Kate Gale

There were words I had to leave behind, moonlight, backward ponies. Leaving flowers out seemed safest. Trying for something surreal, A trouble free rise of smoke and lavender. No not lavender. Any shade of purple is best left alone. Perhaps a jaundiced smoke rising in my poetry would be best, although I like violet haze. Many a summer morning, while other folks are eating bagels, lox, cinnamon rolls, I rummage through old cider houses, find words like obdurate, bipolar, manic, cold heeled. But writing about love, well, not even searches to junkyards as far away as Peking turn up the slightest unused vowel. So, I make words up, create my own language. You Chinese me in the roofy mornings. You Japanese my legs in the spidery evenings. Our children are the leggy offspring of centipede afternoons. Our bedroom is the Acropolis. You temple me backward. I could bless you all the way to shadowland. If we were not already steepled there, our undergarments ruffianed off onto chairs. You catapulted silence, dogkissed, catlicked my paws held my squeaks and rattles. Where the rest had said, What’s this? You said, it’s mine.

Today is a Tuesday, one of many. He has a girl he loves every Tuesday, her day off. He burns at the fine fire of her conscience, tells her they’ll be married someday. He has a wife, Doreen, a freckle-faced fat thing who harbors resentment that during her Tuesday at her mother’s, he insists on going to the movies. Rose petals he picks up in the neighbor’s yard end up at Tuesday’s feet and sprinkled through the sheets. Of course they must make love, since he sees her only once a week. Doreen requires sex after seeing her mother. He feels like an ox on Tuesday, powerful and massive. He tells this to Tuesday and to Doreen. Doreen tells him he is an ox a brute master of the air and his rightful bed. But Tuesday, who knows oxen are slow moving, dim witted, and castrated at birth, follows him home instead of playing her dulcimer, climbs the wall, watches him mounting his wife, leaves rose petals on his doorstep, takes the train to cornfields, steers and heifers watches the city disappear in rain. Thinks briefly of how tenderly he rose in her fingers while the remains of their breakfast, eggs and potatoes cooled on the wooden table with the tattered tablecloth.

You can’t imagine the goats who were my only friends as a child how they tore at my underwear, hitting their heads into my legs, playfully throwing me into the air. How their snores rattled the night. How their milk tasted sweet and thick and altogether wild. How they followed me through the orchard and up into the rocky fields above and ate blueberries through the afternoon. How at twilight I’d walk down, a hand on two goats’ backs and they’d talk me all the way down. How many times I was beaten about the face and shoulders and back. How the goat smell kept me from properly experiencing food. How I crept out to the goats in the night and slept very well there the goats licking my bruises as though I were sacred and wounded and divine.

What I like about your country she tells me is the toilets I wouldn’t mind bringing one home but it wouldn’t do much good she says she likes the bathtubs and the refrigerators but she is not so crazy about the tortillas which are not made properly or the cilantro which tastes like soap Also the freeways ruin the landscape and the children watch television when they could be playing soccer and the teenagers stare at their parents with bare faces that say give it to me and the abuelitos are like dogs to the children the children walk by with no respect mangoes here are not so good not enough rain and the women here have so many clothes I think your country has the most wonderful bathrooms and everyone has a house although tents would be nicer I think or boats or even just sleeping in a tree My family has a tree we live under but the tree has no toilet I grant you that.

Gertrude Stein. We could end there. But we won’t. Because we want to make meaning. Of something. to say something. Of value. In order that. It’s absolutely. The professor said. Wiggling his ears. In a satisfied way. And the students all said, Amen. That’s the way with critical acclaim. Absolutely. There are rooms. There are builders. There is a clock. There is a cake. There is a rope. There is a sounding to depths. But when she dies, what then? Who knew what it all meant? And when all the modernists are dead? The critics will babble and frenzy forever to find the nouns she never wrote between the crowded verbs and adverbs.

To my first love, I wept profusely. These tears confused the boy, and he would act. Generally, he took me out to eat. I grew fat, sobbing my way into some of the best restaurants in Richmond. My first husband ignored the initial shattering of tears. But if I went on grovelling, wailing long enough he’d collect me from the floor give me a bit more grocery money, wipe my eyes tell me it would be okay by and by. My second husband despised my tears. He’d seen women crawl and shake enough, said the vipers can enter a trance at will and let their best sobs heave ho to twist a man and bend him into shape. I trouble not this third man with my tears. Have in fact forgotten how to cry and in forgetting have grown steel eyes, a molten core like mad Vesuvius, am held in check by nothing but the weather and the whims of fate.