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Model of a City in Civil War

Page 3

by Adam Day


  in fog; groaning, algaed pylons.

  The impractical sand, clouds hanging

  in dystrophy. Blue trees below the struts

  of a radio telescope. A hare racing

  through the tide. Eels dead and alive

  sold from back of a truck. A preacher

  stumbling over a mastiff, like a little man;

  the insinuation of a human on a chain—

  the slobbering aperture. A street sweeper

  swinging his broom like a scythe. A starling

  speaks and goes. Like someone who has a choice.

  SNOW IN A BRICK COURTYARD

  On a kitchen window’s slate ledge,

  a swallow, white chest dusted orange

  from the moth in its beak. Across

  the courtyard, a black dog perched

  atop its house, one ear pricked

  to the wind. A rusty nail

  sticks up from a sodden

  half-buried plank, shocking the snow

  with a faint russet pulse. And a child’s

  distant croup-cough seems to stir

  snow from frost-glazed branches.

  Here is the cloud-helmeted sun, and here

  is the world smoothed and close

  to the eyes, like the gleam of cupped hands

  bathing a face above a sink’s darkening basin.

  WINTER FEVER

  . . . which even now Jack

  was preparing. When he knelt

  at the roof’s edge and threw

  crushed ice over the yard

  it began to snow

  all over town, and I saw

  milk running in sheets

  down a blackboard, children swerving

  through the darkness

  in their underwear,

  and Marcus riding the carousel’s

  bearded seal—bending to whisper

  into its ear, his long upper lip

  flat and sweating.

  It was the coldest night

  of the year—the cats were in heat.

  THE COW

  Snagged in a barbed fence, bands of phlegm

  at my lips, having already left

  flesh on the humming wire, I imagined

  myself capable of standing. With hands

  like the absent farmer’s—with his vulgar

  pride in mediocrity, his waterlogged

  pornography, and Great Dane called Hamlet—

  instead of these clumsy, mud-clotted hooves.

  In work boots—a tattoo of snow in the pattern

  of a paddlewheel on my coat—clipping

  the farmer and his people above the ankles,

  like mallards, from the frozen pond, impaling

  them with straightened bedsprings

  for posing—their eyes train windows,

  blank and daubed with pollen, their bodies thrown

  over my shoulder, legs bundled like iris stems.

  THE INSOMNIAC

  The pig with the black feet is an insomniac.

  Long ago kids left a mask filled with leaves

  in the yard. Now the insomniac wears it—

  leaning his head down, snuffing, it sticks

  to his moist snout, and he’s Marlon Brando.

  We find hidden, delicately stripped orange

  skins, candy wrappers, and shredded letters

  that name him, Albert. He’s like a Russian—

  enormous, vulnerable, perhaps tragic—

  a lover of darkness: snow-capped trashcans,

  coal bins, ships’ holds, sinkholes. He wanders

  in the nightwoods for days, sending back

  sounds like the ripple of radio voices

  until it’s not Christmas, just one more day

  and he hangs by his slick black feet, unzipped,

  the warm wet release lipping his chin.

  Never indiscriminate in his passions

  he understood being human, the chasm

  between the classes, but never condescended,

  even when he must have known he’d be eaten

  on paper plates with potatoes and a couple of carrots.

  WE LIVED ABOVE THE KEY SHOP

  When I was a child

  father came home

  with hands for us. Before,

  it was our faces

  to the plate—now

  we could eat

  with ease. Our feet

  he smuggled home

  just in time for us

  to begin school. Imagine

  my sister and I,

  only a spectral space

  between our ankles

  and cold linoleum. Eyes

  came days later

  but those he stole

  from the Vietnamese

  couple down the street—

  they screamed after him

  in their language

  to bury them

  at the seashore with crab claws

  and the scales of shad. We saw

  that first day of classes,

  the walleyed cruelty

  of our peers—an overweight

  boy strapped in

  a Miss Somewhere sash—

  and something shrunk

  inside of us so small

  that sparrows were born

  from our faces and blew about

  until they crumbled and we

  caught them on our tongues

  but were always unsatisfied—

  it’s hunger we were born with.

  CLEAN LINES, DIFFUSE LIGHTING

  Sometimes the old man cut

  mother’s hair; there were limits even

  to his failure. Other times, when

  we were in the mood that someone

  should pay for what we found

  intolerable—field mice, threatening

  rain, a shout in the street—he

  might even cut himself. He was

  so mild he began to snow. It’s all

  made quite beautiful now, really,

  with clean lines and diffuse lighting.

  COMING IN AT NIGHT

  He butts her, with bathwater in the divot beneath her nose, this cat

  of ours, and washes his face of her, fur curled back

  like a moist leaf.

  Between thumb and two fingers I rub his ears, as coarse

  with dirt as a snail’s etched shell.

  And here, because of the closeness

  of the night sky, cicadas’ wings seem enormous, sweeping things.

  Far from here, seagulls hover above stairs that descend into water.

  We have never been so far from shore.

  Yesterday, she and I climbed

  our house’s forest of rafters to the highest windows to see

  how much desert we could see.

  Thistle, thistle, black swallowtail,

  cottonwood that signals, finally, a creek nearby that we walk out to,

  and watch

  its bottom-layer of detritus, dusted with mud, waves

  upward, loosening memories of cold green hills,

  lamps swinging

  over them in darkness. The smell of warm bricks and the rain

  on them. And on the mill’s dam a shard of broken bottle

  flashing, and the black shadow

  of our cat rolling by, waiting

  for fish heads thrown

  into the canal—the creases between my nails and fingers filled

  with blood

  from the cleaning. Walking in from the porch, she is lying

  in bed—like my own hands looked at long enough, she becomes

  strange. On the roof the copper vane is tacking in strong wind.

  Quiet breathing,

  flushed ears, errant hairs thick as wet grass, the webbing

  between her forefinger and thumb thin as bleached leaves.

  And perhaps later we walk out over the sand, without waking, pounding

  out some secret we bury in desert darkness.<
br />
  WASHING MY OLD MAN

  The pads of his palms are cool and mapped

  with wet creases like blades of grass. His figure

  arranges itself in my head. His is the sleep

  of furniture. There were lots of times

  I didn’t love him. But it’s been said I look

  like him, or a famous director. The French

  always say things are the same when

  they aren’t, at all. Someone asked him once,

  “Which god do you mean?” “Yours,

  if you like,” he answered. That he was sometimes

  horrible and still lived, that he was

  often horrible and somehow we loved him.

  HE SPEAKS OF OLD AGE

  Eighty, I’m up at eight, bathe

  and trifle about until lunch. After,

  I have a cup of bourbon and coffee,

  It makes my mind race. I’m seeking

  help. Do I get breathless when I exercise?

  I’d hardly know. I have reached the age

  now when my daughter can beat me

  at croquet. It took me a long time

  to become a human being. I can’t say

  I have a lot of hope

  for the whole thing. I procrastinate

  by answering email. My neighbors

  judge me now entirely on the cut

  of my coat; but we’re all equally poor

  so the verdict is softly given.

  Beside my bed the radio plays; I read

  Malone muert. My world is fairly floorboardish.

  Outside, the drab reiteration

  of brickwork, dahlias spring

  from a moldering mattress, charred

  timber litters the leaf-brindled rainwater.

  My favorite room is the kitchen,

  though I’ve given up on eating—

  I’ve gotten to where I don’t like

  to have food in my mouth, and heaven

  is the moment after constipation.

  I’ve grown not ugly, but entirely

  unattractive. Bathing now, my eyes

  are drawn to the wide-wrinkled, two-potato

  sack at my crotch. Though, you’ll be

  happy to know, even now my sex life could

  fill more than one wet holiday weekend. Still,

  passive as a toilet, I want my God back.

  HIS DEMENTIA

  Hands clapped flat between

  knees I slept as the old man

  shuffled through the French doors

  and grabbed my shoulder—

  rolling over, he slipped his hand

  into mine—skin like black cabbage,

  the skin of one badly burnt.

  He leaned close—eyes green marbles

  under ice, and I could see beside

  the long darkness of his ear’s tunnel,

  a blue sore like a decomposing berry,

  and he said that he wanted Houdini

  in the Hippodrome with Jennie

  the elephant, and his black stack

  of scratchy Red Seal albums

  for the crank Victrola, and the dunes

  and cut & pressed glass ruins

  of a coastal town. I let him into bed,

  and we listened a long time

  to the furnace—I sang Caruso

  into his good ear, until he began nodding

  and I escaped from my skin leaving it

  beside an old, deaf, nearly-blind man,

  a palsied pile of nylons, a world of snow.

  IN MOURNING

  My father was inconsiderate enough

  to die. A barrister, he loved

  his wig. The criminals liked it too. No one wants

  to be sent to prison by someone wearing

  a t-shirt. They cut his carotid in autopsy

  and asked if we had a scarf he might wear

  for the funeral. So he lies in state

  like Liberace. The rings won’t fit

  the swollen fingers. On his sixtieth

  he planted his face in the cake. When

  the undertaker isn’t around I run him through

  the range of motions—the pulleys

  and cranes of his knees still creak. I’ve never

  seen god in the face of a sleeping girl

  or anywhere else. The old lovely bastard.

  NOW AND FOREVER

  I’m not wary of myself, or others,

  but myself in the presence

  of others. It might be safest

  to stay home and read. Saturn’s rings

  become the cast-iron balcony

  of a house seen from everywhere,

  on which inhabitants of the planet

  take the air in the evening.

  None of us is more alone

  than another, and still no comfort

  in it. I have never clutched anything . . .

  at dusk deliriously. Sunlight

  on stones is nothing like laughter

  and still there is nearly enough.

  FÅRÖ

  After Ingmar Bergman’s The Passion of Anna

  The snag of meeting new people

  is that you’re asked to care about them—

  nightmares, affairs, surgeries. Outside,

  twenty-five sheepbells like wind chimes.

  Nail bucket won’t stay on the roof. Boys hung

  a small dog from a low branch—it’s cries covered

  by gulls. Got the noose knot right. Took him

  down live. That night I’m invited to dinner; tie

  and black jacket. Swedish gin, discreet charm. Two

  women with overbites god-talking, and a job

  in a turtleneck. Shadowed interiors before snow-lit

  casements. Leave a door ajar and there are

  questions. Miss a fellow’s funeral, the bones’ll

  never know. Frost-eaten pinecones. Muck-boots

  in the green wetwhite goose shit, passing a butchers’

  rack: lamb flanks, hog’s heads, a small shack humid

  with horse piss and fish. If a rocks glass is thick

  enough it makes a good sound when it breaks.

  THE KINGHORSE BUTCHERTOWN BRAWL

  Fifteen and scared, stabbing

  a thick-necked skinhead

  in Solovairs and a mule coat—

  the quick resistance and crack,

  sound like a hoof on gravel. He davened

  back on his heels. The dumb, bird-shot

  shock of his mouth

  and the boggy slot, petering out

  a bloody puddle. I rolled my tongue

  around in my mouth a second,

  then split. After twenty blocks

  of cold I stopped

  to wipe my hands and felt bad

  but not sorry yet.

  DAKOTA

  They took him

  in their car

  to the 4400 block

  of ____ Avenue,

  near the airport,

  where they left him

  behind a utility

  shed. The older

  one driving. They

  put a plastic bag

  over his head

  before they shot him

  above the left ear. He

  must have thought

  they were going

  to suffocate him.

  A POLITE HISTORY

  Walking through ice-seamed streets

  to a theater, a streetcar full of talking

  bodies passed a woman, before a column

  of tanks rolling towards the town square

  to confront a revolt. The woman

  waved at the soldiers, and at that moment

  she was tempted for the first time to join

  them. It was not that the woman, with her

  small breakable nose, tolerated the cruelty

  of such a struggle in the hope

  that it would bring a prosperous future:

  the harshness of the
violence was simply

  endorsed as a sign of authenticity, three

  or four times bigger than an opera.

  THE REVOLUTION

  The signal was a girl’s raised

  gloved hand to her red hair. So, it spread

  along the rye fields, through the alfalfa

  and dusty roads, to our homes, like birds

 

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