THE RORY CALHOUN FILM FESTIVAL
They met at the Rory Calhoun Film Festival. She was wearing a black cowboy hat just like Rory Calhoun wore in The Rider. He sported a fedora, a replica of the one that Rory Calhoun wore in Hijack. Her first words to him were, You look like a holy barbarian. Ah yes, he said, you refer to The Beatniks, Rory Calhoun’s least-known picture, in which he was unshaven, wore a sweatshirt and played bongos in a dive where Beatniks read poetry; but actually, he was a detective on the hunt for a missing heiress. Impressed by his knowledge, she knew in that moment that she wanted to die with him in a black Studebaker that plunged over a cliff, tumbled down a hillside and exploded, just like Rory Calhoun and Veronica Lake in Diamonds to Dust. Veronica Lake, that’s who she reminded him of. The blonde hair flowing, covering one side of her face, revealing, concealing. They would never know that they had been in the same kindergarten, that they had been born on the same day in the same hospital, that they were twins, separated at birth, stolen by baby traffickers. They would never know that even before they were born they were Rory Calhoun fans, as their mother sat alone in the dark watching Rory Calhoun in Dark Angel, while they lay side by side in her womb, each of them attempting to devour the other.
DOLLAR THEATER
Sometimes I feel like Heidi coming home to her village. All along the valley there are cries, Heidi is coming home, Heidi is coming home, church bells are ringing, even the brook is ringing. The bag lady stops rustling through her bag. The man under the huge overcoat stops snoring. Sometimes I feel like Bogart. Sitting with my drink, an Egyptian cigarette dangling from my lips. I’m cursing my luck at seeing you again. It’s like that dream where you walk into the room and I wake up. Then I fall asleep and you’re putting the flowers you brought into a vase, then I wake up. Sometimes I feel like Frankenstein. I’m staring at my strange hand, my strange leg, I’m all made up of different people and I’m wondering if they ever knew each other.
HACKERS AND 70S HIT SONGS
Hackers can turn your computer into a bomb. They can be in Mumbai and you can be in Bozeman, Montana. It is your first day at your new job. You type the ampersand and boom—you’re spattered all over the office. Maybe the last thought you have is Mama Told Me Not to Come. Hackers can stare into your house through the computer screen. They can hypnotize you with the cursor, planting a posthypnotic suggestion that when you hear the song “My Sharona” you’ll bounce your chin repeatedly against your chest. Hackers can make you say It’s Just My Imagination Running Away With Me. Hackers can make your spirit abandon your body as if you were dead. Hackers can make you walk like Wayne Newton with your blank, wide eyes seeing nothing. Hackers can make you dance The Hustle like a cartoon with only your arms and legs moving. Dogs will bark at you from deep inside your computer screen. Hackers can make you think the dogs are singing Oh Daddy, Don’t Walk Away So Fast.
TAKE
Take that pampas grass we offered in honor of the Empress and take the Empress too. I prefer the tower struck by lightning. What shall we do with your father, pounding the door while we make love on the carpet? Thus the convoy of grocery carts filled with our belongings at midnight when he would no longer pay the rent. Here is a list of things I wish I had not given to the Salvation Army: my black leather jacket with zippers on the sleeves. The silver ring embossed with crescent moons. My orange, yellow, green, blue, red, and silver disco shirt. Take the ghosts with you. Or at least, tell them to quit standing around my bed like skeleton surgeons over a comatose patient. Why did you carry those orange peels from apartment to apartment? I’ll go wait for you in the park at that open field. It was there that I last saw my Australian boomerang diminish.
A MAN LEANED BACK
and fell into his own body. He fell for a long time. He had expected to see pulsing veins and red flesh, but the walls of his body were more like an elevator shaft. Objects were embedded against the walls. A display of some kind. As if the objects, pliers, broken cups, an office chair, had fallen into his body and become stuck to the walls. What was he, public art? An abandoned well? There was a favorite shirt that he lost many years ago. He would have reached for it but it would no longer fit him anyway. Falling through his own body, the man thought that he should brace himself to hit bottom. He braced himself. He managed to curl himself into a ball. But that set him spinning, fast, and the objects in the wall became a blur. He wanted to see the objects flash by, so he unrolled himself and continued to fall. Oh, and there was something shiny in the wall. Maybe it was the ring he had always thought was stolen by his brother-in-law. The silver one with the crescent moons carved into it. How he loved that ring. He began to wonder as he was falling through his own body, what else would he see embedded in the walls? He felt something pleasant, a hopeful anticipation. It was as if he had forgotten that he was falling. No—more like he enjoyed falling through his own body.
TANGLEWOOD
The moon left a note on the table. Now you can’t find it. At least, that is what Nobody says. You call him Nobody because he has no body. Maybe he stole the note. It was the tide that pulled the moon into its tangle. Or was it tango? Whatever it was, the tide was to blame. That’s why the hair on my forearm was frightened. It was the rabbit’s sky. A murderer’s knife left in the cold. A tired girlfriend defeated all hope for the immediate future. You’re bamboozled with chilled tangelos right on cue. Just another memorial; deserted battlefield of memory. Ask not how the bells flap and clap without you. No bong for Mr. Bong. No applause. Please. Keep your hands clenched in your pockets like hand grenades.
UPRAISED ARMS
There was a man who slept on his back in the sand with his arms raised to the sky. My arms are the twin towers, he thought, attempting to resist a dream. My feet are Babylon. My stomach is where snipers hide. There was a man who came to rescue the people. Oh really, said the people. Let us greet you with arms full of flowers. With arms. There was a man who lived in a tower, most disturbed by bees, by corrosive mold and dusty rust. By loving couples, strangers exchanging portraits in the dark, immune to peeling paint, curtains sailing about in the wind mimicking fog. We are embedded in the fog, said one stranger to another. It was dawn over Baghdad, but neither stranger believed in light.
THE ABANDONING
People stroll past in groups of three or fours. Some in couples. All silent, all with their arms crossed against their chests. Sunlight flashes from their silver-painted fingernails. Who would have thought that light could absorb so much of The Abandoning? Now these same people are walking back in the opposite direction. Some carry a frond of pampas grass held aloft like a green and white crowbar to pry against an edge of The Abandoning. Just when did The Abandoning happen? Were there many Abandonings, or just one? No one knows, but downtown there is a stepladder embedded in concrete, some say it is the letter A, but others say it is a memorial to The Abandoning.
THE DURATION
Nothing much happened during The Duration. But a child did say the word duration until its meaning disappeared. Cream puffs reigned supreme. Baked Alaska was big during The Duration. We thought it would be a kind of interlude but, technically, it could have been forever. Snowdrifts were also popular. Something white, like laundry, hovered over the land. In a darkened circus tent, a hobo clown tried to sweep a circle of light into a dustpan. It was The Duration. The way it eluded the broom. The way he could never quite sweep it up as it contracted, becoming smaller and smaller, as the dark grew larger.
THE WAITING
I have been waiting for you so long. I have made you a cairn of stone. The night speaks to the dish that listens to the sky. It speaks in a language only the night understands. Nothing is on the ground to block your way. No vegetation, no dirt, nothing alive, only stone. And if you were to come and walk with me we would find nothing on the flat ground except an occasional small meteorite. The fog hums to the silence in a language only the fog understands. I thought I heard your voice last night. I thought you put your mouth to my ear. Your breath was
as cold as stone. You said, The fog is on fire.
THE AFTERMATH
The Aftermath arrived uninvited, without retinue, or precedent. Gray sunlight was gradually suspended. Stars formed in cliques, giggling, carrying on. Cosmic rays continued to probe unabated, as The Aftermath remained, uninvited. Several numbers piled on the couch, but added up to nothing. Blame The Aftermath. Single-windowed souls were admitted, some bringing gifts of pomade. Tiny sandwiches were served, each of related interest. Low-grade voluptuousness eventually passed into sleep. The Aftermath sat in a corner. No one spoke to it. The nerve.
THE PANTS DANCE
A brown pair of pants walking across the room. Is this the same pair of pants a spirit held up to my mother when she asked what sex I would be? My pants cower under the bed, cowardly pants. My pants swing on the clothesline. My pants follow me into the Voodoo Lounge. Stupid pants, I thought I told you to wait in the truck. You can dance with your pants. It’s called The Pants Dance. It’s a dance for old men. You are permitted to dance sitting in your chair waving your pants around your head.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following print and online journals, in which these poems appeared, sometimes in slightly different form or with different titles:
2River: “The Aftermath,” “The Duration,” “Nightstand”;
13 Miles from Cleveland: “Postcard from Pink”;
42 Opus: “Postcard from a Nude Beach,” “Undecided”;
Big City Lit: “Little Known Fact Number Two”; “Subservient Chicken”;
Big Toe Review: “Dollar Theater,” “Hemlock 1-7563,” “Page,” “October,” “The Pencil of Transubstantiation,” “The Poker-Playing Dog Poetry Workshop”;
Cease, Cows: “The History of White Anklets,” “Helen’s Birthday,” “Vowelville”;
CEliA’s Round Trip: “The Alibi Room,” “Missing One”;
Connotation Press: “The Duration”;
Dirty Napkin: “Little Known Fact Number One,” “No One”;
In Posse Review: “The Pants Dance”;
Jelly Bucket: “Little Known Fact Number Three,” “My Angry Mob,” “November First,” “The Religious Brain,” “The Unstucks at the Gates of the Desert Folly Garden”;
Mead: “The History of the Minstrel Show,” “A Portrait of My Childhood Painted by Goya,” “The Rory Calhoun Film Festival”;
Mental Shoes: “November First,” “Upraised Arms”;
Mid-American Review: “Former Lovers” “The Expert”;
Other Voices International Project, Volume 43: “His Last Night,” “Postcard from Pink”;
Poemeleon: “The Case of the Disappearing Blondes,” “Felsenfeld,” “The Felsenfeld Movement,” “Confusion”;
Praxilla: “The iPod of Pithy,” “Sappho,” “Tristes Tropiques”;
Qarrtsiluni: “83,” “The Three”;
Rattle: “Just Like Two People”;
Re:Union: “His Last Night”;
Rhino: “The Poker-Playing Dog Poetry Workshop”;
Shadowbox: “Footsteps,” “Matchbook,” “Tanglewood”;
Spillway: “The Abandoning,” “Day at the Beach, 1958”;
Tumbir: “Just Like Two People”;
Tupelo Press Fragments from Sappho: “Sappho”;
Twelve Stories: “The Chair”;
Willows Wept Review: “The Three.”
“Postcard from Lake Manzanita” and “The Poetry Lesson” appear in Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California, ed. Christopher Buckley and Gary Young (Greenhouse Review Press/Alcatraz Editions, 2008).
“Postcard from a Civil War Reenactment” appears in Found Anew: New Writing Inspired by the South Caroliniana Library Digital Collections, ed. by Ray McManus and R. Mac Jones (University of South Carolina Press, 2014).
Some of these poems appeared in the chapbook, Chickenhead, Foothills Publishing (Kanona, NY, 2009).
“The Poetry Lesson” is for Charles Harper Webb.
“Hemlock-1-7563” is for Ernesto “Tito” Alaniz.
“83” was written with Rick Bursky.
The “Felsenfled” poems are in memory of Thomas Nash Glynn.
This book is dedicated to Katherine.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Garcia is the author of five books of poetry: The Flying Garcias (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991); Rancho Notorious (BOA Editions, 2001); The Persistence of Objects (BOA Editions, 2006); Chickenhead, a chapbook of prose poems (Foothills Publishing, 2009); and The Other Odyssey (Dream Horse Press, 2014). He is also the author of My Aunt Otilia’s Spirits, a bilingual children’s book (Children’s Book Press, 1978). Garcia’s poems appear widely in such journals as The Antioch Review, The Colorado Review, and The Georgia Review, and in several anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2005, Touching the Fire, Seriously Funny, and The Best of the Prose Poem. His awards and accolades include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, the Cohen Award from Ploughshares, the Georgetown Review Poetry Prize, and the American Poetry Journal Book Prize. From 1991 to 2002, he was a Poet-in-Residence at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, California, where he conducted poetry and art workshops for hospitalized children. Garcia teaches creative writing in the Antioch University Low-Residency MFA program. He currently lives on James Island, South Carolina, with his wife and their dogs Sully and Max.
BOA EDITIONS, LTD. AMERICAN POETS CONTINUUM SERIES
No. 1
The Fuhrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress
W. D. Snodgrass
No. 2
She
M. L. Rosenthal
No. 3
Living With Distance
Ralph J. Mills, Jr.
No. 4
Not Just Any Death
Michael Waters
No. 5
That Was Then: New and Selected Poems
Isabella Gardner
No. 6
Things That Happen Where There Aren’t Any People
William Stafford
No. 7
The Bridge of Change: Poems 1974–1980
John Logan
No. 8
Signatures
Joseph Stroud
No. 9
People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949–1983
Louis Simpson
No. 10
Yin
Carolyn Kizer
No. 11
Duhamel: Ideas of Order in Little Canada
Bill Tremblay
No. 12
Seeing It Was So
Anthony Piccione
No. 13
Hyam Plutzik: The Collected Poems
No. 14
Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980
Lucille Clifton
No. 15
Next: New Poems
Lucille Clifton
No. 16
Roxa: Voices of the Culver Family
William B. Patrick
No. 17
John Logan: The Collected Poems
No. 18
Isabella Gardner: The Collected Poems
No. 19
The Sunken Lightship
Peter Makuck
No. 20
The City in Which I Love You
Li-Young Lee
No. 21
Quilting: Poems 1987–1990
Lucille Clifton
No. 22
John Logan: The Collected Fiction
No. 23
Shenandoah and Other Verse Plays
Delmore Schwartz
No. 24
Nobody Lives on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard
Gerald Costanzo
No. 25
The Book of Names: New and Selected Poems
Barton Sutter
No. 26
Each in His Season
W. D. Snodgrass
No. 27
Wordworks: Poems Selected and New
Richard Kostelanetz
No. 28
What We Carry
Dorianne Laux
No. 29
Red Suitcase
Naomi Shihab Nye
No. 30
Song
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
No. 31
The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle
W. D. Snodgrass
No. 32
For the Kingdom
Anthony Piccione
No. 33
The Quicken Tree
Bill Knott
No. 34
These Upraised Hands
William B. Patrick
No. 35
Crazy Horse in Stillness
William Heyen
No. 36
Quick, Now, Always
Mark Irwin
No. 37
I Have Tasted the Apple
The Chair Page 5