Adrian C. Louis

Colleen, this is the time of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my virulent love for you. The Cowturdville Star-Times, which usually has a typo in every damn column, says the grasshoppers this year “are as big as Buicks” and that’s not bad, but then we get two eight-point pages of who had dinner with whom at the bowling alley café and who went shopping at Target in Rapid City and thus the high church of Adrian the Obscure is sacked. Even my old Dylan tapes are fading, becoming near-comic antiques. The grasshoppers are destroying our yard and they’re as big as my middle finger saluting God. The grass is yellow. The trees look like Agent Orange has hit but it’s only the jaw-work of those drab armored insects who dance in profusion and pure destruction. Sweet woman, dear love of my life, when you’re not angry and sputtering at everything and everyone, you become so childlike, so pure. Your voice seems to have grown higher recently, almost a little-girl pitch. Today, like most days, I have you home for your two-hour reprieve from the nursing home prison. We’re sitting at the picnic table in the backyard staring at the defoliation of lilacs, brain matter, and honeysuckle. You’re eating a Hershey Bar and a crystal glob of snot is hanging from your nose. I reach over, pinch it off, and wipe it on my jeans. You thrust the last bite of chocolate into my mouth as a demented grasshopper jumps onto your ear. You scream. I howl with laughter until you do too. Happiness comes with a price. This is the times of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my swarming love for you. Last night on PBS some lesioned guy being screwed to death by legions of viral invisibility blurted the great cliché of regret: I wish I could be twenty again and know what I know now … My own regrets are equally foolish. And, I wonder, how the hell is it I’ve reached a place where I’d give what’s left of my allotment of sunsets and frozen dinners for some unholy replay of just one hour in some nearly forgotten time and place? Darling, in the baked soil of the far west, I first saw the ant lions, those hairy little bugs who dug funnel traps for ants in the dry earth. At twelve, looking over the edge of one such funnel surrounded by a circle of tiny stones in the sand, I aimed a beam of white light from my magnifying glass and found I could re-create a hell of my own accord. Poverty and boredom made me cruel early on. The next summer while digging postholes I found a cache of those grotesque yellow bugs we called Children of the Earth so I piled matches atop them and barbecued their ugliness. I was at war with insects. In my fifteenth summer I got covered with ticks in the sagebrush and that fall I nervously lost my cherry in a cathouse called the Green Front and got cursed with crabs but that’s not what I want to sing about at all… come on now. This is no bug progression. This ain’t no insect sonata. This is only misdirection, a sleight of hand upon the keys and the unholy replay of just one hour in some nearly forgotten time and place that I’d like to return to will remain myth or maybe a holy, tumescent mystery. And let’s not call these bloodwords POETRY or a winter count of desperate dreams when reality is much simpler. Colleen, I swear to Christ this is the time of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my sparkling love for you.

But it’s too late to say you’re sorry. — The Zombies I Man, if you’re dead, why are you leading me to drink after five sober years? Sonny, can I get a witness? I had a Snow White vision of the prodigal son returning to America that day of my final hangover. I tried to clear the mixture of cobwebs and shooting stars from my brain with spit-warm Budweiser, but the hair of the dog just was not doing the trick. I ended up pummeling myself seven times that day and named each egg white load for a Disney dwarf. The first was Dopey. The final was Sleepy, I think, or Droopy. II Last year you scrawled a letter to me about your first and final visit to the Vietnam Memorial and how your eyes reflected off the shiny black stone and shot back into your brain like guidons unfurling the stench of cordite and the boy screams of men whose souls evaporated into morning mists over blue-green jungles. You had to be there, you said. That’s where you caught the cancer, you said. III Sonny. Tonight I had a dream of Mom’s death twenty years too late and now my eyes will not close like I imagine the lid on her cheap casket did. I was not there when she died. Home on leave from Basic Training, you stood in for me because I was running scared through the drugged-out alleys of America, hiding from those Asian shadows that would finally ace you and now, now in the dark victory of your Agent Orange cancer, it gives me not one ounce of ease to say fuck Nixon and Kissinger, fuck all the generals and all the armies of God and fuck me, twenty years too late. IV History is history and thank God for that. When we were wise-ass American boys in our fifth grade geography class, we tittered over the prurient-sounding waves of Lake Titticaca …Titti … ca-ca and we never even had the slightest clue that Che was camping out en las montañas de Bolivia … We never knew American chemists would kill you slicker than slant-eyed bullets. V Damn Sonny. Five sober years done squeaked by like a silent fart and I’m on autopilot, sitting in a bar hoisting suds with ghosts, yours and my slowly evolving own. When we were seventeen with fake I.D.’s, we got into the Bucket of Blood in Virginia City and slurped sloe gin fizzes while the innocent jukebox blared “She’s Not There” by the Zombies. Later that drunken night you puked purple splotches onto my new, white Levis and a short, few years into your future this lost nation would award you two purple hearts, one of which your mother pressed into my hand that bright day we filed you under dry desert dirt.

Numanah, Grandfather, grant me the grace of a new song far from this lament of lame words and fossils of a losing game. No more flat pebbles skimmed between the wetness of tongue and thigh and eye again! I never asked to be the son of a stained mattress who contemplated venison stew and knew the shame hidden in grease clouds stuck to the wall behind the woodstove where Grandmother cooked. I only wanted to run far, so far from Indian land. And, God damn it, when I was old enough I did. I loitered in some great halls of ivy and allowed the inquisition of education: electric cattle prods placed lovingly to the lobes of my earth memories. I carried the false spirit force of sadness wrapped in a brown sack in the pocket of a worn, tweed coat. In junkie alleyways I whispered of forgotten arrows in the narrow passages of my own discarded history. Then, when I was old enough I ran back to Indian land. Now I’m thinking of running from here. Pine Ridge, South Dakota February 1988

I flew into Denver April. Rock salt and sand peppered the asphalt reflecting myself on a downtown street where I’d paused on my route to smell lilacs. The wanton winds chortled wickedly over remnant snows in gray clumps of doom and my heart soared gladly at winter’s death but an hour later I had whiskey breath at a dead end bar full of Indians. A Winnebago woman waltzed with me and told me how handsome I truly was so I bought her drinks and felt her hips and somewhere between the grinds and dips she lifted my wallet and split.