Chinese Whispers: Poems (2 page)

After my fall from the sixteenth floor my bones were lovingly assembled. They were transparent. I was carried into the gorgeous dollhouse and placed on a fainting couch upholstered with brilliant poppies. My ship had come in, so to speak.

There were others, lovers, sitting and speaking nearby. “Are you the Countess of C?” I demanded. She smiled and returned her gaze to the other. Someone brought in a tray of cakes which were distributed to the guests according to a fixed plan. “Here, this one’s for you. Take it.” I looked and saw only a small cat rolling in the snow of the darkened gutter. “If this is mine, then I don’t want it.” Abruptly the chords of a string quartet finished. I was on a shallow porch. The village movie palaces were letting out. I thought I saw a cousin from years back. Before I could call out she turned, sallow. I saw that this was not the person. Conversations continued streaming in the erstwhile twilight, I betook myself to the tollbooth. The pumpkin-yellow sun lit all this up, climbing slowly from ankles to handlebar.

He had shaved his head some seven years ago. The lovers were bored then. They no longer meandered by the brook’s side, telling and retelling ancient secrets, as though this time of life were an anomaly, a handicap that had been foreseen. “In truth these labels don’t go far. It was I who made a career in singing, but it could just as well have been somewhere else.”

Indeed? The dust was sweeping itself up, making sport of the broom. The solar disk was clogged with the bristles of impending resolution. Which direction did he say to take? I’m confused now, a little. It was my understanding we would in joining hands be chastised, that the boss man would be sympathetic, the sly apprentice unresonant as a squatter’s tree house. See though, it wasn’t me that dictated ...

that dictated the orbits of the plants, the viburnum at the door. And just as I had called to you, the image decomposed. Restlessness of fish in a deodorant ad. By golly, Uncle Ted will soon be here. Until it happens you can catch your breath, looking about the walls of the familiar nest. But his flight was delayed for five hours.
Now
someone was interested. The travel mishaps of others are truly absorbing. He read from a large timetable and the helium balloon rose straight up out of the city, entered the region of others’ indifference and their benighted cares. Can’t that child be made to stop practicing?

In another life we were in a cottage made of thin boards, above a small lake. The embroidered hems of waves annoyed the shoreline. There were no boats, only trees and boathouses.

It’s good to step off that steel carousel. The woods were made for musicianly echoes, though not all at once. Too many echoes are like no echo, or a single tall one. Please return dishes to main room after using. Try a little subtlety in self-defense; it’ll help, you’ll find out.

The boards of the cottage grew apart and we walked out into the sand under the sea. It was time for the sun to exhort the mute apathy of sitters, hangers-on. Ballast of the universal dredging operation. The device was called candy. We had seen it all before but would never let on, not until the postman came right up to the door, borne on the noble flood. Racked by jetsam, we cry out for flotsam, anything to stanch the hole in the big ad.

We all came to be here quite naturally. You see we are the lamplighters of our criminal past, trailing red across the sidewalks and divided highways. Yes, she said, you most certainly can come here now and be assured of staying, of starving, forever if we wish, though we shall not observe the dark’s convolutions much longer (sob). Utterly you are the under one, we are all neighbors if you wish, but don’t under any circumstances go crawling to the barrel organ for sympathy, you would only blow a fuse and where’s the force in that? I know your seriousness is long gone, facing pink horizons in other hemispheres. We’d all blow up if it didn’t. Meanwhile it’s nice to have a chair. A chair is a good thing to be. We should all know that.

The last trail unspools beyond Ohio.

Dickhead, they called him, for his name was Dong, Tram Van Dong. Carefully he slid open the small judas in his chest and withdrew a heart-shaped disk. It appeared to be cut from thicknesses of newspaper crudely stapled together. There was handwriting on one side, “spirit writing,” he indicated with a motion of his head. Yet it all seemed for naught, ancient stock-market quotations or chalked messages on hoardings of the last century, with plus and minus signs featured prominently. “
O vos omnes
,” he breathed, “blown together like milkweed on the hither shore of this embattled plain, will your feet soon mean to you what once they did? I think not. Meanwhile the tempest brays, favor is curried, the taffetas of autumn slide toward us over the frosted parquet, and this loquat heart is yours for the dividing. Sailboat of the Luxembourg! Vibrations of crisp mornings ripple ever closer, the joiner joins, the ostler ostles, the seducer seduces, nor stirs far from his crimson hammock. Delphic squibs caparison the bleak afternoon and the critics love it, eat it up, can’t get enough of it. ‘More pap! More pap!’ Have a care, though, lest what I tell you here trespass beyond the booth of our conniving. Yet it will spread, as surely as an epidemic becomes the element we have chosen to live in: our old infectious experiment.”

Shoehorning in one’s own tribute to crustiness is another life-form for him. Something then went out of us. In the pagan dawn three polar bears stand in the volumetric sky’s grapeade revelation.

“Time to go to the thoughtful house.”

They may not get you here, they may not get you there, they may not get you everywhere, but they will get you somewhere. Yet the proposition never came to a vote, was not voted on. You see the realism in it? No, of course you don’t, for something else is still there, something to replace all of it in one block. Anent the spillway: His crimes are gorgeous but don’t matter just now. Later

we will call him on them. When it subsides. That is, everything.

Just a teardrop of milk, thanks. Don’t believe that rag. It inferred we were adolescents, once, that sex roared over us like a mudslide, leaving us. We were lost. So lost, in fact, that his mother didn’t know me till I came out toward her, and she knew me and was not afraid, was glad in fact, for the rainbow late in the day in its foam of cloud, poised above the basin. Then I had a preshrunk sweater sent to him and asked if there was anything else. “Nothing, a fresh breeze.” Still, leaves are asleep. The bears act as if no one’s there. She curls up in the curlew’s nest, weeping on its golden eggs. It took the savagery of centuries of animal conflict to bring us just short of this, and you, why have you done? Oh, I

don’t much matter I guess. If that’s all I’ll be on my way. To the box in which savage handwriting is hidden, too dense for you to decipher, too lorn for a world to unravel just now, but like they say I’ll be suing you. So really it’s fine until Christmas I can stand it, a runt, I’ll just go on blooming in my box, unaware of things sleeping pagans say about us, glad to crash, collapse the silk hat, garden’s done and I’m all in and breathless for a breather. Come right in. What world is this.