The Blue Buick
Page 7
Saturday night. Hum of the crowd floating
from the ballpark, shouts, slamming doors
from the bar down the street, he would lean
into the lathe and make a little song
with the honing cloth, rubbing the edges,
smiling like a man asleep, dreaming.
A short guy, but fearless. At Margie’s
he would take no lip, put the mechanic big
as a Buick through a stack of crates out back
and walked away with a broken thumb
but never said a word. Marge was a loud,
dirty girl with booze breath and bad manners.
He loved her. One night late I saw them in
the kitchen dancing something like a rhumba
to the radio, dishtowels wrapped around
their heads like swamis. Their laughter chimed
rich as brass rivets rolling down a tin roof.
But it was the work that kept him out of fights,
and I remember the red hair flaming
beneath the lamp, calipers measuring out
the last cut, his hands flicking iron burrs
like shooting stars through the shadows.
It was the iron, cut to a perfect fit, smooth
as bone china and gleaming under lamplight
that made him stand back, take out a smoke,
and sing. It was the dust that got him, his lungs
collapsed from breathing in a life of work.
Lying there, his hands are what I can’t forget.
The Ascension of Ira Campbell
So there was Campbell rising in a scream
on the yellow traveling block that carried
five thousand feet of drill pipe in and out
of the hard summer earth that abideth ever,
paperback Tractatus sticking from his hip pocket.
Student and roughneck, Campbell dug his gloves
into the gray swag of metaphysics
and came up empty, but here on the wordless
and wind-flattened high plains he sang,
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must
be silent. He toiled, looting every
proposition for its true spirit, said
it was the end of language, the dark rustle
of the soul’s wings that would haul the mind
beyond meaning. It’s all here, Fairchild,
he screamed, waving the red book above his head,
the cables moaning, Campbell ascending
into the cloud-strewn facts of the sky,
blue or not blue, a sky amazingly itself.
The Dumka
His parents would sit alone together
on the blue divan in the small living room
listening to Dvořák’s piano quintet.
They would sit there in their old age,
side by side, quite still, backs rigid, hands
in their laps, and look straight ahead
at the yellow light of the phonograph
that seemed as distant as a lamplit
window seen across the plains late at night.
They would sit quietly as something dense
and radiant swirled around them, something
like the dust storms of the thirties that began
by smearing the sky green with doom
but afterward drenched the air with an amber
glow and then vanished, leaving profiles
of children on pillows and a pale gauze
over mantles and tabletops. But it was
the memory of dust that encircled them now
and made them smile faintly and raise
or bow their heads as they spoke about
the farm in twilight with piano music
spiraling out across red roads and fields
of maize, bread lines in the city, women
and men lining main street like mannequins,
and then the war, the white frame rent house,
and the homecoming, the homecoming,
the homecoming, and afterward, green lawns
and a new piano with its mahogany gleam
like pond ice at dawn, and now alone
in the house in the vanishing neighborhood,
the slow mornings of coffee and newspapers
and evenings of music and scattered bits
of talk like leaves suddenly fallen before
one notices the new season. And they would sit
there alone and soon he would reach across
and lift her hand as if it were the last unbroken
leaf and he would hold her hand in his hand
for a long time and they would look far off
into the music of their lives as they sat alone
together in the room in the house in Kansas.
A Model of Downtown Los Angles, 1940
It’s a bright, guilty world.
—ORSON WELLES IN THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI
But there is no water.
—T. S. ELIOT, THE WASTE LAND
The oldest Mercedes in California adorns
the crowded foyer of the L.A. County Museum
of Natural History, and babies shriek like bats
in the elevator that lowers my daughter
and me to the basement. There, among the faint,
intermingled drifts of ammonia and urine
from the men’s room, phantom display lights
luring shadows over the inventions of Edison
and Bell, and dusty monuments to a century
of industrial progress, lies the mock-up L.A.,
whose perusal has been assigned to my daughter’s
fourth-grade class in California history.
Fallen into ruin, its plexiglass sky yellowing
and covered with cracks, the fault lines of heaven,
it is soon to be hauled off with the duplicate
rhino horns and kachina dolls dulled with varnish.
Sarah circles the city, her face looming
large as a god’s over buildings, across avenues
and boulevards from Vignes to Macy, then back
around to the borders of Beaudry and Eighth Street,
where in 1938 my father sat alone
in the Tiptop Diner and made tomato soup
from a free bowl of hot water and catsup.
Across the street was the office of the L.A. Times
where several upstanding Christian men had conspired
to steal the water from the Owens Valley.
Our farm became a scrap yard of rotted pears,
a bone yard, irrigation canals dried up
and turned to sage. A thousand lives in ruin
while L.A.’s San Fernando Valley rose
from desert into orange groves and, overnight,
made a fortune for the city fathers. One day
our hayrack caught fire and there was hell
in the air. On the roof, my father saw
in the distance a Hindu city with camels,
water buffalo, and four elephants: Gunga Din.
Water gone, vultures circling, Hollywood
was moving in. We followed Mulholland’s
aqueduct south to L.A. and the cool dark
of the Pantages Theatre in blazing August
while my father hunted for cheap housing,
shacks with swamp boxes near Echo Park.
Each day he rode the classifieds until
the bars looked better, drank warm Pabst
at Mickey’s Hideout where Franz Werfel
sang Verdi arias and told him stories
of Garbo, Brecht, Huxley, and Thomas Mann.
Later, he worked the rigs on Signal Hill
for a dollar a day, slinging the pipe tongs
and coming home smelling of oil and mud.
The days: morning light opening the streets
like a huge hand, then the bruised fist
of evening, that incredible pink
and blue
bleeding into night, and the homeless
in Pershing Square claiming their benches again.
That summer he was shipped to Okinawa,
the Japanese trucked like crates of oranges
to Manzanar near Lone Pine in the Owens Valley,
and I wandered among the jacarandas
and birds-of-paradise at the Public Library
reading The Communist Manifesto
and plotting revenge. But I was a child.
Now I study Blake’s Songs in rare editions
at Huntington’s Library and Botanical Gardens
and imagine the great patron and his pals
looking down on L.A. from the verandah
and sighing, Bill Mulholland made this city,
as the sun pales once more beneath a purple fist.
So, here is the Hall of Records, and Union Station
where my father, returned from the Pacific,
swore that we would head back north again.
Last night on television a man named Rodney King
showed how the city had progressed beyond
its primitive beginnings, how the open hand
of the law could touch a man in his very bones.
And there, staring back from the west end
of Spring Street, is my daughter learning her lessons
as she bends down for a closer look, pale blue eyes
descending slowly over the city, setting like
twin suns above the Department of Water and Power.
The Children
. . . genially, Magoo-like, when in the street he might pat the heads of water hydrants and parking meters, taking these to be the heads of children.
—OLIVER SACKS, THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT
More than children: frail, disheveled angels,
the awful weight of their wings shrugged off,
light feet again in love with the earth. They sing
some celestial liturgy too brittle for my ears
and guard the souls of commuters from the beasts
that would otherwise surely drive them into hell.
As they stand against the Plymouths of this world,
the clock of eternity is upon their foreheads
and a red arrow will point them homeward again.
But for now, humming their requiem to human memory,
they usher me toward the vanishing point.
That there should be such beautiful little ones!
symmetrically arranged like the found objects
in Cornell’s boxes—a postcard from Paris,
a thimble, the King of Diamonds, a porcelain doll.
I follow them along the streets whose names
are only trees to me, past the toy shop remembered
and forgotten repeatedly. As in a dream,
my own home, vaguely familiar, drifts toward me
buoyed by the music of my past: the Kinderscenen,
or mazurkas to annoy my father and wake up the cats.
As the poet of children wrote, the altering eye
alters all, for I was a boy of vision,
and childhood was a scene from The Magic Flute.
Here is my wife, the green Homburg floating
across the verandah, to guide me up the steps
that seem suddenly like the backs of turtles
returning to the open sea. Here are my paintings
giving onto pools and glades that only I can know,
and my old Bösendorfer with its ancient brown tones.
The chords rise beneath my fingers, a seamless
harmony between the seer and the seen, the spirit’s
body, the body’s prayer.
Evening drops down.
I sing the Dichterliebe, and my wife accompanies.
Outside, the voices of children are heard in the rain,
Und Nebelbilder steigen / Wohl aus der Erd hervor,
and misty images rise / from the earth.
Little Boy
The sun lowers on our backyard in Kansas,
and I am looking up through the circling spokes
of a bicycle asking my father as mindlessly
as I would ask if he ever saw DiMaggio or Mantle
why we dropped the bomb on those two towns
in Japan, and his face goes all wooden, the eyes
freezing like rabbits in headlights, the palm
of his hand slowly tapping the arm of a lawn chair
that has appeared in family photographs
since 1945, the shadow of my mother thrown
across it, the green Packard in the background
which my father said he bought because after Saipan
and Tinian and Okinawa, “I felt like they owed it to me.”
These were names I didn’t know, islands distant
as planets, anonymous. Where is Saipan?
Where is Okinawa? Where is the Pacific?
Could you see the cloud in the air like the smoke
from Eugene Messenbaum’s semi, that huge cloud
when he rolled it out on Highway 54 last winter?
The hand is hammering the chair arm, beating it,
and I know it’s all wrong as I move backward
on the garage floor and watch his eyes watching
the sun in its evening burial and the spreading
silver light and then darkness over the farms
and vast, flat fields which I will grow so tired of,
so weary of years later that I will leave, watching
then as I do now his eyes as they take in the falling rag
of the sun, a level stare, a gaze that asks nothing
and gives nothing, the sun burning itself to ashes
constantly, the orange maize blackening in drought
and waste, and he can do nothing and neither can I.
The Welder, Visited by the Angel of Mercy
Something strange is the soul on the earth.
—GEORG TRAKL
Spilled melons rotting on the highway’s shoulder sweeten
the air, their bruised rinds silvering under the half-moon.
A blown tire makes the pickup list into the shoulder
like a swamped boat, and the trailer that was torn loose
has a twisted tongue and hitch that he has cut away,
trimmed, and wants to weld back on. Beyond lie fields
of short grass where cattle moan and drift like clouds, hunks
of dark looming behind barbed wire. The welder, crooning
along with a Patsy Cline tune from the truck’s radio,
smokes his third joint, and a cracked bottle of Haig & Haig
glitters among the weeds, the rank and swollen melons.
Back at St. Benedict’s they’re studying Augustine now,
the great rake in his moment sobbing beneath the fig trees,
the child somewhere singing, take and read, take and read.
What they are not doing is fucking around in a ditch
on the road to El Paso ass-deep in mushmelons
and a lame pickup packed with books that are scattered now
from hell to breakfast. Jesus. Flipping the black mask up,
he reaches into the can for a fresh rod, clamps it,
then stares into the evening sky. Stars. The blackened moon.
The red dust of the city at night. Roy Garcia,
a man in a landscape, tries to weld his truck and his life
back together, but forgetting to drop the mask back down,
he touches rod to iron, and the arc’s flash hammers
his eyes as he stumbles, blind, among the fruit of the earth.
The flame raging through his brain spreads its scorched wings
in a dazzle of embers, lowering the welder, the good student,
into his grass bed, where the world lies down to sleep
until it wakes once more into the dream of Being:
Roy and
Maria at breakfast, white cups of black coffee,
fresh melons in blue bowls, the books in leather bindings
standing like silent children along the western wall.
The Death of a Small Town
It’s rather like snow: in the beginning,
immaculate, brilliant, the trees shocked
into a crystalline awareness of something
remarkable, like them, but not of them,
perfectly formed and yet formless.
You want to walk up and down in it,
this bleak, maizeless field of innocence
with its black twigs and blue leaves.
You want to feel the silence crunching
beneath your houseshoes, but soon everyone
is wallowing in it, the trees no longer
bear sunlight, the sky has dragged down
its gray dream, and now it’s no longer snow
but something else, not water or even
its dumb cousin, mud, but something used,
ordinary, dull. Then one morning at 4 a.m.
you go out seeking that one feeble remnant,
you are so lonely, and of course you find
its absence. An odd thing, to come upon
an absence, to come upon a death, to come upon
what is left when everything is gone.
The Art of the Lathe
Leonardo invented the first one.
The next was a pole lathe with a drive cord,
illustrated in Plumier’s L’art de tourner en perfection.
Then Ramsden, Vauconson, the great Maudslay,
his student Roberts, Fox, Clement, Whitworth.
The long line of machinists to my left
lean into their work, ungloved hands adjusting the calipers,
tapping the bit lightly with their fingertips.
Each man withdraws into his house of work:
the rough cut, shearing of iron by tempered steel,
blue-black threads lifting like locks of hair,
then breaking over bevel and ridge.
Oil and water splash over the whitening bit, hissing.
The lathe on night shift, moonlight silvering the bed-ways.
The journeyman I apprenticed with, Roy Garcia,
in silk shirt, khakis, and Florsheims. Cautious,
almost delicate explanations and slow,
shapely hand movements. Craft by repetition.