The aeroplane turns away; the engine stops.
The shadows are suddenly seen in lengthened form.
The watching cow begins to low …
An Historical Breakfast
A man is bringing a cup of coffee to his face, tilting it to his mouth. It’s historical, he thinks. He scratches his head: another historical event. He really ought to rest, he’s making an awful lot of history this morning.
Oh my, now he’s buttering toast, another piece of history is being made.
He wonders why it should have fallen on him to be so historical. Others probably just don’t have it, he thinks, it is, after all, a talent.
He thinks one of his shoelaces needs tying. Oh well, another important historical event is about to take place. He just can’t help it. Perhaps he’s taking up too large an area of history? But he has to live, hasn’t he? Toast needs buttering and he can’t go around with one of his shoelaces needing to be tied, can he?
Certainly it’s true, when the 20th century gets written in full it will be mainly about him. That’s the way the cookie crumbles — ah, there’s a phrase that’ll be quoted for centuries to come.
Self-conscious? A little; how can one help it with all those yet-to-be-born eyes of the future watching him?
Uh oh, he feels another historical event coming … Ah, there it is, a cup of coffee approaching his face at the end of his arm. If only they could catch it on film, how much it would mean to the future.
Oops, spilled it all over his lap. One of those historical accidents that will influence the next thousand years; unpredictable, and really rather uncomfortable … But history is never easy, he thinks …
Journey for an Old Fellow
Can the old fellow get out of the kitchen? It is an arduous journey which will take him through those remarkable conversations of the dining room; and through the living room, where murder is so common that to even notice it proves one the amateur … Then the hallway and the stairs to the upstairs of dark bedrooms where boats rock at their moorings … Out through the walls grown translucent with moonlight, into a marble world of sheep grazing on the hills of the night …
The Large Thing
A large thing comes in.
Go out, Large Thing, says someone.
The Large Thing goes out, and comes in again.
Go out, Large Thing, and stay out, says someone.
The Large Thing goes out, and stays out.
Then that same someone who has been ordering the Large Thing out begins to be lonely, and says, come in, Large Thing.
But when the Large Thing is in, that same someone decides it would be better if the Large Thing would go out.
Go out, Large Thing, says this same someone.
The Large Thing goes out.
Oh, why did I say that? says the someone, who begins to be lonely again. But meanwhile the Large Thing has come back in anyway.
Good, I was just about to call you back, says the same someone to the Large Thing.
The Long Picnic
An official document blows through a forest between the trees over the heads of the picnickers.
It is the end of summer, and there is only the snow to be looked forward to. The photosynthetic world is collapsing.
Those who have been picnicking all summer in the forest see that their food has gone bad. The blackberry jam is tar, the picnic baskets are full of bones wrapped in old newspapers.
A young man turns to his sweetheart. She’s an old woman with white hair; her head bobs on her neck.
The picnickers try to catch the document as it flies over their heads. But the wind carries it away.
What is written on it is that the summer is over …
The Lonely Traveler
He’s a lonely traveler, and finds companion in the road; a chance meeting, seeing as how they were both going the same way.
… Only, the road had already arrived at its end; like a long snake, its eyes closed in the distance, asleep …
Making a Movie
They’re making a movie. But they’ve got it all wrong. The hero is supposed to be standing triumphantly on the deck of a ship, but instead is standing on scaffold about to be hanged.
The heroine is supposed to be embracing the hero on the deck of that same ship, but instead is being strapped down for an electric shock treatment.
Crowds of peasants who long for democracy, and are supposed to be celebrating the death of a tyrant, are, in fact, carrying that same tyrant on their shoulders, declaring him the savior of the people.
The director doesn’t know what’s gone wrong. The producer is very upset.
The stunt man keeps asking, now? as he flips and falls on his head.
Meanwhile a herd of elephants stampedes through central casting; and fake flood waters are really flooding the set.
The stunt man asks again, now? and again flips and falls on his head.
The director, scratching his head, says, perhaps the electric shock should be changed to insulin … ?
Are you sure? asks the producer.
No, but we might just as well try it … And, by the way, that stunt man’s not very good, is he?
An Old Man’s High Note
The ceiling closes heaven like a door. This old man is local to wall and ceiling, the drawn curtains and the fire in his hearth …
His son struggles in the dark above the house, like a rubber boot tumbled and driven in a river. The old man wonders if it is not chimney smoke that creates the tortured ghost.
The old man, who is himself dead but for memory of when he lived, sits then remembering when he was not dead in ghost summers fading like old photographs where shadow and light become less different all the time, all the time, until at last they’ll not be different …
The old man makes a high note with his voice; holds it; thinks he can hold it indefinitely. It is not a sound usual to the range of his voice or desire. It is the sound of a violin string where a bow of seeming infinite length is drawn on it through the hours of the night.
It is not like a scream that would fill the room with red bits of flesh. It is a high-pitched yellow beam, eeeeeeeee, that goes on and on, neither falling nor rising, without use or emotional intent.
And he wonders why he has never done this before … Being so near death, or so far from life; being, as it were, without the desire for either life or death; being between, without leaning one way or the other — why had he never found this high-pitched note in himself before, this one which he holds through the night?
His son struggles in the dark above the house like chimney smoke tumbled and driven in the wind … Memory, which is clogged with death and illusion, with thousands of leaves which the mind’s eye records as areas of summer … All this and more, coffee cups and spoons, doors that opened and closed, all the streets and roads that were at last one, roof slope and shadow, the soft coat of twilight over the day … And the high note continues, even as the first pale light begins to describe the earth again …
Oyster Stuffing
It was the last Thursday of November, and a large turkey had been murdered …
They say he was up in bed reading a cookbook just before sleep. They say he had just handled his pocket watch; perhaps to wind it and see the time. There was a feather caught on the winding stem.
On the table next to the bed was an open ink jar with a quill pen stuck in it. The turkey evidently had been marking a recipe in the cookbook for oyster stuffing …
His head, still wearing its sleeping cap, was on the pillow. The body had obviously been dragged through the window and across the yard through the snow …
The investigation has been postponed because of the holiday; most of the police will be having Thanksgiving dinner with their families …
The Parental Decision
A man splits into two who are an old woman and an old man.
They must be his parents. But where is the man? Perhaps he gave his life for them …
I ask the old
couple if they’ve seen their son.
The old woman says, we’ve decided not to have any children.
The Reason Why the Closet-Man Is Never Sad
This is the house of the closet-man. There are no rooms, just hallways and closets.
Things happen in rooms. He does not like things to happen.
… Closets, you take things out of closets, you put things into closets, and nothing happens …
Why do you have such a strange house?
I am the closet-man, I am either going or coming, and I am never sad.
But why do you have such a strange house?
I am never sad …
The Taxi
One night in the dark I phone for a taxi. Immediately a taxi crashes through the wall; never mind that my room is on the third floor, or that the yellow driver is really a cluster of canaries arranged in the shape of a driver, who flutters apart, streaming from the windows of the taxi in yellow fountains …
Realizing that I am in the midst of something splendid I reach for the phone and cancel the taxi: All the canaries flow back into the taxi and assemble themselves into a cluster shaped like a man. The taxi backs through the wall, and the wall repairs …
But I cannot stop what is happening, I am already reaching for the phone to call a taxi, which is already beginning to crash through the wall with its yellow driver already beginning to flutter apart …
The Tearing and Merging of Clouds …
… So it is given: we follow as through a tunnel down through the trees into the earth, where the dead swim cleansed of the world; innocent in undiscovered desire …
Chains of events hold between points, bridges that are not for the traveler, but for the seer, for whom such bridges are unnecessary …
The porridge on the table longs for the ceiling, dreaming of new plasticities …
The window watches with all its meadows and rivers, its trees leaning in the wind to see more fully …
Everything is made of time, and we go out in waves, accumulating around ourselves in halos of dust; the borders bleeding each into the other; the tearing and merging of clouds …
Through the Darkness of Sleep
In sleep: softly, softly, angel soldiers mob us with their brutal wings; stepping from the clouds they break through the attic like divers into a sunken ship.
A handful of shingles they hold, leafing through them like the pages of our lives; the book of the roof: here is the legend of the moss and the weather, and here the story of the overturned ship, sunken, barnacled by the markings of birds …
… We are to be led away, one by one, through the darkness of sleep, through the mica glitter of stars, down the stairways of our beds, into the roots of trees … slowly surrendering, tossing and turning through centuries of darkness …
The Unscreamed Scream
A woman thinks she must cook her cat today …
Suddenly tears, like theater glycerin, seep up out of her ducts and down her cheeks. She thinks of a plague that might overtake the birds, causing all the birds of the world to die … They are raked up like leaves … In a few weeks humankind forgets that there ever were birds on earth …
The sweet hot lachrymal tide once more overflows as she thinks of music being torn and scattered by the wind; musicians overtaken by sudden flood; an earthquake finally destroying the house of music …
Clouds, she thinks of clouds, dark like caves; holes where people wander, having lost their minds; there, those who do evil ride bicycles in mockery of those that stumble forward, mindless, like the blind with broken butterfly hands …
She thinks she must cook her cat today … Set it on fire! Squeeze it in the door! … This to keep herself from screaming …
VII
from The Wounded Breakfast 1985
How Things Will Be
FOR JAMES TATE
… The kitchen will always be hungry then. The cupboard won’t even find a bone.
The bedrooms will lie awake at night, blank-eyed against the whispery shuffle of hallways wandering back and forth, like blind mice looking for their eyes.
History in voluminous skirts waddled by knocking courage off the table.
The singing by the river turns out to be a radio plugged into the mouth of a corpse.
In a nearby field a butterfly is being folded up by a praying mantis into a small bright package.
… A tub of arthritic blood: Mother Hubbard kills the Sphinx.
In a dresser drawer a ruined city of hemorrhoids.
This … and the moon …
The Way Things Are
There was a man who had too many mustaches. It began with the one on his upper lip, which he called his normal one.
He would say, this is my normal mustache.
But then he would take out another mustache and put it over his real mustache, saying, this is my abnormal one.
Then he would take out another mustache and put it over the other two and say, this one’s normal.
And then another over the other three, saying, this one’s abnormal.
And after several more layers he was asked why he wanted to have so many normal and abnormal mustaches.
He said, it’s not that I want to, it’s simply the way things are …
Then he took all the mustaches off. They like a rest, he murmured.
The first mustache, which we thought was real, was not.
We mentioned to him that we thought his first mustache was real.
He said, it is, all my mustaches are real; it’s just that some of them are normal, and some of them are abnormal; it’s simply the way things are …
The Sculptor
FOR DONALD HALL
There is a time when the dead, not yet fully fallen from the bone, are fleshed with a kind of soapy clay. One waits for this certain ripening. It depends upon the soil, the time of year …
Best is the digging in the early dawn, the ground wet with dew, the air with mist. A few crows cry then, and the screech of sea gulls. They sense the unearthing. What is work to me is food to them …
Unearthed, I cut the rotten clothes from the flesh, careful of the soft tissues, the female breasts, the male genitals, that they are not detached or deformed.
If it’s a fat person I dig out handfuls of belly. I finish it by smoothing it, and finally poking a new navel with my finger.
I pinch and squeeze as mood prescribes. If driven I can turn a man into a woman, a woman into a man!
Once I changed a man into a child by removing certain bones. The result was less than life, yet, more than death; it was art …
You
Out of nothing there comes a time called childhood, which is simply a path leading through an archway called adolescence. A small town there, past the arch called youth.
Soon, down the road, where one almost misses the life lived beyond the flower, is a small shack labeled, you.
And it is here the future lives in the several postures of arm on windowsill, cheek on this; elbows on knees, face in the hands; sometimes the head thrown back, eyes staring into the ceiling … This into nothing down the long day’s arc …
The Love Affair
One day a man fell in love with himself, and was unable to think of anything else but himself.
Of course he was flattered, no one had ever shown him that much interest …
He wanted to know all about himself, his hobbies, his likings in music and sports.
He was jealous he had not known himself as a child. He wanted to know what kind of a boy he had been …
When asked if he thought it would lead to marriage, he said that that was his fondest wish, that he longed to have babies with himself …
The Matter
In it were the things a man kept, otherwise they were not in the box: a toy person with an arm missing; also a leg.
Actually, both arms were missing. And, as one leg was missing, so was the other; even the torso and the head.
But, no matter, because in it was anothe
r toy person. This one was also missing an arm and one of its legs.
Actually, it had no arms at all; same with the legs, the torso and head.
But, no matter, the box was full of armless and legless toys without torsos or heads.
But again, no matter, because even the box was missing … And then even the man …
In the end there was only an arrangement of words; and still, no matter …
Sheep
They are in the house. They move like clouds over the floors.
They are in the bedrooms. They return from the cellar. They wander in the attic like balls of dust.
A man is sitting in the kitchen, his face in his hands. He is crying, his tears wetting through his fingers.
The sheep baa and to him gather, licking his hands for salt.
A ewe then sweetly offers herself in heat.
The Tunnel Page 9
