Barbara Hamby

The mockingbird says, hallelujah, coreopsis, I make the day bright, I wake the night-blooming jasmine. I am the duodecimo of desperate love, the hocus pocus passion flower of delirious retribution. You never saw such a bird, such a triage of blood and feathers, tongue and bone. O the world is a sad address, bitterness melting the tongues of babies, breasts full of accidental milk, but I can teach the flowers to grow, take their tight buds, unfurl them like flags in the morning heat, fat banners of scent, flat platters of riot on the emerald scene. I am the green god of pine trees, conducting the music of rustling needles through a harp of wind. I am the heart of men, the wild bird that drives their sex, forges their engines, jimmies their shattered locks in the dark flare where midnight slinks. I am the careless minx in the skirts of women, the bright moon caressing their hair, the sharp words pouring from their beautiful mouths in board rooms, on bar stools, in big city laundrettes. I am Lester Young’s sidewinding sax, sending that Pony Express message out west in the Marconi tube hidden in every torso tied tight in the corset of do and don’t, high and low, yes and no. I am the radio, first god of the twentieth century, broadcasting the news, the blues, the death counts, the mothers wailing when everyone’s gone home. I am sweeping through the Eustachian tubes of the great plains, transmitting through every ear of corn, shimmying down the spine of every Bible-thumping banker and bureaucrat, relaying the anointed word of the shimmering world. Every dirty foot that walks the broken streets moves on my wings. I speak from the golden screens. Hear the roar of my discord murdering the trees, screaming its furious rag, the fuselage of my revival-tent brag. Open your windows, slip on your castanets. I am the flamenco in the heel of desire. I am the dancer. I am the choir. Hear my wild throat crowd the exploding sky. O I can make a noise.

Every bus ride is theater, giddy schoolgirls trying on the tawdry masks of women, flirting with my nephew, red and green lights, shop windows piled high, gold glistered skeletal mannequins in slips of iridescent silk. At night in the wind blowing over the Pont Marie I hear Camille Claudel crying from the walls of her studio, and two days before Christmas Elliot and I stand miraculously alone before La Gioconde, follow her eyes, cracked surface of her skin like softest sand before the deep water of her mouth, and later standing in the cold our Buddhist gardienne Nadine tells me in rapid-fire French that in all things she tries to remain neutral,neutre,neutre, neutre, the only word finally I understand in the barrage tumbling out of her mouth like a waterfall, but I can’t be neutral, passion welling up in my heart for the exhausted maids, dapper men in berets, the madwoman on the PC bus, screaming,Salope,salope, as she descends at the Pont d’Ivry and everyone on the bus looking at each other,Whore? Who’s the whore here? or the chic older woman, leather pants baggy on her skinny shanks, reading a battered paperback Rimbaud as we take the bus to see Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales, the master himself as Chaucer, spinning his ribald stories of human folly, each one a mirror, and when I see myself in bus windows or store glass, the shock never wears off, for I recognize myself and see a stranger at the same time, because the minutes are racing by at the speed of light, and I am saying goodbye to Paris, to everyone, myself most of all, watching her disappear down the rue Jeanne d’Arc, and what can she possibly be thinking as she walks to the movies in the middle of this afternoon of her life?

A-bomb is how it begins with a big bang on page one, a calculator of sorts whose centrifuge begets bedouin, bamboozle, breakdance, and berserk, one of my mother's favorite words, hard knock clerk of clich é s that she is, at the moment going ape

There must be a Russian word to describe what has happened between us, like ostyt, which can be used for a cup of  tea that is too hot, but after you walk to the next room, and return, it is too cool; or perekhotet, which is to want something so much over months and even years that when you get it, you have lost the desire. Pushkin said, when he saw his portrait by Kiprensky, “It is like looking into a mirror, but one that flatters me.” What is the word for someone who looks into her friend’s face and sees once smooth skin gone like a train that has left the station in Petersburg with its wide avenues and nights at the Stray Dog Cafe, sex with the wrong men, who looked so right by candlelight, when everyone was young and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, painted or wrote all night but nothing good, drank too much vodka, and woke in the painful daylight with skin like fresh cream, books everywhere, Lorca on Gogol, Tolstoy under Madame de Sévigné, so that now, on a train in the taiga of  Siberia, I see what she sees — all my books alphabetized and on shelves, feet misshapen, hands ribbed with raised veins, neck crumpled like last week’s newspaper, while her friends are young, their skin pimply and eyes bright as puppies’, and who can blame her, for how lucky we are to be loved for even a moment, though I can’t help but feel like Pushkin, a rough ball of  lead lodged in his gut, looking at his books and saying, “Goodbye, my dear friends,” as those volumes close and turn back into oblong blocks, dust clouding the gold leaf that once shimmered on their spines.