Poemunity — your poem community

On Tuesday on the way to Tween Time Alison is all bubbly with guess-whos and guess-whats. “Guess who really stole Mrs. Bagwell's ring?” “Guess what Mrs. Bagwell is doing now?” “Guess what you and I are going to do this Friday?” I hold my hand up. “Whoa! One guess at a time, please.”

1 The nineish summer-skinny imp-boy veers the bicycle he has no notion yet of trusting off the sidewalk, where the squashed mulberries form many contusions. Riding as though and as though on an animal (maybe his bike should have gazelle eyes) he is hatching plans somehow angelically pristine of doubt between them and fruition. He dumps the bike on this side of the jungle gyms, while cottonwood foam blows up from the branch, and wind imparts the grass two sibling greens, and parents show their callow half-formed centers cajoling children. He is alone, and sets himself to picking clover; whole minutes pass when all he does is increase one bouquet of grass-high nondescript white clover blossoms. There must be a million in the field not in his hand. He lays the fistful down and takes a roofing nail out of his pocket, and with it and his eldritch patience awls through-holes in his foam-grips. He twists the stems into a stalk he tapers, pinches off, and jams into the handlebars, only to watch the blossoms fall apart and over. He tries and fails again, incredulous now the ornament he planned as though designing a contraption, some trebuchet or hovercraft half-specified and magic, will not work on mere enthusiasm. His tantrum comes on suddenly, a spastic little stomping dance across the grass, and ends without his having made a sound. He is off the way he came. They are not brutal, the feebly dreamt surrounding houses, crops striving in the dirt, child-rearing habits lapsed and current, like childhood diseases. The bric-a-brac on his bedroom floor that damns him to time. But neither are they tender of that thing his paltry ruined posy, the fanning homely crumbs of perfect whim, is evidence of. 2 The hangdog rookie lifeguard shuffles in already delegated an action item involving a stepladder, a spray bottle, and a biohazard bag. The dim guttering aura of his authority tries to fill the locker room, as does the smell of sock, and calms imperfectly the preteens disobeying rule eleven regarding horseplay. The kid attains the utmost, handicapable shower stall, yanks the curtain and deploys his ladder, ascending three rungs of his portable Golgotha and staring as though straining to make out St. Paycheck in a stained glass window. The bottle and empty plastic sack slump at his sides, props whose ritual has slipped his mind, or tools of tradesman or physician agape at a humdinger, for damned if not nine feet up the cinder blocks, improbably massive, glistening, and cantilevered, there does not jut a load of crap. He says, almost quietly, already showing awareness of those situations where resort to melodrama will not help, but still somehow reluctant to let go of being someone singled out by fate, “You have got to be motherfucking kidding me.” No poo-flinger or projectile buttor titters from the bench. The sun, supremely supercilious in the skylights, mums; the ceiling fans the shit perhaps was aimed at spin an rpm too fast for one to follow. The dented cubby rows and columns retain the continence of safe-deposit boxes. If he does not punch out and not come back, the lifeguard shall be our savior in ways we scarcely dreamt or paid him for, thinking all he had to do was watch our children. As for the mystery of whether one is being kidded, it is his to bear. No ceo of pooldom makes that much. 3 The corner drugstore lends the cause a spigot; the cause runs hoses to the parking lot, and proto-nubile junior-high girls lure out of the intersection, by sign and banner, ten perverts an hour. Shucked garden-snail of an errand-runner, five dollars gets you a sort of car wash, and gets the wrestling team closer to their travel fund objective. Small talk with the game and patient coach will pleasantly derail you, as the squad swarms with half-grasped purpose in your service. One is dutiful and has a bucket. One is cheery with a rag. The rowdy buck for the nozzle, the second-rowdiest fleeing when one prevails: rinser-off of quarter panels and future quarterbacks, broad-shouldered as though tapped for it, as though for violin or chess. Can he see, from where he is, the rainbow that he issues, the laughter-stippled day convened for him and his? Days to come he is hawking two-dollar Jujubes out of a knapsack in the alley by the multiplex; there fall to him the odd, ambivalent vagina-samplings behind the Sonic Burger, and on his cast the day he tries to ollie the planters at the bank, a turquoise heart to dot the i in Brandi. We are going to be all right; good supervisors abound; our grab-ass shall be moderated, and those who tskare bound to say I knew you when. We need be lots of things, but never lonely.

The unclean spirits cry out in the body Or mind of the guest Ellen in a loud voice Torment me not, and in the fury of her unclean Hands beating the air in some kind of unending torment— Nobody witnessing could possibly know the event That cast upon her the spell of this enchantment. Almost all the guests are under some kind of enchantment: Of being poor day after day in the same body; Of being witness still to some obscene event; Of listening all the time to somebody’s voice Whispering in the ear things divine or unclean, In the quotidian of unending torment. One has to keep thinking there was some source of torment, Something that happened someplace else, unclean. One has to keep talking in a reasonable voice About things done, say, by a father’s body To or upon the body of Ellen, in enchantment Helpless, still by the unforgotten event Enchanted, still in the old forgotten event A prisoner of love, filthy Ellen in her torment, Guest Ellen in the dining hall in her body, Hands beating the air in her enchantment, Sitting alone, gabbling in her garbled voice The narrative of the spirits of the unclean. She is wholly the possessed one of the unclean. Maybe the spirits came from the river. The enchantment Entered her, maybe, in the Northeast Kingdom. The torment, A thing of the waters, gratuitous event, Came up out of the waters and entered her body And lived in her in torment and cried out in her voice. It speaks itself over and over again in her voice, Cursing maybe or not a familiar obscene event Or only the pure event of original enchantment From the birth of the river waters, the pure unclean Rising from the source of things, in a figure of torment Seeking out Ellen, finding its home in her poor body. Her body witness is, so also is her voice, Of torment coming from unknown event; Unclean is the nature and name of the enchantment.

The unclean spirits cry out in the body Or mind of the guest Ellen in a loud voice Torment me not, and in the fury of her unclean Hands beating the air in some kind of unending torment— Nobody witnessing could possibly know the event That cast upon her the spell of this enchantment. Almost all the guests are under some kind of enchantment: Of being poor day after day in the same body; Of being witness still to some obscene event; Of listening all the time to somebody’s voice Whispering in the ear things divine or unclean, In the quotidian of unending torment. One has to keep thinking there was some source of torment, Something that happened someplace else, unclean. One has to keep talking in a reasonable voice About things done, say, by a father’s body To or upon the body of Ellen, in enchantment Helpless, still by the unforgotten event Enchanted, still in the old forgotten event A prisoner of love, filthy Ellen in her torment, Guest Ellen in the dining hall in her body, Hands beating the air in her enchantment, Sitting alone, gabbling in her garbled voice The narrative of the spirits of the unclean. She is wholly the possessed one of the unclean. Maybe the spirits came from the river. The enchantment Entered her, maybe, in the Northeast Kingdom. The torment, A thing of the waters, gratuitous event, Came up out of the waters and entered her body And lived in her in torment and cried out in her voice. It speaks itself over and over again in her voice, Cursing maybe or not a familiar obscene event Or only the pure event of original enchantment From the birth of the river waters, the pure unclean Rising from the source of things, in a figure of torment Seeking out Ellen, finding its home in her poor body. Her body witness is, so also is her voice, Of torment coming from unknown event; Unclean is the nature and name of the enchantment.

What we built to hold us, the year's memory, menus and daytrips, after a while came loose. Those nights we balanced on each other's mistakes, cradling our wine: twigs those branches now. Who knew what lived there? She she she called one bird. What lived there knew its place. Another bird splits its nest wide, hinges the gap with spider silk, learning to give, to give, to give until breaking. Only then— either one gives until breaking or one does not.

I approached the luminous stranger who came to me from darkness in a gown of lettuce leaves, in a velvet cloak of green that appeared at first another piece of dark, but pulled apart into the glow-sphere that danced in swaying steps, the lucent majesty that slipped toward me from the reigning silence black above my cage. Oh extravagant—and were my teeth too sharp to greet or sharp enough? I do not understand now what was meant to happen and what was a mistake—but know the bursting, the sickening snap of ecstasy wrenched back to the body and the green gown flung in crippled circles traced like diagrams of wasting moons above my head—or portals to another world, I thought, but as I thought, the shriek dissolved, the body crumpled from the air and landed on its side beneath the salt lick. All night I tended the wasted skin and careful, brought it water, alfalfa, made a bed of cedar chips and tried to gather molecules of breath that floated from the plant shelf. When I remembered morning, I began to cry, began to pray for night to stay until the green took shape again and if that shape were gone, I prayed for night to stay, to be held in the same forever-dark in which I first looked up and saw the gentle body, and saw the graceful swaying of the stranger coming as if for me—now I do not know—but then, as if for me, and all my loneliness gone.

Where do you want my heart now? Placed next to yours on your pale skin so that I will fall in love with your sweaty pain I have heard your bones crack the dry cement that leafed the frenzied spirit within I witnessed its wildness escape into your body screaming kissy words while your fingers plucked at my guitar your eyes were Koyoti’s & Ska-la-la’s trying to rip a path to my soul & I froze there in my manly state knowing there’s nothing that I can do

It came with those scratches from all their belt buckles, palm-dark with their sweat like the stock of a gun: an arc of pickmarks cut clear through the lacquer where all the players before me once strummed—once thumbed these same latches where it sleeps in green velvet. Once sang, as I sing, the old songs. There’s no end, there’s no end to this world, everlasting. We crumble to dust in its arms.

The day upturned, flooded with sunlight, not a single cloud. I squint into the glare, cautious even then of bright emptiness. We sit under shade, Tía Lucia showing me how white folks dine,the high life. I am about to try my first oyster, Tía spending her winnings from the slots on a whole dozen, the glistening valves wet and private as a cheek’s other side, broken open before us.Don’t be shy. Take it all in at once. Flesh and sea grit, sweet meat and brine, a taste I must acquire. In every split shell, the coast’s silhouette: bodies floating in what was once their home.

On the other end of the line he sounds like my brother but is my father telling me about Coony who is fat. His whole body like a stomach round all round, fat even on his head. Eighty and heavy. How he joked Coony about his weight, joking him about a tow truck he’d need to haul him out of the tub like an old sunken ship pulled out of the gulf of blues, leaving whirlpools in the porcelain. “Quit all that eating and drinking,” my daddy say he said to him. “Quit pointing in that garden and reach down to get it.” My daddy say he joked him, ribbed him good. (And I know my daddy laughed gap-toothed, his mouth, throat, chest, and gut wide open for the signifying jest. His gray hair striking back time.) He sounds like my brother when he was a little boy, digging in the encyclopedia for the cause of something obscure, occult, trying to figure out how old Coony slipped in the bathtub that was always there and died like that. Baby Sister called to tell it first and she wasn’t joking after all like my daddy thought she was, Death a sad trick children pull. On the other end of the line my father sounds like my brother now. I know how Dying, bitter or tender, is the dark water that keeps us young. And this gulf of blues, deep and shiny, the only place to be between Time and Eternity.