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Poetry:2000 |  |
Tiananmen
I am not Chinese. The library's lights flicker pale-orange and white as I sit here at my table, flipping the pages of old books and magazines. The books are filled with words. The words are filled with people. The people are Chinese. In my not Chinese head I see the eyes of men and women and children. I hear the sound of their voices, their laughter and anger and pain and joy. They speak in Chinese. This is not my language. Red banners I wish I understood what they were saying, but I am content to understand what they are feeling. Then comes the fire and the words of other Chinese people in strong rooms not so far away. And the moment ends. Like that. It just ends. Later the Chinese people in the strong rooms not so far away congratulate each other. The Chinese people in the strong rooms not so far away say strong things and try to make everyone think that nothing has happened, really. But it has. I was there. And the Chinese people in the strong
rooms not so far away will never sleep very well I walk out of the library and the pale-orange and white light and wish I understood, I mean really understood. But I don't. You see, My Hand I sit in my room and listen to rain fall and wonder what I am doing here in this town in this state with a beer in my hand and the smell of oranges in my nose so strong that it almost makes me sick. I sit and stare at my hand and wonder at what it has done. It has written about empires and men and women and wars and art and death and the best parts of life. It has drawn and painted and made marks that I hope will last until my children can see them so they will know after I am dead that I really existed, that I wasn't just some intangible memory. It has run its fingers through hair and across skin, has run across soft lips and felt the steamy breath of more beautiful women than any man has any right too, though I always want one more. My hand has played the part of a weapon, making other men fall at my feet, making their blood wash over their clothing and into their mouths. There are scars on my hands, scars from rocks and rusty nails and a golf club wielded by a drunken Cambodian. My hand is my soul made real, and as it sits there, clutching the sweating beer bottle I smile and wonder why I am even thinking about it. Draw Draw a woman without telling her. Michael's
Bistro I sip the scotch and feel it warming my insides, driving off the damp night like a woolen blanket. My legs are comfortably crossed and my back leans into a wrought iron chair as I watch the nighttime traffic crawl by below us, police cars and pick-up trucks and buses filled with people I don't know. The wind runs its fingers through a nearby sycamore's hair and my friend makes a joke that no one gets, then smiles when we laugh anyway. As I hang off the side of this old Federal-style building, its face hidden under centuries of paint, I consider my regrets, ranking them: first by severity, then historically, and finally alphabetically. Afterwards I scratch behind my right ear, the short hair under my fingernails, and wish I had some small sense of foresight. But instead I have the company of good scotch and better friends, and that is enough. So I sit and listen to a symphony of humans and machines rising and falling in the purple midnight sky, sipping my glass of scotch, running my thumb along the tumbler's lip, pretending I am immortal. The Day I Got
to Neal's Farm First I run one finger down the length of the hood, cutting a river of blue through the Gobi in miniature. I look at my finger, now bathed in a layer of pollen and dust, and consider tasting it, but fight the urge (when we were children we did not fight the urge to taste, did we?). Instead I rub the hodgepodge of plant seed and earth flesh between my fingers and listen to the almost unperceivable sound of grit biting grit. I turn away from the dirty blue car towards the mountains and watch them heave and turn, stretching out for their evening's rest. Slowly, almost hesitantly, the mountains pull the sun into their bosom. Green fades into black and gray, blue deepens into purple, red disappears entirely. Night is the world pulling on its nightclothes, not woolen pajamas, mind you, but a black see-through neglige. I smile at the thought and pick up my old harmonica. The harmonica sends small wailing noises into the evening and I feel a kinship to the men of Scotland who sent their own small wailing noises into their mountains. The harmonica plays of its own will, here hitting a high note, here three short low notes. I tap my feet on gravel and imagine myself accompanied by an old, wrinkled, brown man with an olive fedora. He plays silver and mother-of-pearl drums and speaks with the harsh accent of Chicago. I think his name is Earl. Wispy clouds brush against the stars, setting them aflutter, or maybe I am just tired. I glance into the sky and listen to my harmonica and imagine that I am Abraham or Moses, sitting on some mountain alone with God on the hood of a dirty blue car. Perhaps I should grow a beard. Swim When I swim Saturday The brown river rolls beneath the bow
of our small blue raft, The silence folds over us like a blanket as I think about how my Mother would have made us stop to take pictures of the yellow swamp lilies that dot the river's edge. A smile creeps across my face underneath my tired red eyes and I flip the brown crawdad lure into the water. My father catches fish after fish, each a bolt of living mercury. I only pull in green weeds and old brown grass, snagging my line and cursing under my breath. Our guide's name is Wayne. For a moment I imagine that our small blue raft is a Sopwith Camel and like Snoopy I am flying against the Red Baron, but Charles Schultz is dead and the rattling of the machine guns is only the sound of a passing coal train loaded to the teeth and headed south to Radford. Eventually the rain stops and I pull off my clear plastic poncho. I roll up the sleeves of my old gray and maroon Pendleton and breathe deep. My nose is filled with the smell of fish and wet wool and I realize that in that in haze of the early morning I had pulled on my brother's good tennis shoes instead of my old river clunkers. Dammit. We land on a sandbar near Bozoo and I shoulder my gear, clutching an unread book. I climb into the cab of my father's green Ford pickup and as we slide down old mountain roads we laugh and at old stories and dirty jokes, all the while dreaming of green peppers and onions and occasionally, without meaning to, I remember My Mother would have made us stop and take pictures of the yellow swamp lilies. A Sketch of
Myself I look in the mirror and see the image of a man. The man is me, and I am not entirely dissatisfied with him. Schrichschrichschritch is the sound of
the skin of my hand on the stubble of my chin, I have very thick eyebrows that connect in the center and a smile that reminds me of the Grinch (which is not as bad as you might think, since it comes in handy when you have just said something particularly devious or clever and you want everyone to pause on the remark, considering it, weighing it like gold or grain in some long-forgotten Phoenician marketplace). At night my eyes are brown. My skin is light, never holding a shade of brown longer than a few days, but my cheeks are pink when I am happy, and my ears, damn my ears. They are the key to my thoughts, betraying me with shades of scarlet, turning so hot that when I was young I used to think they would burn right through my skin, leaving me with two charred relics attached to the side of my oblong head (which always reminded of Bert, save I was never quite so jaundiced as that puppet. . . though neither of us seem to have ever have had much of a sense for fashion). I pull on an old white t-shirt emblazoned with the symbols of my hometown's private army (the high school football team with three state championships) and tuck it into a pair of thick blue jeans that are dotted with specks of blue and purple paint (the discards of a portrait of my brother painted the week before on the floor of my dorm room). Sitting down hard onto my bed I pull on
my weather-worn yellow boots, tying first one then the
other. Like some antediluvian relic, some holy article of lore and legend, my grandfather's faded plaid shirt lies in state on my bed. I lift it delicately, the thin cloth sliding through my fingers like buttermilk. Weather and wear have transformed it from wool and cotton into silk, from the ordinary into the rare, the commonplace into the precious. I consider sewing up the holes in the sleeves but, like every time before, I decide against it. Overtop of the shirt I pull on the mantle of some mythical Norse fiherman, a navy blue sweater whose sleeves have been stretched far too long. But the weave is good and the smell is comforting, so I ignore its age (or do I embrace it?) and straighten the plaid collar of that shirt (again, I say antediluvian) which wraps lightly around my neck. As I walk out the door I grab the long gray overcoat my Mother bought me for Christmas my sophomore year in college and a thick sketch pad with a forest green cover. I turn and look around my room and debate whether I should straighten it before I leave. I don't. Then walk I out, through my green front
door and through a garden of yellow snapdragons and pink
rhododendron, so sad Three Stars
Not so long ago. Not so long ago, Three stars, three colors, three lies. How many men, how many women, how many children died for those lies, those stars? Too many says the old man. But the old man still stands straight when the bands play songs about wars and blood. The old man still stands silently when he hears fools murmur foolish words like "justice" and "honor" and "war." The old man still remembers the white star, or the red, or the yellow, still believes the old lies. Its not his fault though, not really. God made him a fool. Tyrannosaurus
Rex I am the patron saint of little boys everywhere. I do not wear a halo, I crush and rend and tear and rip and gnaw and sever and cram and consume and cut and slash and bite and butcher and gobble and gut and hack and hew and lacerate and mutilate and pierce and puncture and mangle and slaughter and stab and wound and slice and devour. I do all the things the mothers of little boys fear, all the things they hope to shield their sons, their good little sons, from. And I say again, I am the patron saint of little boys. I wear no garments, I am a warrior who does not make war, a
soldier who swears no allegiance to armies of men. I devour gym teachers and bullies with
a delight that would terrify the mothers of little boys I carry no trumpet, My song is one of ancient battles long
past, of teeth and rage. I roar for little boys when they
need to hear me, when they whisper my name through
clenched teeth. I am all the anger and pain and joy and freedom-lust of every little boy all balled up into a single thought, a single idea, embodied into a name that sounds best when hissed through the lips of a child who imagines himself strong and great and infinite. I am the patron saint of little boys everywhere. I do not wear a halo, My Foolish
Self-Absorbtion I sat in the hot bar, breathing in the stench of cigarettes, sipping slowly on a glass of warm tap water. It gives me time to think, to observe, to take in other human beings. I watch them dance and laugh, I watch their eyes fill with tears that won't come as they try to imagine themselves happy, as they lie to each other about how this moment or that wasn't really all that important, not really. The warm tap water is still colder than the boiled water I would sip in Chinese bars, water poured from an old steel vat with peeling red paint, water that I would always follow with a drink of Coke, praying that acid would kill the invading Hottentot microbes born in Chinese waterways. The girl with the blonde hair comes over to talk to me, her smile as false as everyone else's, her eyes heavy with the burdens of a secret pain. She drinks too much beer and talks about when we were younger, about older days before she had a baby, before she had a burden. She talks about my friend, the man she still loves. He is not the father of the baby, not the source of the burden. No, he is just a man, an man who wore a uniform, a man who gave her hope for a new world and a better way, a man who fell away from her as the months slid past (like a cobra, sliding through the cracks of an Indian bungalow). She talks and talks, and I say nothing. She needs to hear nothing. She needs to talk. So she does. And I listen. She talks My eyes burn from the smoke, my back aches from too many hours on a barstool. I pity her pain, I envy her passion, I am bored with her simplicity, I am fascinated with her life. She is a human being and by accident, thanks to alcohol and painful memories, she is revealing every aspect of her humanity to me. She is a friend but not a confidant, but tonight her soul belongs to me. Not God, not Satan, to me. I find this troubling. So she talks on and on until late into the night, now laughing, now on the verge of tears. She talks on and on and like a priest I hold confessional. But I am not a priest. I wear no starched white collar. I shake my head (inside my head), I shake it violently (again, inside my head) asking myself why I must take on her burden, why I must set aside my own pain for someone else. Am I not lonely? I am a man, imperfect! I am a man, delicate, broken time and again! I have loved and been loved, I have rejected and been rejected! I still dream of impossible reunions, of perfect worlds! Why must I hear of other people's perfect worlds, why must I see in their desperation myself, a reflection of all the pains I have seen in my life? Why must I endure the mirror that is the pained face of another human being? I do not know, I do not want to know, I do not want this burden, I do not want this mirror, I do not want this weight, I do not want this! I do not say these things. So I sit and listen and smile and nod and scribble bad self-portraits on a cocktail napkin, wondering when this woman will sleep well again. Damn small cocktail napkins. Brown-Gray-Black
I am walking. The sky is gray and old today. It stretches out, touching the mountains and the hills, haunting the brown skeletons of trees. The sun, the invisible sun, must be sinking, must be seeking the quiet refugee of warmer climes, for the day grows darker and darker, whites fading to grays, grays fading to black, black sinking into a color that has no name. A cold quiet rain falls and the earth heaves a sigh, or is that just the autumn fog, clean and white, rolling out from the mountain's hundred limestone mouths. There is no thunder, and the drama is a subtle one. There is no need for drums here, no call for cymbals in this symphony. I walk on. The grass is brown and dead under my feet, short and spongy in some places, tall and flag-like in others. I like the way the tall grass sounds as it brushes against the soft blue denim of my blue jeans, a schruffing sound, a good sound. Yesterday, I remember, this grass was yellow. But the world has no yellow today, no cunning golds, no delicate saffrons. The brush leaves cockleburrs in my sweater, but I do not pick them out. Dried brown greenbriar catches my clothing, then breaks, snapping, weaker in its old age than the bones of an aged Indian priest who chants to Vishnu or Shiva for a wisdom and mercy. What a strange metaphor. Near the tall gray ridge that overlooks the slow moving creek (a creek that empties from the mountain's bowels, cold and clear and fine as Italian glass) brown-black buzzards dance with each other, circling and rolling and reveling in their own freedom. They eat the dead, they reek of decaying things, they are vile and despised. But they can fly, they are needed, they are great. They do not seek thanks for their services, not from men or women or anything that walks the earth. They know they are hated. But they can fly, fly from their antagonists, and they know, in the end, they will be there to see the men and women and the things that walk on the earth fall, and they will do what it is their place to do. But today they dance, and that is good. I walk on. I notice the sandstone, pick it up, roll it in my hands. It is sharp and gray and shaped like a scythe and for a moment I wield it, cutting down branch and blade, imitating the behavior of my ancestors in their skins on the plains of Northern Europe, dreaming of the taste of mammoths and cave bears. I cry out into the not-night and call to my brothers in their skins but they do not come, since, you see, they have been dead for a hundred thousand years. I brush my dirty brown hair back into place and end my charade, but I do not drop that stone until I find just the right stump, just the right mammoth. I miss it, shrug, and walk on. I trip and fall, not an unusual occurrence, and suddenly I am in Germany, clad all in green and drab, clutching a weapon, dragging my body across the trail, listening for the guttural language of the enemy who shares my bloodline. I think of my wife and the child she bears who will be Eric if he is a he and Abigail if he is a she and I want to be there, not here in the cold gray much and muck. The fact that my wife is neither pregnant nor real is notwithstanding. I am Eric. I am an American, fighting our war, our great war, dreaming of my wife who is not real but who I wish was. Later I would cuss about how I didn't know how that gray mud stain got on my pants. And there, floating on an ocean of brown and gray and black, a flare amidst the gloom, is a leaf. It is a maple leaf, deep red and touched with gold and green. It is not perfect, there are seven small holes on the lower right, they are beautiful. Around one of the holes the life has begun to fade, revealing the dead brown flesh of a vegetable in its later years. I consider picking it up, touching it, confirming that it really does exist, that it is not just a vision that my mind has poured forth in a desperate effort to give me something to believe in. Then I don't. I would rather believe, I would rather have faith. And so I merely stare at it, afraid to touch it, afraid that I would fall like pagan touching the holy Arc. But as I walk away, I think to myself, hell, I would be willing to die if I got to touch the Arc. And then I turn around. Corey's Poem I met Corey at twenty-three minutes past four on an early August afternoon, my skin sticking to the red leather of a fleshy red barber's chair. Corey wrapped a pale blue sheet about my chest and neck, ran her fingers through my tussled brown hair and asked how I wanted it cut. I told her I wanted it high and tight on the sides and just evened-up on top. She responded with a nod and a sound that I find very difficult to translate into onomatopoeia, then ran her fingers through my hair again, reminding me of other women who ran their fingers through my hair under entirely different circumstances. I close my eyes and shudder as the electric razor whirrs softly against my scalp. I feel goose bumps rise on my arms and neck as an assortment of blades that would impress any good Chinese torture expert runs through my hair, trimming and chopping and cutting as Corey talks about her life. Corey describes her fiancé, Bob. Bob is a truck driver who gets along with her daughter and tries to do nice things for her, every once in awhile. Bob likes dark blue t-shirts and won't let Corey wash his hats. Bob doesn't think a wedding is worth spending too much money on, and so they are going to elope this Saturday to Las Vegas. Las Vegas is a place full of strippers and flashing lights and craps tables and everything cheap and ugly and false. I despise the idea of Las Vegas, the horrible vulgarity of the thing. I hate Bob, hate his cheapness, his lack of scruples, his unwillingness to hear the quiet sadness in the soft voice of a woman named Corey who has given up on any real hope, her quiet voice ironically strong even in its acquiescence. Corey washes my hair, sweeping the jetsam of my neck away with warm water and hot soap. I feel her fingernails working into my scalp, I listen to her talk about how much she loves psychology, about how she would love to be a psychologist, if, well, (a pause) Well, Bob thinks that three more years of school is just crazy, and you know, I agree, I mean, I'm tired of school, and I don't mind hair-dressing, after all the money is pretty good and the hours, well, they could be a lot worse says Corey, and I wonder how many times she has practiced the speech, how many cold purple nights have been passed with only Bob and that speech to comfort her and I feel my fists clamp around the arms of the chair as she dries my hair with her thick white towel. Its 5:12 and the early August evening smells of truck exhaust and leaking antifreeze as I try to spit out the acrid taste of hypocrisy in my mouth, the lingering flavor of my last words to Corey. Congratulations, Ma'am. The
Scientist's Dream I wish I was an illiterate blacksmith. I wish I did not understand physics or
chemistry, I wish that I lived in a world of smoke and fire and steam. I wish that I did not smell of cologne
and fabric softener and latex gloves. I despise pop music and the drums and electric guitars of self-loathing heavy metal artists are scanty substitute for the ringing symphony of hammers on metal. I wish my wife was an unbathed peasant
woman who cooked meals of tough brown bread and a meaty
red stew that lays thick in your guts. I hate her. I wish that I could change something,
that I knew how to make anything. I wish I was an illiterate blacksmith. Wanting to be
Albert Sometimes I look in the mirror hoping
to see that same I haven't seen it yet. . . Poem for the
Man in the Gray Suit Sitting with His Wife Two Pews in
Front of Me I turn the thick paper of my yellow-brown program over in my hands waiting for the moment until it begins and swelling music washes over the hushed whispers of housewives and old men and young lovers, enveloping white columns and blue velvet drapery and slipping in and out of my head and my ears and my body, touching my insides with delicate fingers and the music twists and works its way into my veins and arteries, mingling with my blood, pushing my heart against my chest and like a scared child my hand slips into the hand of my wife who is not a beautiful woman but is more than just pretty, and I hold it tight, our thumbs running over each other in time to the rising flood and we are making love in our hands and I love her so much and the music ah the music is good and foreign words written by foreign men urge us to never forget that life is good and the sanctuary is the ocean as the music steals my breath, drowning me, crushing me, and I am so alive at this moment, right now, and I hold my wife closer and cry because God I am so happy. Appalachia Rome. History books whisper to the wise that
greatness often resides in the backwards. I can wait. Jamestown The ruins are brown and gray.
I pause because the world is quiet. The only voices are ghosts who whisper
in my ears in long dead accents, barely recognizable to
ears well-trained by speech therapists and the six
o'clock news, but I strain to listen and I hear them oh
God I hear them and the tears stream down my face There is a
Piano in My Living Room There is a piano in my living room that my Mother used to play. I look at it, I think of her, I cry, I think of her singing "Somewhere
Over the Rainbow," I calm down, I walk quietly away down the hall, my right hand tracing the wall. The Perfect
Woman I met the perfect woman once. A Poem About
Me I walk through the fog, the early
morning fog, and I am completely alive. I get into my car and drive away, still missing my mother, still missing women long past, still missing so many things. I am hungry. I am completely alive. Erasmus &
Machiavelli My mind is a high school auditorium. My mind is a high school auditorium that smells of
must and mold. The high school auditorium (my mind) hums with other people's whispers. Everyone is here. I stand on the stage. My hands are in my pockets, my overcoat hanging over the side of my wrists. The rough cloth of the brown coat feels real on my skin, and I delight in the tightness of the tie around my throat. It is a red tie. The lights are hot and the air is cold and the universe murmurs around me in this high school auditorium and I hear ghosts whispering in my ear to speak to them, to lead them, and I wonder whose ghosts they are and tell myself (to lend credence to my musings) they are the long dead spirits of Erasmus and Machiavelli. I can smell beer on Machiavelli's breath. My stomach tries to strangle my heart as I walk clip-clop to the podium like some bad photocopy of Patrick Henry. I arrange my papers, only slightly disturbed that they are written in Egyptian hieroglyphics, and begin to speak only to find that my voice is not my voice. When did my voice become so deep? When did my voice become strong? And I speak on in the voice that is not my voice but
is my voice, and my ideas pour out like music into the
dark, musty high school auditorium and slowly the crowd
begins to shift and respond, and slowly the crowd begins
to breath me in, Machiavelli claps sarcastically in the background. Hannibal This is how Hannibal felt. I sit by the stinking brown river and wonder how my silhouette looks against the grays of the far shore and the red-orange of the polluted sunset, whether I look like some Victorian bauble, whether I am some outdated conversation piece, a shadowbox in a Kodachrome world. August's hot breath tugs and yanks at my tie as I stare off into the distance, looking all the way back to Virginia, wondering where I am and why I am here and why I believed in damned fool dreams like some Medieval pilgrim seeking unbidden forgiveness from far-flung relics and the staring eyes of unseeing portraits of dead men. This is a movie I tell myself (not believing it), and I wait, wait for the girl to come and look at me from afar, her breath bated, her heart pounding. This is a movie, I tell myself, and I am Clark Gable, and she is going to come and stand between those two trees. She is going to whisper my name, and I am going to turn around and our eyes will lock and I will stand up and walk to her until walking becomes running and running becomes "I do." Hannibal sits beside the river thinking of an Easter Sunday that will never come. His arm is around a woman in blue, between them sits a daughter with curly brown hair and a white lace dress. Hannibal looks at his sword, rusted into its scabbard, then half-laughs as he throws it into the river. Hannibal would spit after it, but his mouth is hot and dry, so he curses and walks back to his car. . . There are no more elephants, you see. |
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