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Before sleep, and testing the worrisome gas
pilots, you saw a spirit smudging the full moon's face, and begged not to
let those clouds abridge that moment, not to blot out your mother's image.
But they did. And in you, a lamp might have burned its fuel: no last chance to
reach up and take hold of that white, reproachful look. What else could
have matched it: the face in the open casket, the wisps of white
hair, tatted lace filigreed about the neck? High over the patio's
trellis loomed your mother's ghost. Then, in the sky's
great bog, her spirit submerged into its filaments. And you slunk back
into your average house, and saw things perhaps the way they really
were: no lamp quite as bright as that moon now; where there was
once a husband to hold, nowadays the portly Pomeranian coiled about your
feet at night; the matching laminate provincial dressers and the lumbering
armoire that didn't quite match, the one he called "the
confessional"--how droll--and the curtains laced back against the window to let the moon paint the
patterned spirits across the quilt. In this room, you slept; he, in
another. And what was Bridge St. this far from her stony grave, now ambled over by
the bored Irish lambs amid the drizzly pasture? What remains were there
of a marriage, whole at first, then slowly given over to the dull
disintegration when the hole between the giddy, girlish past and the sober,
ancient present, widens and matches the mood of that first, sullen, drag-out fight
some thirty years ago. If he lays another hand on you, you'll end it there, take heed.
It won't be the spirit- broken mother who bundled up her youngest, and
cried with him on the foot bridge of Grant Park until frost bit through grizzled
afternoon and the lamp posts frowned over the wrack of leaves below.
Thinking how you lampered home then, my mother, what amazement to watch you,
years later, hold my arm one dark Sunday night, dash from the Dunns'
cottage--matchless and sure-footed through the treacherous bog and
boots laced tighter, as though they were keeping both our
nerves secure--and spearhead the trek back to your father's cottage. How did
you bridge it, cross that fear in the years before you died? When
did you take umbrage, at last, with the moon and its misery? With a
husband's bedroom lamp out by eleven, and the quiet remainder of a Sunday
night to hold your hand into the dull, forthcoming week? I see
you now among images of a different sort: gazing down, lucid and cool,
upon the empty place where you used to live. I see you before that
confessional in higher spirits, your ghost blustering the lace curtains, and
clutching three matches: one to hold beneath the guilty house; one, to
bring down the foot bridge; and one to blaze the lamp which, through the long
night, I know, will spirit you. |
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Converting church to polling station seems a
breech of faith: in place of font and tabernacle, here, a ballot
box; and where, against these walls, the pooling
candles should have cast their soulful flickers, now with room to romp, a
lawless child deals his mother glancing blows. Even the minister
keeps a layman's spellbound gaze fixed upon the
desperate measures she must take to bring the boy to heel. We're all
the measure of a parent's worth, but hardly does it hearten
faith in political institutions or the moral charge
wherein we keep our trust, to see her act with pride in civic
duty, and then box her son about the ears. I begin to wonder, whose
brainchild was this, to strip a sanctuary bare, enlist this
stoic cast and crew from the church's congregation diligent
to cast upon my civic duty such a pious feel? But then,
these measures, props, seats and senators--so often they're just
child's play for church and state. And votes, just
prayers: for shaken faith of migrant farmers kneeling at those dirty crates
which box our grapes and melons; for communion of the rich
who keep a city's dreams protected for themselves; or for
the upkeep of the cross on public lands. What to do with
indigents, cast from park to depots? Gay men crucified on fences?
A box of simple ballots saves or damns the souls of
many; measures morals in reduction of the taxes; imbues the poor
with faith in economics or casinos; or, with the stubbornness
of a child, miraculously changes the canyons into acreage. As
a child I prayed to flags and banners hung behind a priest
who'd keep the votive candles burning at all hours, and
administer his faith in contributions tithed, in scraps of soap and
aspirin, outcast tee-shirts bundled for Biafran children; he'd
countermeasure Father Groppi marching viaducts beside Negroes,
yet our poor-box, chiseled finally off the vestibule wall, never
once was filled. One backs these pulpit politics, especially when told to see
as a child sees the world and multiply the hymnal numbers to
measure out the mystery of life. But, safe at home by
order of the curfew, I'd keep my scapular and missal boxed, then listen to the
soul's downcast sermon of the things that fill our prisons and our
pews: blind faith in every promise sworn before a child; the great
and measured guards and gods who keep our hopeless company; and
the ballot, cast into its cardboard box, then winnowed with a
little faith. |
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A pushcart in a suburb, a rag-and-bone chant, a
brow of olives: It was beyond me how a tinker found himself among
these houses. How many boulevards of new cement and mid-summer
gasps before a glass of tap water and a fistful of dull
knives ever changed hands? Desperate to charm us, he had
tied ribbons to his axles and sweat-stained jacket. And still,
to keep him off her beds of statice and marigolds, a neighbor nudged a
sprinkler, made its knives of water arc across his path. Surely he must have
wondered how she lives within: who cooks in the cool, darkened kitchens
of bungalow houses? Aprons, unsullied and starched, are folded into
linens drawers, ribbons instead of straps. Gleaming copper kettles are
made cachepots to bed the odd bromeliad; no blades to whet, nor tines to
temper; no gaps inside leaky pots, to dam up. Walkways spool
between cedar ribbands to doorsteps. The closely cropped blades of
timothy, like stumpy knives broken at the forte; curbstones and gutters,
rilled with tiny leaves brooking the sod's run-off into sewer grates that,
block after block, embed his wheels, make him set the cart to rights, so
that the neighborhood's gasp ushers him onward, to terminus: a road piebald
with potholes and houses whose porches are shucked of whitewash; driveways,
mere beds of crabgrass and gravel. Here, the poorer folk
admired his ribbons: a son, urged forth with an enameled cup of
orangeade and, yes, the knives to sharpen. But beyond this point, only what we
called "country," some gasps of settlement: cedar waxwing; ambling worker bees;
what was a tree-house once; jack rabbits threshing clotted fields of
burdock, where none of us dare live, and where, broken by his toil, he turned back.
Years after, canyons gasp between cactus and the honeycomb of housing
tracts, and now the bad portent of our progress flanks my freeways,
amending roadmaps with ribbon- cutting ceremonies; I grind the car's gears to
work, and spackled houses, mouldering the valley with chalky roofs, assure me
of what will outlive siskins or scorpions in a scuttle of coastal sage.
Once an architect connives to raze their scrubby hillside, she will edge
forth this margin of houses, force the folds of land to bow down until the
desert's breath gasps out and out. It wounds me, but who else will lie
down on this bed of neglect: I know I travel the graded country,
fated to relive this engineered loss of self--a foot upon the
pedal; a wrist against the knife's keen point of little duties to eke out a life amid
lost jobs; the blue ribbon prize of steady work to ferry me past these ugly
houses, strewn ditches. "I'll live," I say--yes, but the cars gasp across overpasses,
and trailers jackknife until the mesas and all my lost, sweet riverbeds of
dust, are torn to ribbons. |
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One jolt, and he's upright, near wakeful, and
lurching from that same dream of parrots flaming over the cold moraines, finials
of canopy, and vales of other-worldly sadness. Seconds expire when he
and this vision alone are all that exist. Then the fiction darkens, only
a far-off car alarm left to ponder. Sometimes, to calm him, I'll sit up as
well, my arm like a wing brooding across his shoulders, then tell him where
he is, ask him if he's sick. This, we know, is a relative term (some hours more
fickle with pain). The last six empty months we have grieved, even in our sleep,
to fix this damaged dream. She has died, Pionus senilis, after a lengthy, staggering
illness, owing to systemic aspergillosis. This quietly ravaged
her lungs with a veil of fungus, which burgeoned until every other organ
withered--inevitable if left undiagnosed for as long as that. And how
antiseptic, to think along such lines; to disinfect the qualities and charms
that rendered her a lone four-year-old, and gave that wasted bit of life
some meaning. No forensic dispassion could ever undo those mornings when,
seeds in tote, before we'd lift the threadbare blankets covering our angel, we'd
hear her through their dreamy artificial dusk, querying our presence with a few
syllables of greeting, veiled and garbled; once freed, she would climb up,
ill-tempered, stretch the pinioned wing which could sanguine both ceiling and shirt with
its blood feathers; and next, swing forward, befuddled, to be lifted up, kissed,
walked, then settled again into a cyclone of seed husks and nutshells. But like a child who
thinks on life's brevity, fails to grasp it, then one day, does, and finds it in
her breath, she slipped into the sick repose of the dying. And he, too, very near death
then, sobbed into fever dreams, vomited foam, and soaked the terry towels with
sweat, while, wheezing to his left, in her corner: a needled breastbone and lump of feathers
patchy from surgeries that left wine-stains of iodine, stitched with scabs she'd
pluck from the downy under-wing; her eye leering below a waxy lid as he fumbled
with his urinal. And this pipe dream-- that she'd preen again her gory plumage, that he'd
soon quit his tumult--I left alone. This, the doomed condition: that she must choose
to live awhile longer, for his sake, if only that he would heal enough to see her
yield. And to this secret end I availed new routines: squeezing out cold flannels, rushing
ice-packs when his nausea prevailed; swelling her improvised tent sibilant with oxygen;
swabbing out his pale, left putrefied with the aspic of his stomach; urging
from her the droplets of fungal sick that sputtered through her ceres to my cheek when
I flapped her exhausted wings. Until, one day, he arose well enough, and she, at
dawn, cradled her cap into the loom of my hand, and finished it. How, then, to seek
out grace but in the breach of his dream where he may swag his hand into the cleft, then
fold down again, homesick for her stunted wing? Each of his gasps alighting
my neck must be a lone shiver of failed flight; each, her veiled flutter,
breathing into our separate dreams. |
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He's danced the poor woman for hours, without
break, and the bride's mother has simply had enough: a
discreet signal to the polka band ends it. His breathless
guest finishes her gimlet while clarinets dismantle into
silvery stumps and plush. Then, the entire party is
flushed out: keys in kidskin gloves; frostbitten cars
blocked by the stalled Cadillac, nylons shivering below
the silvern slab portico of the banquet hall. A taxi's parking
brake ratchets into place as a drunken uncle spasms the
block with a tailpipe's clangor. Finally, the hall
attendant, flushed and congestive, pulls along a push-broom,
consecrates the ballroom floor with it, locks up the place in
disgust. Once newlyweds embark on honeymoon, love decreed hours ago by church and law, heralded as plumb and
flush, what then but the peevish dregs of a party? When
silver jubilee is next for revelry? When skeptic friends,
aghast at the luck of the married sometimes, ally into a
bloc of gossips dogged about celebrating others'
breakups? To hell with that. We'd wed alfresco, full of lush, shameless witness: Kasia in simple crepe, her
august groom in tweed, plighting troth before the
breakers of Long Island Sound, the staging drilled and
blocked atop a shoreline hillock of granite, open air on
salver, chalice, cruet and candles, like millionaires in
Crete; or, my sister Karen's old Tibetan vows, her
towerblock of spouse in lotus wreath and robes; sun and
sylvan canopy across the grass; the smoldering of
concrete pit in which they purged their vices, made their
breaks with the past, and leeward watched the rising
gusts skim with smoke. You and I'd rebuff the camouflage found in pews, temples, and bridesmaids. Skip the
bogus bluster of pipe organs, and antique Battenberg
lace blocked into that swollen bustle of a wedding dress. No
foolish fusillade of rice here. Matrimony makes just one
creed: love's rarity, permitted to be frank, may flaunt
or break tradition. Why, then, dear man, are we barred from
silver chalice, shared sliver of cake, or open pledge of
kiss? Blocked from standing flush and proud before parsons, who
plague us to vow a life less indiscreet, and a death to
consummate the heartbreak? |
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He's a twilight ghost, nearly a pattern against
the gentle shadows that nettle the freeway off-ramp. And I would hardly tender a lengthy stare in his direction, fearful that our
looks should cross. But now, his sloppy form inclines against the
dusky hollyhock, and from the darkness, branching out before
him: a lancet of skin that, with the murky elegance of a
mourning dove trained upon preening a feather's shaft, he is
stroking. That languid train which cargoed my father to Archangel halted once, near
a gentle stand of pines. And the luckless young woman who should glance it to avoid a mired hole in the train floor where
others tended to their bowels unashamed, she ambled off and was
hawked by a Russian guard who, with his bullet, followed
her across the field, left her a squalid heap in snow. Does this tragedy cross my thoughts now because, in unabashed moments, I
feel trained to bear another's yoke of shame? My own innocence, so cheaply hawked? Can the amorality of pleasures, groans and effluence
seem genteel, ever?
I've tried hard enough to own up to my worst moments, tender though they be to prod and break open with the
clumsy lancet of my conscience. In a first-class couchette across untilled land set with plundered bricks, I lurched from a wet dream
into a puzzled stare across a train's compartment, where a stranger's marvel
grew tender at my arousal--simply hapless, and no worse. But when the train huddled into a station, where, at a border guard's
behest, I gently edged off my winter boot and fileted from my calf,
like butcher's hocks, a souvenir of currency worth months of wages
earned ad hoc and flaunted now to cheapen up this soldier's life
. . . Oh god, this, a lancet of shame to me much sharper than sex's
peccadilloes. And what of any
gentle thought to sex, even in the father who must bathe
his palsied daughter's cross of genitals, look upon them with that selfsame
disgust for nostril, anus, train himself to squelch all pity for what might be her
own desire, simply tend her and leave it be? Better to pass the sponge headlong. And when the tender |