was frayed, tough, the wineglass empty, the ashtray full.
So the drinking started, then later, after Bakersfield,
the seizures, more drink, Tegretol, phenobarbital,
Dilantin, the whole mess. But that was years ago.
She made a kind of smile that wavered at the end.
Life’s been simplified for us. It’s simple now.
But of course she was talking to herself, not me.
And I was thinking, this is it, how lives go on,
this is how it happens, what I do not understand.
But then, this, too, this, too: when I drove her home
one night in early summer and we sat outside
with the pulse of cicadas washing over us in waves.
No talk. But I felt there was something between us.
Her profile blurred by a patchwork of shadows, eyes
stealing the light from the trailer’s window. A woman
twenty years my senior. It wasn’t sex. Not quite.
God knows, I ached to know a woman, wanted it
so bad I could have cried. In fact, I did. But this was,
well, not even love, more like wonderment. Erotic,
yes, but still, frozen, not to be acted on. She turned
to me and knew what I knew and smiled and went in,
or started to, then turned around, walked slowly back,
slid into the seat and still smiling looked at me
a long time before reaching over to place her hand
behind my head and carefully, delicately, as if
there were only a slight coolness moving there,
running the tip of her tongue along my lips.
Until it ended, the earth was breathing, it seemed,
or the space around us had become some sort
of immense beating heart, and when she peeled back
my shirt, and her lips—damp and unmercifully
soft—moved down my chest and belly, I believe
that I was actually trembling, a small wing beating
in my throat as she took me into her mouth
and afterward placed her hand flat on my chest, just so,
as if to say, a gift, just this once, never again.
But this was before the summer dust and heat
came down the way it does in July heavy as sleep
so I felt half-drunk running the pipe rack, unloading
flat-bed haulers rumbling in each day, drivers sitting
on their fat asses letting me do all the work, and so
I mashed my foot between two drill collars and spent
the next few days in bed terribly happy reading
Flannery O’Connor and laughing myself well again.
Two or three weeks later, my father called me over.
Take a look. At his feet lay a sort of concrete bullet,
or bomb, sand-colored, with what seemed little flecks
of glass on the tapered part. You know what that is?
Well, that’s the end of the story, bud. His foot nudged
the nose of the thing as if it were a dead deer.
The diamond bit. Chunks of low-grade diamond embedded
in the cutting surface. Can drill through anything.
So the old tri-cone’s out. With this one they can stay
in the hole forever, and you know what that means.
And I did. Almost our whole business was threading pipe.
On oil rigs, pulling five thousand feet of drill pipe
in and out of the hole to change bits damaged
pipe joints. With the new bit, less damage, less work.
For us, a lot less. Not enough to make a profit.
Not even enough to pay costs. Amazing. And so,
it was all over, or soon would be. I looked at the face
of my father staring into the future, at the shop
he had built, the lathes lined up along the north side,
their iron song almost unbroken through twenty years,
the never-washed, grease-laden windows, gutted drawworks,
gears, bushings, tools spilled across the now scarred,
cement floor where I had worked every summer
since I was ten. And then a feather grazed my ear,
the ruffle of wings, and a vision rose in my head:
I was free. My future lay clear and open and bright
as the treeless field across the road. The burden
of inheritance now lifted, vanished. No shop.
Anything: musician, writer, anything I wanted.
I walked out into an endless sky. I rose. I flew.
The death of the shop was slow. Over the next year
or so work tapered off, as we knew it would,
and the welders and machinists walked away,
slowly, one by one. My father found other jobs
for them, in Midland, Snyder, towns like that,
and I put off college for a year to pick up the slack.
Roy and Maria dropped by the house on their way
out of town, Buick idling in the driveway, top down.
Come here, she said. She kissed my forehead, Be good
to the girls, treat them right. And Roy lit a cigar
and pointed to a box of books beside the car:
Read, learn a thing or two. They could have been going
to a wedding, all eager and bright, nothing wrong here,
and the car swaggered out, crunching gravel and squealing
onto Highway 54 with that Airstream trailer
gleaming in the distance, a silver sun floating
on heat waves along a straight black line of asphalt
to Route 66 and whatever would happen next.
Roy died a year later of a brain aneurism
at Maria’s sister’s house while he was watching
a Dodgers game on TV. He always said
that when the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to L.A.,
the world began to die. Well, I guess it did.
I came home from college for Christmas break
to find the Buick in our driveway. Maria had it
driven here, my father said. After Roy died,
she didn’t want it. She wanted you to have it.
When he handed me the title, placed in my palm
that small, pink slip of paper with Maria’s name
on it, it lay in my hand until my hand moved,
which was a long time.
Along with it was a message
about the Buick’s trunk, where I found a box
marked ROY’S STUFF, and inside Maria’s note:
It’s not much, most of it from the Paris years, tip of the iceberg, really, a lot written but a ton thrown away. After L.A., Roy could never finish anything. I think he never wanted to see it take final form. Always possible, but not quite there. You could say he fell in love with the blank page, the about-to-be-written. You know his rules: pay attention, forget nothing, worship the imagination. And he followed them, even if there’s not much left to show.
And then she gave her sister’s address in L.A.
I looked the poems over, a mystery to me then,
though I’ve begun to see now, I believe, the ghosts
of Cendrars, Ponge, and Char standing over them.
And at the bottom of the box were pages photocopied
from a journal with this entry among the others:
It goes on. It goes on and on. Tonight, after dinner. We danced.
The old music. We have nothing, really. Nothing but ourselves.
That something may remain. When I returned from college
that next summer, the trucking business was picking up,
and my father and I began to think that we could turn
the shop to making custom truck beds. Make some money.
Stay afloat. Besides, college was such a disappointment.
Nobody read there. Well, maybe the professors,
in their “are
a of specialty,” if that means anything.
Who could have known? There was a farm kid from Sublette
who said he came to learn Italian to read Dante
the way he should be read, but he transferred out.
I could write better, anyway, at home, I thought.
I was pretty lonely. But there were still the movies,
where I spent my extra time. When I drove there
one Friday night that winter, it had snowed, heavy,
about five inches, and I hadn’t even bothered
to brush it off the car. The movie wasn’t much,
but there was one scene I can’t forget. A man,
a lonely small-town jeweler who is deaf and mute,
has that day lost his best friend, the friend he loves,
and as he walks the streets blind with grief, his hands
begin to move across his chest in sign language.
He is talking to himself. His hands move swiftly,
furiously, like small birds fighting in midair, then
faster, a blur, the mad flight of a man’s hands
speaking hugely but silently, clamoring,
crying out, . . . and then it stops. The hands drop
to his sides. Without motion. Without speech.
A man walks down the street with his hands at his sides,
and so does everyone else. And who can tell
the difference?
Strange to think of all this now—
another time, another country, where I look down
each night on the lights of Paris littering the river—
but when I emerged from darkness into the coarse glare
of street lamps, it had warmed up, and walking toward
the car, I could see the snow melting and dropping off,
small pieces sliding off the hood and down the fenders,
the big Buick rising from the snow with patches
of watery blue emerging as it rose. I stopped
ten feet or so away and stared at it, astonished,
stunned, that coming into being still going on,
as the white top snow-laden beneath the street lamp
gave off rainbow colors, iridescent, the hard fire
of a thousand jewels, and wherever on the metal
the snow had melted was the glazed blue, looking
brilliant, deeper, bluer than it had ever been.
I stood there a long time listening to the soft crush
of clumps of snow as they dropped onto the street and then,
in the background, hearing the night sounds of horns
far away and a lone shout somewhere close by
and watching the lights in the gleaming blue surface
from passing cars and from the stars and the moon
and from anywhere there was any light at all
as all things seen and unseen and all kingdoms
naked in the human heart rose toward the sky.
Mlle Pym
from Three Poems by Roy Eldridge Garcia
On Saturday Mlle Pym would marry a philatelist, and her relatives had decided to boycott the wedding. They were as tolerant as the next person, but since the death of Uncle Max, an assistant postmaster, stamps had been banished from the family. Uncle Max was a funny man, full of laughter and clever banter, and even a single stamp resting in one’s palm seemed cruelly to point to his absence, his wit that had brightened the house for some fifty years. However, Mlle Pym, who loathed Uncle Max’s stale jokes, felt no qualms about yielding to the philatelist’s advances, awkward as they were. The announcement of their wedding was sent by special delivery. Each wedding invitation carried ten five-centime stamps, each of a different color. So when the couple found only strangers at the wedding, they were angered but not surprised. The ceremony was flawless, and emerging from the church, the bride and her philatelist were showered with stamps from all countries, of every hue and shape. There was Portugal, green with rose edging, and quaint Bolivia, imperial in its bold blue. And fluttering ominously down to rest in the bride’s outstretched hand was Iceland, pale and triangular, damp from the tongue of a stranger.
The Deposition
And one without a name
Lay clean and naked there, and gave commandments.
—RILKE, “WASHING THE CORPSE” (TRANS. JARRELL)
Dust storm, we thought, a brown swarm
plugging the lungs, or a locust cloud,
but this was a collapse, a slow sinking
to deeper brown, and deeper still, like the sky
seen from inside a well as we are lowered down,
and the air twisting and tearing at itself.
But it was done. And the body hung there
like a butchered thing, naked and alone
in a sudden hush among the ravaged air.
The ankles first—slender, blood-caked,
pale in the sullen dark, legs broken
below the knees, blue bruises smoldering
to black. And the spikes. We tugged iron
from human flesh that dangled like limbs
not fully hacked from trees, nudged
the cross beam from side to side until
the sign that mocked him broke loose.
It took all three of us. We shouldered the body
to the ground, yanked nails from wrists
more delicate, it seemed, than a young girl’s
but now swollen, gnarled, black as burnt twigs.
The body, so heavy for such a small man,
was a knot of muscle, a batch of cuts
and scratches from the scourging, and down
the right side a clotted line of blood,
the sour posca clogging his ragged beard,
the eyes exploded to a stare that shot
through all of us and still speaks in my dreams:
I know who you are.
So, we began to wash
the body, wrenching the arms, now stiff
and twisted, to his sides, unbending
the ruined legs and sponging off the dirt
of the city, sweat, urine, shit—all the body
gives—from the body, laying it out straight
on a sheet of linen rank with perfumes
so that we could cradle it, haul it
to the tomb. The wind shouted.
The foul air thickened. I reached over
to close the eyes. I know who you are.
A Starlit Night
All over America at this hour men are standing
by an open closet door, slacks slung over one arm,
staring at wire hangers, thinking of taxes
or a broken faucet or their first sex: the smell
of back-seat Naugahyde, the hush of a maize field
like breathing, the stars rushing, rushing away.
And a woman lies in an unmade bed watching
the man she has known twenty-one, no,
could it be? twenty-two years, and she is listening
to the polonaise climbing up through radio static
from the kitchen where dishes are piled
and the linoleum floor is a great, gray sea.
It’s the A-flat polonaise she practiced endlessly,
never quite getting it right, though her father,
calling from the darkened TV room, always said,
“Beautiful, kiddo!” and the moon would slide across
the lacquered piano top as if it were something
that lived underwater, something from far below.
They both came from houses with photographs,
the smell of camphor in closets, board games
with missing pieces, sunburst clocks in the kitchen
that made them, each morning, a little sad.
They didn’t know what they wanted, every night,
every starlit night of their lives, and now they have it.
Motion Sickness
I am tired of the heave and swell,
> the deep lunge in the belly, the gut’s
dumb show of dance and counterdance,
sway and pause, the pure jig of nausea
in the pit of a spinning world.
Where the body moves, the mind
often lags, clutching deck, anchor,
the gray strap that hangs like the beard
of death from the train’s ceiling,
the mind lost in the slow bulge
of ocean under the moon’s long pull
or the endless coil of some medieval
argument for the existence of God
or the dream of the giant maze
that turns constantly in and in
on itself and there is no way out . . .
I am sick and tired of every rise and fall
of the sun, the moon’s tedious cycle
that sucks blood from the thighs of women
and turns teenage boys into wolves
prowling the streets, hungry for motion.
Let me be still, let me rest
in some hollow of space and time
far from the seasons and that boring,
ponderous drama of day and night.
Let me sleep in the heart of calm
and dream placidly of birds frozen
in the unmoving air of eternity
and the earth grown immobile
in its centrifugal spin, and God
motionless as Lazarus in his tomb
before he is raised dizzily
to fall again, to rise, to fall.
A Wall Map of Paris
. . . tragend als Strömung das Haupt und die Leier.
—RILKE
A night of drinking, dawn is coming on,
my friend’s hand falls along a darkening stain
that runs from Vaugirard to Palatine
and west to rue Cassette. There, he says,
Rilke wrote “The Panther.” And that darkness
came from James Wright’s head one soggy night
when he drank too much, leaned back into the Seine,
and recited verse till dawn. Ohio sunlight
stuns the windowpane, and I’m seeing Paris,
where the morning bronzes cobblestones,
the grates around the chestnut trees, and a man
with a fullback’s shoulders and a dancer’s tread
whistles a Schubert tune and walks toward
a river like the rivers in his head.
He looks for Villon’s ghost at Notre Dame,
recalls Apollinaire, the rain-soaked heart
The Blue Buick Page 12