Teahouse of the Almighty

by Patricia Smith

  waiting faces, reading, reading. They stink so good, and he is

  amazed at their talent for tangling the recalled. But they talk

  too damned much. All those split declaratives deny his eyes.

  5.

  The politics of smooth and unpuckered, the sounds of a man

  reciting what he will never know. What separates the living of

  this from the dying of it, it is all that no-color, that hugest of

  sound, the din, fingertips swollen from touching everything

  twice, the dim wattage of time crawling beyond where it was.

  Faces, angle and ghost, rise up to him, dance their mean

  little circumstance dance, claim the simplest drifting names.

  Slamming all his eyes against them only carves the hard loss.

  6.

  Promise drips from songs, but the heart can’t see anything.

  7.

  The body, snide prankster, won’t stop. Tumbling through sheets

  leaves a bright sting. The right music ignites even the flattest ass.

  Damned toes tap. Anything on the tongue must be swallowed or

  expelled. The gut fills, piss trickles. Eyes flap open, even though.

  The elbow cranks, the cock stiffens, roots of thirst and addictions

  thicken. The sun bakes blank recollection on open skin. Inside him

  a wretched world spins, machine unerring, striving for such a silly

  perfect. The body doesn’t need moonwash or windows. It just churns.

  8.

  His pulse has the gall to beat urgently, like it does when one spies

  a familiar canvas or a lostago sweet. It’s as if one of his strangers

  has dangled life’s pointed, two-pronged instruction just inside the

  void: Remember what you have seen. See what you remember. He

  spends his days straining toward either or both of these squiggling

  concepts, building whole novels on a hint of ginger riding someone’s

  breath. In the end, almost buried by his sad collage, he clings to a

  single truth: Whenever he asks for water, it arrives. It always arrives.

  9.

  When a gone man dies, what could possibly be taken away? It must

  be the light that leaves, darkening even places it has never touched.

  10.

  Salvation blesses him with gasping eyes, pinned open and glaring,

  and hours that slide like silver over his skin. The first thing he sees

  is everything. His whole life hurtles past, paining him with its

  scarlets and excess, the pulsing soundtrack a sweet irritant. The

  first thing he sees is all of it, the interminable meetings, the mercy

  fucks, a sweaty tumbler of ice water, finally his own knees. Eternity

  is this looped, unblinking cinema of himself. Paradise is crammed

  with the cruelly blessed struck dumb by scenes too loud to live.

  THE WORLD WON’T WAIT

  On Tuesday, I watched as a 27-year-old man

  held an electric toothbrush in his hand.

  His fingers fumbled a bit at the switch,

  but he flipped it, then sat astounded

  as the dry brush shimmied and jumped in his palm.

  This run on batteries?, he asked,

  turning it upside down,

  his eyes lit with a toddler’s wonder.

  Perhaps you see nothing amazing in this.

  But let me paint a picture of this man.

  His chest is impossibly plumped, thick and rigid,

  his skin mapped with stretch marks

  where the muscle has exploded beneath.

  His shaved head, a field of grizzle and sweet spray,

  is peppered with gouges where the blade sensed

  his blood and slipped. He is a child of single syllables,

  grunts just under the radar:

  I need to eat.

  I’m real tired.

  Think it’s gon’ rain.

  I like that shirt.

  He is my

  son, crafted of fevers unleashed and jailhouse iron.

  And now, with the clear beyond cry, I see

  that his punishment was never there,

  among the scabbed tattoos, sluggish clocks, open toilets.

  His sentence began in the free, in that moment

  when he turned a cheap chugging red toothbrush

  over and over in his huge hands and said,

  Look at this, Ma. Wow, look at this.

  LISTENING AT THE DOOR

  Beneath the door, I could practically see

  the wretched slither of tobacco and English Leather.

  Hiding on the other side, I heard Mama giggle

  through clenched teeth, which meant potential

  husband sitting spitshined on our corduroy couch.

  The needle hit that first groove and I wondered

  why my mama had chosen the blues,

  wrong, Friday-angled, when it was hope

  she needed. I pressed my ear against the door,

  heard dual damp panting, the Murphy bed squeal,

  the occasional directive,

  the sexless clink of jelly jar glasses.

  What drove me to listen on those nights

  when my mother let that fragrant man in,

  banished me to the back of the apartment,

  pretended she could shine above hurting?

  I’d rest my ear against the cool wood all night

  as she flipped through the 45s—

  looking for Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder,

  somebody blind this time,

  somebody crawling on his knees toward love.

  THE END OF A MARRIAGE

  is totally silent, eerie in its zero.

  Not even the clunk of paralleled possessions

  dropping into cardboard boxes or the satisfying

  slamming of doors, one after another, can slap

  a period on chaos. It’s just one syrupy moon-eyed

  gaze, taking in his overlapped belly, the dangerous

  mole dotting her left shoulder, the blue veins

  like roads to death behind his knees. It’s that watery

  stare with no stop, the frenzied gulping of line,

  curve, voice, all the stark unbended was of them.

  Yes, we flinched against the losing, even our venom

  was distinctly hued. Everyone kept asking, begging

  detail, but all there was was the utter nothing, just

  our eyes locked on our eyes, traversing that ragged

  territory once more for the record, finally dropping

  abruptly from the edge of my body, the edge of his.

  It was a threadbare connect meant to end tragically,

  one that was broken when we blinked and he turned

  away and I turned away, our eyes fused open.

  Then we began our walk toward separate sounds.

  BOY DIES, GIRLFRIEND GETS HIS HEART

  Patterson, Calif. (AP)—A 15-year-old boy who learned that his girlfriend needed a heart transplant told his mother three weeks ago that he was going to die and that the girl should have his heart. Felipe Garza, who his brother said had seemed in perfect health, died Saturday after a blood vessel burst in his head. His family followed his wishes, and Felipe’s heart was transplanted Sunday into Donna Ashlock.

  The deep things we know.

  How systems grow restless

  and damning in us,

  stunning the machine.

  And what we feel.

  The head romances us,

  coos anxious wooings,

  makes us want to lie back

  and listen to the failures,

  the bones thinning,

  fat clogging the paths.

  Outside us, what?

  Some opening waiting to scar over.

  Some flower peeled open,

  its drum growing slow.


  And, suddenly, the least we can do is us.

  Patterson, Calif. (AP)—A 17-year-old girl, who three years ago received the heart of a boyfriend who died, needs a new heart because her body is rejecting the transplanted organ. Doctors are looking for a suitable heart for Donna Ashlock, who has been living with the heart of Felipe Garza since Jan. 4, 1986. Doctors learned last month that the Garza heart has been permanently damaged by Donna’s body’s repeated attempts to reject it.

  I want this earth out of me,

  this conjured world, this wire,

  this battery, this button.

  I would rather the suddening stoplight,

  the dawned silence.

  Beat it backwards, shoot it through

  with slivers of glass, chop it from its walls.

  Arise it beyond me, make it arc

  over my dead head like a heaven.

  Imagine the given thing being all you are.

  Imagine a machine’s steel tear.

  Know how I know this cannot be my heart.

  It loves me too much.

  Patterson, Calif. (AP)—Donna Ashlock, the 17-year-old girl whose body rejected the transplanted heart of a boyfriend, died Tuesday while waiting for a new heart.

  Heaven is a room without air,

  tinier than you would expect.

  Their harbors summarily discarded,

  souls are smashed upon souls,

  writhing, lit neon with overwhelms of holy.

  Here names, crimes, and choices

  are forgotten. There is only one door,

  and the harried souls hurtle through,

  bargain for space, pulse gleefully.

  The fickle, traitorous heart is a need

  no one misses. In heaven,

  they keep one beating

  in a cage, purely for show.

  DUMPSTERS, WASTEBASKETS, SHALLOW GRAVES

  I almost learned this in my almost life: Breathe

  like your living depends on it. Here is something

  I almost remember—Mama’s prickly translation

  of hold, belief strained. In the first hopeful instant

  she held me, slip slide in looped chenille, scarlet

  coil marring my belly, wee head sweatstuck to the

  crook of her arm, my tiny chest had rockets inside.

  One finger moved my wet, slick hair into pattern,

  traced the shadow of my slowing heart. I learned

  that swallowing once will not feed you. I learned

  the brief language of a poking finger. And because

  I cried so little and learned so well, she imagined

  a misting future. She almost gave me a name.

  TO 3, NO ONE IN THE PLACE

  Ignore the crack in rhythm, the mangled lyrics,

  my face stunned under sticky layers of cinnamon

  and rose. I drew the woman you wanted. I spritzed

  Chanel in my throat shadows and in a line inside

  my thighs to my knees. I shaved landscapes,

  shunned underwear, colored my nails bitterly red.

  And then, just ten minutes to show,

  I studied my angles of craving.

  I will hoist myself up onto the ancient Steinway,

  drag a blue feather boa along the gleam, tilt my head,

  and separate the limelight into merely a million angels.

  When I was 16, my hips moved like they had water in them.

  When I was 22, men in patent clickers and sharkskin suits

  couldn’t say my name without weeping. I sang them to sleep,

  then left. By 30, I had set fire to the names of two husbands.

  Everything I crooned was pissed and indigo. Now I’m warbling

  beneath a shifting layer of 40, bound to a sad stash of ballads

  anyone with a steady tongue and half a dream could sing.

  There’s my half a dream over there, barely recognizable

  as you, slumped in your seat at a quarter to leaving,

  not knowing or caring if I ever got around to that song

  you asked for with a wink, a single sweaty dollar.

  You wanted to hear “My Romance,” which I sang

  like any more breathing I planned to do depended on it.

  I cooed, flirted, and crawled my whole self into every note,

  and when I came up for air, I knew you hadn’t heard it.

  I was backdrop, I was time passing, I was hey somebody

  get me one more whiskey, I was did the rain start yet,

  I was bet those tits aren’t real, I was wish she was younger,

  I was at least the piano player’s decent, I was damned

  drinks are watered down, I was I can’t believe I blew

  this much cash, I was bet she was hot 20 years ago,

  I was where’s the john?, I was damn she blew that note,

  I was should I wait around?, I was fuck, it’s all the same

  in the dark, I was hope this old piece a’ ass is worth it,

  I was is she ever gonna stop singing?, I was oh yeah

  feelin’ that Chivas, I was did she ever sing that song,

  whatever the hell it was, that sappy shit I paid her to sing?

  There’s a back door to this place. I use it sometimes.

  But first I have to face the dressing room’s endless mirrors,

  where the wronged songstress sees herself repeated,

  where I scrub off four layers of sweetened skin,

  ease folded toes out of tortuous pumps, and pray away

  the broad ache in my throat. There’s a tap on the door

  and I think maybe it’s the manager with my cash

  or this week’s excuse for not having my cash. But it’s you,

  rumpled and bleary, dangerous because you’ve peeked

  my dreaming, because you are the lie I’ve decided to hear.

  You want the whole heart of the millionth angel.

  Cue the woo of surrender, the sloppy fuck with soundtrack.

  SACRIFICE

  “Twenty eight Chilean women stripped naked in the middle of a busy road in Santiago, Chile, to pay homage to poet Pablo Neruda…”

  —UPI, 1/2/2005

  “Naked you are simple as one of your hands”

  —“Morning: Love Sonnet XXVII,” Neruda

  Flustered, without license or sanction, the women

  clawed at whispered cotton and lopsided seam,

  pushed irritants to their ankles, and stood upright

  for whole seconds, just long enough for nipples

  to pimple in soft wind. Behind them, a home that

  once held his pens, his grimace acknowledging

  a tumbled phrase, earthquakes that grew pliant

  in him, and now twenty-eight quick asses framed

  in the window. Much too rushed for structure, the

  photographer did what he could to stun the slow

  chaos—heads were twisted, eyes in blink, pubic

  hair indistinct and shadowed. As sirens wailed,

  the women hurried into their clothes—blouse

  with nervy stink circles, skirts accordioned in haste.

  Their names were nothing and they were rootless

  in their wandering away. There was no sense

  to their sacrifice, until the night came and the poet’s

  slow remembering hands returned for their souls.

  MY MILLION FATHERS, STILL HERE PAST

  Hallelujah for grizzled lip, snuff chew, bended slow walk,

  and shit talkin’. Praise fatback, pork gravy, orange butter,

  Alaga syrup, grits, and egg sammiches on Wonder Bread

  slathered with Hellman’s, mashed ’tween sheets of wax

  paper. You hoard that food like money. You are three-day

  checker games, pomade slick back, deep brown drink

  sucked through holes where teeth once was. You’re that

  can’t-shake lyric, that last bar stool before the back door.<
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  All glory to the church deacons, bodies afloat in pressed

  serge, nappy knobs of gray hair greased flat, close to conk,

  cracked tenors teetering and testifying. Bless you postmen

  and whip cloth shoeshiners, foremen with burning backs,

  porters bowing deep. I hear swear-scowling and gold-tooth

  giggling over games of bid whist and craps, then Sunday’s

  Lucky Struck voices playing call-and-response with

  the Good Book’s siren song. In the midst of some hymn,

  my wilting fathers, I see you young again, you spitshined

  and polished, folded at the hips on a sluggish Greyhound,

  or colored in the colored car of a silver train chugging past

  Pine Bluff, Aliceville, Minneola, Greenwood, Muscle Shoals,

  headed north where factories pumped precise gospel

  and begged you inside their open mouths. You’re the reason

  the Saturday moon wouldn’t fall. You mail-order zoot suit

  wide wing felt hats to dip low over one eye, pimp walkin’,

  taps hammered into heels, kickin’ up hot foot to get down

  one time, slow drag blues threading bone and hip bump

  when the jukebox teases. All praise to the eagle what flew

  on Friday and the Lincoln Mark, the Riviera, the Deuce

  and a Quarter, the always too much car for what you were.

  You were lucky number, the dream book, the steaming spoon

  of black-eyes on day one of every year. Here is to your mojo,

  your magic real, roots and conjures and long-dead plants

  in cotton pouches. Deftly misled by tiny religions, you spat

  on the broom that brushed your foot, stayed left of light poles.

  Griots of sloped porch and city walk, you, my million fathers,

  still here past chalk outlines, dirty needles, and prison cots,

  still here past ass whuppings, tree hangings, and many calls

  to war, past J.B. stupor, absent children, and drive-bys.

  You survive, scarred and hobbling, choking back dawn ache,

  high pressure, dimming and lying eyes, joints that smell thunder.

  Here’s to the secret of your rotting molars, the tender bump

  on your balls, your misaligned back, wild corn on that baby

  toe, the many rebellions of your black, tired bodies. I watch

  you cluck the hard history of lust past your gums, squeeze

  rheumy eyes shut to conjure the dream outline of a woman.