HIS LAST NIGHT
A man could not sleep. He supposed it was because he was to be executed in the morning. Bummer, he thought. He picked at his belly button. Something he seldom did. There were grains of sand in his navel. He wondered if he should have done this more often. Soon there was a pile of sand in his cell. Then sand dunes. He wandered off into the dunes.
He drank from cactus and the occasional well. He covered his head with things he found, scraps of cloth, chunks of Styrofoam. He found pieces of metal and plastic. He met others out there. Several men and one woman, rivals, were searching for artifacts left behind from the sets of Star Wars movies.
He could tell from the tilt of the constellations that he was walking back in time. One evening he stumbled upon the Last Supper. A Passover dinner, but there were no chairs. He inquired of one of the disciples and was told this is the custom. It is meant to show their haste in preparing to leave Egypt.
James, brother of Jesus, was holding forth. He made a joke about matzo being the world’s first fast food. No one laughed. Jesus was quiet. He seemed to be in a funk. One of the disciples asked the first of the four questions: Why is this night different from all other nights?
The disciples all turned toward Jesus. Jesus said, Forget all that, let’s make this night about me, no matzo, no Egypt, no Moses; henceforth, this wine shall be my blood, and this bread shall be my flesh and you shall consume it—no sacrificial lamb with unbroken legs, for I shall be the sacrifice.
The man who could not sleep wandered off, down the back stairs and into the alley. He set off for the desert in the vague direction of where his cell had been. Soon he was joined by Judas. Neither man spoke.
MY ANGRY MOB
First you see the lights of their torches bobbing in the distance. Closer, there is Miriam, the housewife and proud of it, in her polka-dot muumuu, waving a rolling pin. Clyde the blacksmith in his leather apron, waving his favorite ball-peen hammer. Farmer Blandini with his pitchfork, red-faced, his jaw clenched. Jolene, the librarian, who in her haste, drops her glasses, cracking one lens. The school nurse cradling a shotgun; the paperboy, a rake over his shoulder. Preacher Bob, with a Bible in one hand, a hatchet in the other. My angry mob out on the front lawn. Some carry rope, some bricks, rocks, staves, and skillets. My angry mob, sometimes they yell, There he is—get him! But tonight they’re quiet, mumbling among themselves, milling about, kicking the grass, up to no good, sounding like the leaves of the magnolia tree rattling in the wind.
MY FOG
My fog sits sulking in the corner. It only spoke twice. It said, Please. Later it said, Thank you. I don’t know why or for what. I know not all fogs are so polite. What about the fog that forms on the mountain and creeps downward, full of enemy soldiers? They carry no guns or grenades, just daggers and swords. What about the killer London fog? The poisonous fog that was sleeping on the bottom of a lake until the lake turned over in its sleep? If I look at the corner where my fog sits, of course it is gone. When I look away the fog resumes its vigil. I hear a foghorn in the distance. It sounds like it is calling out, Your fog. Another foghorn answers it. My fog. Your fog. My fog. I get up and look out the window. Across the street I catch a glimpse of a house I have never seen before. Maybe it was part of a flock of houses migrating through the fog to their winter lots. Yes, that could happen. Everything is moving after all. Just like Los Angeles. One day you look up and see a mountain looming over the distance. Next day it is gone.
HELEN’S BIRTHDAY
One February fourteenth a cloud came to stay at Helen’s house. The cloud did not know it was Valentine’s Day. It did not know it was Helen’s birthday. It was a shy cloud, and was hiding from the rudeness of cannon fire, although the war had been over for some years. It was the only cloud that had rained fountain pens. Helen sat on the couch with the cloud each afternoon. She told it her secrets. She whispered to the cloud, I saw Mia Farrow in her underwear. The cloud was glad it came to her house. Sometimes the cloud would leave an antique fountain pen between the cushions. It liked to look out the window at the passing clouds. Although the cloud never spoke, Helen knew the dropped pens were signs of affection. She read to the cloud stories of trying times. Often she closed her eyes and imagined she was a nightclub dancer in Cairo, Egypt, but she was really an Allied spy known to her handlers by the code name Tiffany. Helen showed the cloud her awards and diplomas. Her awards and diplomas that lined the wall above the couch. Her awards and diplomas that drifted across the wall in the morning light.
SUSAN
When Susan was four years old, she had a cirrus cloud for a pet. She named it Serious. Serious used to call her by her middle name, Laughter. They would play. Serious could become a painted turtle. Sometimes he would pretend to be smoke from the war. One day a paper machine followed her home from school. She did not know if it was a machine made of paper, or a machine that made paper. Or was it Serious, pretending to be a paper machine? In her private life, the life she lived while she was sitting at the bottom of the attic stairs, she played the violin for the ocean. The ocean would stop its waves and listen. She could play a song about doors opening and closing. On the evening before her fifth birthday, Susan threw a red handkerchief made of silk into the sky. It rose up and did not fall back to earth. It was a present for Serious: This is for you, she said, as she flung it upwards, you can use it if you cry. The next morning, when she woke, there was something clenched in her hand. Still half-asleep, lying on her side, she watched her hand opening. It was something small and white. Holding her palm up to her eyes, she saw it was a tiny feather.
CHRISTINA
When your hands pretend to pray, even the sky is convinced and supplies appropriate lighting. Sometimes your hands take you dancing. This way, your left hand might say as it pushes aside a curtain of shattered glass. No, this way, your right hand says—Here, steal these flowers from a cemetery. Now you kneel to cup a pool in your hands. You rummage through a waterfall. Now your hands drift over a forest, screeching like a pterodactyl. Small creatures hide from the shadow of your hands. But it is all the same dance, the dance of your hands leading the way. Your hands push the sun into a cloud. You pull evening toward your belly, fold it like a napkin and put it in a box. The box is in a room. The room is in your hands. No church or steeple. A bare light bulb. No furniture except for the box. You sit on the floor. Your hands nestle into your lap and go to sleep. Tonight your hands will dream about you.
MISS C.C.
A woman thought she had too many Cs in her name. She took her name and wrote it many times on many sheets of paper. On a country road she waited for the wind. The wind came. She threw the many pieces of paper in the air. Spinning her names in a circle, the wind took them to a secret place. It was a small room behind a bathtub. The woman felt free of her name. Her name with all its Cs. She walked back along the country road. She had a trick that only she could do that caused gophers to peek out of their burrows. She could observe telephone conversations inside wires that crisscrossed the night. She saw the color blue and wondered what it was used for. In the morning she woke without her name. She decided she liked Ss so she named herself See-See. She wondered if the wind that took her old name would cast a shadow. She wondered if the shadow would resemble her.
OCTOBER
Every night I have a dream. A pickup blonde. An ice-pick. I need one of those croakers you tell dreams to. Every night I have a dream. A pickup truck. A blonde. A deadly game of pickup sticks. Every night the house I grew up in. The clean sneak. The shiv. The clip-joint. Every night the showdown in the mirrored room. An icepick in the ear looks like a brain hemorrhage. I kill somebody. Or somebody kills me. I’m not sure. Morning hits me like a blackjack. I can’t crab the dream. I’m such a daisy; my feet are rooted in the sheets. You tell your dream, you don’t have to dream it anymore. If you don’t believe in dreams you won’t die in your sleep. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, the last slice of the moon’s decapitation. Now you can put someone else’s face over yo
ur own.
NOVEMBER FIRST
So many candles. A book leans against a doorway. Drunk again. Listen Bud: there is no such color as beige. The hosts, both sitting on the couch, are making up dialogue to Korean soap operas: Feel my hat . . . It is taller than your hat . . . You have stupid hat. Meanwhile the guests line up for their gifts. Lucky Strikes. Eagles Milk spread on white bread. A fishing lure. And now the latest news: the color blue has become a special kind of money. In Los Angeles, autumn now lasts fifteen minutes. They listen in disbelief. Finger bones scratch bony chins. One recalls how she admired the little sugar skulls last year. Now she has one all her own. It even has her name on its forehead. Just in from the other side of the wallpaper: same old, same old.
FORMER LOVERS
One joins a cult and goes to India to escape you. Another becomes super-orthodox and follows a rabbi rumored to be the Messiah. It makes you wonder, what is it about you that drives women toward God? One sends you empty envelopes. Only one ever comes to see you again. She wants your advice on the nature of evil. They form covens. They make little dolls that look like you. They come to your readings and snort whenever you read a love poem. One sends you a package that contains a colorless, odorless powder. After you wake from a fitful sleep they remain in your dream and discuss it among themselves. They say you are washed up. Your poems are red sails in the sunset. They want to give you a Viking funeral while you’re still alive. The one in India lives in a cave. She has become a holy woman. She sends you a bill for a set of dentures. The one who came back to see you has become a man. She wants you to change your sex and marry her. The rabbi rumored to be the Messiah is wanted for embezzlement. He escapes to Canada hiding in the trunk of your former lover’s car. You remember her. Her father was a famous writer, who, peeved that you did not play tennis, challenged you to a duel. Her skin was smooth as vinyl.
FOOTSTEPS
Not tapping metallically, as one crossing a courtyard in hobnail boots, or a busker pacing in an alcove of The Plough and Thistle, not pathetic, one shoe flapping, its sole attached with twine. Not the scrape of one dragging a brass bed, but a measured, reassuring, firm-yet-soft pat of leather against pavement crunching the occasional leaf—the footsteps of one who hears the clatter of dishes and soft voices drifting out of rooms as balm and longing. While above, in the open spaces between the cypress trees, pelicans drift toward their island nests. The sun setting in the sea. Dark water. Gray sky, clouds illumined from below. One star. No, a planet.
THE MASKED ONE
He slept with a T-shirt over his face. Thus no one in his dreams recognized him. But if they did, they were discreet, referring to him only as The Masked One. Once, his large dog fell asleep in his arms in front of the television set. He thought nothing of it, but that night the sensation stayed in his arms and he dreamt he held a dying child. When he stayed at hotels in his dreams, he used an alias. He left items behind in these hotels, but he often forgot which alias and which hotel. When he held the dying child, he cried as he never had before. He woke feeling very happy. He slept with a T-shirt over his face. It rose and fell over his mouth, as if he were a covered statue come to life.
SAPPHO
If not, winter, violets in her lap, golden-sandaled dawn . . . Sappho is talking in her sleep again. She is dreaming of Egypt. She is dreaming of bandages. She says, Angels look like normal people. Together we step inside a bubble. It takes us under the Aegean Sea. It’s supposed to be the backyard behind the house where I grew up. Sappho and I are third-graders home from school. We are wrestling on the grass together. She is wearing a plaid cowboy shirt. Sappho sits on my chest. Outlined against the sky, she reminds me of Dale Evans. I tell her she looks like Dale Evans. This may be my first attempt at poetry. Sappho laughs and bounces on my chest. My words are small bubbles that rise into the sky.
THE POKER-PLAYING DOG POETRY WORKSHOP
I was leading the poetry workshop that was famous for being like the French Revolution happening in reverse. My wit flowed like a child riding a tricycle in the calm eye of a hurricane. But the students stared at me, as if I were a slow-motion film of a murder-suicide. The light and shadows of an entire week of Venetian blinds dragged its prison bars across my face. All weapons and cash on the table, I declared. Soon the poetry workshop looked like a mobsters’ poker game in the back room of a casino. We brought out the Havanas. Then we became poker-playing dogs. I was a collie. Most of the students were mutts; one, Jock, had one ear up and one down. But Basil, a poet in the epic mode, was a borzoi. He wore a monocle. We decided to pose for a photo in a tableau of famous poets. As a collie, and leader of the Poker-Playing Dog Poetry Workshop, I got to be Walt Whitman. Mo, a pug-faced chihuahua-bulldog mix, was Emily Dickinson.
THE POETRY LESSON
Charles and I are painting a wall in my childhood room. This is how we teach a poetry lesson at Harvard. A minor official from the Dean’s Office comes to see us. He can barely suppress a smirk as he tells us, in his fake British accent, that the Dean is not pleased. Our paint is peeling after it dries. The spackling is showing through under the paint; obviously, we did not prime it. And the wall was supposed to be Navajo Pink, not Boneyard White. In short, bad poetry lesson and our services are no longer required. Well, I remark, feigning indifference, I bet those Greeks forgot to prime their temples and statues too. So that’s just hooplabumky. And in case you don’t know what that is, Mr. Minor Functionary, that is when you feel all alone, abandoned like a country bumpkin on a basketball court, but the squeegee of indifference wipes the window of your mind clear and dry. Charles, being more experienced in academia, says nothing. We gather up our tools and climb out the window, over the fence, down the alley and into the street. It is San Francisco in the late forties. Technically, Charles hasn’t been born yet. But hell, we’re poets, and as the wind blows right though our bodies, we wish the wind well.
THE EXPERT
I am an expert at dying in slow motion. I know, the giant in the barn in the movie Seven Samurai was thought to be the first, but I was dying in slow motion long before dying in slow motion was even invented. There are three things you need for dying in slow motion. The first is, you have to be able to find things in the dark. Even in a strange room, one you have never been in before, you have to be able to kneel in the dark and recover your companion’s earring from inside her slipper, no searching, on the first try. The second is, you have to always be mistaken for someone who looks just like you. Long ago, I walked into a shop and the young lady behind the counter said, It’s you! Yes, I replied, it’s me. No, she said, it’s really you. This went on for a while. Finally I asked her out, but she refused, because I was me. As I left, I turned back and said, Yes, it is me, and I’ll never forget that night in Singapore when you gave me your answer. My God! she cried, it really is you! The third thing you need for dying in slow motion is unknown. Some say it is the ability to appear to fall slowly and to land softly.
Others say you have to long for someplace or someone that never existed. But I think if you knew what the third thing was, you would not be able to die in slow motion. You would not be able to die so slowly that those who have paid to observe you die in slow motion will be dead before your limp body touches the ground.
USEFUL PHRASES FOR BUSINESS LETTERS: EXAMPLE ONE
I am contacting you regarding the peek-a-boo umbrella. I assume that one should ignite a crust of apogee while setting out on a journey of such import. Disregard the peek-a-boo umbrella. Let us pursue fandango, lurid alibis, the juxtaposition of a winged heart and lettuce, or a winged hart leaping over the Van Allen belt. Nor do I refer to the pain of needles circling the planet. I mean megaphones of lucidity; I wish to draw your attention to what I’m talking about. Please find enclosed a photograph of a famous person’s teeth. Memorandum: For we shall gather at the river. Note: If you don’t know the famous person’s name, in conclusion you may use “Faithfully yours” or “Yours faithfully”; barring that, please return to Useful Phrases for Bus
iness Letters: Example One.
THE TYPEWRITER OF TRANSCENDENCE
In this age, no one thinks about the Typewriter of Transcendence. Perhaps because, unlike other typewriters, it is very quiet. The keys type themselves as it takes dictation softly, so as not to wake you. The Typewriter of Transcendence. It has all the letters of all the alphabets. It has all the characters of languages that have no alphabets. If you lift it up and slam it down in anger, there is no need to call a technician in Calcutta who is well versed in American baseball, nor a prisoner in Alabama, who will read to you from a script. In a rage after a series of dull dreams, dreams inspired by events of the day, a sound in the night, a television program, like reruns of Mannix for instance, you throw the Typewriter of Transcendence out the third-story window of your small apartment. You wait by the window, listening, waiting for it to explode against the pavement. But there is no sound, as if you had thrown it through a hole in the earth. Later, the Typewriter of Transcendence reappears on your desk, as if, silly boy, you had ever even considered throwing away the Typewriter of Transcendence.
The Chair Page 2
