Because His Youth
Or
The Parrot’s Spanish
Rikki Ducornet
HE HAS ALWAYS DEPENDED on his boundless, one might say uncanny, vitality to keep his head above water. Because his youth sustains him, he cannot grow old without it. His hands, once so elegant, are now reduced to paws. His entire body like some great damaged paw. Already he can see it fallen to the pavement, its contours marked with chalk. An hour does not pass without his cursing the Fate of Man. His own fate in particular. When he sups, he sups on clay.
At lunchtime he had passed his daughter in the street. She introduced him to a raven-haired beauty in vermilion sandals who treated him to instinctive apathy. The memory of that, the girl’s impeccable feet, her scent of freshly steamed rice, compounds his torment.
These days any disagreeable encounter, even with lesser creatures such as salesgirls, mortifies him. He takes care to shop in familiar places where he is respected and well known. In the precipitously receding, yet palpable past, he had purchased a Panama hat from a woman his daughter’s age and with whom he flirted so successfully she called the house—the risks of his duplicity are immense—just wondering, she had whispered, her voice pleasantly unhinged, just wondering if …
But already unlike his former self, he had put her off. His prostate, for God’s sake, gave him pause. His marvelous sperm was thicker now, unfamiliarly so—as if he had changed species. And he has! He is become a member of an endangered species.
“You are fascinating,” he had said to her, wondering as he spoke how many such as she he had possessed. But his past was littered with conquests and he had lost count. “Fascinating … ,” he breathed it, “but I am about to go on vacation with my wife.” He sighed and when the salesgirl laughed knowingly, he laughed along although the wife in question was relatively new and a hottie with a mane of magenta hair and a lapis lazuli navel stud. She was a successful therapist; he took wives who were independent: an actress, a scholar, a neurologist—the better to conceal his own mysteries.
“We’ll leave it to your return,” the girl offered with all the cheek of youth, “but when you wear the Panama, think of me.”
He liked to say that to assess a woman’s erotic capacities was a form of ecstatic divination. His clairvoyance, the ease of his seductions, establish him in his own eyes as a prince of erotic practice. And the many brief encounters, the extended affairs, demand ingenuity and diligence, a cautious crafting of the hours. (He had once loved to sail and had prided himself on his skills with charts and compass; he handled his daily agenda with equal caution.)
The women assured that he never had time on his hands—a thing he abhorred above all else. As his wives faded into insignificance, the women in their variety provided for fresh forms and a sense that his life—in fact mundane—was significant. The world carried little meaning for him, and the women functioned as semaphores. When he fucked he was alive among the living. When he fucked he was hatched of his shell like any new thing.
Weeks passed and when he did not call, the salesgirl wondered if, in fact, they had been laughing together at his easy duplicity and the promise it implied, or if she had simply been jacked around.
She called again. She was bored and she was broke; she wanted an older man to treat her to a good dinner at the very least. She imagined receiving presents. She entertained this fantasy: they would meet at Victoria’s Secret when his wife was out of town and he would look on with admiration as she modeled underwear. She did not know that he was too much a narcissist to consider spending time and money on a shopgirl. A few hours of illicit sex was all he planned to give her, although illicit sex was a thing he liked above all to give himself. Also, he was putting money aside for retirement and dental work—those inevitable indecencies. (There was a brief period when he did enjoy helping out a certain very pretty Vietnamese waitress whose exoticism and infant daughter—so full of promise—inspired unprecedented acts of selflessness.)
The salesgirl was his first and last experience with Viagra. Initially impressed, she soon became dubious, even skeptical. An hour into it she wondered what was wrong with him. Was he overcome with guilt, unable to forget his wife and so incapable of orgasm? Something of a sexual athlete herself, she grew irritated. And he, exhausted, looked at this woman who was gasping with irritation beneath him and, for the first time in a lifetime of fucking, feared for his sanity. Fucking the shopgirl was like fucking in the underworld, airless and interminable. He imagined he was an old bull about to be sacrificed to a bankrupt god; he imagined his throat was about to be cut. Hers was the last Panama he’d buy.
That night as he slept beside his wife he awakened from a nightmare, shouting.
In his recent youth, a mere decade or so ago, and at the height of his powers, he was a magnificent animal with an uncanny capacity to shimmer with sexual heat whenever he entered a crowded room. He thought of himself as a minotaur, his world mazed with cunts. But now he can feel himself cooling down. He considers fish oil and a personal trainer. Terrible thoughts come to him at his most intimate moments—when flossing his teeth or sitting on the can. These physical acts remind him of death, stampeding. His mood is abrasive, the minutes pernicious, his guts tied in knots. Advancing age is torture! Torture! It is like having one’s knuckles fractured with screws! He thinks of the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib—those unfathomable mortifications. He thinks his own predicament is somehow this terrible. Hell. He might as well be shitting fossils. Pissing thorns! Like the codgers he despises precariously nursing their old bones down the sidewalk, he too is reduced to taking powders in order to function like a normal human being. In other words, it is evident that old age is a monstrosity of nature. There is no room left on the planet for a man trundling toward seventy at twenty miles an hour! If only he had the sexual energy he’d lost just yesterday, he’d go out like a firecracker. He’d go up in flames! Fuck his wife’s solicitous blow jobs; fuck his doctor’s cautious inquiries! Fuck his wife’s twenty years’ leg up on him!
One early evening he finds himself alone, his wife detained in city traffic. It is the end of summer and the light in the living room is dim. Another summer gone, goddamn it! Even the seasons betray him. He catches himself before he can doze off. Five years more of this shit and he’ll drown in his own bloody tears.
He thinks that to have lived in the present was a gift of real beauty. He thinks that those who have the gift of the present are the ones lively women like to be near. He considers that what he had offered was both indecipherable and indescribable, something manic but not exactly scary: his own brand of super-attenuated joy. Unsustainable, clearly. Risky—God how it had cost him! But absolutely essential.
And irresistible. Not only to women, but small children, girls above all (!); sometimes little boys. When on the rare occasion he would accompany a wife to the supermarket, a little boy might offer him a gumball or a rubber worm. His current wife likes to tell how she had seen an unknown toddler dash down the canned soup aisle to hug her husband’s knees. Other people’s household pets adore him. Cats that habitually despise visitors leap onto his lap. Once when they walked into a café together in Mérida, a dejected parrot surged to life, pressing its face against the bars of its cage to cry out with such passion all conversation stilled and everyone turned to look. And although he had only just assured his wife he would not abandon her in public places in his quest for attention—a thing that had begun to seriously test her temper—he responded to the parrot’s solicitation without hesitation. His Panama balanced jauntily on a head of hair that at the time was barely threaded with gray, he walked to the cage and leaned close. The parrot’s little black tongue, its eager eye and urgency, caused his pulse to quicken. If the attention was anomalous and uncanny, it was also flattering. As his wife stood by impatiently tapping her foot, her bottom appealing to the local crowd, he engaged the parrot with impudent good humor. The parrot’s Spanish was far more extensive than his own, yet this did not appear to
faze either of them. They kept it up, his wife remarked, beyond the bounds of sense or decency.
Trestle
Andrew Mossin
And every ark awaits its raven,
Its vesper dove with an olive leaf,
Its rainbow over Ararat.
—Melvin Tolson
Libretto for the Republic of Liberia
One ought to speak of events that reach us like an
echo awakened by a call.
—Walter Benjamin
A Berlin Chronicle
1.
Is it paradise to know the end
is coming by water the ending and the water
as they come are there in dry eastern banks
likeness without form the bright innocent
tasks undone undoing the wintry onslaught.
What are acts
how do they define who we are where we
may yet go undone becomings
unsituated alternative selves whose limits
cannot yet be determined.
A decade is not so long to utter one true sentence.
Knots lying on the floor and the hands
supple to the touch as a woman’s hair
divides one part of her face from the other
Reading how he wept
how he stays weeping after the event
in a text of Avrils unfurling April-like in a rush
of bitten-off leaves … .
“He wept he weeps on my breast
a womanlike man is crying for his life and I—
what should I say?”
The dusty trees, the elongated arms that stretch
out to receive the rain that comes in bands
down the hills where one goes
as another breaks open the Gospel
“No man trespasses without water at his side”
in idioms of faith
dispensed almost as an afterthought
over blanched bones of the
unburied dead.
2.
And if you
Put your body in place
of others memorialized the positions
again of bodies in death as they lie
under earth no salient record of their having died but these:
The soldiers and their prisoners entered the Katyn Forest at sundown.
It was April they wore their summer uniforms.
Hands tied behind their backs they were led to the graves and shot once in the neck.
The rope used to tie their hands was Russian.
The bullets used to kill them were German.
Most were found with indecipherable documents in their pockets.
They had been wearing their summer uniforms.
It was April their hands were roped together.
One by one they were led into the forest on the banks of the Dnieper and forced to dig
their own graves and were shot once in the back of the head.
Three iron crosses now mark
the ground where corpses lay indistinguishable from
each other … so perfect does a thing become
it cannot live out its time on earth … .
Ideas that turn into words & back again.
“The way of killing men and beasts is the same …
truckfuls of chopped-up men
who will not be saved.”
Alter the language the bodies remain out in the open for all to see.
“When the graves were opened some were still
holding their rosaries. Their hands were tied behind
their backs, a single bullet to the back of the
head at close range. The rope looped through
their hands and around their necks to choke
them if they offered resistance.”
There is this record between us. We saw
them once in a photograph. Passed
and passing. A ritual
of reenactment that leads ineluctably
elsewhere. Away from where they lie in an embankment
still covered in snow.
What we hold in common
are those we have killed. “Black
entrance, white shrouded
figure of far-flung familiarity.”
I cannot redeem your voice
sadly can neither remember the last
time we heard you or saw
your shadow, there.
3.
There’s no end to the giving of names.
Alleged blankness. Blind allegiance. “I saw you …
terrible … light built a shrine in place of
your presence.”
What obliterates suspends belief.
Some toughness some illogic that can’t accept
degradation terror inhumanity
as the only proper subject.
Posthumous debt. Posthumanist drift.
“One cannot speak of inhumanity … protection …
by contrast the international community … ineffectual … ”
When Jan Karski said to us, “Never
let others know how smart you are”
he meant: recognize your own complicity
intellectual prowess that cannot prevail if seen
by others as they will surely recognize it
and kill all sign of “you.”
To get to the other side
we must build arable rivers, wide avenues
of grass and trees. There must be
a motive for return, as if the very spirits
were called forth again, the dead
arrayed before us: “drink black
waters, there too will humanity go.”
Or else an accord reached within oneself
that to survive means to mask oneself to undo
identity spiritual theft forging selves
foraging leftover speech spiraling
out of control as if one’s body
were witness to itself
in perpetual freefall.
Blood slickens the palms.
Moving with the rhythmic depressions
of dystopic suffering
time slides backward and forward
across the grain of encounters
too numerous to name—
you are reading me right a friend writes I was pushed
down on the ground they handcuffed me & said here’s something
for your book you fucking faggot here’s something
you can tell your folks at home
So that when he stood in the sunlight
they brought him upward until his elbows and forearms were
parallel with his chest and pushed him into the
waiting car one of them making sure to
grab his crotch as he did so.
4.
At random
what can it be that strips volition
compels us each in our own way to a
politics of silence. Why should the
tragic facts come back at all. A man
stoops over bends down hears
the voices inside when they come to take him away.
Hears nothing but the wind against his home.
“And what I carry in the bag on my back
wherever I’m exiled, to whatever prison … ”
Abandoned city, its population center held in an image
that will not settle will not sharpen
with time’s passage.
In the forest there is
nothing noble, the deer stand apart
from us, go off, blackness of their departure.
We cannot see past where they have gone
into the trees the human inhuman
shelter where the animals stare back
at us, not noble, not suffering, simply
present.
And the burden … on whose
legs when they stop running the bodies
stopped in place:
memory can’t suture the
fragments
back into place the bodies can’t be summoned
back from their hiding places: loam seventh octave
supple hinge of breastbone cartilage
fleshy cadavers arranged
for burial.
I remember my father (reading from Oppen) as a younger man than I am now
My mother was a tragic girl
Long ago, the autonomous figures are gone … .
Or the deaths are merely fantasies the holes
cut through the box and light seeping through until
you can break the spell memorabilia
of the fortunate
Its war their war the same war
is never the same war we fought here is salvage stricken from the record
they kept so little there is what remains in this son’s blackened hands.
His own shadow
was more than he could bear the war
And yet fugitive traces
emblems stitched together …
the young face of a soldier in Palestine 1941
reunited with the Polish Home Army
football played against the Iraqi team until late afternoon
in blinding desert heat … .
5.
Fatal to recall
in human time the end of
our ability to record what we did.
The surface brittle, even the script
mottled and illegible. “Looking
for you, smoke trail above me,
you, in the shape of a woman … ”
What stills existence when it shuts
down before the camera. No hunt
no privy or intimacy. Mordant
regret? Sanguine policing of the last
Fifty Contemporary Writers Page 30
