For luck

More than once for luck I have placed my hand against the swollen abdomen of a pregnant woman, & perhaps this is why I have led such a charmed life (knock on wood). I remember in Honduras a patriarch laying his hand on the head of some small child or grandchild – casually, as if in everyday greeting: “Bendiga.” “Gracias.” And the child scampers off. But once, it, too, had been a nameless presence at the center of a woman’s body. The soul might well know everything before birth, a blind seer with a single working orifice, round & perfect as the good-luck doll the Japanese call Daruma – push him over & he always gets back up. Westerners may invoke Plato’s cave but in East Asia it’s Bodhidharma who sat in darkness, fat-assed legless zero nine years in the making. He even circumcised his eyes of eyelids to ward off sleep, that stealthy enemy of enlightenment. In Japan, Daruma dolls come in both sexes & the eyes are always left blank so the owner can paint them in, one at a time: the first when making a wish, the second when it’s granted. Aspiring politicians are especially prone to this practice, the Japanese equivalent of kissing babies. But only those without guile are ever truly blessed. Don’t be fooled; pregnancy is a dangerous business. The fetus feels the weight of your hand, it hears your voice & if you are careless in shepherding your thoughts it may think: Aha. You feel a sudden kick & draw back, only to receive a second jolt where you least expect it, unprepared for the jealous stirring from your groin, that flesh of your flesh grown desperate for blessings.

Infallibility blues

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Error, my love, stay close. Without you, I’d never find the exit from this hell of mirrors. Look – another dawn stains the lunatic fringes of my sky in tints of crimson. Washable. Ready to wear. The monitor at my bedside shows my heartbeat skipping like a scapegoat. Who was that mitered man, and what was he doing in my chambers? Get back, you paperweights! I brandish my scepter like Aaron’s rod. My staff is stiff. It comforts me.

Error, you were the first and best of all my teachers. Once I found I could not leave my office for a pilgrim’s road, you drew dark nights on the insides of both my eyelids. With Him there is no left and right, I told my faithful. Bull or no bull, your matador’s cape goes to heel with the horns of any dilemma. Sweet Teresa may have been pierced, riven. A true saint. But it’s you I love.

Errors mount, they say. Mount of Horeb, Sinai, Zion, Olives. Mound, as it were, of Venus. Crowned with the shining head of a life, blind eye precious in His sight. Life and more life, life, life! A priest who can’t get it up is no priest. Shorn of foreskin, the holy hill must never again come under the shadow of so-called sacred groves. The mark of Cain printed in a baptismal font.

Solitude is a luxury denied the truly righteous, if they exist. Alone on my side of the net, I serve. My life is a service. However much my mind may go errant, this stubborn donkey knows to head straight for the oats. No sins without blessings, no blessings without sins. And everything made perfect in His sight. His all-seizing eye. I feel myself watched by the hour and the gargoyle minute, by night and by day. They grow and shrink through the seasons like all living things, thinking they’ll endure forever.

Is it about endurance then, my love? Ha! Give me nine months of contemplation and I too might bear some unimaginable offspring. Try me! But He knows best. I could wear a hairshirt, practice auto-flagellation, but the agony of childbirth is a blessing reserved for women. We priests are called to imitate Christ, giving birth from the tomb instead of the womb, yawning portal under the altar where we perform our redundant magic, food into flesh. Open, like this straw they’ve stuck where the breath goes in: extreme suction. One more river to cross.

Or am I in error again?

Or is she – at last – in me?

A likely story

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A light rain is falling outside the offices of the National Chamber of Converse, where the current occupant of the position known only to the Secret Service as POTUS has convened a special meeting with his cabinet of curiosities. A pair of common or English sparrows is busy mating on a high ledge. The male hops on and off at three-second intervals, unseen by anybody but the omniscient narrator.

I know you won’t be surprised to hear that the streets below host an obstreperation of demonstrators. They wave signs printed in yesterday’s newspapers’ Franklin Gothic, sable, with exclamation points rampant dexter. “NO DEPOSIT, NO RETURN!” they trumpet, and “NO REST FOR THE WEARY!” The briefer messages seem to be the most popular: “NO OUTLET!” “NO SHIT!” And of course, “NO WAY!”

A flat-chested man in a suit of clothes is trying to push his way through to the entrance, without success. It’s as if he isn’t even there.

The usual small knot of counter-demonstrators tries to make up for its lack of numbers with an unconvincing show of outrage. Their problem is, they don’t actually believe in outrage. Let your hypothetical camera zoom in for a close-up of a telegenically tall, clean-shaven woman chanting into a megaphone, “Chill. Chill. Chill. Chill. Chill,” as her comrades brandish their crudely lettered signs: “Hold Everything.” “Beg to Differ.” “Word.” “Consider the Source.”

“Consider the lilies of the field,” says an argumentative cop. He’s been spending the past week investigating a pedophilia case, and frankly, he’s feeling a little testy. What’s the use of all their new high-tech, non-lethal riot-control gear if they never get a chance to use it? Homeland Security is more interested in radical sheiks than radical chic. “What is it with you people, anyway?” he wants to know.

For her part, the female sparrow is beginning to think she wouldn’t mind a quiet life out in the country somewhere – or failing that, at least a crumb from a crumpet. Unbeknownst to her, her erstwhile paramour has just managed to fly straight into a window, and is lying dazed on the sidewalk. The clean-shaven woman notices him and stops her chant, bending down for a closer look.

“What is it?” “What’s wrong?” The other counter-demonstrators stop brandishing for a moment and crowd in. She lifts the sparrow in cupped hands and, seeing its nictitating membranes raise their curtains, begins to sing to it. She has a classically trained soprano voice; it carries clear across the street to where the flat-chested man stands stock-still, listening to a lullaby he hasn’t heard in thirty years, ever since his youngest sibling graduated from the high chair with flying colors.

The moon’s the north wind’s cookie, the babe is in the forest green and all that. In a few minutes, the sparrow will recover well enough to fly away, fly away, oh glory! – even mate with a few more partners before the blood clot in his brain finally finishes him off. No one will be around when that happens, but fortunately his heavenly father keeps an eye out for just that sort of thing. Or so they say.

The cops will receive contradictory orders on whether to try out their new, fresh-ground black pepper spray. The demonstration will turn ugly and begin looking for someplace to take a leak. A man holding his pants up with a strip of cured hide from a large herbivore will take a turn at the megaphone while the clean-shaven woman lets the flat-chested man buy her a double latté at a nearby coffee shop. They will sit at the counter, where she will use several napkins and a black felt marker to outline her theory about how negative growth is the engine of the gift economy.

She is, after all, a counter-demonstrator.
__________

Tomorrow: Her outline.

The runcible spoonful

By guess & by golly we got there, by hook & by crook. The zigzag egg of our astonishment was weighted with silver, pura plata, and we passed the runcible spoonful back & forth, heaped high with frost. Ho ho honey, we sang, take a whiff on me. My guitar was small but serviceable. The blue light specials called to us from the far shore & we went, ah, over to Gatsby’s again. We were melancholy in the anticipation & melancholy in the aftermath & in between there were the dancing lithesome shadows that that busy little flame threw out. We dined, they say, on mincemeat with spiced quince jelly; I don’t recall. It could be a spoonful of coffee; it could be a spoonful of tea. But I do remember that our dealer healer feeler had a ring at the end of her nose, her nose! It was wild. I looked up at the stars: all that darkness, all those seeds of light. Oh lovely Pussy, oh Pussy my love . . . You know the rest.
*

Out

The statistically average American family, consisting I suppose of motherfather, nemesister, brotherape, each in their separate seedpod of distraction, inhabit a house without a single active verb to keep them warm. They are all learning how to be outcome-oriented. If time weren’t still lurking among the flowerpots in the kitchen window, their lives would become joined in one vast wound, I wrote, standing on the stone bridge over the stream. The sound of water: something I used to think of often when I sat in classrooms waiting for the bell to bring us back to our senses. I always pictured a clearing deep in the forest where a spring welled up, unseen by anyone including myself. Later on, this favorite image symbolizing something like hope gave way to the cry of a night bird – a black-crowned night heron, a wild goose. I gave chase without avail. That cry offered the promise of shade in a land too brightly lit, like dark foliage in a 15th-century illuminated manuscript with hardly any blank space left in the margins. I hadn’t thought about this for many years, until the other night when I stood in the road looking back at my own house. It was all dark except for one window, dimly lit by the glow of the computer monitor – though to anyone who didn’t know this it might have seemed to emanate from the pilot flame on a gas stove, or a florescent nightlight. I stood outside in the darkness wondering what it might be like to have that statistically average family, wife and however many kids, remembering computer-generated images based on averages from hundreds of different, real faces. Male or female, such average features always turn out to possess uncommon beauty.

Brainstorming 2005

Ideas for the coming year:

  • Go line by line through one of my poetry manuscripts, using each line as the jumping-off point for a new poem.
  • Compile and illustrate a Book of Missing Hours with old Via Negativa posts.
  • Run for office.
  • Use the Internet to rally support for a National Do Nothing Day on some date of no special significance, to change every year and be chosen by lot.
  • Apply to a large foundation, or to the state arts council, for a grant to support Via Negativa.
  • Become a stalker of a celebrity poet, such as Tess Gallagher or Rita Dove.
  • Donate one of my kidneys to a needy Iraqi.
  • Learn to paint by numbers.
  • Run amok.
  • Change my name to Chrysler.
  • Set goals and continually strive to achieve them.
  • Write a letter to somebody using actual pen and paper.
  • Sing along with the CD.
  • Poison pigeons in the park.
  • Start a new religion using nothing but slogans and television advertising jingles from the 1970s.
  • Crawl on my belly like a snake.
  • Make hay while the sun shines.
  • Persist in my delusions.
  • Collect all my fingernails, toenails, shed hair, laundry lint and, if possible, shed skin for an eventual computer-assisted collage portrait of Jesus, or maybe Elvis.
  • Submit something to somebody.
  • Rock and roll.
  • Acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
  • Turn this blog over to its readers.
  • Go on a date.
  • Get a job.

(Ha ha! Just kidding with those last two there.)

Shooting the water

A small procession on a red dusty road, and everyone’s dressed in red, red. The pace is not fast, the song is not slow, the pines aren’t stirring in the breeze. As they grow nearer you can see the black coffin, and it’s only three feet long, my dear, it’s only three feet long.

*

Well, yesterday morning I was making breakfast, and believe me when I tell you that there was nothing different about that. I always make the very same thing, because who wants a surprise first thing in the morning – or second, or third? A glass of orange juice from concentrate and two eggs fried sunny-side up in butter, sprinkled with dried tarragon. I sat down with the newspaper while I waited for the eggs to fry, my plate heating on a separate burner. Well, just as I got up and started across the kitchen toward the stove, I had the strangest feeling. It was a little like that feeling of weightlessness or disassociation one gets during orgasm, except there was no sensation involved, no question of pleasure or release – simply an absence. It lasted for less time than it takes to tell you about it, because to become conscious of a thing like that is to banish it almost immediately. Indeed, what I call a feeling was probably not the experience itself but its impression, like the afterimage that forms on the inside of your eyelids if you open your eyes for a split second and close them again.

*

What are they singing, these people, and why don’t they all look sad? The road is straight and hot and the heat waves make their legs appear to wobble from side to side. I climb the bank and rest in the shade of the scrubby pines, waiting, my camera at the ready. As they get closer, I notice something odd: the coffin has no lid.

*

Warning: objects in dreams are farther away than they appear. Whenever I happen to wake, right away I begin thinking about blogging. A dream that might otherwise seem unremarkable gains in significance simply from the prospect of being recounted. But I’m always wary of “recounting fraud,” you know? I ask myself, were things really so logical? Were they even as sequential as narrative conventions imply? And what was so frightening, why did familiar landmarks seem so huge, so full of shadows? The letter killeth; but the spirit giveth life. I turn over onto my left side, knowing that I can only fall asleep on my right. Just before I drift off, I’ll roll back into place.

*

Like a log, my dear. I always sleep like a log. Like a log hitching a ride in a coffin. I peer through the telephoto lens in disbelief. They’ve dressed it in baby clothes, but it’s clearly no infant. If they’d debarked it, I might not have recognized it, but I can see the reddish-brown plates: it’s a mate to the trunks I’m standing among. The people shuffle past in weary cadence, clapping softly the way you clap when the cemetery’s a mile or two from town.

*

It’s rare that I’m terrified of something in a dream, but it’s just as rare that I don’t feel at least a little fearful. Face it, I’m a slow moving, medium-sized mammal with a number of potential predators to worry about. Sometimes I’m smaller and more rodent-like, but I’ve never yet dug my own burrows, always taking over the abandoned homes of other creatures instead. That’s human enough, isn’t it? At one point last night, for example, I was exploring a couple of woodchuck burrows near the top of the field that seemed to open up into some kind of cavern. I decided to test the echo, stuck my head into one of the holes and gave a roar. A couple of huge shadows detached themselves from the side of the pit and growled back, a low rumble. I felt a blast of hot, stinking air like a week-old corpse.

*

Whose log-body can this be, dressed so fine for its own funeral? I follow at a distance, already picturing how this will look on the glossy pages of National Geographic. The scene at the cemetery merits a three-page pull-out, at least. In place of gravestones, large, curved animal horns jut from the earth. Some are painted white; others have been wound about with colored yarn. Little bells dangle from the point of every horn. The wind is a welcome visitor, it seems.

*

Have you ever felt a wind inside your skull? Talk about mute, abject terror! A nightmare you’ll remember years later, looking through a magazine at the dentist’s office with the whine of the drill dimly audible above the Muzak. You find you can’t concentrate on much besides pictures, and fortunately this magazine has quite a few. In fact, it’s difficult to find the articles, apart from the captions and a few paragraphs following the titles – or are they headlines? The Misunderstood Manta. Ancient Nubia: Birthplace of the Pharoahs? A Funeral for the Whooping Cough. And here’s a nice piece on the Venus de Milo, which seems so emblematic of something or other. (Yes, of course she’s a which, never a who.)

*

Listen. Here it comes now through the pines, hissing. A gourd rattle gives it legs. Someone starts swinging a bullroarer and all the hair stands up on the back of my neck. The shutter clicks away, seemingly of its own accord: the sound made by the claws of rats on an empty granary floor. Not that they’d ever print that sort of thing. By the time the editors get done with my prose, baby, I barely recognize myself among all the cliches. I might as well be shooting so much water under a bridge, back in goddamn Iowa.

Here comes the candle

Who reads blogs on a holiday, anyway? Worse yet: Who writes in them?

Creatures with teeth, things with talons, O Daddimommigod with eyes like saucers and bellies that drag along the ground, your laughter frightens me. I eat mash in clabbered milk and feel it drip through my crop. I gobble corn and hear metal, steel against stone. You have us where you want us. What more do you want? Numbers, numbers. Wings that flop like fish on the end of a line. I clasp my two helpings of darkness to my side with great thanksgiving.

Creatures made of blood and pus and shit, things full of sickness and bad medicine, shears that show off shapely legs on which they never once have had to stand. Empty eye sockets, a dictator in designer glasses pretending to admire my beak, snip! Sorted by lot, we grow so full of sleep it’s hard to keep our backward knees from buckling. The floor isn’t something I’d want to touch with any other part of me than my armored feet: it crawls. It writhes.

Creatures without teeth, things without bones, O Daddimommigod let me hide my head in the down of your breast, so tender and plump. Hour by hour the sky grows whiter, harder. Now, even when I’m awake I drum and drum against it with my stump of a pecker. I’ve swallowed everything until I can hardly turn, I can barely breathe. My knocks are growing feebler. I’m beginning to think there’s nothing on the other side.

But wait – what’s that rumble? What new thing comes flickering along the horizon? These flying drops of moisture, so sweet! More and more of it, a wall of water. I close my eyes and tilt my head back. It strips me of dirt, of feathers, of skin, of flesh. All head and tail I am swimming upstream, one blind whip against the world.

United

We are united in the way we light out for the territory, waving our little flaps of foolscap. We believe in the separate good to be made from the common plunder. We serve blind growth, worship the holy tumor, the severed tit. Tempests boil over in every teapot. Drain your cups & turn them over, boys! Now wait while the invisible hand works its legerdemain. Under one dome you’ll find an entire legislature in session! And under another, I swear, that tricky little pea.

We are united in our love of private parts. We all stretch our feet toward the same fire, party of the first part and party of the second part, originally separate blossoms modified by Manifest Destiny into rays of unearthly light, spokes of a wheel, teeth on a cog. It all fits. Here comes the honeybee, my friends. And here comes the world’s distraught suitor, mumbling She loves me, she loves me not…

We are united in the way we put our sweaty palms together beneath our chins: for prayer, many of us; some for friction against the sudden chill; a few to rub in ointment or saliva. We have hundreds of channels, a thousand points of refracted light & in every one there looms the shadow of the swatter, ah, my fellow flies!

Translating the rain

A contribution to the Ecotone topic Places for Books.

Body of rain, I drink to you. Body of long grass & the dark edge of the woods. I woke up at 3:00 in the morning murmuring the words to a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom I have not read in years – O if we but knew what we do / When we delve or hew– / Hack and rack the growing green! / Since country is so tender / To touch, her being só slender . . . A gentle rain with crickets in it & the twittering of thrushes & warblers who have flown all night, in & out of showers, no stars to guide them. I went back to sleep on the couch with my head near the screen door, listening, & dreamed about a woman made of light whose warm regard turned the pages of books yellow, orange, scarlet, made spines of books crack & the covers warp. With a faint whispering their pages began to come loose and flutter down from the shelves in multiple reenactments of the myth of Icarus. I walked through dimly lit stacks chanting an LC call number like the name of a long-gone lover, shuffling through the fallen pages, which were already up above my ankles. This rain will go on for months. When it stops, the sky will reach all the way to the ground: an appalling brightness. We will squint & shiver, we will stamp our feet for warmth on the hard ground, swept bare by wind. Our fingers will itch for the feel of pages turning. Strained eyes will long for opaque surfaces, the darkness between the trees. Our skins will turn brittle. We will search like lizards for a flat rock in the sun.