Carl Marcum

A cigarette kiss in the desert. The wind-proof arc of flame sparks inside the speeding Buick. Menthol: a break from the monotony of highway nicotine— most intimate of drugs. Make this mean sorrow or thermodynamics, whatever small gesture there is time for. Light another one, the vainglorious interstate dusk and ash—the long, silver tooth. This shirtless abandon, this ninety-mile-an-hour electric laugh. The edges of windshield, haphazard chatter. The clatter of the hubcap and the thunderclap: the white-hot retinal memory of your life as a Joshua tree. Permanence in the passenger seat. This long haul, this first drag—nothing like cinnamon, nothing like the iron taste on the back of your mortal tongue.

The silence that was neither Spanish nor English was my prayer. —Luis Alberto Urrea 1. Last night I dreamt I was Pancho Villa— ragged, bandoliered, reckless. I dreamt my poetry at the end of a pistol, felt it kick nearly out of my hand. But this morning I awoke again white and assimilated into these cobwebs of my half-self. When did I forget my mother? Sometimes Spanish syllables creak like wobbly shopping cart wheels, I have to lean against accent, fill myself with verbs:necesitar, hablar, poder. 2. Half,medio, milkweed, Carlos Gringo, Carlos Murphy. Part mexicano, part Kentucky hillbilly, I’ve angloed my way through this life— hablando español de conveniencia, nunca pensando en la bendición.

Start this with the invocation: a seventy-seven Pinto, an eastbound freeway, two boys a few months from their driver’s license. It happens again because you’ve said it. You sit in the back seat, a ghost of red vinyl, to listen to these boys—one of whom was you, the one along for the ride—talk brave about cheerleaders and socket wrenches as they pass a stolen cigarette between them. They don’t know you’re there, wouldn’t believe in you should they look backstage, backseat. The boys are driving back from an October orchard where they’d gone to see leaves change. You remember:orange, brown, as though you’d just seen those leaves, because in this proximity to yourself—the boy in the passenger seat—you are thinking the same thing, and each of your in- carnations feels like they’ve thought this before. Your ghost, your present tense thinks that maybe this isn’t right. Now you’re along for the ride. These boys haven’t cuffed up against their own mortality yet, though one of them is sick. The other one, driving and picking at the thin hair falling from his scalp, will die soon, because what lurks in his dark blood can be cured by medical science. And that cure is what will kill him, as it leaves him weak, unable to fight off infection in his lungs. But that comes later. You are here with them now to find out what you owe to whom—your life, mortgaged to one of these boys and you’ve never been able to rectify that debt. You are the stage direction, a ghost backstage, wanting a spotlight, a soapbox a soliloquy. Dissolve back into your life, like sugar in tea—exit this scene now, stage left. * You are the apparition again in your mother’s house. You follow yourself down the yellow hallway to the ringing phone in the kitchen. You already know who’s calling, the way you knew then—when you were the self you’re haunting. Your friend is dead. You know this even before his sister tells you—but because your ghost is too close, the boy can feel your grief, but can’t feel his own. And you did know then, didn’t you? You knew that morning, that the earth awakes closest to the sun—four days into every new year. And Lazarus, dead now, four days. Roll away the stone. Believe in something besides the past. Awaken from this dream like a man called out from a cave. It happens this way each time: a bourbon breakdown in January rain—weeping an invocation, cursing corollary. * Can you go to Tom’s grave today and mandate him back to this life? Should you cue him from the wing like a stage direction? Would he damn you—a sadness, a gravestone on your chest, for calling him into this mortal suffering? If you had been in Houston that day he’d have died anyway. You’re a fool to think you can bargain across the river. Haunting the past won’t stop it from happening each time, exactly the same way. Won’t stop your heart from breaking like a glass decanter, brown whisky sliding mercury across the tile.