American Poetry
Page 19
Perhaps you would like to come in off the ledge
and share a mug of hot cocoa laced with absinthe.
Or is that the kind of little naughtiness you prefer to shun?
Have you noticed that there’s a lot of snow
clinging to my last Fabergé egg?
Take off your tie, throw away your shoes.
Have you seen my collection of portholes?
some pried from the very finest luxury liners
to have foundered on these rocky shores.
It’s not that I am given to issuing a high resolution
lightly thawed whoop or two
whenever my oversized eyelids
belly fat knuckles start twittering,
and the crease in my gabardines start gabbing
to the pleats gathered at the corner, waiting
for the light to change its spots,
but I just love yodeling
“O sweet crotchless tyrannosaurus,
why hast thou huffiness handcuffed me
to the Hunting Lodge of Unrepentant Nations
and their sprawling kin? Am I not
allowed a few extra paces
before I am commanded
to run into the woods?”
Such timely intermissions prove
how newly minted and hot I became,
while sitting on a painted horse,
surrounded by dancing dandelions.
Did I forget to mention the adventures of Smoky Muskrat,
Maison Spittle, and Cheap Varmint Night and his Band,
The Sheep Bladder Brigade? Or am I being too allegorical,
too much a one night pill flipper in a copycat’s storm?
Will I ever be regarded as truly satisfying?
Can I become one who exudes
a heroic magnetic profile?
become one whose blessed visage pulls the dust
off your brow of well-endowed verbs?
Will you remember me as something more
than an imported bandana
when I am draped in bad blood squirted from a can
made of recycled helmets retired ogres pitched in a ditch?
Hey, are you glugging to the ghosts of Salvation Coliseum?
This isn’t a resurrection factory, you simian of slime.
What are you doing? Walking your toast
down to the coroner’s barn? Quit hawking
your perforated hanky, there is always more of this
where this came from. Remember, the last time
you had your brain amputated, you were required
to sacrifice your definitions of meandering reincarnations
in favor of a satchel of bologna pizzas.
Or were you just another hungry artist
quick to lick the trumpet of integrity?
Hard to dream about the outside when it stops
raining long enough to forget you once had
a memorable name. This is where I get off
the bus, Buster. Or is it Bruiser or Boozer,
Flappy or Winsome with an Axe?
On the other side of the lake lives a two-headed dragon.
Pink smoke rises from the nostrils of the one known
as Ying, while blue tears fall from the one known as Yank.
It is rumored that they used to be a Siamese twins
but got tired of eating from the same hollywood bowl.
As a dishwasher, I became familiar with their plight,
and tried to comfort them, but with little consequence.
You encounter all sorts of shadows in this game preserve.
Some have been suspended in the trees for eons,
their souls locked inside the recyclable peanut
butter jars insulating the wizard’s hexagonal library.
That’s how I plan to get promoted to Senior Gatekeeper.
A small wagon floated downstream, guided by nymphs.
Huge fragrant bouquets descended from the rafters,
quickly covering the stage, but, by then,
the headline star had fled into the closet
the management rented out for such occasions.
Time to hoist your mortal spoils out of bed, Bunky.
I wasn’t trying to become you when the mountain
tugged itself together, collapsing outside the doghouse
where I pass my afternoons, dreaming of the day
my portrait will finally hang in the dog museum.
You pass more than afternoons, you blasphemous pustule
on the noble edifices that have been studiously erected
by a fleet of robots, sleek and newly released,
like a certain frog’s vivacious belch, from
the recently upgraded prison recreation facility
just down the road from the gas station where I saw you
licking grease off the monkey they keep
tucked behind the cash register.
I wasn’t always this gentle. In fact,
I wasn’t always an Austro-Hungarian umpire, either.
Twice I’ve been from somewhere
outside your sovereignty. Once I was even Japanese,
but that was before the war brought us home,
to the blue picket fence draped with ribbons and razors.
Quit smooching the mirror, goggle-eyes. You got a face
that could pass as a kangaroo’s pouch.
Not that I don’t muster up some small careful affection
for that doomed race of puddle hoppers,
but we all jump into oblivion, don’t we?
Maybe you ought to get into another line of work.
Maybe you ought to fold your name somewhere else,
sign on someone else’s dotted line
since you were never issued one in the first place.
I am sure I can find you an envelope big enough.
What about the barrel of forks you hid in the alley?
Say, what are you doing here anyway?
Who said you could stop by and smear lemon grass
meringue over your cloudy lapels? You think
you got something big to say? Something momentous?
Or is it what you had to memorize
in order to escape the men with lightning in their eyes?
FILM ADAPTATIONS OF FIVE OF AMERICA’S MOST BELOVED POEMS
It burns and winds. For as long as I can remember, my Sunday task has been to polish the antique wooden perambulator until it gleams like an aluminum breadbox. Do you mind being the landlady’s favorite pet? No, Little Igor, raunchy ruminator and muralist to midsized manufacturers, these are not the horoscope dials you should be consulting. Look at the fuzzy ones over there, on the pink control panel mounted beneath the custom aquarium populated with poisonous snakes, addled alligators and small but hearty fish. Have you ever seen such a diverse array of live entertainment clouding the waters before?
On misty days the sun hangs pale blue over a black diamond sea. Academic painters of every persuasion rise from their imported beach chairs and press their ointment-covered noses against the unnecessarily spotted glass, unaware that cross-eyed snakes are staring back at them. Intrepid mountaineers follow the whistle of the marmot up to the highest crags, and over playgrounds and puddles alike rises the cry of a wounded sea otter, fondling the most delectable portion of his imported fish dinner. Meanwhile, a caravan of carrion has been dragged across the sand.
It turns and whines. All motels are penetrated by two sounds—a scream and a complaint. Today, as long ago, these are the two sacred messengers of the Western Nile Plumber’s Union and their far-flung subsidiary units. Trying to overcome the image of being nothing more than a bunch of loud-talking, gum-chewing cronies, the union leaders decided to dispense with opening ceremonies and closing sermons. Later, concerned with the rank-and-file’s growing resentment of enforced civic duty, some of the leaders voted to reenact well-known gaffes at previous company picnics, while others elected to le
arn the intricacies of miniature collie and poodle grooming as an alternative to hosting the Sunday car wash. Their favorite costumes included a red satin tuxedo, a cowboy mustache, and nicotine-stained talons. Last month, the duly elected Vice-Secretary issued the following decree: No velvet cones with tassels are allowed to cross the threshold.
High above the Wabash River, its riverbanks lined with quaint cobblestone streets and newly renovated factories, complete with working fire hydrants and helmeted dwarfs scattered discretely among the hordes of wayward children, a foreign possibly alien power has managed to thrust the city’s entire work force into a state of suspended animation. The mayor fears the immense stone bridge that was to become a major tourist attraction in the tri-county area will remain unfinished. The pianist is trying to imitate the sound of an oncoming train. No one dreams that the images are stolen from a semi-retired sorcerer while he is dreaming of a miniaturized sorcerer who is assassinated and buried in a jelly jar by a quartet of indignant barbers. A hexagonal shield gleams in the ruby-colored gloom descending from the sky. Great ospreys nest in the crowns of the unfinished arches. Four goats wander across the ice. The head goat, William of Upper Broadway, keeps reminding Thutmoss of the likelihood that strange plants are migrating rapidly across the ocean floor.
A man pleads with the creature locked inside the hair dryer to reconsider the wording of their oath. The less said about the source of this rumor, the better. After taking refuge in a deserted gas station containing seven slim coffins, one for each gambling centipede, the high brow hero—he has a forehead the size of Rhode Island—decides to return from hell to find out why his latest girlfriend didn’t follow him to the very ends of the earth. Meanwhile, in a drugstore in Angela, Ohio, an attractive young woman by the name of Akron decides to buy two lottery tickets, one for each side of the coin.
BORIS KARLOFF IN THE MUMMY MEETS DR. FU MANCHU
Emerging from the woods, the audience stumbles upon an isolated scene: In the late afternoon’s arcade of artificial gloom, a dainty, dotted hand deftly smooths the lower slope of a massive forehead. Zoom to close-up: Thick oblong plane’s corrugated surface, its vertical grooves sprouting with stiff thistle or hard clumps of new hair. Moving suddenly into focus is a multi-leveled chorus of angular limbs festooned with pin-pricked skulls of uncategorizable animals. A paleontological nightmare thinks the perverse paleontologist, her imported platinum tongue stud momentarily glistening between her lover’s neatly pointed teeth. Color-coded keys shift and finally settle at bottom of lint-lined pocket. Sharks churn and chug, excited by the array of scents swiftly filtering through their olfactory detectors. Defined by the lingering traces of a mischievous grin, one that suggests satisfaction of a nonverbal order, a heavily jacketed though largely unpimpled boy points out the newly severed head of the evening moon, which, elsewhere, is floating directly above the Bank of Shanghai’s misaligned ideograms and misplaced radicals.
Soon, every member of this roped-off section of time and space will meld into the unnumbered ranks of invisible spectators condemned to wander across the inclines of a barnacle-encrusted city. Gladys tugs at her store-bought underwear. Is the name of its color forget-me-not? For a month of free parking, you must answer the following question: Whose gloved digits parted the black petals of the actress’s accordion before the votive candles slid out of view? She hears but cannot determine the origin of a voice which whispers, you are guilty of screening liquids of a private nature into the public basement.
A nameless place in the universe or a dead phase in a mechanized elephant’s recently restored memory bank, no one knows.
In the lower balcony, Jiminy Jimmy tries not to muffle the bundle of fidgeting taking up space beside him. He dreams of the day he can leave his insect self behind, a papery husk gathering human dust in the shallow valley of a velvet cushion. Outside, beneath the curtains of the evening sky, the mournful cries of a disgruntled tyrant are quickly punctuated with the boiled dust of his headless ancestors. Rows of soldered bells and newly unfolded buses are waiting to absorb the growing stream of visitors. On the screen, hordes of infected termites eat through the edges of the unfurling role-call. A large gathering of beady eyes begins investigating the remains of this tiniest of essays.
Night’s panorama of stars is no longer a coming attraction.
Hans Violin enters the tunnel and emerges as Hank Harmonica, bit player and familiar television talk show host. Meanwhile, after waking up in another section of the numbered quadrant, Gus “The Big” Viola discovers he has been reduced to a small-boned, foreign-born, dry cleaner. Time briefly accelerates its production of contaminated images. Realizing that, while he will always remain foreign to those who seek the indelible signature of his services, he has unwittingly let himself succumb to a flurry of mispronunciations. In doing so, he has become an even smaller, small-boned, servicer of others. However, now no longer either a dry or clean specimen, Gus decides he must lessen the flow of his daily sobbing. Otherwise, he is incapable of eliminating his love of operatic presentation, even though fate is about to cast him as a person without merit, a clod or a heel, a snippet of abject flotsam inhabiting a zone fit for exhaust fumes and unapologetic vandals. What he doesn’t yet know, but which the audience suspects, is that his tears, however few may fall, will slowly stop evaporating.
Bones and cars accumulate at the bottom of a mouse-colored lake.
Without knowing exactly why—he is in this regard still optimistic about the future—Gus begins wishing he was wearing a red leather poncho and sitting at a shiny black piano. Somewhere in the back of the spacious, aromatic auditorium, a young woman clutches a tattered plastic rose to the tattooed Turkish dagger above her quickly beating heart. She feels the beads of sweat tightening around Gus’s long, slender neck. He has become a swan peddling around a small lake surrounded by tanks. It is winter and the war is in its sixty-fifth year. The large, antiquated camera swivels haphazardly toward the next set of sprockets. A speck becomes a many-legged shadow hovering above a roofless manger, where a one-eyed mother comforts her two-headed infant. The audience gasps; it is the only acceptable response a civilized person can make under the circumstances.
As we are unable to escape the law of averages, there is, of course, one exception. You see, I have entered your line of sight, a tall, almost shapeless profile with long arms, hands and fingers stiffly extended, as if, of their own accord, they are searching for some malleable form to embrace and squeeze.
I am swathed in thick, wide bandages, which makes it difficult to offer a newly minted hanky to Gus, the tear-stained dry cleaner, who ignores the puddle slowly forming by his feet. I am standing in his store, or as the blue-lettered sign on the window states, his very reliable and friendly establishment. Was I drawn here because he too is foreign? an impediment to speech? Did he exude a magnetic field I could not veer away from? Was this collision planned by large unseen forces known to move in mysterious ways?
My sole purpose is to inquire how I might go about finding someone who can aid me. The goal was stated at the outset by my pharoah father, before the first effects of his second reincarnation set in: I am to find my original identity, the one from which I and my sperm bank embarked, many eons ago. Not the one Gus sees before him, wrapped in dusty bandages, but the one inhabiting the one whose face is covered with strips of cloth soaked in the Nile.
The sky darkens to the color of a bruise and the last of the renegade stars are quickly nailed into place.
It is a silly thing, to ask someone how you might go about finding out who you are. Presumably you already know. But, in my case, I am of two minds and at least two bodies. One is only visible to me. The other is the one I inhabit but cannot catch sight of.
My dilemma is familiar. I can’t recognize my reflection, as I can only nod to the shadows the director has painted on the wall behind me. These painted blobs move in tandem to my hesitations. We could begin to dance, but that would only prove a distraction to those whose attention I
have gathered like wool on a spring day.
Oh ferry man, perhaps I too was meant to guide puppets across the River Styx.
Certainly, my mission, if you can still call it that, remains largely unknown to me, the dry cleaner, and the audience. The small glances cannot be strung together. Rather, we manage to form the extendable legs of a polished aluminum tripod, on top of which someone has installed a motorized camera. All the seats are taken; and there is nowhere else to move. Time to hunker down and look forward. Darkness, it seems, is approaching, a swift car galloping majestically across the tundra. As advertised in the brochure, the temperature is starting to plummet. In the short time you have left, you must persuade the couple in front of you to remove their hats and wigs.
Two Poems
Melanie Neilson
PLAYTIME
Well, I may meet you over in
Whipperwill
time, time so long
A midnight trailer if you will
time, my time so long
Skirt the wish you
tore the mooring
fold a promise
tree bit night
whipperwill a long time
Well, I may meet you over in
Whipperville
time, time so long
A midnight thrall if you will
time, my time so long
Skirt the wish you
nix the mooring
tell a promise
whipperclatter
note socks a long time
Whisk a glint of provincial
with pentecostal grit
the noon in moon comes unfairly soon
zap plow id hollow yellow
Where I do and don’t live
a-walking in your sleep
where we meet and substitute
the time, time so long
Skirt the wish-you
nix the mooring
tell a promise
whipper jubilee
latter for two a long time
PRETEND
1.
Ol’ Sleeping Bag’s got me
I carry in my unaugust bird
blanco y negro peeping together
under the sunny marzipan sky
I dig homemade television music
and maximum security
the handy toothache past
easy trout for head found