Parting Gifts Volume 10 Number 1 Copyright © 1997 March Street Press All rights revert to the authors upon publication

Pigeon/David Chorlton/1
The Connoisseur/David Chorlton/2
Harry’s Dream/Irene Eberling Marsh/3
Curve/Eugene Marten/4
Back Country/Emile Luria/7
A Single Glass/Erik Muller/8
Resonant Frequencies/Jeffrey Michael Bockman/9
Carlos, 1997/Irene Eberling Marsh/11
Curtain-Call/Errol Miller/12
Dancing/Errol Miller/13
At Sunrise/Sheryl Nelms/13
Demanding My Money Back/Errol Miller/14
Birthing/Errol Miller/14
Ode to the Electrical Outlet/Jean Prafke/15
Walk This/Alysia K. Harpootian/15
The History of Black/Jean Prafke/16
My Father and the Detroit Tigers/Judith Beth Cohen/18
Out of the Salt Pond/J. L. Schneider/22
Abbe Suger of Saint Denis Opposes the Second Crusade: Letter to Louis VII/Robert Cooperman/25
And He’s/Alysia K. Harpootian/26
Wanted/Lisa Fitton/27
In the Spirit House/Joan Payne Kincaid/28
The Wig/Amanda Gardner/30
The Stopwatch/Amanda Gardner/30
Love-Light/Joyce Odam/31
Concerns/Joyce Odam/32
Conundrum/Joseph Semenovich/33
God in the Mission/R. Yurman/34
136/Simon Perchik/35
435/Simon Perchik/36
349/Simon Perchik/37
Kestrel/David Gross/38
Gatherers/David Gross/39
Shooting At the Couch/David Gross/40
Living on Hardscrabble/Walt McDonald/41
Loss/Tessa Dratt/42
Skin Off My Back/Miriam Gershow/45
Outside/Judith Bell/47
Tainted/Kathryn Kulpa/49
One Percent Milk/Kathryn Kulpa/51
Uma vingança/Michael Fawcett/54
I'm Hungry/Katherine Hageland/56
Talk/Wendi Kaufman/57
Why I Keep Looking/Carol Sanford/60
Clap Hands/Ben Wilensky/61
Georgia O’Keeffe, Deer’s Skull with Pedernal (1936)/Michael L. Johnson/64
Bill Reid’s The Raven and the First Men/Michael L. Johnson/64
Drive-In Movie: Real Life/Ken Meisel/65
Untitled/Stephanie Burt/66
American Gothic/Robert Ghiradella/66
Angels/Heidi Bell/67
The True Story of the Lost Boys/Rebecca Baggett/69
Abundance/Rebecca Baggett/72
Disobedience/Dorian Cirrone/73
Diagnosis/Dorian Cirrone/73
Stringing Lights/Deborah Bayer/74

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Pigeon

Only during the morning and evening rush hours are there many people in the streets. Otherwise the sidewalks are quiet and the bus stops are used by nobody but the homeless who like to sit in the shelters. One evening early in winter at the usual time many passengers were waiting for the bus, and although they had often used the same line they remained strangers who did not recognize each other’s faces. A man stood with one hand hidden inside his well-worn raincoat the way Napoleon is shown in portraits. He looked around, appearing distracted. When a bus arrived at the stop, the passengers made their way around him and got on while he remained where he was. Many looked at him sternly to indicate displeasure at his being in their way. He did not notice them. The bus departed. People continued to walk past the stop, and the man in the raincoat, without warning stepped forward to stop one of them he had selected for no particular reason, then opened his coat and extended his large hand in which he held a pigeon. Here, he said, take him. He doesn’t fly. The pedestrian accepted the bird without speaking and held it at first in both hands. It stood up and extended one wing, while the other had clearly been broken and drooped at its side. It was an unusual color for a pigeon; speckled brown, and as it settled in the pedestrian’s hands it bobbed its head and turned it to look around. The pedestrian continued on his way with the pigeon cradled in his arms. It had been a frustrating day for him, but it ended well. Everything would be different from now on.

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The Connoisseur

Despite having grown up in a city that has never been regarded as anything but barren when it comes to the arts, the connoisseur retained all his enthusiasm for fine painting. He was often close to despair as he walked among the public buildings of the city, buildings which had no soul, no design, and were no more than theories of glass and metal in the incredible sunlight.
The connoisseur would stop complete strangers on the street and lean toward them, speaking quietly: Poussin, he would say, or Giotto. The response was invariably bewilderment. Men and women alike just walked away from him as quickly as they could, shaking their heads and muttering to themselves about what a heat-crazed fool this was. He stopped a young woman who thought he was about to ask for directions, but instead he said: Don’t you think a minute spent looking at a Rembrandt would be worth a lifetime amid all this? And he waved his hand to indicate the polished surface of what he saw as the uncivilized world. The young woman slapped his cheek. It was not the first time this had happened.
Not one to give up, the connoisseur kept trying to communicate. Nobody was exempt from his approaches, businessmen, waitresses, the gardener at a hospital he often walked past.
Do you like German Expressionists?
Claude Monet.
The Blue Rider, Kandinsky, what do they mean to you?
The gardener said something in Spanish and continued his digging. It seemed hopeless. It seemed that common knowledge had it right, that beauty did not matter and expression was subversion here.
Jan Vermeer.
No reply.
Renoir.
Nothing. Once he became desperate and resorted to: Alessandro Magnasco. It was too much to hope for.
After months of ridicule and rejection, on a certain June day he was attracted to a woman who waited to cross Central Avenue. He stood beside her and without introducing himself leaned over and with his lips an inch from her left ear whispered: Giovanni Bellini.
The woman took a deep breath and broke into a smile as she turned to face him and replied: Circa fourteen thirty to fifteen sixteen. Then she stepped forward to cross the street, and as she did so the connoisseur thought to himself that she did indeed bear an uncanny resemblance to the Madonna degli Alberelli, a harmonious work from the middle period.

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Harry’s Dream

You climb the same ladder
as if nothing had happened.
Trapdoors flap in the ceiling,
walls lean within arm’s reach.

You do not look down
but you have learned nothing.

You try for the top rung.
You are falling, your hands
bouncing wall to wall,
a staccato pendulum.

You are dropping faster
than in the other dream.

The building is whipped away.
You are dangled over
the freeway, its torrent,
its quicksand.

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Curve

A man came down the grassy embankment above the freeway and stepped in front of our car. I was in the backseatI’m not sure whose idea it was, I felt too old to learn to drive. Anyway, he got himself in front of the car. We were eastbound. The buildings of the city center were behind him and somewhere behind them was the early sun. He pushed emphatically at the distance between us with the palms of his hands. The kid next to me said something.

The instructor leaned over and pressed the horn. Rush hour was his idea, the idea of yielding and merging. We all pitched forward in our seats like the crash-test dummies on TV, you could feel the tires shrieking In your feet. There was no room getting over to either side of us and the man stood there getting bigger with his arms out while we drove straight into his eyes. We didn’t hit him too hard but it sounded heavier and more solid than he looked. The girl at the wheel grunted, made the sound he might have made at the moment of impact. Then she was done hitting him. Inside you felt like you were still being thrown.

“I saw him all the way,” the kid next to me said. I’ll always connect him with the smell of burnt rubber. An Arab, the kid thought. “What is he, pinned?”

The man rose in front of us, a little farther away now. His shirt was open and he seemed not to have any buttons left. He headed north across the freeway. He continued to get hit by cars. We continued to hear all the horns and the rubber because everyone was going downtown this morning. Something low and sleek brushed him In the passing lane and kept going downtown, delivered him spinning into the low concrete barrier in the median. His pants were torn, he hugged his ribs. His arms were red and black where the road had taken his skin and replaced it with some of itself. I’m saying you could see his heart fluttering like a sparrow’s from where we were.

“Claims he brakes for something,” the kid said and named the cars that didn’t stop. Someone finally hit someone somewhere behind us.

“Okay,” the instructor said, and “Shit.” He told the student to turn on the hazard lights but he had to do it himself—she was watching the man step over the barrier onto the westbound lanes. Hardly anybody was heading that way at this hour but he managed to get himself hit by a pickup coming around the blind curve from the innerbelt, middle lane. The day hadn’t even started and already it wasn’t his. He rolled up the hood and you could hear where his skull and the windshield got together, and the sound it made the girl make, again less than a word. She never made another. He rolled off the hood when the truck stopped, got up and limped across the freeway to the shoulder on the far side.

The driver yelled from the cab. His windshield was cracked with blood. He had a lawnmower in the bed. He pulled over before very long but the man ignored him and kept on down the shoulder toward the city center, moving with the one leg that could run.

We were rolling again but not very fast. The instructor had said something. Traffic to the right was picking up again. He told the student to watch her cushion. “Pull over when you can,” he said. He signaled out the window.

The kid next to me looked above the hill the man had come from. He said something figured up there but I didn’t know the street that well.

On the other side of the freeway the man had stopped and was looking down at something on the shoulder. A small shiny metal tube. He picked it up and got going, shoving it into his pocket.

The tear in his knee bled through the one in his pants. Dark red streaked from his forehead to his chin, started up again on his bare chest. His shirt flapped and billowed behind him. Without stopping—it might have hurt less that way—he picked up something else, a wad of paper or tissue I thought he might apply to his wounds, but he stuffed it into his pocket without stopping.

The instructor still had his arm out the window. “Okay,” he said, “they’re letting you over.” But what he was saying must have gotten less interesting than the man on the shoulder who was picking things up and leaving small red drops of himself in their place. It was hard to say: matches? A pack of gum? A shiny card of some kind. A little yellow box like a disposable camera. A packet of sugar? A straw or a Tampon. The girl at the wheel stayed with it. The instructor sternly ordered her over.

“You can’t leave the scene,” he reminded her.

“Check him out,” the kid next to me said. “On time to be grooming the roads.”

It was often hard to tell. Something glinting like a hand mirror. An address book or a cassette. A bottle of nail polish? A bus transfer? A paperback book. His hands were so bunched with what he’d found he started to lose some of it. The shoulder curved with the road up ahead, under a bridge, and up ahead of the curve was another man walking the shoulder, in less of a hurry. He was holding a big black purse out in front of him so he could look right into it with one eye closed, a cigarette in his lips, one arm half gone in the purse, inspecting one object at a time and usually throwing it over his shoulder:

keys.
A scarf.
A photograph?
A rubberband? You couldn’t always say. Another kind of shiny card that he kept. He found a pair of sunglasses and put them on. He already wore headphones.

We were all coming to the curve.

The instructor sounded like he was making it up. “This is a Class C felony. Failure to pull right over constitutes automatic failure.” Traffic behind us was slow and knotted. We sped up.

“I’ll flag a cop,” the instructor said but not from his heart.

“A waste of saliva,” the kid said next to me. What his father would say. He wasn’t really that much younger than me. The two men on the shoulder seemed to slow and stand as we drove faster, left them behind, lost them around the bend.

“Aw, you!” the kid complained. “Why’d you do that? I wanted to see whose day it was.” We kept speeding up. Behind the wheel the girl’s shoulders were moving. She and the curve brought the sun, brought the whole day out from behind the buildings before its time, blinding us with it.

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Back Country

Back country in the Everglades,
Water, a polished mirror
Transforms thunderhead clouds
Into huge cauliflower stalks,
Russet at sunset,
Black from sprinkled burnt butter,
Scanning for sun sparkling on bonefish tails.

I paddle slowly so water
Wont slap the gunwales.
Hundreds of cormorants form a line
Before Horseneck key.
They fly at us
Inches above the water,
A long thick quill pen
Drawing a black India ink line
Parting so slightly around the boat.
For a moment in this universe
There is only my Dad and me
And the thunderous flapping of wings.

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A Single Glass

For encouragement
he drinks a single
glass of wine

thinking of heart patients
like himself all
across town raising

a glass, a toast
To Tomorrow!
He drinks to that.

Once blood pronounced
You will be weary
the rest of your life.

He lay down then
pinned by the stone
of that sentence.

Now wine mixes
with blood, confusing
the issue. Should

he die tonight
in bed or on the way
to the bathroom

this wine
tastes good, red
for the heart

for courage and ease
as the glass cups
the wine and he

empties it.

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Carlos, 1997

You spend the afternoon
walking in and out
the same doors
always unfamiliar.

You carry ice cream
for your long-dead wife
a fleck of memory
a party in 1937.

Evening sleet, the sky fails
visitors hunch into cars.
You dip your fingers
sprinkle the lobby.

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Ode to the Electrical Outlet

On the snowy television screen,
we watch the current of a sky
that does not understand us.
Energy has no choice but to become
something other than itself.

It’s not for love
that these mothers
flow with electricity. After all,
we’ve been taught never to talk
to strangers, to believe that machines
begin and end as machines.
Their startled faces we ignore
because they are in the image
of ourselves. We like to believe
that we were never born.

Pale sockets that have
an apparent logic
to their rectangular faces,
they demand a life without sleep
and the ability to get jobs done right
the first time. At the very least,
they believe in an eternity
of crisp refrigerator light.
They were born lucky.

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Resonant Frequencies

If the world were an aquarium an observer could see the radiating circles of words in water, mingling or slipping through each other. With the visibility of words might have come a greater attendance to their value. As it is, they litter this terrarium like candy wrappers.

Physics, however, may occasionally do what humanity does not, investing power, true physicality, in the pratter.

At the corner of Lafayette and Great Jones there occurs a fluke of nature. The gas pump talk and the cafe talk vibrate into each other, recombine, and travel on together as a now seemingly encrypted message of octane, humidity, condoms and republicans. At East Broadway and Pike, as the conversational soundwaves pass over the smelly Asian durians, the bass rumblings of the Williamsburgh Bridge synchronize into a single wavelength, onto which the jumbled signal of the two men and three women grafts itself like a surfer in perfect Zen harmony with the curl.

The strength of this chimaeric wave increases only incrementally, but pitch and sine, amplitude and cosine, are freakily correct: the resonant frequency of the bridge. The trestles begin to shake, the dust of a million pigeon droppings sifting down to the street like flour.

Pedestrians scream and scatter from beneath its decaying hulk. The bridge looks like some nightmare spawned at the dawn of the industrial revolution, exposed metal skeleton and viscera.

Like bats the news people swarm to the bridge, having caught the high pitched frequency of fear inaudible to most humans. Every sensational explanation is flaunted before the insatiable public by all the possible experts: seismologists with their seismographs; secret agents with their earplugs and dossiers; meteorologists with their wind tunnel tables; astronomers with their plots of solar flares and comet paths; engineers with their differential equations.

Meanwhile traffic has been redirected to alternate routes, and lies like a dazed snake across intersections, overpasses, other bridges and inconvenient underground passageways. Cars are abandoned as terrified commuters navigate the undulations of the bridge’s surface.

At the gas station, the reactionary talk radio host is interrupted by a bulletin typed up by an intern with a tattoo, that alerts the white-shirted attendants chatting by the pump. The blaring television of the old woman in the apartment above the cafe alerts the three women sipping their caffeinated seconds.

For a moment there is a unity of intent, a telling silence of concern. The freak node at Lafayette and Great Jones contrasts and then collapses. Several of the odiferous, spiked Asiatic fruits rupture from the sudden pressure change following the cessation of talk at the gas station and cafe. The resonant frequency loses its momentum, the trestles cease their sonic pulverizations, the road’s sensual undulations slowly die down. The cloud of powdered pigeon droppings dissipates in the river’s breeze.

The news people and experts collect their equipment and drive off in their air-conditioned minivans. A single out-of-town commentator wipes her brow and marvels at the wondrous intersection of man and nature.

The two attendants go round the corner for a beer. One of the three women answers a business call on her cellular phone while the other two whisper about the two new hunks at the corner table.

Somewhere up in the ozone layer the trading prices from her conversation bounce off a satellite, adding its tiny signal to the millions of other transmissions, the satellite spinning delicately in the sun’s cosmic rays as its small nuclear powered guidance system shifts one-point-five millimeters.

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Curtain-Call

That ol’
one-more-time
syndrome, undressing
down for literature,
it don’t pay me a dime,
desperate idiots with given
gifts who shower the known
world with sheaves of paper
slid under heavy human doors,
makeup artists who
hide the truth
and ladies with big sweaters
bulging sailors, you go ’round
the world to gather material
and bring it upstairs
and feed it to the dog
and listen to the radio
for a while before
fixin’ supper.

Then
you want
to sleep before
you finish
the job.

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Dancing

Traffic
was really backed up
that night, wicks were trimmed
and brass lamps polished,
and dreams, hardened
by years of neglect, were brought
out of hiding to be examined.
You know the smell behind
doors that have been
closed for a long time, like
mothballs or hospitals or places
where old folks have
passed away. I
Rocked & Rolled and was comforted
on Thursday night and again
on Saturday morning, and I
fell asleep for several years
in a halfway house beside
Blue Bayou. My wife
came and found me there, rather
edgy, a ward of the state.
And later, blinded by red wine,
I agreed to lots of things
and gave away my
favorite books and toys.
The other woman scrambled
eggs and left with another
man who was into sports.

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At Sunrise

our hammocks sway
empty

in the warming wind

wait
for your day off

that never comes

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Demanding My
Money Back

Sometimes
you marry a lady
for no not love.
Poor dead thing, she’s living
with another fellow, now, who has
a weird disease in his head.
Exactly what is a value?
I gave her food and water
for 10 years and she
never liked me.
One night I found her fooling
with the preacher, her heels frozen
onto the ceiling, reading his own
private leather bible, and then
there was the Postmaster later
who had a pretty uniform.
She was in the master
bathroom, rubbing him like magic.
“What’s for supper?” I asked,
and she didn’t say a thing.

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Birthing

I want to birth
a new framewok
for my poetry,
I want to clear out
the ledger and start
sucking my thumb
and get that
fine essential
glimmer of hope.
It ain't hard to write
if you're in California,
but I've gotten
too personal
here on the Delta,
like there are stories
all around me, even
this very day things
are happening everywhere
and I am just shoveling
dirt one day at
a time.

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Cleaners

They are used like laws
when all else fails.
Left unattended,
they burn through designer clothes
the way burglars escape banks
empty-handed: they know
the price for nothing is the same
as the price for something. Because of this,
never ask them for love or a loan;
their dumb bills will face you
like the fronts of suburban homes.

Check your locks at night.
The blind brutes wait, piled in
their spare rooms and pickup trucks.
Fingerprints disintegrate from
the thoughtless present of machines.
Even suicide adds up to a few
small instruments asking for obedience.

At the dump,
countertops and toilet bowls know
only the lottery recreates stars.
But in the dark suburban homes,
night acids eat in silence, pool
in drip pans under aging motors, bubble
inside hair-clogged drains that smell
of pond scum. They maintain
a fresh kind of emptiness
the way logic never ends.

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The History of Black

The tourists are bored with light.
They rub footprints across golden
stars set into sparkling California
sidewalks, no longer feel
loyalty to the well-known.
If they were burglars,
they would make money
stealing televisions from
their own homes.

When the sun
wanted a profit percentage,
the travel agents burst with laughter.
Like agnostics with frostbitten limbs,
sworn celibates and vegetarians, they
are aware that nothing is enough.

A west coast cable company now exports
sunlight to darkening Minnesota.
There prime time thins over
crumpled cornfields and a forty watt
tungsten town with its personal silver planet
and monument to a crashed Russian satellite.

Door to door by flashlight,
hysterical mothers
demand signatures to move
legislation that would deny
the earth its shadow.
Black travels.

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Walk This

After we hung up last night
An hour or so of this and that more
That I guess because
I can’t even write straight.
I mean letters always slant
But it’s the degree.

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My Father
and the Detroit Tigers

When I was growing up in Detroit, my father was a good househusband. Not your typical fifties man, he did more than mow the lawn, he also grocery shopped, filling our basement storeroom with can after can of Heinz vegetarian baked beans whose green labels certified them as “kosher.”

“What will we do with all those beans?” my mother protested. For me the well-stocked larder was comforting. It would be a bomb shelter when the air raids came, a place to hide during a tornado, and I knew we would never starve.

On Sundays, the Detroit Tigers would be with us. My father carried the game wherever he moved on his little four by four transistor radio. The announcer’s name was Harry, just like his. The radio voice went from high to low, the batteries jostling as Daddy moved from room to room.

“Two men on base and it’s low and wide, ball three.” It was a reassuring background drone I needn’t follow.

“A high fly to left field.” The roar of the crowd would catch my attention and I’d look up from my library book or paper dolls. After Shabbas services on Saturdays, this Sunday ritual also seemed religious, as if the radio play-by-play were a litturgical chant. Every so often I’d ask: “What’s the score?,” must have been my code meaningmy interest focused on the results, not the slow extended dance, too dull to follow. The background murmur droned on and on, the sound attached to my father as he and the radio went from room to room straightening and puttering. My question: “What’s the score now?” must have been my code meaning: “Daddy, I know you’re here and I love you.”

In front of Detroit’s City County Building, across Jefferson Avenue from the Ford auditorium, sits a statue called “The Spirit of Detroit.” A huge man balances a family in one hand and the sun in the other. Underneath him the inscription from Corinthians reads: “God, through the Spirit of man is manifested in the family, the noblest human relationship.” We’d pass the giant when my father took me to his downtown law office. Then we’d walk through Grand Circus park to the Guardian Building, where the uniformed man at the front desk greeted him. The elevator operator rode us up to the fifteenth floor where the frosted glass office window read: “Harry S. Ellis, attorney and counselor.”

Seeing his name gave me a thrilling shiver. Could this be my father, the same man who stood in the kitchen on weekends, a wet cloth in his hand, scrubbing the counters, the refrigerator, the sinks, because Mother didn’t clean well enough to satisfy him? Here a secretary typed his words off a dictaphone machine surrounded by ledger books, legal forms and his own stationery. No longer just the man who shopped and davened daily, swaying in the corner, he became a stranger “Mr. Ellis, Attorney & Counselor,” someone important, someone the world had to reckon with.

After an office visit, he’d take me for dinner to Joe Muer’s restaurant on Gratiot where I’d drink Shirely Temples. Fish caught in the Atlantic ocean that morning was packed in ice, put on a plane, and flown in, “so we could eat it the very same day; that’s how fresh it was,” Daddy said. So many varieties: red snapper and scrod, perch and haddock, flounder and swordfish, it was difficult to choose. Was swordfish kosher or was it a shellfish and therefore taboo? The rabbis debated, but Daddy played it safe. Rabbis could make mistakes.

When he took me to a baseball game, I felt I’d been taken into a secret male bastion, as if there’d been a sign above the stadium reading: “No Girls Allowed,” just like the boys’ clubhouse in the Little LuLu comic books, but Lulu always outsmarted the silly boys. Sitting on the bleachers next to my Dad and Uncle, I tried to follow the game, to keep track of hits and strikes and balls on my scorecard, but writing was too hard when there was so much to look at. The grass was oh so green, so much greener than our lawn at home. Around me a great show unfolded: numbers flashing, the scoreboard blinking, vendors selling unkosher hot dogs Daddy couldn’t eat. But he let me have one and treated himself to a Stroh’s beer. We could buy ice cream bars and Hires root beer, and boxes of popcorn and carmel corn.

The people around us called each other names and shouted at players on the field, swearing at Al Kaline as if they knew him. I looked to my father. Were we safe here? He reassured me.

“Don’t be frightened, it’s part of the game. They don’t mean what they say. It’s all in fun.” I wanted to trust him.

Going to Briggs Stadium meant venturing back to the neighborhood where he was born: Hastings street bordered by E. Grand Boulevard, Vernor near Mack, Brush and St. Antoine. The dilapidated houses once held immigrant Jewish families. My father remembered those vanished sights and smells: Zeman’s Bakery, the Michigan Dairy Cafe, Littman’s People’s Theatre, the Workman’s Circle. In 1923 when he was just fourteen, a Jew named David Brown ran for Mayor of Detroit, and though he didn’t win, the race was important. That was before Father Coughlin broadcast his anti-semitic propaganda from Dearborn’s Shrine of the Little Flower. In the thirties, the climate had changed for Jews, and Detroit was no exception. In the fifties we were still getting over the aftermath.

That summer at Fiddleman’s kosher resort in South Haven, I watched my father play softball with the other men. Though I wanted to feel proud when he stepped up to bat, I found myself praying he would strike out or walk. The sight of him running the bases, stocky and unathletic, on pills for high blood pressure, frightened me. I knew that men his age could drop dead suddenly, felled by a heart attack. I held my breath, wishing I could run in his place.

Nearly forty years later, when he was ailing, confined to a walker, no longer able to get to his office downtown, I gave him a new radio. This model had earphones so he could listen to ballgames and keep his hands free, but he never got used to that Walkman. A private voice in his ears wasn’t real enough. He preferred the old transistor. He’d hold that beat-up radio in his hand or place it on his lap, then lean back in his reclining chair. Eyes closed, he’d rest, soothed by the crack of the bat, as the announcer’s voice and the cheering crowd filled the corners of his room, like his daily prayers.

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What to Call Him

My father has a hard time with this.
Mainly because he never calls people by their name.
He renames.
Even when he’s known you for 10 years.
Like he still calls Rose
Rita and
when he talks to her he’ll be sure
To use her name 5 times in one sentence.
Like
“You know Rita, I really think Rita,
That you should expand the restaurant, Rita.”
Meanwhile his secretary is sitting there saying,
“Rose.” after every Rita.
He’s waving his hand at her.
So don’t feel bad when he calls you the yokel
Or the fly-by-night.
It’s natural.

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Out of the Salt Pond

After two pulls on the cord, he starts to sweat. He sits down, breathing hard, looking at the bottom on the boat. After a minute, keeping his weight low in the center of the boat, he checks the tank. “We’re out of gas,” he says.

They switch places in the tiny skiff, their bowed spines moving past each other like two stone arches. By the time he’s in the front of the boat, and his wife is in the middle, they’re quickly drifting out of the salt pond.

“That’s never happened before,” is the only thing she says.

“It’s not my fault,” he snaps. “You know I’m forgetftul.”

A dead swan floats by, plump and snowy white. “It must have ate something,” he says, looking over the edge of the Cheeseborough. “You never see them so full, so fresh, when they’re dead. Usually you see them mangled or partly eaten. Are you going to start rowing or not?”

Facing the dead motor, her back to him at the prow, she slips the oarlocks into place. She starts to sheave against the tide, which is pulling them out of the pond. She stops, opens the top buttons of her blouse, and starts again.

He closes his sweater at the neck. Since the surgery, he’s been cold all the time. His heart has yet to slow down from the exertion of pulling on the cord and switching places in the boat. Because of his condition, they can go out on the Cheeseborough only a couple months a year, only on the hottest days.

She seems to like the rowing, he notices, as if she’s proud of her strength, as if she’s showing off. His wife’s back, bent from osteoporosis, seems naturally curved to her task.

They make a phantom progress toward the small marina where the other skiffs, similar to the Cheeseborough and belonging to other retirees from Community Shores, sit idle. It’s too hot for most of them today. She pushes in earnest against the tide, trying to get back into the pond.

She liked fishing once. Now she only likes to eat the tomato sandwiches and pickled cabbage in the middle of the pond. When they retired, she thought they’d be going farther south than Connecticut. The winters here aren’t too much better than they were in Wisconsin. The summers are more humid. And maybe a bigger boat. A different name for it. Large sport fish instead of cod and clams.

Suddenly the causeway’s heavy shadow falls onto the boat. She barely has time to duck before it’s above them. She lets the oars bob as the boat floats under and through the deep shade, past the sets of brown pilings tied together like teepees, and to the other side. Community Shores disappears from view. She turns to him, as if a warning for the bridge, even now, would be enough of an apology.

“Keep rowing,” he says to her after they’ve cleared the bridge. She picks up the oars and starts again. Her breathing is thick with the heat, short and gulpy, her thin hair straightening from the sun and sweat.

The estuary begins to widen. They hit the top end of the breakwater, stones the size of small cottages slanting up the shore. She rests the oars on her knees.

“We’re not going to make it,” he says.

“The current will slacken when we get to the mouth,” she says, breathing hard. “Then I’ll be able to pull up to the town dock.” They drift for a few minutes. Then he says, “Did you put the flannel sheets on my bed?”

She bows her head over the crossed oars in her lap. “Yes,” she says, and rows again.

He hears voices over his shoulder. The Atlantic and its landless horizon comes into view. On the right side of the river’s mouth, along the town dock and boardwalk, there’s a small carnival in progress: Yellow and blue tents, large bunches of balloons, like clusters of multicolored grapes, small rides, beer concessions. It looks as if the whole town is there.

“Don’t go in there,” he says.

He cannot make himself comfortable enough in the bow of the boat to make it look like they want it this way. That it’s normal. The gasless outboard suddenly looks like a stump on the back of the Cheeseborough.

“Where else can we go?” she asks, a breath for each word. Her blouse is soaked through, and her skull glows red beneath her white hair. She reverses her stroke and turns the bow of the boat toward shore. They begin to make small progress toward the town side of the river’s mouth.

He turns his back on the boisterous carnival-goers. The people are calling out to them. Several of them are drunk, yelling loud hellos to the tiny boat. She stops rowing. The Cheeseborough stops its slicing against the outgoing tide and starts to drift again.

She stows the oars. Slowly, paintully straightening her back, she turns around in the seat and faces the people. Unsteadily, she stands up in the bobbing boat, the agony of rowing rising to her face. The tide has them now.

“Don’t stand up in the boat!” he yells at her. “You don’t have to let them know we’re here. Row, damnit!”

She raises one arm up, raises it heavily above her head, and waves. She widely swings her arm back and forth to the people on the shore. They wave back, cheering loudly, sending them off.

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Abbe Suger of
Saint Denis
Opposes the
Second Crusade:
Letter to Louis VII

My Royal Lord Louis,
Remember the Count of Poitou and his thousands
and how they died in Outremer,
their vulture-stripped skeletons leprous-pale.
But you yourself have said
you seek not Christly vengeance for them,
only to make pilgrimage at Jerusalem’s shrines.

You must first crave enemy blood like wine
before you decide to wage war,
must hate and respect your foe
as a hunter is wary of a wounded boar.
And you, forgive my temerity,
are too placid a man to burn
with that righteous rage.

France still gasps from famines,
from civil wars that have left us panting.
Though Eugenius excommunicate me,
examine my Pope’s motives:
not to aid Edessa and Antioch
but to coax men into forgetting
this rift between popes,
the schism of Byzantium and Rome.

You are young, monastery-reared.
Will Christ forgive you if you lead
70,000 more men to their deaths,
if your Queen perishes from Turkish arrows
or is made a slave in the sultan’s harem,
if your own bones sepulchre the desert,
your people bereft of their Moses?

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And He's

My parents have it all planned.
And my sister-in-law is in on it too.
She called my mother to tell her he’s a good cook.
My mother says,
“Now that’s an added plus
A man who knows his way around the kitchen.”
Is from Providence.
Has a good job.
And he’s Armenian
Of course.

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Wanted

SM, 5'5" - 6'2", sensitive, honest, romantic, any color, any age as long as you’re mature. Like me, things that drive you up the wall include unsolicited calls from long distance service providers and those stupid flags people put in front of their houses, pledging allegiance to pineapples, cardinals, and sailboats. Unlike me, your moods do not revolve around your PC’s behavior or the outcome of your last performance evaluation. You don’t want kids. It’s okay if you already have kids because everybody makes mistakes (I’m not placing this ad in the paper for my health, you know). Speaking of health, you are either a smoker or a nonsmoker who won’t nag me all the time about my smoking. Otherwise you’re barking up the wrong tree already. Must I remind you that the exhaust from your car does more damage to me in one day than a lifetime of my second-hand smoke would do to you? Smoking is the only bad thing I do—it’s the only bad thing I do constantly, at least. Let’s put it this way: it’s the only bad thing I do that, when you consider the alternatives—never mind. Talking to you is like talking to a wall. Go ahead—just sit there and don’t say anything, as usual. You must be thinking I wish I had never answered that ad. I must’ve been nuts! But you’d never admit it. No—you’ll sit there staring at me like I’m the nut. Well let me tell you something, buster: I wasn’t born yesterday, okay? It takes two, which, now that I think about it, is what got me into this mess in the first place. So forget it!

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To look at Joan's chapbook

In the Spirit House

You went to the door in a mask
the small trick or treaters, their throats thinking blood
in the room, dark and empty with tears
a light with glass shade reflects along the ceiling
and architectural lines of 1911 house
foaming horrors of humbleness and tiptoe tradition
when continuance is a futile nuance maundering about
pecking at keys like secret drinking
everything creative must be hidden as indulgence
all the money you didn’t earn comes clanking like ghosts
out of Dickens’ Christmas Carol
pull on mischievous under things.
We looked on the pond at twilight cloaked
on November 9 for a sad eight months
damned ancestors never leave this world
you wake up and he tells you it’s too bad
your father died and dropped you from the corporate world
and heavy heads are passed around
hang them on hooks they’ll never be noticed in his room
they dance disembodied existence on wooden hooks
your mother appeared from the grave one night
and told me failure is good
the seasons pass slowly where they lie
perhaps with black umbrellas as in Our Town years ago
and chilren stumble and slide down the frontporch steps
while you are reading they cut you off
the dog ate at eight and you can’t change a life
for anything better even by buttering-up
things are not quiet in the spirit house, the Dobe
didn’t know and tried to kill they screamed
and choked on candy down their throats thinking blood
the clock struck midnight down the great hall
of reflected white-walled light
where hooded monks and Merganzers were at the phone
megabytes of a day face you with a wall
prepare to recognize if not seize life
you say the moment better be thrown away…
Smoke and mirrors, monks and Merganzers there
but no sign of the Osprey in a snow shower mayhem
and the crickets stopped at the museum
to Oceanic Religion and cult contemplation
the swaying owl-like masks moved messages along
their advice often invoked murder
or verbal abuse and abandonment
in a darkened room of influential wooden faces
and women with mutilated wooden sexual organs
under glass ceiling of dismembered gender
where wild dogs ran amok a small girl
in a too long gown mis steps
lies crumpled down below without a sound.

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The Wig

The mother hadn’t seen her daughter in years. She was surprised when she arrived, uninvited at her daughter’s wedding to see that her daughter was anorexic. She looked like a pencil buried in a sheath of white. “The bride is anorexic,” exclaimed the mother to all the guests and finally to the bride’s sister when she found her hiding underneath the buffet. The bride’s sister glared at the mother and at the red wig which was sliding sideways off her mother’s head. “Well, somebody has to say something,” the mother retorted.

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The Stopwatch

I am sitting in the living room watching television. My face is pressed two inches from the screen, blocking out my grandmother lying in bed and my mother washing dishes, drying dishes, dusting, sweeping, stomping. Someone has said all commercials must be three minutes or under. I glance at my watch. I want to time the commercials but my watch doesn’t have a second hand.

I ask for a stopwatch for my birthday and I get one, a shiny steel one with red and black figures on the face. I put a yellow cord on it so I can wear it around my neck and I sit and watch tv and time the commercials and soon I wish I didn’t have the stopwatch because now I record every second I have to spend in this place.

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Love-Light

Light will lower
      itself into your eyes
where all light dies…

why do you permit it!
      sacrifice after sacrifice
getting lost in you…

why do you
      need it! darkness after
dark of you…

receiving, dissolving,
      the pure sad love that
keeps on trying?

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Concerns

swimming into the mouth
      of locked water
            a young whale

                  finding the
                        shallow beach
                  at the end

            and rocking itself
      to death
against our helplessness

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Conundrum

To need something
Who needs something
Who needs something
Else. The conundrum
Like the god Janus;
Every time he turns,
Even for just a bit,
He wears a new face.

I laugh. It’s not irony,
Nor satire, but closer
To burlesque; I live
On the top floor
Of this six-storey house.
When the wind blows
I hear the twist and twirl
Of the weathervane.
It creaks and screeches,
An ugly mood out tonight.

Wouldn’t it be neat were I
Like the god Hephaestus,
My wife, Aphrodite, i.e.,
Beauty. On every blade
Of that weathervane,
Multiply them into infinity,
I’d paint her wearing
Her favorite face. Always.

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God in the Mission

              black leather gold letters
              on gold chains
              Luis Carmen Antonio Imelda
              bright against dark skin

no crosses
no still waters
no place to lie down

              voices soft eyes tight
              behind polite stares

barren ground
light in the courtyard
birds sounding the air

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136

Wider than rooftops this dead cedar
almost as thirsty—a camouflaged raindrop
perches till the silence closer, closer

frightens it away :the flock
making their fly-by knee deep :the blood
smells from shingles and formations

—I tell you what could I do
and in the dark who can say
water is not the color opening our lips
or this rain spreading its plumage
over the dead —this battered fuselage

wider than the world and carried —the sun
nothing but desert, offered this tree
as if it had eyes that would open
would wings and the morning.

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435

Even in August its contrails
without wings :this spider
won’t let go and the logs you stacked
wave over wave crashing against
the hard landscape —each heading
whitened in mid-air, frozen
for more strength, more altitude
—each odorless thread
trying to fly in formation
and close alongside the sweet smell
that still safeguards the sick
the dead, the center, the clouds
not yet malignant or unyielding

—each summer and the logs
readied for a sky that will devour itself
the way a loom years later
somehow sets fire and your old army shirt
struggling in the attic
thrown open for the redeeming height
that never comes
—did you think you were picking flowers

that you still have the touch
—just two fingers, lifting this spider
on a safer course, away from its target
—it’s only a window
and you could use more air
under these fingers you keep counting.

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349

This machine counts for me
—all I do is poke
as if it adds too slow

has to be reminded
who is gathering and you
among the lakes and miles

and postcards
—I press its X the way kisses
—additions take so long.

All I do is touch your lips
and my finger brings to the screen
a silence, the woman

looks older than you
and I am older
though no one can hear

—so many levers
to lift the broken-down numbers
shaped the way your name

rests on a dark page
—you wrote how far
—there were numbers! and I look

everywhere
with tiny batteries
with fingers —on my knees.

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Kestrel

At rest on a windfall hickory
chainsaw cooling in the snow.
Soundlessly he drops
from the gray sky
onto the black and white hillside.
Close enough to see
the cold fierceness of his dark eye
the lapis lazuli on his wing.
Contemplating one another
prairies of clouds roll over us.
Then, startled straight up
through arthritic branches
meager shadow of a fieldmouse
clutched beneath.

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Gatherers

Over crosshatched rowcrops
red-clover    alfalfa
a high hollow humming
through crowns of tulip trees
amber shafts of broken sunlight.

In fields of wildflowers
a timeless dance
above bent blooms
where they labor
along ancient spice-routes.
Stitching blue valleys
across wind-woven water
to the standing doors of the hive
where workers empty nectar
from frayed pockets.

Smoke rises.
The keeper waits.

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Shooting At the Couch

After she left, things went from bad to worse. Overdue bills choked the mailbox, began crawling beneath the door. Beer cans and Jack Daniel’s bottles multiplied like maggots over the floor his head wobbled from their contents. He stayed awake all night smoking and drinking, fingering his Smith & Wesson, watching the Three Stooges and “Love American Style.”

Then, early one morning his sister called offering help, they argued, he shot the phone. Oddly, he grew calm, the movie went black in his brain, he felt like a new man so he shot the washer and dryer. As days passed everything opened up for him. He murdered the refrigerator and range, blasted the bathroom lavatory into little pieces, gunned down the kitchen sink, garbage disposal. Left powder burns on his wife's vanity.

Finally, he sat down on the printed sofa they had bought together for their anniversary, reloaded, stared at nothing in the mirror.

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Living on Hardscrabble

Barns with cargos of hay, the ranch is an ark
caught on a sandbar. Wind batters chaff
and sand in our eyes, the mold and feed-grain pollen
of the plains. Sheep and cattle breed
and pastures bulge. Each year we haul a load

of barbed wire back from town, dig more post holes
until sweat blinds us. Stretch wires
around alfalfa fields the steers believe they own.
Shove back the gate and let the herd escape
to acres of green, grazing their way

to the slaughterhouse, trucks like cargo boats
docked in the harbor, waiting to back up tight
to the loading ramp, the dumb beasts
chewing their cud and staring, fearing no evil,
believing this wide and rocky ranch is the world.

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Loss

The dream came just before I woke up Sunday morning. I’d slept in, and it was much later than usual. In my half-alert state I had trouble understanding that the clock’s digital display read 8:16, not 6:30 as was usual, by choice as well as by habit.

In the dream, I was with my mother’s old friend, Mary. We were standing at the end of a long corridor—it could have been an airport corridor, or the platform of a train station, but for certain, it was a public place and all around there were people on their way to some destination.

Mary and I saw the stooped and dwarf-like figure of my mother coming towards us ever so slowly. She placed one foot carefully in front of the other, and it was clear each step she took was an agony. She looked at us, but didn’t appear to know who we were.

I panicked. I called to her.

“Mommy, what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be dead!”

She didn’t answer. She just kept moving forward, towards the two of us who stood dumbstruck, our hearts in our throats, waiting.

“But Mommy,” I said to her as she got closer, “What are we going to do now? I’ve given away all of your possessions! I’ve sold your apartment! Where will you go? What will I do with you? You are dead, remember? And…and, I gave away all your cashmere sweaters because they were so small, too small for me, too small for anyone but a child…. So now, what will you wear? How will I keep you warm?”

She didn’t say anything, just kept moving towards us, listing slightly in Mary’s direction.

I left my mother in her friend’s care and rushed off to the place that had once been my mother’s apartment.

The surroundings were totally unfamiliar the way these things happen in dreams. I found a cupboard built into a wall I hadn’t known existed. With a lot of pounding and pushing and wigglingof brass fittings, I forced the cupboard open. In it, were some articles of clothing.

At first my heart soared, fueled by the relief of finding that there were still some of her belongings lying about. But then, looking more closely at the contents of the cupboard, I realized the clothes were uselessly odd or inappropriate. There were beaded ball gowns, satin sashes, taffeta cocktail dresses and heaps of silk scarves in all colors and designs.

As I pored over its contents, the cupboard expanded and became what had been my mother’s closet as I remembered it from hildhood, a place I used to explore after she and my father had gone out in the evenings to the theater or the opera or to entertain people.

Once they were gone, I’d indulge in the sweetness of trespass and sit on the floor of that closet for hours at a time to smell her fragrance on the clothes, touching the rich and exotic fabrics with one hand while sucking the thumb of the other.

In the thick of the dream, and with a crushing sense of urgency, I gathered up all the garments in my arms, although I knew that these clothes offered neither comfort nor warmth.

The problem at hand was death, not youth or beauty, and the challenge was to weave sustenance and protection out of the insubstantial pieces of whimsical fabrics. Somehow, I would have to clothe my mother. Somewhere, I would have to find her shelter.

I know more than a little about caring for the living, and even quite a bit about caring for the dying. But I know nothing about the requirements of those who are already dead.

What I really wanted was to get my hands on a walker or a set of crutches, or better yet, a stretcher. But all that the dream-closet had to offer was decorative, and the odor emanating from it now was sickly sweet. It reeked of the excesses of the living.

Back in the busy public place full of people in a hurry, my arms full of clothing, I searched for my mother and Mary. I couldn’t find them anywhere.

Mercifully, I awoke. As I watched pale streaks of morning light spread across the bedroom floor, I understood again that my mother was dead, really and truly gone. There would be nothing more I could ever do for her except to remember.

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Skin Off My Back

Ben leaned his face over mine, his body stretched out alongside me, one elbow up next to my face and his other hand open across my stomach. I laid on my back against my rainbow-striped sheets and I thought, Don’t look at my face. Don’t look at the pubic hairs poking out all over the blanket. Don’t look at the dirt.

He came closer. Close enough for me to crawl into his skin with my fingers and toes and nails, close enough for me to smell his face, close enough for me to push him inside. This was it. Me and Ben here, the two of us alone with his perfect face.

When my dad pounded the table until the plates clattered and the water spilled into little pools around the glasses. When Mr. Cathers stared at my tits instead of my face each time I answered his geometry questions. When the girls in the locker room pointed at the rows and rows of pus-white pimples up and down my back. When I looked in the mirror and saw dirty fingernails, chapped lips, and eyes that didn’t line up right, one eye smaller than the other, a permanent squint. This is where I came. With Ben. And his beautiful face.

He pressed so hard. Pressed down on top of me. I closed my eyes so he wouldn’t see the moles on my neck.

He thrusted. Hard. Not like I was used to with Frank, who went slow and steady and said “Baby, baby, baby,” the whole time, or “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” even if I just lay there. Ben was different. Ben was strong. When Ben went in me, I felt my insides. All of them. My liver and my intestines and the food in my stomach and the muscles up and down my spine. With Ben all the way inside, all the way hard, I knew I was there.

Please god, don’t let him be looking.

“I love you,” he whispered in my ear, right when his hips slammed against my hips. Just as my bones broke. I heard them splitting, cracking into a million tiny pieces. He whispered those words and then the shards of bone floated through my blood, traveled all the way up into my stomach and fingers and eyeballs.

Ben didn’t love me. Ben was fucking me because I fucked. I was the girl who fucked and everyone knew it. My dad. Mr. Cathers. The girls in the locker room. But when my bones dissolved into nothing, Ben was the only solid thing left inside me, the only thing holding me together. I believed him. His words in my ears and my face and my thighs and my cunt.

Ben pushed harder and faster, like he wasn’t in far enough yet, he had further to go and he had to get there in a hurry. I tasted his sweat in my mouth. Drank him.

“I love you,” he said again. I stayed silent, opened wider so he could go anywhere he wanted.

When Ben left, when it was over, when I was alone again, I let myself know it was a lie.

I let myself know it all along.

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Outside

Emogene scrambled out of the truck, eager to escape the close air of the cab. She stopped short of the screen door, waiting for her father.

He buttoned his shirt, tucked the limp shirttail in his pants. “Go on inside and get out of this heat, girl.”

She shook her head so hard her eyes hurt. Anybody listening to him would know she was afraid to go in by herself. Her father strode up the steps and she fell in behind him.

Elvin’s store was dark, cool, empty. Light from the narrow windows behind the counter lit up the dust that trailed them in from the road. There was a clean smell about the place, like hay that had been put up to dry.

“Hey there,” Elvin Bean called, padding over to greet them. “Where’d you get that little thing, Clayton?” he asked as he always did.

“Ol’ colored man down the road gave her to me, reckon I’ll keep her,” her father replied without looking up from the cigarette machine by the front door.

“What’ll you have today, honey doll?” Elvin looked straight at Emogene over his low counter, his eyes level with hers. He knew the answer to this question, too.

“Brownie drink and a pack of Nabs,” she mumbled, looking down at the floor, pretending to kick at something with her bare toe. Elvin was a midget. His wife, Ida, was a midget, too. If Emogene looked at him straight on, she might catch it and be doomed to stay as small as the eight-year-old she was now.

“Brownie drink and Nabs coming right up for the little doll.” Humming a tune more breath than song, he turned, reaching in the low drink box behind him.

When Elvin retired from his life on the railroad he bought the store, making everything over to fit him. The counters and refrigerator cases were half as tall as the ones at the grocery store in town. Sliding ladders built into the shelves let him put stock up high. On slow days, he did his book work at a desk behind the checkout counter no bigger than Emogene’s at school. He and Ida lived in the back in tiny rooms with tiny furniture. She taught the neighbor children music on her miniature piano.

In the early evening, Elvin milked his goats, standing below the platform he had built for them. On warm nights he and Ida sat side by side on the porch swing he had hung low, their feet just brushing the floor.

All this used to feel right to Emogene. A store where she could see everything and put whatever she picked out right on the counter herself.

Ida, if she wasn't giving a lesson, would call her into the back to play chopsticks on the piano; Elvin gave her soda crackers to feed his goats.

But this summer she had shot up, becoming, as her father liked to say, “a mess of arms and legs.”

Sweat popped out on the bottle Elvin pulled from the drink box. He reached over the counter, handed her the Brownie drink. She shot a look at her father. Pulled up against the door frame, he drew on his cigarette, his attention on something outside.

“Elvin, I reckon I’ll have me one of them RC Colas.” He let his cigarette drop, the heel of his boot grinding it into the unfinished wood floor.

Emogene downed her drink, washing away the web of dust and heat in her throat. She waited for her father to come get his Cola, to pay Elvin. She could hear the drone of the horseflies out where things felt right.

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Tainted

The booths in the pizza parlor were orange. Two girls in the booth behind Patty and R.J. were playing “Tainted Love” on the flip-page jukebox. Over and over. Tainted love, oh, tainted love… They were whispering, bursting out every now and then into whooping, hilarious laughter. Somebody named K.L.A. was the inspiration for most of these breakouts. It made Patty think of when she and Joyce would snort through their noses at the initials R.F.J. His inside-out sweater. His Jimmy Carter voice. What else about him had been so funny?

She was twisting her ring. She saw it and made herself stop. R.J. was playing with the red squeezit ketchup bottle, pushing it in just far enough for a bubble of ketchup to peep out, then letting it go. The sides of the bottle were brown and crusty. Surely any man who would do that to a ketchup thing for twenty minutes was sick, an obsessive, something.

“So how was Europe?” asked Patty.

“It was…”

“European,” she said, and thought she saw the distant cousin of a smile cross his face. A look of amusement like the smiles of European women, women he may have known. Mona Lisa in the Louvre, or some gamin-haired art student standing by, waiting to make her move.

“The lights are flickering,” he said.

“That’s because they want us to go. They close at eleven,” said Patty.

“Oh.” He let go of the ketchup bottle, disappointed, it seemed. He would be sad to leave that ketchup bottle behind, or was it that he was afraid to leave the safety of a public orange booth, afraid to be alone with her?

Outside it was a yellow night, heavy and still warm, as if summer wasn’t over, as if cold would never come. Patty and R.J. followed the street down to the river. The Tainted Love girls turned a corner before them and faded away still laughing.

“That diner we used to go to stayed open all night,” R.J. said.

“I told you it closed down,” said Patty. The two of them used to linger there for hours, eating french fries and coffee malts. That was when they had nowhere else to go, not her house nor his, and Patty understood for the first time all those songs about lovers wanting a place to be alone. But that was a year ago. She had known from the minute she picked him up at the airport. He had gone and come back as someone else and she had stayed the same.

The road they were walking on turned to gravel, then pebbles, then grass. There was nothing left then but the river.

“I wish the diner hadn’t closed,” he said.

Patty looked at the river. “I guess this means we’re not getting married.”

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One Percent Milk

At the end of their trip to Maine he wanted milk. Just milk. A hundred and thirty-five miles and they were almost home and he asked her to detour to the Cumberland Farms for milk. But Peg was boycotting Cumberland Farms because they terrorized hapless underpaid teenage employees into signing ludicrous confessions of stealing cigarettes and beef jerky; and besides, she herself had worked in that Cumberland Farms for two months four summers ago, and she had a horror of meeting anyone who knew her from that point in her life.

“It’s out of the way,” she said. “I’ll go by Correia’s Market on the way home.”

But Correia’s Market was closed. “Go back to Cumberland Farms,” said Jeremy.

“No, that’s so dumb. Besides, my parents probably left us some milk at home.”

Her parents were in Florida for two weeks. She and Jeremy would have the house to themselves. Before the weekend in Maine, that had seemed like a good idea.

He wasn’t a good person to drive with, thought Peg. That was part of the problem. He had no neon diner sensibility, no taste for the twangy, singing music of the road. He kept playing this Pet Shop Boys tape. I want a dog…. a Chihuahua… It would have been funny in certain circumstances. But synthesizers and irony were lost on Route 1. Jeremy couldn’t will himself into sunny mindlessness to appreciate miniature golf courses and five-and-dime stores with biting lobster-on-a-stick toys and Dolls of Many Lands. He didn’t even drink beer. But this was inexplicable, this sudden mania for milk.

He looked in her parents’ refrigerator. “All they’ve got is blue milk. That watered-down milk. I hate that shit.”

And this made her laugh because in college, when they really did serve watered-down milk, the kind made from boxes of white powder, she and her best friend Elizabeth used to sing this little parody song she made up, You don’t want a milk that’s pure/You want a drowned milk,/you want a watered-down milk. She sang it for him and he looked at her and she had to explain. “It’s this Dylan song,” she said. “It’s really love, a love that’s pure… well, it’s kind of from this lesser-known album.”

“Yeah,” he said. “One that twelve people bought. You and Elizabeth and nine aging hippies from Canada.”

“That’s only eleven,” Peg said.

“Oh. And Bob’s grandmother, she bought one.”

“Ha ha. Anyway, this isn’t that kind of milk. It’s real milk. It’s 1% milk, it’s fine.”

“Only girls drink 1% milk.”

“We’ve got half and half,” said Peg. “I can mix the two of them. It’ll be like milk in the olden days, you know? When the cream used to rise to the top?”

He looked unimpressed. “I’m going to Cumberland Farms.”

She sat at the table after he left, remembering Ogunquit on that trip they took in high school, the Old Salt Inn (the Old Slut Inn, Peggy and her sister would whisper in the back seat, and their mother would say, What are you girls giggling about?), the cheap straw hat and the shuffleboard court and she and her sister screaming midnight laughter over some boys with sparklers. They went to see Grease at the local theater twice because it was the only thing that was playing, and they acted out all the songs playing miniature golf and all these little kids stared at them but they didn’t care. Their father said the soda machine outside was a waste of money so he bought six-packs of warm Coke from the grocery store and they filled the sink in their room with ice, trying to get the cans cold. When I get married, Peggy told her sister, I’m going to come here on my honeymoon. Only not this motel. We’ll stay at some cool old inn.

She and Jeremy stayed in a cool old inn. Only they weren’t married, and it wasn’t their honeymoon, and the ceiling of their room was dark with water stains. Jeremy said some woman upstairs had probably drowned herself in the bathtub and left the water running.

He used to make her laugh all the time. And she used to make him laugh. They had been friends once. She had to keep remembering that to remind herself that it was true. They had been friends once, and they could be friends again, and one day, next year or the year after that or ten years from now, when they were both married to people they hadn’t yet met, she would remind Jeremy of this weekend, and he would laugh.

He came back carrying a plastic jug of whole milk. She handed him a glass but he shook his head. “I already drank out of the bottle.”

“And was it good?” she said. “And are you satisfied?”

“Yes,” he said. “Now I’m satisfied.”

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Uma vingança

In a Lisbon restaurant, in a poor, perhaps dangerous neighborhood, two women are arguing. The blunted syllables of Portuguese. It is very late at night, and the candle in the center of their table is burning weakly. Outside it is raining.

One of the women is fat and dirty. She is smoking a scented cigarette, gesturing with her hand. There are many bracelets on her hairy arm. The other is thin, pretty, a frailty of pallor in a black hooded sweater.

“Then, Angelina, you hope that I can solve your problem with fifty-thousand escudos? And you want me to give you the money? Senhor Alvarado’s blackmail again? You know you never paid me last month’s ten percent?”

Angelina stares through the window without answering. Rosa is unable to converse, she only questions. She is a greedy pig, uma avara. Angelina detests her. More than ever Angelina wants revenge for all her humiliations.

“Alvarado will kill me tonight if I don’t give him the fifty-thousand escudos. Without the money I’ll never get to my room. I know that you probably have more than a quarter-million escudos in your purse.” Angelina closes her eyes and places her slender hands together over her lips as if praying. Her hands tremble.

Rosa laughs and drinks from her glass. She is drunk. When she moves her arm the bracelets clink.

“I won’t give you even a centavo. And I want you to bring me last month’s money by Friday. Alvarado can do whatever he wants.”

It has stopped raining.

Rosa is going to leave the restaurant. She puts her heavy purse on the table.

Angelina, softly, almost with confidence, “If something happens to me you will never get any money from me Friday or ever.”

Rosa’s fat lips contain a deep rolling belch as she stabs her cigarette butt into the plate among the crumbs of the rum cake. She gets up unsteadily. “Alvarado is a peeling scrap of a man. He threatens. But he knows you will pay, eventually.”

Abruptly the fat woman leaves the table and, scraping her heels on the wooden steps, descends the steep stairway down to the empty street.

Angelina pushes open the rain-spotted window. She hears the drunken humming and the tinkling of bracelets as they gradually disappear.

The candle is giving little light now. Angelina thinks that Rosa will probably be passing through the narrow Rua dos Cegos soon, where Alvarado said he would be.

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I'm Hungry

I remember the Riverside studio,
our Lemon Street rendezvous,
two blocks of heavy breathing
from the Mission Inn.
Crumbling Art Deco,
California ’30s Spanish;
windows open like port holes
beside the antique headboard.
Saturday afternoon bees
circling daisies in a Mason jar
on the yellow, chrome kitchen table.

Outside French doors
jays jabber in the pepper tree,
stop in mid conversation,
perch like sequin-eyed voyeurs
on the balcony’s wrought iron railing.

Motionless on the rumpled sheets,
five-alarm fire contained,
we lie entangled
like fingers locked in prayer
until one of us says
I’m hungry.

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Talk

Your parents will talk to you as if you were a child. The fact that you are not a child does not matter. You are almost 30, living on your own in New York, and yet when you enter your apartment the answering machine—its red light flashing like a warning—is filled with their messages: file your taxes, write a thank you note, call a cousin who just moved to the city. When you hear this: lower the volume; flip through old mail; doodle perfect circles one right after the other.

Your boss will talk to you as if you were a mind reader. That fact that you are not a mind reader does not matter. Most of her sentences begin: “Didn't you know…?” You didn’t. When she speaks: look at her blankly and try to remember something you never forgot. Nod your head and think of being somewhere else.

Your boyfriend travels a lot. He sells airtime. The first time you met him you asked: “whose air?” He held your face in his hands, laughed and never answered. When he is out of town, he will not call. Instead he will send a postcard, the free kind from the hotel drawer, telling you his return date. This week you get one that says: Friday! The word is underlined twice. When your girlfriend asks you when he is returning you say: “Friday!”

You try to make your voice sound underlined.

On Friday! you spend your lunch half-hour perusing magazines at a local kiosk. You are drawn to an expensive, glossy, gourmet number with the large gold words on its cover: Romantic French Dinners for Two. The letters are in 48-point type. You imagine the woman who set this type is better paid than you. You can easily picture her: upscale office, cashmere sweater set, matching leather belt and shoes. You try not to think about your black leggings covered in cat hair and your sweatshirt that says Bauhaus. At her office, you are sure, there is classical music piped in; you know she spends her day choosing words like luscious and succulent.

Back at your office you flip through your new gourmet find. There is classic rock piped in from ambient speakers and you mouth the words to an old Stones tune while you make a shopping list for your Romantic French Dinner For Two. You tell a co-worker you’re making your boyfriend Poisson en Meurette, letting the r’s roll in the back of your throat like a gargle. She looks at you strangely and says: “You’re making him poison?”

On the Q to Gristede’s, somewhere in the neighborhood of West 57th, the train stops, cutting its lights and motor. A man next to you, in a Burberry raincoat, rubs against your leg. You think of the old joke about how to get to Carnegie Hall; you know it is not on the Q train.

At Gristede’s the can stacker looks like a young boy from your teen magazine. He’s wearing a tag that says aisle attendee. You tell the attendee you are on a sole-search. He directs you to aisle three. He does not smile. You fill your hand-held basket with thyme, garlic and sole and hum to the Muzak version of You Can’t Always Get What You Want.

You decide getting drunk alone is a cliché and call your best friend. She will understand, she will tell you: “You need a new boyfriend, one who shows up.” Unfortunately, she is not at home. Instead you will talk to her machine, leaving a red blinking warning about the hazards of dating.

Your cat rubs against your leg, smelling the fresh sole, ignoring your diatribe. You have read that cats see only in monochrome. You remember your boyfriend is colorblind. You know he will never see red. Just as you know he will one day call someone else’s machine and leave a message that starts: Sweetheart.

You turn your answering machine off and wrap your arms across your shoulders, pressing them in close to your chest. You pace. There is a difference, you think, between falling out of love and falling apart. You begin to talk to yourself in a new way. Your tone is soothing. Gentle. At first this sure quiet voice sounds strange, unrecognizable. But this is a beginning, it will take time: one day soon it will be the only voice you hear.

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Why I Keep Looking

Perhaps the dead lie in a permanent coma,
endlessly dreaming the life they had
but unable to say, “I dreamed…”

Or perhaps they rise shining and ubiquitous
to flit through the universe,
companionable and complete at last.

Perhaps they come back.
I was once his mother and would know him.

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Georgia O'Keeffe,
Deer's Skull with
Pedernal (1936)

Nothing sentimental
about this skull
hung on a twisted branch
to symbolize
the desert it
seems to hover above,
its symmetry
fiercely composed
against clean, distant sky
piercing the eye
sockets with points
of blue—
how much self-portraiture
in such bleached bone?

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Bill Reid's
The Raven
and the First Men

Raven on this day might have been
creating the world, flinging stars
and sun and moon into the sky,
stocking rivers and the sea with fish,
or changing to another form.

Instead, cedar-carved, he declares
a moment of ancestral past
here forever where he has found
the first men, embryonic, dazed,
cowering in a clam shell while
he perches atop and coaxes them
to venture out onto the sand

and me to leave my self and hold
all spirit wings unfold above.

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Drive-In Movie: Real Life

In the still night, the moon, drenched in the high trees,
         the lovers, groping at one another,
At a drive-in picture show, while Frankenstein, the monster, mauls
         another innocent, half-shocked victim:
And down screen, in a station wagon, one fully-focused family
         gobbles handfuls of licorice, popcorn,
And four cars over, a woman’s braceleted ankle protrudes
         from a backseat window as she laughs
Low and churlishly under her breath, the way it goes when some-
         thing cruel, secretive is happening
Between consenting adults, like maybe an illicit pinching,
         on the back, on the neck, the ass—
At the concession counter, a father, arm around a little boy
         who is crying, face full of tears, will it
Come in through my opened bedroom window…and no it won’t, son,
         it’s just a made-up story, an actor
Up there…it’s just a made up motion picture, things like that
         don’t really happen in real life.

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Untitled

The ghosts lie flat against the ground
Encircling the flowering pear trees
With the fog of their entreaties

It is not even sundown
Apricot light dripping beyond the stoplights
Deep into the wood behind

The light
Diffused

Losing its way among
The brush and air
Choked with dying honeysuckle

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American Gothic

Every summer in the small towns of Kansas
or Missouri you can see it.
The light just hanging, people confused,
uncertain what to do with it.
But listening, listening hard, turning the one way.

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Angels

The brightest of lights and a liquid dark presence, a smell like smoke and mussels gritty with sand, motion over water streaked with moon. He remembers the reverence in his mother’s voice as she told him how it was said that she would have no children, and then, unexpectedly, the angels brought him here one summer day so hot it wilted the leaves on the trees.

He grew, his body catching up in size to the large toddler’s head which, in the albums full of photographs, was as out of proportion with his body as a sunflower’s on its thin stalk. As he got older, he learned things that made him doubt his mother’s stories, things about human anatomy and what desire does to it. Snickering in health class, he held the condom with two fingers, flung the diaphragm like a frisbee to the boy who sat across the aisle, pretended to eat all of the tiny colored birth-control pills in the white plastic case. He spent his years at Jefferson Junior High slouching through the hallways with boys who bragged about what the easy girls gave up outside the gym during school dances. He knew how he had gotten here. He had read the words and seen the diagrams. He had even heard his parents at night.

Still, he could not shake the myth, could not attribute to storytelling or imagination the sensations of the elements bound together inside him, the feeling of flying at incomprehensible speeds, his body’s earliest and truest memories. He swam beneath the surface in ponds, lakes, even in the public swimming pool, with his eyes open, looking for a doorway, the home of the angels he was sure had made him of mud and shells and carried him, scorching, into the air. Sometimes after his parents had gone to bed, he would climb out his bedroom window to the flat porch roof and smoke a Camel he had stolen from his father, looking out to the dark water of the glittering lake just beyond his yard, listening for splashes, watching the sky for streaks of light.

When he was seventeen, there was a girl for whom he felt a wrenching, nameless emotion. Together, they swam off his parents' dock one night in August to escape the heat emanating from trees and grass, heat trapped by the heavy cloud cover. Automatically, he swung his arms back and forth under the surface of the water, waiting for a touch, a slick form to brush past him in greeting; he searched the perimeter of the lake, the sky above the trees.

The girl’s hand startled him when it rose from the water and reached for his shoulder, which she pressed once before turning and swimming to the ladder. He followed and lay on his back next to her, the warmth of the wooden dock soaking through his towel. They talked about the rest of the weekend, about homework and dinner with her parents on Monday. Don’t be nervous, she said. She leaned over his body and kissed him, the dragging ends of her wet hair bringing goosebumps to every inch of his skin. On her lips, inside her mouth, he tasted his beginnings: salt and algae, water, sand crystalized by fire.

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The True Story of the Lost Boys

All the boys were grown up and done for by this time; so it is scarcely worth while saying anything more about them…
—J. M. Barrie

They’d give anything to go back. But they’re trapped now, in those big hairy bodies with which Peter used to threaten them, trapped in strange thick flesh that stinks of sweat and tobacco and last night’s cabbage dinner. Each of them carries inside him, cautiously, the way he might bear an overfull glass, the knowledge that it didn’t have to end like this. In each of them, that knowledge presses a hard relentless fist against his heart.

Nothing distinguishes John from a thousand other men. He disguises his thinning hair badly, smokes too many cigars, wears thick spectacles that give his face a heavy, dumb-sheep air. He’s the sort of man little boys jeer in the streets, paunchy, inarticulate, and resentful. Tarts giggle after he’s left them, whisper his requests in friends’ ears. He cries in his sleep most nights, snarls at his wife if she wakes him.

Michael retains a certain sweetness about the mouth; he believed longer than any of them, and it’s left him wistful, gentle, sad. He could have married five times over—women long to comfort Michael—but he knows it’s no use. Something inside him remembers the fairy girls too well, their gossamer lightness, their voices like silver bells. Or perhaps the haughty mermaids, their disdainful tails flashing like jewels in that lake outside the world. Or even the Indian princess, her cool proud face, her daring, her quick, sure hands. The woman for whom Michael longs can never be discovered or named.

The twins christened themselves Paul and Geoffrey, adjusted beautifully to school, positively relished uniforms, prep time, cricket, and house loyalties. Now they share a flat in one of the better districts, work the stock market, dine at one of their several clubs, drink a little too much port after dinner. They’ve lost themselves forever among the thousands like them, relax pleasantly into oblivion. They draw the curtains tight at night, banishing the stars, then wake in the absolute darkness to whisper, panic-stricken, “Are you there?” “Are you there?” “Oh, yes.”

Curly didn’t last long in school. He works at a grocer’s, hopes to buy into the shop someday. He married too young, to a girl from the teashop down the street. They have too many kids, and she’s thinner than she should be, querulous and unhappy. Curly doesn’t think much about happiness, but sometimes while he sorts apples and sets out winter tomatoes he almost remembers a time when earth couldn’t hold him, a time when he would not think of yielding to that force that wants to drag him deep and deeper, anchor him forever to the ground.

Nibs keeps a large firm’s books, arrives at work ten minutes before time every morning, departs ten minutes after the hour at night. Every item on his desk is placed just so; he knows the balance sheets to the last penny. His employers value him and joke of his little affectations behind his back. Unlike the others, Nibs never dreams of the Neverland—he passes his nights in the city streets and back alleys, slipping like a fevered shadow through the dark. Something beneath memory recalls how he used to slide through the nights with a knife in his teeth, something whispers that that was what he loved best in all that world before time, before identity, before he became a man and had to recognize what sort of man he was.

Slightly, to everyone’s astonishment, married well, sat in the House of Lords, became a bishop’s confidant, was presented to the King. But his fatal flaw was his lack of imagination—he desperately needed but could never resurrect those nights when he slept in a warm jumble of bare brown arms and legs, could never recreate for himself the sweet, sweaty scents of the Lost Boys’ bodies and hair. Inevitably he was caught, one winter night, in the seamiest district in London, bribing a young boy with a handful of shillings. A considerably larger sum did nothing to divert the arresting officer, who had a small son of his own; the boy’s parents proved similarly unresponsive. And as everyone knows what happens to perverts in prison, no one was much surprised when Slightly stepped from his fourth-story window into a perfectly clear night sky, a night when every star seemed to beckon him home.

Tootles went mad at nineteen and swears he can fly. He’s kept on a third-story ward, and its windows are barred. Every night, Tootles strips off his clothing, leans his pathetic fish-belly against the cold metal, presses his face into the bars, and calls and calls for a boy whose name he cannot remember. The distant stars jeer and mock him, as they mock us all, but mercifully, he can no longer understand.

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Abundance

Mother offers thin slices of apple, arranged like a star on the plate. Cold. Chaste. White. They stick in my throat like the prayers we mumble at night: they stick in my throat like God.

I don’t want God. I want to be bad. Dream M&Ms poured over my thighs, clinking like coins in my lap. Dream the creamy darkness of Three Musketeers coating my tongue and my throat. Dream Haagen-Dazs, Oreos, Almond Joys, Hershey bars, Breyers and whipped cream. Even the names make me melt, loosen my belly like a hand brushing my thigh in the dark.

The ways we say love, without words. The way we drink love in, the way love says Yes, yes, welcome desire, welcome joy, mindless and needful as the infant wailing I want in the night. But now she says No, without words, she says Bad girl. Bad. Some nights I believe, some nights I scour my insides, try for a while to become that stick of a girl we pray for, to pray all alone to that great No in the dark. But still I wake wanting, longing for joy.

I want to lean across tables, accost them in check-out lines, rest my warm hand on their cold ones and whisper: Did you ever dream sweetness? Dream plunging your hand wrist-deep in hot fudge, dream your tongue slipping over, between every finger, then polishing your palm to pink? Did you ever dream placing the first drop of honey just so on your tongue, then tilting your head back, the jar at your lips, gold filling your mouth and your throat? God. Gold.

Try, I want to whisper, to shout, daring them to break free. But already they’re turning away, thin faces sharp with denial and pain. Try, I plead, urgent now. Say yes. Love. Fill me. Yes.

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Disobedience

He once broke
a glass dinner
table with a mustard
jar when neither
of his children would
eat the last hot dog.
The daughter relented
and used her fork
to cut it in half.
That was more
than he could take.

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Diagnosis

The psychologist,
who suspected paranoia,
asked if I thought people
were talking about me
behind my back.
I said, “No,”
because I knew
people were talking
about me behind
my back.

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To look at Deborah's chapbook

Stringing Lights

They weren’t going to go all out this year. They would only outline the yard. The husband wanted to use the plump red bulbs. The wife said no. The small blue ones were more elegant.

A trio of black helicopters appeared out of no where and set down amidst a chaos of dust in the Granite Dells behind their home. Men in black, holding rifles, jumped out of the helicopters, scurried into the rocks and vanished. The strand of lights went limp in the couple’s hands. The helicopters lifted up and away. Far away, past Thumb Butte. Their neighbor, gripping binoculars, trotted over, “No markings on anything. It’s the secret government. Don’t bother calling the cops, they won’t know diddley-squat.” They agreed with her, hoping she’d leave. She didn’t. She kept talking. Maybe there were aliens whisking people away and doing awful experiments on their bowels and brains. “We’ll lose a lot of folks as we move into the fifth dimension,” the neighbor said. The husband bent down for another box, “Honey, let’s do it up like we always have.” His wife said, “Let’s.” So they wrapped the windows and doors of their double-wide in lights as usual.

At dusk, they stood out front to take in the shimmering colors. The wife hugged herself and her gaze shifted up the darkening street, “I wish everyone would go all out.”