Back in the Dark Ages,
before the afternoons turned
to curdled milk,
we had a machine
made entirely of wood,
stained to look like iron
& greased with bear fat.
It creaked something wonderful,
like a house full of crickets.
It was easy to operate at
slow speeds, the idea being
to fit one’s body in among
the upright rocking levers
& dance with it, dressed like
a Siberian shaman, spool
for the spirit world’s
high-wire act. But
I made it go too fast
& it flew apart.
I found myself lying
alone on a hillside,
under the speechless stars.
The Sycamore
The young veteran — a double
amputee — is still learning how
to pilot a wheelchair. He stops
a few feet from the concrete lip
of the pond, gazing across at
a sycamore shining in the sun.
His eyes travel down the trunk
& into the water, the shadow
going one way, the reflection
another. A carp slides under
the flesh-toned bark. Meanwhile,
his flannel shirt has turned into
a screen for reflected sunlight,
dazzling the mallards crowding
around his chair. He glances
down at the dancing shadows
on his chest, then reaches behind
for a bag of breadcrumbs,
which he sets there where a lap
used to be, in that abyss.
One hundred days
If everyone else jumped off a cliff, yes,
you’d get in line. That’s how it was.
The national radio said they would kill us all
if we let them live.
We are not barbarians — we are no different from you —
but this is a poor country.
We couldn’t afford 800,000 bullets,
much less the guns to fire them,
so most of the work had to be done
with ten-cent machetes
made in China.
It helped to be a little crazy: the cockroaches
looked so much like neighbors,
like friends from childhood, even
your own wife.
At first they screamed, but then
they’d grow silent, waiting for the end,
already frozen inside.
It wasn’t always pleasant, but we worked
together, in friendly competition
to see who could land the first blow
or do the most killing.
We chanted songs & slogans from the radio.
Some people did not even find someone to kill
because there were more killers than victims.
I saw people whose hands had been amputated,
those with no legs, and others with no heads.
I saw everything.
It went on for a hundred days, until the rebels came.
Afterwards, we burned our clothes
& buried the machetes in the backyard,
using the blades to dig the holes —
there was a nationwide shortage of shovels —
& firming with a foot that rich volcanic soil
where anything will grow.
__________
Written in reaction to the movie Hotel Rwanda, which I saw on Monday night as part of a History Film Series at Penn State Altoona. It’s an amazing film, in part because it portrays one man who did not jump off the cliff — a true hero. The portion in italics above is taken from the testimony of one of the killers, a man named Gitera Rwamuhuzi, courtesy of the BBC.
Out back at the all-night diner
The assistant baker, shapely
in her chef’s whites, squeezes
past the rack of fresh rolls
cooling in the doorway
to stand in the alley by the stacks
of plastic milk crates & listen
to the robins waking, the occasional
rattle of the manhole cover out front
when a car goes over it, & the quiet
breath of the prep cook drawing
on his cigarette, pah . . . fff . . .
They are both still replaying
their conversation from the last break,
two hours before: how in less
than a month, she will move
to the next state for a job
that will let her work during the day
at a desk in a tall glass rectangle
next to the interstate, put
her college degree to use. I’d do
the same, the prep cook told her.
As for himself, he’s decided
he’s tired of preparation.
The owner has promised
to give him some hours behind
the line, where the action is —
not to mention (& he didn’t)
the waitresses. Chilly out.
I’m getting goose pimples,
says the baker. The rolls harden
in their metal beds. Dawn settles
over everything like fine flour.
Spell for a widow-maker
Snag turned deadfall,
dread widow-maker with
your fag-ends caught
in the crotch of a living tree,
hold fast while the chainsaw
gnaws through your limb,
don’t pinch the bar in your haste
to get free, but as soon as
the uppercut meets the undercut,
drop straight, don’t twist
or kick. Sink into the soft
mulch of your many autumns,
the bed you made for just
this final fall.
Roentgenisdat
Photo by József Hajdíº — X-Ray Records
Now this
is truly hip
(or spine, or rib):
x-rays recycled
into jazz
& rock
‘n’ roll!
What began as a reaction to wartime rationing, it seems, went underground, & by the 1950s, millions of short-lived records — roentgenizdat — circulate on the black market, wearing out long before the bones whose negative images they bear. But they are cheap & easy to make. Soon, Soviet teenagers are rocking around the clock.
The apparatchiki are horrified. This is not music, says Khrushchev, but cacophony! The masses are asses. Their bodies’ subversive urges must be subordinated to the will of the people.
Then on Mayday, 1967, thousands of youths, instead of ogling the annual parade of missiles, spontaneously begin to dance in Red Square, doing the twist. Pandemonium! The police wade in with truncheons, fracturing skulls, snapping clavicles: more grist for the illicit record mills. The biggest roentgenizdat rings are broken up, their leaders sent to the gulags, but it’s no use.
Chubby Checker
& Chuck
Berry spin at
78 revolutions
per minute.
Needles
erase as
they play.
The ghosts
of living bones
roll over
& over.
__________
Thanks to alert reader Mlle. X for bringing these links to my attention. Do go take a look at the rest of the Hajdíº photos.
Planting sang
Sing a song of sang, that human root:
wrinkled homunculus growing slow as thought.
Even the seeds take twenty months to sprout,
stones that finish growing in the ground
as if traveling through the interminable gut
of some great beast that vanished in the Pleistocene.
Sing a song of burying in haste,
the berries’ flesh a tempting prize for mold.
So if picked on a morning in early September,
nestled into a plastic vial & sent by overnight mail,
you must plant them as soon as they arrive —
don’t put it off till after supper.
Choose each resting-place with care,
moving slowly through the woods & stopping often.
Pretend you’re burying a grandparent, piece by piece.
Make a hole with your index finger
no deeper than the second knuckle,
drop the blood-colored berry in & cover it up.
Pray for uninterrupted sleep, & an end to sleep.
Let your stomach rumble, soft & low.
__________
Quite by chance, I just found out that my local public radio station aired a related story this morning. Refer to the other links on that page for more on sang culture in Pennsylvania.
Bees on bull thistle
I took this picture two weeks ago, right before sunrise — click to see the full-size version, as usual. The following poem is a good example of the sort of exercise I engage in to stay in practice, on days when inspiration utterly fails to strike.
Night stops them cold
where they cling
to the green thorax
of the mother of bumblebees,
that bed of nails.
They hang
lifeless but not dead,
sleepless but very far from waking
to the vast meadows that blaze
above their heads.
Jumpseed
I can’t look at jumpseed without my body remembering how it felt to be five & walking home from school, that long mile & a half up the hollow, how my fingers found some obscure satisfaction in stripping the eponymous seeds off the stems, feeling them rattle against my palm, & idly pulling out clumps of translucent, shallow-rooted clearweed. They lined the road bank, two shades of green.
Freshly moved to Pennsylvania from our home in rural Maine, I had been skipped into the first grade & was just finding out that a profound overbite marked me as half-rodent. Clearweed, stingless nettle, so easily dislodged! Jumpseed, so willing to part with handfuls of your hard, green teeth! I took you for granted. I failed to learn even your common names for decades.
__________
Again, another reminder that the blogzine qarrtsiluni, which I help edit, is soliciting contributions for a new theme, education. The word limit this time is a whopping 3000, but of course briefer submissions are welcome, too. Send fiction, nonfiction, poetry and artwork to qarrtsiluni (at) gmail (dot) com.
Poetic ideal
If it were possible to write a poem that vanished
completely from the page as it was read, so
that it would last for just a single reading
by whoever found it first, her eyes
& silent lips inadvertently erasing
each word as s/he partook, gaze
like a flame moving through
the flesh of some effigy
for the ineffable, ah–
this would be that
poem, this screen
that page & you
that dear
reader.