Station Zed

by Tom Sleigh

  That the leisure class I served I aspired to, so I could join

  the high G of the cello floating off, slowly vanishing

  in a pianissimo fermata? Then nothing more,

  silence and night? But this was California,

  and soon the heat pump and water filter

  would strain the water to such a blueness and temperature

  that acid-washed LA would go swimming night and day,

  the blue havens built by alambristas, union bricklayers, unskilled juvies

  teaching me the Faustian accounting

  of my employer, Bob “Just Call Me a Genius” Harrington:

  Screw ’em out of this, screw ’em out of that,

  but sweep up your mess and you’ll get

  away with murder. Sucking up the slurry of cement

  and sand, the hose pulsed in the pit

  of the parvenu, the ingenue, the Hollywood producers

  and Van Nuys GM bosses whose assembly-line crews

  riveted my beat-up Firebird’s body, Wolfman Jack’s XERB

  taking another little piece of my heart now, baby,

  as I sprayed gunite on rebar ribs and the air compressor

  pounded like the other Firebird: Stravinsky taking his temperature

  in West Hollywood, Schoenberg watering his lawn in Brentwood,

  Mann perched above the waves in Pacific Palisades

  had also perused catalogs weighing concrete vs. vinyl

  as blast caps detonated in holes the demmies drilled

  and ash sifted down over my face and shoulders

  to post-war twelve tone assaulting my ears.

  But while I and my transistor radio worked ten hour days,

  my father dreamt our own little South Seas grotto:

  every weekend we rose to the promise of chlorination

  as he and “us boys” dug trenches for our water lines,

  hacked away the hillside to make our ice plant grow,

  and rented the monster backhoe

  digging out the pool pit to rim it with lava stone

  against the mud. My father waved the baton

  of his shovel to light the fuse to the chord

  of dynamited stone: the cloud of our need

  went up all over California

  and rang in overtones all through me.

  Detectives

  The two detectives prowling at the edges of my dream are late—as usual. Already I’m being pushed toward the cliff edge, driven not by a gunman or a maniac, but by wanting to escape my betrayal of a friend—a serious betrayal, worth thirty pieces of silver. On all the talk shows, they talk about how I lie, about my need for attention and how no stunt is too low to get it. But when they tell how I sold out my friend, my dismissal of kindness and decency, like leaving your wife when she has cancer, the shame is too much. Off the cliff I fall, until the ground looms up, and the detectives come running—the man wearing the years-long death mask of detachment, the woman, who’s only been dead a few days, the mask of death as disillusion. And in their eyes, there’s something so heartbroken, so lonely! As if their work as detectives, almost sacred in their minds, had been made into a sideshow by bad actors on TV, and I was their last chance—muffed again!—to prove to the world what was good and true in being a real detective. And so to make them feel less defeated, I start to lie, denying I betrayed her.… And the veiled triumph in the man’s eyes at having caught me in my lies look like my father’s eyes, so that I know just what he’s feeling when he reaches to take his partner’s hand—a hand so like my mother’s that when she reaches to take mine, I recognize her passionate avowal undercut by wariness, sounding the same as in life: We’ll stand by you, she says, her cool grasp assuring me that they know I know that all I’m pretending they don’t know we all know, but look, that’s OK, we’re family, aren’t we? a family of detectives?

  “Let Thanks Be Given to the Raven as Is Its Due”

  I read a story, I’d like to think it’s true,

  about a raven in Rome who lived

  above a shoemaker’s shop and every day the bird flew

  to the Capitol where it greeted the Senators by name:

  magnificent sounding names, Germanicus, Drusus,

  Decimus Brutus, even Emperor Tiberius just come

  from Capri where, for a wrong prediction, he’d thrown

  his astrologer off a cliff. The raven

  was no snob, though, he greeted the people of Rome

  as they passed by, with names like Paulus,

  Paulina—the same name as my long-dead great aunt

  who lived in Newark in an apartment complex so notorious

  for heroin that one day when I visited her

  she talked that way … that way that makes you wonder

  how a woman who was a social worker,

  a Eugene Debs Socialist, could become so vicious in

  her mind. But the courteous raven spoke

  with such virtue that it seemed more than human—

  and when the raven greeted Tiberius, who kept everyone

  in a creeping state of terror, he called back a greeting,

  blessing the bird as a good omen for Rome.

  And year in year out, the raven flew

  to the Capitol and greeted every morning the soon-

  to-be poisoned, the soon-to-be suicides, the thinker who

  would open his veins in the bath, the arbiter

  of pleasure who knew his days were few

  and so to read Sappho meant, in his last hours,

  to forget a little of his fear. And the raven

  greeted the prostitute who had the contest with Messalina,

  great wife of Caesar, and Messalina won:

  twenty-five men in twenty-four hours, which might not sound

  like all that many, barely more than one an hour,

  but it isn’t the number, is it? The bird perhaps knew that men

  and women are the sole animals whose first experience

  of mating makes them regret which is why the bird, caught

  between two natures, must have felt the aura of Tiberius,

  the need of Messalina, but hailed them anyway—

  the way it would have hailed Rome’s thieves and slaves

  and commoners like my aunt running the gauntlet of junkies

  she passed through each day in her apartment complex’s hallways,

  just teenage kids, some of them, who liked the taste of junk—

  though two or three did try to rob her, and the super told me,

  when my mother and I finally found a place to move her,

  how the kids liked to torment her, shouting out,

  “You old white bitch!” which she returned with her slurs—

  or think of Tiberius’s apparent modesty in refusing

  the groveling Senate’s honors, the way his outward show

  of virtue—he forbade all public kissing—

  gave morality a high tone: did his power

  at last unmask him? So that he found relief

  in training little boys to swim under

  and between his legs, little licking, nibbling fishes, while

  nursing babies were given his cock to suck and highborn

  Roman women he raped he put on trial

  if they fought against him so that one stabbed herself

  to be free of his lust; or during a religious sacrifice

  he was so taken by the acolyte that he rushed him off

  and his flute-playing brother too, not even

  waiting for the priest to finish, and afterward,

  when they complained, he had their legs broken.

  And in affairs of state, his cruelty watched

  over twenty executions in a day, the bodies dragged

  with hooks into the Tiber, and any man whose estate he coveted

  could only find relief from his threats by cutting his own throat.

  That’s one version of Rome the histories tell—
>
  the same as my version of my aunt is certainly not

  how she’d tell it. Which makes the raven’s shadow

  perched above the Capitol an inkblot shape that can turn

  into a nightmare, even as its feathers split into rainbows

  the spectra of the sun. Flying home one day, the raven shit

  from the air and soiled the shoes of the shoemaker

  next door, and the man killed the bird, the records don’t

  say how, whether with a stone or poison

  or a net or strangled or crushed by the man’s hands.

  The people of Rome flocked to the man’s home,

  they drove him from the neighborhood,

  they lynched him—while the bird’s funeral was celebrated

  with pomp: a black-draped bier was carried

  on sturdy shoulders of two Ethiopians as a flute-player led

  them past masses of funeral flowers heaped up

  on the way to the pyre built on the right-hand side

  of the great Appian Road at the second milestone, on what has

  the unlikely name the Rediculus Plain spelled not

  with an “i” but an “e”—after the Roman god Rediculus,

  deity of returning travelers and of opening and closing

  doors, who shut the door on the raven’s tomb. And just as the door

  was sealed, the risen ghost of Christ came passing by and, meeting

  at the bird’s pyre his disciple Peter

  who would soon be asking to be nailed to his own cross

  upside down so as not to compete with his master,

  told Peter that He, the Son of Man,

  King of the Jews, was a dark bird of omen

  returning to Rome to be crucified a second time.

  The Animals in the Zoo Don’t Seem Worried

  “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”

  — Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

  Looking at the lion behind the plate glass,

  I wasn’t sure what I was looking at: a lion, OK,

  but he seemed to come apart, not literally

  I mean, but I couldn’t see him whole:

  Mane. Teeth. The slung belly pumping

  as he panted and began to roar. His balls

  sheathed in fur swaying a little. His tail’s tuft

  jerking in an arc like an old-time pump handle

  rusted in mid-air. Somebody or something

  I read once said that when Jesus had his vision

  of what his father, God, would do to him,

  that Jesus could only see pieces of a cross,

  pieces of a body appearing through flashes

  of sun, as if the body in his vision

  was hands looking for feet, a head for a torso,

  everything come unmagnetized from the soul:

  the lion caught me in his stare not at

  or through me but fixated on the great chain

  of being that Jesus couldn’t see and that

  a zebra might gallop in—black and white stripes

  marking longitudes of this world turning

  to meat, bloody meat—this vision of an inmate

  that Jesus’s father helped to orchestrate by

  making a cageless cage with glass instead

  of bars—though the lion didn’t seem to care,

  he was roaring for his keepers to bring

  him food, so everything’s what it should be

  if you’re a lion. Nor did the sea lion

  seem concerned about having gone a little

  crazy, barking incessantly so I could see

  the plush, hot pink insides of its throat,

  though like the lion through the glass

  there’s this distortion, my reflection

  I’m looking through that makes me float above

  the zoo: and now this silence at closing time

  pours like a waterfall in different zones

  of silences that, pouring through my head,

  surround roaring, barking, human muttering—

  is any of that what being sounds like?

  Or is it just animal gasping like what

  Jesus must have heard from the thieves

  hanging beside him, one damned, one saved?

  What was in his heart when his vision

  clarified and he saw it was a hand he

  recognized that the nail was driving through?

  The Twins

  You know those twins hanging on the corner,

  they look like me and my twin brother

  when we were younger, in our twenties,

  the paler one like me, sickly, more uptight,

  but weirdly aristocratic, more distant

  than the one like you, Tim, who, if

  you were him would put his arm around me

  with that casualness and gentleness

  I’ve always craved between us, which we

  nearly lost in our twenties but got back

  in our fifties now that death’s in my face

  when I look at it at just the right angle:

  then your smile’s so open, Tim, that we go

  back even further, to when we were

  boys listening on the stairs to our older

  brother telling us about girls, what

  you could do with them, what they’d do

  with you … not much like our board games

  when all we’d think about was rolling

  the dice and moving the metal dog or battleship

  round and round the squares, counting out loud,

  intent on winning … but these past few days

  your eyes keep confronting me in the mirror,

  your glance full of a goofball happiness!

  And the wreath of poppies around your head

  grazes my forehead too, and like the dope

  I used to shoot, the clear dose in the syringe

  lets me down into my body like I’m deep

  inside your body, the two of us together

  fed by the same blood, waking, sleeping,

  nestled next to each other, thumbs in our mouths—

  but it only lasts a little while, this feeling

  of me inside you inside that liquid warmth

  up the back of my neck and down toward

  my cock, the high moving at its own sweet will—

  Tim, I’ll only belong to you forever

  when the other brother, the pale and stern

  and faceless one who holds the needle still

  when I slide it into the vein and smiles back

  my smile, I’ll only belong to him too when he,

  in some parody of an old rocker in a crowd

  of old rockers holding up lit cigarette lighters,

  snaps shut that flickering: oh sure,

  to sleep is good, to die is even better,

  but the best is never to have been born.

  2

  Homage to Zidane

  In all the cafés

  on the seafront

  whatever could be seen

  kept exploding in riots

  of blue, red, green—

  horns everywhere hooting

  for the ball soaring

  toward the net.

  Slicks of trash

  and plastic glinting

  from the waves, the world

  was in a fever

  to see the perfect goal,

  the giant screens

  on every corner

  loud with the locust thrum

  of satellite hookups.

  Between two limestone cliffs

  I plunged into the filth,

  sucked a mouthful

  of oil

  and set out

  swimming hard

  to where I heard

  rising voices

  shouting in Arabic

  Score Score.

  A big wave swept

  me under,

  another
and another,

  until I shot out

  of the water that gleamed

  like a forehead butting mine,

  expert but without malice

  threatening to drag me down

  until I slid out on the rocks.

  I shivered, and wanted to live

  in the clear light

  of the announcers’ voices

  echoing in different languages

  weaving a net so fine

  the sun could pass through it—

  yet you could see

  in instant replay

  the ball caught and caught

  and caught, and not one stitch

  of that fabric

  going taut.

  Refugee Camp

  When one of the soldiers asked me about my fever,

  despite the fact that I was almost seeing double,

  and I couldn’t get my head clear of the zebra

  I’d seen killed by lions the day before—

  the zebra

  on its side, striped legs jerking, twitching, as their heads

  disappeared, necks shoved up to the shoulders

  into its belly—

  I said, No, the fever’s better,

  let’s go for a ride.

  So he put me on the back

  of his motorbike, an ancient Honda 160

  with blown-out baffles so it made a rackety,

  popping roar that split my head in two.

  The old Somali poet, as we took off, was still reciting

  his poem about wanting to go home:

  beard stiff

  with henna, his old pants immaculately clean

  despite the dust and living in a hut with a floor

  made of flattened out CARE cardboard

  from unpacked medical supplies.

  The United States must help us, he sang,

  and, What do you have for me, now that I have taken time

  from my busy schedule to sing for you?

  I had nothing to give him and so I smiled

  a sort of hangdog smile—which was when the soldier said:

  How is your fever? Would you like to go for a ride?

  Dust and wind and engine-throb blacked out

  any sound so we were completely cocooned

  in our own cloud, muffling grayness spreading

  ear to ear—

  my arms wrapped around the soldier’s waist,

  his sweating shirtback drying into my sweating shirtfront,

  we passed the compound where an hour ago

  I heard a woman tell the registration officer,

  nervously giggling through the translator’s English,