so it could feel us coming.
The storm she says conquers our airwaves.
Do we choose to laugh at the unformed sky along the water? Throw a beer can at it? Or turn our backs & mix into the telepathic & burning metropolis? Either side is a drug.
______!",# -'&"%*-(./&)().*!%"'0*
2. She would make me an offshoot of her driving: confuse me with destination.
Now she wants to take off her jeans & oscillate her legs in the surf.
How will you tune in your voices? They cause a nervous system I can’t locate.
Then she tunes into me saying field of blood into her hair, into her list, which I make believe is a symmetry of non-stop gazes into the details. The details of the bodies: lipsticked heads, shaved heads, with or without the Future Dream in their faces.
3. She would pick up the doll from the saguaro. 4. He got impatient with things going loose.
I pull up a white shirt by its sleeve, heavy with water like lifting a body’s left arm, & throw it up the beach. This pulls from the dark heart girl a vast laugh. She knows the lightning has hit the city at last.
The underwear is too hard to catch. She wonders if someone naked or transparent will appear, wonders what the bodies we can’t see do when they want to be bright like inside a doll.
The lifeguard tower is our spot to inferno our senses— her leg touched by headlights.
But this lovemaking is staged for her to tell me her destroyed names.
______!"- $%&'()##)%*(%+#
I have none. I watch lightning because holy lights shock my city alive, divide my city into double galaxies. I’m swinging my arms in both.
5. The insomniac I drove the mesa with at night— 6. The guitarist who took films of me—
But is she only this list? Does her skin, when it touches mine, feel which side of living I’m holding her in?
She’s putting this nervous system around my neck.
Why are her lips becoming difficult to kiss? Why is a chaos of droplets the future she wants me in?
These dead shouldn’t have let her shake them into me— They shouldn’t have let me get to the following song—
______!". 0#%#&#%###1#%#2#3#'#&# ______
1/2*3*4$&*5(%"6* * * eing nineteen and fearless. About to lap-dance the trickster who’d unzipped in the dark. Jumping off the rude guy and then clocking B him in the jaw. Shoving stale popcorn in his face as he grabbed. Bouncer Tom come to my rescue, come to lift him out, chair and all before he could zip it in. All the men laughing as the fool hung out of his trousers. All the girls cheering as he tumbled out the doors. Free beers on the house and noone try that again with my girls. But you, said the owner all dressed in black with a comb-over, I know you’re 36-26-36 but you make too much trouble. Go cool your troublemaker heels at my other place down the road. Dancing at the joint down the road where the dj nicknamed me Brick House. Bribing the dj to play Brick House. The spotlight shimmering off the red sequined strip. Owning the room while sporting that red sequined strip. The flannel and boot crowd fumbling pocket change under the strip, rough fingers and no finesse. Loving the moves and hating the men, loving the men and hating the moves, hating the moves for making me hate the men, who love the moves and probably hate me, but jump back into their cold Cleveland cars to love themselves handily before returning home. And trying to keep it simple trying to keep it simple trying to keep it simple and If you can’t, said the dj, try one of these little blue buddies instead. That place was called Brown’s. That rough bar gone rougher come the deep freeze of winter. Come the deep freeze of winter in northern Ohio. The stink of fry-pit perch from the bar buffet, fry-pit smokestack greasing the icy sky. Boy shot sandbags open with his BB gun, poured sand to help cars grip the endless ice. Sundown by mid-afternoon throwing night down too early. One Friday night when the heat pipes froze I wouldn’t take it all off. Glass of beer flying at my crotch from a table of bad bored. Cold beer white skin goosebumps hopping down malt-stained thighs. Next night dancing naked with the fever caught from dancing wet the night before.
______!"/# 0%&%##1%23'&#
Next day home under blankets in the ramshackle on Morgan Lane, red sequins still glued on and glinting under the covers like embers in a died- down fire. Cleveland rock n’ roll Cleveland. Fifteen-mile shiver in a gasket-blasted Pacer. Fifteen miles down the balky break-down-anytime road between Brown’s and the ramshackle on Morgan Lane. Fifteen shiver miles singing the chorus to Brick House to stay warm. Night road the dark outstretched arm of a big sorry man. Pointing thataway girlie, seven more miles to go and it’s Hello Cleveland All-nude and All-u-can-eat same place same time same price. Me on a bender. Hump-dancing a man’s wife onstage, me on the bender, she on a dare. Making more money pretending to fuck her than any other night. That night’s tips bought another month in the ramshackle on Morgan Lane. Wondered if I should give her some money as she turned away from the cheers suddenly pale and sick with shame. Me in a rut. Me in a rut on another sub-zero night-time afternoon. Seven sad men in the bar and me trying to dance to Bob Seger the spiteful sad barmaid’s insisted-on favorite. Bob Seger the worst unfunky. Can’t do any moves but white-girl herky jerky. Seven men watching from scattered seats around the room. Seeing the bearded landlord of that ramshackle house on Morgan Lane in the scattered shadowy seats of the seven men watching. My landlord sitting there watching like a sin professor, chewing the fat cud of what-a-surprise. Landlord come to my side door next morning and scratched his flaky beard onto the side door steps and gave me the up-and-down with wet-lips and eyes. I smack the side door spring-shut right in his face. His phone call ten minutes later, his deep breaths between the words I’ll need an increase or else if you know what I mean is that anyway to treat your landlord as the morning toast burnt in the fiery-wire toaster. Deep breath and hell-bent nerves firing and telling him that if he tried to kick me out I’d tell his wife everything and I wouldn’t mince words and who do you think she’ll believe? Taste of burnt toast conjuring up the sound of a landlord breathing. Taste of burnt toast forever ruined by the landlord who made himself a regular at Brown’s and outstayed me there by his whole life. New city five years later. Twenty-four and hungry in the new city under the sunbelt sun. Twenty-four and hungry in a city of toupee-white-belt- powder-blue-leisure suits. All bad tippers getting their Sanka from career
______!,4 1/2*3*4$&*5(%"6* waitresses who’ll never leave their jobs. Job cross-off after job cross-off. Walking jobless down the road to the big magenta sign. White girl in a top hat hip-cocked and grinning on the big magenta sign. Falling back on a skill because it pays easy money. Forgetting it’s not easy, sometimes not even money. Losing the tips in my T-strap to a swift fingered frat boy in the new city. A big roach crawling in my wig in the dressing room of the new bar. Tables of thin beer and boat shoes and cheap tropical shirts. Shorts so thin you could get a disease doing a lap- dance. And one day a lady in a headband, a prim lady with hair the color of corn, swept back from her powdered brow in a velvet headband. Prim headband lady walks in with a shaft of rude sun and says she wants to dance. Wants to audition and dance for the men. Wants to meet all the girls and see what it’s all about. Show me how to dance for the men show me how to do it what else do you do? All questions no legwork no waist no chest no good. They say you can’t take it all off but don’t you take it all off? Prying like a little sister only asking to get you in trouble, surprise over dinner when she tells your parents what you said. Don’t tell me you can’t make more money after you dance, don’t you make the real money that way? I won’t tell, don’t you think I could do it too? Girls pawing the floor in their fishnets like a wary herd. Girls looking for exits. What girl you know comes to strip in a headband said the old blondie wiping oil into her chest as the lady took her headband back out the door and down the road. Hours crawling towards night. Rank sunset coughing up a sallow moon. Glasses clanking onto shelves barmaid setting up cigarettes stubbed down. Moths swarming in the headlights as cars pulled up too close, high beams swimming the floor through the windows. Car doors chuffing shut too loud, too same-time, too many car doors shutting too loud and all at the same time. Headlights flashlights front door badge glints men shout. Waiting a split second too long. Waiting a split second too long before the bolt. Whole herd of girls in flimsy this and that trying to beat it to the bathroom to the window out the back. Headband lady giving the megaphone a blowjob. Big lady officer in grey and blue with a piece. The Mama Sarge of the whole shebang. Girls with stories, girls with memories tucked under their supposedly impervious animal-thick skin, with gut radar, antennae firing and legs jolted to move. Mascara panic running. Heels clomping,
______!,5 0%&%##1%23'&# shoes flicked off to stocking feet. Making it halfway down the back hallway which was making it absolutely nowhere at all. Line of sass girls led out into the headlight glare. Line of sass girls fuming in Flexi cuffs, handcuffed by the new city’s PD. Flap of more vice- badge wallets like show-off card tricks. Hand on my head pressing me into a back seat, cop climbing in too, squad car door chuffing shut. What’s the difference between vice and vise. Choke-meat smell of burgers just eaten in the back seat. Chortle and click of radio set on low. Wrappers and cuffs and tangle of more flexis in the back seat. Vinyl gaining grip on the bare skin of my back leg. Officer Somebody Big Man making cowboy talk in the back seat. Making quick clumsy fondle. Making dig for the goods. Mustache crumbed with lunch, flexi-cuffs keeping blood from hands, vinyl bite at skin shift. Scratch of trouser leg and bigfoot black shoe and Say my name. Biting lips to not do not say. Thigh muscle lockdown. Grim stare. Count to ten knees locked shut. Dancing means muscles. Dancing muscles saved the dancing girl. Twenty-four and hungry in the stationhouse chair in the empty belly of the profitless night. Twenty-four staring at powdered donuts on the stationhouse donut table. Cup of sour coffee, quiet stretch of soremuscle legs. Blondie walking in behind the Mama Sarge walking out behind the Mama Sarge. Blondie’s chest still shining with oil a grit-tooth swallow running down her old throat, her beach-witch hair falling dankly down. Fingers pressed to inkpad, fingers bumped to paper. Officer Somebody like it’s post-roundup on the chaparral talking post-game with Mama Sarge. Being booked by the new city’s PD for soliciting Officer Somebody. She insisted, I swear. She wanted me. The seersucker-suited whiskey-breath sour-gut lawyer come in after his breakfast summoned by a phone call. Grabbed a jelly donut and said Here’s the drill. Seersucker-suited whiskey-breath sour-gut lawyer with sugar on his grizzle who got me off and then got off. I signing for my effects in the stationhouse, ziplock bag and wanting to fake my name. Sunblast outside the terrible shine of the squad cars lined up in their stalls. Shrug and change and shower and get back to work. Shrug and work and shower and change and work. Going back to work and just dancing, stretching sore legs against the pole. Thirst come on like a virus. Needing a water pitcher onstage or I panic. Endlessly parched and desert-stranded
______!,6 1/2*3*4$&*5(%"6* thirsty and not knowing why. Gulping water after water and careless about anything giving hands a wide berth. Stray dollars grabbed instead of let under elastic, a barren stretch of girlskin and few tips and I didn’t care. Water pitchers filled and emptied, gulping from the spout. A night and another night and still thirsty and then a drunk calling me a whore. You gonna shake it for your Daddy or what Stopping mid-dip just staring under lights. Arms fall down from the wings of a shimmy. Looking for the face, red screwed up drunk face, long face hollowed out luckless and raw. Can’t stand these uppity attitude types stand there like we wanna watch them think Stopped mid-dip just staring out at the voice in the room. Stopped and let myself think. Amazed under lights. Thinking, there it is. What I’ve been missing. My launchpad, my gatecard, my carkey, my doorbell. A reason to fight. Disco ball is a siren swirl before my eyes. Drunk standing up back, puffed out chest a blessed idiot messenger come all this way from nowhere, just for me, all riled up now just for me Why you stop dancing you stupid girl get the lead out Just him, just me. He the bum-rushed downluck fool in the chair and me the not-so-young meat onstage. Him the doubledare do your job know your place and me the sudden thinker. Thinking, I know why I’ve been thirsty. All the pieces falling into place like sequins on the red strip. This is the green light, his face, I’ve got the motor gunning no brakes down that black arm of the road. I’m a grip on pitcher handle, heft it up the big cool belly of the water pitcher newly refilled. Draw back shoulder like a bow and arrow. There’s an Amazon in me. Recoil, ready with a big arc, a cascade of water, a perfect sprung arc off the stage and right into that red standing face, a full pitcher of water in perfect delivery landing smack dab on the man’s mean face. Glorious wave and splash and filigree of beading on eyelashes and open red mouth. Glorious record skip as the bar cuts the music and the girls come to watch. Glorious perfect legs moving springing off the stage, glorious manager heading consternatedly my way as the glorious agendas of all the losers in the world collide in the ruined interchange a jumble of cars about to crash. Glorious hands out and ready waiting for a man’s naked silly neck and yelling This one’s for Cleveland.
______!,!
1#%#2#8###1#9#)#'#&#%#2#8# ______
4%')60$&/"%78*!(88"9&($)* I have sacrificed almost the whole race of frogs. (Marcello Malpighi, physician, 1628-1694) * 1. INSINUATED
The past tense becomes our subtle under- taking as we rummage through bureaus and boxes of the dead’s things: a life pithed and particular to a time and a place. One century as the logical conclusion to twenty. Among the photographs and false teeth, the cigarette cases, prosthetics, and beaded hairpins, Grandmother’s homework is revealed.
Exposed, she wrote, a preserved specimen of frog was examined, the external structures noted, a drawing was made. Then graded and stuffed, parched as dull wheat, in a pine desk drawer.
Her proof her drawing—the empirical moment— a well-preserved tucked-under secret.
2. LESSONS LEARNED. THEN LEARNED AGAIN.
Phylum: Chordata Sub-Phylum: Vertebrata Class: Amphibia
______!,7# 4%')60$&/"%78*!(88"9&($)*
3. THE DARKER DORSAL SIDE
With scalpel-edged delicacy from sternum to pubis, I dissect my frog. Record in colored pencils on loose leaf. Private school children get fetal pigs and felt tip markers. They are encouraged to label fried chicken— its external structure as well as its smooth and elastic musculature—but the frog in formaldehyde democratizes us.
Let the frog stand for coming of age and common experience.
We are Descartes searching south of lung, behind kidney for the pure frog, the Platonic ideal. But we can’t shut up, can’t stop repeating. We little surgeons carve cadavers with little histories. We carve up the past as though it were only present. Russian spies and astronauts dropped among us, run-aways, dope fiends, Indians, agitators, prisoners of war—all. Because Phylum: Humanitas: Sub-Phylum: Class. Because exposed and splayed out they speak a thousand languages of extinction and happenstance, are vague remnants of familiarity who read us Kipling, were killed quietly by the phylum, have died forgetting our names.
4. IRONIC TAXONOMIES
Let the frog stand for these a madness, a prophecy a rain of them
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!"#$%&'"%()*)%"+(*"(,-(./"(./,-&+(( /"(01"+-2.(3),-.( (after Giordano’s painting, “The Massacre of Niobe,” ca 1680) ( the things he chooses to leave out. But not Giordano. At least two hundred times I’ve seen his mythical subject with that abrupt bottom-of-a-foot dead center of the enormous canvas resting on a bearded corpse next to a mask—a fabric lion face furled and frayed around the edges. I come to this particular museum often because it is not the Prado and is down the street in my hometown in the South and so has as its permanent collection what the more illustrious museums either did not want or could not want or would not fit. Each of the times I visit—and without baroque hyperbole— this (expressionist, yes) mask takes me by surprise and to tell you the truth, I’m quite certain that brother Giordano meant to paint shoulder armor with epaulets because that would be appropriate to the confounding tension between (the thin line between) the upward pull of the Baroque and the vast epic space of the Modern poised for Progress and expansion. No, Giordano probably did not intend the implied treason, the affront to popes and princes—why, to suggest that their regality were somehow false and flimsy—well—you have to think about the expectation of art in the 17th century; the twinning ideas of mastery and perfection. What it might mean to be… human. Nothing less at stake here than the very plinth of Western civilization being articulated in pictures. You have to think about how the image enters the world of the viewer (how the thing is lit, for example, how its heft of shadow presses on or grazes over the eye—all it sees and so on): you have to think about Poussin—eternal presence, Sabine rape—and how Giordano must have compared himself to Caravaggio’s theatre, to Rubens’ pinkpinks, to Velázguez for Christ’s sake. But consider the frame they inhabit, the lines and folds. Consider that, perhaps, Giordano’s art was a freer art and, perhaps, he painted that mask or the idea of that mask on purpose as if to say in 1680/now: the stage has been set, the canvas empty What a real surprise then… a mask (a mask!) in the midst of this
______!""# !"#$%&'"%()*)%"+(*"(,-(./"(./,-&+(/"(01"+-2.(3),-.( massacre surrounded by hard stares, taut horse bits and circled mouths of horror and extreme angels or gods who sit on figured clouds and shoot imperfect arrows into the backs of citizen slaves or mothers (but this is not the age of revolution—you hear no Goya scream at the back of your throat yet just the soft incredulity of mythical footsteps running away across damp leaves)
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!('*6"*,$8*+="%&$8* * My mother has gone to view the dead body of my aunt and to bury her. It is very important she insists for people to see the body dead, to make that break with life. This is something she will keep on doing whether I like it or not. I suppose if we don’t see these dead bodies, the dead would just go right on living, causing all sorts of trouble. My husband’s grandfather, for example, visits his wife every night, crawls right out of his grave, climbs her walls, demands pork chops, wants to have sex. I have a few dead friends back in Tucson who remain very much alive to me; distance renders such notions possible. If you stay in one place long enough and a virus or a war moves through you could even lose count of your dead as they go on about the solitary business of each day: washing the chinaberry stains from their cars, stripping down for a nap under a hot sun on an especially cool afternoon, hanging clothes like banners on a makeshift line that cuts the throat of the sun, listening to cicadas scream and drone, still waiting for remission, cease- fire, or cure. I have seen many dying but not dead. Is it fair to keep the dead alive? I have another dead friend for whom I wrote a memorial poem. I never saw his body either, but as I wrote, surrounded by memory surrounded by finality’s fine point, there he was: shrouded in every syllable as I placed each in its own inky coffin. He is dead every day.
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>?"9&'*@,')A"&* * When it was found that ejecta blankets not only occur on the moon, but also in some humans, it was a new day for science. Convinced that this phenomena was confined to meteor impacts and other astronomical anomalies it was of vast import when scientists found a young man who, among other things, had experienced a “covering-up” effect after a traumatic moment in early childhood. Although he would not specify what exactly had happened, he described the aftereffects in this way: “Fogginess. A not so clear thought process. The misinterpretation of happiness.” After countless therapists and self-medication, it was out of desperation that he enrolled at the local Community College. There, classes were cheaper than at the State University and less crowded. Astronomy 119 was offered on Tuesday and Thursday just after his meetings with Dr. M—. And it was at these classes that he first saw through a telescope the pocked surface of the moon. As he passed over the impact craters and their surrounding debris, he forgot about his bedtime for the first time in years, and made eye contact with a girl who, only inches from his face, had made progress earlier in the semester, there was first a slight numbness and then his tightened fist uncurled and lay motionless on his bare knee.
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B%6()')9"*C* * Like most Deloreses, Delores was a bartender. Her apartment on 32nd Street—west of Charlie’s Bagels—had a cupboard full of eggs and a husband named Jasper who made her days away from the East Sixty more than alive. “Have you had many breakfasts, honey?” Jasper sometimes joked with her before going to the Chairman’s meetings. They had a dog, Innisfree. He could eat sixteen mice per year. But last March Trombone the cat outdid the dog—seventeen round ones. “I haven’t forgotten the last time you swept the porch, dear,” Delores occasionally said to her husband on her way to the bar. She sported a fine camelhair jacket every Wednesday. On the back of the jacket, a yellow Post-it dated February 16th, read: “Don’t forget the peas.” She always forgot the peas. She hadn’t turned around in weeks.
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-(D"E-(A"* * He received his honorary juror badge in the mail the other day, along with some incorrectly addressed envelopes that should’ve been delivered, as usual, to the local record store. Somehow, though, it seemed pertinent to immediately pin the badge onto his sleeveless shirt, strap his gun over his shoulder, and make a beeline for the mall. He proudly wore the small square piece of official paper, brandishing it to most passersby. It read: “You are juror # [and then a bar code]” He liked that. He needed to be scanned and identified every now and again because he often confused his nom de plumes for his Christian name, making it almost impossible to be notified of pending catastrophes or—as was the most recent mix up—class reunions. Luckily though, he knew the mall had such devices, scanning ones, and it was all he could do to contain himself—the clothes and other products that filled the mall also excited him. And as he did every time he found out who he was or had been, he would treat himself to some sweet smelling cologne and a pair of leather pants. Unless, of course, it turned out his name was Ivan or Moloch, then he would buy earmuffs or something.
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-"88$)8*@"D$%"*F%'G",().* * Alexander the Great always took his pens and pencils wherever he traveled, mostly because he wanted people to think he was writing things down, but in reality he just liked the way they looked behind his ears. Different from the yellow pencils we now know, his were black like thick lead rods, and his pens, although very similar to 20th century pens, were never used for writing. Even though some speculate that Alexander enjoyed his pencils in his right ear and his pens on his left because of an early reading disability, no one knows why the boy never quite felt comfortable fashioning both at the same time. Specialists have even falsely compared Emily Dickinson to Alexander because of her pens and pencils. Emily did in fact wear pencils— the number depending on her mood—twisted into her wiry hair as she wrote. But not Alexander. It may have seemed to his soldiers, countrymen, and sometimes even his lovers that, like Emily Dickinson, he had been writing when he showed up in a foul mood wearing either instrument, but in actuality it was in different cities that he would decide between pencil and pen. If Alexander were feeling down for example—usually after a battle that took longer than it should or if a friend was killed—he would wear seized gold or foreign perfumes and never write a thing about it. And alternately, when he was in Asia Minor ruining entire populations, Alexander felt wonderful—he wore pens the color of the Mediterranean protruding from his brown curls, and unlike the pencils, they reminded him of beaches, running naked, and always neglecting to write home.
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H20#'&/"&(9*I"%G$=8*H28&"0* * While half the group tried to recall the importance of history, and the other half just tried to memorize their lines, Albert—the instructor—remembered being a child and all the other children he knew who grew up to be alcoholics. One specific memory from a night of partying in a Super 8 motel was like a poorly illustrated comic strip. All the principle cartoons— Albert’s friends—laughed at nothing in particular as Albert himself—the protagonist—was drawn savagely into the motel room’s double bed. He had several inches of the chartreuse comforter tucked beneath his hollow chin with a blurb bubbling up from his head—the broken-off kind indicating a thought. The other illustrations sitting around the table (cell #19) turned toward Albert after hearing a small metallic sound coming from his brain. Even Camile, who rarely read Albert’s mind, made to indulge whatever it was Albert was thinking. The group paused as the thought, which was filled with scribbles, a few words, and a blurred silhouette, slowly stopped its vibrating. Camile and the others found this less than entertaining and returned to their intrepid game of cribbage, leaving Albert’s memory to remain not what it used to be.
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!"#$%&'()$*%+,-%.$/%.0,(*'/1%23'4$*% % 5%6,/+(3"'/%7$1"8'8",/% % 1. Us concoction, sweetly of Lucy, derivative for how many long, need (for the rest at all, and love & pep) an illustration.
2. Octopus teeth in a ring and elongated tentacles: things have their center and their branches—ideas of first buds and then the elderly tops falling back because of night frost, frog debris, wind and too much rain at the petals. She influenced us, the amazing student. God! knowledge like that of what is first, last, of offshoots and where and what the pith is and is going to be.
3. A mind tracing beginnings beneath the branches, so seeing the cervical gap from liver pressure and urine tricklets, estrogen florets, and watching the fetus dwarfing back to fragilely gripping the wall, and moist enterings lucid at the tip. Maybe compare that to goals met from intellection after you installed shimmers in the objects you studied, deliberation from your first virtuous curiosity—for sure, a kind of birth.
4. France absorbed Joan’s program starting with herself in Domremy. Hello, center. I feel in June here sincerity considering His sun, on my face, that shall refract to cousins and farthest mobs, extend in a delta toward frayed men in Orleans and farther. The Colorado was rafted. Whales squeeze for stretches of air-block. Coast, falcon. Migrate, sand. What else should extend is mentioned in Live Gauges for Ten Thousand Scapes.
5. Traced out, extensions flourished—emotions imitating them. Maybe burnt green, one extension, a palm frond canting so that shade will rot a seed enough to drop down. Maybe sonorous, footed in a line by the whited, warped trim of the wharf, cormorants sounding, extending out. Individual, our imaginations were sincere, real greens, real whites. Sincerity oozed
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-(G"*4'=."8*D$%*F")*F/$=8')6*H9'#"8* * J*K$)D=9(')*+"6(&'&($)* * tranquility. Maybe spans even of contaminated river, with mucus and eel warts, but opening and opening starting points and examples.
6. So extension from whatever is all: from mole-rat, King, or dust-mite, flaky growth, or you, or bear, protozoan on his claw.
7. The attention all times will almost depart us, splatter from a bough with reachers, doze, paddle seaward, flit, sag dangling from the top, probe (almost) for the center that wandered.
______!-" 09&%3;%&#>%&*%))(&*(2?;(#
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-(G"*4'=."8*D$%*F")*F/$=8')6*H9'#"8* * J*K$)D=9(')*+"6(&'&($)* * COMMENTARY I. 1. About King: “His charisma’s clear.” —Reporter
2. About Bach: “His ritornello woodwinds his Kyrie.” —Reviewer
3. About You: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” —William James
4. —Said into space towards members of an ear. Deliberately! Deliberately word by the word for room for thought that rest liberates. Or else spun by eyesight into font on paper. Whichever, each an illustration of sweet attention, for whom who knows? until the meaning is likened in turn to some relevant thing, like a film or a paintable flower. Do you know Cat On A Hot Tin Roof or Simple Men? Have you watered the hyacinth?
5. Fine. And yet illustrations can be other than comparisons.
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-(G"*4'=."8*D$%*F")*F/$=8')6*H9'#"8* * J*K$)D=9(')*+"6(&'&($)* * C.II. 1. What? fingering the rubber-band that way, illustrating anxiety. “This, here, who, how?” your forehead saying. And so we think your opposite is a squirrel’s calling mouth, a thing that hears the gauge it goes by, sincere, aware, and thus sincerely hearing.
2. “Whoever reflects on what passes in his own Mind, cannot miss it: and if he does not reflect, all the Words in the World, cannot make him have any notion of it.” —John Locke
3. It, perception, and others: are they as though of silt? Vague ways we’ve ridden, or fogged-over hypotheses stuck with terms? A perception, a hill- view together with bulbs of spill-spark, stuttering lights amid clouding mountains: the image of (for us) friendliness between us. And the meaning there perhaps very simple. Bulbs meeting glasses with bubbles, that image constellating with rain hitting all directions. It is the Fourth of July! But heard, all that, named, felt clumsy. We would do that until we found a gauge for it all, demystifying the meaning.
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!"#$%&'()$*%+,-%.$/%.0,(*'/1%23'4$*% % 5%6,/+(3"'/%7$1"8'8",/% % C. III. With a whacker gut the branches away and down, down there must be inhabitable, a world that (to be at all a world) must allow stuffing. One says, “I am the self inside myself.” But why, since things equally are inside, Dürer’s paintings, geometry maybe, (what else?) and blue diary handwriting about a divorce, (what else?) Bertrand Russell’s caricature, canyons and deer in them we saw, (what else?) and the odor of cormorant and illustrations using mole-rats? You are of (not among) them, those, these, all this.
______./0 -(G"*4'=."8*D$%*F")*F/$=8')6*H9'#"8*
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-(G"*4'=."8*D$%*F")*F/$=8')6*H9'#"8* * J*K$)D=9(')*+"6(&'&($)* * C. IV. VIDEO POKER 1. Bells of wired rows contaminating my version of heaven, loudly for winning hands, for nothing quietly, hefting lids of the eyes upon a straight or straight flush, Augustinic and Vivaldic rotations in spans of one bite... newest coins, fingers’ push, queen’s & king’s face, and departures thrice, past the fleck-sparrow’s nest on the sign, via dried drool pools atop keys of the bank machine.
2. To do self-made tests!
3. The elderly woman’s chest-sweat nudges through cotton, the bells tintinnabular to her more than a younger lover. To not play at all; rather, to watch others losing and winning as a self test!
4. The low ceiling somehow not preventing this watching of myself from a pagoda, high up, imagined with dragons etched in the posts, and orange- bordered characters.
5. These impromptu documentaries of ourselves, which we project onto foreign magnificent zones. FOUND: Basho doing it, translated as The Skinny Path to Oku:
______!-/ 09&%3;%&#>%&*%))(&*(2?;(#
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-(G"*4'=."8*D$%*F")*F/$=8')6*H9'#"8* * J*K$)D=9(')*+"6(&'&($)* * C. V. 1. Days & moons are hikers though eternity, and the years passing are travelers of that sort too. Other wanderers: folks counting time on a boat or going by moments walking a horse home by the bit, those whose journey itself is home. Many from history fell dead right on the road. Yet I couldn’t repress wanderlust, drawn by pulled clouds, again & again me dawdling alone up the seacoast. So I swept cobwebs last fall inside the riverside hut and soon spring skies returned, mists floating, so I wanted Shirakawa Barrier as a traveling space, the spirit Dosojin’s voice unconcentrating me during every boring thing. Barely got through fixing my raggy pants, doctoring my rain & sun bamboo hat, the Matasushima moon rising to mind the instant I treated my sore shins with burnt moxa. Leaving for Sampu’s cottage I gave up my place,
2. family’s presence— old hut of mine: transformation into a doll’s house
3. That part of a haiku chain left tacked by me on a post.
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-(G"*4'=."8*D$%*F")*F/$=8')6*H9'#"8* * J*K$)D=9(')*+"6(&'&($)* * C. VI. 1. We eye-balled the road to Nambu, a wrinkle in the distance, and held over at Iwade, and rode then along Ogauro’s bank past sulfur hot- spring steam. Forward to the Shitomae Barrier without seeing other human travelers, only the guards keeping us almost from walking through: maybe we were hobos & assassins. Sun fallen behind the mountain when we trekked to the very top, where we slept in the open-air shelter, a watchman’s. A few variables there giving us suffering: three days of rain yelling in irritable winds:
2. the horse pissing! by the lice! & fleas! on my pillow.
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-(G"*4'=."8*D$%*F")*F/$=8')6*H9'#"8* * J*K$)D=9(')*+"6(&'&($)* * C. VII. 1. MAKING THE THOUGHTS SINCERE means spying from a pagoda, hearing the morning with eardrums of night watch... Imagination like this will have to do: eye of six cavernous miles back, at least six, a poised eye surveying the underneath frowsy sienna lot, an arena; and a plash like dripping haunts the rotting boundary fence. But one panting jump out the shadows, a traffic of beings in constant florescence, cellular, observable beings. Thus a world. It will have to do.
2. It and the eye that knows it constitutes you; things have their center and their branches.
3. The extreme hypothesis of palm readers seem more accurate than “inside” and “outside” seem.
4. On the old trolley our raincoats touched and we noticed. So to inhabit a world and to watch it does not mean identifying with the afterlife of mosquitoes forced recumbent in amber.
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!"#$"%&#'"%#()*# # # # ecoiling from a blow that never came, his eyes rolling to one side, his head following, swiveling only a second after, pulled by the eyes, R a corner of his mouth turning but stopping short; couldn’t—no, don’t want to show this much, but it’s too late now, I’ve already shown everything. She’s seen it; it’s obvious, she’s shifting in her seat, her eyes moving down. Yes, there’s the floor. “Should I go?” No, he says, it’s just… it’s… Don’t go. But already she’s pulling things to her. He can see the muscles in one leg tensing, preparing and then followed by the other and she stands. And so he stands and without ceremony walks to the door and holds it open for her; she’s right behind him, she slips out, muttering a goodbye without looking back. That wasn’t how I wanted it… The door, closed now, presents bland uniformity—he can’t remember why he’s standing there. He must be going somewhere, yes that’s it; his hand on the knob, the latch slightly disengaged… he opens the door and deposits himself outside. He locks the door and sees her in a car, driving past him. Hello, he calls out, waving. She slows a moment, then drives away. His hand still in the air—he pulls it back and it folds against his chest; his heart’s still beating. There’s chrome everywhere, stars on the asphalt, constellations reorganizing themselves every minute or so—so they’re satellites. Here the constellation Ford, there the almost extinguished Plymouth; he knows their mythology. Nazis and Indians. But no, not constellations, if satellites, then not constellations; but it’s the asphalt that fixes it, solid and immobile—so not satellites at all. Space is void, so the stars are the fixed points; the asphalt is solid, so the stars must move. His sign is Nissan; he was born under Datsun, but things change.
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Over by Harley Major he looks for the tree. He feels for his glasses—I don’t wear glasses—he thinks that maybe if he wore glasses, then he would have dropped them by the tree, but the tree isn’t there today, though it should be. Oh, he says, Harley Major moved, the tree’s now just south of Nissan. He wonders if it’s a fortuitous convergence, having the tree in Nissan; walking toward the tree he thinks again: I don’t wear glasses. And then: Maybe I should. He walks past the tree, around Nissan, surreptitiously brushing Harley Major with the hand not folded against his chest. Still beating. Harley Major is burning especially bright today, it must be the hour, bright Harley is always a good omen. His hand drops, finds his pocket and he walks on. According to the Bible, only the artists go to Heaven. Not all of them, only the good ones. It’s not that God’s all that fond of art, but he definitely dislikes bad art. God hates commercial art, social commentary, mass- produced regional art-products. God likes Matisse, He probably owns a couple of Picassos—or at least has them on loan. Only good artists go to Heaven. And a few scientists. That’s what it says in the Bible anyway. Pasquale, Hobbes, Voltaire… he’s reading the comics. At a café now, forever in cafés; he ran into someone from the hospital on the street. She said hello, he said hello and waited for her to say more. She asked about medication and he told her that he left it with his glasses. He said, How are you, are you still insane? and she got mad and so he told her, You’re still not twenty years younger, I thought you would be by now. She kept saying that in the hospital, that if she were twenty years younger… He thought she would do it when she got out. He wished her luck and walked on. But now at the café he doesn’t remember her and he puts the comics back in the pile of papers, No news today… He asks for tea. Transient stars shine on the wall, rushing over the bad paintings, unwilling to light them; the sun and the lamps do it enough already, too much he thinks. Figures and colors, backgrounds and signatures: a nude, a portrait, a still life; one of them is still wet. A star paused a moment and caught his attention, the painting glimmered and almost glowed; he had to touch it. The paint came away on his fingers. He’s looking at them now, blue and yellow, oils that won’t come off easily. His tea arrives. “What was up with that earlier?” It’s Michelle, she’s back, maybe she didn’t leave after all. Hello, Mick, he says. She hates it when he calls her that. “Don’t go, ok?” he says to her, “just stay a little.” He smiles and
______*+, I$*+$%"*D$%*3G2* touches her hip. Michelle asks again and he tells her that he hadn’t meant what she’d thought, he just didn’t finish the expression; it was going the wrong way, he says, so I stopped it. I meant something else. What was that? she asks. “Your sign is Honda,” he answers the wrong question, “isn’t that strange that we should both be born under signs of Japan?” She’s familiar with his cosmogony, she knows that she’s a Honda. She doesn’t know what it means, but she knows at least that much. “I’m a Nissan-once-Datsun, and you’re a Honda… that’s why we don’t get along with the Domestics.” She laughs, needing it to be a joke. She’s actually a Virgo, or Scorpio, depending on who you talk to, no one’s too certain on the matter, so she’s O.K. with being a Honda—it’s only one; one is enough. Yellow hair, blue eyes. She’s on his fingers. His hand reaches under his shirt, he paints her over his heart. “I’ve been thinking…” she’s saying.
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F/"*K/(9A")*')6*&/"*L'0* * * * nce upon a time a hen went with a rooster to the nuthouse, and they agreed that whoever found a way to escape would tell the O other one. Soon enough, the hen found a very large hole underneath one of the sinks in the bathroom, but she kept quiet about it because, although she had an honest face and nice manners, she was often given to irrational moods and fears. So, one night, while the doctors and the guards were drinking beer and playing cards, the hen went into the bathroom, climbed through the hole underneath the sink, and ran away. It wasn’t very long before she encountered a large stone well at the top of a hill from which she heard a tremendous crying and groaning. The hen was filled with a strange curiosity and peered over the edge of the well, but she lost her footing and fell into the water. Down at the bottom of the well was a hunchbacked devil, who said, “Now I’ve got you, and now you shall work hard for me.” And he took her away with him. The devil gave the hen the most difficult jobs in his kitchen. She was made to bake bread all day long, and at night she was in charge of slaughtering the beasts and preparing their meat for the table, while all she ever got to eat were dumplings that were hard as rocks. “If you do not do as I wish,” the devil said, “you shall become a black poodle and wear a golden chain around your neck, and you shall eat live coals until the flames come spewing from your throat!” The poor hen had never felt worse or been more tired, not even in the nuthouse. She made bread all day, and at night she salted the meats for the table with her own tears. It got so bad that finally an enchanted talking ham decided to take pity on the poor hen and try to comfort her.
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“It seems to me,” said the ham, “that both of us have fallen upon a great misfortune. I am a handsome prince that has been turned into a honey-glazed ham by a wicked enchantress, and you are obviously a beautiful princess who has suffered a similar fate at the hands of someone just as evil.” “I am not a beautiful princess,” replied the hen. “I am simply a chicken that escaped from the nuthouse and fell down a deep well.” “Regardless,” said the talking ham, trying not to get too flustered, “I have a plan that I think we both can profit from.” The ham told the hen the secrets of the hunchbacked devil: that he had three hearts, and that each one gave him a different special power. She need only cut off a little bit of the magic ham and put it in the devil’s supper and he would fall into a deep sleep that night. She would then be able to slip into the devil’s bedroom and cut out one of his hearts. If she was able to swallow the devil’s heart whole, she would command the powers that that heart contained. There was no way to know ahead of time which heart contained which powers, but the ham and the hen were feeling lucky, so the hen cut a little piece out of the ham’s side and insinuated it into the devil’s soup. That night, as expected, when the hen slipped into the devil’s bedroom he was sound asleep and breathing noisily through his mouth, as devils often do. The hen then cut the devil open, took out one of the three small hearts, and swallowed it whole. Before stitching the devil up again, she put one of her eggs in the place where the heart had been, in hopes that the devil wouldn’t notice that something funny had happened while he was sleeping. The next morning everyone was feeling somewhat out of sorts. The ham had a pain in his side, the hen had a stomach ache, and the devil seemed more sluggish than usual. “I don’t feel like breakfast today,” the devil said to the hen, “but make me something special for my dinner.” And with that, the devil was off for his morning walk. Despite their discomfort, the ham and the hen were excited, for they were still unsure as to what powers the hen now had. The hen tried to wish the ham back into the prince he claimed he was, but nothing happened. The hen tried wishing the both of them out of the devil’s castle, but nothing happened. All morning they tried wishing for different things but nothing seemed to be happening. “Fat lot of good this heart will do us,” said the hen, “if we can’t figure out how to use it.”
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Glumly, the hen quit trying to work the magic heart, and she settled down to make a butterscotch cake for the devil’s dinner. As she worked, she bemoaned her fate, and she kept thinking of all the things she missed from the nuthouse: the paintpots and the board games, the wooden blocks and plastic toys she used to play with. That evening, as she was sitting down to eat her dumplings, the hen heard a great ruckus coming from the dining hall. “What’s this paintpot doing in my cake?” Roared the devil. “And these board games, and these wooden blocks and plastic toys?” “Why, they’re presents for you, dear devil, sir. This is the special surprise you asked for,” replied the hen, for although she was many things, being slow on her feet was not one of them. The devil was so pleased with his presents that he didn’t even notice that the hen had run back into the kitchen to talk to her honey-glazed friend. “It seems that you have the power to make things appear in the breads you bake,” the ham said. “Big deal,” said the hen, rolling her eyes. “True,” agreed the ham. “Perhaps you should try swallowing another one of his hearts.”
TWO
“Chicken cordon bleu for me?” screamed the devil in falsetto as the hen pushed forward another steaming dish of poisoned food. “But of course, dear sir. It seems you have acquired a taste for my special ham,” said the hen. “Yummanghuuhhgriffthnegig,” said the devil, as he shoveled the food into his mouth. “This better work,” said the hen to the ham when she returned to the kitchen. “You’re telling me,” said the ham, surveying the growing hole in his side. The ham and the hen spent the rest of the evening digging through the hen’s special breads for presents until they were sure it was late enough to try sneaking into the devil’s bedroom.
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As before, the hen stole into the devil’s bedroom, pulled down the covers, opened his pajama top, and began sawing away at the devil’s flesh. “I’m beginning to get a taste for these,” said the hen as she swallowed down the devil’s second heart. The clock was just beginning to strike fifteen as the hen returned to the kitchen, covered in blood, and tossed the butcher’s knife into the metal sink with a clang. “Did everything go all right?” asked the ham. “Yeah, whatever,” said the hen. “Did you replace the heart with another egg?” asked the ham. “Yes,” said the hen. “Do you know what powers you have now?” asked the ham. “Shut up, I’m tired,” said the hen. And she crawled into her nest of straw between the molasses and the scouring pads without even washing the blood off her feathers. In the morning, one of the devil’s hand-servants arrived in the kitchen to announce that the devil would not be leaving his bed this morning, and would like to have his meals sent up to his room. “We’ll get to it when we’re ready,” said the hen. “Until then, you need to get the hell out of my kitchen.” The hand-servant stared at the hen for a minute, realizing that she was covered with dried blood, and then scurried away. “Now let’s see what these god-damned hearts can do!” said the hen. “Are you sure you’re feeling okay?” asked the ham. “I’m fine,” said the hen. “Now let’s see if we can get ourselves out of here.” So the hen wished the both of them out of the castle, and poof, they were out of the castle, sitting on a high grassy hill, looking down on the castle which was miles away. And then the hen wished for piles of gold, and poof, they were surrounded by heaping piles of coins and jewelry. And then the hen wished the ham back into a prince, and poof, the ham was still a ham. “Are you lying to me about this prince business?” asked the hen. “I am a prince, I really am,” said the ham as he began to cry. “I suppose you want me to kill the devil and swallow his last heart,” said the hen. “But I am a prince, I really am. I’m a really really handsome prince,” blubbered the ham.
______!./ =9&0%##+)=3(2*91#
“Shut up,” said the hen. “Just shut the fuck up.” Back in the kitchen, the hen started sawing away at the ham’s side again. “Ow! That hurts!” screamed the ham. “Can’t have it both ways, you little shit,” said the hen. “Just hurry,” said the ham. “I’m sure that the devil’s beginning to get suspicious, and you shouldn’t have yelled at his servant. Who knows what he’s up to now.” “Don’t worry,” said the hen. “In less than an hour you’ll be back to normal, and we’ll be miles away, richer than we could hope for in our wildest dreams.” But, in truth, the hen was hatching other plans. For if the devil died, and she had acquired all his powers, then there wasn’t any good reason to leave this huge and gorgeous castle. In fact, she thought, it wouldn’t be such a bad life to have my own bedroom and a house full of servants catering to my every whim. Suddenly, it occurred to her that the only thing standing in the way of her new and glorious life was the talking ham himself, and his knowledge of the secret power of the hearts. “I’m going to take this to the devil myself,” said the hen, and she left the kitchen with a silver tray of ham and eggs and began to climb the stairs to the devil’s bedroom. The poor sad devil had never looked so frail. He was propped up with several pillows trying to do the crossword in the newspaper. “Here’s your breakfast,” said the hen. “I don’t think I’m very hungry today,” said the devil. “I think you are,” said the hen. And with one deft move she took the hamsteak from the silver platter and shoved it, and her entire fist, down the devil’s throat.
THREE
The hen gave a little shiver as she swallowed down the last of the devil’s hearts whole. And, because she was gaining a certain sick pride at a job well done, she replaced the last heart with another egg and carefully stitched the devil’s chest back up, even though she was sure that the devil was now completely dead and would only be thrown into a hole in the garden before the day was over. The hen then took a long hot bath in the devil’s marble bathtub, dressed herself in one of the devil’s terrycloth bathrobes, and
______!/4 F/"*K/(9A")*')6*&/"*L'0* walked back down into the kitchen to deal with the last loose end—her honey-glazed former friend. “I was beginning to get worried,” said the ham. “You’re getting smarter, then,” said the hen. “Isn’t it time we got going?” asked the ham, beginning to tremble just the slightest bit at his friend’s new attitude and appearance. “We’re not going anywhere,” said the hen. “Why should I leave, when I have all these powers and all this wealth?” “But I don’t have any powers, and I’m still a ham!” exclaimed the ham. “Well, I’ll turn you back into a prince,” said the hen, “but I’m afraid I can’t let you go free, for how can I trust that you won’t tell the next poor slob who comes along about the secret of my powers.” “But I won’t, I swear,” said the ham. “Why not?” asked the hen. “You betrayed the devil, didn’t you?” The ham just stared at the hen in terrified silence. “I will keep my promise and turn you back into a prince, but then you will be banished to the dungeon to live out the rest of your days,” said the hen. And she closed her eyes and began to chant the transformation spell that the last heart had taught her, all the while jumping up and down and flapping her wings in the air. It wasn’t long before the kitchen filled with a thick, cloying smoke and everyone in the castle began to hear an otherworldly screaming. “What have you done to me?,” screamed the former ham, flailing his arms about. “I turned you back into a prince,” said the hen, staring into the face of a handsome prince. “But what about the rest of me?” squealed the former ham. The hen was about to ask the prince what he was talking about, but as the smoke cleared she realized that she wasn’t looking at a handsome prince standing in front of her, she was looking at the top half of a handsome prince that was resting on a wooden cutting board. “Maybe your bottom half materialized inside the devil?” suggested the hen, now feeling strangely uneasy. “We did feed an awful lot of you to him, didn’t we?” The half-prince could only gurgle in disbelief. “I’ll just have to go back upstairs, cut your other half out of the devil’s belly, and sew your two parts together,” said the hen, trying to make the best of a suddenly complicated situation.
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But, as it turns out, she never got the chance. For just as she was reaching for the butcher’s knife in the sink, the not-nearly-as-dead-as- anyone-had-thought devil entered the kitchen. “What’s going on in here?” roared the devil. “She’s trying to destroy us both!” yelled the half-prince. “And I’ve swallowed all three of your hearts, you fucker,” screamed the hen. “So there’s nothing either one of you can do to stop me.” And the hen rose up to twice her height, and her eyes began spinning like pinwheels, and her feathers started shooting sparks, and she was about to banish both the half-prince and the devil to the depths of Hell when suddenly the most amazing thing happened. You see, unbeknownst to all of them, the eggs in the devil’s chest had been incubating, and just as the hen was about to work her dirty magic, three small chicks began to peck their way out of the devil’s chest. The sight of these three unexpected children suddenly poking out of the devil’s pajama top startled the hen so badly that she vomited up all three of the magic hearts and they landed on the floor in front of everyone. The room fell silent for a single shining moment. And then the chicks started screaming as everyone dove for the floor, punching and clawing, trying to swallow as many of the hearts as they could.
FOUR
Meanwhile, the rooster had finally found the hole underneath the sink and escaped from the nuthouse.
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1#%#?#?#'#(###?#9#)#=#3#9#&# ______
F/'&*.%("G$=8*D,2().*&/().*.$)"*/$G"%().* * What will she sing, now that his mouth has fallen slack? She casts needles beneath purer grace notes and elided sibilants, the slide of glass on wound steel. You hear a bird on the record, accidental, waking the dog, who kicks. Imagine some feathers, worm heads, the precariousness of claws on sills. Imagine Tennessee and sixguns on backroads. You hear me, that hum, but too what’s under it all, steadiness, thrum. Fineness in shadow. I’m running my hands. Parson, plowman, what ideal runs over this pale boy in gaudy suit, emmylou this hickory into that one and only cadence, the boom of flung torsos, one which collides and one a bird beneath tire treads, or wingless, or pitching sheeps into noon like dumpster donuts, always a small gift, always unexpected.
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1#%#?#?#'#(###?#9#)#=#3#9#&# ______
@",$M*&/"*N"6* * Where I am. Forgot the specific angle and wattage of recurring red light (spinning police siren / neon sputter / siren again). Lost the fiction,
the canvassed location (this or that motel). A name inverted, to mean something else. My own: slim gogo agent. You were. And that matters. Kissing me
with chocolate in your mouth, or tequila, stutters of small redemption, sidewalk cracks which maybe hold what we lose. What’s valuable. I held. You, hanging.
I have sat here with this same chipped cup for years, never stopped being thirsty or started to articulate your going missing. There is a crime scene
photograph I’ll never see; spattered head-on-wall-on- film. Millimeter and motion caught there, left wanting, thinking motel. Thinking, one small finger in my cunt.
My own. To get rid of. It’s Wichita, nine days straight. It’s a blackout. It’s the feel of bleached sheets beneath me. It’s hideous, your eye long exploded, the blackness
of the blown pupil which seemed only to see sorrow. And music, pop song, stupid radio song. Your funny eye and crushed cheekbone and the AM mono from the side of the vibrating
bed. Kansas. Arizona. The lover who is not a lover. The lover who has shot the best of his head out. That I should need that line. Again. But under this vanished man, beneath
______!/7# @",$M*&/"*N"6* this breaking and delicate skull, below the violent end is something that pulls me closer, hand over candle flame, five years later. Did you pose before the metal hand which reached for you? Which took you out? (Incident or performance/middle eight which leads back / makes headlines / makes chorus makes resolution.) Kansas wilts and scorches. I will not.
*
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1#%#?#?#'#(###?#9#)#=#3#9#&# ______
K$)&'()0")&* * What you wanted—a place for the disparate, severed but replete with a something (a wanting?), object: physique d’ephemer, a shutter blown back. Scattered furniture. A cobbled street, something still beneath smoke and water. You too could fracture into malleability, into mere agitation. You are a spark, he a mirror.
There was Philadelphia, two days of a steady rain. Cornell’s boxes at the museum, glasses of something, a tumble into the street, all shame and stockings torn at the knee. Is it what we don’t speak that we can’t forget? And your sherry eyes whiskey the sidewalk. You are sparks, mirrored, god a dog who wants to be stroked. To see one’s self dreaming is terrible and endless, refracting mirror after mirror after mirror. You only wanted a soft bed, a place to put these things that wouldn’t fit. These very things are what you love, parceled: feather, letter, small doorframe. Then birds fly out of the box, dreams scattering half across Italy in fog.
______!/,# K$)&'()0")&*
You want to be happy? There are more important things. What you love only seems locked into his handsome face—vanished and vanishing. His green eyes. Before his mirror you know he never wanted you here, brushing your teeth in his sink, all these boring bits of you and of him, only separate and thus sadder. (A fear of endings is a crisis of faith, enigma of glass cubes, ephemera of silica, dust, penny arcade.) His arm betrays him by leaving the small of your back, then his back by turning to you on the train through Jersey. This is how things get known and broken (bewilderment at the disappeared pattern). Once, he came to you, then left without spark or mirror, headed north, a collection of pieces, faceted glass. His dream walks the remnants of your own. He is present here too, as something still. He writes upon waking, she burned the thing that stopped her going back. He is resonance itself as you are distance, what you never wanted, accumulations of useless, haunted things (chosen) in your apartment, in his (as boxes), scatterings.
*
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1#%#?#?#'#(###?#9#)#=#3#9#&# ______
D%$0*&/"*6(.(&',*?$=%)',* * February 12th and winter an empty threat. Summer greened us in, convertible tops, lime. At ideological retread seminars, day campers peed their short sets and we changed them into anonymous poly blends. There is nothing slower than turning from you, from them. Car wheels on gravel mixed with snow, the outer borders of the state and its rehabilitations. May you never leave what you are about to love. The city smells again of sulfur from the outposts, and I’ve been waiting for that song to enter the tubes of the jerryrigged radio, for that tex-mex AM revolution of this-is-how-it-goes. Your uniform never more handsome than in a heap on the dashboard I imagine carries you past the checkpoint. Inside somewhere, the children wait for the rain to stop.
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$#%#&#&#'###(#)#*#*#)#+#,#-# ______
!"#$%&'"()%#&*+,-#./%& & A battalion of blondes and their hairless captain of desperation take the wrong trail
in a sold-out nightmare, gasping for light,
sharpening gray bayonets and eating breakfast out of half pint-sized cans.
In the sand near the water, amid the melange of lorry tracks,
cracked spectacles, roots and thorns, a tender worm migrates
through this movie of absolution. Focus on the detour past a pair
of shabby, tightly-laced jungle boots. No wings anywhere.
Something must be waiting under the rocks at the gate,
Scratching words in the universe: never never never never
arrive.
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$#%#&#&#'###(#)#*#*#)#+#,#-# ______
!"#$%&'()*" " Why can’t I be cleansed? By cleansed I mean something more important happening to me. John the Baptist could cleanse me but they cut his head off just for fun. and going to Jesus is exhausting. Must I be touched by the hands of an innocent, whose life is indescribable, before I can no longer feel the hole in my vessel?
I don’t see the difference between restitution and renewal. Bright orange gulags inherit the swag.
Can love cleanse? The right kind. Can other people be your salvation? Maybe.
I see these old couples on TV (my only contact with the aged). The woman is in a hospital bed, eyes closed, the picture of serenity, hooked up to the dying machine. The doctor pronounces the words: “There’s nothing we can do.” The man begins to cry. It’s been forty years since he last cried.
______!""# !"#$%&'()*"
He confesses he’s not ready for her to go yet. The cockatoo will keep saying her name. The doctor’s eyes move. “There is one other option. A new procedure, very experimental. We could attach you both to the dying machine.” The old man keeps saying her name but he isn’t looking at her or listening to the doctor. What was her name? Something that sounds like rise or lies. They’d been taking long walks when the sun was about to come up. They hardly slept.
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4$$6*:(P%'&($)8* * There was the propeller and there was the bowl of acid. They both had black hair and I tried to ravish them, they looked so graceful and inviting.
There was the Amazon breast nailed to the front door, blood dripping onto the welcome mat. She must have hit star-69.
If I was ever going to rise up, something yellow has to happen. Is it possible to ridicule beauty?
A dead crow lay in the parking lot, flat as a no from god, one suspicious wing aflutter in the breeze.
An old friend stopped by for coffee. Coming up for air, he said, and there were tears in his eyes from the smell.
This was by no means a normal Saturday afternoon.
My lungs weren’t dipped in boiling copper. I didn’t sit on the couch in my underwear cleaning the shotgun and watching cartoons. I sipped my harmless coffee, made goo-goo eyes at eternity, waited for night to pull up to the gate and honk its horn.
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0#(#2#2#8###A#'#)#)#'#%#1#=# ______
@%""6().*')6*5""6().* * I would just as soon not eat. It’s a pain in the ass. I wish I could take a jar of paste three times a day like a good astronaut and get all the nutrition I need. Maybe that’s where we’ll end up, but for now I eat the regular stuff. Peanut butter, broccoli, milk, tongue, crackers, black beans. I feel like I’m feeding. It’s disgusting, I eat so fast. My ex-girlfriend used to say—we’d be sitting at the table—“Did you even taste it?” She’d give me the you’ve-got-to- change-this-behavior look. Right through my eyes to the back of my skull. I had to get out of that relationship. Sometimes I dine with people, they look up, I’ve cleaned my plate, I’m sipping my water (I love water). They say, “What the hell?” I know, I eat fast, it’s disgusting. They’ve barely had time to spread their butter and bug the waitress for more syrup. I can’t help it. I want to get it over with and go on with my life. Am I afraid the food will abandon me? When I was a kid my father would take the whole family out to Ponderosa Steak House. I was named after the owner, who was a man my father admired. We’d go through the line, order number four or number six, sit down to eat. He’d always start in on everyone else’s dinner when he finished his own. That hairy forearm coming across the table like a missile. We had to sit there and take it. My mother said, “Dave, why don’t you leave them kids’ food alone?” “We’ll get ‘em another one,” he grunted. Which never happened. The trick was to shove the steak and French fries down your neck before he could get his mitts on them. That’s why I eat faster than a slot machine. But I’m clean. Don’t let anyone tell you different. If you sat me down to lunch with my namesake and the ex-girlfriend, I wouldn’t spill a thing. She could tell him how long I’ve been waiting to meet him. How proud I am to be named after a steak house baron. He’ll pick up the check. Pay off all my student loans. On the way home the ex- girlfriend whispers in my ear. Soft. Inhuman. She’ll try to end the famine in my blood. Somebody bless her. Before she opens her eyes.
*
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<#%#2#)###%#$#:#9#:#<# ______
:'%2().*!".%""8*$D*O%$9"%(&2* * * * ozens of people walking down Bishop Street one morning, if they looked at all skyward in their busy scuttles, would have seen a Dnaked man dangling from a window ledge. But they did not have to be especially observant, as the man, one Dan Redomsky, began to yell for help and kick his spindly legs about, striking his knees inadvertently against the cold, hard granite façade. Letting out little yelps and intermittent ouches, Dan was soon drawing attention to himself, so much so that a crowd began to gather eighty feet below him, at street level. Some shouted up to him, “Jump!” and then laughed with their friends at their cleverness, not noticing that their suggestion was impossible, for Dan had nothing to jump from, since his feet were swishing around in the air and not planted on a ledge; and one woman was heard to say, perhaps not as quietly as she’d have liked, “Mm, cute buns.” Seeing that she was overheard, she covered her mouth with a hand and scurried off down the street, the only person on Bishop that January morning with a red face. “Help!” Dan called out, bringing the attention back to him. Unfortunately, the security for the building was very tight, and none of the passersby who stopped to see the naked man hanging from a building was allowed inside to go up and save him. The security pointed out that in order to get inside one needed to have a badge. “Do you have a badge?” they asked the group. “No,” the group admitted, and then gloomily turned away. Dan’s fingers were surely tiring; ditto his arms and shoulders. The weight of his, let’s face it, chubby body would before long be too much. He could now be seen to be trying to hoist himself up back to the window, his arms shivering with effort and futility. No one could say how long he had been hanging that way, but it must not have been long, since he wasn’t yet a
______747# :'%2().*!".%""8*$D*O%$9"%(&2* splat on the pavement. Hearing the effort in his grunts and the weariness that seemed to be ever increasing, fretful pedestrians once again asked the security if there was not something that could be done. Perhaps they, the security, could go help? Or maybe they could call someone? “Now, now, now,” the security said, adjusting the hats on their heads, which were in danger of being blown off by the wind. “What good would that do? By the time we get up there, he’ll be back inside and tying the laces on his shoes. It’s just a prank, and the only way to stop a prankster is to not give him the attention he’s after. Right?” The crowd all agreed that, yes, that was so. “But all the same,” one said, “would it not be a good idea to have someone pull the man up, just in case he’s not joking?” The security, curling up their fingers in theatrical frustration, yelled, “That’s just what he wants us to do!” They then turned around, went back inside the revolving doors, and sat in their big comfy chairs to sip coffee and talk of important matters, leaving the crowd, collectively, alone. One of the old ladies in the crowd (there were many) turned to the group and said, “Does anybody know how to scale walls?” They all admitted that, no, they could not scale walls, at least not without some ropes and safety helmets. So then they were left there pondering other alternatives, whilst Dan Redomsky continued to kick and flail and lose his grip. One new man passing along the street, Pirro Soporo, the only man in the entire city to be actually wearing a fedora, a man whose adjectival description could only in all honesty be the word “mysterious,” stopped and asked what the hubbub was. Apprised of the nude gentleman clutching onto a windowsill for dear life and of the insufficient help of the security, Mr. Soporo tossed his parcels and fedora aside, spat in his palms, rubbed his hands together, and sprinted toward the wall. Coming within three feet of the wall he then jumped, sailed the rest of the distance to the building’s front, and made a mad scratch for the niches wherein the granite blocks were adhered to one another with cement. It was no good. His fingers were too stubby and the nooks were too small. He gave up within a few moments, reclaimed his hat and parcels, and promised to write a letter to the company on behalf of the nude man, regarding the poorness of the wall’s climbability.
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As Pirro Soporo walked off into the horizon, the crowd returned their gazes to Dan Redomsky, who had, at some point during the moments since they’d last looked, managed to get his feet into a crevice and take some of the weight off of his arms. He perched there, his body at a bizarre sixty- degree angle, his hairy end sticking out like a figurehead, swaying back and forth as he got into the most comfortable position possible. The throng let out relieved sighs, hoping that this turn of events would somehow buy Dan Redomsky more time to find a way back inside, or for them to get up there and rescue him. The matter at hand, it seemed to them, was to somehow find a way up there without alerting the security of their presence. Perhaps, one suggested, they could find a fire escape round back that would let them in. But no, everyone agreed, most buildings of this size do not have rickety metal structures connected to the windows a hundred feet up. So then one suggested that maybe they should go across the street and call the police; and that perhaps the police could override the security and save the day. Sadly though, there were many escaped convicts and uncaught criminals in the group, and no one was too keen on calling the coppers. Snapping his fingers and bulging his eyes, one of the shorter men in the back cried out, “Why don’t we just charge through the door, all of us, and force our way past the security?” Everyone thought a moment, trying to come up with a reason why that was a such a stupid idea and why did he even say it, but none could be found; and so, grouped together like a flock of birds, old and frail Missus Cosima Ne the head duck, they burst through the doorway, toppled over the security in their Barco Loungers, and stormed the elevator. Once inside the elevator, after admiring its sepulcher- like ornamentation, Cosima asked, not unwisely, “Which floor is he hanging from?” Everyone inside the elevator wheezed; no one knew. No one except, that is, Fabrizio Goodman, who fortunately enough possessed a photographic memory and was able to recount that it was the one, two, three, four, five, sixth flight up; to which Cosima replied by pressing the nice round 6 halfway up the list on the elevator panel. In spite of that, the helpful pedestrians on their way to save Dan Redomsky were not out of the woodwork yet. During their time counting floors in their head and remembering from which window up Dan was hanging, the security had roused and sneakily placed their hands over the elevator’s doors, rendering them uncloseable. The fiends, with their
______74, :'%2().*!".%""8*$D*O%$9"%(&2* espressos’ brown stains still sending up wisps of steam into their eyes, chortled to each other and grabbed, forcefully, bodily, reprehensibly, poor frail old spinster Cosima Ne right by the neck of her argyle sweater. No amount of haymakers from her heavy horsehide purse was able to get their brawny grips to loosen or, much less, give way. “Go on without me!” she importuned. “I’ll only get in the way. I’ve had a good long life, I’ve seen as many presidents and Olympics as I need. What’s another four years? Nothing. Go ahead. Go.” Oh, but Gordon Wisteria, a sandhog by trade, refused to vouchsafe the old woman to the security. Rolling up the wet sleeves of his worn cotton flannel shirt, baring his brown crooked teeth, he tackled the security with his arms spread out and his feet pointed together, like a horizontal high-dive, bringing them down hard, chipping one of his own eyeteeth as they all three crumpled on the cool marble floor, Cosima Ne standing disoriented, clutching onto her purse as if it were a teddy bear. The security was out cold, their mouths in pouts, their arms and legs touching each other on interdicted places. Cosima Ne, with her jib now concluded, scurried back to the elevator, waving Gordon Wisteria in alongside her, and pressed the loopty-loop of a 6 again, this time bringing the doors to a close with a ping of servitude. Once closed, the sovereignty of the elevator was usurped uncontested by Iain Kozumplik, who was by far the tallest person in the group at 7´1˝ and who solely could identify the Muzak dinking in the elevator as the synthesizer’s imitation of traffic noises, intended of course to coax and acclimate jumpy commuters as they made the adjustment to corporate interaction. Once knowing this, the group happily sang along with the chorus, “Honk, honk,” until the composition was cut short by another ping and they found themselves, sadly, already to the sixth floor. Iain suggested that they consult a directory in the hopes of finding which office belonged to Dan Redomsky, whom they knew exclusively as the Naked Man Hanging From a Window. When it was pointed out to Iain that they did not know the man’s name, he paused, rubbed the black bristles of his chin stubble, and remarked that perhaps they should inquire into this manner with someone on the floor, most preferably a receptionist. “Executive Assistant,” corrected a voice from the back. Iain apologized for the gaffe to the space in front of him, peopled with office plants and breakaway walls, and pointed ahead to a woman with a black set of earphones and a microphone thereon attached, which had been bent in such a way to curve
______74- <%2)##%$:9:<# around her cheek and rest opposite her lips. Her burnt-orange chemise matched the color of her hair, which was conspicuously dyed within the past few days or so, the color stains on her forehead and around her ears giving her away. To her Iain said, “Quick, where’s the naked man’s office?” “Whose?” “I haven’t time for repetition. The man, naked, hanging out a window: which room is it? We’ve come to save him.” “Hmm. I wasn’t aware of any nude persons dangling from a window. Let me check.” She pressed a hand to her earphone and dialed up a number on her out-of-date phone. “Florence? It’s Alice. Are there any naked men hanging from a window?” A pause. “Yes, I think it’s this floor. Hold on.” She covered the mouthpiece and leaned toward Iain and the group. “Yes it’s this floor!” Iain yelled. “Please don’t listen in on my conversations.” She uncovered the mouthpiece. “Yes, the sixth floor. Uh-huh. O.K. All right. Well, you don’t say? And how old was he? Ha, the same thing happened to my Harold when he was two. Yes, it was just a few months before he got out of it; don’t worry. All right, dear. O.K. All right.” She pressed a button on her phone and looked back to Iain. “Seventh floor.” Everyone in the band gave Fabrizio Goodman dirty looks, and it was all he could do not to cry. Displaying the decisive action that earned him his leadership, Iain Kozumplik made a scramble for the nearest window, flung it open, and stuck out his head. From there he could see Dan Redomsky, nude and turning blue from the cold, hanging on with his last bit of strength, his fat undulating in his rear and belly, his toes wiggling as a stretch from being strained against the wall for so long. “Do not despair!” Iain yelled up to him. “We’re on our way. Which office is it?” Dan cried down to Iain, “734: Dan Redomsky. Hurry!” Iain threw the window closed, turned around with his jacket fluttering behind him like a superhero’s cape, and strode to his compatriots, elucidating them with his newfound knowledge of Dan Redomsky. And they were to the stairs in a moment, fighting over whom would be first up the stairway. Iain and Cosima began to scuffle, grabbing each other’s eyeglasses and trying to pry them off the other’s head. Cosima’s horn-rimmed glasses, Iain’s wire-oval frames: both flew into the air and twirled like a gyroscope until they came down and splintered against the
______74. :'%2().*!".%""8*$D*O%$9"%(&2* cement of the stairwell. As everyone watched this transpire, mouths agape, young Billy Wisse, eleven, climbed over the awestruck clan and bounded up the stairs. Seeing him, the followers of Dan Redomsky scampered up the stairs, a throng of voyeurs, and came at last to room 734, whose oak slab door was shut and decorated with cutouts from the Funnies taped to it. There they found Dan Redomsky, eyes bright and a piano-key smile across his face, fully dressed in a lavender suit, putting the finishing touches on his outfit by tying the laces of his soft leather shoes. Later, over a round of drinks, they all agreed that it was for the best, that had they come into his office and found him holding onto the windowsill, flung out there into the cold, naked, they would not have wanted very much to pull him in anyway.
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0#%#=#9#&###B#+#B#?#%# ______
CDEF*QRR*K,"M8* * clew: 1. A ball of yarn or thread. 2. Greek Mythology The ball of thread used by Theseus to find his way out of the labyrinth. 3. clews The cords by which a hammock is suspended. 4. also Nautical a. One of the two lower corners of a square sail. b. The lower aft corner of a fore-and-aft sail. c. A metal loop attached to the lower corner of a sail.
1: This time zone is sleeping. Shhh. the light comes.
6: Sissy Spacek moves towards us Through the wheat fields, wearing A backpack, listening to cassettes. She gestures up. The Kevin Kline we know from Film is one dark dash below the parachute. They are ready to take on the roles of Mom and Dad.
7: A child walks into a whale With eyes that light up red In a museum featuring Biblical scenes: Jonah, leprosy, spirits Of demons pulled right out of pigs.
9: Where did you expect me To be going? The firehouses all Lit up in neon, the kittens Demanding only the best crystal
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Litter. We are underwater Now, you and I. In the air, it is said, we can breathe. It is projected we will be able to but The necessary Is it I see you bend your finger. How do you do that. No, really, Hello, how do you do.
12: The plumber shoves this box to reach the pipes.
13: Dad is watching Mom make dinner. She has a wooden spoon in her hand. Her hand is on her hip. The peppers sizzle in the skillet. The ground Meat, a heap in the green bowl on the counter. They have had that green bowl since they were married. The bowl is eighteen years old.
14: Here we are on the bumpy caravan Riding past the people with arms growing Out of their stomachs, the harpies and the wrens With their wren-size lion heads. This is a place with A Priest named John. This is his kingdom. There are giants in the mountains and talking pigs That know where the cherries grow With heavy pits of gold.
15: Behind her back, Dad Fills the dishwasher and squeezes in the lemony goo. Mom mashes olives with a fork to saltines That she feeds Dad from the TV table. His cold is worse Tonight. The sparrows snap their heads from left to right And bite the pillbugs. Mom draws a bath. Dad finishes
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It off and wipes his mouth. The flowers in the window Give fragrance. A washcloth. The rabbit paw fern shudders As the heat kicks on. I come into the room from far Away and touch one of these tendrils, the gray fur of The rhizome reaching at its own speed into the room.
20: There’s a bear standing in the road Watching us approach. Mom tells him to get in the car And please keep quiet so She can concentrate.
22: You may taste three of the flavors. And then you may go forth And discuss the ones you neglected To select. Dad will be on his throne As Father to hear what you say to Mom as Mother. You are the first To witness your own life. There’s nothing But physics when you get down to it. Speed and the amount of it in the light.
24: Mom washes your face. She holds your forehead As you lose your lunch. She is Hovering above the whole house in a recline Of nervous glamour. Dad mulches the Yew branches and comes Inside for a glass of lemonade. You lie on the chicken Pox couch, as Lily Tomlin, Covered in calamine lotion.
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26: Reader, let’s sit in the mud for a moment And look for miniature snail shells. Discarded, they are the cups Of tiny people who live in the backyard In moss and grass. They are genuinely small. About the size of one eighth of your finger. Their bones are like shark’s, the skeleton Is actually cartilage, so they only bend When you step on them. Before Dad Does the mowing, though, I like to give Them a warning.
27: The Christmas lights blink segments in the trees.
28: Who you knew was interested in more than Just a getting to know you session. Who was In over his head, who was up in arms. How can you Confirm that you are being held. You can’t.
29: I walk up the street with Your hand in mine. We are now lovers. It’s excellent. Unhitched gate To a gallery behind the gentleman’s club. All the landscapes we’ve only imagined take off their Frames and call birds to them. Badlands bellows “Robin, come rest in my mountainside! Come move among my humps!” Painted Desert calls: “Canadian geese, I’ll stroke your neck with My petrified wood!” And then Grand Tetons whispers To the sparrows who tentatively arrive In the summer wind. The sparrows hover above the yard, waiting.
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Your hand hovers in mine waiting. My mind hovers over your hand. “Okay” I say. “Okay.”
30: In the sun is an animal with seven French Horns, a personal acupuncturist, and enough Torpedoes to take out Venus. We learn This from the Bible, and immediately the Today show Sends a Crew. They row fastest and get the scoop. When the animal decides to make its move, we get The first step on film. We get the second step on film As well, and the rowers wipe their mouths. Mom brings us another bag of chips in the backyard. And Kool Aid, tropical — we watch the show through publicists, pinholes.
33: Some shows had bright color That would pull into a comet — Naugahyde-upholstered seat Round like a mitt, with a silver Coated, three pronged, base Oiled for maximum spin. The spin was silent. The room was beige With a carpet of burning Colors hung on wall. And the center of gravity In me somersaulting And ratcheting me up like a car in heat One loose leg to kick the rug to kick to kick Around faster and around and faster. I could hear their kind voices In the fizz of rectangular light.
34: Place Deborah Norville’s career In a field of purple wildflowers.
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36: Two mentioned Were lovers. The same two continue To keep secrets from you, reader, and hide In the bushes, front yard. Watch the shadows as The Christmas lights begin blinking. The magicians will arrive in their magic Cars that run on hope and they will Point away. Agatha Christie Combs brambles from the silky Coats of her yappy little dogs, Lifts her head, and smiles at you.
37: Reader, I propose that you had or have A front and backyard as we all do on television. With hollyberry bearing trees, Yewberry bearing trees, landscaping, Textured mulch pound bags, a driveway, a car. This is the meter and anything else is Measured more or less. I mean America empirically. The building you lived in, Your first kiss folds into the story And reminds you of a movie. Think about your collarbone Feel it there a solid thing that With its citrus, antennae, buckyballs, prairie dogs, Diane Sawyer on her raft and the grand river’s expanse. Its suggestion of graced flow For flow’s sake alone through The remarkable random slopes and gullies Of America and its shirt of embracing intentions. Remember the glacier and what it did To the marigolds?
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39: This is Mom as a City or Town. This is Dad as his own Register of Deeds. The town council draws maps And unveils a new Wendy’s franchise. The citizens go bananas and plant so many Celebratory bulbs— The municipality is illuminated like The whole place is on fire.
41: Jane Pauley in a pool filling with the light of dusk One arm rests on the rocking, transparent raft. She kicks her way to the ladder, breathing.
45: Dead Dad will be played by Disneyworld’s Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Those first spins Take you by surprise, but I see Mr. Toad checking his pocket watch From the corner of my eye. Mom is climbing that big silver Ball that stands for EPCOT. Get down we cry to her. Get down right now. Mom stands next to us silently And I see she bought a keychain Depiction of Mr. Toad’s jalopy.
46: Never you mind. I have a button That pushed whispers You to sleep, holds you, Pulls the string of your words Loose, fastens it From your mouth to
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48: The way the pencil sharpener smelled. The way the vote turns on feelings. The way a crutch feels in your armpit and how it lets you fly.
50: Sometimes there is something not human In the middle, like a dog that sees things Differently. Here’s a personal story: When I took “Old Yeller” out Of the Cherry Hill public library in elementary school, There was a paper inside that said if I wanted a blow job I could call this number And ask for one. Did I. No.
51: Behind her back, he Fills the dishwasher and squeezes in. Kelly butters saltines. She feeds him The TV table. Kevin’s cold is worse Tonight. The sparrows snap their heads from left to right And bite the rabbit. The fern shudders. The heat kicks.
52: It’s all okay, the whole time, Betty White was frying up bologna In the center square Keeping it warm there and safe with provisions. You can visit the Museum of Television and Radio. You can watch it happen again.
57: Mom stands by As the stranger shakes upside-down In the elevator. He coughs up The cherry-flavor gummy fish That was choking him.
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61: His cold is worse Tonight. The sparrows snap their heads from left to right Their small heads fit in your mind. The rabbit shudders As the heat kicks San Francisco into pieces, Into the wide Sargasso Sea.
62: Let your hair down, Katherine Hepburn, Let us climb in To your Connecticut mansion Where the fireplaces Are confidently burning. Here she comes with another armload of logs. Reader, rest here awhile, On the carpet, your hands to the flames. The stilled frames from The African Queen And Bringing Up Baby Are themselves tonight, as it is night. Here, behind the sofa, One shy cinematographer Places a purple Lens over the room.
64: The pool is getting up Out of its in-ground concrete surroundings, It’s moving like a grand ghost, silver Slippered around the backyard. Touching The pine trees, their viscous sap The ivy, the pool is standing blind To the baby rabbits running at it In ecstatic madness, nosing it, the squirrels Too they are thirsty they are thirsty Mom under the table is thinking about the bills. The ducks and their bills in their sky are diving down
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And flying through in bursts. The boys that I will kiss are in the water. The cooled voices of the anchors Are holding the water to the ground. The pool stands still and shudders against the voices. It stands still and Mom is still. Come reader let’s swim. If buoyancy Is still here then we can float in this. We can swim in the pool as it gets to know the yard And readies to explore the town. We can Ride the crest. Shots were fired. The eagle has landed In your hair and is lifting us up To the tops of the waters.
67: North of the pools is a six-sided pavilion. From the television she gazes at herself with Compassion, intention and contemplative joy. The story is a harsh one. The boy and his brother were beaten down with sticks. The gum would never wash out. The chickens in the Processing plant had not come to know kindness Or been in the audience of love. The brothers Eventually triumph and the chickens make them stronger.
69: When the barn doors open, and mom and dad leave. When the barn doors open and the cats leave And the cows leave, and their calves, and the trees too leave as they Do in spring, when they become what they could only be Now that heat allows the sap up. From the TV room, Dad listens to Mom Put the dishes away.
70: Joan and Stan Were their names in my case. Like arbitrary noun genders in another language. I would like to learn yours.
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To unlearn my Joan and Stan And see another pair For what they accidentally are. I will be Your lover If you let me Up from my chair. Please let me stand and let me Put down this newspaper held Between us. All you can see of me so far Is a silhouette. Please don’t be frightened When you see I am only
72: The kids run to catch their buses. Mom as Moonstruck’s Cher, Stands in the corner of the room Holding a cool wet washcloth Which itself holds The curve of Dad’s forehead.
78: Mom and Dad hold their kids to the sun. The kids hold sheets Of black paper with pinholes And through, on white, a point of light. Now, under the magnifying glass, The sun finally begins to burn. The sun is not your friend. The sun is not your mother your father your lover. The sun will explode and take everything and not even know it.
80: Dad’s cold is worse tonight. The role of love Takes a spoon to the ice cream and opens his hand. Mom kisses him. Dad tries to lift his head to her.
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85: Prickly heat on your neck in the summer when you Have been sitting in the humidity, when Mom was Standing by the tree, when the tiki torches lit Themselves. There’s Mom crying. What can we do For her to make her feel better. What can the pool do for her. What can the grocery store do but offer itself Up. One child descends and puts The laundry in the hamper. Let Mom be played by Candace Bergen. Let Mom be played by Mom.
86: And those aren’t kisses. Who gets their obituary Big. Like a fruit, like the expansion of space. Dad what are you doing here? I thought Your audition was over.
89: The marigolds shed their parasol seeds and the magic happens Again with water, the roots rocket down the fist of new leaf punches up.
91: Breathing underwater now. Relax, this is how the anemones Do it, through the skin.
92: The stain on her professorial blouse, probably coffee. The papers strewn by me on The floor I dropped them by his desk To look up to sneak up The sleeve of his loose t-shirt His warm buttered bicep and further up and under Curlicue of jet black hair smoky goodness. I put the papers in a stack. I got an “A.”
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93: There isn’t a door. One body against yours. It is one Body and yours is another. Fingers tap together The way organs play together. Harmonize, allow a life.
94: There isn’t a keyhole. There isn’t a door.
97: Here is a roll of quarters for the arcade.
98: Are you able To break love down into its constituent parts. A cradle. A pinwheel. A basket. A cargo ship. A plastic lemon on the end of a tether. An anchor lodged in the mud.
99: I mean America empirically everywhere including all over the body. You can’t. Your collarbone.
100: The role of love will be played by Dad wrestling his two sons up Into the air which will be played by water, Which will be played by Mom’s tears Not even aware of themselves still inside Her when she was a girl Like her adult teeth and the eggs that would become My brother and me. The atoms move around Like skee balls thrown with all Dad’s skill On the boardwalk up the lane up Into the fifty-point hole, one after another. The night owls hoot in all the forests of the earth,
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Turning their heads almost all the way Around. They fly Into the fifty-point hole to take a look around. The kids are starting to spin In their spinning chairs and they are laughing and dizzy. The tickets are starting to spit Out of the arms of dad’s waiting room chair. Throw hard with care. Let the ball go up and roll right on in and Dim the electric light. You have enough tickets to get on before The best part is over. With the explosion, The plants shudder, less, then less, then less. There is stillness. Their stillness is horror. Dad’s hand’s stillness is horror. Take your tickets and hurry on in. The role of love will be played by your entrance.
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=#3#%#:#(#8###2#'#:#;#3#(#2# ______
F/"*L(8&$%2*$D*J%&* * * * irst there was a girl sitting on a stump. Her father said wait here, so she waited in a patch of sun at the forest’s edge while the thickets Fdarkened. Now we can say there had to be things eventually, but back then there weren’t any things. There was no stuff. They did have a number of specifics: flint, bone, brother, hunk of meat, rat. And they had not-a-thing. They had missing tooth. They had hole. The girl demonstrated this by poking the mud over and over with a stick. While she perforated the ground she was thinking about how much the gods must want to fuck her. She thought about how intensely the gods must love her, to send her such a warm day, with lusty breezes that swirled around her body like hands. She touched her chest. God I’m stacked, she thought. The girl bent down and started to squish the warm mud between her fingers. She mashed it around and picked pebbles out of it until it turned into a springy dough that she could thumb into different shapes. After a while it started to resemble her—although with a blobby head and bigger boobs than she actually possessed, plus a swollen butt. She turned it over in her hands. It reminded her of a very small baby. On second thought, it was more like something that had come out of her ear. The girl almost loved it, but it bothered her. The more she stared at it, eyeless and brown, with a light tack, the more she thought it must have something inside it. Something very good or else wrong. This gave her a weird feeling, like someone was watching her pee. Anyway, she put the thingy on the rock and leaned back to soak up the last delicious drops of the afternoon. But when she let her mind drift, she found that instead of thinking about how much the gods wanted to fuck her, she thought about how much they wanted to give it to the voluptuous little figurine instead. They were all hot for that mud tart! Under these
______767# F/"*L(8&$%2*$D*J%&* circumstances, it seemed obvious that the best thing to do was to squish it back into the ground. Bye bye, she muttered (acidly), her fist raised, but at that exact second her father walked up and snatched the figurine away. “Holy moly!” he said. His big jaw sagged in shock. “I almost thought of this once! This is like one of those things you almost think about—like when you’re looking for something for so long, you forget you’re even looking for it. That’s just so weird.” Then the father strode off in the direction of the encampment, marveling at the little figure in his hands. The girl began to scream with rage. Ahhh! She grabbed another lump of clay from the earth and set out to make a second figurine—the same globes for breasts, the same ripe and clefted butt, the same football-shaped head. Immediately upon finishing it she destroyed it. She punched it, and kept punching it until her knuckles bled and swelled, but she was still sobbing and she still had a feeling that she could never get rid of it, like some bug from a dream you can never permanently kill. When the girl returned to the encampment, she wasn’t all that surprised to see that the other members of her tribe had started to model their own mud figures. There were a half dozen voluptuous dolls on display in front of tents. It was like an infectious disease. And with each figurine she discovered, the girl felt a bit of herself devoured. Each was a piece of her that had been kidnapped and then reduced to a form both simpler and stronger than she was. “This is gonna make me pregnant,” bragged one lady, a mean aunt without teeth who the girl didn’t like the smell of. “It’s only dirt,” the girl pointed out, choking back snot. “But,” said the aunt, “she looks fertile. She’s mine. She’s going to make me have a baby.” The girl wandered from tent to tent, making sure. Yeah, they were everywhere. Then she crumpled in the middle of the camp and wept. By now she was covered in mud and dust and had begun to resemble the clay figurine herself, but it didn’t matter, she wasn’t one. She couldn’t be turned over or owned or clutch some nugget of magic inside the way the clay girl could. She could never be both so complete and so mute. Now the question wasn’t when the gods would descend from the heavens and fuck her silly, but if, given the competition, they’d bother to do it all. Probably not.
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TWO
Later there was a different cave girl who didn’t have any parents. They had been trampled in a hunting accident when she was a baby. She lived with a heartless crone who made her sweep out the cave everyday, and chew hides, and collect armloads of spider-infested wood. All this in order to earn her keep. The crone was silent and ugly and fed the girl half-rotting meat. She didn’t love the girl. No one did. One day when the cave girl was gathering roots on the plain, she happened upon a handsome young cave man with beautiful, strong arms. He was hunting giant ground sloth with a spear. He had a half-wild dog named Flower who helped him hunt, and when Flower saw the cave girl he barked and barked until the handsome cave man told him to shut up. When the dog wouldn’t stop, the cave man kicked him. He told the girl he was real sorry about that and touched her hand. Then he stared off into the distance while he asked for her address. The cave girl was elated because the hunter was ruggedly handsome. When she looked at his arms, so lumpy with muscles they were like snakes digesting rodents, her mouth started to water and her mind became absolutely empty. Once she was back home with the crone, all she could think about was the hunter. She stood at the lip of the cave, scanning the horizon, possessed of the clear and certain knowledge that at any moment he was going to come over the rise, and walk into the cave, and crush her against his chest while the crone huddled in the corner because that mean dog Flower would be slavering and growling at her. The cave girl knew this was going to happen, even though day after day, it kept not happening. It was depressing. Finally she decided to do this new thing she’d thought up earlier, during the long, boring days when she sat in the back of the cave chewing on stinking hides. It was a very powerful and scary thing, but she decided to do it anyway because she had one of those crushes on the hunter where she couldn’t stop thinking of him. So she made the world on the wall of the cave with charcoal, ground rock dust, and the powdered husks of beetles. She made horses and rivers and foxes and trees. She made the birds that sing. It wasn’t their full shapes she made, but the shadows they’d cast at dawn or sunset—just the basics, just the soul of the thing. She made the hunter with arms and legs bulging
______76, F/"*L(8&$%2*$D*J%&* with muscle tissue, and beside him a little dog with his snout open, barking. She put him in the center of the world. Then she made herself, comely and reaching towards him. It took her an entire day. She had to grind up the pigments in her mouth, so she went hungry while she did it. Meanwhile the vicious crone was visiting friends, and smoking a pipe, and eating fresh meats rubbed with fat and herbs. When she returned in the evening, the crone saw the world the girl had made. The bright animals, illuminated by the light of the fire, seemed to prance upon the rock wall. The trees of the plain seemed to sway in the wind. The crone panicked. She’d never seen a representation of anything. No one had. She quivered with fear in the corner. She was particularly afraid of the picture of the dog, with her gleaming fangs. But in essence she was afraid of all the things the cave girl had drawn on the rock. They weren’t real, but they weren’t fake either—they inhabited some phantom realm in between that had the power of the invisible on it. The cave girl was overjoyed. She had made the world! Yes! The next day the hunter came to see her and they played a game with bones on the floor of the cave and groomed each other shyly. The cave girl was so happy that it took her a while to notice that she was still dissatisfied. Because she was more fond of the likeness of the hunter than she was of the man himself.
THREE
In the morning the servant girl woke up, pulled on a sackcloth dress, and limped into the kitchen. The girl was known in the village as “La Putrella” because she was homely, and one of her legs was shorter than the other. Even so, she was good-tempered and faced the disappointments of her life with a bright smile. She put the kettle on and wiped the soles of her feet with a rag. She could see that the weather was going to turn warm, and she thanked God in heaven for sending the world such a beautiful day. One by one, the other servants joined her in the kitchen. La Putrella cringed when the scullery maid known as Gina sauntered in, straightening her little bonnet. Gina was a pretty girl with fine, strong limbs and white teeth. It was obvious that her greatest pleasure in life was to taunt La Putrella.
______76- !"#$%&'()$*"%('
Every day Gina reminded the servant girl how stupid she found her, how overwhelmingly insignificant. “The way you cut bread,” Gina pointed out (in Italian), “is remarkably awkward. You are disgraceful!” Then Gina limped heavily around the kitchen, with her thick hair swinging behind her, in an impression of La Putrella. The others laughed. La Putrella sawed away at the loaf, and said nothing. Later they carried sacks of linens to the river and started plunging dirty sheets into the water. La Putrella tried to situate herself far from the sharp- tongued Gina. There beside the river, La Putrella found herself overwhelmed with the beauty of the day, despite the insults of her comrades. She thought (in Italian): Oh, but it’s lovely! Someone should bottle this and seal it with a cork, like wine! Even so, it wasn’t enough. Though God had made the day, and tossed it to her like a jewel, her instincts told her that something was lacking. Now we might say that La Putrella felt that such loveliness needed to be recorded in some way. It needed a vantage point from which to be seen. But at the time she just thought (in Italian): This day could use a little something extra. “Look at her,” Gina said. “She’s so stupid she can’t even keep her mind on something as simple as the washing. She stares up into the heavens like an imbecile.” La Putrella renewed her fervently held hope that Gina would be discovered stealing vegetables from the master’s larder. She would be lashed to the wheel and dismembered while everyone jeered. “Stupid slut! You’re doing it wrong!” Gina shrieked. She grabbed the linen from La Putrella’s hands and slapped her across the check with the wet fabric. It was outrageous! Yet no one stood up for her; none of the other girls so much as blinked at her. The only one who cared for her was God. With tears in her eyes, La Putrella limped away from the river, towards a small chapel. The church was closed, as the Bishop was having it redone, but on such a beautiful day the workmen had naturally flung open the door to admit the breeze. Once inside, she could only make out a few dim forms: a cross, the altar, the workmen standing on scaffolding daubing pigments on wet plaster. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she found herself faced with a dazzling sight: the plaster was soaked with colors so bright and true they seemed lit from within. The pictures themselves were an amazement—it
______+,- F/"*L(8&$%2*$D*J%&* was as though windows had been cut into the walls of the church, little frames of space and light with the Holy Family crouching inside like chipmunks on a ledge. She’d never seen anything like it. She drew closer. Wherever she looked it was as though she was at the center of it, looking in—like she was the divine eye that sees all, even Gina being a bitch. La Putrella felt that if she were to stretch out her arms toward a picture, she’d be within it. She reached towards a fresco of Jesus, naked and bleeding on the cross. Behind him were beautiful hills studded with olive trees. Within, the sun was bright. Her arms disappeared inside, smeared with pigment, and the rest of her body followed. There was a dizziness. And then the world lacked nothing.
FOUR
A college girl sat in her seat during the Art History lecture. Slides of Gothic cathedrals leapt up on the screen. She wasn’t paying attention. She had just cut out a picture from a magazine of a famous actor whom she wanted to be her boyfriend. He was rich, famous, and good-looking but a little ravaged, like his face had been sandblasted by his bad-boy ways. If he really knew her, she thought, he’d probably love her, and she could clean his stylish apartment and prepare food for him while he was off making movies during the day. (No! I won’t tolerate a maid in here! she’d protest.) Then, without exactly knowing why, she took her scissors and cut off his head. Something clawed at the pit of her stomach then, some sharpened sense of dread. She felt guilty, as though she had really beheaded him. Now he’d never love her.
______76/
%$&$'$($$$)$&$($*$+$,$ ______
!"#$%&'()&'()%*' ' When you get very angry, what do you want to do?
a) Take tango lessons. b) Eat a polish sausage. c) Pick someone else’s nose with oversized pliers. d) Pee in a glass half full of water.
Which statement do you feel is most true about eating a hotdog?
a) It takes too long to accomplish. b) It is a heartbreaking task. c) It gives you greasy thighs. d) It tastes nothing like a hotdog.
What do you associate with the phrase “pocket diversions”?
a) The letter P of the letter V. b) Collapse and survival. c) A handmade, handsomely bound 4½” x 7”? book of epitaphs. d) A roadmap to Hell.
How do you feel about the sex act?
a) It is overrated. b) It is undervalued. c) It is like picking someone else’s nose with a kielbasa. d) It is necessarily complicated.
______!"#$ K(%9,"*B)"*B),2*
Which image is closest to the first image that comes to mind in picturing your significant other fornicating with a person other than yourself?
a) An agitated bag of fish and chips. b) A white stallion with purpled, flared nostrils. c) Your mother stuffing an impossibly small kielbasa. d) A used toothpick.
How many slices of bread reside in a standard-issue loaf?
a) 22. b) 11. c) Depends on the size of the rolling pin. d) What the fuck is this?
Which kind of strategy do you prefer in times of war?
a) Lemonade stand-offish. b) Hospital duplicity. c) Electric Amish. d) Fashion.
How do you feel right now?
a) Gypped, but in good stead in the eyes of the law. b) Stymied, frazzled, and gaseous. c) Like a conscientious objector in the battle of the sexes. d) Hyper-gendered and old.
*
______7!5
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!"#$%&'(&)**#+,*-'.&/0#""1&2"#%-'.3& & BLUE: Like a newly found bruise, one that recurs, not exactly all the time, more than sometimes, never fully. Slightly less than licit: a length of time that lasts a lifetime, your lifetime, hardly like anybody else’s.
BRILLIANT: Sharp or dull, often liable, the speaking likeness of a pain or wound. The imitation of cranes, something that draws a new red line or illustrates the unwillingness to budge formally or fashionably.
ENIGMA: The game of games, something misunderstood, ill-understood, or not understandable, but engaged in nevertheless like mourning morning. A mistake made like a knot for someone else to undo.
GARDEN: A place for sinners in the holy city. A kiss swollen shut, a heavy door that crushes a left foot, a space in which to hide a ridiculous paranoia, panic, or pair of cold feet.
LOOP: The impossibility of guessing how many pebbles fill the washed-out grape jelly jar. Looking outside for a guarantee, a last-minute hook-up, a last stay against the forces of wish evaporation.
PASSPORT: To travel on a divan, lying down, watching the land, people, cities, and ruins passing by. Low energies wiped across large distances for the purpose of identification and, if necessary, intercourse.
RESTRAINT: Cross-hatched salt grass, mettle of nettles, metal against metal, how to open a strongbox, how to play with a thimble. A pressure put upon a single moment, a way of loving that moment too much or not ever enough.
TOMATO: Smaller than a watermelon, larger than an olive, the color of fresh blood: the mitochondria of the salad. Strong, carnal, the right red in
______!"#$ F"%08*$D*J&&%'9&($)*S4%""A*:"%8($)T* tender. The tin can kind permissible in a pinch. In house wars, the object thrown or un-thrown or simply resting on the kitchen table waiting to be consumed at any cost.
UNCERTAINTY: A heavenly mana transformed into a mantra: “Zero is my hero.”
VARIATION: A pattern of alternating currents especially the type zapped through a hand glazed with cloudy bath water. The vibration between chill and crunch, maintained by a lot of pleading. A fatal while.
WALK: A path of undetermined length and stride ending in a make-up, a fight, or a draw. Never neutral, always inviolable, always in the way of something else of equal importance, e.g. sitting, sipping tea, screwing, screaming.
YOGURT: The color of fair confidence, akin to free ice cream during a depression. A semi-solid food, soured but succulent, often enhanced unnecessarily with honey, fruit, or spices.
______7!!
1#%#2#<###8#%#<#'#:#;# ______
1$%68*U$=%*H#",,EK/"9A"%*+(./&*I$&* N"9$.)(<"*@=&*H/$=,6*@"*V8"6*+$%"* BD&")*()*+'&&"%8*$D*&/"*N$0')&(9*F2#"* * acromegaly: n. abnormal enlargement of the head and the extremities due to dysfunction of the pituitary gland.
barchan: n. a sand dune formed in the shape of a crescent, with the ends pointing away from the direction of the wind. blue-sky law: n. a security law protecting citizens from fly-by-night schemes, which have no more basis than so many feet of blue sky. decahedron: n. a solid with 10 faces.
ébauche: n. a basic watch movement made without jewels, case, etc. ensilage: n. fodder stored in a silo. festina lente: Latin. make haste slowly.
hexarchy: n. a group of six states, each with its own ruler.
interdigitate: n. to interlock, like the fingers of both hands when clasped. isopag: n. a line on a map linking all points where winter ice exists at approximately the same time. leishmaniasis: n. infection by a certain flagellate protozoan.
______7!7# 1$%68*U$=%*H#",,EK/"9A"%*+(./&*I$&*N"9$.)(<"* microelectrophoresis: n. a technique used in chemistry for examining under a microscope the migration of minute surface particles under the influence of an electric field. ossicle: n. a small bone. pseudoparalysis: n. a state which is not true paralysis but in which a person is unable to move a part of the body because of pain, shock, etc. pteridology: n. the scientific study of ferns, horsetails, clubmosses, etc. raphe: n., pl. a seam-like joining between two halves of an organ, as of the tongue. retrobular: adj. behind the eyeball. runcible spoon: n. a sharp-edged fork with three broad curved prongs. sic transit gloria mundi: Latin. thus passes away earthly glory. seta: n. a bristle or bristle-like process. sextan: adj. of a fever recurring every fifth day. test-ban: n. an agreement between nations not to test nuclear weapons or to test them only under certain prescribed conditions. thaumatrope: n. a card with a different picture on each side, which when rotated swiftly causes the two pictures to appear combined as one. wurst: n. sausage, esp. in combination as liverwurst, bratwurst. yegg: n. (in colloquial usage) a traveling petty burglar; a vicious ruffian. yellow-dog contract: n. a contract by which an employer agrees to employ a worker who in return agrees to leave or remain outside a union.
______7!" 1%2<##8%<':;#
zarf: n. a decorative, usually metal, holder used in the Levant for handling coffee cups made without handles. zugzwang: n. a situation in a game of chess where all the moves open to one player will cause damage to that player’s position.
______7!,
$#%#>#'#$###(#2#'#<###&#(#)#=#9#&# ______
>W(&*>W'0X*H"9&($)*333Y*H=%G(G',*HA(,,8* Z="8&($)8*[\*&/%=*[]* * 3) You’re in the woods and you’re lost. You’ve just panicked your way through setting up your tent, and the sun’s setting, and you keep telling yourself I’ll wake up with the sun tomorrow, and I’ll walk due some-direction, and I won’t vary or veer and sooner than later I’ll hit a road or trail or something the sun’s kissing the horizon and I won’t panic ‘til then, or at all, and this’ll be a dumb story I tell someday, about how I went solo hiking near Witch Lake, WVa, with the maps for Witch Lake, IL and ha, ha, ha… and the sun is gone, and the sky is fading from liquidy blue to loam black. You turn in, zipping the screen, the nylon window, your sleeping bag.
You wake up because a baby is crying. You’re so far out from anything, it’s so dark, that for a while you just lie in your sleeping bag, trying to get your bearings. It feels like you’re spinning, spinning in a witch’s cradle your mind pipes up, and you curse yourself for being a silly ass.
Your watch says it’s 3:03 am. You sit up, unzip your bag, and listen.
Somewhere, not far off, there is a baby crying. Its sobs are ragged and desperate, tracing through the dark like witch’s whistles, or jet-black bottle rockets with no reports. The sound arcs up out of the night, flat and echoless and angry.
How close to the tent is it? Not so close, but is it quiet because the babe is far off, or because it is near but small and weak? It’s not closer than a yard, but a yard is so near, even within your mostly-dead flashlight’s meek beam.
______7!-# $%>'$##(2'<##&()=9&#
Or is it only quiet because it chooses to be quiet?
What the hell are you thinking?
But how’d a baby get out here? You have this picture in your head, inexplicable, ridiculous, but chilling, of an infant with awful, spindly 12-foot limbs and a baby’s body, a baby’s crumbled, squeezed, panicked gourd of a face. You imagine it lumbering towards the tent’s animal warmth on its knobby, extruded limbs. Babies cry when they’re lonely. Or hungry.
Or angry.
You shudder and force that mess of limbs out of your head: It’s ridiculous, if for no other reason than that it is quite clear that the crying isn’t moving. You imagine a baby lying in the coarse tall-grass, ineffectually kicking, crying itself breathless, then gulping in a deep sob only to cry more, fruitlessly. The sobs dig at you; you want to unzip the tent’s door and hunt out into the woods, find the little fella and gather him into your arms, take him into the tent, care for him. You want to believe that you have a little steel in you, when push comes to shove, that you’re principally a creature of compassion.
But you can’t. How does a baby get out here into the woods, so far from anything, from even light? How does it end up out here and stay quiet until 3:03 am, and only then start to fuss? How is it that a crying baby is alone? You think of gypsies and drifters, of Indians with their babies swaddled to buckboards to keep them from fussing and queering a hunt
Or an ambush.
Your body feels like Saran Wrap, tight and crinkling.
In elementary school Mrs. Bachman told you about mimics and actors: fish that dangled food-looking bait in front of their gapping, needle-toothed mouths; birds that pretended to be injured so as to draw out would-be predators; cuckoos leaving their eggs in others’ nests; wasps implanting their brood under the living flesh of caterpillars. Something vicious and
______7!. >W(&*>W'0X*H"9&($)*333Y*H=%G(G',*HA(,,8* hungry and wily playing at being weak and needy, things that seem one way, but really are another altogether.
So you just sit there, knowing that your heart will break if you find a blue little frost-trimmed baby out in the meadow tomorrow morning, or that it will burst with terror if you go out and cast back and forth across the moonless field, feeling eyes crawl over you, searching for the source of the cries— which have suddenly stopped.
Has it left? Has he died? Is it drawing in for the kill? Your chest tightens into knots-- is the silence good or bad? Perhaps it feels better but worse, but the crying begins again, maybe a little softer, certainly neither closer nor farther off. Your watch says it’s 3:08 am.
Questions: a) Why have we stranded you in the dark, in the cold, in a field? b) Why are we willing to risk a baby’s life to prove this point? c) Or is it really not a baby at all? d) And what, exactly, are we driving at with this exercise, anyway?
4) You’re taking a shower late at night and suddenly go blind, completely stone blind. Your shower is one of those deep, old, bathtub-&-curtain arrangements. You’re also running out of warm water.
After several minutes you’ve positively, undeniably confirmed that your are, indeed, blind, that it isn’t some sort of power outage or momentary hysterical dysfunction. You cannot see, and there is no reason to believe that you will be seeing anything anytime soon.
The water is now lukewarm, quickly heading toward ice-cold.
What do you do? How do you begin to address this situation?
As those first dizzy moments pass, you hear glass break, the bolt thrown on your front door, heavy boots on your stairs.
______7!/ $%>'$##(2'<##&()=9&#
The bathroom door has no lock.
Question: a) What do you do? What can you do?
5) Your phone is ringing. It is very early in the morning and your phone is ringing and it wakes you up. On the phone is a very good friend of yours— your best friend, even. She’s hysterical, crying almost too hard to speak. She says that something has happened, that she needs help very badly. That it’s unpleasant, but she needs help.
You say you’ll be right over.
You arrive, and your friend is still hysterical. There is a naked female corpse—maybe 30-something, maybe younger—crumpled at the bottom of her cellar stairs. You’ve never seen a dead person before, not even at a wake or funeral. She looks a lot worse than you thought she would—not that there’s anything gory, just that you didn’t realize how disturbing it would be to see a woman crumpled like a discarded doll.
Your friend, your best friend, says: We’ve gotta get rid of it.
(It?, you think)
She says: There’s a pipe saw in the garage.
(Garage?)
She says: What’s wrong?
(Wrong?)
Questions: a) There are several obvious questions in a situation like this, vis a vis survival. Answer them below:
______774
* * * F$0*1',P')A* PORTFOLIO
______775# !"#"$"%"&"""!"#"$"'"(")"*"+"'"" ______
!"#$%&'#$ $ $ $ spent a year in art school and found that I was being taught how to give a pretentious description of my work rather than being taught how Ito paint. It is what it is and I strongly suggest you treat yourself to the listening pleasures of the blues artists herein. As Sam Phillips said, when he first heard Howlin’ Wolf: This is where the soul of a man never dies.
—Tom Walbank
W. C. Handy (1997) Little Marion Walter Jacobs (1993) Tommy McClennan (1995) Robert Nighthawk (1996) Charlie Patton (1992) Mahalia Jackson (1996) Bukka White (1992) Mance Lipscomb (1993)
%$&$'$($)$*$$$+$&$,$-$*$,$ ______
!"#$%&'(%)#*&%+,-",(*%#.%/-*0-1%2,3,4*56% % I. Note to the Translator
This is what I have to tell you, but nothing is certain. It begins, it ends. It’s how the air unfolds, coming in from the sea: two hundred miles of rain-clothed windows. The geography of a room rising into the crumpled water, between the salted air and the black swans sleeping on the Desna.
I am worried, not of the swans, but of the river, and of this: Have I said what I meant to say? Will you believe that the river is now only a frozen trickle of what it was?
I tell myself that belief comes with instructions to be read closely by candlelight in a small upstairs room, Mother playing her violin in the kitchen over a sack of postcards from Budapest. Beautiful city, beautiful city.
Is this enough? Will you know that when I say speak I mean speak, that when I sleep I cannot face the window... There is more to say, of course, but I can go no further tonight. The porcelain stove under a whistle of steam. The nurses in the janitor’s bed.
Did I say that the Black Sea is folding itself into a napkin, that a woman is asleep in the next room, paraffin lamp shining into the garden’s blue walls? I would like to turn it off, and talk with her about a field of stubborn wheat beyond the city. How it does not move, even with the wind.
______!"#$ 09=;+%##G93(%3#
II. Drinking the Wing: St. Moritz Hospital for Children and the Insane
Beyond the patient’s backs scrubbed raw and shining in the candle-washed rooms, there is a street, then an alley. Winter is over. The rain will not end.
At the top of the staircase, there is a window painted shut. From here, I can only see the tops of birches, their leaves spiraling into what resembles a city, the slow beginning of silence. The doctors tell me this is Switzerland, and I would like it to be. It seems that if it were true, there would not be so many moths. I count them out on the sill and paste their wings onto the window with my spit. The shapes of mouths, of butter-and-eggs, lily of the valley. What else is there to do? They think the mouths talk to me, but they are wrong. It is me that speaks to the mouths. Wings don’t speak. Silly questioners, silly hounds-tongue, gill-over-the-ground. My mother could never play the violin. She dug in her garden between the blue stone walls, plucking away the roots of dandelion, and she never said much, only rubbed my legs (ah, those legs!) after rehearsal with cod oil and whistled to the mocking bird asleep on his branch, to the faraway sea, the long road there. There is something I remember her telling me though, about the trees near the sea, how the wind molds them into shapes of what they were under the soil, before they became what they became, a web of roots, the nothingness that holds them: a spoon beside a cup: a spoon drinks the wing.
It’s time we talked about the sea, you and I, the cold edge of this window sill, the connected dance of wave, of sand. Or, the memory of what I was, of what can never be opened. The victory of breath over weight is in these legs, white, uncallused, and closed-in under the mothy starch of sheets. I sound so pathetic. What sort of victory is this, my translator, my mother,
______7"6 5%$0*&/"*-$8&*!('%("8*$D*:'8,'G*I(?()A2*
my peach-leaved willow? My head shaved to keep away the lice. You know, I was a ship once. I could sail across a room. Now, I’m only a mapmaker and I will draw a map from me to you but the crumpled water will change and erase what I set out to become. It’s the waves, the bishop’s foamy cap, taking away the land.
I will draw a map of this room, a wall rising into what is left of the stars. Where the wall meets the floor there are the heads of moths, a pile of dust. And what comes from the dust is the need to be swept away, a garden grown over with frost. The need to be. I will draw a line here, so you can know that what comes from this is not the meeting of wall and floor, of sea and air, but a swatch of light against the skin, a long red welt across the back.
III. An Evening Sonata
It begins, it always ends. A full moon. The drying onions, white over the hospital stove, make it almost untellable, make the tears. The slightly open mouth repeats it, lets it fall, lets it sink.
You may ask what exactly is beginning? and I can only tell you that a dirge, dusty and rising from the Cossack’s barracks in the half-light of dusk fills me, and the nested furrows of pigeons about the church’s doors fill me, and the slight grate of the doors is a hymn, and it may fill me, but to know when the beginning begins (the sleep, the very thirst of that moment) is to ask for a thimble of water, drink it, and say it is enough. Onions netted and shelved, the linen of their cupped hands: I keep them with me. A rainstorm over the mountains?
______7"! 09=;+%##G93(%3#
Yes, that is with me. The browned photograph of Stanislav, his eyes the eyes of a sheep nudging open the gate of mother’s carrot-rows, radish tips between each hoof: I keep it, although we are not allowed to keep anything here, in this house inside a house. I hide the onions under my bed, next to the sleepy rooms of Stanislav, my brother, my notebook of sky, my thieving little saint.
The day the organ grinder came, window open, a swallow’s nest napping in the eaves, and you, four years old, watching the monkey take coins from the grinder. I would have liked to have been there when you fell, your white face dropping as faces do, from balcony to balcony, the harp of your chest plinking a song, a raspy one-note sonata of brick and bone and the simple closing of light that comes before evening.
It would have been easier if you died.
IV. The City of 400 Churches
Back to you I come, Kiev. Mother of blue-shelled domes, garden of sodded ghosts, you have painted the old house yellow and my father is not where I left him, beyond the morning, but before the fields of poppy. I come back to you, empty of what I left with. There are fewer trees, trunks bathed in the cobbles of your breath. By paving the stalks of bulrush and violets, the river can finally park its great weight of moon, nuzzle under the boats, and sleep.
* * *
Translator: choose a tongue that wants this city. Translation: where can the living be? (Here, on the landscape of sky, a meadow of roofs, the elms of chimneys, the graceful movement of air between us as powerful as it is effortless?)
* * *
______7"7 5%$0*&/"*-$8&*!('%("8*$D*:'8,'G*I(?()A2*
I am speaking to you, Kiev, under the elms of the elementary school. Elm? School? Yes, speak. Whatever you say, it will not rise into me, but will rise into what I will become, into the shallows of Vlata Creek, into the swell of unnamed sea.
* * *
The hospital walls are losing their nails. I wanted the tiny ones to pin the map of myself to my self, to consider the width of days, the long walks through fields of poppies. (My father carries a basket of pears under each arm. There is a wasp for each pear, and so on. This is the last time I will see him.)
* * *
Kiev, you are a small red ribbon in the hair of my mother, asleep in the pantry, mice in her pockets. I will walk with her to the river tonight, and pass the moujiks in their carved wooden huts, their stalks of grain boiling on the sides of the road. Black pots of tanning seeds, their faces flushed and alive under each pot.
It has happened before. It will happen, and I will look as I always do, to the sheep coming up from the washing, bright against the horizon. They are not clouds. They are not of clouds.
* * *
It is darker tonight, this night. You are my nurse. Speak to me, Kiev. Tell me that there is enough oil for the lamps, that behind the church’s doors, (those dark houses of our childhood) there is a field within a field, the sorrow that comes with autumn. Yesterday, I began to think that even though I cannot dance here, in this hospital of closed doors and onion skin, that I would like to walk down the hall and turn my head
______7"" 09=;+%##G93(%3#
quickly, back and forth, as if the blur of beds and steel racks of cups would help me remember how it was to rise above the sitting figures in the theaters, to answer the question and not have to worry that the answer would not be enough. The fields are newly cleaved. The sky is clear. The newspapers are full of dying words, and I will never come back. There is no turning back.
V. How Summer Suits Are Washed
I can only tell you that in the fields, the peasants wash with sand and if one owned a suit it would be used as a seed bag, a red milk-sack dyed red for the sake of their eyes, who only see shades of red during cock fights and on the Cossack’s arms. They need color, these peasants, blackened and grayed. I know this because I lived with them, for a month, or two. An aunt, an uncle, roosters fighting in the haymow... I can’t remember the time, only the color. Color, when I was a child, meant something was going to happen. A sunset: night. A mountain: shadow. A dance: sunrise. And things did happen, whether I wanted them to or not: whether that mountain’s shadow slowly closed in on me or if I closed in on myself. There in the haymow, I was too small to understand the rooster as it came at me, its desire to cut faces, any face, with its beak. Through the blood I could see the bird, waiting for its handful of breadcrumbs, knowing that what it had done was right. The peasants, bearded and dull but glowing a faint red, were beautiful, and they danced for me in that barn, under the lanterns, under the dim knowledge of pain, and what comes after pain, which is nothing I could ever say: Which is everything. And they washed my tiny suit in milk and in sand, and I will wear it until the lanterns die and the dance ends.
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VI. Good Morning, Sea
The ability to lose the abundance of loss
That is all really The two are puddles linked by a child’s footprint in a field of wheat a black swan lifting into the day Is more needed? Yes, there is something my mother told me
How the sea is simply light in an empty room and what came before the sea is a photograph of an open window in the room next to it
the tremble of a shade a lamp turned on
I am afraid this isn’t quite right This fear This ache It is nothing new I don’t like the morning anymore the way the rain covers it
The room is losing its color
It has lost
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O',,8* * * KELLY HELLWORTH rincess would have to make sure everything was just right, all the pieces in place. Whatever a man could do for Joe, he did; nothing Pwould ever be too much for Joe, whatever it might be, however large or small. He did, he wanted to go to the funeral; Horse-Face’s grandson even called, making sure Princess knew there was a place for him, but Princess had to say no. Little Peter said he understood and hung up. He called back two days later and gave him an IP address and a series of passwords so he could watch from home. Princess wrote everything down, though his memory was better than it had been even in his twenties, at the height of his much acclaimed photographic memory—and he didn’t tell anyone, he didn’t tell them it wasn’t photographic, he just made sure to not keep too much in his head, didn’t keep anything unnecessary so he always had room for the important things, like IP addresses and endless series of passwords. “You want to make sure you have a recent browser,” Peter said, “5 or better.” Princess said O.K., he said No problem, and he said Thank you Peter. They said their goodbyes, running through the respective litanies of regards to be given and thoughts to be conveyed to whomever was wherever they were, and they hung up. He would need a suit, didn’t matter that no one would see him to know if he wasn’t dressed appropriately, but Joe would know, he always knew— and that wasn’t even the point anyway, you did what you were supposed to do, and no, that wasn’t the point either. Not a supposed to do thing, not a requirement, it was more, deeper. Princess’ heart beat, he breathed. He would wear a suit. A nice suit. His last suit was at least ten years too small, he kept it in a little closet shrine with all the other suits from all the years, all the men he’d been from decade to decade. And you can see them, and they are worth saving. Woolen or linen or silk works of art, each one. You,
______7".# O',,8* * bound with a coarse rope that only hurts if you struggle, the knots expert and intricate but not fussy or excessive. Princess tied them slowly, he let you watch and explained the origins and typical uses of each as he pulled them, and you with them, tight and locked. You are his last job. The thing nobody knows is that the world ended in 1968. A slow grinding, some skipping, fits and hiccups, everything wore down. It took about a year and by the time it flipped to 1969 everything was done, the world was over. Funny how it didn’t change anything, the world ending and all that. And nobody knew. Princess knew, but no one else. He never told. Probably Joe knew it too, and that’s why he left when he did, in ’68, but Princess never talked to him about it, and Joe never let on like he knew and so it didn’t matter anyway. The thing that everybody knows was it was Joe that caused him to be Princess, Joe the reason his mother, God rest her sainted stupid soul, named him Princess. She was deaf in one ear, and no one, not one person ever ever asked Joe to repeat himself. Joe wouldn’t have minded if someone had, but you know how it is. Your heart beats, you put on the suit, you breathe, you get it the first time Joe says it… She was 9 months, fit to burst, ready to drop any minute. Joe, his hands on her belly, smack out to here, he turns to watch this little slip on ten-foot heels with a rack enough for him to stretch out full upon, and he says, on the poor half-deaf lady’s deaf side: “If the child should be a girl,” and here he paused to watch the slip, honey hair and eyes so blue Joe thought he was looking right through her head into the sky, a sky that heaven meant for him to see, and the slip smiled, and Joe smiled at the girl. Northern, Joe was thinking, did he know her family? He would find her out, he would bring her home, he would introduce her and her family to his own and they would share in the kingdom, this girl of honey and heaven with her mouth all smile and her hand coming up now to pull her hair out of her face… “If she should be a girl,” he said again, so softly, then turned full to the pregnant woman, “I desire that the child be named Princess.” And that was that. Three days later, after thirty-eight hours of near impossible labor and a last minute caesarian to get the baby out, a boy was hauled blue and twisted and near- dead from the depths of his rapidly deteriorating mother—multiple hemorrhages—and he was made to breathe, made to cry, and they put him to her breast, to emphasize to her that she should make it, that she should live and care for this new boy. And she said, this dying woman said, “This is
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Princess. I name my son Princess.” She looked to her own mother, there by her side, in this room too dark and too brown now; it had seemed yesterday so homey and warm, but now the walls more like clotted blood than chocolate or soil, the sheets torn and roped like intestines around her legs, and the woman’s own entrails poking from behind her uterus still on her stomach, the knobs of them shining like teeth in death’s mouth, the hole just south of her bellybutton, Princess’ umbilicus still trailing into the uterus, and his left foot kicking the incision, dipping his toes as if into an inkwell and signing his name on the bed, on her ribs… “Tell Joe,” she said, so low she wouldn’t have heard herself, “Mama, you tell Joe I have given him his Princess.” Not one person in all of Princess’ sixty five years has ever once said a thing about his name. Not even you. You didn’t say a word. Princess opens the closet and crouches down next to you. His eyes small and tender, his hands gentle and calloused. “Do you need anything right now? I have to go see the tailor about a suit. Do you need maybe to go to the bathroom, since it has been a while, shall I take you to the bathroom before I go?” He lifts you from the cushion he has provided for you, and he leads you by the knots between your wrists toward the bathroom. You expected to be bound with your hands behind your back, but Princess is kind, and besides, you can’t get the knots undone, so it doesn’t matter that you can see them, or that you can reach the ones by your feet. He tied you so you can shuffle down the hall, shuffle around the kitchen when it’s time for meals, but not so you can do anything else. If you’re quiet, he doesn’t bother to gag you. It hurts him to have to go to what he terms ‘unnecessary lengths’ and so he would rather to not have to gag you, if you don’t mind cooperating on this little bit. You are given the courtesy of some perfunctory sort of privacy, in that he doesn’t stare at you while you do what you have to do, but he is in the room, but you understand: “You understand this is necessary, right?” and you do. Princess pushes the plunger on the soap for you, squirts it into your palms. “Don’t get the ropes wet, that’ll make them get too tight, and I’m going to be out for a while so I won’t know if you’re uncomfortable.” You are careful. Princess takes you back to the closet, asks do you need anything else, since he is going to be gone for a while, he wants you to understand that it could be several hours. You decline, you thank him and he brings you a book and then another book. You were expecting Puzo, but that’s
______7,4 O',,8* * because you’re insensitive, you’re ignorant, and you’re a racist. He gave you Flaubert and Cormac McCarthy, turned on the little light near the corner, and closed the door. Locked it. Sealed it. Locked it on the other side, by the hinges. Princess takes his job seriously. Princess checked the stove, made sure all the faucets were off, then turned the lock on the knob of the front door on his way out of his apartment. His apartment is by the Park, has a really nice view of it from the fifth floor, and he liked to sit and watch young couples walk slowly along the trails and over the bridge right there. Less interesting were the joggers, the rollerbladers, the people on bicycles or the homeless working their way past, though the homeless knew enough not to set up camp or shop in this area. It was understood that you did not sully the view from this building. Princess took a deep breath of the park, then waited for the trucks to pass and then took another breath, this one tinged a little with exhaust, but still good air. His tailor was a few blocks down, a few blocks over, and normally he’d walk, but he’s getting older and the heat’s up with the humidity today and he’s got Joe on his mind, so he hails a cab. He gets the first one. He always does. It’s Jimmy Falcon that picks him up. “Shame about Joe,” Jimmy Falcon says, “it’s like the world’s ending, you know, Joe gone now…” “No, not like that at all,” Princess says, “but I am sad.” He wants to tell Jimmy the world’s been over for almost 34 years, but he doesn’t say anything. He just looks out the window, wondering again why it all stayed the same even though it was done. He doesn’t care, not really, he just thought there would be something, some kind of signal or marker, something to let people know, and that there wasn’t made him sad for everyone. Maybe it should have made him doubt that it was over, but it never did. He knew it, and that was all he needed to know. And it didn’t matter anyway. “So you’ll be going to the funeral, huh Princess?” Jimmy’s looking in the mirror. “I can’t go,” Princess says, folding his hands in his lap, “but I talked to Little Peter.” “Horse-Face’s grandson?” “Yeah, the same one. He’s going to hook me up so I can be there, so I don’t have to miss it.”
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“Joe would want you there, but I know he’d understand, you were always special to him.” Princess says nothing. “Hey, I’m driving you around but I don’t know where I’m driving you. Where you going?” Princess tells him to go to Fante’s. Jimmy makes an immediate right. Drops him a few minutes later at Fante’s and Princess gives him a hundred. Jimmy hadn’t even started the meter. No one ever did. The air’s thick here, so Princess breathes shallow until he gets inside, then breathes deep the scent of woolens and silks, all the best from all over the world. Princess apprenticed for Fante’s father, just a twelve-year old boy carrying the bolts and needles for old Fante, learning everything he could about all the things that made a suit not just right, not just great, but perfect. How to dart invisibly, how to tuck without trace. Learning so he would always be perfect himself. Fante’s still carried hats, but Princess stopped wearing them when the world ended, his small nod to change, baring his head to a sun that didn’t shine anymore, for a God that just wasn’t around, not now. Not since ’68. He thought, back in 1960, that it was ending, the world, but that was just a little cough, a hint. Right after Camus crashed he felt it. It got Princess’ attention, he watched and waited. He knew it was coming. And then, of course, it did. If he could have asked for anything from it, he would have requested that it give him a date, a time that it finished, since he really liked that sort of thing, but there wasn’t a spot he could point at and say: That is when it happened, that is when it all stopped happening. He let it go. It wasn’t important. Fante says he misses his father. Joe dying makes him miss him. For Fante there wasn’t really a Joe except in how he related to his father and the suits he would help him make for Joe. “I hear they’re going to bury him in one of mine,” he says, and he starts to cry. “I’m honored you know, it’s a great honor that he will wear the clothes I made for him, but I wish it was one of Pop’s. They understood each other, you know. Pop knew Joe and would always dress him right, better than my best ever was. But still, I am honored. I want to be proud, but all I am really is sad.” “I’m sad too, Fante.” Princess puts a hand on the man’s shoulder. Fante is younger than Princess by ten years, but looks much older. Only fifty five but walks like he’s seventy, though his hands are younger than that, much younger than Fante himself, still strong and stable, sure of
______7,6 O',,8* * themselves no matter how Fante might feel. Princess actually taught him about making suits, passing the older Fante’s teachings on to the younger. Despite the difference in their age, they had always been good friends, brothers, Princess always protected him, and Fante loved him for that. That and so much else. Fante wanted to die before Princess, he said he wasn’t strong. Princess told him that he needed a suit, and that he, Fante, needed to make it quickly. Fante understood, “Yes, for the funeral. I will have it ready and it will be the finest I’ve ever made. If I cannot do it for Joe, I can at least do it for you, you who are so special to him, even now, even though he’s gone.” Fante’s arms up, his measuring tape trailing like an impasto ribbon or banner between the Raphaelite palms, a leftover message from God, God telling Fante exactly where to put the little soap marks. God used to tell him, Princess, God used to show his hands where to go, where to cut, where to hide the little knots so they’d never be felt or seen; angels and saints hiding the seams and matching the grains and, and… but then in ’68… and what was the point anymore of dressing people? He was conscientious: he finished the suit in progress, but every other order was cancelled, or transferred if Fante thought he could handle it. Princess told the Fantes that day, in ’68, that he was going to get a new job. He didn’t explain why, but the older Fante didn’t question him—no one ever did, and Princess pretty much always knew what he was doing, so even if someone didn’t know to keep their trap shut, they wouldn’t have any reason anyway to say anything—he said the younger Fante would just have to step up and do his teachers proud; wouldn’t want to dishonor Princess by tailoring badly. Fante the younger, always too tender, bit right through his tongue trying to keep his jaw from trembling, cracked a molar and blew all the effort with a braying sob when he tried to thank Princess for both his efforts over the years and his faith in him now. Princess wanted to tell him that it just didn’t matter anymore, but there really wasn’t a reason to say anything about it. Dominic P. set it up for him later that day, his new job. First job was the next day and Princess found it easier than he thought it would be. In light of the world having ground down, it seemed more productive. Made more sense to subtract now, now that things had gone into negative numbers.
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Everything’s getting a little too heavy for Princess, everyone so melancholy. But at least they’re clear about what it is they mourn. Not Joe, he was old, lived more lives than anyone had a right to. Everyone clearly and openly mourned themselves, what their life meant now, since Joe wasn’t there to define it any longer. But still, Princess wanted a break, needed a break. He closed his eyes and watched the light pink through the fleshy folds of his eyelids, listened to the whisper and rasp of the tape on his shoulders, around his chest, Fante all business now, Fante forgotten about Joe for the moment, lost in the suit. “All night,” Fante said. “I don’t need it until Friday,” Princess said. “You will have it tomorrow.” “Thank you, Fante.” And Princess left. Johnny Falcon still at the curb. Princess waves him on. He’s going to walk. He turns in to the Starbucks on the corner, tells the pretty girl he’d like an iced americano. She smiles, she flushes, caught up in the thing. She knows what Princess is, even though she doesn’t know him, or even about him. A person grows up in this area, that person recognizes it when it walks into the shop. An eager boy from L.A. asks Princess does he maybe want a frosty blended something or other, and the corner of Princess’ mouth dips, just a little. This followed by the boy hitting the floor, near unconscious. The pretty girl, pushing her hair out of her eyes, putting the dented thermos bottle on the counter, turns back to Princess, “I’m so sorry about him. He’s new. I’ll make your drink now, sir.” Princess wants to marry this girl… or adopt her. He’s not sure.
“You’re special to him too,” you are told. Princess lights some candles, as he always does, for dinner. Tonight he’s made a light chilled cucumber soup with a little mint and lemon zest. Then it’s some broiled salmon crusted with crushed almonds and pepper served on angel hair with crisp vegetables. You don’t like fish—well, not salmon, but this is pretty damn good. And you’re not in a position to complain anyway. You did like the soup, and you tell Princess. You might be his job, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be polite. “I’m glad you like it. I wasn’t sure about the almonds with the salmon, but I think it worked out pretty well.” He grabs a magazine from the counter, hands it to you, open. “She suggested the soup.” It’s Martha Stewart. Suddenly you’re crying.
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Princess hands you a clean napkin. He says you shouldn’t get yourself worked up. He says not to worry, and that it won’t be long now. A few days, no more. You aren’t reassured. You thought since they were all on HBO now, you thought everyone was safe. Thought no one would dare embody the cliché, but it doesn’t seem quite the anachronism you expected it to be. You lamented at first that he wasn’t more like that French guy in that movie, but now you’re glad. The French guy didn’t look like he could cook, and, well, Princess can. But this isn’t about you.
Fante calls in the morning, he says the suit is ready, and that his son will be at the shop all day if Princess wants to pick it up. Princess says thanks, pulls on his shoes. It’s not so hot yet that he needs to take a cab, so he thinks he’ll walk to the Starbucks and see if maybe his girl is there. She made a nice americano. Princess won’t let anyone tell him that the corporatization of coffee makes for consistent quality that not even the dirtiest coffee-hating nazi bastard could screw up, he knows that even if the machines do most of the work, still it takes a pure soul and a strong heart—not to mention family—to be the sort of person that can give a good americano. This girl, not only was she sensitive to the structure of her world, this little world of just a few several blocks that had cradled Princess his entire life, but her eyes they were deep espresso, almost black, and her teeth weren’t straightened, but instead she let them gap just a little and cross just so; she doesn’t even know they needed work. Not that Princess is saying they did. He asks you do you need anything, and takes you to the bathroom. He’s rushing just a little, he’s a little distracted. He forgets to turn on the light in the closet when he leaves, but then he comes back, apologizes and lights the little lamp, locks you in, then leaves again. You hear the three solid clicks of the locks on the closet, and then a second or two later the softer grinding turn of the simpler lock on the knob on the door, and you’re alone again. Princess doesn’t notice Johnny Falcon pull up next to him and pace him for half a block. Johnny finally calls out, asking does Princess need a ride, in such a hurry as he is, apparently, this morning? Princess waves him on. “Hey Princess, you got you a date or something?” Johnny asks, laughing. And Princess realizes how inappropriate it might appear, him so giddy on the way to pick up the funeral clothes, and he slows his pace
______7," <())8##;())A923;# some, takes the spring a little out of his step. He pulls down the smile and lowers his eyes. He waves Johnny on again and Johnny shrugs and pulls out into traffic. When the cab is out of sight, Princess feels light again, and turns his head to the sky, scanning the tops of the trees in the Park for young birds. He knows someday he’ll look up and there won’t be anything any more. This is all just the little shudders and clicks of a car cooling down; it’s been off, abandoned on some cosmic back road, and one day or another it’ll all stop. But he doesn’t care today. And he doesn’t care that he doesn’t care. He’s got a new suit, and there’s a girl just around the corner with thick black hair too heavy to hold a ponytail, whose shine makes it fall like olive oil over itself, each strand a slippery molecule sliding under its own weight to rest perfectly next to the others… he doesn’t want to think of her in terms of food. It’s strange. He tries thinking of it less organically, then just gives up, smiling about his suit and his coffee. It doesn’t matter the reason for the suit. It is always a good thing, a new one. And she is there, at Starbucks, and she smiles the second he walks in. Princess smiles back, nods, and this girl, this wonderful girl who understands this small world, she moves immediately to the machine and begins to pull her perfect miracle for him. Princess looks around, behind the counter, at the tables. The girl says, “Oh, the boy? From yesterday?” Princess nods. “He’s fired. He’s going back to L.A.” She hands him his americano, iced, glorious. Princess wonders does maybe she have a name, but not aloud, and then decides that maybe it’s best that she remain as is. She didn’t ask his. He left it alone. Princess puts ten dollars in the tip glass. He wanted to put a hundred, since that’s how things are done, but he thought it might be misinterpreted here, while the ten would convey the same meaning without drawing attention. The hundreds that get passed around, they don’t get spent, only exchanged now and then for newer bills. They’re like tokens. This girl, she needs the money, and were Princess to give her the hundred she’d have to spend it. He doesn’t want to put her in that position. He says, Thank you. He nods and she smiles and he leaves. Salvador, Fante’s son, is skating outside the shop when Princess arrives. “What’s up, P?” he says, flipping his board and falling on his ass. Princess takes Salvador’s board. He walks into the shop.
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Salvador rushes in behind him, “I’ll get your suit. You got a minute, to try it on?” Princess says he does. Salvador ducks into the back, returns eight seconds later with the suit, black. No such thing as double-breasted for Princess, he never liked the boxy, big look, though he did understand the utility it offered when one had to carry certain tools with them. Before ’68 that wasn’t an issue, so Princess was always single-breasting himself, alternating between two and three buttons on the jacket, depending on his mood, no break on the cuff of the pants, pleats making their appearance as the years went by. The lines were always simple; though he could have dandied himself, he’d been handsome enough to pull it off without looking like a puff. He kept everything straight, thinking himself like a tower, a slender tree, always reaching up; Princess never needed to look solid, never wanted to project the imposing appearance the other guys sought. Fante had graduated Princess to four buttons with this suit—they’d played with five, six, even eight buttons back in the day, for the boys who were too thin to pull off the double, who were more concerned with style than tradition, though they invariably dropped the number of buttons as they matured, every last one of them bulking up on pasta and sidearms until they had to go for boxy. This one, Fante’s created an architectural masterpiece worthy of the runways, but understated enough for a sixty five-year old man to wear without looking ridiculous. A single vent in the back of the jacket, a single pleat on the pants, a straight line from the chest to the waist and the lining of the pants working with hidden seams to provide the intrinsic structure necessary to carry the line all the way to the cuff; Princess stepped into the fitting room and changed. Fante had forgotten to take into account the slight irregularity in Princess’ shoulders, how the right dipped just a centimeter lower than the left, which caused the right lapel to push out just a little. Princess understood, it wasn’t a big deal. He’d move the buttons later, maybe half a centimeter. It would make the bottom a bit uneven, but not so much that anyone except Fante would notice. The bulge in the lapel would make him look like he was carrying, and he didn’t want that. He didn’t carry his gun like that. Princess had always favored a special holster that placed his gun, a gift from Dominic P. after his first job, in the small of his back. It made him stand straighter and that always made the suits hang the way they were meant to, and though he wasn’t a man with many pretensions, he did like the antiquated idealized look of the man of industry, head up, eyes to the
______7,- <())8##;())A923;# future. It did not matter to the suit that there wasn’t anything to look toward anymore. “All cool, P?” Salvador asked through the door. Princess stepped into his shoes, stepped out of the room, holding his shoulders even to make the suit hang straight. “Shit man, that’s tight. Turn around now… yeah, that’s the shit." “Thank you, Salvador,” Princess said. “And thank your father for me.” “Dad plies him a mean trade. Get you all the girls in that rig.” Princess stepped back into the fitting room and changed. Salvador called through the door, “Next one you let me make it, O.K.?” Princess said he would. He didn’t know when he would need another, but a new one is always a good thing. Wouldn’t hurt to have more. “I’ll come in next week,” Princess said. He asked Salvador to wrap the suit for him.
Peter called the night before the funeral. Princess was making dinner while you sat at the table, trying to do a crossword in the paper. The ropes made it difficult to see what you were doing, and Princess was sympathetic to your trouble, but you didn’t ask him for anything. He’d come by and give you answers every few minutes, lifting your hands by the rope between your wrists, say, “38 down is malign,” then, “55 across is never on a Sunday— one word,” and then drop your hands back on the table. Princess looks at you once while he’s talking to Peter, and you know this has something to do with you. You haven’t bothered to try to figure out what your significance is here, what exactly any of this has to do with you. You just know that it does. Now you know that it has something to do with Peter, with Chicago maybe, though that doesn’t help any, you still don’t know anything. “12 down is agrarian,” Princess isn’t on the phone anymore. He goes back to the kitchen and finishes preparing the salads. You’re having big Caesar salads tonight, and Princess picked up some Gelato on the way home, and a movie. You read The Stranger today, Princess gave it to you before he went out, and you thought maybe he was saying something with it. You’d read it in high school and you liked it. You didn’t expect to, but you liked it again today.
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After dinner Princess washes the dishes. You offer to help, just kidding of course, but Princess thanks you and hands you a towel, reminding you to be careful to not get the ropes wet. You eat gelato on the couch and watch “The African Queen.” There’s no symbolism here, this is not a metaphor for anything, no one’s trying to tell you anything. Princess just wants to see it, and you’re watching it with him.
Princess lets you sleep in the next morning. You don’t have any sense of time in the closet, so you don’t know how long you slept until Princess opens the door and you can tell by the light in the apartment that it’s late morning. You have only a few hours before the funeral, so you figure this is all going to be over soon. Confusion has resigned you, Camus has confirmed you; there’s something about certainty and unavoidability that makes you placid. You tell Princess you don’t need breakfast, you’d just like to finish this, if he doesn’t mind. You’re tired, you’re bored, and though Princess has been more than kind, the most genial of hosts, even if you did spend the last week bound in a closet, you’re ready to have this done with. “You are coming with me to the funeral,” Princess says, making a small adjustment on something on the table. And suddenly, it’s all clear. Sort of. Princess’ job is to bring you to the funeral. You don’t know why it’s important, why you have to be there— someone could have just called and you would have been on a plane within an hour, they didn’t have to go this route. You don’t pretend to understand the way things work, but still, they could have just called you. You say you don’t have anything to wear, and Princess tells you that’s not a problem, he has suits enough. One of them will fit you. You like this idea. Those suits are nice. Princess pulls one of them out, a simple, charcoal gray three-button affair that looks about your size. You ask how you’re supposed to get dressed with the ropes and all, but even as you’re asking Princess starts to untie you. He indicates the bathroom, tells you there are fresh towels and you go happily in, steaming a week’s worth of your own odors off your body. You shave, you find some pomade, you make yourself good enough for the suit. You walk into the living room, wearing the boxers and tee shirt Princess left by the sink. Princess approaches you, holding some kind of belt with a small black box in the middle, the thing he’d been messing with
______7,/ <())8##;())A923;# on the table. “A simple precaution,” he explains, “not something I want to do, but necessary, you understand.” He shows you how it works, how the box is a tazer with electrodes that will rest on either side of your spine, and he holds out a small remote, presses the button and demonstrates for you that it is more than sufficient to immobilize you—should that be required. You assure him that you’ll be good—you’re almost giddy, but you do a good job of suppressing it—and strap the thing on yourself with a smile and small flourish, turning around to show him how well it fits. Princess smiles and makes some small adjustments to make sure it’s placed right and then hands you the suit. The shirt’s white, the tie a predominantly blue pattern. You look good. Probably not as good as Princess did when he wore this, but it’s better than anything you own. Your shoes will do. They need a shine; Princess gives you the means and spreads some newspaper on the floor, asking you to be careful of the suit.
Princess hails a cab out in front of the apartment. It’s not Johnny that stops. He’s at the funeral. Everyone’s at the funeral. Johnny couldn’t afford the time off or the plane fare, but arrangements were made, as they were for everyone, and so he’s there instead of in the front seat of the cab that you and Princess climb into, looking nothing at all like what you are, and only a little like a couple of guys on their way to a funeral, on their way to view a funeral anyway, if not to make a physical appearance. “Intended destination?” the driver inquires, not turning around, just looking a little in the mirror. “52nd and Madison,” Princess says. This tells you nothing. The driver launches himself into traffic, a little heavy right now, honking and swerving. “We have time to spare,” Princess tells the driver. And part of you knows that normally this would have no effect on your average cabbie, but you’ve just spent the last week in this man’s closet, and so you’re not surprised when the driver immediately slows down and begins to drive sensibly. You try to pinpoint the why of it, the what of the communication between Princess and this man who does not know him. You don’t know, you’re so used to the idea of Princess as what he is, you don’t know how anyone else might see him. It’s a good day. Bright, clear, not hot. Birds and happy people. Unhappy people too, sure, but they’re not in the way, and so their unhappiness doesn’t matter. Some of them might be dying even, on the way
______7-4 O',,8* * to see their oncologists or surgeons, but nobody’s dying right now. No one is going to die today. That much you know. That whole death thing is on hold at the moment, out of deference to Joe. Princess pays the driver, tips him well, and you get out of the cab. Princess steers you toward a Kinko’s, and you’re about to ask questions, you’re about to say at least five stupid things, but you hold back and wait for the answers, since they’re coming. You don’t need to ask anything, everything’s taken care of already. Princess holds the door to Kinko’s open, and you almost do it, you almost ask questions, but again you have the good sense to keep your mouth shut. You are left by a register while Princess talks to a boy over by the computers. The boy nods, says something about the last one finishing up a simple print job right now, but yes it’ll be clear in under five minutes. Princess thanks him and comes back to retrieve you. You had a full minute there, you suddenly realize. You could have left. Princess wasn’t watching you at all, and the range on your belt thing probably didn’t even reach to the door, you could have gone. It’s the suit that held you. Princess might not care about you, but he would have hunted you down to get the suit back, you’re certain of that. But the moment’s gone, the chance past, and really, it would have negated the last week in the closet. Your curiosity unsated and you would have never known for sure what this was all about. It might be enough to know that for some unknown reason someone had arranged for your presence at a copy shop to sit with this old hit man and watch them lay Joe to rest, but you’re not too sure about that. Princess motions you to follow, using a small gesture, his hands clear of the pocket holding the trigger. No coercion, no threat, just a simple request. You comply and follow Princess to the computers. They’ve cleared it out for you. It’s just you and Princess, and you realize they’re emptying out the whole shop. The doors are locked and the clerks disappear into the back. You can see a security camera. You wonder if they’re watching. You wonder what there will be to see. On top of the monitor of one of the Macs is a little orb-shaped camera. Princess goes to that computer, and you follow him, waiting for an invitation to sit or speak or play dead or something. You stop waiting, pull up a chair and watch Princess open up a browser, type in an IP address, then mess with some settings on the site that comes up. After a brief lapse where the computer looks to have locked up, a small scene emerges.
______7-5 <())8##;())A923;#
Strange textured gray, some kind of jiggly abstractionist painting, you’re not sure. It shifts and you see a lever, a handle of some kind, and then it pans up and you’re seeing the back of a car seat. A ding from the computer’s speakers and then someone’s voice says, “Hey, he’s on. It’s Princess…” and then the view swings crazy and someone’s nose and mouth fill the screen. “Hey Princess! Howareya?” Princess laughs, a little, the first laugh you think you’ve heard. “You’re too close.” A pause while the camera swings again. “You need your teeth cleaned.” He didn’t even laugh during the movie last night, he was so serious about it. The screen shows the back seat of a car. A Lincoln, you think. Maybe a BMW. Not that they’re similar, but it really could be either. You see a couple of people, one with a laptop, the other with his arm in some kind of exploded perspective: he must be holding the camera. You try to figure out what kind of hookup they’ve got here, satellite phone? Would a cell phone be able to handle this kind of transmission? They answer it for you: “Wireless T1, baby, you like it?” Princess smiles, asks how their families are, how everyone’s holding up. The men in the car turn serious, somber, suit themselves to the occasion. “We’ll be at Peter and Paul in a minute, most everyone’s there already. Shame you couldn’t be here, but you got your responsibilities.” “I’m there enough,” Princess says, “you just keep the connection open. You got full batteries?” One of the men in the car snorts and says something about batteries, the other looks at the screen of the laptop. “Says we’ve got 98 percent here. Should be good for the duration, but we got an extra in case we got to switch. In such case, we’ll do it on the way to the cemetery, O.K.?” Princess tells them it doesn’t matter too much to him. He says car rides aren’t all that interesting to him anyway, and as long as they do the switch then, it doesn’t make any difference. You hear the car stop, doors open, and then the perspective swings crazy again and the screen bounces for a few seconds. You can make out brick and other masonry, some desert-looking plants, and then it slows down and the guy with the camera pans it right then left, then up and down, slowly showing you the façade of the church, some people milling out front. “We’re going in now,” one of them says. Then dark for a second, and then you can make out the interior of the
______7-6 O',,8* * church. The men move to the front and you get a panoramic shot of the back of a pew and then the altar as they move the camera into place. “We’ve still got some time,” Princess tells you. You settle in for the wait. You want to say surreal, but that sounds stupid. You want to turn to someone, nudge them, share their popcorn or something. You don’t know what to think of this, this unprecedented thing, but it doesn’t really matter what you think, since this isn’t about you anyway. But still, you want to commentate, you want to editorialize, you want to have something to say and someone to say it to… you’ll tell your mother, you’ll tell your friends, they’ve all got to be wondering where you’ve been these last several days, and even though no one will believe you, they’re going to love the story nonetheless. They’ll say you should write it down, and maybe you will. Maybe you’ll submit it to Esquire or GQ. They’d so go for this kind of thing. You’ll have to play up the locked in a closet in the apartment of an old hit man part, make it more… something. The reality there wouldn’t translate well, you’ll have to find some peripheral tale there, some long dark closet of the soul angle to play upon it. People are moving past the camera, everyone stopping and saying hello, everyone wishing he could be there, it’s been so long, but everyone understanding. You wonder do they see you. You wonder if it matters to them. Probably not. They probably don’t know anything about you, and that’s probably best. Definitely best if none of these people see you. One story for Esquire or GQ is quite enough, thank you. The ceremony starts, the camera is pointed toward the back of the church, and follows the progress of the casket and its entourage up the aisle to the front of the church. There are only five pallbearers. You wonder what this means. You look at Princess and you think you understand. Princess was supposed to be there. Princess was the sixth, but he’s here with you, doing this stupid job. It’s a good Catholic ceremony. You’ve always kind of liked how every ceremony is just a mass with other stuff going on. Follows the same progression, the same steps taken every time, and you’re not surprised one bit when Princess stands at the beginning—you stand with him, you know when to do everything too—and waits for the opening bit to finish before he sits. An Alleluia, some this, some that, and then you’re on your knees just like Princess, just like everyone at the church. Profession of Faith, Mysteries of Faith, Homily, Offertory… it’s all there. You don’t recognize
______7-! <())8##;())A923;# the scripture, but you’re sure you’ve heard it before. Then the funereal bits are pieced in, and the Cardinal says something and then Bishop says something, then a whole bunch of other people in beautiful suits, though none as beautiful as yours; Princess’ outshines your own and you wish for him that he could have been there, the Mafioso fashion event of the decade. Shame to waste such a suit on Kinko’s. Communion comes after the Offertory, and you are surprised when Princess pulls from his pocket a small gold container, opens it to reveal that he’s brought the Host with him. He turns to you: “The body of Christ.” “Amen,” you say, accepting the Lord into your mouth. Princess takes his own, and then you’re both on your knees again. For like twenty minutes this time, they’re silent so long. And then Princess touches your shoulder, you zoned out a little, and you stand with him while the ceremony is concluded. The camera follows the casket back down the aisle and out the shining mouth of the church, brilliant the way you imagine the gates of Heaven must be, and you know that you and Princess are the only ones to have this perspective, to see the Ascension of Joe. And then everyone files out, then the camera crew moves back to the car. “Beautiful ceremony,” you say. Princess agrees, then asks you to be quiet for a while, until this is done. The guys in the car come back on screen, “Hey, we’re going to shut down and switch, all right? We’re going to go into standby, so we don’t have to reboot. I don’t know if that’ll work, but it’s worth a shot.” Princess says he’ll be there, he’ll see them in a minute. You think that standby only works if there’s a battery in, but who knows? You try to figure out how that all works, if the state of the computer is saved onto the drive, or if it just remains in RAM, but it doesn’t matter, since they’re back almost immediately, congratulating themselves. “Bobby got a damn fine piece of machinery here,” you are informed. And you agree. The majority of the ride is spent watching the knee and the edge of the screen of the laptop. Despite their momentary joviality with the laptop thing, they’re still pretty serious, still a little beat up by the day. You wonder how much a wireless T1 runs these days, where you get one anyway, what the limitations and capabilities are… is it in the trunk, is there a truck following the car and they’ve got a wireless router and wireless network card and…
______7-7 O',,8* *
The car arrives at the cemetery. Must not have been too far. You’re used to endless processions from one side of town to the other, taking hours sometimes. But then, nobody’s ever been Joe in the lead car before. And they’re not here, so it may very well be a short ride… but considering everything else you’ve seen in the last week, they probably just bulldozed a straight line from the church to the cemetery. In your little sense of what absurd really means anymore, that doesn’t really fall within the definition. That’ll sound good in the article, the metaphor, whatever it might be, the straight and narrow line of destruction created to take this man to paradise. You’re thinking that kind of thing is more Esquire’s style. The colors on the screen are washed out by the bright sunlight. God himself made an appearance at the interment, you write on a little powerbook in your head. Nobody talks, except the priest, and he’s brief. Then they let fly the doves, a nice touch, you think, however cliché. And then it’s done. One of the guys with the laptop, his voice hoarse, whispers that they’re going to shut down now, and they’ll see Princess in a couple of days. Princess says thank you to them, says goodbye and closes the browser. “Thank you for attending this with me,” he says to you, and stands. You stand and follow Princess out of the shop. He hails a cab and gives an address not his. He explains that he’d like to walk the last couple of blocks. It’s a nice walk through the park back to his apartment. No homeless people, just happy people, happy and alive and free. You’re betting that the infinitely considerate Princess has somehow arranged to have your clothes laundered, ironed, perfumed, folded… that they’ll be ready for you when you get back upstairs. You’ll step out a hundred times better than you stepped in, cleaner and smelling better, a whole new man ready for a night on the town. You enter the building and take the stairs. Princess behind you, you’re taking the steps two, three at a time. You’re giddy and you can’t wait to start writing. Should you see some people first, test the story on a couple of audiences, get some style and flow going before you try to type it out? That seems the best bet. Princess is attaching a silencer to his gun. You don’t know this. There are two men waiting in Princess’ apartment. You do not know this either.
______7-" <())8##;())A923;#
You reach the door and Princess puts a bullet in your head. The door opens and the men step out and take care of you. See, this wasn’t about you. This was never about you. “He can keep the suit,” Princess tells them. “Fante made it for him. It’s his.” “Nice suit,” one of the men says. “Fante does good work,” the other agrees, “That’s his on you, too, isn’t it?” Princess says it is. “I’ll leave you gentlemen to it, then,” he says and goes back downstairs. He wants some espresso. Looking at the park, something catches Princess’ eye. Above the trees, off to his right, the paper of the sky looks to be peeling, its old adhesive gummy and stringy, not the sort of stuff one would use for something meant to last forever. It held long enough, longer than it was needed. Princess turns away and walks, not hiding the spring in his step this time, to Starbucks. He smiles, he even whistles a little. “Well, hello Mister President!” the girl says when he walks in. Princess bows and asks her would she like to dance.
______7-,
%#%#2#9#&###3#2#'#G#)#(#3#3# ______
F/%""*K%(&(9',*H&"#8*&$** V##"%*+')'."0")&*H=99"88* * * * ummi Zinc Butts were an answer to a crisis. Radical marketing placed Ludens’ Cherry Drops with a whopping thirty percent of Gmarket share last quarter in the lucrative ‘guilt candy’ segment. Stimulated, yes I was, that faithful think-tank Tuesday morning. Candy inspired by the shape of, well, peaches and fueled by good ol’ American-style guilt. Gummi Zinc Butts showed me the path to success. Only ten months on the shelf and we had sixty percent of market share. And it wasn’t my strong ideas that got us there. It was my raw gut instinct fueled by pure carnal need. Secrets to Management Through Controlling the Chi states that only one thing need come after a brilliant idea: another brilliant idea. That’s the chapter I got lost on. “What Would Jeremy Do?” reads a banner in the break room. On a slow afternoon skinny freckly four foot Jeremy used to talk some big smack about kicking EVERYBODY’S ass on ToughMan. I found the redheaded stepchild’s dissertation in the university annals. So sinister a plot I quickly found that money bought shitface the paper that won him a hotel management/food service degree. I tear out a page or two and quote it back during Tuesday’s meetings. It works. I’ve demonstrated rapid success into a private office with my own phone line. Imitation is the highest form of flattery. Tuesdays are Chief Director’s ‘New Ideas in Marketing’ meetings. He’s a dolt. I’d like to think that his underage girlfriend is owed some credit for my one good idea. Whole meetings waste away while I check out her fine flag corps ass.
______7--# %%29&##32'G)(33#
The meetings take place in the basement. Maybe a year or so ago Corporate took on a new strategy. My new peer associates balance perilously on the edges of their chairs, in crouched prone position, brutal gut instinct. I decidedly dress inappropriately; Van Heusen shirt and a tie. “By God, we’ll one dot five the quota this week boys or it’s no conjugal time-outs for the staff!” Spits Chief Director. I huddle dazed waiting for the old man to keel over, listening to his hearing-aid scream. Dickhead son Jeremy rocks back and forth in the corner drooling. Daddy sees the coup and doesn’t care alzheimer’s viagra money. Marry the girlfriend. Daddy Chief Director gone suddenly fangs appear. My peer staff are demure villains; larval predators await the sale. Indie convenience stores are our most recent target. ‘C-Store ninnies’ we like to call ‘em. Behind the mask of candy I can be whatever character satisfies their needs; I stroll don’t stalk the aisles of endless cubicles. The associates rush the manager’s quadrant snarling, hiking legs and pissing off their territories. I must enjoy the ride, I always wait in line. Annabelle would sleep with me tonight and that means something. She’s way too hot for me all the staff wants her. I’m distant, I don’t reciprocate: there’s the attraction. Eight hours a day in a chair I’ve grown quite the belly and what self esteem I have left! She kinda got me my job. Letter of reference so maybe I’d put out. Suddenly I spy a little C-Store money come in the door. Predatory instinct staff all pick up her scent, rush Ms. Money, encircle and begin good-cop bad-cop routine. All the beta males growl and spit but back down; silverback gets first cut. “Honeybaby I know exactly the candy your store needs.” I show her the limited circular tins. I need this sell for the rent. Out of nowhere pops up shitforbrains. “Looky over here sugarpants. I gotta value packs.” “Honeybutt why don’t you come over to my store and do an analysis?” says Ms. C-Store Money. I won’t can’t take a supervisor referral, not from fuckpants. Something come over me terrible. Can’t control it slapped Jeremy hard. Hard like ToughMan prelims didn’t know it was coming. Stupid looked at me all silly on the way to the floor, half grinning like he wanted it. I got up on top of him and started slap punching his cockhole. ‘I didn’t draw first
______7-. F/%""*K%(&(9',*H&"#8*&$*V##"%*+')'."0")&*H=99"88* blood’ would later be my losing argument to the judge. Felt good to break the next in line. Ms. C-Store Money ran out the door. Anabelle finally pulled me off. There goes ‘Employee of the Month.’ Please not the lecture about co-dependant upsell. Jeremy tooth-dangling smile up at me. It hurt him but not like unemployment hurts. Dr. Laura tears of guilt stream down my face.
______7-/
%#&#$#2#(#A###(#2#=#<#'#&#(####H#9#=#3#(#2# ______
3)*'*N$$0* * Doom like room utters and alters change, like range. * There is my clock, mark it on the map. * Very fast for two voices, confusing together— split duet. * A door’s melody is in its keyhole.
______7.4#
%#&#$#2#(#A###(#2#=#<#'#&#(####H#9#=#3#(#2# ______
U$=*L"'%*BG"%*U$=%*>'%#("9"* * “You should see an itsy wooden door. Do you? Okay. The door opens into a gymnasium. Go in. There is a door out of the gym, on the left-hand-side wall. On the left. Good. It’s a magnetic-bolted door. Open it— the combination is 5-5-6-4-9-4. Hurry! I’m in here!”
______7.5#
%$&$'$($)$*$$$)$($+$,$-$&$)$$$$.$/$+$0$)$($ ______
!"#$% % Fabric of eels and cobras and a network of slippery nerves on and in an all-American girl, who is pushing and cursing the two-faced crowd around her fractured car. I touched the squirming needlework which we photoed, wrote up, drooled over, and drew.
The engagement—
“Show me your ring. Yikes! Can we call this a rock? Get a bank box. Who’s paying? Lock it in your bottom drawer. Or mine. Is—is it fake or mined?”
The wedding—
vacuuming sewing machines free of fluff, sharpening needles. Soon we’ll be filming in slo-mo me at my most unsportsmanlike: I’ll toss this soon-sewn queen-sized quilt of so soft fox from behind round the nude bride. When I do you’ll see the guests exhale, and a few stir.
And then
achy nooky fellow fie falling— killing her her son burst from her lips, hacking he brought up spittle, throat clear he brayed, you have spoiled your death with me— Icky Nicky falafel foray.
______!"#$ +'%2*
*
My ex,
Mary? Her skull was an urn. She was fixated on Phoenix, AZ—a real phoenix of an idée fixe. She scrambled eggs without milk. But I don’t want to walk and talk about Mary, I just want to see our son.
______7.!
%#&#$#2#(#A###(#2#=#<#'#&#(####H#9#=#3#(#2# ______
F/"*c$=%)"2* * A thing with a quality meandered before its desire to cross the stream occurred to it… its meandering found focus during the crossing… after the stream more wheat-tangled fields jigsawn by streams stretched on the other side. The thing with a quality ran miles crossing fields and streams. It came to a city where two small things ran in a sunny alley between the two buildings that concern us here: the thing hoped to catch the two things before their coming friend, a third thing, arrived, as it would, seconds before the thing caught the two things. The thing caught three things. It asked them to hum tones before all four ran into the sunny alley. All things began to hum and then run. The three ran on their way out of the alley, The thing entered a door in the alley after considering, as it ran, letting, or not, the little things go. It let them go and entered a building through its alley door. What was in the building? The thing. And others, less active. But growing. Sensitive vegetable things in an indoor forest. Bewildered, pleased, the thing enjoyed the pleasure of an indoor forest. It sprinted, weaving and dexterous, among the things, planning to meet the stream it met as it halted suddenly because of this stream. Now the stream boiled with salmon, now the vegetable things grew in straight rows
______7.7# F/"*c$=%)"2* planted by humans, now they clumped in radiating colonies, now the stream seemed as much debating with as flowing forth in its chosen direction. Then it absolutely flowed in its desired direction. The thing waded in, adjusting, paddling, warning itself about the waterfall it would begin to suspect was ahead as it lurched along with the current. The stream became the waterfall, through a hole in a wall that, granite and solid, marked a boundary of the forest. Through and over went the thing, falling inside falling water, now it knew, now it thought how its accurate prophecy was spoken too late. An effortless forward with a likely death at its end—better than great labor for a likely death as end—down, down the thing went forward toward the bottom, cloaked in a stream of water…
______7."
1#(#)#'#=#=#%###%I###:#2#9#+#:#;# ______
K$)G"%8'&($)*F/%$=./*'*1',,* * First a knocking.
Then, the lights open their eyes.
First man: Pumpkin moon tonight, with a river inside. A river, I swear it.
The Second man shakes his head and replies:
No, no. Paper-maiché—like a Japanese lantern. A lantern on the river. He makes a slight motion with his hand. Up, then down. (Which, of course, the other does not see.)
But now he is thinking of pumpkins. An open field of them, the taut hollow beneath his fingers and the smooth skin against his palm.
A patch of pumpkins grows up out of the concrete while the First man begins to feel the quiet lapping of waves on his naked toes:
I saw a funeral once when I was stationed in ______. A whole family had been killed in a raid and for each member they set a lantern on the water. Two went unlit because they had no more candles.
The Second man sees the river beyond the pumpkin patch with fireflies’ shimmering gauze reflecting, and then:
They say when you die there is a light.
Each man falls silent.
In sleep they dream a river of pumpkins and lights.
______7.,#
1#(#)#'#=#=#%###%I###:#2#9#+#:#;# ______
O'8&*+$$%().* * i Bone white of the seagull against a storm dark sky. ii Salt-cracked, this house a long hollowed temple. iii Moth wings loose in a drawer cover the folded letter, a neck bent in sleep: iv When it comes to this— you steal your own bones for soup. v Outside, the continual bruising of the shore.
______7.-#
J#%#8#8#+#1###0#9#;#&#=#9#&# ______
F/"*5'&/"%,"88*!'=./&"%* * * * imayat had three daughters who were very beautiful. His wife had three beautiful sisters whom he loved dearly. One night a terrible H storm blew in from the east and stayed for five days during which the sun never once appeared and the roads were turned to rivers. The sixth day arrived and the sun suddenly shone down upon the flooded neighborhood and only those who lived underground with concrete walls, iron floors and waterproof ceilings were able to safely return to their old ways of life. During this time one of the sisters of Himayat’s wife lost her daughter and husband in a fire and after weeping and wailing for hours she hobbled to her sister’s home and set up lodging in the foyer. Wrapped up completely in a dirty window curtain salvaged from the disaster, she moaned: “I have lost everything and everything is lost! I certainly won’t go on.” Inside she was beginning to harden and noticed the attentions her tears and hair- pulling received from the man of the house. Especially the tears. Amid her salty emissions, she shrewdly set about adopting another little girl to, as she put it, “Replace my pure blind idealism with a tawny tidbit of tried and true faith. When I find her I shall name her honestly, to reflect what I genuinely feel.” With a stooped back and lowered head she secretly buried her daughter, planting her favorite seeds in the fresh-turned soil. The neighborhoods of the valley came together and decided that they were going to pump the flooded town free with trucks and windmills. Of course this involved a lot of cooperation and unguarded moments, and after a few months of labor it was also agreed that the collected waters should be made into a viable floating ocean as a symbol of their united efforts to help one another. Plans called for a liquid oval of floodwaters to be gathered, filtered, cleansed, perked-up, colored blues and yellows and released into the valley. The people said: “You can go as far as those
______7..# F/"*5'&/"%,"88*!'=./&"%* mountains, but you must not cross them or you will come undone.” The ocean nodded knowingly in agreement at this, and even smiled when a tall thin farmer warned him fiercely, saying: “We’re not above killing to get you back.” Life went on in the valley as in the days before the rains, only now there regularly appeared a distant shadow of shimmering gold and radiant blue which gradually transformed as it got closer into a well-rendered and very believable floating ocean, moving slowly, disturbing nothing. Life went on and on, full of light, sound and energy. The once-bare neighborhood grew mellifluous and delightful as the years progressed. Pear trees blossomed like generous friends over the rooftops: they also housed reasonably-sized birds whose native sounds wove together in the air with human voices to concoct charming sounds of rhythmic living. Here and there an older dog would sidle from one shade to another or lie unfettered in a bright block of sun as bicycle wheels mimicked their slow canine rotations before coming to rest at their appropriate spot. The adopted sister of the dead girl, named Faithless, but called the Fatherless Daughter by enemies and friends, wrote poetry from inside a colorless window in a secure house of iron and concrete. When she composed she often thought, though without any real hope, that her long- gone father and dead mother (for that sad woman never moved from the foyer nor forsaken her pitiless grip upon the ripped and tear-spattered window curtain) might receive her selfish thoughts and be mollified by her willful self-absorption and be forced to return from beyond the grave. Unlike the entire world, this girl refused to ever see the goodness in simple things. Instead she fed constantly on drama, complexity and intrigues drawn from her imagination. While alive, her trussed-up mother could only manage to untangle herself long enough to ask: “Why are you so unhappy?” before slipping away again, far from the hard eyes of her only living daughter, into the mirrored atmosphere of her rather wicked and duplicitous mind. One fine day the girl found a golden pipe lying in high grass near a red fire hydrant. No one seemed to be around and there were no footprints or depressions in the area. There were no clues at all as to who might have dropped the golden pipe. “Someone must have dropped this recently because it is still burning and smells like cherries and woodsmoke,” she thought without thinking very hard. “How could this happen without so much as a whisper of worry from the owner of such an
______7./ J%88+1##09;&=9&# expensive piece of work? Because the sun was shining and because she had no where to be (she was a pale duplicate of her ambitious burned sister, after all), the brown- haired girl sat down and began to think dreamy thoughts about the possible owner of the golden pipe. As her thoughts were those of a poet and not of a school teacher or blacksmith she soon found herself mouthing the words to a song about swans and day-dreaming of riding aboard a white boat as it trolled blithely toward a mysterious ethereal shore. “I would do anything to know whose pipe this is,” the girl thought out loud to herself. In a flash with a swift puff of wind the world came to an immediate halt. Frozen like a mountain of ice. Nothing that had been moving moved. No wrens or finches called in the still neighborhood. No birds sang at all; not one sparrow, jay, crow or hawk; not one falcon, eagle or petweet. Neither a stork nor a jabberer croaked a murmur. There was also a distinct lack of singing and other human sounds in the wide, straight canyons of the canopied suburb. No crickets or critters sounded. Much less missed, though no less missing, were the noises of grass cutters, milk delivery vehicles and public radio stations in the common weave of rhythmic living. Nothing moved and nothing sounded except the girl in the grass and a voice which was very familiar. “Oh my youngest and only, the pipe belongs to an alligator named Sidi Ahmed! It is his magic golden pipe which he treasures very much!” the voice practically shouted. “But Mother where are you?” the girl was highly doubtful that it was truly her since she knew her mother was dead from falling asleep with her head in the black stove. “How do I know who you are? You might be the Devil come to rob my raspberry, simmer me slowly and eat me forever!” the Fatherless Daughter shouted to the pregnant breeze, full of poetic gusto and rural bravery. After that the air was still for a very long time. Being easily bored and rather daring the precocious girl decided to take a smoke off the pipe since nothing was moving and the voice of her mother or the Devil seemed to have gone away. “Besides, I don’t care what happens to me in this world! Let that dirty Sidi Ahmed come and try to take my pipe!” She closed her brown eyes, drew from the pipe and held the hot breath within her like a bite of cooked meat. Her innermost wish was to know why things happen the way they do, so before opening her eyes, she puffed up her cheeks and drew from the pipe again. The girl’s chest burned
______7/4 F/"*5'&/"%,"88*!'=./&"%* with hot air that tasted of cherries and woodsmoke, but still she held the breath within her like a bite of burnt meat. Her heart began to beat a thick trumpet that sounded like: rubble, rubble, burn, rubble, burn. The pipe in the girl’s hand felt smooth and cool so she held it to her wrist to calm down. She thought: “I’ve become a ghost and now I’ve found a magic pipe and smoked from it. I think I shall wish for exactly what I want!” The girl opened her eyes to the same world in which time was frozen and began to consider how to phrase her wish. Gradually she became aware that a distant flapping was now quite close to her and in no time the smallest pigeon she had ever seen landed on the red fire hydrant in front of her. Its eyes were tiny moist circles wrapped around an almost invisible black dot in the center. The exhausted bird could not have been as wide as the point of the Fatherless Daughter’s brown shoe and no taller than her little toe. First it leaned to one side then lowered its head in the least likely direction. After a few moments the pigeon began to stutter out a warning in a high choking soprano, paced by its own rapidly sucking breath: “Y-y-you’re only a y-y-young g-girl. Y-y-you needn’t be un-ha-happy! W-why don’t y- you t-try swimm-m-mming?” The pigeon’s barely audible breath was becoming more and more labored. “Dunk-king the b-body h-helps b-break up t-the illusion of, of, of . . . permits!” At this last word the tiny bird made no more sound but coughed and fell down into the high green grass, tiny eyes open wide at last. A tiny blue dung beetle then crawled out of the pigeon’s open mouth, moving with its head facing the bird’s beak, carrying four pieces of rice. “It’s the rice which makes the bird voice and the beetle which keeps the rice honest!” the Fatherless Daughter thought. In a puff with a flash of wind the world continued to be frozen in a timeless silence, though now the sky moved swiftly, manifesting all manner of weather patterns and just as quickly dissipating them. At this time nothing in the sky was exempt from incredible change. The Fatherless Daughter was changing as well, instead of thinking only of the value of the golden pipe, she also held it to her lips for its smooth shining coolness. Rather than relish the selfish thought that she had a dangerous alligator’s magic pipe, she simply forgot the origins of the pipe altogether. Although she still could have wished for knowing why things happen the way they do, she wished only for relief from the heat that was spreading through her body as a result of the two smokes of roasted air.
______7/5 J%88+1##09;&=9&#
The brown-haired girl momentarily forgot her painful family memories in the viperous slow crawl of this new burning, and then she forgot about the burning by concentrating on the night sky. Nothing moved except the girl in the grass and the convex dome of clouds and lightning and the stars’ immediate drifting. Somewhere, something was stirring in its slumber as a result of all that silence and stillness. Years passed by both large and small, mostly in silence. Every day the Fatherless Daughter would draw from the pipe and sooner or later an exhausted pigeon would come and whisper the same short-of-breath message perched atop the red fire hydrant. The message always ended with the same warning about the illusion-of-something, then the bird would fall, the eye looking skyward would glaze over and a blue dung beetle would emerge backwards carrying four grains of rice. At first she only boiled and ate the rice, but each time the girl smoked she felt larger and hungrier and soon the rice was not enough. Then she began cooking the infinitesimal pigeon slowly over a fire and eating it along with the rice. In no time at all she was cracking the shell of the beetle by firelight and licking its insides as well as boiling the rice and roasting the bird. Years passed and the girl didn’t move or think of leaving because she thought that everything was the same everywhere. She even believed that the two sole changes in her world, the sky and the pigeon’s advice, were simply complex parts of the same pattern, repeating itself over and over and over again! In the midst of the motionless neighborhood landscape, the girl one day remembered her stepmother and thought quietly and powerfully: “I am not unhappy even though I am suffering greatly!” The Fatherless Daughter had come to think of her body emanating straight lines. Hoping that her dead parents might sense her expanding awareness and be moved to send a message through the death curtain. During this time the girl’s hair grew as fast as the polished sky changed and soon it coiled and turned, integrated and individualized, under her like a dense brown hedge almost twenty-nine feet tall. It grew a little in every blink and half-second. When it grew to a hundred and seven feet a shimmering gold and red ruby shadow inched over the treeline, a resplendent and realistic watery blue oval! The floating ocean silently approached, moving slowly, disturbing nothing. The girl had long ceased to be a girl and no longer considered herself
______7/6 F/"*5'&/"%,"88*!'=./&"%*
The Fatherless Daughter when the moist shadow of the floating ocean changed the unchanging scene. When the ocean was directly in front of the girl on her pillar of hair, a small sea whorled aside and out came all the sounds of the universe. There were clicks, snips pops, horns, hammers, sneezes, streams, brooks, rivers and everything in-between. The sound was both deafening and somehow not a whole lot different than the silence which it had entered, somehow it was both highly musical and horrifying in its expansive, swallowing blankness. The sounds of the universe carried outward and rippled back toward the clean dark hole in the ocean, and from this iris emerged an elephant. By the way of introduction, the elephant offered to read the girl’s fortune. The girl felt a thrill like smoke inch up her pillar of hair as she began memorizing the elephant’s fine eyelashes and elegant deep-etched wrinkles. “Why is your skin so gray and dusty?” she asked as she greedily consumed the elephant’s gentle form with her brown eyes. “I am mourning my dead because I cannot forget them,” the elephant replied. “I have a weak stomach and little resistance to poachers but with these ears I can hear all the sounds of the universe.” The girl hadn’t had a helping of the golden pipe all day and she was growing impatient with the ruminating of this dusty old elephant, so she blurted out rudely: “Well how are you going to see my fortune? Tarot, I- Ching, runes, tea leaves? It better not be the bottle spin!” The sound of breaking waves became the creaking of timber that resembled the deep throbbing of stone. These universal sounds unified and became one primary sound emerging from the black hole in the floating ocean, a sound like: rubble, rubble, burn, rubble, burn. The elephant seemed to be listening intently to something, but all that the girl heard was the way her heart beat like a trumpet that sounded like all the destructive noise of the universe combined. One hundred and seven feet up in the air and all the girl wanted was a smoke from the golden pipe. “All I want is to wish for exactly what I want!” The girl’s voice was angry and sad and frightened that she had forgotten what she wanted years ago. In the silence and the vanity of her hair, and the pride she took in doing everything exactly as she had done the day before, the girl had forgotten that in the face of unmitigated suffering she was truly ignorant. In this disturbed state she reached for the coolness of the golden pipe and took a deep draw and held the sparkling breath
______7/! J%88+1##09;&=9&# within her like flesh on a hot coal. “Oh my only and youngest,” a long- remembered voice shrilled, “You are drowning! You are drowning!” Behind her closed eyelids, the girl could see an image of the sun from underwater and suddenly into the image plunged four enormous squat thrashing limbs! It was the dusty old elephant swimming in the floating ocean! And two small brown legs and ten brown toes told the girl that someone was riding the elephant! As the girl opened her eyes, she held the cool pipe to her wrist. All she could think of were those handsome brown feet! She saw Sidi Ahmed for the fist time. The after-image of true love on her eyes was so powerful that at first she didn’t recall the description of the original owner of the golden pipe or recognize that it was manifest in front of her. The alligator was peering over the edge of the pillar of hair at the girl, clearly comfortable hanging on by his sizeable claws. Sidi Ahmed’s eyes were like extensions of the row of yellow teeth cradling his boomerang mouth, he said: “For stealing my pipe I am going to bite off your arms, legs and head. And because they look to be in good condition I will swallow them without gnawing them and you may live in my stomach and keep the place clean.” Just then the elephant came floating over in a muddy sinkhole that had separated from the very believable ocean made of floodwater. The alligator and elephant were distant cousins and from past reunions the elephant knew how much Sidi Ahmed loved a riddle, so he challenged him: “Why don’t you take a smoke and tell us what the secret of the Fatherless Daughter’s life is? Meanwhile I will read her fortune and get her ready for your stomach.” Sidi Ahmed’s breathing came slow and regular from his two-snubbed nose and he was still for a long, long time, but his inky eyes had dark comings and goings squirming within them. The elephant said: “If you should find the meaning of her life, she will be janitor in your gullet. If she discovers the truth first, you will be her guide in the hereafter.” Finally the alligator growled evenly: “I will. I will. I will.” Sidi Ahmed’s wire sandals yanked out tufts of brown hair as he snatched the golden pipe and went off in search of fire and a quiet place to conduct his experiments. When Sidi Ahmed disappeared behind a thick grape arbor the world and the sky began to move in unison again. The elephant floated closer than ever to the girl, so close that she could smell his musty breath and see brown earth on his pink hidden lips. Laying down three cards, he said:
______7/7 F/"*5'&/"%,"88*!'=./&"%*
“These cards represent dimension, space, and time.” The girl’s brown dress was itching, and because the world was moving again, she suddenly felt ashamed to be sitting atop a nest of ratty hair. Impatiently she asked: “Why is dimension more important than shampoo?” “In your body there is a silent memory, it is there prior to time, it is dimension and it is identical to immortal love.” the elephant replied. “Now now pretty, wrinkled peckinpah, don’t tell me you believe that rubbish! I will certainly not!” the girl laughed loudly and harshly. But in spite of her vehemence the girl was interested in her future, so she added: “What does the goldenrod on the second card stand for?” The elephant told her it was the only flower that grew on her charred sister’s grave in the stony cemetery. “The flower is the conduit through which suffering and experience influence your intuition. It thus represents space.” The girl was trying to pay close attention to the elephant’s words, but the demands of her body seemed to have accelerated since the world was released from its glimmering torpor. As he spoke, the tunnel in the floating ocean was becoming a smaller and smaller entranceway for the elephant to squeeze though if he were to return to the heart of the misty floating seas. With the sounds of the universe thinning out to become normal neighborhood noise, the eloquent elephant scrutinized the emptiness of the final card with his gentle envelope of attention. “What does the blankness mean?” the girl practically shouted in a voice that she recognized to be the Devil’s. “What does the final card mean?” The elephant stepped through a very small hole in the well-rendered ocean, that symbol of union and unguarded moments for a few brave people. The opening closed until all that remained was the trunk of the elephant on a gently waving blue and gold ocean surface, and through it came one word: “Impermanence.” Heading home to cut her hair, the girl paused to pull up her brown bobby socks when a thunder clapped and a dark flapping cloud of tiny pigeons blackened the sky and seemed to speak. In a thousand sing-song voices that darted, wheeled, and turned as a singular music, they repeated something like illusion of permanence illusion of permanence illusion of permanence, over and over, again, and again. After the living and flapping bird cloud passed, the girl who has been Faithless spied a necklace made of sixty-one yellowed alligator teeth hanging suspended in the sky. It was barely visible during the daytime but shone at night like a shining razor-
______7/" J%88+1##09;&=9&# sharp guardian beneath the forever starlight. Life went on and on, changing and unchanging. Memories of the days of smoking the golden pipe and waiting for the sounds of the universe faded, but the girl never forgot the lesson of impermanence, which she carried with her until the day she died. And die she did.
______7/,
1#%#2#<###A#8#&#&# ______
F/"*H9%(#&*F/'&*I"G"%*L'##")"6* * * * hat comes first is the heavy weight of a signal. No. Scratch that. It’s only the interpretation that makes it through. The signal itself W never came. Never made it all the way past the webs that lie for perception. Never pierced the act of comprehension. Got turned around in the ongoing arrangement of its composition. Got lost along the way like an off-buried worm twisting away in the wrong direction. It had an impact though. A slight of effect that carried over. A feint of twitches and tics on Monday. A warm funny feeling down there today. And tomorrow there’ll be a string of cuts and nicks from shaving when it subtly bleeds through once again. But when it happened not a thing, not a thing at all. No sense or reflex action, not even the slight turn of the head or raised lift across the brow. And whatever it may cause by the way of aftershocks it never becomes anything more than just that. Not now. Not yet. Like the cicada it’ll need a great many years, perhaps the whole bloom of old age, before it finds it’s way back into the fresh air and the ripening of fruit. Coming back to him in a blossom full of wonder and ‘what was that’ surprise as some lost childhood toy found in a passed down family antique. But by then, of course, it will all have been too late. He, having gone his way. She hers. And it falling back to the floor like a stone of forgotten melancholic regret. They say it would never have happened anyway. That the odds were too great in the first place. Greater then that of a chance pheromone floating through the air, subject to all sorts of backdraft and current, surviving every manner of humidity and contamination and finding its way into just the right receptor. One upturned at just the right degree, hooked over the incoming vector at just the right angle and synchronized in just the right cycle of breath. And even then, on top of that, needing to land softly
______7/-# 1%2<##A8&&# on the nasal pit with only a hope that it holds the correct chemical key. The component that connects and sends a signal able to bypass the cortex and shoot straight into the hypothalamus with a rush. And not even that would be enough. But also the taking of it up like the lost beads off a broken string and much more then even that would have to be undertaken too. Much more then any mere turn of the head, to some tickle in the lung and a strange feeling, neither bad nor good, indeterminately felt everywhere. And much more then even all of this according to those that speak on things they have never seen. Much more then you could possibly imagine they announce having not even witnessed the near miss. Not allowing their own minds to view the potential of the crash. The possible quorum of hurled bodies and fragmented mass, of smashed orbits cut up by broken glass. Not having even seen the starting point of what might have been. Having only turned their heads after the fact, at the hearing of an odd word, or the sad sound of a slip somewhere far off. Never staying on until the end when it will weigh in at its full measure. For them it is all uninvolved. The signal an incommunicable anomaly, removed of any responsibility. Just one more worthless addition to the trash. Whatever was there that might have had any worth, universe raped and looted long ago. The big bird of prey that is on the newborn the moment it leaves its egg. Spreading its wings like a quick dark cloak. Drowning out those first gasps and screams. Whatever you may have heard, actually made out, just a sound garbled through the vocabulary of dreams and death. And all that is left is an indeterminable mess, something best abandoned and forgot, left with the rest to fade away by way of rot. Never giving it the recognition it deserves. Not even the honor of a drop that falls from the dry desert heavens and manages to find its way through puddles, ponds, creeks and streams. All the way to the great rivers as one of the few from afar that by luck and chance and days and months makes its way to the sea beyond the beach and its wide lick of blue tongue. Never rising in cheer at the grand feat it might have achieved, nor the grace with which it skated the line. Ignoring it altogether how it kept thin between the fat of subjects, never once going astray in the vagueness that we are. But then again what can one say before such a broad reach of entropy. It happens every day. Every entity reaching out in an arraignment of time that keeps thinning and thinning in an attempt to encompass everything. What hope can we have for the hope that will not die.
______7/. F/"*H9%(#&*&/'&*I"G"%*L'##")"6* *
No more then the hope we have for all. The very same dream of the original word that screamed its way into being. The one that made it through and came out with a dance and a song. For every one such as that there are a million more we fail to see. Every missed possibility of the eternal that never came to be. It is for the sake of them that the one which makes it sings. It happens. It happens a lot.
______7//
1#%#2#<###A#8#&#&# ______
1(,,('0*1(,,*F",,* * * * illiam rubbed his hands over the scrub that the late day had made of his face. His fingers passing over the lantern like jaw of a Whatchet that had long become just another feature in its place. A mug which had put disgust in the others ever since he first could walk. The strange shape of his head forgotten right now as he smears drool across his sleeve and his chin. Forgotten along with why they had bothered to bathe and shave him. Memories smeared like the snot on his shirt. The one which told him why he was up on the hill. The one which had put a shovel in his hand. Left alone to remember only what he liked. The warmth that the thick hair gave his checks. The game of hide and seek with lost breakfast crumbs and cake. How his fingers liked to play as they groomed over and over what was no longer there. Left alone with only the hope it might grow back by the time they ate.
He does what he can to lash the saddle back together with the scraps of his pants. An effort that’s left him in only the shatters of cloth. With what little left of his shirt now but a bloody bandoleer around his shoulder. Taking up what comes from the wound where the bullet passed through. Leaving him beat, bloody and nearly nude to weave up a strap that’s strong enough to hold. Left alone in a land without features with a hurry coming under a fast declining sun. The blood still slowly flowing though the pain has altogether stopped. The bullet seems to have passed through without a shatter of a bone. The prospect of it healing included a chance that he could live. But none of this is a matter for him. The hope of such good fortune is not counting in his concerns. Only his horse in the distance and the far off target of revenge form the sum of every thought that’s left alive inside of him.
______"44# 1(,,('0*1(,,*F",,*
She stands in the window with her hands folded neatly as a pair of sleeping birds. Perfect as a picture for the husband riding in over his vast and endless lands. Still as the scene as she watches him come in, seeing that he rides alone. Coming in with the dusk on his heels and the dirty work left somewhere back on the road. Coming in alone to the loneliness of herself. Coming in like the long hand of the night reaching out and taking everything in with a crush of her breath. The shadow of a victor growing long as he approaches his home. Watching everything he can now call his own fall away with the light. The house and the fields, the shacks and the hill, all the women and the men and their children covered in dirt. Every inch of earth the horizon holds in. All of it his to loan and have others work. But above all there is her. The one in the window, the one watching him. His uncontested prize, his trophy and his wife. The reason he has just taken another man’s life.
William liked the shovel. He liked they way it chopped through grass. He hoped they would let him keep it. Keep it like the spoon that he curled up with in his sleep. Not take it away at the end of the day. Like they always take everything away. He liked it because it was strong. Stronger then his leg like his spoon was stronger then his teeth. He wanted to hide it under his bed. He liked the way it smelled like grass. But they will take it away. Just like they take everything away. Even the hair on his face. They always did.
She doesn’t ask what happened. She doesn’t have to. It’s written all over his face. It’s in the matter of fact confidence which slides off the air he strolls in with. His posture and his pace saying it all without even a word. It’s better that he doesn’t speak it. It wouldn’t matter if he did. She is already well versed in all the lies. And all the truth that there is she already knows. She knows it all as she watches him from the stairs. Is certain her love is dead by the time he reaches the bar. Knows exactly what to do while he measures out a glass of gin. Taking him in through the reflection the night has made of the glass. Knowing how it happened doesn’t matter. If he had hired men or done it with his own hands, it doesn’t matter. She is certain that it’s been done. That it is over and that she is his. Trapped in a cage of neverending land. Held in by an absence of anyone who cares. Barred from any hope of rescue. She knows it is the end of every dream and that only one escape is left.
______"45 !"#$%&'((%
He reaches his horse just as the darkness completes. The beast busy grazing stays still while it helps him with the saddle he no longer has to haul on his own. Even seems to take up the weight of his wound as it rears him around. Echoing forth a new hope with a neigh and a kick. Leaving the pain and the cold behind with the sun as they ride off towards revenge that is now no longer just a hope. But is something certain and in the open as if it was somehow already planned out long ago. And all that’s left is the last action. The why and the how coming down to a dim. Tightening into a tunnel with only one end. The one he’s carried toward over the last of the land on the last gasps of his breath.
No one cried today. Someone always cried when they held him down for a shave. When they kept him still before the razor. He didn’t like the razor. It meant someone went away. When they put a shovel in his hand and sent him up the hill. Days when the dogs weren’t allowed to play. Days when it smelled like rain. He liked days like today. Even when someone cried. Even if it was him. He liked the hill and the rain. He liked the shovel. The shovel is not his but it’s in his hand. He used it to walk. It was like a big spoon that ate up the land. It was even stronger then his spoon. It went chunk as it sunk and talked when it hit rocks. It liked the taste of dirt. Didn’t mind at all the stones. It cut the green clean and whistled when he spun. It felt smooth on his face. It smelt like grass.
She sits through dinner with her face held together by a feint of a smile. The last ounce of her breeding holding on until the last. Not letting weakness slip through the roots of all that is stoic and grace. Saying little. Saying nothing. Knowing all that has ever been said is but the skeleton of a story already heard. Not letting him in, not even feeling his touch on her skin. Knowing she will never feel again, not even now as she moves towards the end. Holding on to her strength through the moments with sips of her soup and a slow chewing of her food. Noting the hint of glass under wine, the metal taste of the spoon. Finding more in these things then in any thing ever before. So absorbed that even when something is said, that he was hunting or had gone on to town, she no longer hears. Forgets whichever lie it may have been the moment it is said. It doesn’t matter. She knows that he is dead. He may as well admit to the truth. May very well be saying it now. But she is not listening any more. Hearing only a voice
______)*+ !"##"$%&!"##&'(##& coming in through a tube as she merely smiles and points out the ripeness of the fruit. Aware of only them as they’re eaten. Seeing only the dead and the candles in-between dripping down to their own dark end.
All the blood that’s left boiling over into a fury. Into a fever beating harder then his heart. Harder then the heave of breath in his chest. Every thought tossed off like ballasts of cement. Falling silent under the heavy tumult of hooves. The man and his beast no longer two but hurling forward like a fist through wind. Held together by a saddle held together by a thread. Consumed with only the throat that lies ahead. The one he’s designed to choke and rip open. Not worried about weapons or men. Left only with the fury that will rage until one of them is dead. Until only one may lay claim to the soft that is the tender of her flesh.
They ate late on days like this. On the days when the dogs didn’t play and they gave him a shave. The hunger grew strong as he sat on a rock and pulled out his spoon. He told it that it would have to wait. Pressed his thumb on its tongue and enjoyed the smooth on his face. The only thing they never took away. He looked at the shovel at his feet and dreamed that he was big and used it to eat up the dirt. Laughed like a giant with no end to his food. The hill but a big giant bowl of mush. Eating up the trees and their roots while rivers ran straight down his throat. Until his stomach growled and he remembered how he hated the days when they ate late.
The man and his wife ascend the stairs together in slow speechless steps. The woman giving the girl a nod to turn out the lights and let herself out the back as they go into their room. Undressing while her husband watches from the bed. His eyes on her curves being slowly revealed in the dim. Hers fixing on one dark corner to the next as she goes to him. Succumbing to his strength with less resistance then he could have ever imagined. Growing vain when she shows no fear and he knows that he has her. Shows her what she already knows with his hands. Shows her hard that he is the only man she’ll ever have. Regardless of how she is no longer even there. Her eyes but mirrors of night reflecting glass. His seeing only what he physically possessed. Never knowing what they might have learned. Never needing to learn anyway. Never having to open up enough to let in the rest. He would have only held her through his days like a toy until he grew bored or forgot
______!"# 1%2<#A8&&#
how to play. Never knowing how to animate her with anything more then the movement of his own life. Forever feigning an embrace with the stiffness in her limbs. If he could find any joy in this she no longer knew. For she is no longer there and it is all together too late. Not there to share in his pleasure any more then he acknowledged her torture. Only aware of her breath as she knows it is over. That the blood has ceased and that she is falling asleep into the only dreams which ever let her be free.
Taken away by the sight of two birds at play. Lost in the small flights of feathers and circles. Like a little dance in his heart they became the very black of his eyes. Everything else rolling away and back down the hill. The stings on his neck and the pain in his gut taken away in swirl of joy and wonder. He reaches out for them. Tries to touch them. To grab on to the song and the chirps with his ears. Dreams they are wings that carry him away. Taking him up toward the sun and the bright light above all the rain and the mud.
He came in through a window, one of the many, quiet and deadly. Silent only until he found the cabinet with the gun. The last doubt shouting out with a hand that smashed through glass and tore back with pieces of wood. Finality sinking in as he embraced the rifle and slid in a shell. Slammed back the chamber with it’s round and headed up the stairs without fear or a sound. The tremble in his legs and his fingers from a weakness and a lack of blood he could no longer feel. Taken over by fever and an anger that burned feral. Darkness sweeping in on an omen of cold air. The last habit of life a worry that a window had been left open somewhere. Death having long ago set in before it set foot on the stairs. Coming up slowly worried of a door bursting open, a report from another gun, the look of horror that is murder when it finally comes. The pain creeping back in when all he crosses is silence. Slipping into a world that ends on a knob. The one slowly turned toward the open and the end. Pulling everything in toward the still sleeping curves long poisoned and dead. Knowing it all as he closes in on what will never move again. Taking up her hand before letting it fall back cold, heavy and dead. Falling back on his knees with only the barrel holding up what’s left of him. His head hung on the end which is as cold as his skin. Pausing finally to breath before letting the night slip back in.
______"47 1(,,('0*1(,,*F",,*
The runt rubs his tongue with a stone as he hears the hunger howl through his bowels. Looks down at the people and the shacks underneath all the murk. The big house where his mother works. Forgets why he’s here and starts to run down. Gets halfway there before someone yells to turn around. To get back up that hill. To pick up that shovel and not to forget there needs to be three dug before he eats his fill.
______"4"
1#%#2#<###A#8#&#&# ______
F/"*H&$%2*F$,6*BG"%* * * * ow it happens is never clear. What it becomes is never certain. Why it won’t ever stick around is just one more secret for the pile. H The whole event never even catching onto a name. It’s like a game where only the parts and their players ever grace us with sounds bites and tongues. Coming along in your everyday spoofs and spooks. The little trip ups and the slips. The things that sum up rifts and fall back at once inept and aloof. The traditional Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the classical Shindindeleaub and his Catsalamahoo. You can pick whichever sticks and paste them over whatever. Give one golden boots to trample down the other through the mud. Make one young where the years are what’s hunted, the other out at the end of age where the years are squirreled away. Dress them in sex with a his and her. Throw them up in the air and mix them up again. Turn them into a yeah and a nay, the this and the that, the one that will come and the one already past. The trick is to get the ends to knot together. For now let’s leave them as the dumb and the dim. Playful labels which never give you anything more then just a handle. Don’t worry which one is which for if you manage to get one right you can be certain the other is bound to pull a switch. They are merely the cock and bull story of what it’s all about, the sum of every difference that never adds up in the abbreviated list. Be careful trying to keep them together for they can take you for a ride, driving all around town like the monkeys of no evil. The one with the eyes shouting directions to the one behind the wheel who can’t get answers to his questions while you’re stuck in the back with your hands holding a scream. Think of them as the soldier and the hunchback, the right and left arm of a puppet ripping itself apart once it’s sewed itself back together. Always
______"4,# F/"*H&$%2*F$,6*BG"%* starting over, again and again. The mighty and the weak agreeing to disagree with an accolade to argue. Just rounding them up his hard enough. Like jackals of chance and surprise they are two figures running along a neverending sunrise. While you wonder what’s the point of chasing after their taunts and hyena like cries. When all you get by getting them together is a swirl of fur and bloody hides as you stand helplessly aside watching them tear themselves limb from limb. They told you opposites attract, but neglected to mention that they tend to explode. They’ve worked out a way to their lives however. Regardless of how everyone, including them, persists in getting their names wrong again and again. They’ve found, as a matter of fact, an incompetent irregularity by which they get along. Where Dim might run forward without heed or get run and stuck up a tree. While Dumb slowly treads backwards, frequently falling down or stumbling over the side. Coming back up in the role of a bright and unforgettable sun while the other acts the shadow falling back, slipping under rocks and getting sucked up by cracks before they ever manage to touch. They run like two rivers through the future and the past. One an acidic flood devouring everything in its path. The other following in a quake of dust, obscuring every scar and filling the bottom back up. And though they never meet, they share and steal the same tributaries and eventually even empty into the very same sea. It’s been held as a point of view by some that they never really part company. Indeed that they share the very same quarters, fighting like kid brothers over who gets the top bunk with an endless rock paper scissors or tic-tac-toe. Oblivious to the actual act of their quarrel, much as we are ignorant of the cracked glass of the now and then lens through which we see them. Wholly unaware that there is an unsettled contest as we are at often out of tune with the nonlocal or at odds with the notion that now is always and forever. Those that hold this to be true claim they’ve even seen them dance together. Like the can and the can’t going hand in hand toward mutual doom and disintegration. All the way to the end with smiles full of undeniable bliss. They never fail to point out however that the end is not really the end. That it is just something moving in and out of view. And you, merely a perspective passing by, are lucky to even catch it out of the corner of your eye. That if your dare declare one to be wicked and the other to be good, you’ll err with your conclusions and fall before ideas which are
______"4- 1%2<#A8&&# fixed. And that if you ever chance to see them again, through all the fuzzy borders of sense, you’ll not be certain which one is which. The key that keeps them glued is but the unsteady word of a truce. Something garbled through the words. Lost in the static and upturned volume. Nothing more then a familiar tone caught in a crowd that forever shifts and turns around. The chance picture that pulls you in and leaves you standing suddenly aware of what you are. The here and now being what it’s all about. This is the moment when it comes, the very space in which you can see them. When thought merges into feeling and feeling merges into sense. When two ends of a smile fight over a frown and weave together a singular drop. The one landing in your hand with all the limbs and ends rolled up. The one racing away through your fingers like a fast flowing tear and bleeding out every ounce of its momentum with a splash as they’re off again. Back to the bumps and the rough and tough stumbles with dim falling over right of the bat and dumb tipping his hat like a drunk fresh on the scene. The now having passed and the here well out of grasp. The face of the divine having slipped back into the how, what and why of ever changing masks. What hurt before now offers pleasure as dim gets back up donning one a hell of a honker in a jig of fleet-footed jazz. And dumb, not to be undone, grows out his ears and flies off on the large flappy wings of Dumbo. It’s different every time. And they do it again and again. With a zig to match the others zag they’re just two Swiss cheese bodies trying to puff up for their friends. They do it over and over through the spasms of beginnings and ends. Again and again. Never lumpen enough on their own to fill in the whole but as mutable and unstable as timber put to fire.
______"4.
)#'#=#%###?#)#+#=#<#'#&# ______
Qdb^* * In my locker, shadow-books hovered behind the vents. I pried one open; mirrors and hair gel.
Fourth period, the class solved for x. I studied a boy’s neck, soft down and new scent.
Indian summer. Mown grass, peat dust, fields cut to scrub and burn. The dust blew into corners, between pages, down the main hall and up the one mountain.
It covered everything. It was another thing.
I memorized theorems, I breathed through the vents. I thought in sentences.
It settled shallow and broad, like water, or like oil on water before you shake the jar.
______"4/#
)#'#=#%###?#)#+#=#<#'#&# ______
5%$0*F/")* * I woke to full code five, perfect iambic in the upswell. That gift, the taste of which we’re lucky enough to know, if we’re lucky enough—
I should have written it down (I must have written it down), but. When the earth closed over I had old envelopes, I had piles of scrawl. Little tearings at the edges.
The first time—like a secret—I was supposed to be doing something else. What was supposed to be my (fine) mind moved, but crosswise— a deep beneath days of classroom, bedroom, lawn. The sound folding in the rows and then that one hum, low and sliding:
it felt like grief (or what I thought grief would feel like). Taste on my tongue, turn in my gut. The burn and lurch of it.
And then it was again, or now, gone (seeing as I hadn’t missed it until). The world came back, the dirty linoleum. One shoe squeaking
______"54# 5%$0*F/")* against the other. I had a new sweater, a lunch break, a test. I had a sister and a lock on the door. I lived from then for the next chance, straight shot of now in the chatter. It opened up, it held the pearl. I slipped back down through a hole in the net.
______"55
)#'#=#%###?#)#+#=#<#'#&# ______
J#"%&$* * Apart? you asked reading the gold stencil on the door. No, open, I translated then you took my coat and hung it on the wall and then there was the business with the chair both of us pulling it out at once and I wanted your touch again on the small of my back that hand-shaped spot reaching out, measuring the exact distance to your hand some unimaginable interval (like that arrow approaching zero that keeps splitting the air but never arrives) you sat down and we drank some water and ordered some wine and the waitress came back with the wine balancing the two red globes just stood there while we negotiated the spinach salad or the soup, and should I have the fish (you always got the pasta) and she stood there garnet light levitating above her hands and she said: are you two married because if you’re not you should be and in the silence I said no we’re not even dating and she said I’m sorry and almost spilled the wine in your lap: two red orbs with the light gone out.
______"56#
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:$(9"*-"88$)* * It was amazing how little came out, and how much I wanted. Everything piled up at the exit, leap and roll escaping round the edges until the song—that sad knowing hopeful swing of the heart—lay deflated in my throat, a silk stocking with the air gone out. Breathe, she said, but by then even speaking was strange, my body
(of which I was suddenly, embarrassingly aware) forcing only a croak, a crack from its instrument. The wet impression of something removed. So we started again. Consonants then vowels, down the register and up. The discipline of tone, pushing air in and out. Before lyric or rhyme, before can’t carry a tune—at la and ma and mum and bub, below even word or world. Breathe, she said. I breathed. Make some noise, for once in your life.
______"5!#
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1"7%"*=8"6*e*P2*8M""&)"88* —Kay Ryan * Use me then, take me humming and buzzing down into hallelujah blankness— bread, salt and oil, hand on my back, shape fit to a curve, iris open past purple to yellow. Pollen stains on my hands, my shirt. Use me like the bow uses the hunter: arrow arm and eye, that one moment of sweet forgiving nothing-elseness. That thing we’re made for.
______"57#
%#&#$#(#2###1#9#&#=#9#&# ______
JD&"%*1()&"%*+'&/*K$0"8** H#%().*H$*!=P($=8* * What I have come to know after love or long white winter spent inside the panes, swilling Triaminic: ruddy guilt is kept up in brown cement- like tubs. It knows this story’s bent is parabolic— the rubine scent of onions in the air, geometry yielding no answer but line and plane, a kind of armistice. Blood leaping to the snow below from newfound cuts in me, my belly tender with the AM jabs of song. Is this the refutation or the proof? The patch of lightning-white lichen shifting in the night beneath the cedar’s toes, the compost pile combusting, rhubarb in fruition; mica slivers tucked away in burlap bags for later; monarchs caught and in the throes of new jar death—meat-eater, beauty, poisonous to birds; or viceroy, the corollary, mocker; there is no truth in words.
______"5"#
%#&#$#(#2###1#9#&#=#9#&# ______
-"'%)().*H/$%&/')6* * I was told that French was true the only true that I could know that television brought the news through the snow across the lake in both languages that static burns your skin like snow that coeur and jouer are not pronounced the same that creve is cleft and hearts are rent in two along the borders of the states that dotted line set out on maps that crossing the International Bridge like Orpheus in a hearse my knowledge of mythology being slim my efficiency on lyres unrenowned the word seeming like it should have a k: unreknowned or unrenowkned or something Canadian like ice or amethyst that k mobile like a buzzing phone that lights up like a heart in a theatre where The Waterboy is playing dubbed into French and thusly is not as funny.
Hearts are dim inside when seen; they rarely pulse or beat like in the films or buzz like in Operation. They sit there on your plate when removed, like stars years away and awful.
______"5,#
%#&#$#(#2###1#9#&#=#9#&# ______
V8","88*!('.)$8(8* * This poem like you, my armless brother is broken up and gold; its skin wet with dreaming cysts lines that bust and bubble up from beneath the milky epidermis, from some new and hidden surly organ that, from the body’s basement, breathes.
Its skin displays the features of disease, the controlled blood dots scabs, the sores and holes that lay still open to the air unresolved like the failure of a rhyme to click the lack of stitch that brings the meaning to a close.
The faceless specialists inform me of its gaps deliver the sad prognosis say I must give you up my brother my poem that I must turn you over to scans and white machines analysis and anesthetic.
Meters will surround your bed keeping tabs on your progression but of course there’s nothing they can do. It’s written in the words those cords so taut that tie your ropy DNA
______"5-# %&$(2##19&=9&# to mine to our gasping grandfather and the machine that kept him breathing and to all the collecting dead that line the family’s halls like mourners cut in black along an aisle through which your flawless armless body, brother, slowly moves in its march down to the flame.
______"5.
%#&#$#(#2###1#9#&#=#9#&# ______
+2*J%0,"88*@%$&/"%78*O%'2"%*-(8&* SI$&*()*B%6"%*$D*30#$%&')9"T* * Angel of Incidence Angel of Dream Violence Angel of Reflection Angel of Ziebart Rustproofing Angel of Huge Snow Angel of Gasoline Stored in the Basement Angel of Phosphorus Bits Found on the Tracks Angel of Alum Poured over Pizza Angel of Unbreakable Combs Angel of Carob Angel of Domestic Beer Angel of Poorly Made Beds Bruised Angel Angel of Difficulty in Brushing Your Gums Angel of Dream Logic Angel of Stop Signs Set on Fire Angel of Running Away Angel of Plastique Angel of Saltpeter and Vaseline Angel of Crushed Trachea Angel of Gas and Detergent Angel of Bomb Angel of Armlessness Angel of Static Angel of One Too Many Emergency Rooms
______"5/# %&$(2##19&=9&#
Sexy Nurse Angel Who Is Featured in Many Good Dreams Angel of Clean Amputation Angel of Asphalt Angel of Structurally Unsound Decks through which One Might Fall Angel of My Friend Corey Who Lost His Hearing Angel of Ore Angel of Irregular Retina Angel of Black Remnants of Mining Angel of Michigan Angel of Words Half-Formed in the Throat Angel of Turpentine Angel of Submersion Angel of Electric Garbage Disposal Angel of Submission Angel of Petty Vandalism Angel Who Is Anatomically Correct Much to My Surprise Angel of Arsenic Angel of Abandoned Mineshafts Angel of Steam Hoists Angel of Angles, Acute and Obtuse Angel of Bear Trap Angel of Power Tool Accident Angel of Cancer Angel of Toilet Sabotage Angel of Primary Colors Angel of Returnable Cans Found in the Ditch Angel of Polishing Stones Angel of Urination in Public Bathrooms Angel of Mineral Deposits Angel of All the Sad Beasts Angel of Big League Chew Angel of Not Making the Cut Angel of Crappy 70s Rock
______"64 +2*J%0,"88*@%$&/"%78*O%'2"%*-(8&*
Angel of Sodomy Angel of Pompeii Angel of Careless Brothers Angel of False Testimony Presented in Court Angel of Snuff Angel of Old Dust Utility Angel Angel of Gangrene Angel of Pure Accident Angel of Perfect Pitch Angel of Bad Intonation Angel of Getting It Right Angel That Cannot Be Fucked With Hairy And Terrifying Angel Most Fearsome Angel Holding My Head In Its Fist Angel That Impales Me in My Dreams Over and Over Angel of What’s Left Angel of X Angel of Resisting Narration Angel of Pie
______"65
$#%#&#%#'###'#(#)#*# ______
!"#$%&' —for Motoko Vining' ' sada locks his car and turns away, leaving it parked on the shoulder of the highway. He crosses the low ditch and begins climbing A upward, following a stream. It’s early autumn; these days, the sun stays low and cool, rolling along the horizon for hours. Most of the leaves on the ground are last year’s—dried and bleached out, the same dull white as bones. Walking under the trees, he breathes in, then exhales, the air cool in his throat. He has a sweater tied around his waist, a canteen on his hip, an energy bar in his pocket. In his hands, he carries only his fishing pole. A year ago was the first, the only time that he’s been to this place. An engineer where he works told him it resembled Japan, and that drew Asada here, stirred his curiosity. His family had moved to the States when he was fourteen, and now he is forty-four; while he doesn’t recognize the similarity in this landscape, he hopes it might startle memories from inside him. He has put off his return all spring, all summer. He had to come before his hesitation stretched out into the first snowfall, before the trip was delayed into next year. His breathing is already coming faster; he slows, but does not stop. This slope climbs for miles, even beyond the timberline, far beyond his destination. He is hiking to where an old stone mill, gutted and abandoned, sits beside the stream, where the remnants of a dam still collect a shallow pool. The stillness there is only disturbed by the gentle slapping of leaves; aspens circle the water. The year before, standing beside the pool, he had seen what he believed was a shadow on the stone wall of the mill. It folded, though, then spread, and he could not see what might have cast it. Climbing along the wall, twisting higher, the shadow moved as if it held weight and was expanding, growing arms and legs. Asada’s chest had gone cold. He had fled down the mountainside, stumbling, not looking back. This time, he won’t run. He’ll
______!""# H/'A")* stay. He has not been surprised for a very long time, and he feels a desire to be shaken. The bank is rough and torn where, months ago, the swollen stream ran. He crosses the stream, trying to follow the clearest path, and fish dart from stone to stone, abandoning the shadows along the edges. Bending, he tightens the laces of his leather boat shoes, the most casual footwear he owns. He wonders if this would be easier with hiking boots, and whether people often hike alone. Perhaps it’s usually done in groups, or in couples. He tries to imagine a woman walking beside him. There is a movement in his peripheral vision, to his right. A deer, standing only twenty feet away, raises its head and stares. It’s a doe, slightly darker than the the leaves on the ground, ears out like funnels, light showing through them so Asada can see the red veins forking there. He can smell her, also, sweet and rank, tight in his nostrils. Lifting his fishing pole, he points it like a gun; the cork grip presses against his cheek as he sights down the round, metal ferrules, straight at the deer. She only snorts at him, unimpressed. She walks away slowly, her white tail switching back and forth. Asada also walks on, in the other direction. He is disappointed in the deer, for not running, and of himself, somehow, for not making her afraid. This is not a marked trail; he is probably the only person for miles. He wonders how she became so accustomed to people. Again, as he climbs, he thinks of women. At the computer company where he works, there are several he’s friendly with, yet the ones he’s pursued have rarely wanted to know him better. White women realize he’s not as exotic as he looks, while Japanese women consider him slow to assimilate, to adapt to life in the States. None of these women work in his department, so they cannot understand, cannot know how it affects a person, translating technical correspondence. He uses Japanese words that most Japanese would not know, English words that Americans would never encounter. Together, these two groups of words are like a third language— one beset by redundancy, with two words for every single thing, with almost no one to share it. Tree branches cross like latticework overhead. He holds his fishing pole in front of him, clearing spiderwebs. Today, he doesn’t mind being by himself. He doesn’t want to explain his expectations to anyone and, besides, he feels things are more likely to happen if he’s alone. The bushes thicken.
______"6! G(3(2##29:<#
Parting them with his hands, he looks down just in time to avoid stepping on a dead bird. A crow or raven, its black feathers still shiny while its eyes crawl. Asada holds his breath. After a moment, he hears a car on the highway, distant now, somewhere below. He leaves the dead bird behind. He has been walking under the trees, in the shadows, for over an hour when he steps into the clearing. The side of the mill facing the pool is lit by the sun. The white stone wall looks cold and bright; the three windows— two low, one above—are squares of darkness. For a moment, it seems that the mill has moved closer to the water, and then he realizes it’s the breadth of the pool that’s changed. The pool is all reflections. The tips of the aspens bend inward, stretching there. Birds dart low across the surface, doubling in the water, folding their wings to plummet, opening them to rise. Asada stands near the low dam, where all the earth has been washed from between the white stones. He looks into the mottled gray trunks of the aspens, at their bright yellow leaves in the sun. Behind the mill, a broken fence stretches, wooden rails down in some places; further along, a whole section has collapsed. He notices that there’s no lure on the end of his line, not even a hook. It doesn’t matter. He casts out his bare leader and the pool ripples and settles. Little trout rise, curious, holding themselves steady in the clear water. He watches until they lose interest, and then he reels in the line. A breeze rolls down the mountain and the aspens’ round leaves slap and clatter. Asada shivers, sweat drying inside his clothes. His legs and feet are sore from the hike. Then, it begins. Ten feet from where he stands, where the pool drops off into slightly deeper water and he can no longer see the bottom. It’s as if something is rising from below—an indistinct shape, its edges finding clarity, different shades verging on colors. A round face, almost, a darker body, flickering, trailing off. Asada’s heart accelerates, his scalp tightens. A cloud’s reflection slides across the pool, blurring the surface, and the image does not return. He looks up, then, toward the mill—it seems a dark shape moves in one of the low windows, as if someone was standing there and has slipped behind the wall, beyond where he can see. Asada unties the sweater from his waist and sets it on the ground, in case he has to move quickly. He reminds himself that he is more curious than afraid. Attempting to appear calm, he again casts out his line; this time, the trout don’t even bother to pretend they’re interested. He looks away
______"67 H/'A")* from the pool, squinting into the aspens, the shadows between them. What he thought were natural marks are actually letters, he realizes, initials and words that people have carved into the trunks. Between the stones at his feet, he now notices cigarette butts; they don’t appear to be especially old. The second time the figure rises, the reflection is in a different place— across the pool, nearer the opposite bank, surfacing between the trunks of trees. Asada looks away, at the mill. The lower windows are empty. He looks up, to the window above. It is the figure of a woman, standing thin and dark. Steady, unmoving, hands held out in front. It is difficult to make out the face’s expression, to tell if the features are Asian or otherwise. The long hair is tangled, hanging across the face. The dress is loose, or perhaps it’s a kimono; it hangs as if wet. The figure appears to have just climbed out of the water. And then—it’s difficult to tell if the figure moved, or how, or which direction—the window is empty. Asada almost calls out, but he does not. There are rules, he feels; calling out might simplify the situation, and that is not what he desires. Waiting, trying to remain patient, he wonders if someone standing in the trees, somewhere further up the slope, might cast their image into the pool so it was reflected upward, so it appeared in the window. No, he decides—if that were the case, the figure would have been upside down. Asada sets his fishing pole on the ground. Wading, tripping through the bushes, breaking low branches in his hands, he heads around the back of the mill. The wooden door has a lock attached to it, but the hasp has been torn from the wall. The bottom of the door is sunken into the ground; he manages to bend the top enough to wedge his way through. There is no one else inside. Above, there is the sky, no roof at all. There is no remnant of a second floor, either—not even a ledge beneath the upper window, twenty feet above. No place anyone could stand. Asada steps over crushed, faded beer cans, over the ashes of an old fire. A trickle of water enters under one wall, slips away beneath another. Standing at one of the low windows, he looks out across the pond, to where his fishing pole rests, next to his sweater, which is folded on the white stones. He bends his neck and looks up the smooth wall, at the high window. If he wants the figure to return, he decides, it would be best to return outside, to stand where he had been, to concentrate on the pool’s reflections. He crosses to the door and forces his way back through.
______"6" G(3(2##29:<#
The air has turned cooler. He puts on his sweater, eats the energy bar, drinks water from his canteen. He holds his fishing pole like a sword, slicing it through the air. Now it is dusk, and the spaces between the aspens are difficult to see; above, the yellow leaves are pale, unlit. Shadows extend darkly across the pond, threatening to seal off all reflection. He wants there to be every chance, but soon he will be unable to see; he’ll have to follow the stream through the darkness, its sound, all the way down to where his car waits. The black shape comes through the water like a seal, cutting smoothly beneath and not quite breaking the surface. No reflections remain, only shadows. Asada looks upward, toward the mill. The figure has returned, and the face is now more distinct; the hair is thrown back, the features clearly Asian. The arms are still held out. The edges of the shoulders begin to shiver, as if the solidity cannot be maintained, as if the whole thing might dissipate, blow away. And then it begins to climb through the window. Asada expects it to leap into the pool from that height, but it does not. And it does not swing a leg over the sill, but slides through headfirst. As it comes, it changes, turning fluid, seeping beyond itself. Shadowy, it twists like smoke, rolling down the stone wall, leaving wet marks in its wake, loosing tentacles and spinning them back to the center. At the bottom, the mass unfolds, never settling; it slides across the ground, into the thick bushes. Asada stands, holding his breath. He will not turn his back. He will not run. His ribs flex inside his chest, their cage rattling its hinges. His senses of taste and smell, his touch and hearing and sight, they are all whittled sharp. In a moment, the head rises above the line of bushes, on the other side of the pool, just visible against the dusk. Wavering, becoming solid, the body appears in sections, as if ascending a hidden flight of stairs. Then, feet still hidden in the underbrush, the figure starts up the slope. The legs seem to move slowly, yet the body slides smoothly along, its speed increasing. As it heads into the trees, the shadows thicken behind it. Asada steps quickly, his feet kicking the white stones so they skitter across each other and splash into the pool. When he reaches the aspens, he hesitates, then begins running between them, up the slope, in the direction the figure disappeared. His fishing pole rattles through low branches, snaps in half across a tree trunk; he stumbles, drops it, the line tangling and snapping, the whole thing dragging behind him and finally letting go.
______"6, H/'A")*
He arrives in a clearing, the ground still slanted, where trees have fallen. Rotten and hollowed trunks cross each other; dried grass pokes up between them. Asada feels that he is close. He breathes deeply, bending over, his hands on his knees. And then, inside a round knothole of one of the fallen trees, he sees what looks like fabric. Dark and wrinkled, yet not a shadow. He steps closer, and pushes his finger gently through the knothole. As soon as he touches the cloth, a high-pitched screaming sounds from the fallen tree. Asada stumbles backward, falling to the ground. The quiet returns, and yet, through it, there is the faint sound of scratching, of movements within the log. Asada stands, and moves carefully to the hollow end. He squints against the falling darkness. In a moment, a tangle of black hair begins to emerge. It is a girl, he realizes, a young woman. Loose bark falls from her hair; there’s dirt smudged on the pale skin of her face. Her features are delicate, beautiful. Slowly, she crawls from the log and stands, five feet from Asada. Her kimono is soaking wet, and so long it hides her feet. She brushes her hair from her face with long, pale fingers, and tries to smile; her expression is frightened. “Tadasu-san,” she says, her voice low and melodious. “Watashi ga dareka wakaranai no ne?” “No, I don’t recognize you,” he says. “Tadasu-san ga nihon wo detekara 30-nen mo tatsu mono ne.” “Thirty years?” Asada hesitates, realizing that he is answering her in English. It is the language that comes first to him; she seems to understand. “Why did you run away?” he says. “Who are you?” “Sugu ni koe wo kakerare nakkatta,” she says. “Tadasu-san ni watashi no iukoto ga wakatte moraenai to omotta no.” “You were right,” he says. “I don’t understand.” “Yumi yo,” she says. “Itoko no.” “Why did you come to me?” he says, but she does not answer him, not right away. Instead, she begins to tell him her story. It has been thirty years since he’s seen his cousin, Yumi, and then she was a baby. That was in Japan; she stayed behind, and she is still there, she tells him now. Her body is there, but it is in a place where no one will ever find it. It is in a forest, far from any town, where no one would expect her to be. She rests in a shallow ravine, and leaves have settled on her, icy floodwaters have washed her
______"6- G(3(2##29:<# clean. Over a year has passed since she died. Silt has thickened around her; roots have taken hold, stretched straight through her. It is wonderful. As she talks, Asada watches her carefully, trying to understand. Her voice is like a song, surrounding him, like nothing he’s ever heard. He wants to reach out and touch her, but he doesn’t dare; he fears she’ll sink into the ground, or rise and dissipate through the trees’ branches. When he’d stuck his finger through the knothole, her body felt solid. Pieces of bark still hang from her hair. She is saying that no one in Japan knows that she is missing. She had fallen out of contact with her family—she is ashamed to tell him the details, not that they matter. She is happy now. “Why did you come to me?” he says again. “Anata ga watashi ni tottemo aitagatteta kara,” she says. Asada believes this—she has shown herself to him because he had wanted to see her, had needed it, more than anyone else. And he does not pull away when Yumi steps closer. As she leans against him, there is no sound, no change in sensation. The only light is from the moon. Asada turns a slow circle, his eyes searching in every direction. His arms close around himself. He is alone.
______"6.
3#2#(#>#'#=###;#+#3#=#(#)#)## ______
N$)()*J#$9%2#/2* * Farewell / Is a word / That must be / Like a sword / That has worn out / The scabbard. —Frank Stanford
FRAGMENT ONE
Sensitive gyroscopes making awkward leaps bring me here, like a new sport, a new dance, feeling intrigued but trying to bring you along. I’m inviting you to meet a friend, who I wouldn’t recognize myself except the novel road curves towards his home, circles it and does a little number engaging his own qualities into their fullness. Akin to a sparring match, and actually, that’s right. The one is engaged in combat, though only to illustrate a handhold, or a sense of balance, the Wu Wei inside a fall, through the mastery he possesses. Because the matter is a sword, a handle for us both, to the battle, or closer cut to the bone, the one, my friend, who has prepared to do battle.
FRAGMENT TWO
My friend is ronin, a creature of honor who no longer has agency to honor or to be honored except in fear. At one time, in its time, to be ronin was dishonor to a samurai but then, as the world died and the shoguns were lost into the minds of the populous, all samurai were without place. Generations later almost all samurai became ronin, wandering samurai, tacticians, generals, executioners, uncontrolled. But you might already understand, because you are close to me, just a few degrees off, and are alive in a time of secret educations, and perhaps you have seen the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura. I watch for samurai who have forgotten scars but not battles.
______"6/# 32(>'=##;+3=())#
FRAGMENT THREE
Come to the center of the archetype, the temple. I am talking about the place where myth overwhelms the most elegant features of histories, recorded in books and films and uncovered in antiquity by scientific means, to become a convincing, intriguing truth. Magic is the place where complexity overcomes itself to become instantly comprehensible, simplicity which shines, lantern in the briar, rosette in glass, clearly. No simple order is magic like this until seen by the magical eye, the eye like Thich Nhat Hanh’s which sees “a cloud floating in this sheet of paper.”
FRAGMENT FOUR
The samurai stands in the temple, stretched by many forces. Personal and impersonal forces. I see many lives layered over his. I once had a woman in my life who I called my samurai, once when she came out of her bathroom in black geometric kimono. And she was unlike any other who I called samurai, in private or in jest. My others were like the ronin, though feared and lonely with lost companions, free and dignified by their own practice, though they only chopped wood. She, tired and stiff, was still toiling under a shogun. Her days with a camera to her eye, directing the battles of other men, a gilded position with few moments of freedom. She needed to be stroked, given everything without effort, but still strictured by obedience and honor was her elastic and exalted skill. Fealty gave her art but the canvases were rolled up and sold without being seen by her concubines and peers.
FRAGMENT FIVE
Consider dignity and grace, in battle as in life, as the hallmarks of samurai in a society of poor thieves and farmers. These honed skills wielding sword and landscape in massed battle must have been like a jeweled cat fight, faceted, shimmering ghosts, machines, swarming clockwork of genius. As like a painting into life, like floods in slow motion.
______"!4 N$)()*J#$9%2#/2*
FRAGMENT SIX
But modern history records a time when the elaborate gilded education of strategy and war was cast aside. The hierarchy shifted and samurai were seen amongst the common like blades without scabbards, ferocity without meaning, agents bereft of agency. This means something to me just now. Think of armies disbanding en mass after a cataclysmic war. Always, the warriors return to villages and cities, becoming fishermen and bakers again, grandmothers and stepfathers, disappearing with their scars. I believed the empires destroyed many men, taking identities with their fall. But some lives cannot hide inside work, a job, or lose the meaning of their discipline. The lives of saints who cut their hair and build houses, who give credence with their gravity to the invisible college, the mystical order of secrecy and wisdom.
FRAGMENT SEVEN
My ronin pours me a complicated drink, hot when it reaches me, and doesn’t waste a word on me in my observable mood. He serves as is appropriate and graceful. Tact finds important work at every depth of intimacy. No veil unpierced, I think. Remember the story of the ronin shaving his head and wearing monks’ robes in a practiced act of deception. He is not a sword so that when he attacks, the deceived doesn’t remember to fight instead of bowing, and staggers out bent impaled on his own plucking. No Sword. Not just snatching a sword from his opponent to then cut him, but to fight as if a sword was not important. The knife sings when there and when not. When the ronin returns we must act out the ritual of ordering and eating to its end, like deep cover, then a second drink and he joins me. I see all his knives laid out, which one he selects to discuss, clean. Not to cut, and an education has begun. He eschews credentials and so cannot bestow them, can receive no pledge, or very little at all, only contracts with other loose blades for a renegade conflict, rush the fortress again. Possibly just a trick to invite death.
______"!5 32(>'=##;+3=())#
FRAGMENT EIGHT
When I die, the world that I lived in will continue as it was. I cannot take anything from it, but I won’t be able to sustain any more attention to it. My concerns will remain the same only less diffuse, like I’ve finished sweeping up the endless shattering glass of my living and must begin to inspect the pilings. To invite death all the way in, to the bedroom of the matter. When I die I will run out of this world like melting ice, once so still for a lifetime. What I remember is once Briar Rabbit and I, Briar Aspirin, were walking past one of those freestanding kitchens out in the wood. They appear like a multi-purpose stage set for homeless Baba Yaga. They stand empty, big windows and a big bell at the doorway to announce dinner for anyone, for Vassalissas carelessly wandering. Well, we notice this sound, quick high and punctuated, whizzing inside. And so I say: “Well, well. Guess there’s something for us to look into.” Rabbit hunched her shoulders and said, “I can’t see anything.” That’s because it was the smallest thing you’d think to look carefully for flying into a window over and over again, the little Briar Hummingbird. Thing was smash smash smashing his self while I tried waving it away. Those few snarls and arm-wavings made me ache with the fear I suppose I was after. And it didn’t work either, Hummingbird was frantic: some sad character in my life had left the door open and little humming one-track mind got lost inside. Door was still open but he hadn’t found the way out, which still makes sense if you’re not trying to think like yr neighbor or yr humankind friend. Rabbit said around to me from inside “Little chest on this bird, pounding hard. I’ve never been so close to one. Or at least not where I had all the power and authority.” I needed to ask what she meant. “Well, see, little little scared one doesn’t know how not to die in here, and lords, if we can’t save him, we’re no better, but from here, from now, I know all Hummingbird needs to know. The way out is over there.” She had a point. We set about trapping the Briar Hummingbird, just like you catch a spider, covering him with a basket, and sliding a firm surface, as is recommended, under bird in question. Only we were awfully clumsy, or I was, Rabbit calling caution, cause now Hummingbird was inactive, not caring what happened to precious leg or feather. I was frightened. Little thing’s heart is meant to be suspended in flight, like when I’ve seen him, all precision and magical appearance and lack of concern with the rest of us. This seemed dangerous, like a shark forgetting to swim
______"!6 N$)()*J#$9%2#/2* or a deep thing brought up to the surface too fast. We carried him out to the little porch on the kitchen and uncovered him. Long whistle and low blowing on Hummingbird but he doesn’t stir. Rabbit says, “I never imagined hummingbirds could play dead.” And he was still, oooh, totally still, and all I can think is I just met him, that if I just left him alone, there’d be nothing for me to do now, now that he’s dead. Even when we see tiny subtle eye movements and the pounding chest return, Hummingbird wanted to do nothing but lie on his back. Should the Briar friends just leave the little one alone now? Without an ending to the story? With tears almost in my eyes, the pound pound pounding smash smashing mystery of loving beauty and swiftness, so much to be hurt amongst the constant death and forgetting of the sharp strange Briar world. And in an Aspirin way I just wanted to knock him around, but the Briar Wind came to us first. These two old friends made a quick arrangement, too quick for Rabbit or Aspirin eyes and he was up and gone. Just waiting. Stuck on his back like Turtle but free like anything without a terrible mind, in an instant. “Well,” Rabbit said, “good job.” On the windowsill there was a single gray feather from that battle. A willing sacrifice, playing dead to my heavy hands. “Amen,” said the briar and the bog.
FRAGMENT NINE
I am only safe with samurai. Only the honed blade, the most apparently dangerous can coexist with a person such as myself. Who will sit in the glade of yellow flowers knowing brigands are coming over the hill in moments, and peacefully weave a silent daisy chain of dreams with me. And speak softly with me. I won’t rouse in time, too close to sleep, failing even to boast or brag against old cruelty. Only ronin will sit long nights with a fool, uninfected by dementia. Unangered by fantasy and obvious gullibility, almost enthralled with fatal awe.
FRAGMENT TEN
How will I write something that will hold this magic together? (A story of episodic partners) Brilliance binds these things but will you see the sun or
______"!! 32(>'=##;+3=())# just my shadowy objects? Most folk tales won’t try to convince you, they’re just already true, at least how I’ve heard it.
FRAGMENT ELEVEN
I remember leaving the ronin, the one great and honorable ronin. It was springtime though the desert only just barely showed it to me, then or now. He saw another acolyte leaving for the wilderness, errant, another heedless attempt to escape an ineffable lesson. I had listened though, to their stories as he wove, where they gathered their armor and their manuscripts to risk never coming back, or falling in love in a way that keeps the bow headed for ever deeper seas. I thought I would always know the way back. He knew that there was no risk: once gone, never coming back. The months forget their names need telling, and the dangers are only kept to a distance with watching, simple spelling, or staying.
FRAGMENT TWELVE
Throwing down your sword is also an art of war. If you have attained master of swordlessness, you will never be without a sword. The opponent’s sword is your sword. This is acting at the vanguard of the moment…
…not to grasp (the opponent’s) attempt to keep hold (of the sword) is also “swordlessness.” —Yagyu Munenori
Before in our lives we have all gone down to some river or another and spoken with those who don’t often speak. We tell them about the black fumes of our dreams roots smoldering and asleep. —Frank Stanford
______"!7
;#+#?#;###=#3#(#'#&#*#(#2#?## ______
!"G$&($)*
- 1 -
This is about devotion, the eye that sees everything, where I put my hands, how I walked away from you. I heard your watch ticking, my arms were numb. I could count each of my steps; when I looked back, it started raining. You said, “Look at all those beautiful clouds.” This is how air turns into water, this is where our prayers turned into conversations. This is the silt on my shoes.
This is the pool we are wading through, this is the portion we are given. It is dark as ink soaking into a paper napkin, where I wrote my name and new address. There is a fountain of tears boiling in the desert. There is a plaza where I last saw you. There is time for me to tell you this.
______"!"# ;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 2 -
Who is lost, who is drifting? I am, but we hide behind what keeps us here. The world is ink, I can’t tell you about it. So who will listen to your matchstick bones? Who won’t answer your questions? Listen to me. Did God tell you to break all your dishes? Did you know what to do? Because I don’t like what I’m doing. The beautiful God of the desert, dark as ink, smooth as skin, like a plum with a pit on a tree, deaf as a stump and nothing but answers, that God waves an arm: like fish caught in a net, you, me and the dead are carried snapping aloft. The holy beasts stand before us. That’s what I’m told. It’s what I want to believe.
When I say words are mistaken, worn-out, off-balance, irrelevant, like God they turn against us and where we want to go, I mean I’m not happy here, and God evades me in this place. We were in the yard, it was cold outside. Did you look up at me? I was speechless, I wanted to be carried into the sky like a child. You want to believe God will make everything clear. Instead God tells you to breathe, so I’m asking you to breathe; be the breath for all these devotions, let me know. I ask this in your name.
______"!, !"G$&($)*
- 3 -
Hold still for the barber of devotion, try to forget about breathing, listen to your ribcage. God is shaving close against your heart, on the floor is a nest of hair, everything else you don’t need. You look out the window as if it were a waste of time, but it’s not, it is as obvious as the alley you have to walk through. Devotion is a stranger walking behind you; devotion is a thief in your pocket, a razor against your throat, a man with a gun; devotion is broken glass and grand larceny, a puddle in the road, a shattered windshield; it’s what you slip against, what you’re pushed into; look at the dead bird: that is devotion, and the holy people who get in your car: they are laughing at you, and when there is nothing you can do against other people’s anger, that stranger pulls you out, rescues you. He says God is between us. We are always dancing. What you can’t keep, you will learn.
______"!- ;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 4 -
It should be made out of ice. It should melt inside us. It’s what we want, where we should live the rest of our lives; this empire of blue, we are shivering to hold onto this place. Let God fill my mouth: I will give you my coat. I will invent what I can’t keep. I will be a stone building, a penitential hotel with gardens and fountains overflowing, where you can stay for weeks and nothing has to happen, where all things are necessary, they sing in a language your heart can listen to. Listen to me.
______"!. !"G$&($)*
- 5 -
Devotion is your house on fire. It already knows how to burn. It was burning because everything waits, once you know this you are in the revolutionary kingdom, you are one step higher; it’s the word that drives you away from your neighbors, you don’t need them. I am a torment of birds against the throne of God. I am on fire with love: let me feed more paper into you. The smoke will lift you up with me. I will carry you on my shoulders. I will feed you sandwiches. When you can’t sleep, when your voice collapses from singing, I will drizzle honey down your throat. I will build and build and build, I must, I need to, I have no choice, I have no time. I am falling out of the sky, and God says devotion is so much air it could smother us, or allow us to burn one minute longer: you know what you want. It is as easy as breathing. We have such crippled lungs.
______"!/ ;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 6 -
Forget about drift, it doesn’t belong to you. Listen to what you say, it follows you around. You can’t remember where you left it. Again and again. You will find it, you will swallow it whole, it will walk all over you, it will swim inside you, this love, this love we can barely stand; we are bending to one side, we are longing— who cares if our words are mistaken, if our arguments turn into prayers, like bones and feathers on a dead bird, if there is too much between us.
Open your mouth and sing.
______"74 !"G$&($)*
- 7 -
Forget who is lost, who was left in the desert, I will show you the secret fountain, I will bathe your feet in its waters, you will hear it raining devotion, you will feel God drifting around us; my friend, even your bones are breathing, a musician playing the flute of your body.
In this city we move through music, we do not know the words, we are quick as raindrops, evangelical, we break all the dishes, shout nothing repeats that isn’t reflecting God’s pattern: here is the book of my right arm, the thigh that knows everything about dancing, you know what to do.
The God of the desert, that you can’t remember, who was here before there was a desert, who will persist in the rain, that is whirlwind and feather, breathing hot glass, dark as smoke, a flock of birds that fill up the sky, calling your name, the dead, luminous stars scattered among them, over a pool reflecting love, is here, is here, is here, is here!
______"75 ;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 8 -
What are you going to do about devotion, evangelical as a pen writing, as a nest of hair? You were having a dream. There was something you knew that you can’t remember. You saw a storm of birds darkening the sky, God’s love reflected in a piece of broken glass: you picked it up because it was yours. You cut your hand. You told me, you said, “we want to go, get out of this need, just fall asleep, carried out of the sky like angels.” Devotion is a fistful of broken pieces I can’t put back together: it cuts into my hands the more I try to hold onto you. You said when God tells you to invent what you can’t keep, you discover memory, you tuck your limbs into yourself, you listen, you never hear.
______"76 !"G$&($)*
- 9 -
About all this breath, should it come to a stop, what will you do when you have to answer for your devotion? Will you blame it on the India ink, the broken pen, the airplanes that darkened the sky? You forgot how to read, you think God is an abstraction, you hear this voice, you can feel the heat of its breath on you, it says “there is no limit to what I am singing,” that voice, it is terrible, it is bending over us, a flexibility, you live because you don’t deserve to live. The only freedom is the freedom from memory. And you, in your bed, in your dreamy constellations, you feel a kiss, rasping against your skin, you’re hungry all the time: you imagine how beautiful everything could be, you are told the secret of turning broken glass into diamonds, it calls for a lot of blood: you wake up with your ears bleeding.
______"7! ;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 10 -
We are here out of need we’ve been eating our anger like soup, from a chipped bowl, on a crowded, dirty table, leaning into God, who moves away, touching the inside of this: we want to know who wrecked us, who left us; what we want to do is unresolved between you and me, all graceful and slowly backwards, a storm we watch approaching, breathing out and listening: in this world that’s not going to be here much longer, we are fish longing for air, even when it burns; we’ve been learning how to swim for years.
______"77 !"G$&($)*
- 11 -
About our longing for oxygen, this is the heart that wobbles for you. I don’t know what to do with my devotion. I think about cooking with you last night, the scent of pepper, my two hands in the air, the sink in the kitchen, breathing, the bumps of your spine.
I want to say we can lean against each other, we can listen. If it isn’t music, it could be steady enough for dancing, it could be held in your hands, it could be bread, an onion, a sharp knife, and this could be what we are wading towards, looking outside, God is a car full of people leaning out the windows, riding the sideboards. There’s room for us if we want to get in, there’s a place for us, it will sustain us.
______"7" ;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 12 -
Who was in the desert with you, who heard your watch ticking: where were you when it was raining up devotion?
It isn’t love that has you on her teeth, up on a rail: you listen to radio acrobats but you’re not dancing.
And there was a plaza, there was a fountain. I saw your bones breathing, I was with you like a pen writing against your skin; we ate plums, waved our arms between the sun and our eyes.
Donna, why do our conversations turn into prayers? when God says words are mistaken, who are we leaning against? There is so much between us, we can’t even reach the inside of it.
God tells us to be cornerstones. God says all things are possible. God grants us devotion like a handful of water, but it has to be full of glass. We wake up bleeding, we ask, what do we do with this?
______"7, !"#$%&$'(
- 13 -
She said you rely on blood too much, try living, try the empirical kingdom, try the chocolate cake, it’s delicious, or melt the candy angels, you rely on angels too much. She said take my hands, hold onto this: you won’t remember what you’re not allowed to keep; the love of God is a word that can be written underwater, that you may write it and write it and write it, so that it is indelible, so that it is a tattoo, a new language that is impossible to lie with. She said if you love me you will write my name.
______!"# ;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 14 -
So this is the second skin, and we are need all over, we talk to the dead, turn into prayers, leaning over in places, into you and me: I want to tell you everything about devotion, the bowl of plums, the saints off balance, how your hands turn into birds, the wineglass in a nest of feathers; when I feel you near me, I feel like the ocean, fresh and floating in salt water, the eye of a whale that is the size of your fist; when I see you I hold my breath, I know in my chest, in my lungs, the plums are for us, we sleep in the possible, I want to give you what I’m not allowed to keep.
______"7. !"G$&($)*
- 15 -
Listen to the typewriter of devotion, worn out, off-balance, wobbling, it will write on your heart everything you can’t keep, a new memory, a cornerstone, it will have weight, but we are made out of tissue paper, the ink soaks right through. I want to be graceful. I want to know where I’m going. I want God to give me a new set of directions. I want to know where to put my hands as I feed more paper into the machine.
I want someone to say, hold onto this, let me fill your mouth with smoke, I know what to do.
My ears could leap off of my head I’m listening so hard. I’m bending to one side. I am trying to understand, but all I hear is one watch ticking, the sound of my bones thinning, the sound of dirt.
______"7/ ;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 16 -
Says give yourself up to me. Says you will see the glory of my throne. Says the air turns into lightning. Says the cars bending to one side. Says the hurricane of my love. Says you will see my name in words of fire. Says you will know it, says it was written for you. Says I need you, says I forgive you, says this is my body, you are touching the inside of it, your hands stirring up everything. Says breath and water. Says this is also devotion: you will roll like a float in the sea, in drift, here. Says let this be an undertaking between us, says an open book, speaks in words of fire, Says I am what is yours, says I am helpless, says my hands are gentle lies, cupping you.
______""4 !"G$&($)*
- 17 -
We are need. So what. We are moving, we are used to that. We think we understand our world as a collection of paper and letters, piled high, growing larger, leaning into you and me, into the words we’re not allowed to repeat, the holy name worn-out in places; we’re up to our waists, hungry, bobbing in waves that push us off-balance gulping, or else so certain, we forget how to swim, turn into frogs, get used to everything, turn up the heat, turn it up like a master. We would be casual in it, it would be so easy, we’d be good, we’d be quiet, we will boil, like food, gracefully.
______""5 ;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 18 -
This isn’t music, it repeats, the same words in different orders, evangelical, like an alarm clock, a message on your machine: There are some people God commands. They look stupid. You don’t see what they’re seeing. Would you rather be innocent? Would you pour honey down my throat? Would you let me starve? You argue, you know what to do, will you do it? Will you pay for what you want, even if you don’t know you want it?
All the phone lines are dead. The yard is full of bees. You are trying so hard to believe, you would pull out your tongue to stop the lying, but it’s already fall. There is too much between us, we have nothing to talk about. There are no miraculous airplanes of love, no angels swooping down to save us, no wise men looking out for us. Just smoke rising from the burning leaves. It’s not the words you want to hear that you have to protect.
______""6 !"G$&($)*
- 19 -
Devotion is a fist: peel back the fingers. Study hands, the secret life can be read into the palm, the imprint of nails, what is no longer remembered, another body left in the desert, ants crawling all over. Not certain anyone is ever listening, not certain about anything, who will listen? Who will put it to use? She says I cannot keep it inside anymore. I don’t care anymore. I tuck it into myself, but my hands stick out.
______""! ;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 20 -
You know nothing, you’re implicit, you’re lost, you’re sleeping: I’m watching you breathe, and nothing breaks that doesn’t bring me with it, evangelical as an eye reading the book of your heart; it will open, and God will see the conversations we wrote in there, that grew out of need, the grief that puts us back where we belong.
______""7 !"G$&($)*
- 21 -
Whether anything happens, we are equal in these cracking days: in the teeth, the fish, the trembling man and the tiny sky....
If we are falling out of the world, like angels wobbling, if we are so close together, when we move we aren’t dancing, we want to, we want to.
We want to be graceful. We hold onto this: there is an ocean around us reflecting God, and we are going to wade through it. We are going to float upon its surface. We are going to be weightless. We are going to swim, we don’t know when, but we will. It has been promised, it belongs to us:
Let God invent anchors, we will be ships.
______""" ;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 22 -
In all these years, we were flying fish, our mouths were hands, our lips fingers, we were longing for air. It was raining, the heavens smeared in octopus ink, and I couldn’t stay. Because if clouds were simply water, if it had only lasted a second, it was the sky full of cranes that made me think this about you, it was us in a car and a feather floating down. We were driving away, so who is to say where we were? We saw God dancing, and now I don’t know what to do with my hands. If devotion is a net, who do I let go?
______"", !"G$&($)*
- 23 -
Devotion is drifting where you won’t listen: I am always listening. The sound of your watch keeps me awake, The watch you found in the desert, the one you placed on the headboard above me. I wish this would stop. I want to break all your dishes. I smashed each of your glasses, it didn’t help. We are wading through what we don’t want to explain. It doesn’t matter. When I had a dream I was with you in your kitchen, when you opened up a jar and showed me a porcelain egg in a nest of hair, when it turned into a snake, when you said this is where you get what you deserve, I didn’t know what to do with my tears. I woke up against you, and there was so much between us, all I could do was breathe.
______""- ;+?;##=3('&*(2?#
- 24 -
Just look at my hands, the ink under my fingernails; I’m not a fountain, I forget this all the time. I stretch my arms out and act like I’m bronze. I can’t predict the future, but when it is raining I can believe anything. I can go for a walk and think my bones are full of devotion, grace drifting and evangelical. I can claim we are fish longing for air, that we are moving from need. But here I am, I’m stuck, I want to be what I am writing, a fountain, a storm of birds, a miraculous airplane, but this is my arthritic mouth, and this is the hand that clutches, this is what fell out of the sky when I wasn’t looking, the dead bird that shakes itself and flies away.
This is devotion. I don’t have enough of it. I want to give it away. I want it to live apart from me.
I want to talk to God about it, I want to compare notes, I want to break out of language like God can, and be indefinite, and say the right thing, to be able to walk out on myself.
Like a new memory to learn, I will learn it, and I will say it to you, so that it will always be with us, in our weight, in the way we can move, in our limbs when we sleep, when we are tucked into each other, that we are possible even if we are wobbling, and what you can’t keep, I will give away: all there is, it will be enough.
______"".
$#2#(#A###*#+#2#<# ______
I$&"8*$)*K$)8&%=9&($)# *
stopped at the intersection of Mountain and Glenn last night, on my way home—there’s a stop sign there, so it’s nothing unusual. It’s been Itorn up for a few months while the road people do the road things they’re doing all over town, and that I don’t suppose they’re ever going to finish—not that it matters much to me, only it takes a little longer to get around town than it used to. The elderly lady in the boat to my right was reluctant and nervous as she nosed out into the intersection, scraping her undercarriage in the dirt and making the sorts of faces you would expect to see. I lost interest in her progress and looked across the street at the car opposite me, just in time to see the passenger door fly open and a kinda cute chunky girl lurch toward the opening, only to fly backwards back into the car and out of sight. I didn’t get it at first, but figured out the guy had grabbed her hair and pulled her back inside. By the time that part was clear, he’d already moved on to the next stage and was applying his elbow to her face. He pushed her forward, smashing her forehead against the dashboard—the elderly lady gunned it and obscured my view for a second, and by the time she was across the door on the car I was watching was swinging closed. The guy was yelling, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I thought it was some elaborate joke. It had to be. He started across the street and the girl went for the door again, yelling something else I couldn’t hear, and the guy let go of the wheel with one of his hands and let the other one drive while the first punched the girl repeatedly in the face. The cars behind me started honking, annoyed that I wasn’t moving. So I started across, turned the wheel, trying to get behind the guy so I could pass him and cut him off when the road widened and then… I don’t know what then, but something. I mean, right there at the intersection, right there in front of everyone… something should be done. I could lecture him and he could get out and kick my ass while the girl in the car yelled at me to
# $2(A##*+2<# mind my fucking business as she mopped her bleeding eye1. But the next car across from me had already started, cutting me off and making me lose those seconds I needed to catch up to the guy; people behind me screaming out the window to get the hell out of the way, threatening me with a little of their own violence—and usually I think it’s all just idle threats, but I wasn’t so sure anymore. So I drove home.
1 The last time I saw something like this was in 1993, in San Diego. I was, again, driving home and saw a group of about five kids playing in a yard. As I neared them, a car screeched to a halt and one of the kids went a little wobbly and kind of white. A big man jumped out of the car, yelling something, and went for the whiting, wobbly kid. The big man stretched out his big arm and grabbed the kid, who went immediately limp while the man started smacking the kid’s poor little head around. I stopped my car in the middle of the road and ran across the street, saying something really authoritative like, “Hey!” The man turned to me, dropped the kid and punched me a few times while telling me to mind my own goddamn business. I was pretty scrawny and weak, so I went down pretty quick, and the guy gave me a couple of kicks to the stomach and ribs, but I took them, thinking at least the kid’s getting away. I was wrong. When the kicking stopped, I looked up right into the saucer-eyes of the kid, who had absolutely no idea what I was doing there. Then the big man’s big arm eclipsed him and I watched him take a couple more shots to his face before the big man dragged him to the car, telling him how much worse it was going to be when he got home, saying something about how his friends should stay out of it if they knew what was good for them. Another halfhearted kick for me and they left. I knew, as I got out of the car, that I was going to get a little damaged, but I knew also that there was a reason for it, that the end result would be that the kid got away, having run to an aunt’s house or something, and that would set into action a whole string of events that would culminate in the kid going off to Kentucky or Minnesota where he could be a kid—a disaffected, angry kid, sure—but one away from at least this one horrible man. I was so angry at that kid for weeks. Mad at him for negating my gesture. Angry at him for making me make it worse for him. I thought that if the kid had been good enough to just stay home and take his beatings there then nobody else would have gotten hurt. He should have thought about the consequences for the kids who had to watch it, for the people driving by that would have to see it and end up feeling powerless and hopeless, and especially for the guy who was going to try to help out and end up not just powerless and hopeless, but bruised and cracked and bleeding…
I$&"8*$)*K$)8&%=9&($)*
And then last night there was a big raid on the house across the street. I mean, we’re just moving in, still in boxes and tripping over everything in the house, asking each other, “Where’s the spatula?” and “Have you seen that Love and Rockets cd?” and saying things like, “I could have sworn I put the box cutter in this box… why’d you have to use so much tape on everything, huh?” And so we’re kind of immersed in this and Trillian’s mad because we won’t let her play with all the dangerous things in all the open boxes and everything’s moving higher and higher out of reach and we’re telling ourselves it’s just for the moment and we’ll go through the boxes after Trillian’s in bed, and then suddenly it’s like twenty or a million blue and red lights and yelling and pounding and we look out the window and everything is cops everywhere, and they’re all swearing and nobody’s nice or explaining everything because this isn’t on FOX. They drag someone out and after a few hours it’s all calmed down again. Tonight I was walking down the street, thinking I’d check out the park about halfway down the block, thinking about how cool it’s going to be to have a park right there for Trillian to play at… a big cream-colored Cadillac something pulls up, met after a second by a gray Nissan something else, and they do a very overt exchange. A pricey one, too, from the size of the package the Nissan got. The gray car pulls away and I’m standing there in the middle of the street, just a few feet away from them, and someone in the Cadillac leans out and asks what I want. I say nothing. I mean, I tell them that I don’t want anything. I use too many words to say it too, so I guess I say a whole lot more than nothing. The guy gets mad and says all sorts of mean things and threatens me and tells me to stay out of the neighborhood if I’m not looking to purchase… I ask him if paying rent counts. He doesn’t hear me, asks me what I said, asking in that threatening manner, the one that says he doesn’t care what I said; the problem is that I spoke at all. And then there’s a cop rounding the corner and the Cadillac pulls away and the police-guy, still not on FOX, asks me if I’m stupid or something. I say no and he tells me to get out of the street, tells me not to loiter. Tells me I look suspicious. I tell him I live down the street and he says he’s never seen me before. I say that’s because I just moved in, and he asks where and I point and he thinks I mean the house across the street from my house… so he doesn’t like me. See, he was there just last night, and I found out today that the reason he was there was someone in that house had beaten someone to death on 4th Avenue. I tell him, No, it’s the
$2(A##*+2<# house across the street, but I can’t remember the address. I am suspicious. I give him the phone number, ask him to call the number and ask the address and ask my wife do I live in that house (we kept our phone number the same so I wouldn’t have to learn a new one) and he tells me to get out of there… he doesn’t let me walk toward my house, looking suspicious like I do, and so I have to walk out of the neighborhood and around the block, across Glenn, up Tucson and then over and down and back on to my street, where I climb into the alley and crawl through the brush, poking my head through the bushes every minute or so until I find my yard. Crawling through the alley so as to not appear suspicious. I hop the fence and don’t tell my mother-in-law, who hasn’t moved out yet, who leaves for Europe forever in just a few days, who’s so caught up in packing she wouldn’t understand a word I said anyway, and I go to bed. Am going to bed anyway. In just a minute.
I’ve been in a bad mood for the past week or so. Not really grumbling or mad at anyone, just unsettled. The neighborhood we left was worse than the one we moved into—I thought so anyway—the houses here are nicer, the families are families, there are fewer rentals (we’re not really paying rent in our new house, it’s family and we just took over the mortgage, so the only real rental is across the street where the murderers are starting to move out), there aren’t any low-rider hot-rodders gunning it up and down the street at two in the morning and threatening my wife when she asks them to take their arguments out from in front of our house, or even out of our driveway. And that neighborhood was still a billion times better than when I lived in the apartment at MOCA, downtown, across from Pleasure World, where transvestites with knives and guns would try to kill each other a few times a week, where dwarves would offer their short services to me, not believing that I lived in the building into which I was entering. Prostitutes would try to follow me in at least once a week—but somehow that was at least a little funny. Not much, but some. Then there was the interstitial house where Andrea and I lived right after we got married, but before the house with the hot-rodders, where crackheads would beat each other and make up and make love (is that what it is? On crack? What is it?) and then
I$&"8*$)*K$)8&%=9&($)* beat each other again, yodeling strangely on the street corners and no one would ever stop it. It’s just everywhere2,3.
2 It’s even in our public art—on it, anyway. Right there, a few weeks ago, on Broadway and Aviation, where they put those photographic tile mural things, a guy was hanging, dead, from the railing above one of the murals. A normal- looking guy too, except for the whole dead-and-hanging-face-first-against-the- mural thing. I didn’t understand, I turned around and drove back just to make sure that what I thought I saw was in fact what I saw. And it was. Five in the morning, I was on my way to the studio to do some book stuff, and there was this guy… I tried to find out something, anything, but none of the departments or organizations you would expect to have that sort of information would give me anything, or they just didn’t have anything at all. The problem I have here, with this particular incident, isn’t the whole dead-guy thing, but that it’s so commonplace, so trivial, so boring, not worth the time of the police or the newspeople… Not that I want everybody’s business up in all our faces all the time (like it’s not already), but this guy, he’d made it my business, and I wanted to know why. I wanted to know why he felt he had to perpetuate himself in my memory, and since he had done that, just who the hell was he anyway? Not that he was dead, but that he made it my business. 3 Flash back to even earlier, when I was a little rockstar and everything was great. I shared a house with my cousin T. (not really my cousin, we’d just known each other so long that it was easier to say we were cousins—I had a huge Puerto Rican cousin too, his name was P.R.), who would wake me up every morning at 6 by blasting the Grateful Dead on his stereo; living there too was rockabilly Dave and Brandi who did hair. We were watching a movie and one of our neighbors came by, all drunk and sad and we told him to go home. He came back later and told us we had to help him drink his big bottle of vodka. So we poured it into a big glass and gave him the empty bottle and told him to sleep it off. About an hour later it was all cops everywhere and an ambulance and we figured the guy’d hurt himself. He’d actually hurt his roommate, stabbed him in the throat. We stood outside, gawking, and a lady across the street grabbed a cop and pointed a witchy finger at us and said it was all our fault. It had to be. The next day, across the street on the other side—we lived on the corner, so we had lots of across the street neighbors—this guy Jimmy or Greg or something was arguing in his front yard with his girlfriend. He was mad because she always talked to other men. She said, “I’m a waitress, Jimmy or Greg, you idiot, I have to talk to them.” He said she didn’t, she didn’t have to talk to them at all, and she said he was being unreasonable. He said something else, and she
$2(A##*+2<#
Everything is horrible. It was no better when I lived where Richard now lives, with the feeding station across the street—not that I’m saying the feeding station is bad, that feeding people is bad, but they’d spend the times between feedings coming to my door and asking for stuff, and then when I gave this one lady a really beautiful apple, an apple I was so happy to have and so looked forward to
pulled out her vocabulary, a pretty big one, and he took that as a threat and so he defended himself, going two-fisted on her face and stomach. I immediately dialed 911, told them what was going on, gave them the address and told them it’s right across the street from where the stabbing was the previous night, in case they needed any further direction. The operator asked a couple more questions and then Jimmy or Greg picked the girl up and threw her over the fence. “He just threw her over the fence,” I said. I was told the police would be there soon, and I had no doubt as to that, since they made a pretty regular patrol of the area anyway. But they didn’t show up, even though the fight continued for another fifteen minutes. Eventually they went inside, and later the girl went to work to go flirt with men about french fries and sandwiches and coffee. And then after about two hours there was a pounding on my door. I opened it and there was a cop, parked in my driveway, standing on my porch, asking me was I the guy that made the call. I said I was, and said that the incident wasn’t at my house, but at that one—I pointed. He said that everything looked calm to him, and I said that if they’d fucking shown up when the call was made instead of two fucking hours later, it wouldn’t have been such a tranquil scene (while I was talking to the cop, the door of the house of the previous night’s fun opened up and I saw my neighbor poke his head out, smoking a cigarette, a huge bandage on his throat… I wondered if he could use the incision, if he could smoke through it). The cop got mad at me and told me to show some respect if I didn’t want to find myself going to jail. Then he tramped across the street and talked to Jimmy or Greg for a while, leaving his car in my driveway. That night, after we’d all gone to bed, the side door of our house crashed in, and I looked up to see Jimmy or Greg standing over my bed, drunk and really really angry. I could hear Metallica—his favorite band—blasting from his big stereo, his phallic substitute, his huge component system with which he defined himself and defiled the tranquility of our long August evenings. He leaned in and asked who called the cops. He knew it was someone in our house, since the cop had parked in our driveway. I pointed at the wall, at T’s room. Jimmy or Greg broke down T’s door and gave him something of a beating. And yeah, I felt a little bad, but I didn’t hear the Grateful Dead that next morning.
I$&"8*$)*K$)8&%=9&($)*
eating, she got mad and swore at me and threw the apple at a painting on the wall, leaving a big dent in it that I’ve never been able to get back into shape. I think she shit in my driveway too. Someone did anyway. And everyone everywhere is so angry and that really is what it all comes down to in the end. We’ve got grandparents slowly deteriorating, having stroke after stroke after stroke, my grandfather in Massachusetts barely holding on so he can see Trillian again. We’re going out there in a couple of weeks, even though now’s the time I’m supposed to be making the sporks. Somehow it doesn’t seem right to go making them right now. And while I understand why we’re going there, and I want to go, I have the smallest hint of doubt as to what the point is, really. There’s the family point, there’s the Grandpa wants to see Trillian again point, but how long is that going to go on? How much suffering does there have to be? Does seeing the little girl really make the last year and a half worthwhile? Will it justify the next however long? I can’t say. I mean, the functional reality here is that soon he’ll be gone, followed in time by the rest of them and then by us and then Trillian… whether we see each other or not really makes no difference, doesn’t really change anything. I know that we do what we can to find happiness, but the reality at work here is this: Life will be long and hard, all our dreams will amount to nothing, and then we will die. That’s it. That’s really it. And yes, that’s the half-empty view. The all-empty view. But it’s the one that’s there. It’s the one I’ve had in practice for a couple of weeks, had in theory for most of my life. And so it’s with this mood I’ve started the endgame work on this issue of spork. One of the authors makes mention of Camus’ The Stranger, and while that might be cliché, I remembered it, remembered what Camus said, and then remembered another of his books, The Plague, and got to thinking about the both of them, and how the man was saying the same thing I’ve been moaning about in the above paragraphs. Of course, he said it much better than I have here, but it’s his saying it that made me decide to keep my words rather than writing something light and cheery, talking up what a great thing we’re doing here and how we’re going to band with the artists and the Artists and the musicians and everyone and we’re going to make some goofy army that will
$2(A##*+2<# transform everything4. I’m not saying that, because that’s not what’s going to happen. And not because we’re the wrong ones to do it, but because it’s never going to happen no matter who does it. That’s not how it works. And even if it could, there’s no reason to anyway. No reason to transform everything. What Camus said was: Everything is pointless. All your dreams will amount to nothing and then you will die. But he also said that it’s a good thing. O.K. he didn’t come right out and say that, but that was the point. He said you do these things, you help the sick, you paint your pictures, you write your silly books because you want to. Not because you’re going to save anyone or that you’ll change anything on even the least fundamental level, but because you’re a doctor or painter or writer… You do these things because you’ve chosen to be this or that and you choose to act in accordance with your decision. This is far nobler. This is meaningful. I have chosen to make sporks. I’ve chosen to make all kinds of books, for no reason other than my desire to see these books be made. What I’m saying is let’s dispense with all the overly pretentious illusions about our rationale for our actions5. There is no reason to go about things the way we do. But, as me and Albert and so many others are saying6, there
4 Clarification: I firmly believe that we are doing a great and important thing. This does not change the fact that it is ultimately meaningless. And it does not contradict my earlier statements (see Issue 1.2) about what I hope will be my small effect upon my small bit of this small, meaningless world. That our dreams will amount to nothing should never preclude our having them and working our asses off to see that these things are ours. 5 I’m so rife with apparent contradictions here. Yes, keep your dreams, understand why you do what you do. Just be concise, be clear. Have dreams. Have real dreams. Don’t have the I’m gonna save the world ones when it’s actually I’m gonna quit my job someday and write all the damn time. If you are actually going to save the world, then I guess you should keep that dream. If you are the twenty-third coming of whomever, then you may well have every right to have the sorts of overly pretentious intentions that I’m scoffing at. In such case, my apologies, I wasn’t writing this for you. But even you could use a little salt with your intent. 6 What is usually said when this topic comes up: Yeah, yeah, we know, we’ve heard this so many times already. And I know you’ve heard it, I know it’s been said over and over, but it has to be said again and again until we start to understand it. We hear it too early, when we don’t have the framework for understanding that would allow for a useful integration of the idea. We hear it
I$&"8*$)*K$)8&%=9&($)* is no reason not to. The converse of our meaningless existence is: So What? The opposite of pointlessness is pointlessness, but that doesn’t mean we stop and wait to die, or that we end it all without the wait. Instead, we find in exasperation and transience and pointlessness the justification to do whatever the hell we want to do. Take any belief or course of action and arc it out past its conclusion, take everything out past the end of time and it all amounts to the same amount of nothing. The greatest and the least equalized in the end, blended with everything in between… do not delude yourself that you will make a difference, do not tell yourself you have to have a great reason for your actions. Maybe you want to knit potholders your whole life, maybe you want to cure cancer or AIDS. They amount to the same thing—and cancer patients and AIDS patients, don’t they need potholders, too?—so don’t choose one over the other because one’s going to make more difference than the other, since they’re not. Me, I do environmental work to pay the bills. In the rationalist, meaningful-existence view, this is a good thing. But I don’t care. I do it because they leave me alone and I enjoy the work. If I were destroying the environment but they left me alone and I enjoyed the work, I’d still be doing it. I want to pay my bills, I want to be able to buy the supplies I need for spork when spork doesn’t have the money to buy them for itself. I get up early in the morning and come to the studio because that’s what I want to do. It makes me happy. The process of binding a book, or making one of my bad paintings that no one sees, or writing one of my unreadable books that make people smile and nod and say, “It was well written, I can see that,” when they’re feeling generous, or, “I didn’t understand a word of what you were saying, but don’t worry, I still like you anyway,” when they’re when we’re teenagers and it becomes part of our teenage framework, the one we abandon as we get over our pointless rebellion and ill-advised taste for stupid clothes and bad music. Camus and early Depeche Mode are in no way equivalent. We learn our philosophies at the wrong time and so they get lumped in with all the things we grow out of… and since we’re all wise and grown up now, when something or someone refers to those things, we toss them aside as silly adolescent bullshit that we got over when we got some sense. If we truly understood any of it, we would have much happier, less complicated existences, unfettered by the constraints of our endless search for meaning and reason. These things must be continually said, until we finally get a hold on what it all really means.
$2(A##*+2<# not so generous (other, far less generous things have been said about my work, but I don’t feel any real need to list them here), the process involved makes me happy. I feel good when my hands are doing the folding or cutting—even when the glue shows through and ruins one of the books I’m binding it doesn’t bother me all that much. I’ve lost my sense of meaning, lost my yen for meaningfulness, tossed aside (I’m thinking) with my sense of audience. Compacted, distilled, uncomplicated, this all comes down to simple desire. I want to make sporks. But sometimes I want to play solitaire, sometimes I want to watch “Smallville” over and over on my computer (I downloaded the first season. I hated the show at first, but I’m thinking now that Lex Luthor is the best character on TV to come around in a long, long time). Sometimes I want to eat a big, rare steak. When I want to eat a steak, I’m not making sporks, and when I want to watch “Smallville” I’m not eating steak, though I guess I could do both at the same time7. And when I’m not eating steak or watching “Smallville” or playing solitaire, when I’m making the sporks, I do it differently than we did for the first volume. This is in part because we didn’t want to do it the same way forever, and part because Johnny and his brother sold the shop where we did the silkscreening. I guess, if we wanted to keep on silkscreening, we could have found some other people to sit down and speak our dreams and intentions to, telling them about the great and vital role the could play in the creation of this thing we do—or I could sit to the side and smoke a bunch of cigarettes while Richard says the words that I can’t, since I don’t believe them anymore, if I ever really believed them anyway8—we could, but I think it’s time to change. It’ll be the same size, but I’m opting for covers of bookboard and bookcloth instead of the “floppy” covers that seemed to freak so many people out. And to you people who were so freaked out by the “floppy” covers, I’m not changing this for you. As the Camus-referencing author in this issue said, “This is not about you.” It’s about me, wanting to keep this interesting for myself, wanting to up the quality of the thing we make. The canvas covers were a necessity brought
7 Or golfing. Sometimes I golf with my dad. I’m really bad at my short game, but I’m verging on Happy Gilmore with my drives—even if they do end up most of the time on some other fairway or the freeway or Speedway. Got me some distance, I do. 8 My favorite English teacher in high school used to call me Monsieur Meurseault. She let me write a song in place of a term paper. She rocked.
I$&"8*$)*K$)8&%=9&($)* about by no money, by no tools to make a hardback book, no tools to do a perfect-bound paperback book—and we certainly were not about to write for grants or hold bake sales or car washes so we could get the funding needed to pay someone to do this for us. I mean, what’s the point of going to all the effort if all you’re going to do is send it off to the printer who will send it to the binder and then they send you the thing that you’ll tell people you “made”? See, if you didn’t make it, you didn’t make it. Maybe you compiled it, maybe you wrote it, maybe you edited it. Sure, you did all those things, but you didn’t make it. To me, that’s not enough. Nowhere near enough. Maybe we’ll write for grants or have bake sales or car washes in the future, but only to facilitate our continuing to make these things. Ourselves. For me, that I made this, makes it better than most everything else9,10.
9 I keep writing to authors, or their intermediaries, or agents, or whatever contact information I can find for them, I keep asking them please can I bind their books, can I just make for them a small edition of these things they’ve written, make something that’s equal to their work—I do make beautiful books. I should keep them so in the unlikely event that someone comes to my studio I have something to show them rather than the unfinished, failed things I keep around as reminders of what to not do again, or ways to not bind a book… but I don’t have any of them. The ones that were not commissioned were made specifically for people and given to those specific people. I’m still doing exclusively flatback, since I don’t know how to round and back a book yet, but when I go to Boston in a couple of weeks, I’m going to corner that nice Robert Marshall over at Harvard Book and Bindery and make him show me how easy it really is. Strange that I have to go all the way across the country to learn something, but he’s really the only one I know that does what I want to know. There aren’t any binderies in Arizona. None that I can find anyway. There are small presses, there are people that make books by hand, but they’re all nontraditional like me, and they’re happy being that, while I am not. The people making the books here, as far as I can tell, aren’t making books to last, or even to be handled. They’re making art pieces—and that’s fine, but that’s not what I want to do. I can make a crappy pretty book that’ll fall apart just as good as the next guy. No; I can do it better, I’m a master of the crappy pretty book that’ll fall apart. I’ve done that, I’ve got them under my belt, and they’re all disintegrating, not standing up to the test of time. I see no reason to waste my efforts thus. The closest bindery where I can learn anything is in San Diego, and while that is closer, they want all kinds of money to show me how to do anything. Maybe I should understand that, but I
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don’t. I mean, Me. They want to charge Me for gracing them with my presence. I’ll go East, thank you. 10 And perhaps I should qualify a bit here. I don’t want to, but I’m not really trying to piss anyone off. Well, maybe a little… like those kids who just staple their things together and call it a literary magazine. Sorry buddies, no go. That is so crappy. Show some respect for your authors, for the idea of art or Art or language… or anything. For yourselves. I would never produce such a piece of shit and try to pass it off as a worthwhile thing. How do you sleep? Punks. (My friend Tim makes a photocopied and stapled thing full of stuff, but he knows exactly what it is, and he presents it as such. I really like it, like Tim too—even though he just moved away. Punk.) What I mean, what my qualifier is here: I understand how the industry works. I understand that people are not all that interested in the binding of the books they buy at Borders or Barnes and Noble, or wherever they go, they are interested in what’s in them, and as long as the binding holds together long enough for them to get through the book, they’re happy. I understand that it is not cost-effective to make a well-made book, that most of them are just kindling anyway. I’ll admit, right here in the small print, that my favorite kind of book is the trade paperback, my favorite of those being the reinforced cloth ones from Black Sparrow Press. I love the way they feel, the solidity and flex you don’t get from commercially-produced hardbacks. Even Art books, the big coffee-table ones, aren’t made as well as they used to be. And I understand that it is a good thing that there is an industry devoted to getting the books out. Thank god for them, even if they do produce 99 percent crap. There is always that one percent. And when a friend is accepted by the industry, I’m genuinely happy for that friend, and maybe even a little jealous—but jealous not of the publication, rather I am jealous that they are able to write a thing that can be published. I am not able to do that. I cannot not ramble. I cannot tell a coherent story. I love coherent, well-written stories, but I cannot write them. And sure, you can toss up Infinite Jest or House of Leaves and tell me that maybe there’s hope for me, but if you’re one of the unfortunates who have read my book, you’re not going to be one of the people telling me maybe there’s hope. I’m happiest doing things the way I do, I don’t want to mess with that. The books I want to make, the ones I really want to have, I see them used as props on TV, flung carelessly around by actors who don’t really care what’s inside them… did Tom Cruise in “Vanilla Sky” really care about those books? No. Maybe he collects them, he the person and not the character from the movie, but that’s not what I’m talking about. These awesome leather-bound things,
I$&"8*$)*K$)8&%=9&($)*
When you’re making a spork this way, you want to start with the covers. Cut your bookboard to size and then cut the cloth so that you have an inch allowance for the head, tail and fore-edge, leaving a good two inches at the spine-edge, since that’s going to fold under and form the joint of the cover. This cloth is what you would sew through to attach the covers to the book block, and it’s a pretty tricky proposition, holding it all together while you get that first push of the needle and cord through the cover and block, since nothing’s holding them together at this point. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Once the boards and cloth are cut, use some wheat starch paste (recommended) or PVA (Polyvinyl Acetate, not recommended for covers, but it sets up more quickly and is permanent, where the paste can be removed with water if you want) and glue the cloth to the board, applying the glue to the surface of the board (not recommended, since it could cause the board to warp—the way you’re supposed to do it is apply it to the cloth and then stick that to the board; I have good reasons for doing the opposite) and then stick it to the cloth. You then immediately spread a little glue on the overhanging cloth at the head and tail and press them down, not stretching the fabric (as this will also cause the board to warp). Next, miter the corners, trimming some of the cloth away so as to not leave a bulge, and glue the fore-edge. Put this in a press, or under some weight (a few heavy books will suffice) and give it a couple of hours to dry. When the covers are dry, apply the endpapers. For this step, you would put a thin layer of glue on the endpapers themselves, thin to avoid bleeding at the edges (wheat starch paste will not stain the cloth, so if you’re using that, you don’t have to worry as much, but PVA will dry hard and clear and too too visible), and then you carefully position the papers on the inside of the cover and press them again. The drying time should not be so long for this step, since you’ve used less glue (didn’t you?). The covers, after a while, will be ready. Then you can do the sewing and all that. Oh, joy unbounded! So, anyway. This thing I made, this thing I’m making: The binding is Japanese, a simple four-hole punch binding, though I didn’t punch the holes. I drilled them. I had Brian Arnold, the guy who helped me with the sporkbox make me this crazy wonderful jig to hold the text block while I drilled the holes. I’m drilling because it’s too thick to punch through. We’ve
exemplars of the craft, that’s what I want to make. I will, someday. You just wait. Maybe I’ll let you have one. Or at least look at it.
$2(A##*+2<# gone more than 200 pages this time… Traditionally, a Japanese-bound book will have a paper or cloth cover, and the binding will go right through it, but there is another way of doing it, and that’s what we’ve done here. As you have already seen, the hardcover part of the cover extends only the width of the book, with a little folded under onto the first and last pages. Through that we have done the lacing. You start in the middle, one of the middle holes, wrap around the spine, then toward the head (or tail, depending on what end you started on), wrapping it over the top (or bottom), then around the spine again, then back through the original hole, to the next, then around the spine and then to the next and around the head and then the spine and if you’ve done it right, you should have two loose ends on the same side of the book ready to be tied off. You can play a lot with where you want the tie-off to be. Maybe at the head, or on the spine. That’s up to you. We’re hoping that I do it so the cord can be used as a bookmark, meaning I’ve tied it near the head. I’m still writing this, meaning I’m not binding it, so I can’t really say for certain what I’m going to do or not do. I can speak only of intent. Also, in a traditional Japanese punch binding, the book will be in sheets rather than signatures. I like signatures. I love signatures, and I really like the way they look on this issue. I’ll like them on the next one too, since we’re doing it for at least the full run of Volume Two (which, as Richard probably mentioned, consists of only two physical issues, the other two being events or some other unbound thing. Whatever he might say to the contrary, we’re still a quarterly). It’s easier for us to do things in signatures anyway. That’s how we see the world, it’s how we do everything. And maybe when I say “we” I really mean “me” but I’m going to act like I’m including all of us in this one. My goal here, in the binding arena of spork, is to eventually amass the materials and equipment necessary for an honest-to-god, hot-damn!-I’ll-eat- a-horny-toad-if-that-ain’t-the-finest-thing-I-ever-saw kind of product. And if you’re one of those afraid of change types, one of those nostalgic ones, and you’re all sad the covers aren’t all floppy and awkward like something outta yer grammy’s attic, and you want to pay… I’ve got canvas, I’ve got ink. I’ve got glue and cord and a saw and you’re welcome to come on down to the studio and I’ll show you how to do it. Or better yet, fill the void I’m so cavalierly leaving with my abandoning of the tried-and-true, and put out your own damn thing. Put out a good one. Make me jealous, make me
I$&"8*$)*K$)8&%=9&($)* ashamed. Show me up. It’s not like there’s so much competition out there… not like there’s any. Be nice to have some.
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!"#$%&'($"%)*+,"$-)+ + KARL ADCOCK is a 20 year ANDREW ERSKINE FOSTER old from California. comes from Vermont, and has lived in Tucson for the past year. MICHAEL CRYER BROOKS He writes fiction and poetry. He lives in Tempe, AZ and is a free- trivides his time between writing, lance writer. He first discovered gun shows, and his apiary. the spork while enjoying the now extinct enchurrito (sic) at Taco LISA GLUSKIN has worked as Bell in the early ‘80s. Michael a technical editor, gift wrapper, is very pleased to find that the film-studio gofer, and faux-Irish spork has evolved into a literary- cocktail waitress. She lives near sized endeavor. Lake Tahoe, where she is attempting to grow tomatoes. DREW BURK accidentally killed Last year, she won the James a bird with a golf ball the other Duval Phelan Award for From day. He’s doing small penance via Then, her manuscript in progress. the sunburn he got while out Lately she’s been writing poems killing birds with balls. His score about theoretical cosmology and is bad for both golf and bowling, junior high school. but he might be getting better. MAGGIE GOLSTON lives MELISSA A. CROUCH took in Tucson with her two dogs, refuge in the study of poetry Henry and Mister Bones. She after being turned down for sings pretty songs to them. supporting roles in C.H.U.D., She holds an MFA from the Evil Dead, Deep Red, Dead University of Arizona, and Alive, and The Shining. With her work has most recently her dreams of being covered appeared in Ploughshares. Come in fake blood and running visit her at her bookstore, screaming through the woods Biblio, on Congress Street. shattered, she is earning her [They have an extensive poetry MFA in Memphis, TN. selection at Biblio. —the editors]
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KELLY HELLWORTH’s ANDER MONSON is originally daughter says, daily: tell me from Upper Michigan and has a princess story, daddy. spent most of his life in the Midwest and the Middle East. TREVIS HUTSELL can spit He lives for the time being in blood out of his eyes. He makes Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Recent pictures out of words. He does it work can be found in Fence, inside his head. Quarterly West, Conduit, West Branch, Alaska Quarterly Review, QAYYUM JOHNSON works and North American Review. at The Franklin Mint, in the Commemorative Civil War DAVID ERIK NELSON lives Chess Set department. in Ann Arbor, MI, where he teaches high school English DANIEL LABEAU lives in and co-operates a small online Philadelphia. He acts in non- magazine, Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k) union films, writes poetry & (www.poormojo.org) He’d like a series of books about a boy to thank our lord and savior, Vice President. He received an Jesus Christ, without whom all MFA from the Iowa Writer’s of this would have turned out Workshop. His chapbook, more or less the same. Codex Arizona, was published by Love2 Press in 2000. JOSHUA POTEAT lives in Richmond, Virginia, but JANA MARTIN is swamped occasionally wants to live in with work. She is very very busy. Tucson, among other places. We are sure that her page proofs He was the 2001 summer poet- and contributor’s note will arrive in-residence at the University of soon. We wait patiently. Arizona’s Poetry Center, and the winner of a few other assorted MARY MOLINARY was awards the last few years. born on the cusp of nuclear apocalypse and TV trays. She STACEY RICHTER has written lives in Memphis, TN, where over fifty novels, including Desire she teaches and tends bar, armed at the Double D Ranch and Dust, with only an anthropology degree Doubt, Desire. She is a member of and a husband from Tucson. the Romance Writers of America. +
PETER ROCK was born and AARON TRIPLETT: at 29 and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, a half, I am guaranteed that it’s a and is the author of the novels third over, possibly half over. The Ambidextrist, Carnival Wolves, The greatest trick the devil ever and This is the Place. He thrives played was convincing me that on humiliation. These days, he I have all the time in the world. lives in Portland, Oregon, with I’ll never get the chance to relive his fierce wife. today, yet I continue to squander it. Now I look to John Edwards RICHARD SIKEN has now for hope. written four pieces of non-fiction and feels he is getting better at SONJA ULSTERBOM is a juggling the “saying something” printmaker and pastry chef. She with the “being interesting.” His lives in Seattle, WA, with her dream job features robot dogs. long-time boyfriend. She tells herself stories about devils and HUGH STEINBERG’s poetry farm animals while she works. has most recently been published in Crowd, VeRt, Volt and Spork. JONATHAN An adjunct at California College VANBALLENBERGHE of Arts and Crafts, he is a teaches English and composition recipient of an NEA Creative at various levels. His poetry is Writing Fellowship and of influenced by Basho’s travel- much love and generosity from ogues, his fiction on Dutch his wife, friends and family. morality plays and his experience The world keeps getting bigger growing up in Juneau, Alaska. He and bigger likes watching Tucson geckos.
BETH TOËNER is going to TOM WALBANK plays slide stop this car right now. She guitar and harmonica in means it, no more messing traditional Delta and Chicago around. She’s going to turn it styles. He hails from Devon, right around and flash oncoming England but has lived in the traffic. She is currently finishing a states long enough to know book that’s bigger than a novella, better. He has just finished a but smaller than a novel. In this children’s book called Robert’s in-between space, she’s just fine. Sunny Day Dance. !
JERRY WILLIAMS’ poetry collection, Casino of the Sun, is due out from Carnegie Mellon University Press in October. He is currently driving across America. We believe our request for a contributor’s note is on his desk, hundreds of miles away.
MARK WYNN: take a potently packed piece of prose and pop it like a pill. A little piece of dirt that unfolds in your throat and leaves you with a short quick choke. Cough it back up in an embryo of your own phlegm. Get rid of it with a flying hurl of spit. Let it land in the gutter with the sewage and the refuse that is nothing more than the runoff of dreams.
MARK YAKICH is a painter and a preacher. He also thinks he writes; he digs a hole. He wishes that sweat beads would turn into real beads.
JASON ZUZGA was a 2001- 2002 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and is currently enrolled in the University of Arizona MFA Poetry Program. His work can be found in LIT, The Yale Review, jubilat, and Fence.