The Blue Buick

by B. H. Fairchild

  in a kind of baseball heaven. The signs

  along left field say, WELCOME HOME. The darkest

  dreams begin to fade. Happiness comes down like rain.

  Lightning strafes the sky. The batter eyes the sign

  from first and nails his right cleat to the ground. Dark

  clouds loom. We’ll lose at home. To rain. Sweet rain.

  Betty

  Among azaleas and drooping lilies of the Nile

  fagged from August’s firestorm, Betty rakes

  blown trash, groaning underneath the burdens

  of a life of housework, teaching high school Latin,

  and lugging one day to the next the heavy stones

  of worry: blind son, vanished husband, taxes,

  debt, and the Dodgers, who upset natural law

  when they left Brooklyn for L.A. It’s all downhill,

  she yells to me across the yard, you’re not even you,

  and she quotes again the line from last night’s Nova:

  Every atom in your body was once inside a star.

  Rising in a patch of autumn sunlight, she scans

  her property: termite-ravaged fence, roof rats

  gutting rotted oranges, tree roots buckling

  the driveway, dry rot in the redwood planks,

  crabgrass, clogged drains, her ancient bus on blocks,

  UC Berkeley and peace-sign bumper stickers

  from the sixties. Sunday morning she climbs in

  with coffee, scones, and Seneca, her only saint.

  Takes the metro to the track and puts down

  ten on Trotsky’s Dream. She likes the crowd,

  hoi polloi, and those horses beautiful as gods.

  Later, leaves tumble down on her diminished

  form while she dozes in a plastic lawn chair

  as if blind to seasons. But it’s California,

  green in winter and in September Santa Anas

  swooping through the valley as Betty curses

  the sudden news: liver cancer, her doctor says,

  a month or two at most, and within a week

  she’s knocking on my door, mustard yellow,

  death looming in her eyes. Tonight, 2 a.m.,

  in moonlight I see someone standing in her yard:

  Betty, beer in hand and staring at the stars.

  The Game

  Field lights that span the evening sky, siren songs

  of kind, loud girls in thigh-high skirts, and then,

  like a rush of cranes bruising the autumn silence,

  the crowd leaping up and shouting as we stride

  across that green plane bright with new lime

  and dreams of high school immortality.

  After the game, the old men buy us beer

  and we drink it straight from pitchers held

  like trophies, bronze in the neon light, foam

  dribbling down our shirts. There is a sadness

  in their happiness, their hands upon our backs.

  We are their finest days now vanishing, or dead.

  And so they buy a second round, a third,

  for their brave young men. Ben White puts his fist

  through drywall, and Timmy Doyle breaks

  a pool cue with one hand. Undefeated,

  drunk, in glory we drive home. We are heroes.

  Our fathers scowl, our mothers tuck us into bed.

  The Student Assistant

  Across the street from Southwark Cathedral

  after reaching nine centuries back to touch a wall

  still standing through the London blitz where the sign

  says, PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH. THIS WAS CONSTRUCTED

  IN A.D. 1136, I walk the path a certain medical student

  might have taken to Guy’s Hospital in 1812 when

  he was buying cadavers from the grave digger

  at four in the morning as the heavy south bank fog

  settled upon the shoulders of the Thames,

  and having made his purchase in the surreptitious

  thick night, dragging the corpse across cobbles

  the way Hamlet lugged the guts of Polonius from

  sudden vengeance into the murky halls of guilt.

  This student assistant, a promising young man

  with a brittle future and quick wit trudging through

  the dingy film of the London night also wrote poems

  about melancholy and the sweet, throbbing agony

  of desire and beauty, but there he trod, pulling

  his burlap sack over stone and muck and stair

  with Southwark looming overhead like some dark god

  of history, pulling death into the purgatorial rooms,

  the terrifying, lye-washed, stinking, candlelit rooms

  of Guy’s Hospital. Little Keats. On his death trip.

  History: Four Poems

  1. Dust Storm, No Man’s Land, 1952

  First, the fluttering of screeching birds,

  their sudden plunge and climb through manic,

  spiral flights, chickens squawking in the backyard,

  and then doors slamming and the air grieved

  by gusts of prairie dirt as I look back

  to see the sky turn sick with darkness,

  a deep brown-green bile boiling up to smear

  the sun dull as rusted-out tin siding

  sinking now in muck, oblivion, the little

  death of nightmares. I’m blind to my own body

  and the vanished sidewalk where I crawl doglike

  spooked by dead birds, the shock of feathers

  to the touch, and scattered branches until

  lighted windows begin to cleave the dust

  the way a plow turns barren ground, the sod

  I’m told that should have stayed unbroken,

  ancient plains of short grass that fed bison

  long before the massacres began. Home again,

  I wake to silence like a newly fallen snow,

  and in morning light a sheen as if dawn

  were a kind of foil or bronze silk coverlet

  lies across the room from bed to table

  where a model plane has been painted gold

  with sunlit dust and the floor holds brightness

  the way the land itself must have one fine day

  when they climbed down from their wagons

  and smiled, for the wind was clean and the sky

  was clear and they had come a very long way.

  2. Shakespeare in the Park, 9/11/2011

  Tonight beneath a Texas sky Lear wept

  and gave his grief to a river in Fort Worth,

  and an audience remembering the broken

  towers of New York lay down their beers

  and leaned into the dark. Shakespeare in a park

  where not so long ago two thousand head

  of cattle bound for slaughter grazed, stared

  across America’s frontier, and heard

  the same cicadas’ cry, its rise and fall.

  Above Lear’s absent crown the moon had paled

  to little more than real estate where men

  have walked. A poplar waved the stars away.

  An army of cicadas sang the old mad song.

  I will not sleep tonight. My children’s children

  breathe uneasily beneath the burden

  of a story strange and not quite clear to them.

  My wife dreams the passion of Cordelia

  and the stupidity of men. Beyond

  the lavish lawns and bushes of the higher

  suburbs loom nightmares of a phony war.

  Light will soon be moving on the plains,

  and bare, forked animals will rise. As long

  as the cicadas sing, I will not sleep tonight.

  3. Economics

  for the occupiers

  We signed our names on their old papers. . . . We knew when they cheated us out of every single little red cent. . . . We knew that. We knew the
y were stealing. . . . We let them think they could cheat us because we are just plain old common everyday people. They got the habit.

  —WOODY GUTHRIE, HOUSE OF EARTH

  The teeming street, rich with crowds and voices,

  huddled masses gleaming under rain and streetlights.

  The human microphone, antiphonies of call, response,

  and songs like ancient hymns among stone tombs

  awakening once more the nocturnal gods of Wall Street.

  And the old man’s tale comes back to me outside

  a long-abandoned bank in Oklahoma robbed in 1933

  when locusts wedged between the sandstone bricks

  throbbed their little desperation song, days on end

  monotonous as rotting fence posts along dry fields,

  the air a wall of dust, Black Bear Creek a bloodless scar,

  and the horse people of the Otoe long since gone away.

  His voice hardened into something thin and brittle

  for suddenly, he said, suddenly back then, he knew,

  in that flat Baptist land of bad deeds and worse money

  where preachers raged against all forms of sin

  except the greed of the sleeping kings of poverty,

  that the scabby hand of vengeance was alive

  and real and moving slowly through the fields

  and burning streets of little towns like this one because

  the third thief placed the barrel of his Remington

  beneath the bank president’s chin and said,

  This, sir, is what happens when banks are built

  on the broken backs of the people, while the young man

  who became the old man who told this story lay

  face down on the floor clutching his foreclosure notice

  and thinking, who is the thief here, who is the thief?

  4. Alzheimer’s

  When, when, when is what my sister mumbles now

  beneath this tin-can piped-in music and parrots

  squawking in the guest lounge, but what I see

  is the light glancing from our mother’s ring

  as she hands the coins to the organ grinder

  on the corner of Polk and Main one day in Houston,

  1944, her face ruined, mascara running, the burden

  heavy upon her, then later, the light crumbling

  through the feverish leaves of cottonwoods

  in the sideyard and still the sobbing, hands flailing,

  that wobbly keening of the organ in my head,

  those rickety tones floating up as if from an island

  in the Pacific and next morning the coffee’s perk

  and bubble cluttering the air, the bacon’s sputter,

  a kind of chirping, I thought, of birds, Pacific ones,

  and my father surely heard them since he was there

  beneath those trees with leaves like big green hands

  heaped with birds, parrots, for I had seen parrots

  in a photograph from Life in all their brightness,

  their grand carnival of yellow, red, and blue,

  their coat-of-many-colors shapes against a beach

  and the vast church choir of sky and cloud that rose

  above it, and so that afternoon in Galveston

  my mother looked across the waves that curl

  and uncurl always, looking at the sea or toward

  the far edge of the sea or beyond the sea, beyond

  green islands or parrots or any of that as I showed

  the photograph to my sister, saying this is where

  our father is, where he’s coming from, and my mother

  grabbed it, crying when, when, when, when, when.

  Three Girls Tossing Rings

  Outside, the lawn slopes and billows under chestnut trees,

  acres of pampered landscape floating in a limpid haze

  that surrounds the house. Dressed in crinoline, white hose,

  and flocks of ribbons, one of them tosses rings, the others

  wait their turn behind the drapes of watered silk. A red ring

  is thrown and misses, the yellow rims around the peg and stays.

  No one keeps score. Their boredom is as natural as grass

  and chestnut trees, or the dull advance of history from hill

  to hill somewhere in the gray distances of Europe. A red ring,

  a blue one, the arc the wrist makes in the throwing, the small feet

  just so. Trenches hacked deep in the fields of another country,

  holes where humans slept in mud, will green over, the broken limbs

  of trees will flower, and the young girls tossing rings after Mass,

  after the family meal, will turn and stroll across the wide, immaculate lawn.

  The Death of a Gerbil

  for Sarah

  Small-bones, buried in a shallow grave,

  black eyes now closed that led you through the night,

  flat, drumming feet now stilled below the staves

  my children crossed for you. You gave them light

  on wet, dim weekends. And sick, asleep for days,

  you taught them care, then grief. They made a rite

  of solemn words and gestures meant to raise

  you to some paradiso, the mind’s embrace

  of soft bodies, dark eyes, and unstained souls.

  With this canto, mouse, adieu. Your sacrifice

  was life encased in glass, or running through

  their dreams pursued by fate’s grim mask, the face

  they woke up from but now must wake up to.

  In those last days you held my children close,

  then let them make a world, a grace, for you.

  Pale from the Hand of the Child That Holds It

  The bronze angel yawns among the photographs:

  father and mother wearing the bright garments

  of memory, that upended Eden where their lives

  seem glamorous and sleek as Cadillacs in V-Day

  parades, he in Navy whites, she in a wide-shouldered,

  Joan Crawford fantasy of yellow explosions on a

  blue field. Her dress ripples slightly at the hips

  where his hands come to rest, and a chorus line

  of date palms bends in unison behind them.

  The dawn shadows of the room lap across son

  and daughter, dreamily retouched in their robed

  graduation portraits while over them looms

  the enlarged family snapshot from Christmas.

  Hearing the shutter snap like a plastic picnic fork

  in the father’s broad fist, they recalled summer

  vacations laid out like cut flowers, the lake’s shattered

  calm, the charred hot dogs, bleached swimming trunks,

  condoms nibbling at the peeling boat dock. Stamped

  with the profile of some nameless Victorian,

  the heirloom lamp squats in the table’s center

  as if this monument to domestic history could lift flesh

  and blood from their chrome frames. And I, the son,

  watch now how dust motes fall through lace curtains

  like snow in one of those overturned glass balls

  where a tree and house hang from a rounded meadow

  above a sky pale from the hand of the child that holds it.

  Three Prose Poems

  from the Journals of

  Roy Eldridge Garcia

  An Attaché Case

  One morning, only an hour after he arrived at the Bourse, M. Belperron, an agent de change, left his office, took a train to Deauville, and walked into the ocean, leaving his attaché case on the beach. The catatonic stillness of the attaché case affected everything. Was it just an object in the stream of events, soiled with the sweat of hands, wracked with an endless cycle of opening and closing, commercial documents placed inside, then removed, then reinserted? Or was it veering toward metamorphosis? These questions rolled over the b
each in waves of such stunning tension that everything became fixed in its movements: the gulls fell and rose, the ocean pressed forward, then fell away, ripples of sand formed and vanished. The attaché case, too, felt itself yielding to the flow of the inevitable and began searching the horizon desperately, recalling the story M. Belperron loved to tell about Galileo inventing the telescope in order to see ships coming in before anyone else could, then quickly investing in their cargo and subsequently making a killing on the market. Soon a boat appeared, only a speck at first, but growing larger and larger. Opportunities were at hand. Someone needed to do something.

  Aix-en-Provence, 1952

  The End of Art

  Raymone, Blaise, and I are in the Café de Flore arguing about Tolstoy’s essay, “What Is Art?” and Raymone, in her excellent but occasionally imperfect English, says, “In his later years Tolstoy enjoyed walking around dressed as a pheasant.” Raymone, I was wrong and you were right. There was something birdlike about him. Something feathery. Colorful. Exotic. And rather small. He hated the art of Shakespeare and Chekhov, as all pheasants do. They have these long tail feathers. Their art is in their ass, you might say. Tolstoy wanted to forget he was a count. Like Marie Antoinette at Versailles dressing up like a peasant in clothing of her own design and walking about in her little peasant village, where there were no peasants. Real cabbage and turnips and tomatoes, but no peasants. The real peasants were at the gates, starving and crying out for food, watching Marie walking around pretending to be them. She was closer to a pheasant than a peasant. Her art was in her ass, where one might also find Tolstoy’s aesthetic principles. It all makes sense now.

  Paris, 1953

  The Language of the Future

  A language has to be found . . .

  —RIMBAUD

  The language of the future had invaded the desert. Its colors were magnificent: rose, indigo, emerald green, an excruciatingly pale yellow, an orange pure and bright as a bird-of-paradise, other unnameable shades and hues running together, and a black so unyielding that it threatened to engulf whatever it touched. The animals welcomed the new language, inviting it into their lairs and tunnels in the rocks. They found in it not so much a warmth as a familiarity, as of something buried and forgotten and then recovered unexpectedly. Perhaps, they thought, this is the way their gods had spoken before the great silence. But the other inhabitants of the desert had become accustomed to the silence, woke to it each morning like a second sun, and so the new language, even though keeping a polite distance from their houses, vaguely disturbed them. “It’s that purple nonsense along the edges,” offered one. “No, no, it’s the sick yellow that gets under my skin,” said another. They could not agree, but when the night embraced the language, first one shade and then another, and commenced its dark song, they knew a change was coming. Sure enough, in the deep, thickening mauve of night they rose like sleepwalkers from their beds and began the exodus, covering their ears against the chorus that swelled around them.