by Jones, Nath
It wouldn't matter what I pulled out. I would have bought anything. I really would have. But like a fish caught in a net suddenly I realize I am bound irrevocably among the hangers. They are little brittle straight-across hangers with claws. My hand is bound among them with my shopping bag and there are bra straps entangling my arm and reaching toward my throat with malice. The little boy throws the thong on the floor and runs away in terror, and I am left thrashing on the floor trying to free myself and my chosen merchandise, if at all possible, from the bewildering strands of elastic.
And then of course she appears. "Looking for anything in particular today or just browsing? If you need any help just let me know. My name's Lyona." Then she's gone. The only reason she said her name was because she works on commission. There is no way that she is going to endanger herself amid the hangers on my behalf.
So I fight my way free and leave the store trying not to cry. In the car I am thinking that if the hangers were better, or if they could employ some sort of display like a tool rack or poster file that they would sell a million more bras and the damn things wouldn't be so expensive. Satisfied with my justification I take a deep breath and of course feel a hook flick against my shirt and am driving on the Interstate with an insipid bra crawling around sickly-useless inside my shirt.
FIGHTERS
It’s 4:44 a.m. and I'm up for the day thanks to the first fight of the year. I live near a rowdy campus bar and there were three guys screaming in the lot behind my house at 4:02. Two on the ground, then three. One screaming, "Let's not do this. We'll all get arrested." The other, "Bring it on, you fucking pussy-man.” And the third. "Mike, I'm not going to fight you."
And so it went on until 4:13. Back and forth. And I was afraid from my window, wondering whether someone would get hurt, and if I'd feel guilty for not calling the cops. But one of the guys was my neighbor. So I held off.
By 4:17 the voices had begun to recede somewhere away down the alley. But within three minutes they were growing again. The fighter had turned on the other friend who had been trying to prevent it all. And they were walking fast with beer cans when the cops pulled up in the alley. Guns drawn and everything. Fine. Someone else had called. So talking and talking and talking. Explanation. And I heard the tall one say, "I didn't do a thing." Pussy.
Last year there was a big old huge fight. It woke me up, and I lay in bed pissed off and tired. I finally decided to call the cops. (I've never called the cops except to ask rather obscene things. That was before caller ID. And that was usually from a friend's house anyway.) But when I went to the window to see what was going on three or four cop cars were already there. They were the ones fighting. And the guys they were fighting were black.
One of the black kids (are college kids men?) was bent over a muddy puddle screaming, "My eyes. You fucking sprayed my eyes." And another three were frozen on the porch saying, "This wouldn't happen if we weren't black." One had run away. Two careful white cops and a tall clean-cut black man, who didn’t look like a fighter, dressed in a very white sweater, were talking carefully and trying to appease one another. It didn't matter. I saw five black guys get arrested that night. Or at least they all went away in the car.
The white kids tonight weren't screaming at the cops. They didn’t mind getting into the car. And they didn't try to run. But they didn't have to, because at 4:42 I saw one of the cops, his gun very nicely stowed away, go into my neighbor's apartment. He was not going to incriminate him. Instead, he turned off the light in the kitchen, found the keys in the bedroom, and came out locking the door up tight—taking care to shut the screen door.
CIARA E.
- 29 September 2000
One eye sky and
one eye sleep. And
three months, day
by new. Your
one eye sky and
one eye sleep
and both Lake
Michigan blue.
AFTER HOURS
I wish you could wander back into the same familiar-land where quiet voices recur in chorus. But somehow like lying in bed as a child hearing the TV or Mom on the phone or Dad discussing something in the next room, those separated voices are the best lullaby. Because they mean you are not alone. Such a beautiful shiny restaurant bar. And so much darkness was reassuring. Similar but not the same as the darkness in my apartment after a cocktail party for the wind.
Memories are fickle things. And I suppose a degree of truth is necessary. But I feel that if I am going to have memories at all that they should be beautiful, and so I will tell you this one in that light.
Two years ago I sat on the floor of my silent apartment watching the streetlight and the wind turn my room into a burnt-shadow cocktail party. We chatted, the shadows and I, about the weather, the night sky, and while the walls weren't listening I told the most attractive shadow quiet whisper stories. I've never seen the moon so drunk. And the shadows and I were embarrassed for him. We were glad when he left. But it seemed, as soon as the clouds appeared, the streetlight had other plans. And I saw him later rushing madly through that canopy not caring a bit that I could see just about everything. I was so tired by the time the wind threw down an almost-finished cigarette and let the shadows on his arm wave good-bye.
I hate to clean up after a party. Too many barely-made memories.
I decided to leave the cleaning to the cat. And as she licked the crystal carefully and lightly stepped among the plates, assessing them each with a sniff, I curled what was left of the oh-so-good party feeling up under my legs and began my mind retreat. Sometimes I do that, and in a memory, I craved mangoes and sweet sticky rice.
There was a bar in Texas. Really it was a Thai restaurant, but the shiny black bar with neon lights and glass brick stretched out comfortably between the tables. I used to go with my friend late at night. So late the place was just a neon sign advertising to no one. Three rooms of luxurious red chairs stripped of their grandeur in the dark. The space filling up behind and under everything with the cool blue light around the bar.
We never got there before they closed, but we pounded like fools until we made friends with the tired cooks who didn't feel like opening the door. We would get the last of the sticky rice, some drinks, and mangoes. We ate listening to women who had loosened their embroidered silk dresses speak Thai. We watched the men in tuxedos with their feet up smoking and staring at reruns of soccer on TV. There was never any money on those nights. No one cared by that time. Just wanted a little time to chat and laugh and allow the evening to dissipate.
ANTHEM
"Oh, say can you see,
by the dawn's early light,"
rush hour traffic stopped in the
fair lanes of their everyday expedition?
Couped up behind mercury windows
with a bottle of sable polish
for the longest talon or tercel,
they mark vii ways to
achieva better life. Greener grass.
And just ahead of the neighbors
on their slow morning way
to the metro,
"What so proudly we hailed"
Le Baron Ford caravans from their
commercial Monte Carlo ease.
Billboard magazines. Flipping
through Sirius radio stations.
that jam the blazer
and Avalon's unstoppable
push toward the Yukon.
A prairie highway whispers fast
as the beetles venture home
"at the twilight's last gleaming."
When their civic accord returns
once more to the town and country.
Slow and fast.
"Whose broad stripes" define fields
of plenty? "And bright stars" blanch
the sodium night? Whose streetlights
and trash along endless fence lines?
Whose telephone-pole rivers
and oven-hot asphalt are ever
gonna end?
And can t
hey have heard Lincoln's
freeway "through the perilous fight"
while explorers, rangers,
Cherokees, and sidekicks
(Zero to sixty. Seventy-five. Eighty.)
play samurai games with cutlass sabers?
Passing and braking, passing again
with a just-in-case Beretta hidden
under the seat?
"O'er the ramparts we watched"
for El Dorado and the sterling hope
prelude to an odyssey dream of
suburban worlds. The regal citations.
A century-long mirage, and fantasy
glimpses of the neon sundance
with infinity, looking for clover-leaves,
and charging ahead like a lynx.
Every night on the double-
line contours the windstar,
skylark, and Taurus danced high,
"so gallantly streaming." Bright
white lumina entered the tollway gate.
And from that prism a grand prix
spectrum, of "the rockets’
red glare" broke. Such light
of the aurora sky rests
quick on two beating
firebird wings. Thunder
and a semi crash.
I watched the grand am probe
Montana, and saw "the bombs
bursting in air." The roadrunners
drive the mountains flat
and bridge the sea highway
with a tempo unbroken by night
or day. And the maxima traffic
moves faster and faster toward free.
Who can believe
there is anywhere not to go?
So then, is confident ignorance of
the nova's way, "proof through the
night that our flag is still there"
driving on in a breeze? Who knows?
I wonder.
"Oh say, does that star-spangled
banner yet wave"
at intersections where a
silhouette begins to eclipse the
world of protégés and corvettes
at breakneck speeds too fast
for wranglers on their broncos,
mustangs crazed by storm,
at junction streetlights of
impatient and cavalier celebrities
without their escorts, riding
intrepid down Fifth Avenue to
the sea-bringing heights of Malibu?
And at the end of the summit can they
see, "O'er the land of the free
and the home of the brave?"
LAST YEAR MY SISTER DROVE ME UP A MOUNTAIN
Near Riverside, California (or maybe it was closer to Santa Barbara) last year, my sister drove me up a mountain to look at the monks. I was afraid. Such a difference, driving up a mountain, from the flat perpendicular, “No, you go first," Indiana cornfield intersections that I’m used to. The curving, sand-gravely mountain road demanded so little space. It could have demanded more as far as I was concerned. No shoulder. Sharp curves without railings. And my sister easing along in her Sterling as though it didn't matter at all that there was no way to see who was coming.
I thought about James Dean, an Indiana boy, driving too fast on California roads. Maybe he grew up that same country way of seeing everything at once when there is nothing at all to look at.
Not used to being blinded by possibilities.
We got to the top of the mountain and drove slowly, looking at the monks, with our radio turned down so as not to disturb them with their quiet sandals in their dry garden. Hunching over joy of prayer. Supported by a rock. Looking toward the ocean. In straw hats.
My sister's teeth-baring wave to a friend. All of them believing easily in the overexposed heaven surrounding them.
I was sullen. It was intolerable. This is not the earth.
Indiana, grayed and gluttonous, is the earth. Damp snow-melt days with wet intruding on your skin. Sloppy average khaki-green living out rental contracts in sub-suburban sprawl. And all the fat American cars.
“Show me heaven there.” I felt like screaming at the hummingbird and his broad-brimmed work hat. How far away from this sanctuary can your belief survive? And for how long in a jar full of acetone and butterfly wings?
I could have cried.
When we drove down she went faster. And I was even more afraid of all the sunlight I couldn't catch.
Isn't it funny how little we can do for ourselves?
WHISTLING WOMAN
You always had to laugh so hard. I never understood it. And it was only later that I noticed how haunted you were. Fighting, I guess, with quick knives against your throat and fast ideas away from bitten nails. A little too far. A little too hard.
I've never understood why I have to use my best manners in the homes which break the most rules where the meanest adults live. But I did take my shoes off and kept my napkin in my lap. And that was okay. I was fine being respectful of adults until I understood who was doing those things to you. But I never said a word.
Don’t! You can’t! Get back here! Stop it! Get down from there! Quit! I dare you.
Was it really fun we were having? They call it acting out. Maybe it was resistance. Maybe it was hoping someone would notice the injustices of our child-lives. But everyone was, so who would notice? I just remember whipped cream-smothered laughing and staging a fall from a third-story window. Remember that? That was funny. Wasn’t it?
We were just kids, you know. Nothing better to do than to believe what we were told. What we were raised up in. What we saw of our tiny pinhole camera worlds. So I don't know how to remember those awful times. Because they weren't so awful then. They were just our lives—yours and mine—and friends forever doesn’t really have to mean anything. They were just our lives. Now they are textbooks and psychology and discussions behind closed doors and fingers pointed with blame and dark walks through hollow selves toward forgiveness. But then those whip-cracks of savagery were good enough for us to call best friends with the peanut butter sandwiches and the new tennis shoes once a year.
Now, after what you've told me, I'm glad to remember back further to this dead working woman in our mother-bones. She knew we'd be along. So she was happy enough. Laughing so hard and whistling so loud without words, without anything for him to really blame her for. Don’t tell! Please, just don’t say anything. What if he finds out? What if someone finds out? So no words. Just whistling. Just laughing. Just our lives. With so much hard hope. And our entire friendship welling up proud without tears in her whelped-whistling work.
ACOLYTES IN TENNIS SHOES
I was recently given the opportunity to read at a friend's wedding. I approached the pulpit, which was settled nicely behind an arrangement of chrysanthemums, and stood. After the ceremony several people asked, "Were you laughing or crying there?" And the bride has called this morning with the same question.
I really wasn't doing anything. It was just another beautiful moment. Very similar to other days' moments. No need to laugh or cry, necessarily. So I was trying not to trip. I was staring at the base of the microphone, and I was hoping so hard, if God were in the room, that whatever they needed would last.
But then I began to read, and it went well.
For your voice is sweet and your face is beautiful…love is strong as death, jealousy relentless as Sheol. The flash of it is a flash of fire, a flame of the Lord himself. Love no flood can quench, no torrents drown.
And I know her grandfather was there, where they were kneeling, where he had died. And other weddings and other moments were there. Weighing them safely. Tradition. Precedence. And I was glad just to stare at the microphone momentarily and pray for it all.
The two of them kneeling together, too excited and preoccupied with routine ritual to hear anything new in the old words, and the six-foot-six priest, and the altar girls wearing their dirty tennis shoes and their middle school faces, and more than enough of us under th
e beams willing to witness that Love is strong as Death. And to know it's possible to invite a God who says, periodically, "Set me like a seal on your heart."
DISSATISFACTION
a not-really poem for Dawn and the rest of us
What do I love when I see you beside me—not in any remembered nakedness, not stoking some old flame, but right now—in the football stadium on the way up these concrete stairs?
There's a long way between you and me and the rest of us. And I'm sorry for knead-loving you. Vortex nights get dungeon dark, maze crazed, and I can't believe how lifted and lurched with-you I was, how clouds shook the baby.
Neglected? Who's not? Give me precious seams of history to run my fingers down. Give me something to suck. Give me time.
He's kissing and calling and such easy support. I'm holding him back but pillows can't suffocate the need-nights. And it doesn’t matter if I want to rush through you not to plunge, touch, down under him.
Because he’s here and he's asking and he's telling me something most comfortable. How can you let me believe any of it?
I guess I could just tell him, “Maybe not,” if you weren't so far away.
That's it, isn't it? So don’t bother to swell me up temporary whole with your empty undoing and tomorrow promises.
He’s watching. He wants me. You don’t. He needs me. You don't. He'll move on without me and you won't.
So fine. If I kiss you on your, "Can't you give me," lips will you go away? Will you leave me alone tonight and tomorrow. If I lie cruel with you and don't get in the way will you promise not to call from your, "I'm late. I'm sorry," world?
And if I die here sadly in your give-me-all-the-naked-again arms will you resign to let me go? And start over, and start over, and start over?
Please?
But, yes, still, fine, yes I like the stories we told on your back with its thick broad me. And I like your chest with Nothing inside but you.
CIRCADIAN
The sun is always chasing the night. Damned by the regular day. Strange then we wonder why our identities never really feel good enough. All of us children of the sun. If you are there somewhere further than me, blazing, I have nothing to give but the sunset pushing west. And sometimes I think, "Where is it that my midday sun, my bright right-here, real-time sun, is rising?
