Saturday, January 31, 2009
Friday, January 30, 2009
The Understudy
The hand of most fate is shot through with the dull color. I hate to say it so plainly, but I have lived too many meaty days gone the way of the young ecstatic. He used the old podiatrist excuse, but between you and me, the guy didn't even have feet. When I said work, then, I meant work like this: shaving stars for scenery, or better yet, dressing up as scenery and trying not to shake unless you were a tree in a certain kind of scene. Supposed to be one. "If you wanted to dance, go to a disco" is what they told me. They were from Iowa, but they played the part of lusty Europeans. Heat farms. That's what I called them under my breath. I've never seen sweat like that. Or the way the veins in their temples bulged and pulsed like snails with smokers' coughs watching an elegant and very, very dirty comedian. They had the whole passion thing down to a science, but as soon as the work day was over, they called out blindly, "sandweech! sandweech!" I usually had one ready for each of them. The director kept promising me that one day I would step into the play, that a role would emerge for me in the spate of endless interpretation. That someone would turn to each actor on the stage and say, "where's Charlie, he said that he would be here, and I need him." And then I would be born, and this ain't no time for diapers. Maybe it's true what they say, that people are like this everywhere, waiting their turn while the others pretend. But that seems entirely too logical for a man with dreams like mine. I hit 400 in the little league. I can cook six kinds of omelettes, fix the plumbing, raid the pantry. When that guy shows up, I'm the yellow moon on the rise. I'm the shadow slipping the next hill. Let him see, let him know, how it feels . . . each gesture an only gesture, each word the one that teaches them about all you're worth. Let him live without a better self out in front.
Blood Bank
What you knew
you knew
only so well,
the cuttings and shutterings,
five miles alone
with the earth's passing.
Each of these
is vacancy,
vacancy stillness
beginning again
like a quiet man pacing
our ceiling, his floor.
It's only metaphor,
and yet
how we understand the
raw world.
Say world, not wound,
not the weeping kind
you brought home
in your hotel heart,
not the blindness
your nurtured.
Six long years in the orchard
learning the music of a dull blade.
Your wrist grew
thick in it, like a dancer
shouldering a legless dancer.
These impossible views
take us back to our possible childhoods.
What aching we knew then, named joy,
what solitudes
we did not have words for.
Sometimes, quieter,
we could hear our bones
adding their inches
like children counting
on their fingers
the spoils
of a candy robbery.
This is only an abstract poem
we would have shouted
if we only knew
such a term could
remove all limit
and leave the thing dripping,
shining in sunlight.
you knew
only so well,
the cuttings and shutterings,
five miles alone
with the earth's passing.
Each of these
is vacancy,
vacancy stillness
beginning again
like a quiet man pacing
our ceiling, his floor.
It's only metaphor,
and yet
how we understand the
raw world.
Say world, not wound,
not the weeping kind
you brought home
in your hotel heart,
not the blindness
your nurtured.
Six long years in the orchard
learning the music of a dull blade.
Your wrist grew
thick in it, like a dancer
shouldering a legless dancer.
These impossible views
take us back to our possible childhoods.
What aching we knew then, named joy,
what solitudes
we did not have words for.
Sometimes, quieter,
we could hear our bones
adding their inches
like children counting
on their fingers
the spoils
of a candy robbery.
This is only an abstract poem
we would have shouted
if we only knew
such a term could
remove all limit
and leave the thing dripping,
shining in sunlight.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
The Goodness of Mark Pauline
Heckert said that one night he was on the roof of Survival Research Laboratories, which is an extremely ugly sort of roof, rimmed with barbed wire, and covered with empty and broken beer-bottles, whose translucent brownness is reminiscent of dead Japanese beetles, and it was evening, and Heckert was in his bathrobe, and ten white punks from one of the Sunset gangs were facing him on the roof in what must be considered a threatening fashion, and one of the gang said, "Come on, you b*tch, let's go for it," and Heckert was thinking he was going to have to hit the guy really hard on the side of the head, when just then his buddy Mark jumped in, pushed Heckert out of the way, and gave the enemy a short burst with a flamethrower. The guy screamed. He was not seriously hurt, but his arm was burned and his shirt was on fire. --"Hey, man," he said. "I mean, you didn't have to flame me!"
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