Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present
Page 21
Me and Molly don’t double date. We don’t multiply anything. We don’t know our multiplication tables from a coffee table. We’ll never be decent waitresses, indecent ones maybe.
Me and Molly do not believe in going ape or going bananas or going Dutch. We go as who we are. We go as what we are.
Me and Molly have wiped each other’s asses with ferns. Made emergency tampons of our fingers. Me and Molly make do with what we have.
Me and Molly are in love with wiping the blackboard with each other’s hair. The chalk gives me and Molly an idea of what old age is like; it is dusty and makes us sneeze. We are allergic to it.
Me and Molly, that’s M and M, melt in your mouth.
What are we doing in your mouth? Me and Molly bet you’ll never guess. Not in a million years. We plan to be around that long. Together that long. Even if we must freeze the moment and treat the photograph like the real thing.
Me and Molly don’t care what people think. We’re just glad that they do.
Me and Molly lick the dew off the morning grasses but taste no honey till we lick each other’s tongues.
We wear full maternity sails. We boat upon my broken water. The katabatic action begins, Molly down my canal binnacle first, her water breaking in me like an anointing.
(1992)
TYRONE WILLIAMS (1954–)
Cold Calls
* * *
1. The spatial/temporal lacuna insures the possibility of temporary disruption—or permanent abortion—of service, insures only the probability of successful enunciation, its own passing over. Cf. Paul Laurence Dunbar as an example of such disruption, failure, breakdown: “My voice falls dead a foot from mine old lips/And but its ghost doth reach that vessel/passing, passing.”1
2. God don’t play that, so radio ratio—slippage: ebonics to tinkling the ivories, Eagle Nebula
3. Foreign respondent—“How White American”—Amy Biehl—“ ‘Sister’ ”—chased across a street—“Died in a Township”—after her car was stopped—“one settler”—by a crowd of youths—“one bullet”—tripped—“I am not able to properly articulate any political ideology or motivation for my conduct”—fell—“South Africa is free today because of the bloodshed.”3
4. Essay in a bottle cast out to sea, or placed in a jar on a hill in Tennessee, Penelope, weaving and unweaving, Scheherazade’s thousand-plus deferments, time-lapsed Grecian Urn, bulk mailings, extensions of credit lines, free-market economies: manifold apocrypha: hope a project beyond approximate futures, Godot in which the thrown, not yet thrown back, esse.
5. In the salad bowl of the museum, the Blonde Negress, a vigilant anachronism, deserts her post and joins her fellow patrons, a line refraining (in) the head she calls her body: “Lo, I am black but I am comely too.” Among the periods, she attempts rememory: Is “but” conjunctive? Disjunctive? Her?4
6. Not de gustibus but homegoing, via Heaven’s Gate (< Hale-Bopp)—or another via: “Wherefore do we pray/Is not the God of the fathers dead?”5 Or yet still a third via: “teeth or trees or lemons piled on a step.”6 Or yet still: two men sitting at a bar. One turns to the other: “Aren’t you the Artie Shaw?” The other retorts: “No, I’m the other one.”7 Despite the end of identical actions at a distance (< Schrodinger’s equation), pursuit converts us: ancestors of our hope, the via, the nectar.
7. from someone who, no longer there, abandoned handset swinging back and forth, fruit laced with strange, charm, top, and bottom—not vocabularized but ventriloquized—in an upright glass coffin rhyming with the “rough-hewn tribute in wood” to an anonymous African American rider, not “divinity alive in stone” aka “William Tecumseh Sherman at Fifth Ave. and 60th. Street in Birmingham, Ala.” An anti-Trojan, virus astride.8
8. Inaudible howl, “foo seee like lee,”9 the diving chrysalis10—hell with a little heaven in it11—and should it surface, should it find its way back home, should its first night back on earth not be its last
9. Ambivalence of double cadence: an extra nail, or the anvil then the claw
10. “Neither there nor there/Almost here/a little nearer to the stars/strangers to the left and right/pages turned, still to be turned,/still there, never to be mine/and here comes a smile/which never arrives—/‘Can I get you something?’/‘Food/For future years.’ ”12
11. “All this in the hands of children, eyes already set/on a land we never can visit—it isn’t there yet—”13
12. The “apron of leaves,” the pieces of silver—what human, having embodied God as shame and guilt, would not be disappointed that only the same could disembody him?14
13. The New Grammar: Neo-Babel: “Trucks, limousines and pickups . . . smashed to pieces.” Crashing into a skyscraper, a Boeing jet “disgorged its sinful passengers,” “bodies spilling across the road into ‘The Peaceful View’ cemetery”—paradigm of grammar and Babel—from which their spirits “floated upwards towards a glowing image of Jesus high in the clouds.”15
Endnotes
1. Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Ships that Pass in the Night,” The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Hakim’s Publications, 210 South 52nd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19139), p. 64.
2. The New York Times, 11/3/95 and 11/30/95, Science Sections.
3. The New York Times, 8/27/93 and 7/9/97.
4. Lewis Alexander, “The Dark Brother,” Caroling Dusk, edited and with a foreword by Countee Cullen (Citadel Press, 1993; orig. Harpers & Brothers, 1927), p. 124.
5. W. E. B. DuBois, “A Litany of Atlanta,” Caroling Dusk, p. 27.
6. Amiri Baraka, “Black Art,” Transbluesency: Selected Poems 1961–1995, edited by Paul Vangelisti (Marsilio Publishers, New York: 1995), p. 142.
7. The New York Times, 8/19/94.
8. Claude McKay, “Russian Cathedral,” Caroling Dusk, p. 88; Judith Shea’s “The Other Monument,” as reported in The New York Times, 8/24/95.
9. Julia Tavalaro and Richard Tayson, Look Up for Yes (Kodansha International, 1997), p. 12.
10. Jean Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, translated by Jeremy Leggatt (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).
11. George MacDonald: “There is no heaven with a little hell in it.” Circa 1886.
12. William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” in English Romantic Writers, edited by David Perkins (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1967), p. 209.
13. Miller Williams, “Of History and Hope,” The Ways We Touch (University of Illinois Press, 1997).
14. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 360, footnote 23.
15. “The Coming Rapture,” painting by an unknown artist, in Jeremy Marre and Hannah Charlton, Beats of the Heart: Popular Music of the World (Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 57.
(2000)
HARRYETTE MULLEN (?–)
Variation on a Theme Park
My Mickey Mouse ears are nothing like sonar. Colorado is far less rusty than Walt’s lyric riddles. If sorrow is wintergreen, well then Walt’s breakdancers are dunderheads. If hoecakes are Wonder Bras, blond Wonder Bras grow on Walt’s hornytoad. I have seen roadkill damaged, riddled and wintergreen, but no such roadkill see I in Walt’s checkbook. And in some purchases there is more deliberation than in the bargains that my Mickey Mouse redeems. I love to herd Walt’s sheep, yet well I know that muskrats have a far more platonic sonogram. I grant I never saw a googolplex groan. My Mickey Mouse, when Walt waddles, trips on garbanzos. And yet, by halogen-light, I think my loneliness as reckless as any souvenir bought with free coupons.
(2002)
The Anthropic Principle
The pope of cosmology addresses a convention. When he talks the whole atmosphere changes. He speaks through a computer. When he asks can you hear me, the whole audience says yes. It’s a science l
ocked up in a philosophical debate. There are a few different theories. There could be many different realities. You might say ours exists because we do. You could take a few pounds of matter, heat it to an ungodly temperature, or the universe was a freak accident. There may be a limit to our arrogance, but one day the laws of physics will read like a detailed instruction manual. A plane that took off from its hub in my hometown just crashed in the President’s hometown. The news anchor says the pilot is among the dead. I was hoping for news of the President’s foreign affair with a diplomat’s wife. I felt a mystical connection to the number of confirmed dead whose names were not released. Like the time I was three handshakes from the President. Like when I thought I heard that humanitarians dropped a smart blond on the Chinese embassy. Like when the cable was severed and chairs fell from the sky because the pilot flew with rusty maps. What sane pilot would land in that severe rain with hard hail and gale-force wind. With no signal of distress. With no foghorns to warn the civilians, the pilot lost our moral compass in the bloody quagmire of collateral damage. One theory says it’s just a freak accident locked up in a philosophical debate. It’s like playing poker and all the cards are wild. Like the arcane analysis of a black box full of insinuations of error.
(2002)
Sleeping with the Dictionary
I beg to dicker with my silver-tongued companion, whose lips are ready to read my shining gloss. A versatile partner, conversant and well-versed in the verbal art, the dictionary is not averse to the solitary habits of the curiously wide-awake reader. In the dark night’s insomnia, the book is a stimulating sedative, awakening my tired imagination to the hypnagogic trance of language. Retiring to the canopy of the bedroom, turning on the bedside light, taking the big dictionary to bed, clutching the unabridged bulk, heavy with the weight of all the meanings between these covers, smoothing the thin sheets, thick with accented syllables—all are exercises in the conscious regimen of dreamers, who toss words on their tongues while turning illuminated pages. To go through all these motions and procedures, groping in the dark for an alluring word, is the poet’s nocturnal mission. Aroused by myriad possibilities, we try out the most perverse positions in the practice of our nightly act, the penetration of the denotative body of the work. Any exit from the logic of language might be an entry in a symptomatic dictionary. The alphabetical order of this ample block of knowledge might render a dense lexicon of lucid hallucinations. Beside the bed, a pad lies open to record the meandering of migratory words. In the rapid eye movement of the poet’s night vision, this dictum can be decoded, like the secret acrostic of a lover’s name.
(2002)
SUSAN WHEELER (1955–)
Invective: You Should Know
One
Now you are in a lather over their taking the Scrabble pieces and using them for decoration. Refresh yourself, bone up on organizational skills, a three-ring binder and this new version of Whist will fit you out like new. For they are beginning to talk when you bend to tie your shoe. They say, the ‘x’ goes perfectly in this xylophone. Before the Roman with the brogue begins his hatcheting, you will have draped yourself as a workhorse courtesan with plenty of extra letters to spare. You will have blanks for everyone, on demand. They will know just how invaluable you are: their burgeoning pockets will attest to it. So now, wipe the spittle from your rouged chin. The players are waiting for you.
Two
I knew my hand was not a valued commodity since I could not bring a powerful or even compelling family to it. It started with your dad’s sweater, that wonderful Italian cut, watching you carried away by the romance of your dancer dad. Well it wasn’t just your romance, everyone it seemed had a way of embellishing a family or in-laws—except perhaps for the thoroughly jaundiced, like mom, who didn’t like anyone but the chirpy and anxious “helpers.” It started when you held out the sweater and said, Here it’s my father’s, it’s a wonderful Italian cut, you can borrow this. Suddenly all the Vegas motifs to the apartment lent you, the bearer, a tragic kind of 20th century captive of sleaze giant kind of thing, dangling the Italian cut sweater from your outstretched arm.
Three
In the meeting room your chaps, Festus, seemed out of place. How sunnily you seem to find the filetab that attaches to each article in seven. There was some talk among us studio sausages that you had run aground on the Foreign Correspondence project and canned the rest, and that is why you hum to yourself at table. Yesterday I saw your wife picking peaches into your rival’s basket—she had the softest smile, like strawberries, hellbent on your ruin.
Four
I hadn’t forgotten the favor you had done me in the barn catercorner to the milkpond those some ten years ago, and when that peacenik spoke ill of you I rose to your defense. I told him about your cock, dear heart, about the wiggle in its walk and the soft cradle you made of the down for my head. If I mentioned the leg you ran off with, my only steed, if I happened to say that the books you were selling could not substitute, if I said that your fingers were as fast and my fall as great as Lucifer’s, that you and I are much alike, that His Will it was and His Will is cruel, if the peacenik then stared with incredulity, well you will have heard it all before, no, my precious one?
(1997)
APRIL BERNARD (1956–)
Exegesis
The careful toe-step of the tabby out on errands. She provides the condition of containment tossed off, unperformed, gratuitous and therefore possible. So with every line scratch out an old date, ink full in the interstices, and do not reread. Her eyes do not flicker to see who seized the trophy woodrat and waved it on parade.
Once the battle is ended and the armies marched off, on whatever barrow or horse or big-wheeled wagon; and grass hints through charred ground; there I lie, not dead, curled in the netted hay roots of the new field. I am listening to grasshoppers remember themselves, and to the erratic looped notes of the towhee: a cascade cut short, begun again, cut short, has she forgotten, no, not this try, each note clear flashed as the yellow-green lights of the maple tree leaves that surround her, spiraling up and over and back in a helix of sound.
There is the possibility of a cabin, already I can hear the whipsaw gnash pine, the shavings release their resin that is song.
If it took an immolation to bare the ground, that is what it took.
So housed about by doubt, beams spiring, most sagrada of cities sky-lit in the tooth of this time, reaches.
(1993)
AMY GERSTLER (1956–)
Dear Boy George
Only three things on earth seem useful or soothing to me. One: wearing stolen clothes. Two: photos of exquisitely dressed redheads. Three: your voice on the radio. Those songs fall smack-dab into my range! Not to embarrass you with my raw American awe, or let you think I’m the kinda girl who bends over for any guy who plucks his eyebrows and can make tight braids—but you’re the plump bisexual cherub of the eighties: clusters of Rubens’ painted angels, plus a dollop of the Pillsbury dough boy, all rolled into one! We could go skating, or just lie around my house eating pineapple. I could pierce your ears: I know how to freeze the lobes with ice so it doesn’t hurt. When I misunderstand your lyrics, they get even better. I thought the line I’M YOUR LOVER, NOT YOUR RIVAL, WAS I’M ANOTHER, NOT THE BIBLE, or PRIME YOUR MOTHER, NOT A LIBEL, or UNDERCOVER BOUGHT ARRIVAL. Great, huh? See, we’re of like minds. I almost died when I read in the Times how you saved that girl from drowning . . . dived down and pulled the blubbering sissy up. I’d give anything to be the limp, dripping form you stumbled from the lake with, draped over your pale, motherly arms, in a grateful faint, as your mascara ran and ran.
(1986)
Bitter Angel
You appear in a tinny, nickel-and-dime light. The light of turned milk and gloved insults. It could be a gray light you’re bathed in; at any rate, it isn’t quite white. It’s possible you show up coated with a finite layer of the dust that rubs off moths’ wings onto kids’ grubby fingers. Or you arrive cloaked in a toothache’
s smoldering glow. Or you stand wrapped like a maypole in rumpled streamers of light torn from threadbare bedsheets. Your gaze flickers like a silent film. You make me lose track. Which dim, deluded light did I last see you in? The light of extinction, most likely, where there are no more primitive tribesmen who worship clumps of human hair. No more roads that turn into snakes, or ribbons. There’s no nightlife or lion’s share, none of the black-and-red roulette wheels of methedrine that would-be seers like me dream of. You alone exist: eyes like locomotives. A terrible succession of images buffets you: human faces pile up in your sight, like heaps of some flunky’s smudged, undone paperwork.
(1990)
The Bear-Boy of Lithuania
Girls, take my advice, marry an animal. A wooly one is most consoling. Find a fur man, born midwinter. Reared in the mountains. Fond of boxing. Make sure he has black rubbery lips, and a sticky sweet mouth. A winter sleeper. Pick one who likes to tussle, who clowns around the kitchen, juggles hot baked potatoes, gnaws playfully on a corner of your apron. Not one mocked by his lumbering instincts, or who’s forever wrestling with himself, tainted with shame, itchy with chagrin, but a good-tempered beast who plunges in greedily, grinning and roaring. His backslapping manner makes him popular with the neighbors, till he digs up and eats their Dutch tulip bulbs. Then you see just how stuffy human beings can be. On Sundays his buddies come over to play watermelon football. When they finally get tired, they collapse on heaps of dried grass and leaves, scratching themselves elaborately, while I hand out big hunks of honeycomb. They’ve no problem swallowing dead bees stuck in the honey.