The Blue Buick

by B. H. Fairchild

  of sad Verlaine, Rilke at the Dome,

  and later at St. Anne’s watches children

  learning how to faire la bise. But on

  Pont Neuf, when he gazes deep into the Seine,

  the face of a glassworker’s son stares back,

  and the river that runs through Paris runs

  through Ohio past Jimmy Leonard’s shack,

  the Shreve High Football Stadium, and Kenyon,

  where a boy with the memory of a god

  and a gift for taking images to heart

  translates from a poem about the head

  of Orpheus, in a river, singing.

  At the Café de Flore

  This evening as I am entering the Café de Flore to buy some cigarettes, I meet Levastine with a half-drunken companion who introduced himself as the “abbé défroqué surréaliste.” He was the first surrealist priest.

  —MIRCEA ELIADE, JOURNAL I, 1945–1955

  I have anointed boutonnieres and cats,

  preached homilies on spectacles and bats,

  baptized the morning, evening, and full moon,

  and blessed both happiness and gloom.

  I proclaim the doctrine of broken clocks:

  on every hour, remove your shoes and socks,

  sing the Marseillaise nine times backwards

  and consider, please, the lives of birds

  (there are fewer than before the war).

  Père Surréaliste does not wish to bore

  with his prayers to orchids and champagne,

  the sanctity of wine, the uselessness of pain,

  but thirty miles from here are flowers

  growing from the mouths of boys.

  For what I’ve seen there is no word,

  I am the Priest of the Absurd.

  At Omaha Beach

  Lewis M. Ginsberg

  d. June 7, 1944

  The waves wash out, wash in.

  The rain comes down. It comes down.

  The sky runs into the sea

  that turns in its troubled sleep,

  dreaming its long gray dream.

  White stars stand on the lawn.

  We move on the edges of speech.

  Sleep comes down. It comes down.

  Dreams wash out, wash in.

  Our fathers walk out of the sea.

  The air is heavy with speech.

  Our fathers are younger than we.

  As the fog dissolves in the dawn,

  our fathers lie down on the beach.

  We’re a dream drifting down on a beach

  in the rain in the sleep of our lives.

  White stars wash over a lawn.

  We are troubled by sea and sky.

  Our words dissolve in the waves.

  On the edges of speech is the sound

  of the rain coming down. It comes down.

  The Memory Palace

  The next stage is memory, which is like a great field or a spacious palace. . . . It is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul. Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am. This means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. But where is that part of it which it does not itself contain? Is it somewhere outside itself and not within it? How, then, can it be a part of it, if it is not contained in it?

  —ST. AUGUSTINE, CONFESSIONS

  He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty (of memory) must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, . . .

  —CICERO IN DE ORATORE, SPEAKING OF THE POET SIMONIDES

  . . . and he taught me Bruno’s memory system, the nearest thing to immortality, he said, for then I would forget nothing, and everything would be imprinted on my soul.

  —“THE BLUE BUICK”

  It is dark but will soon be light. We will place them here, in each room, on each machine, each part your hands touched repeatedly, all those surfaces glossed now with moonlight raining through the slats in the roof.

  There is a certain urgency about this, like the undertow at Galveston when you almost drowned. A certain pull.

  It is the machine shop, of course, because you saw your father build it and your mother worry over it and both of them quarrel and grieve over it, and you worked there, and it became the air your family breathed, the food they ate. It is all around you and inside you, and for reasons you cannot know, it contains everything you did or felt or thought.

  There is, first, your version of paradise, Avenue J in Houston, your father just back from the war, a working-class neighborhood before television pulled everyone inside, all the fathers home from work, mothers calling from front porches, and all your people—Bert, Locie, your sister, Marie, your aunt and uncle—sitting on blankets in the backyard, the good talk and laughter as night comes on, and to commemorate this, along with the things of your life, we place throughout the shop, draped across the backs of lathes and drill presses and milling machines, the sentences you never want to forget, sentences from the first prose you ever read that made the word beauty form in your mind and made you want to write, to write sentences.

  On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there.

  Out back in the welding shop where men were gods, Vulcans in black helmets, and the blaze of cutting torches hurled onto the ceiling the gigantic shadows you watched as a child, place here the things of gods and children: baseball; a twilight doubleheader and the blue bowl of the sky as the lights came on; the fragrance of mown grass in the outfield; the story about the great pitcher, Moses Yellowhorse; your first double play at second base, the feeling of having your body disappear inside a motion; O.T. Swearingen holding his infant grandson in the shadow of the door of the great barn where it was always night; the storm cellar; the great yawn of the door, and then the going down, the rank earth smells, the swallowing up.

  In the center, next to the grinder, place the image of your grandmother, her legs ribbed with varicose veins. O.T., haunted by night terrors, would call out in his sleep, Nellie, Nellie. In the morning in the kitchen with the slanted floor, you would stare at her legs, the purple cords, and think, she has walked so far in this kitchen, has walked to another country, and O.T. was calling her back.

  First we were sitting up, then one of us lay down, and then we all lay down, on our stomachs, or on our sides, or on our backs, and they have kept on talking.

  In the tool-and-die shed that has no windows, things seen in half-light, dimly remembered and almost—but not quite—understood: the woman who scavenged trash cans late at night wearing a high school formal, walking the alleys, the tin clutter of her life rattling through the town; standing in line at the supermarket yesterday, there it was in your head, the hum of the lathe, song of the honing cloth, a child’s song heard from a distance; shooting hoops after sunset, the whisper of the net in the darkness, the surrounding silence.

  They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all.

  The fireworks display at the softball field. Early evening, chorus of cicadas behind you. The eyes of your children sparkling with reflected light. You have no words for bliss and so lose yourself in the stars. On the way home, everyone sings “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time.” Drape this over the lathe your father worked, days and sometimes nights, for twenty-seven years.

  The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near.

  Over here, in the lap of the big drill press, where the drill froze and you panicked, place all things sudden: Uncle Harry breaking into a Fred Astaire soft-shoe; waking in Kansas to snowfall—the hush, the heart’s cathedral, the last echoe
s of the choir floating down, your breath fogging the window, bleaching the trees; the great dust storm, crawling home on your hands and knees so you could feel the sidewalk; old Mrs. Pate’s elm clogged with grackles, then bursting in a chattering black cloud of feathers and falling leaves.

  All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds.

  The field on the west is dressed out with tropes; Keats’s untrodden region of the mind, Dickinson’s cathedral tunes, Donne’s compass, Jarrell’s “waist the spirit breaks its arm on,” all the ones in Plath’s “Medallion.” Nearest, just opposite the big pipe straightener, will be the first ones, from the Old Testament, invisible to fundamentalists. And you will always need them because you hunger always for things seen in the light of everything else, and the light is endless.

  The strangest event in your life, your baptism, because you walked through a doorway but arrived in the same room: place it here, in the office where the elderly bookkeeper, Mr. Mayfield, kept meticulous records. An inventory. And your mother weeping because your life was saved, rescued, like Jimmy Deeds pulled from the river, still breathing. Saved, accounted for.

  One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me.

  On the faceplate of the milling machine, where iron fillings spilled into a child’s outstretched hands, place things felt, the biography of your skin: falling off to sleep, the cool palms of the sheets, the lightness of your body; your first French kiss, your hand on the small breasts of Samantha Dobbins, her belly, her thigh, the astonishing softness, her quickening breath in the shallow of your neck; waves lapping your ankles like little mouths; the pugil stick in your stomach, a voice saying, You have been here before; the nail in the foot; the car wreck when you were four, touching your mother’s face, the tiny slivers of glass flickering red and blue in the police car’s lights.

  On the top shelf of this iron cabinet, circling the toolbox, the ornaments of labor: the time card, punched, with eight hours remaining; The Machinist’s Handbook; the metal hard hat with the leather lining smelling of thirty years of sweat; the aluminum black lunch box with the Captain Marvel decal, the copy of Fitzgerald’s Odyssey inside; the steel burr they removed from your father’s eye, work gloves lying in the gathering bin, where he threw them.

  By some chance, here they are, all on this earth . . . lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night.

  And this, on the iron beam where the sparrows gathered: St. Joseph’s Hospital, and through the big window you watched two large birds in the distance, two white flames swooping in great, crossing arcs against the leaves of date palms, and you concentrated hard on that until the pain in your lungs fell away, diminished until it seemed very distant, hardly there at all. You were astonished at the beauty, the mystery, of the birds. One, you decided, was Time. The other, Being.

  After a little, I am taken in and put to bed.

  And this: in the backyard of the little white rent-house with the Spanish moss hanging down, tossing a Frizbee to your son, and when his small body curved up and out to catch it, a beam of light broke over the corner of the house and passed between his fingertips and the orange disk, and time froze, and three hundred years later he came down and you rose to get another beer from the refrigerator.

  All of this, and more, you must hang onto, you must, but time is running out, here is your daughter on stage, a goddess, the beauty of it is overwhelming; your son rounding the bases the first time, grinning; your wife, oh this one, with her face veiled in shadows, the eyes weary, a life written across her forehead, her hand touching your wrist, that touch, that evening.

  Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

  Along the bedways of the small lathe, where the long window gathered the afternoon light and you could feel the last layers of the workday falling away, place these: an orange grove in California, 1944, the songlike, soprano voices of women lifting and falling; your first library book, Biography of a Grizzly, read on the corner of 3rd and Kansas, the traffic of the world suddenly frozen around you; the high school photo of Patricia Lea Gillespie, a little frightened, the future coming on too fast, too fast; a small boy in a T-shirt that says, I’D RATHER BE IN PHILADELPHIA; a girl with her hair in a bun, dancing for her aunts and uncles, who have promised to cover their eyes; your old friend Radke’s painting, The Arrival of the Future, the future a halo of wasps around his head; your uncle Bill Branum, the funniest man you ever knew, dying of lung cancer, hand dropping onto a steel tray, cigarette ash floating across a white tile floor; the beach at Galveston at sunset, lavender glass and chrome of the waves flattening out, the last light dragged out to sea, darkening sand, voices of your kinfolk lifting gull-like, that flight of laughter, twilight glimmer of beer cans, a black dog, cigarettes, faces squinting at the sun; the sun.

  May god bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.

  And this: the day during a viral fever you felt your Self detaching itself and moving like a boat unmoored from a dock slowly but irretrievably away from your body, and the terror was more real than your body. Do not forget this, for it was hell. Hang this from the hook of the center hoist.

  Look around, see how they are all positioned, each in its place. Now you can remember everything. But there’s no more time, it’s morning, time to go to work, and they are opening the huge shop door, that slow rumble you will never forget, and the light leaking in, widening—light like a quilt of gold foil flung out so it will drape all of this, will keep it and keep it well—and it is so bright now, you can hardly bear it as it fills the door, this immense glacier of light coming on, and still you do not know who you are, but here it is, try to remember, it is all beginning:

  FROM

  Usher

  (2009)

  The Gray Man

  We are cutting weeds and sunflowers on the shoulder,

  the gray man and I, red dust coiling up around us,

  muddying our sweat-smeared mugs, clogging our hair,

  the iron heel of an August Kansas sun pushing down

  on the scythes we raise against it and swing down

  in an almost homicidal rage and drunken weariness.

  And I keep my distance. He’s a new hire just off

  the highway, a hitchhiker sick to death of hunger,

  the cruelties of the road, and our boss hates

  poverty just enough to hire it, even this old man,

  a dead, leaden pall upon his skin so vile it makes you

  pull away, the gray trousers and state-issue black

  prison boots, the bloodless, grim, unmoving lips,

  and the eyes set in concrete, dark hallways that lead

  to darker rooms down somewhere in the basement

  of the soul’s despair. Two weeks. He hasn’t said

  a word. He’s a goddamned ghost, I tell my father.

  Light flashes from his scythe as he decapitates

  big clumps of yellow blooms, a flailing, brutal war

  against the lords of labor, I suppose, against the state,

  the world, himself, who knows. When we break,

  I watch the canteen’s water bleed from the corners

  of his mouth, a spreading wound across his shirt,

  the way he spits into the swollen pile of bluestem

  and rank bindweed as if he hates it and everything

  that grows, a hatred that has roots and thickens,

  twisting, snarled around itself. A lizard wanders

  into sunlight, and he hacks at it, chopping clods

  until dust clouds rise like mist around him, and then

  he speaks in a kind of shattering of glass cutting

  through the
hot wind’s sigh, the fear: Love thine enemy.

  He says it to the weeds or maybe what they stand for.

  Then, knees buckling, with a rasping, gutted sob

  as if drowning in that slough of dirty air, he begins,

  trembling, to cry.

  I was a boy. The plains’ wind

  leaned against the uncut weeds. High wires hummed

  with human voices in their travail. And the highway

  I had worked but never traveled lay across the fields

  and vanished in that distant gray where day meets night.

  Trilogy

  Truly, thou art a God who hidest thyself.

  —ISAIAH 45:15

  I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights

  With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene

  Never disclosed, but hastened to again,

  Foretold to other eyes on the same screen . . .

  —HART CRANE, “TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE”

  The “meters,” chandas, are the robes that the gods “wrapped around themselves,” acchadayan, so that they might come near to the fire without being disfigured as though by the blade of a razor.

  —ROBERT CALASSO, LITERATURE AND THE GODS, COMMENTING ON THE SATAPUTHA BRAHMANA

  Frieda Pushnik

  “Little Frieda Pushnik, the Armless, Legless Girl Wonder,” who spent years as a touring attraction for Ripley’s Believe It or Not and Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey . . .

  —“OBITUARIES,” LOS ANGELES TIMES

  These are the faces I love. Adrift with wonder,

  big-eyed as infants and famished for that strangeness

  in the world they haven’t known since early childhood.

  They are monsters of innocence who gladly shoulder

  the burden of the blessed, the unbroken, the beautiful,

  the lost. They should be walking on their lovely knees

  like pilgrims to that shrine in Guadalupe, where