Knar Gavin

For Marshall “Major” Taylor A hoot is a hilarious person. Perhaps train scream or owl, jeer. Often done by mouth. A man may widen owl wide and give one away. Hoots may result in bans, as in, “the crowd ‘hooted’ the track star clean out of the sport.” Sometimes a hoot may be kept and saved for later. For instance, “They didn’t give a hoot.” A woman may sharpen a hoot in the toolshed with the bread knives. So there may be a toolshed, and this may be where the knives are kept and the hoots. They come from chambers — come at you with those wings. So when waiting in the tool- shed hoot runs its owl talon over the knives. Else it comes at you, other it stares. • In 1890, George “Little Chocolate” Dixon put his foot on the world and held it there, waiting for the Major to come. These were the days when extra layers of name were glazed on — a way of saying both more and less and not at all. In the case of the two-term moniker, permit either/or — you may grab from the bag “Little.” In France, Marshall “Major” Taylor was le Nègre Volant— you may grab from the bag “Flying.” • Sometimes it’s a bad investment to self-publish autobiography —what a hoot. As in, pauperism may wait for you with its long needles readying to blow you out. Under the pauper’s empty ton a man gets baby-bird gaping with hunger. The Major puts his wings inside and dies in Cook County Hospital where it’s too late. Hoot given, hoot held back. Ice-white nurses come warm in their linens to fold back the wings beside themselves, like any good cook come to shut a mouth. This case of hoot has called for leg and wing and swoop. Rise up, Major. Ghost-man old Birdie Munger’s bike — take back the front, it’s time to owl.

He was trying to teach me to economize with my language.Strindberg gray he said, instead of and I thought, sad stuff; plays. Okay: born, rented room, to Dad & Mom business & bar, how could you not? Or thought, I cannot be your Lithuania nor her other Armenia, emptied into river if not skein-tangled senseless. He won’t say her name and not a word of the thitherings. Only that she was lost. Don’t speak the heavy hinges, the crushed-bud breaking of taste from language. That sort of excess has no place in the new economy. Strindberg gray, say, when one thinks only January, January, January. Of the Occurrence as recurrent. A single gunshot in Dempster’s cistern, the echo chambers of sleep. The gray lot of days in low-light hospitals, Strindberg. I’ll call him gray, his sitting heavy. And her so Strindberg with veil and rose, her poised in shadow at the door. Funereal nails sunk into knees would be dripping were they not so goddamn gray. Excess was for days when my mother sat turning grape leaves with three sets of pockets: Turkish, English, & Armenian, plus lemon to dry it all out. By ten, they’d sewn up two; said one is more than enough. “English, only, Sanossian. You will speak what we speak.” I don’t know what it’s like to lose a language. Instead, Strindberg gray, I say, when I want to bring his lost girl back. Strindberg gray, though I cannot take from him January, July, or the months of coping between. When my mother leafs through me in her memory banks, bits of face are missing; sometimes I’m limbless or smear. Gray even scentless, and still all Strindberg. I tell him, I raise her: be darlings and come scream with me from all the pockets sewn over. Maybe by late summer we’ll be humming: Tennessee yellow; Tennessee, Tennessee.

The news, descriptive. Rhetoric, void. It’s finally here:inarticulate brachiopods have no matching teeth and sockets and their valves are held together only by muscles —