KARMA
Karma is our memories that will not free the dead.
KARMA
Stars and wind, the bow with silk tear surging through the black brine. Adolph H. barked for such places shorn of daily clutter. The ship returns and folds through loamy coastal waters in the morning. Seagulls, flying fish-porpoises sleigh harrowed bow curds, forms devouring and being devoured by force, each successively bursting through-no hobble where fantasies slouch; action without residue. The sky transparency accumulating until blue finally spreads soar sourced in the sun.
Who has not raged at every act love forces? Adulation, cherished wound, deeper and fresher than abandonment or betrayal. Whoever has at least once discovered love all illuminating and foretold, only to find it bird poop and the mind plunges on in agony, would seize the chance to sever its seduction into compromise. To live in love at first sight, the world transformed around us. This is what Adolph H. offered to every broken heart.
Can the body nourish the soul? It’s an endless effort to prevent it starving into disappearance. And what does it require? A mouth-what a heart might be willing to spend in a kiss, squeezed through a slot for a crumbly biscuit. Look at what flows through the senses that draws the soul. We feel it strain against us time and again. A song calls it out. But, so do empty spaces, a vista or shadowy alcove, and so poignantly that you’re sure this is whispers between divided lovers-their texture of feelings, the cloth of exile from which they’re woven. Your wistful surprise at the encounter before the looking glass as if you were remembering a dream that had shown you something about yourself, and now it’s pulling away again. All these amours and alienations of the artist seem a soul’s investment in but not full encompassing by the body.
Where has the soul that brought forth Adolph H. been disposed?
Absolute terror forces belief and is sorely missed. Nazism is no less a love story than Christianity. A requited love ends the story. Only as a promise can love sustain empires. No lover has beguiled adultery against the one offered in music. Palpable embrace, still only lightly veils heaven and world, and this desire may be soul itself. The thousand reflecting shards can’t mend it. Faith is insufficient. Prophesy is made of sterner stuff. Far away, the soul has shrunk to an inflection in things remembered as a refused plea. The cathedrals would house high “C”, the song enlightened, skin and echo shed to inspiration. These are the temples that will rise from the grave.
What endures in Nazism long after its structures are gone is its instigating spark that Adolph H. may be said to have nurtured; the same soul infested body that has become subtle to us. Adolph H. stormed the stolen city to regain it by force. He promised what has been ignored by empty space, the danger that trembling spark is in. Re-assemble the fallen tower and raise it until once again it reaches Heaven. Adam whose arm stirred the stars.
In complete darkness, the eye can detect a match struck seventeen miles away. No further explanation for the necessity of outer space or the materialization of Adolph H. by dimming senses. What has become of him in a cosmos whose body racing from the spark in black wakes holds it in relief, belittling faith as pamper and dandy?
Hell is the barren contemplation of minds too feeble to shoulder the virtue that’s thrust on us. If Adolph H. is suffering for eternity from the bodily pain he knew when alive, then the world is anathema to the soul. But, nostalgia is an amber scab; the world taps us for sweetness. The world at its telling moments has sought us, a thousand stars, a thousand lovers to fill it. It would squeeze itself from us. What form isn’t the universe seeking itself in first love?
After the bunker, Adolph awoke distended to bursting with the soul that first animated him. Someone for whom the soul’s continued gestation and longing was an unbearable sweetness fully sensed. He would not act unconsciously, but bear the weight of utterly free will. He would suffer this: the inability to ever release his soul to heal its creation. He would suffer the same nascence as creation, an absolute fullness bereft of object.
Militarized Hinduism would incarcerate Adolph in a bug. The quick finish to a mayfly only promises being without dread. Anyone who imagines Adolph a bug would not be satisfied with a bug as we ordinarily see them: robots having no awareness, or pests that prosecute one order without choice or conscience. Adolph the bug must look in a mirror and recoil with horror equal to ours, otherwise the justice would only be known to accountants computing ratios: Adolph violates this much biomass, a human weighs this many times more than a roach, Adolph the roach must be ground under heel this many times by the average biomass of a human being to balance the books. Such karma is self-contradictory even for a mechanical universe because a machine can not posit a disposition of spirit unless it makes them, and a machine that can’t do that could never transfer Adolph to another form that retains his essence, conscious or not. Molecules are reused with indifference to biography and metaphor.
But, the more common conception that there is a sentient core to karma summons a vast field of compassion, a web that suffers wounds whenever a form in creation tears itself away. Then, shrinking into a roach traces the reaches of soul amputated by losing compassion. More likely compassion forms Adolph into saint or devout lover, but maybe hovering around every roach is the great soul of feeling that was evicted, and the intensity of the ghost’s exile in this inadequate form is a purging grief we might feel witnessing any crime against a soul. How ugly the remnant would only be matched by the beauty of the grieving soul, and how like creation it would be.
LETTER TO MOWGLI
How unsuited men are for holiness. The hairy ankles, the genitals, of course, how with an organ on display outside the body can they preach abstinence? How, indeed, to make a pilgrimage on feet with yellow toe nails? Leap or dash which direction heads home? Mighty Oz, tin and straw and cowardice you addressed, but please, don’t neglect the poor monkeys stabbed by wings.
Mowgli, your breath is worse than a garlic addicts in the morning. You are nearly skeletal. She plans to teach you the missionary position and then abandon you when you have been spoiled by civilization. You will howl over the telephone. You will whimper over a photo of her taken in one of those cubicles for a dollar in quarters. You are in the photo, a creature trapped in a box inside a box.
I send this letter as a warning. You are in the crosshairs. Beware.
Who am I? A friend, a littermate, a fellow maroon.
I applaud you for succeeding where I failed. Many times I tried fleeing to a more civil society, only to lose my nerve and return to the cannibals.
Oh, Mowgli, choose me. I know you. Trust me with your wolf name. I was a princess among the wolves. I will tell you about myself, and then you'll know you have nothing to keep from me. Listen to my confession: My wolves have become concepts to me. They have abandoned me. Once upon a time they came to my bed and put their paws on the blanket or tugged it with their teeth and lead me to green pastures where we looked back at the houses and saw their lit windows and heard the children being called in for sleep. All the sounds and sights were perfect looking back, the lawns with swing sets and the broad porches and the warm light through the lace curtains. We saw little boys running back along dirt roads overhung with apple boughs, crickets playing the saw from tufts of grass. Swallows un-darned the edge of twilight, and long shadows tipped the bowl of summer sky. We turned away and I was led under stars to their circle. Their glowing yellow eyes on me, they gave me my forest name: WASPLEG.
We can only be feral as children, but I trust you. Take me back. I know even "is" is a translation.
Trust me:
I stopped here. I saw the yolk of the falling droplet open. An acorn geysering into tree dug its limbs into eddies between the stars. A rabbit held in mid leap. Around my ears the circle of each sound was suspended. The streams were peeled and I saw out of them without a reflection. A first day had not happened yet; ghosts were alive, and the moon called and the air was yet to dress.
MERRY GO ROUND
This article from a magazine for flight enthusiasts caught my eye. A prologue note said the authors waited fifteen years to offer it for publication. I have abbreviated it.
His website came up Tim Wheeler’s ranch: a
hundred thousand acres of re-runs. He owned a dozen other dachas, each a slab
carved off an American promised land.
Not by coincidence had he bought up old film libraries; his fortune was
made looting the nation’s imagination. He had commissioned an anthem to be
written for the end of days; it was to be played when the films ran out. He
named this ranch on the coast of
Permission for landing was granted. Our plane had been spotted from the ground, her engines at two thousand feet echoing in the bowl of the bay. There is no better calling card than a DC-3 returning to her native soil of distant adventure, especially for a certain age bracket. Tim Wheeler had taken his first flights in Dc-3’s more than sixty years ago, dressed in a suit with a snap on bowtie, a brown snap on bowtie with yellow polka dots, we found out from his very self, say five, six times. Got a haircut, too, day before the trip, hair clipped so short on the nape it tingled and tickled when he ran his hand up against the grain.
Tim is a famously depressed man, and age usually worsens that condition, but it made him more than a gracious host, lighting up as depressed people often do at the prospect of company. It made him nearly confessional and we felt nearly custodial towards him. We were intimates from the first handshake. Besides, we broke the ice with our water landing.
His radioman was giving us directions for approach and landing across the mountains at Tim’s airport when we told him what we needed was clearance to land from the west into the mouth of the bay. We asked them to light whatever channel markers they had. The chuckles and whistles started right then and when we taxied to the dock we were greeted with cheers and bear hugs.
What
a sight we must have been, too good to be true, landing out of a setting sun,
silhouetted, the spray auburn and orange.
Is depression ever more than a disease of sentiment? Tim was having a hard time keeping back his
tears. Every evening he sat in a
Wheeler had always kept women by his side as repositories for his tenderness, but now in the twilight of his life, he had surrounded himself with rough hewn brotherhood: cowboys and ranchers, sailors and fishermen, pilots and Alpine climbers, hunters and explorers, engineers and crane operators, miners and carpenters. Noticeable by their absence were athletes, though he had owned professional teams: Their rancid immaturity clashed with raw wisdom. Silence is the oracle. Near the end, both women and the muse blare over that last voice.
He took us on a tour of his collections. They were flown ahead of him to wherever he was staying. The mansion was filled with lovingly restored memorabilia from his childhood. There was a suite of six roped off rooms-we were led through them as if they were museum displays-each of them a model of his bedroom during three years from his youth, ending at eighteen. Each was an intact ecology, a terrarium, where Tim at three, Tim at six, etcetera, wandering about at night might wake up without any reason to think that all his years of exile were any more than a dream. Of course, he had a movie theater in the basement and he had fine collections of American artists, paintings of Indians and cowboys, scouts and cavalry, and iron castings of horses and bulls. Most astonishing was a penny arcade with one cent peep shows, skee ball, pin ball, gypsy fortune tellers, bottle throws, squirt gun horse races, and so on. This room opened into another that he explained was reproduced eleven times around the globe because it was not portable. It had high windows through which you could see the ocean and sky passing through a day, or week, seagulls calling and fog rolling in accompanied by thunder: an observatory to recreate a sky from a week’s vacation in Atlantic city all under the direction of a computer, and in the center of the room a one-half scale model of a carousel, calliope piping.
It played a paso doble, the same as on the final anthem but without symphony orchestra back-up.
MOULAN ROUGE
Whenever we kiss I worry and wonder,
Your lips may be near, but where is your heart?
Ridiculous times, cruel times, sad times, promising times, missed times, typical times, and not my choice: the rocket sled emblazoned across a poem in powerful stead of the birth canal, the infant hurtling down from the austere stars. What a bold, sterile time it was.
Awake, tramp, lowered into an empty seat in a row of empty seats in the far, secret wing of a movie theater in rural New Jersey; long-spaced street lights, bulbs suspended by dangling wires across shadowy lanes. Hoboken, Secaucus, Indian names from a desolated language that never found a song in these Americas, frozen in memories of the ice bridge, towns stillborn in the shattered names and bluestone. The white ball bouncing atop the projected lyrics, Terri and Gilliam, teens conceived in furloughs from World War II, spooning between breathy syllables, a current jumping tongues at the omitted diminuendo “where is your heart” scooping me from the soul flotsam around “Lilli Marlene”, and mercy, back again even though I knew better.
I coughed to announce myself to Terri and Gilliam, the rusty pipes of adult wisdom, and before heading off into the brackish wash, croaked a few bars to disenchant them lest the theater fill like a hatchery with hearts arrested by bullet or infarction while mid-verse in reverie. The worlds are filled with us, some, like myself, old tramps unsettled in both, some still hopeful with a thousand lessons to learn, but always introduced by a double take, wasn’t this room empty, the booth in the bar unoccupied? Double take, then deja vu, the puzzle solved with histories as airtight as any calking a dream.
We are outnumbered by the fiery, pink babies thought to arrive squished flat by g-forces after their journey from the stars, but it will save you time and trouble, worlds of it, to notice how many who begin in fire end in ash, and to listen to the souls among you composed from the other elements who hint by kindness that it is love alone that breaks the sound barrier. Near at hand is everything beyond the clouds you have raced into losing while souls are delivered in swaddling hammocks of verse memorized in a kiss.
Do you remember him? Just by the curiosity of his memory remaining slightly more vivid than you might expect, backlit by his sudden departure? Few of us are on the familiar terms he was always and daily with his fate. Probably, none of us would boilerplate our lives with a word like fate, but it outlined him, and it was not through size or bluster that he was the first noticed in a room. The night of the Christmas office party even the drunkest would be able to recall that he had left early, perhaps seeing him putting on his coat, though that last sighting on consideration might be apocryphal, but not the sense that a change had happened in the hall, as you sense a door or window opening in a closed house.
I also left early as I did every year, feeling out of place and off balance. Without the cover of work, my lack of connection with everyone there seemed conspicuous to me. He was already drunk and being unpredictable when he was drinking, generously populist enough to scare the stuffing from everyone, his exit could be considered a charitable act, but he was keeping an appointment with a coincidence, a petit mal of destiny. I saw him up ahead on the sidewalk smashing his shoulder into pedestrians heading the opposite direction. “Tourists”, he said to me, anticipating my arrival though he had not glanced back as far as I could tell. “They’ve had their vaccinations.”
He took me to a bar. I thought it too gallant of me to refuse. What business did the mail boy have reminding an editor he should lay off the juice?
He put a wad
of crumpled twenties on the bar. He had tremendous class. Everything he did
could set an example. Hoarding the money in your pocket means you are hedging
your bets. After his death there was a boom market for gossip about him. One morsel
circulated by bloodless wits concerned his anachronistic effects. They felt
affairs and brawls redound to a man’s credit, and that scandal and insight
reside in details. He left behind no credit card or driver’s license. Evidence, they said, of a parsimonious
guardianship over his drinking; considering his boasts, this was hypocrisy,
even apostasy. If he had not bequeathed me everything remaining in this world
that he valued, I suppose I might have taken their word for it. He kept nothing that would dilute honor or
exaggerate power. He had no telephone at home but kept up a limited
correspondence through letters written with a fountain pen. It was discovered
that he left virtually nothing in cash or equities, but had entirely disposed
of his holdings to charities by the time of his death. The largest bequest was
to an orphanage in
The bartender poured bourbon on the rocks for him; he set the tumbler on the counter with a rich clinking of ice. He soon refilled it. He did carry a wallet, but instead of money, he kept photos in it. He laid some Polaroid color prints on the bar, carelessly it could seem; a saloon’s counter always has puddles on it, but carelessly is exactly the wrong word. Hopelessly, objectively, diagnostically, they might be closer, but sacrificially with everything in that act I have yet to understand but instinctively recognize, that’s how he dealt these photos of his girlfriend onto the bar.
She was lying naked on crumbled bed sheets, her legs spread exposing her vulva and a wink of pink. A chubby girl surrendering to the photo like surgery, not sexy or provocative, a crime scene photo more or less, claustrophobic in the frame, flat and merciless in the flash, and she having no idea how to pose or if she should, but too ashamed of her naivete or self-perceived stinginess with love or sex to refuse.
He was a beautifully ugly man. His ugliness had the same effect on you as beauty would, a swoon into pre-articulate first principles. There was that same mystery in his features, that reification of time. His hair was thick and silky, a beneficial corollary to some oily complexions, as was the reflective quality in his red-brown eyes. They were nearly as refulgent as a woman’s. His teeth were busted up and rotten in the aristocratic manner, and he spoke with the lockjaw of the Knickerbocker Brahmin, and carelessly wore tailored coats and shirts, a palette of food stains on his breast, crumbs raked into his beard. The woman in the photo was much younger than he; she looked as if she was still fed by loving parents. He would have been irresistible to her, the larger theater he brought to an affair, the echoes of world-weariness, the balm an essential in her sex could give him, and more than this, the higher stakes risked not just to her privacy but her actual being, love on a high wire over oblivion.
“She dumped me. She’s with a cokehead now, black. I think he plays the guitar, opportunistic choice for a black man. I believe he’s full of shit, in spite of his color. I worry about her; she’s conscience’s fool. She offered me her ass. She has a terrific ass, I can’t over sell that, but she’s really quite innocent and offers it up as it were, deathly afraid but obedient to catechism. Gave me her virginity that way, really wanted to suffer for it, to prove she loved me, really that innocent, thoroughly disgusted, but so unsophisticated, actually claiming to be anally erotic to fool herself into believing she was as selfish as an adult. You’ll have to be careful not to take advantage, as this homeboy is doing. She’ll never enjoy sex, the nuns saw to that, but her faith in love is limitless. She can be destroyed. You will tremble at her touch, honestly, you will. Or shimmer.”
“I don’t want to see this; I don’t want to hear this. You’re going to regret this tomorrow, so I’m going to forget it. I work in the mail room, that doesn’t make me your blues brother.”
“Careful of that vein in your forehead. Cerebral hemorrhage seems to sneak up on us, but everyone else thinks it served you right.”
“I was on my way home.”
He grabbed my bicep in his hand; his grip was crushing. I remembered rumors of bar room fights.
“No more leisure for you. She’s a naked soul, be careful, even though you can’t, you will. A naked soul, you will drink from the well. As for me” and he released my arm, “Don’t want to insult the good bartender”, and he bottomed up a last tumbler and got up to leave without gathering either photos or money. I did it and tried to push them into his pocket, but he brushed them aside.
“They’re in good hands.”
“You were just going to leave them?”
“Oh no, I trust you completely. But, husband that vein, won’t you?”
I jogged after
him, heading East on
I called after him while signaling to the ruffled pedestrians that he was crazy, pointing at my temple and putting a bewildered, plaintive expression on my face.
“Here’s the money and the photos. I’m going home.”
“Can’t just leave me here drunk and broke.”
“Take the money.”
“Can’t do that. Too pathetic to borrow money from an employee. Not even legal, I think.”
“It’s your money.”
“Don’t coddle me. I won’t suffer that. Keep your money; I’m never so drunk I forget who paid for the drinks. It was weak of you, enabling a drunk, but there’s your kindness and I won’t exploit it anymore.”
Across the street, the canyons, lit windows, the comber surge of traffic, dark park on our left, a feeling of altitude you get in the city at night, of skating through outer space. Now, Hansen cabs and the barn stench, their clown-act drivers. Once again, I tried stuffing the bills and photos in his jacket pocket.
“Hey, hey”, slapping my hand away. “Mind you, I am gracious on the topics of thievery and homosexuality, nobles oblige, but I just won’t stand for it in practice. Uncompromising sodomy is something else.”
He had stopped to stroke the long nose of a horse; it shook its bridle, and the curly-haired driver approached us. He’d give us a ride for fifteen dollars.
“Does it work?” Bob asked. “Is it romantic or just strange?”
I was humming with frustration. I tried catching his eye, the wad of money in my hand, shaking my head “no” and shrugging my shoulders. He laughed at me.
“Don’t bother to answer. My catamite wants to go and that’s all there is to it.”
“I’m not going, and that’s all there is to it.”
He climbed into the cab.
“Take the money.”
“Can’t do that. You’re going to leave me and rush home with my girlfriend’s pictures, to do just what? You’re not the friend you pretend to be. Driver, slow around the park, spare the steed, it’s the season.”
“He doesn’t have any money.”
“Whose fault is that? Do you accept Blue Cross? No? For pity’s sake. Get up here man. You can’t just take my money and leave me to clean out the stalls. That’s it, upsy daisy and hurrah. Nothing to fear, we’ve got a drover to supervise us. Relax the vein.”
I had never ridden in a carriage before. I can’t say it lulled me, but its scale and artifacts cowed and hushed me as sitting in a church pew does. I felt frenzied compared to this obdurate anachronism. We moved at a surprisingly fast clip; the nag having no spirit to resist a spirited pace, briskly stepping, summoning from stone and pavement the inevitable cortege foreshadowing of a horse’s hollow hoof fall at night.
“Do you have a flask up there?”
The driver had a pint of brandy he handed back. My attention was on the rigging of this machine that seemed by its accommodation to the horse to have already achieved what modern machinery has consigned to private prayer.
“Didn’t Jesus come in and out on an ass, Palm Sunday, and the manger? Two thousand years, why is the ass still making the cut? I can’t imagine an ass that didn’t defecate bounteously, or a woman who gave birth without voiding. The ass has got to be the scribe, a wink as he passes wind. Three days dead, then born again, no fuss, no mess, no mother, scot-free, except for that long-lived braying ass. Let’s forgive both of them on his birthday”, he squeezed my hand, “It’s tough being left behind”
“Yo, stop right here. We got forty dollars? Yes? This has been unbearably sad, even without the rotgut. It wasn’t strange at all. We talked about Jesus on Christmas and grieved. For the second twenty: has anyone ever proposed to her in this carriage, slipped the ring on? There is no right answer; I’m paying for the truth.”
The driver answered. He looked impish, corona of curly hair, round face and big eyes.
“It did happen, but it’s usually kids their folks take out.”
“And…?”
“She didn’t take the ring. A long ride back.”
“Oh yeah, the worst part of forever.”
There are patches of snow on the stones and hemming the curbsides. The trees are bare and skeletal. We sit in a pagoda, the tower lights melting onto the rowing lake.
He reached into the breast pocket of his coat and removed a card. He had written her name and phone number on it.
“So much cold, you can’t blame anyone for anything, I loved them all, but there are complete innocents. They remind you each time, and each time they usher you out more quickly. I apologize, old friend, for the brevity, but not to be too boring, I have an ethical responsibility to acquit.”
The carriage driver should have been the snag. Photos of Bob were circulated by the newspapers and appeared on television, but I have never been questioned about his disappearance. We disembarked into a lacuna opened when a word is unraveling from a lyric. I tell it now, years later, but it’s the usual story. Her name is Lilli and it was love at first sight, nothing more. We trembled on the tip of a tongue, and then passed into the center of the universe where souls and songs are wed.
BOIL AND BUBBLE, TOIL AND TROUBLE
Cacophony in heaven, Hera is laying into
Zeus. Heaven is no higher than
Hera the harridan, all her suspicions fully justified, but who could put up with her righteousness for a week, let alone eternity? Other than hen pecking, and gossip, she remains idle. Jealous vigilance, stasis, is her vocation. The poet says Zeus fell on Leah like a bolt. How else the pent up husband? The most physical of the gods, expelling what cognition he possessed into his egg-Athena-and leaving himself nothing but natural reflexes, an Id but thoroughly without rancor, after all he is rarely frustrated for long, pausing only when mediating between conflicting divine egos, the rest of the time found acting on his impulses, impregnating the world with action and force.
The bolt-thrower, the phallus from the clouds, but before the bolt falls look how he has sheathed it irresistibly in beauty, so had the daughters of creation ever been given the chance, they would have chosen him anyway, if beauty ever leaves a choice. As a bull or this time a swan he comes, and swan or stag, tiger or stallion, it is in these creatures the sheer sheathing of the male initiative force that make them beautiful: The shouldered bull, the antlered stag are coupled with in dreams, perhaps outside of Hera’s view, and from these unions not only Helen springs, but the Laurel as well, the green, quick wick of heaven’s desire glowing in each.
The Gaels spoke of them, and none since with conviction or actual witness. By the time they had been confined in English, though the melody of their misty tongue made a lilt of it sweeter than Latin ever would, it was all legend and a bittersweet nostalgia. The sea had already gone soot on them, a mercantile sludge overlay its chambers and troves of stars, and the Catholic Church spoke ill of the deep and the antediluvian monsters banished there.
Back when the land lay covered each night by the sea, leaving kelp tresses dangling from thatch gables at cock’s crow and eels squirming arabesques in ox cart ruts and yarn balls of fog with a hag’s tooth biting the milk bucket, there was a briny intercourse in the arctic current.
The peat barely smolders in the hearth and her husband stirs against her, and she too waterlogged to know if this is a dream she can’t shuck, her husband coupled to her from behind and the sea rolling and far off, and barely reaching the chesty thunder from combers pummeling the shore. A starry broth seethes and settles to silk and she catches a quick view of souls swaddled in hoar frost gazing back from the constellations. And then its nappy and lanolin sleek on her, and a henge of round heads is about her, their eyes black and large as the new moon.
Head first the boy pops into the world without a cry and not even the slap on his bottom will push it out of him, and not a call for milk either. Late to talk, if at all, though sleeping, eyes wide and black, he warbles of several places no one has ever been where the cod fall like feathers from a comet’s tail and salmon surge up the Milky Way.
A day, a night and another day, calling for him in the meadow, lambs kicking up their heels and arching their spines, hooves fore and aft clicking over green meadow and under blue one with fleece grazing overhead. Here the creek and dappled shadow, the warm molder and piss stink of the pens, there the road and the grassy shoulders deep as banks, the summer day full and light as a bosom, roots drinking down the hoisting sunlight. He’s at the bottom of the well, diving again and again into the starry bucket at the small end of the spyglass cairn, and at last found he is staring up through where he saw his eyes reflected. Under water he’s gone to don the mask of the boy looking up from the stars.
His uses have barely become known-the silent lad who can hear the fish running and should be followed when he pushes his dory into the black water, the ardent cod leaping into the bow to catch the moon-when a whiskered old gristle with a flat upper lip and a roll to this walk raps on the caulked door. Sea steams from his woolens.
“What farming will be done is done, the plow is fixed on its sharp keel in the field. It’s twelve years now I buried the pup in the deep. The peaked scows above my head I pushed him from me and orphaned him to the sea. I’ve come for him he might deliver to us the blessing in being born.”
By five years his diagnosis was confirmed, by thirteen he will likely be dead by stroke or heart attack: Progeria syndrome. His shrunken face with the great, foggy eyes beneath the frangible, high dome of his cranium, his cricket limbs gnarled by arthritis, his piping, cracking old man’s voice. If the DNA in a body were unwound it would stretch to the moon; I knew this was no coincidence from the time I learned my son’s prognosis. One gene misread in that coiled shaft has popped the watch spring in my son; the watch is stopped and will tell the correct time only twice, am and pm, the hands touching nothing between birth and dying. Each day the sun and moon rise at a different time, between them is a shadow dance, until once each month one sets at its pole while the other rises across the sky. That moment with the hands at six along the horizon, each a tick from losing the other, star abandoned lovers, is my son’s astrology.
He will never ripen. His life has no sacred calendar. His soul arrived before its seasoning in interstitial darkness was completed. A destiny wails behind the curtains like a baby left alone. He will never know moments when futures spread their petals and then closed with all the night a trembling fermata.
Each deformed infant reveals the loom between the stars. My son is a single thread, an abstraction, the cloth and its patterns will never be woven, only that one thing that men have in common that excised from the whole as it is in my son is shown to be only a cue: enter stage left, exit stage right and all the lines between forgotten. My son unhooks the constellations and scatters the stars, leaving only math to retrieve them. By his silence we hear the word that was put in us. Through his sacrifice the stars assent to being heaven.
I called you. If not for me you would have remained there, memories sheared from you, invisible. Only an ear was left, a deeper hollow in the vacuum where my voice came to fill. My song was cast in that mold, and you were cast in my song. I gave you a throat. I pulled you back into the light. Hollowed beyond me, I recovered you, a greater emptiness than the space between the stars, and all your life you have listened for me, a Rose of Sharon, an apple tree among the trees of the wood, a dove in the cliffs of the rock, and everything echoed my song. And I will call you again at the end, and for an eternity as I breathe in and my song empties from you and leaves you again the hollow stamped with all you love in the world, you will in that moment see me and love me, and finish in love, your ear open like a flower in the night.
STAR CHILD
There are more of us than the world will ever know. We are rare as stars, scattered through time. What are the laws that guide our appearance, the orbits that bring us out of the dark? Some imagine a hatchery, hidden in the constellations, a planetary population so dedicated to spiritual knowledge that its physicality has withered to exhaustion, haunted by extinction and the interstellar void. We star children are explained as offspring of this etiolated civilization and vigorous earth mothers-despairing rural girls who are vessels for a redeeming mysticism. Girls selected for sacrifice before they were born, such is the vistas from the stars. Their first children taken from them by abortion or miscarriage, fulfilling prophesy are refashioned and returned with starlight shinning through them. They are conceived in dreams. These children, too, will be snatched, when their ministries must begin. The star ships return, and their large-eyed child is lifted from his room of simple toys that he never showed much interest in, a quiet child who never cried or reached out his small hands to grasp his mother’s hair or finger, and spends his days and nights chastely waiting-an unexplained resonance will awaken her, and she will be given one brief moment to witness her child in a beautiful white glow, gowned numinous, rising towards the stars. An angel returns to the choir, and the house hums with the carol.
Carbon-14 dating has put the age of my
skull between 5,000 to 10,000 years. I was discovered in a cave in
Star child, the only skull ever found of
my hybrid species, discovered in
There was agriculture and a marketplace, there was trade and lovers made love face to face as jaguars never have, but it was all begrudged. The fortunate winners of athletic contests had their hearts cut out while they were still virgins and unpolluted by belief in the world. The rest lived furtively, or they lived invisibly, all of them except those lucky enough to die violently and truthfully. Finally all the ones who had existence had been culled and the remainder evaporated, perhaps spared in the end, gathered into the never was without stigmata. I was already dead and can not report, but maybe after the last chosen souls had ascended those stairways to the space between the stars and the launch pilots-the priests-had turned the blades on themselves, closing the door behind them, the multitudes left bereft in the bright sun and green fields of maize ceased being, saved even from madness. Their heads fully empty, their senses unheard, they disintegrated universes that would otherwise have been expelled by them with their dying breath and besmirched the dark.
STAR
Listen.
Hear it? Once again,
From there,
The spot there, where there is nothing.
Where there was not even a spot before.
But now intensely as if it was only there
That enough room has been left to hold it.
Purposely.
Left completely dark,
No!
Made completely dark by its emptiness,
A place that has been waiting
With enough emptiness densely packed,
To house everything lost.
Point of keenly burning distance.
Where it did not happen, any of it,
The kiss, the child, the day.
Where it did not happen,
And the spear of light to our hearts was broken.
Out of that tunnel through the heavens,
From there the voice is coming.
Listen.
Just exactly there.
A star.
JINGLE
"A woman told me this story. She was woken up by the telephone after two in the morning. `Elaine? It's Terrance.' Terance had died twenty years ago. He was a pianist, only in his twenties, and he slumped off the bench and died on stage during a concert. He had made love with every French professor he had had. She was one of them. “Terrance. It's nice to hear from you. How are things over there?” she asked. He said it had been raining at first, but finally the sun had come out. It had snuck up on him. He was stuck in a sour mood and he just happened to notice a wall. All the details leapt out at him, cracks and chips, and then he realized the wall was glowing, and when he blinked blue after-images floated in his eyes. He looked up and he saw laundry drying on clothes lines. A happy prince has been crowned, he thought, and higher up towers in the city were glowing gold against a blue sky where sooty grey clouds had broken up and were being swept away. “I'm so happy for you, Terrance. It sounds beautiful. Blue skies. I'm so relieved. I've stopped believing that was possible. I hardly seem to care much about them here. I didn't think I'd get that back. Oh, I hope so. I hope I didn't put if off too long.” He answered, “You didn't. We didn't. The sunset was beautiful, it reminded me of all the paintings of sunsets I have seen before, but all the colors they've borrowed haven't dulled the original.” “What a surprise. I've grown resigned. I thought when we get there we pay for overlooking things here by missing them, and I thought by now I might not miss them, anyway. So much has happened and it just seems to foul the nest. Grey clouds sounded much more like it. Terrance, I wonder if maybe it is just you who were lucky. We all miss you.” “But, that's why I called. I miss you. I think it was the sun coming back. I just suddenly started remembering how sunny you were. For me. You could be. You're so generous. You can't help it. I was thinking as the clouds pulled back of you undressing. A light on everything and you come to mind. You know, the sun was warming my pants. I picked the streets so I was headed right into it and that's when I was thinking of you, when my pants were warming up. What are you wearing?' “Terrance. You mustn't think that way. Not there. It's too sad. It's awful. To still think that way. They should never have stopped the rain. I mustn't think about you either, I'm sure I'm to blame. It must be a dream. We must be allowed to forget. I'll pray for you. I should have all this time and instead, God forgive me, I must have been calling you back. And you just don't know, I'm much older now, not like you remember me. It's so unseemly of me. You're just a boy. And I miss you. So, unfair. I've got to let you go. But, it's harder now than it was before. It's all I have left. It's got to be a sin to summon the dead. But, it's become so impossible here since beauty left with you. Whenever it touches me again it's you touching me now. You did rush it so, wonderful boy, opening the door so wide, we were nearly all swept along, we were all ready to go with you, but you were pulled through alone. Forgive us, we pushed you too close for our own sakes, but then we spared you the fatigue that's come later.”
Well. it wasn't dead Terrance at all, but
Terrance on sabbatical in
RIVERINE
Do you have a spare moment? It is not that far from my office to the
Your absence is familiar to me from empty mirrors. I could enter the space where my shadow lived. And look out. Did you know that beauty carries that space inside it? Doesn't that change everything between us? Of course I would mistake you for someone else, but don't you think, that you mistook yourself for someone mistaken by the dead for someone who had wandered away from them? Did you hear them more personally? Did you? If I had loved you, wouldn't you have been responsible for turning my ear to listen to those voices calling you? I don't believe you can hear any of this. By now you are dust. Am I here to say good-bye at last? But it is only because of those like you who are already more of our vacancy than we can afford to part with that the rest of us learn we are only the accumulating of an amnesia that when filled will be eternal. There are too many echoes in that space, I hear them now, and each of them builds you again."
He re-wound the tape erasing it entirely, her voice included, committing the spoken words to eternity, freeing them from the glue of the tape where held down they would not be audible to the dead in their realm of the immaterial.
He nodded off. A minute later he wakes, saying “what?” into the dark room. He can not remember that he dreamed of his son jumping into a sparkling river yelling "Geronimo", his silhouette, arms out flung, cut against the gleaming surge, but he senses close by the figure who will arrive at the end, who will enter the room where familiar things no longer know him,. He does not know yet whether he has recognized this figure or if he is a stranger.
NATURE MORTE
Because, I heard a nightingale. I have been listening, and it’s not going to
alarm you less, this call after thirty years, if I tell you it’s four a.m.
here, but it is. And it is not cumulative. It’s
The stones of
I can offer no earthly reason to explain this affair with Marion C. only astronomical ones. A billion pair of eyes must have witnessed her rise cleansed from the deathbed the night of the Academy Awards. I am no stranger to the witchery in film, the tumbrel march of those sentenced to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award, but that night, loving her helplessly, if not selflessly, we stalled life and death; at least, en masse, we fogged the mirror.
A child of light loomed on the projector’s beam: Gone, the hickory-dickory-dock of its engine grinding out “once upon a time” for any kid to hear in the dark theater, but the starry wake of drifting motes remains. Her limber waste dressed in lambent white gown; if the candle should disrobe from tallow to the shinning filament, it’s Marion C. it becomes.
Since I can recount only an impressionistic collection of moments verifying my role as her career manager, to wit, the finish of a lunch when she tosses her hair-that free, energetic, and yet tragic grace of each of her movements, the child’s woodland heart reinvented in gesture-what is left to explain our intimacy is my walks through Paris, a skein as dizzying as the spiraling plot of her film.
If you have no better destination than
salvation in
It must have been in the wee hours that C.
and I met. Why is she abroad at that dewy time? I suspect she has no more
choice in these matters than the rest of us, and behind as many eyelids as she
has been cast, probably far less. We must have walked by the
A restaurant again; I have yet to
establish myself in a residence. There must be a garret, little better than a
skylight lean to on a tarry roof top or a basement allotment seems likely where
I hear the shoes of
I cannot place some women’s eyes in a single world. Marion C. has these eyes. I can do no better than to say that Charon accepts such eyes as coins for return passage.
But, no, it’s not the chop that has entranced her. It is the change in me. I have pushed forward in my chair and with elbows on the table, grabbed her wrist, the one that holds the chop as if anticipating me. Certainly, it is only this instant that I have bulled my way through the door and into her life, a man without excuses or scruples or invitations. I smell strongly, my coat is crumpled, my hair oily, and my teeth tarry. I may have been wandering the streets for a week in search of her or unerringly found her directly from the airport. I remove the chop from her fingers and take her hands in mine.
“Is it your voice?”
“I can’t sing a note.”
I release her hands and sit straight-backed in the chair. The stoic finds mystery prolix and would spare children suffering. What was it we shared more inherited than the truth? What more final reckoning of lineage did we learn as we faced each other across that table; two people resolved to such a degree on our orphaning that the restaurant dissolves, our lives and possessions dissolve with all our history to that point, and we awaken together in the morning in the world of another creation.
“Are you happy now?” she asks.
A steeple, only such an aerie could so
surround us by light, placing us where the sun rises from the ocean still
tended by flying fish as the sunflower by nightingales. The whales have sung it
lullabies in the deep and carried it along its orbit. Has anyone inside the
song ever heard it? Only in exile does it become refrains. The bells of
Sweet love, I have called you on the morning I walked in while you slept. I have worked the graveyard shift, and you left the door unlocked for me. You sleep in the soft light and I look at you and I had to call. I am returning from the dark streets on the far bank of Lethe. The cities are rebuilt there, and the streetlights glow in women’s eyes, black tulips.
Thank you for playing Edith Piaf on the phonograph, that’s all, oh yes, and for everything, always.
PURPLE FLUTE
Let us agree that this flute makes only one note. Perhaps all flutes make only one note, or there is only one flute, this is possible since we have agreed on our flute so completely that flutes have disappeared and it is only we two who might name what we know a flute to recognize each other. We have decided what note it is and made it exist though we have never heard it and never will. This single note can never be made, but we know just what it must be by churlish echoes, not just the arguments we know we’ll have and the tawdry majesty of the law, but by a dead heron and a heron in flight. This does not mean that the flute to play it can never be made, but that it already has been and other flutes that make so many notes slightly off key to the note we know with certainty is waiting-we must have heard it but can’t remember it, that is why we know it’s true, because we can’t tarnish it or belittle it, it’s as it always was, but where and when did we last hear it, we know that too because it is what’s forgotten-exist much less than the one that makes our note. If you are a woman we have decided we are in love because both of us hear this note and feel all the other notes are spilling away. We have imagined our flute taller than a tower with birds pouring through open windows until perfectly empty, the tower is waiting for a bell. We are only certain that this note must exist or we will be lost to sight. We must find each other..
