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April 08, 2005
Greer Garson
I saw Donald Revell today.
Greer Garson in a bed as a child, washing her bed sheets shot out of the dark clock. Sitting on eggs, teeth on edge, Sal Mineo shoulders Dorothy Wordsworth heating murderous- no, monstrous, erasures like wings on a bicycle that his son owns.
Pandemonium is not the way. Instead, climb into the head of a boy, torn apart by women and wine, and rivers cross you. There is no grey area here. A draining thoughtfulness is all out the pipes, is all out the night, the night itself. Greer Garson is chatted about incessantly on a walk on Walden Pond. My own best friend came over the following day, to talk about, to dream about the envy of my personal erasure.
I laugh and chisel. Arcady, again, in Revell and my life. My adam’s apple bobs in time to the man in front of me, slumped over by the crescent shape of his wife’s berating eyes. Bounce to the woman in the corner, chatty cell-phone catty-eyed dancer that was never there. Bounce to the buoyant blonde behind me; her freckled-lemonade complexion sparkles those whatdyacallit flames framing the outline of a face, placed next to mine in a latticework photo album. Greer Garson had the right idea, the book smarts, the clear-headed sense of the word “expression”. I had bronchitis once, but Garson had pneumonia. That’s “pneumonia” with a “p”.
God save the man not what his utter displaced mutters complain in vain incessantly about, but whether it is in a way. I can’t be as vibrant as Thomas Traherne, or wear purple shirts like Galway Kinnell did, but I can carry a pretty good tune out of sync with God; that, without pride, I can carry a tune, in a way.
Revell carries a torch of limelight that sheds stones on his audience; he reminds me of John Denver and Jesus. My best friend, full of piss and mythology, a bibliophile, a cell biology dissenter, gets the Orpheus Bachhae stuff that we grew up on. What a great day it will be, if we should allow it. My health, like Greer Garson’s, is all shallow breathing and disastrous marriages.
Posted by tony at 10:19 PM | Comments (0)
Conversion
What will happen to his image, once he’s gone?
He looks at the stained effigy and wonders.
He taps the window pane and will atone.
His father had dreamed that he would be blessed and done
with the wallflower summer of his youth, but his son defers
what will happen to his image, once he is gone.
He watches the door and aisles with small, numb
digits that preen, that eyeball from outside in slight fervor.
He taps the window pane and will atone.
This mansion dream of God and money, he calls home.
This calling, this wife, this prayer, should come first.
What will happen to his image, once he is gone?
He stands and rises to the pews; a moment
of silence washes over, his mouth pursed.
He taps the window pane and will atone.
Those moons, with divots, in one fell swoon,
They phase over a naked finger that imprints
what will happen to his image, once he is gone.
He taps the window pane and will atone.
Posted by tony at 09:41 PM | Comments (0)
April 06, 2005
prose poem (needs a title, any suggestions?)
A man refused to have his picture taken. He was afraid the film would steal his soul. or re-constitute. Two crayons lay next to the ocean. They are both blue. Everything here has been mass produced. The little hotel in the city with the window open. The fresh cut flowers resemble the silk ones in the photograph of my grandmother, 1948. Standing on top of the mountain, arms stretched to the wind, Buenos Aires. Her parachute did not open, her taxes went unpaid. Re-fun. Deep sea diving her mask filled up with tears. Two years from now she will attend a wedding or a funeral. Her dress will be long and blue. It will drag beneath her feet. I am alone here, so there
are four of us. I try to keep from wanting the morphine. I pray with both hands.
Posted by garth at 07:03 PM | Comments (1)
Mon Bon Ami
I have never opened my mouth before
today (why do I look both ways
before crossing the one way river–
running down stream on the
blood of Indians) One man pulled
the lever because the other man did.
Infinite homuncular regress and I cannot stop
exorcizing. He shook uncontrollably
the hand of every man woman and
grandfather clock stopped working
six months after he was born. Infinity
is the opposite of impossible
and both are nothing more
than the ocean opening up.
Posted by garth at 07:02 PM | Comments (1)
April 04, 2005
What Daedalus Began We Have Tried To Finish
A seaplane leaves the river
and I am awestruck
by its amphibious ways.
It seems so strange
to build anything with
such intent. A human
contrivance of sky and water
rising towards clouds, also sky and water.
Invisible thread pulls it aloft as two geese
protest the noise saying, watch us and see
how it is done.
Posted by Josh at 07:56 PM | Comments (5)
Navigation
for KC
Emboldened hands roam the skin’s languid map
and chart the naked lanes contained between
neck, breast and belly. Magnetic bodies careen
towards each other, their oblong orbits snap
into place. Sunlight is skewed to a stop.
The day’s colour rises from sleep and streams
like pale ink from window to door. Unseen
fingers, cunning beneath the sheets, go tap,
tap, tap at the trailhead then softly track
a path along your spine. We fall forward
through these long minutes, our small weariness
enclosed in the heart’s geologic ache.
Gravity pulls sleepily at our torpid blood;
the slow earth seems to turn a little less.
Posted by Josh at 05:01 PM | Comments (4)
April 03, 2005
Catechism (revision 4-28)
As we study lists of words, I sit
and nod whenever you ask a question.
Job-like, the words make sense, almost easier
than English, but not easy to separate
from the left-handedness we share.
William Wilson does not share this, the mirror,
the red faces, the green markers. You color code
arbitrary expressions, like “darse cuenta de”
or “enamorarse de” and question my ethnicity.
The opposing left thumbs twist the table
into M.C.Escher sketches, and I wonder,
who is drawing who?
It is a series of words, or questions
that reflects us, and dissipates prepositional phrases
that we incorporate ourselves. What if,
on the subject, “A pesar de” difficulties,
we separate? What do you think? Are you,
“Esforzarse por”, by dint of, a strengthless talent?
Though you are Salvadorean and I am Mexican,
we are Mexican, combined. Your feral eyes find
that my left-handedness is not the equal match of yours.
Yours is years of Catholic school and answers.
Mine is Catholic school and forgetting Lent.
After studying, we walk under an umbrella built for one.
As we talk, we eat the words with beans and rice.
As we hold the umbrella, we trade hands for a second
and mention salvation before our shoulders become.
As I drive off you stand at the elevator, and hum
a realization of Ana Gabriel, while my cell phone
imitates that Latin beat. You look up,
then press the elevator button with your smaller hand.
Posted by tony at 11:14 PM | Comments (3)