The Blue Buick

by B. H. Fairchild

  the men who were once fullbacks or tackles or guards

  in their three-point stances knuckling into the mud,

  hungry for high school glory and the pride of their fathers,

  eager to gallop terribly against each other’s bodies,

  each man in his body looking out now at the nakedness

  of a body like his, men who each autumn had followed

  their fathers into the pheasant-rich fields of Kansas

  and as boys had climbed down from the Allis-Chalmers

  after plowing their first straight furrow, licking the dirt

  from their lips, the hand of the father resting lightly

  upon their shoulder, men who in the oven-warm winter

  kitchens of Baptist households saw after a bath the body

  of the father and felt diminished by it, who that same

  winter in the abandoned schoolyard felt the odd intimacy

  of their fist against the larger boy’s cheekbone

  but kept hitting, ferociously, and walked away

  feeling for the first time the strength, the abundance,

  of their own bodies. And I imagine the men

  that evening after the strangest day of their lives,

  after they have left the shop without speaking

  and made the long drive home alone in their pickups,

  I see them in their little white frame houses on the edge

  of town adrift in the long silence of the evening turning

  finally to their wives, touching without speaking the hair

  which she has learned to let fall about her shoulders

  at this hour of night, lifting the white nightgown

  from her body as she in turn unbuttons his work shirt

  heavy with the sweat and grease of the day’s labor until

  they stand naked before each other and begin to touch

  in a slow choreography of familiar gestures their bodies,

  she touching his chest, his hand brushing her breasts,

  and he does not say the word beautiful because

  he cannot and never has, and she does not say it

  because it would embarrass him or any other man

  she has ever known, though it is precisely the word

  I am thinking now as I stand before Donatello’s David

  with my wife touching my sleeve, what are you thinking?

  and I think of the letter from my father years ago

  describing the death of Bobby Sudduth, a single shot

  from a twelve-gauge which he held against his chest,

  the death of the heart, I suppose, a kind of terrible beauty,

  as someone said of the death of Hart Crane, though that is

  surely a perverse use of the word, and I was stunned then,

  thinking of the damage men will visit upon their bodies,

  what are you thinking? she asks again, and so I begin

  to tell her about a strange afternoon in Kansas,

  about something I have never spoken of, and we walk

  to a window where the shifting light spreads a sheen

  along the casement, and looking out, we see the city

  blazing like miles of uncut wheat, the farthest buildings

  taken in their turn, and the great dome, the way

  the metal roof of the machine shop, I tell her,

  would break into flame late on an autumn day, with such beauty.

  The Invisible Man

  We are kids with orange Jujubes stuck to our chins

  and licorice sticks snaking out of our jeans pockets,

  and we see him, or rather don’t see him, when the bandages

  uncoil from his face and lo, there’s nothing between

  the hat and suit. It is wonderful, this pure nothing,

  but we begin to be troubled by the paradoxes of nonexistence.

  (Can he pee? If he itches, can he scratch? If he eats

  Milk Duds, do they disappear?) Sure, standing around

  in the girls’ locker room unobserved or floating erasers

  in math class, who could resist, but the enigma

  of sheer absence, the loss of the body, of who we are,

  continues to grind against us even into the Roy Rogers

  western that follows. The pungent VistaVision embodiments

  of good and evil—this clear-eyed young man with watermelon

  voice and high principles, the fat, unshaven dipshits

  with no respect for old ladies or hard-working Baptist

  farmers—none of this feels quite solid anymore. Granted,

  it’s the world as the world appears, but provisional somehow,

  a shadow, a ghost, dragging behind every rustled cow

  or runaway stagecoach, and though afterward the cloud

  of insubstantiality lifts and fades as we stroll out

  grimacing into the hard sunlight, there is that

  slight tremble of déjàvu years later in Philosophy 412

  as Professor Caws mumbles on about essence and existence,

  being and nothingness, and Happy Trails to You echoes

  from the far end of the hall.

  In The Invisible Man

  sometimes we could see the thread or thin wire that lifted

  the gun from the thief’s hand, and at the Hearst mansion

  only days ago a sign explained that the orchestra

  of Leonard Slye entertained the zillionaire and his Hollywood

  friends on spring evenings caressed by ocean breezes

  and the scent of gardenias. You can almost see them swaying

  to “Mood Indigo” or “Cherokee,” champagne glasses in hand:

  Chaplin, Gable, Marion Davies, Herman Mankiewicz,

  and cruising large as the Titanic, William Randolph Hearst,

  Citizen Kane himself. Leonard Slye sees this too, along with

  the Roman statuary and rare medieval tapestries, and thinks,

  someday, someday, and becomes invisible so that he

  can appear later as Roy Rogers and make movies in

  Victorville, California, where Mankiewicz and Orson Welles

  will write the story of an enormous man who misplaced

  his childhood and tried to call it back on his deathbed.

  O Leonard Slye, lifting Roy’s six-gun from its holster,

  O Hearst, dreaming of Rosebud and raping the castles of Europe,

  O America, with your dreams of money and power,

  small boys sit before your movie screens invisible

  to themselves, waiting for the next episode, in which they

  stumble blind into daylight and the body of the world.

  All the People in Hopper’s Paintings

  All the people in Hopper’s paintings walk by me

  here in the twilight the way our neighbors

  would stroll by of an evening in my hometown

  smiling and waving as I leaned against

  the front-porch railing and hated them all

  and the place I had grown up in. I smoked

  my Pall Mall with a beautifully controlled rage

  in the manner of James Dean and imagined

  life beyond the plains in the towns of Hopper

  where people were touched by the light of the real.

  The people in Hopper’s paintings were lonely

  as I was and lived in brown rooms whose

  long, sad windows looked out on the roofs

  of brown buildings in the towns that made

  them lonely. Or they lived in coffee shops

  and cafés at 3 a.m under decadent flowers

  of cigarette smoke as I thought I would have

  if there had been such late-night conspiracy

  in the town that held me but offered nothing.

  And now they gather around with their bland,

  mysterious faces in half-shadow, many still

  bearing the hard plane of light that found them

&n
bsp; from the left side of the room, as in Vermeer,

  others wearing the dark splotches of early

  evening across their foreheads and chins that said

  they were, like me, tragic, dark, undiscovered:

  the manicurist from the barber shop buried

  beneath a pyramid of light and a clock frozen

  at eleven, the woman sitting on the bed

  too exhausted with the hopelessness of brick walls

  and barber poles and Rhinegold ads to dress

  herself in street clothes. The wordless, stale

  affair with the filling station attendant

  was the anteroom to heartbreak. The gloom

  of his stupid uniform and black tie beneath

  the three white bulbs blinking MOBILGAS into

  the woods that loomed bleak as tombstones

  on the edge of town; the drab backroom

  with its Prestone cans and sighing Vargas girls

  and grease rags; his panting, pathetic loneliness.

  But along the white island of the station,

  the luminous squares from its windows

  lying quietly like carpets on the pavement

  had been my hope, my sense then of the real world

  beyond the familiar one, like the blazing cafe

  of the nighthawks casting the town into shadow,

  or the beach house of the sea watchers

  who sat suspended on a verandah of light,

  stunned by the flat, hard sea of the real.

  Everywhere was that phosphorescence, that pale

  wash of promise lifting roofs and chimneys

  out of dullness, out of the ordinary that I

  could smell in my work clothes coming home

  from a machine shop lined with men who stood

  at lathes and looked out of windows and wore

  the same late-afternoon layers of sunlight

  that Hopper’s people carried to hotel rooms

  and cafeterias. Why was their monotony

  blessed, their melancholy apocalyptic, while

  my days hung like red rags from my pockets

  as I stood, welding torch in hand, and searched

  the horizon with the eyes and straight mouth

  of Hopper’s women? If they had come walking

  toward me, those angels of boredom, if they

  had arrived clothed in their robes of light,

  would I have recognized them? If all those women

  staring out of windows had risen from their desks

  and unmade beds, and the men from their offices

  and sun-draped brownstones, would I have known?

  Would I have felt their light hands touching

  my face the way infants do when people

  seem no more real than dreams or picture books?

  The girl in the blue gown leaning from her door

  at high noon, the gray-haired gentleman

  in the hotel by the railroad, holding his cigarette

  so delicately, they have found me, and we

  walk slowly through the small Kansas town

  that held me and offered nothing, where the light

  fell through the windows of brown rooms, and people

  looked out, strangely, as if they had been painted there.

  The Book of Hours

  Like the blue angels of the nativity, the museum patrons

  hover around the art historian, who has arrived frazzled

  and limp after waking late in her boyfriend’s apartment.

  And here, she notes, the Procession of St. Gregory,

  where atop Hadrian’s mausoleum the angel of death

  returns his bloody sword to its scabbard, and staring

  down at the marble floor, liquid in the slanted

  silver light of midmorning, she ponders briefly

  the polished faces of her audience: seraphim gazing

  heavenward at the golden throne, or, as she raises

  her tired eyes to meet their eyes, the evolving souls

  of purgatory, bored as the inhabitants of some

  fashionable European spa sunbathing on boulders.

  And here, notice the lovely treatment of St. John

  on Patmos, robed in blue and gold, and she tells the story

  of gallnuts, goats’ skins dried and stretched into vellum—

  the word vellum delicious in its saying, caressed

  in her mouth like a fat breakfast plum—lapis lazuli

  crushed into pools of ultramarine blue, and gold foil

  hammered thin enough to float upon the least breath,

  the scribes hastily scraping gold flakes into ceramic cups,

  curling their toes against the cold like her lover stepping

  out of bed in that odd, delicate way of his, wisps of gold

  drifting like miniature angels onto the scriptorium’s

  stone floor, and dog’s teeth to polish the gold leaf

  as transcendent in its beauty, she says, as the medieval

  mind conceived the soul to be.

  The patrons are beginning

  to wander now as she points to the crucifixion scene,

  done to perfection by the Limbourg brothers, the skull and bones

  of Adam lying scattered beneath the Roman soldier’s horse,

  and the old custodian wipes palm prints from the glass, the monks

  breathe upon their fingertips and pray against the hard winter,

  and the art historian recalls the narrow shafts of light tapping

  the breakfast table, the long curve of his back in half-shadow,

  the bed’s rumpled sheets lifted by an ocean breeze

  as if they were the weightless gold leaf of the spirit.

  Cigarettes

  Gross, loathsome. Trays and plates loaded

  like rain gutters, butts crumpled and damp with gin,

  ashes still shedding the rank breath of exhaustion—

  nevertheless, an integral part of human evolution,

  like reading. Cigarettes possess the nostalgic potency

  of old songs: hand on the steering wheel, fat pack

  of Pall Malls snug under my sleeve, skinny bicep

  pressed against the car door so my muscle bulges,

  and my girl, wanting a smoke, touches my arm.

  Or 3 a.m. struggling with the Chekhov paper, I break

  the blue stamp with my thumb, nudge open petals of foil,

  and the bloom of nicotine puts me right back in the feedstore

  where my grandfather used to trade—leather, oats, burlap,

  and red sawdust. Or at the beach, minute flares floating

  in the deep dark, rising, falling in the hands of aunts

  and uncles telling the old stories, drowsy with beer,

  waves lapping the sand and dragging their voices down.

  Consider the poverty of lungs drawing ordinary air,

  the unreality of it, the lie it tells about quotidian existence.

  Bad news craves cigarettes, whole heaps of them, sucking

  in the bad air the way the drowning gulp river water,

  though in hospital rooms I’ve seen grief let smoke

  gather slowly into pools that rise, and rise again

  to nothing. I’ve studied the insincere purity

  of a mouth without the cigarette that gives the air form,

  the hand focus, the lips a sense of identity.

  The way Shirley Levin chattered after concerts:

  her fingers mimicking piano keys and the cigarette

  they held galloping in heart-like fibrillations until

  the thrill of it had unravelled in frayed strands of smoke.

  1979: “Sweet Lorraine,” seventh, eighth chorus, and

  I’m looking at the small black scallops above the keyboard,

  a little history of smoke and jazz, improvisation as

  a kind of forgetting. The music of cigarettes:

  dawn stirs and
lifts the smoke in dove-gray striations

  that hang, then break, scatter, and regroup along

  the sill where paperbacks warp in sunlight and the cat

  claws house spiders. Cigarettes are the only way

  to make bleakness nutritional, or at least useful,

  something to do while feeling terrified. They cling

  to the despair of certain domestic scenes—my father,

  for instance, smoking L&M’s all night in the kitchen,

  a sea of smoke risen to neck level as I wander in

  like some small craft drifting and lost in fog

  while a distant lighthouse flares awhile and swings away.

  Yes, they kill you, but so do television and bureaucrats

  and the drugged tedium of certain rooms piped

  with tasteful music where we have all sat waiting

  for someone to enter with a silver plate laden

  with Camels and Lucky Strikes, someone who leans

  into our ears and tells us that the day’s work is done,

  and done well, offers us black coffee in white cups,

  and whispers the way trees whisper, yes, yes, oh yes.

  The Himalayas

  The stewardess’ dream of the Himalayas

  followed her everywhere: from Omaha

  to Baltimore and back, and then to Seattle

  and up and down the California coast until

  she imagined herself strapped to the wing

  just across from seat 7A muttering

  little homemade mantras and shivering

  in the cold, stiff wind of the inexpressible.

  It could hardly go on like this, she thought,

  the unending prayer to nothing in particular

  whirling around in her head while she held

  the yellow mask over her face and demonstrated

  correct breathing techniques: the point was

  to breathe calmly like angels observing

  the final separation of light from a dead star,

  or the monk described in the travel book

  trying to untangle his legs and stand once more

  at the mouth of his cave. The stewardess

  delighted in her symmetrical gestures, the dance

  of her hands describing the emergency exits

  and the overhead lights that made exquisite

  small cones in the night for readers and children

  afraid of the dark. As the passengers fell asleep

  around her, the stewardess reached up to adjust

  the overhead whose cone of light rose over her