Henri Cole

Liar, I thought, kneeling with the others, how can He love me and hate what I am? The dome of St. Peter's shone yellowish gold, like butter and eggs.My God, I prayed anyhow, as if made in the image and likeness of Him. Nearby, a handsome priest looked at me like a stone; I looked back, not desiring to go it alone. The college of cardinals wore punitive red. The white spine waved to me from his white throne. Being in a place not my own, much less myself, I climbed out, a beast in a crib. Somewhere a terrorist rolled a cigarette. Reason, not faith, would change him.

There's a black bear in the apple tree and he won't come down. I can hear him panting, like an athlete. I can smell the stink of his body. Come down, black bear. Can you hear me? The mind is the most interesting thing to me; like the sudden death of the sun, it seems implausible that darkness will swallow it or that anything is lost forever there, like a black bear in a fruit tree, gulping up sour apples with dry sucking sounds, or like us at the pier, somber and tired, making food from sunlight, you saying a word, me saying a word, trying hard, though things were disintegrating. Still, I wanted you, your lips on my neck, your postmodern sexuality. Forlorn and anonymous: I didn't want to be that. I could hear the great barking monsters of the lower waters calling me forward. You see, my mind takes me far, but my heart dreams of return. Black bear, with pale-pink tongue at the center of his face, is turning his head, like the face of Christ from life. Shaking the apple boughs, he is stronger than I am and seems so free of passion— no fear, no pain, no tenderness. I want to be that. Come down, black bear, I want to learn the faith of the indifferent.

Born, I was born. Tears represent how much my mother loves me, shivering and steaming like a horse in rain. My heart as innocent as Buddha's, my name a Parisian bandleader's, I am trying to stand. Father is holding me and blowing in my ear, like a glassblower on a flame. Stars on his blue serge uniform flaunt a feeling of formal precision and stoicism. Growing, I am growing now, as straight as red pines in the low mountains. Please don't leave, Grandmother Pearl. I become distressed watching the president's caisson. We, we together move to the big house. Shining, the sun is shining on my time line. Tears, copper-hot tears, spatter the house when Father is drunk, irate, and boisterous. The essence of self emerges shuttling between parents. Noel, the wet nimbus of Noel's tongue draws me out of the pit. I drop acid with Rita. Chez Woo eros is released. I eat sugar like a canary from a grown man's tongue. The draft card torn up; the war lost. I cling like a cicada to the latticework of memory. Mother: "I have memories, too. Don't let me forget them." Father: "I'm glad the journey is set. I'm glad I'm going." Crows, the voices of crows leaving their nests at dawn, circle around, as I sit in a gold kimono, feeling the subterranean magma flows, the sultry air, the hand holding a pen, bending to write, Thank you, Mother and Father, for creating me.

for Janet and Christopher Half-eagle, half-lion, the fabulous animal struts, saber-clawed but saintly, a candlewicked ornament dangling from our rickety sugar pine. Butternut pudding in our bellies. His reindeer and sleigh hurried here and gone—thank God for us childless folks. Almost:   the lovelocked Griffins on the sofa, sockfooted, hearing gas and a kiddy heart in her tummy— a life more imaginary than real, though one is dazzled by gold that fills the egg unbroken. We feed her crumpets and listen again: The lamb’s a hungry bugger, even snug from earth’s imponderable fury. Tomorrow, in a spurt by jet I’m home. Clumsy as a puppy I’ll scale the flightstairs into the nosecone, luggage banging at my sides, enter the egg- shaped cabin and await the infrared climb toward space. Tell me one thing true? If I could count the way things slip from us: Mother’s fur gloves, Sunday’s benediction, the dead gone before us, love’s rambler on the prairie—all displaced as we buckle in our shuttle, jetbound on a screaming runway, gravity pulling at us castaways, more mammal than bird, subtle leg-weary griffins made manifest, arrowing towards home. How do we ignore it: the attenuated being of our age, the bittersweet collapse of dominoes mooned around our pine? Withered with hatred from his quarter, Saint Stephen even at death rolled mercifully over in high holiness. Sonless, wifeless, nine thousand feet from land, I roll the lozenge on my tongue, youthful habit for ache of any kind, parting a survivor (Wait!), love rescuing me from the fringe.

After the death of my father, I locked myself in my room, bored and animal-like. The travel clock, the Johnnie Walker bottle, the parrot tulips—everything possessed his face, chaste and obscure. Snow and rain battered the air white, insane, slathery. Nothing poured out of me except sensibility, dilated. It was as if I were sub-born—preverbal, truculent, pure—with hard ivory arms reaching out into a dark and crowded space, illuminated like a perforated silver box or a little room in which glowing cigarettes came and went, like souls losing magnitude, but none with the battered hand I knew.

Dusty and treeless, the street sloped beneath us. Somewhere a hammer made thunderclaps, forging the night-sky. Then the children, seeing us, dashed from the Moorish houses, vigorously shouting, vying for position, while the bravest, in worn underpants and plastic sandals, climbed a high crater-like wall and plunged, with murderous cries, into the Roman pool where blue-lipped fish waited. Ah, those glorious soaked heads, spiked like palm fronds! Seeing one in our group clutch her purse— repelled by the wet black princes who shivered in circles of yellow mud and begged from us— I felt ashamed. In the brief African twilight, a canary chirped something shrewdly about avarice. Far off, in the little neighborhood where I grew—with neat cement walkways and crab-apple blossoms— money ran through the fingers of our house, with nothing much to record its loss but unhappiness: one of us ironing servilely, one of us sobbing in a bedroom, one of us sleeping on a rifle, one of us seizing another by the hair, demanding the animal-like submission we thought was love. Sunday evening. Mother is wearing a big cotton shift and tweezing her eyebrows. Her head is a thicket of hairpins. In the round hand-mirror that parodies her face, the world looks greater than it is. I am next to bathe in the water of the poor earth, reused by each of us in order of birth. Gray with sodium and grit, it covers me like a black robe, and yet I feel exalted. Soon the violent rain, like wet Sahara sand, would fall, scrubbing the hot labyrinthine corridors of shuttered houses and aimless dogs, where the sparse life is purgative and inexhaustible, where little pilfering hands moved freely in and out of my trouser pockets, though there were no diamonds except those the eyes mined.

My father lived in a dirty-dish mausoleum, watching a portable black-and-white television, reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which he preferred to Modern Fiction. One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease, except the one that guarded his corpse found holding a tumbler of Bushmills. "Dead is dead," he would say, an antipreacher. I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet and some motor oil—my inheritance. Once I saw him weep in a courtroom— neglected, needing nursing—this man who never showed me much affection but gave me a knack for solitude, which has been mostly useful.

Hanging out the wash, I visit the cats. "I don't belong to nobody," Yang insists vulgarly. "Yang," I reply, "you don't know nothing." Yin, an orange tabby, agrees but puts kindness ahead of rigid truth. I admire her but wish she wouldn't idolize the one who bullies her. I once did that. Her silence speaks needles when Yang thrusts his ugly tortoiseshell body against hers, sprawled in my cosmos. "Really, I don't mind," she purrs—her eyes horizontal, her mouth an Ionian smile, her legs crossed nobly in front of her, a model of cat Nirvana— "withholding his affection, he made me stronger.'

It is the hour of lamps. On our knees my mother and I, still young, color with crayons threadbare nap on the living room rug. Though there is no money, no one seems to care. We are self-possessed as bugs waving their antennae through cracks in the kitchen's linoleum floor. When Father begins to read from the red gilt volume in his lap, a circle of light encapsulates us like hearts in a womb. Except their marriage is already dead. I know this though I'm only six. So we visit pharaohs, a boatman on the Nile, Crusaders eating grapes on a beach. Life escapes with all its sadness while two tragic Greek poets inhabit Father's voice. Who'd know I am just a boy when he begins a stoic moral tale concerning a dull provincial doctor's young French wife? If Mother, in French, begins to sing to herself, I know she's had enough. Crayon stubs litter the crumbling rug. Our prostrate cat sneezes at the dust in her fur. And cries from a swallow remind us one swallow doesn't make a summer.

I'm sorry I cannot say I love you when you say you love me. The words, like moist fingers, appear before me full of promise but then run away to a narrow black room that is always dark, where they are silent, elegant, like antique gold, devouring the thing I feel. I want the force of attraction to crush the force of repulsion and my inner and outer worlds to pierce one another, like a horse whipped by a man. I don't want words to sever me from reality. I don't want to need them. I want nothing to reveal feeling but feeling—as in freedom, or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond, or the sound of water poured in a bowl.