Station Zed (2 page)

The cathedral being built

around our split level house was so airy, it stretched

so high it was like a cloud of granite

and marble light the house rose up inside.

At the time I didn’t notice masons laying courses

of stone ascending, flying buttresses

pushing back forces that would have crushed our flimsy wooden beams.

But the hammering and singing of the guilds went on

outside my hearing, the lancets’ stained glass

telling how a tree rose up from Jesse’s loins whose

flower was Jesus staring longhaired from our bathroom wall

where I wanted to ask if this was how he looked for real,

slender, neurasthenic, itching for privacy

as the work went on century after century.

Fog in cherry trees, deer strapped

to bumpers, fresh snow marked

by dog piss shining frozen in the day made

a parallel cathedral unseen but intuited

by eyes that took it in and went on to the next

thing and the next as if unbuilding

a cathedral was the work

that really mattered—not knocking

it down, which was easy—

but taking it apart stone

by stone until all

that’s left is the cathedral’s

outline coming in and out of limbo

in the winter sun.

All through childhood on eternal sick-day afternoons,

I lived true to my name, piling dominoes

into towers, fingering the white dots like the carpenter Thomas

putting fingertips into the nail-holes of his master’s hands.

A builder and a doubter. Patron saint of all believers

in what’s really there every time you look:

black-scabbed cherry trees unleafed in winter,

the irrigation ditch that overflows at the back

of the house, chainlink of the schoolyard

where frozen footsteps in the snow

criss-cross and doubleback. And now the shroud falls away

and the wound under his nipple seeps fresh blood.

And when Jesus says,
Whither I go you know
,

Thomas says,
We know not … how can we know the way?

The sidelong whiplash of his arm sent the boomerang

soaring, pushing the sky to the horizon

until the blade just hung there, a black slash on the sun

so far away it seemed not to move at all

before it came whirling back larger and larger:

would it hit him, would he die—and you ducked down,

terrified, clinging to his thigh, its deathspin

slowing as it coptered softly down and he snatched it

from the air. How you loved that rush of fear,

both wanting and not wanting him to feel how hard

you clung, just the same as when he’d float you

weightless across the pond while waves slapped

and shushed and bickered, his breath loud in your ear …

and after he dried you off, he’d lift you onto his shoulders

and help you shove your head through a hole in the sky.

The first time I let loose the handlebars

and the bike steered itself, fat tires balancing

on their spinning hubs, the sky came closer

to the ground, the mountain slope receding

at the far end of the street was an exercise

in three-point perspective. One point was the bike

carrrying me along through an infinitely

narrowing alley of shrinking box elder trees,

the second was a bird’s eye foreshortening the slope,

while the third loomed way up high where blinking

satellites passed by, some shadowy sky-presence

that knew depth and height together,

knew my knees pumping the pedals and my hands

down at my sides countering the breeze in the
now

now now now
of my swaying in the balance.

There was a Bay, there was a Pig, there was a Missile.

There was a Screen, there was a Beard talking loud talk

in Spanish, there was the Screen in English calling him Dictator.

There was the floor of the room, a checkerboard

of brown and white squares, there were Moves

that were the right ones, and Moves that meant War.

There was a Bomb Shelter rumored to have been built

by a church elder across town. There was Radiation

that let you see the bones of your foot in the shoestore.

There was a Hot War at school where mean kids beat up

Weegee Johnson’s brother, and there was a Cold War

that meant everyone would die. The cat kneaded

your mother’s lap. The dog let loose a growling sigh.

The Pig kept squealing in the Bay, the Missile sweated,

the Screen counted down to zero and turned static.

What was Jesus writing in the dust? The magic hand

of Jesus writing something down? Maybe what would happen next

to you and her as she sat there beside you on the naugahyde

and cried and Jesus kept on writing until a great stone

rolled down on him from Heaven and crushed him?

The Bible didn’t tell you so but Jesus was the stone, Jesus

was the President riding in the car, Jesus was the holes

in the President’s throat and head, Jesus was the television

floating down from out of Heaven that brought to you

the bullets and the horses dragging the coffin

to be buried in the red letters of Jesus’ words

bleeding on the black and white skull of the President.

She cried on the couch and you sat there watching

Jesus writing in the dust like the dust you wrote

your name in before the dust rag came along and wiped it out.

“Elephant stomp” meant you stomped your marble

with your heel until it was buried level with the earth.

If you felt brave enough you played for “keepsies,”

if you doubted your concentration you called

“quitsies” and if you wanted to come close

or get away you called “giant steps.” Contingency

dictated “bombsies” when you stood up straight

and from the level of your eye looking right down

to your target you called out “bombs away.”

No one liked to lose a “clearie” or a “steelie”

and nothing teachers said about fair play

reduced the sting and shame and anger:

your bag’s size waxed and waned, adrenaline

pumped all recess, you were acquisitive,

sharp-eyed, pitting vision against gain and loss.

“Upsy elbows and straights” meant you had to keep

your arm straight and with your shooting hand

snug against the inside of your elbow you’d cock

your thumb, shooter gritty with dirt, and take aim

at your opponent’s marble. Calculations went on

that made time and space purely malleable,

sudden vectors of intention taking over

from the sun so you were seeing it as if

foreknown, though the sharp little click glass on glass

put to the test Zeno’s paradox: in the just

before not quite yet never to be realized

consummation, you grew a long white beard,

you outlived the earth and all the stars and never

would you die as long as you kept measuring

the space between the cat’s eye and your eye.

What could I say, a laborer, to the overseas geniuses?

That my father fought their war against the Japanese?

That the leisure class I served I aspired to, so I could join

the high G of the cello floating off, slowly vanishing

in a
pianissimo fermata?
Then nothing more,

silence and night? But this was California,

and soon the heat pump and water filter

would strain the water to such a blueness and temperature

that acid-washed LA would go swimming night and day,

the blue havens built by alambristas, union bricklayers, unskilled juvies

teaching me the Faustian accounting

of my employer, Bob “Just Call Me a Genius” Harrington:

Screw ’em out of this, screw ’em out of that
,

but sweep up your mess and you’ll get

away with murder
. Sucking up the slurry of cement

and sand, the hose pulsed in the pit

of the parvenu, the ingenue, the Hollywood producers

and Van Nuys GM bosses whose assembly-line crews

riveted my beat-up Firebird’s body, Wolfman Jack’s XERB

taking
another little piece of my heart now, baby
,

as I sprayed gunite on rebar ribs and the air compressor

pounded like the other
Firebird:
Stravinsky taking his temperature

in West Hollywood, Schoenberg watering his lawn in Brentwood,

Mann perched above the waves in Pacific Palisades

had also perused catalogs weighing concrete vs. vinyl

as blast caps detonated in holes the demmies drilled

and ash sifted down over my face and shoulders

to post-war twelve tone assaulting my ears.

But while I and my transistor radio worked ten hour days,

my father dreamt our own little South Seas grotto:

every weekend we rose to the promise of chlorination

as he and “us boys” dug trenches for our water lines,

hacked away the hillside to make our ice plant grow,

and rented the monster backhoe

digging out the pool pit to rim it with lava stone

against the mud. My father waved the baton

of his shovel to light the fuse to the chord

of dynamited stone: the cloud of our need

went up all over California

and rang in overtones all through me.

The two detectives prowling at the edges of my dream are late—as usual. Already I’m being pushed toward the cliff edge, driven not by a gunman or a maniac, but by wanting to escape my betrayal of a friend—a serious betrayal, worth thirty pieces of silver. On all the talk shows, they talk about how I lie, about my need for attention and how no stunt is too low to get it. But when they tell how I sold out my friend, my dismissal of kindness and decency, like leaving your wife when she has cancer, the shame is too much. Off the cliff I fall, until the ground looms up, and the detectives come running—the man wearing the years-long death mask of detachment, the woman, who’s only been dead a few days, the mask of death as disillusion. And in their eyes, there’s something so heartbroken, so lonely! As if their work as detectives, almost sacred in their minds, had been made into a sideshow by bad actors on TV, and I was their last chance—muffed again!—to prove to the world what was good and true in being a real detective. And so to make them feel less defeated, I start to lie, denying I betrayed her.… And the veiled triumph in the man’s eyes at having caught me in my lies look like my father’s eyes, so that I know just what he’s feeling when he reaches to take his partner’s hand—a hand so like my mother’s that when she reaches to take mine, I recognize her passionate avowal undercut by wariness, sounding the same as in life:
We’ll stand by you
, she says, her cool grasp assuring me that they know I know that all I’m pretending they don’t know we all know, but look, that’s OK, we’re family, aren’t we? a family of detectives?

I read a story, I’d like to think it’s true,

about a raven in Rome who lived

above a shoemaker’s shop and every day the bird flew

to the Capitol where it greeted the Senators by name:

magnificent sounding names, Germanicus, Drusus,

Decimus Brutus, even Emperor Tiberius just come

from Capri where, for a wrong prediction, he’d thrown

his astrologer off a cliff. The raven

was no snob, though, he greeted the people of Rome

as they passed by, with names like Paulus,

Paulina—the same name as my long-dead great aunt

who lived in Newark in an apartment complex so notorious

for heroin that one day when I visited her

she talked that way … that way that makes you wonder

how a woman who was a social worker,

a Eugene Debs Socialist, could become so vicious in

her mind. But the courteous raven spoke

with such virtue that it seemed more than human—

and when the raven greeted Tiberius, who kept everyone

in a creeping state of terror, he called back a greeting,

blessing the bird as a good omen for Rome.

And year in year out, the raven flew

to the Capitol and greeted every morning the soon-

to-be poisoned, the soon-to-be suicides, the thinker who

would open his veins in the bath, the arbiter

of pleasure who knew his days were few

and so to read Sappho meant, in his last hours,

to forget a little of his fear. And the raven

greeted the prostitute who had the contest with Messalina,

great wife of Caesar, and Messalina won:

twenty-five men in twenty-four hours, which might not sound

like all that many, barely more than one an hour,

but it isn’t the number, is it? The bird perhaps knew that men

and women are the sole animals whose first experience

of mating makes them regret which is why the bird, caught

between two natures, must have felt the aura of Tiberius,

the need of Messalina, but hailed them anyway—

the way it would have hailed Rome’s thieves and slaves

and commoners like my aunt running the gauntlet of junkies

she passed through each day in her apartment complex’s hallways,

just teenage kids, some of them, who liked the taste of junk—

though two or three did try to rob her, and the super told me,

when my mother and I finally found a place to move her,