The partly finished puzzle lies there like a partly ploughed field inviting every eye and then commanding the eyes’ hovering fingers to halt their indecisive swaying in order to squeeze the chosen little knob into its chosen little notch. It won’t fit. It certainly looked like a fit. How I hate sharing. I hate that hovering hand, uncertain, in the puzzle’s airspace. I end up letting mom finish putting together a bowl of ripening pears, open shutters, reclining nude. Get the goddamned thing back in the box. I don’t care if it’s by Matisse. See how the pieces cling to one another like a clump of elderberries. None of this fruit is mine. Only the few puzzles I’m allowed to begin-middle-and-end, by myself alone, are mine.
How they once sat in that bowl so plump and pristine, so pristine and plump, their stems in the air to enjoy the ticklish strokes of the painter’s brush. How they once sat fixed, defeated by disuse, in the bowl smeared on the canvas and waiting for the photograph’s grin as if it were his penis going in. How many thousand copies of that stupid still life were made for the jigsaw to chew to pieces, all small all knobbed all broken into five hundred wiggly shaped shards.
The way you could tell it wasn’t a chicken that laid all those eggs at Easter…the way was the colors they were colored. A few were speckled, but most of them were a wishy-washy blue or a smeary rose or a wrung-out purple or a yellow that smelled of pickle juice. And chickens had more affection for their eggs than to leave them any old place even under leaves or in a nest of crab grass. So a rabbit was a good guess, and Bobby believed that if he didn’t eat those eggs—boiled as a precaution—there’d be baby rabbits grazing on every lawn until the mower got them or a dog. Easter was a funny day. You were given candy in a nest of shredded cellophane because God’s son, after he was murdered by a cloud of thrown stones, pushed away a few rocks from the cave where he was hiding and displayed his organ in an unfurling of raincoat. What rabbits had to do with this was a mystery. Jerry said that it was rabbits because they were always fucking when they weren’t eating and consequently constantly giving birth by means of those everywhere eggs, but Bobby said that such dumb stuff was for Christmas to figure out. Jerry said nevertheless rabbits were chosen to represent rebirth and picked because nobody was inclined on Easter to eat them with the eagerness that, for no discernible reason, they did ham.
I believed Bobby until I didn’t. He messed up God and Goliath. He said God was four cubits and a span. And that Goliath came out of a hole in the ground. And sailed to heaven I n a kite.
Damn jellybeans. Curse of candy. The black ones are licorice. Beware. Damn licorice. But if lucky you found a nest with a chocolate bunny, hollow to the core, solid-eared, whose empty head you could bite off at the bow-tie line so that you could see straight down into the empty depths of Easter…If lucky. Something about worshipping the ceremonial sun. Nu nu nougat
A bun baked on Good Friday will never mold over and will last up to a year in the bed box curing coughs and ah hems and other people beside themselves with
Movement meant life so the rabbit froze in its toy tracks though the train was coming like death, more certain than shooting. This lack of maneuver was successful when performed among clumps of fiddle fern but out on the open grass it made them as obvious in their presence as a garden gremlin. I stood stone still once, in a similar fright at being surprised to see the bunny within a yard of me, oh what big eyes you have and why were you instinctified, or taught by your folks, to sit solemn as a breath held for the doc in a world of might-as-well-be water?
We say: toy truck toy theater toy train, why don’t we say toy beer? This query has been written with toy words. Toy words are impossible. Here is another question. Why don’t we say toy toy? I was pretending to pretend. I have been thinking about thinking. My toy train will have toy track, a toy engine, a toy station, but my toy truck will have real wheels. Ah…toss me…toss me a toy kiss. Can this caress be done with a real mouth?
My parents were ordinary. They wanted to murder me and I them, but only some of the time. I didn’t know they were ordinary; that everybody had a pair of nags to make life miserable. I thought other people’s parents were better than mine. Rather thine than mine. Could be sung. Into a sack. Like a breatholator. I used to yell train times into a cloth bag. It sounded like a station must, its echoes muffled, woofed from far away. I remember now I dreamed of boarding a car as it was puffing out of all relation to have adventures I had read about—goodbye the magic of masturbation, no, “madness” The paper tunnel would be dark inside like the wardrobe was, but only for a brevity unless it…unless it…unless it stopped there in the grim of forest lurk. Wooh, I would breathe and rebreathe into my bag. The long low moan of a distant molestation.
I wanted to be the kid the neighbors said was so happy and sweet how could he have murdered so many while living next door just down the street in a neighborhood where such things were rare to never, and he mowed our lawns for a decent fee. Whoopee, we’ve made the papers, our little subdivision has; and, although it owns only a few trees, it enjoys regular leaf collection, trash pickup and recycle bins, the quiet of banned motorcycles.
Actually, no one wants to murder anyone. If we would only disappear from the world—ma, pa, and me—I to a wine cellar to age at a vintner’s pace; ma and pa—every relative really—sent like the mischievous to a blackboard, there to be erased. But that’s not disappearing from the world. Heavens to Betsy! That’s name-dropping.
Today is one of my more lucid days. I put it down to the pleasure of unpacking my toy chest, no, the fun of finding my toy box, which was what Louise called her cunt when she fingered it just to put me off. Louise comes back to me, as if my memory of her had been waiting in my baseball mitt for me to recover it, the mitt soft the ball hard the autograph pale to the point of lavender, certainly not the indelible ink or the smooth warm thigh I signed and then drew like directions toward her furrow, she pleased as pink that across her creamy skin a caress left its maker’s mark, an arrow heralding her muff, so lightly haired it still felt alive when I touched it, compelling me to scream, not the effect desired.
It was so. It was my firm purpose to flee this strange place. I did not throw her down, she fell, she told me so, her skirt flew up like a frightened quail, two birds brought down with one boom of buckshot blown into the center of the group by my gun, fired low as they were leaving in a shapeless cloud, a pair that makes a tasty meal served by a suited darkie in the dining car of—what did I call it?—the Silver Queen—one sleeper, one diner, one coach at the will of the transinformer my stream lie nerrrrr my my my my my my my my my my my my my m
My toy chest was made of creamy wood the color of skin, and opened over the whole length of its back, and the entire width of its lifting, but boy, would you believe? its lid had a hinge that unfolded to prop the top—stay up, damn you—the way my father rested the Studebaker’s hood upon a rod when he learned that the old car had flunked its final trip and had to be towed to town Whe w
w hen I had my rails sanded so they shone, when the juice drove the engine that ran the cars that bore my dreams, I liked my toy train better than anything that ever played solitaire with me.
A doll is not a toy and should not be flung into a toy chest like an old glove or used in fits and starts of interest as one might eat a meal. But I flung mine. A rag, it was dressed in spots of paint like a palette. I flung it so Nettie’s head hit the lid and Nettie’s neck snapped like a flag in a wind. She was wearing a pair of new jeans when I got her, everybody giggling when I stripped the gift of its wrapping and there she was—what a present for a boy!—who laughed loudest? hardest? longist? That would be Enid the Round Face, so fresh with a pale light furze on her cheeks like a peach has, yes, a peach-girl doll made of her clothes and wearing a pair of little knitted jeans. And an apron. Right. Both came off and on. Your mo
ve. Checkered like a chessboard where the armies of the white gather to glare their glare at the blacks who return those glares with outbursts of tongue as large as tha
t of a Samoan lapping dog. Stomp. I’ve seen them do. So. I said thank you very much for giving me one of your dolls, Eeeenid. Eenidd said, choking back a girlish giggle, I dinna give you a doll you dummy. But it’s funny. It suits you. To a hee hee, said she. Suddenly I was twelve, or fourteen. After I came out of the closet af
They were just little hills of wool, well, cloth of some kind, over which you could stretch jeans in time, I was told, for atonement, i.e. a way of being barefoot only not bare because no one walked on stones anymore. Af
No leather, whether or not you care. So There.
Snapped her neck.
Soft furry sweet peach. I would kiss it if I could. Munch me made eating celery and ice cubes
The train hove into view through the tunnel I made of papier-mâché for which I chewed the newsprint. My saliva. Really. You can briefcase it. I had a ticket for Toledo. A two bender. I’d take Enid with me to see Toledo.
By now I had a stack of tracks. Lots of curves for bends in the bed. Snap a neck on that giggling bitch who pretended she hadn’t given me a rag for my tenth/twelfth/fourteenth birthday. When shame overcame me. She had so many necks. As many as Medusa had snakes. And I have excuses. Af
Let us sing the dolly song. There has to be a piece that will fit this corner; somewhere in this box of one thousand small knobby jigs there are four. Let us dance the jig the jig the jigsaw. Shit. There is always a missing one. Even when you have just opened the box and there has been no opportunity for a straight edge let alone a corner to fall on the floor and be swept beneath the so
We wish to be stones, we do, we do,
and feel as a path does the steps of you.
We want to grow large like a gall on a tree
and eat every word that’s said of me.
We do, we do, we long to be free,
join with others in mayhem and song;
carve the raw turkey, raise a red glass
to the wind in the wood, my old beau, your ass.
We strive to be sharp as the saw in the mill,
and eat the heart of the game we kill.
We lust, we do, though we fear the dark,
Where we do what’s done in a van we park.
We fear for our lives, we do, we must,
but not half so much as our lives fear us.
there Father said you have lost the piece that fits the corner of the earth you have your foot upon it stupid child
I loved my mother at first
she helped me with my homework
she showed pride for me occasionally
and her best side sometimes, not her worst
she gave me Kool-Aid and bread and peanut butter after school and a kiss for a kiss in addition
for learning the spelling of the word for the day
which was
go away
Eyes Page 16
