Mark Rudman

How easily our lives could have been easier if our fathers hadn't done in whoever stood in their way. Did progress demand they set factories belching smoke like volcanoes? You're right to be dumbfounded as to why you're forced to spend your time making up for your ancestors' mistakes, waste this beautiful day restoring ruined shrines and temples so that the gods might not abandon Rome for good. There could be a turn about: after they were rid of the Etruscans, a few farsighted countrymen had the savvy to steal their fine sarcophagi designs, along with the booty. Decadence is your legacy. I hold out hope for satires, epigrams, and odes, but heaping on the gore is not an answer, and our plays are weak echoes of the Greeks. If you want to have some say in the way things are, put yourself in the hands of a higher order. Have faith in faith. Bow down to the gods who oversee and underwrite and sponsor. There's nothing empirical left to this empire now. What would have been routine raids on small fry republics—from Vietnam to the Isle of Man— are beaten back, and the opposition, in ecstatic mockery, turn our spoils to souvenir necklaces and key chains. The ancient city, riven by civil strife, escaped destruction by fanatic Bosnia and Iraq with their demonic submarines, bombers, and other dangerous toys, by a hairsbreadth. Self-absorbed, promiscuous, we've brought these evils on ourselves like people who, anticipating the worst from a routine physical, forswear doctors until their symptoms call for drastic measures; as only after the condom-clogged, gaseous, syringe-rich, toxic river overflows and floods the litter-free, segregated streets of the capital will the Rivers Network organize a mass cleanup on Earth Day. The young, lured always by the glitter of cities, find nothing cooler than the hotter— than-ever-before dance-crazes flown in from the clubs of Rio, Barcelona, or Berlin. How was a girl to know that marriage sucks the sap out of sex? And why not make it with the guests, especially if it's just the boost his mercurial career needs to rocket off... How are they to know the sexual spectacles began on their own ravaged ground? And these out-of-towners are so endlessly grateful for a dose of decadence because they "sure don't get pussy like this in Topeka." (The New Age victor is the one who gets the onlooker to come without anything physical happening between them.) "How does he think I know how to get the dry- cleaning-mogul's cock to stiffen, as if a good dis weren't hard to find, like 'you use your tongue like you're trying to remove a spot.'" Her husband, in his white tux, appeared nonchalant, but a second glance revealed a man slaphappy and dazed from one too many Zombies; either way, when the Titania II pulls into port she'll allow whoever has the best offer, captain or mutineer, Delano or Benito Cereno, to take her on the dance floor. Dalliance supplies what she needs for her shopping sprees which "this guy whose wedding ring I like never take off can't get through his head are necessary. He's so dense, like I show up in this designer dress on my 'allowance.' Men have no idea what it costs a girl to be truly glamorous in times like these— and when they land the commission remain clueless as to why they were chosen and not the other guy with the goody-two-shoes type wife." It's shattering to consider that these nerds, for whom watching's the real turn on, sprang from fierce, sturdy stock who in their youth conquered conquerors, brought down swaggering, gallant Hannibal, Pyrrhus, and Antiochus, dyeing the sea red with Punic blood. But the early Romans, the soldier-farmers, knew better than to double think what had to be done, and dug with the tools of the long-gone Sabines, and never neglected to cut the logs to honor mom's firm yet anxious request for firewood as shadows shifted on a far rise, night fell, and man and oxen were the same in their deep desire to lie down. Who is immune from ruin by time? Each generation wearier than the one before; these days no one deigns to have children until they are "professionally secure." And the media waits long and long to warn the idealists born during the baby-boom that the future is also being sabotaged: undone by sluggish sperm; hardened wombs. (after Horace, Odes, Book III, 6)

1 The woman stands on tiptoe to kiss the man and for a moment, with their twin-teal backpacks, parkas, and other gear— they look like one new creature. A mutation. 2 Seated in La Rosita their gear guards the table where they sip cafe con leche and lean forward, sitting tall, pelvises tilted forward, to talk—whisper?—their physical closeness almost embarrassing (but to whom?) at this early hour— light rivering in her chestnut hair, their foreheads almost touching as they sit further forward straddling their chairs toes pressed down, heels up, wrists crossed; a posture almost too intimate for a public space at breakfast but somehow right in the Spanish café. She says that while it is absurd to sell forsythia it is a small miracle to buy cactus on 107 th Street and Broadway. (If they’re strangers in Manhattan they seem more at home than I’ve ever been.) They listen to the brisk chatter and clatter of plates and music from the Spanish station which now plays “Yellow Submarine”— universal language?—“our friends are all aboard.” They study the menu and note the beautiful sounds words like huevos and arroz make for eggs and rice. The generous syllabic count and vowel length seem like an echo for their love. And their desire to linger. (Other eyes are on them, not only mine.) They have drawn the morning from a sea of newsprint—in at least three languages—toward their window seat. 3 The light changes along with the brisk pace of the walkers. Someone in a tan Mackintosh reaches out to hail a yellow cab, while the sun gilds the fire escapes and people rise energetically from their beds. 4 Don’t their eyes tire of each other? Or is it not the eyes that tire? They’re not looking, they’re drinking, communicating through their skin several inches apart. Love can’t be trusted. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. They linger over coffee; he strokes the back of her neck; she doesn’t feel impelled to look up or stop but, later, she kisses him behind the ear. 5 And in the mountains there is snow melting to get down from the heights to pour through the clefts in the twisted rocks: natural arches, obstacles—horseshoe shapes. And in the plains there is a dropping of the shoulder-armor, a tingling in the hip sockets, so that even a chance touch at the hipbone startles the center and starts a slow convulsion— release of two creatures (peculiarly, perilously at odds), used to training their gaze on the peripheries, like this bicycle tethered to a parking meter, orange handlebars, silver trunk like a treasure chest perched—not locked—on a wrought iron ledge fixed over the chrome wheel-casings— blue shadow-dappled twig-littered canopies, or the small tantalizing cursive c in the blue neon soft as silk, announcing café Equense where the couple might return in the voluptuous dark. The dark, quietly vibrating like a Mouth Harp, or her—noiseless—breathing…or, when they are lost in Olmsted’s misty, labyrinthine rambles and, framed by traffic, they pause beside the lake in the dank air where the water is still, another world from the blood-running pavement, the meat-packing plants gray and dour below the rotting piers— warped—(and will they be replaced with fresh wood or fazed out with poured concrete that knows no give or take—no—swelling—…?) What can love repair? By what force of love can they imagine themselves beyond the squalor that surrounds them onto another plane blessed and blessing! 6 Who invented ecstasy? What man or woman first walked around with its burden? Cold shelter from the street, among the bronze mailboxes, inside the bright red— freshly painted—door jambs. He picks her up under the buttocks, she arches her thighs around his hips, plants her feet on the tiles: tongues firm, yet tentative, learning their own momentum; (the rubbery wall of her mouth takes him further in and in.) Tongue and tongue, freckle and freckle, tears, shuddering, swelling in the places where they used to ache, “ain’t no cure,” knowing this touch, this grave flicking of tongues could never be repeated, or knowing it could— knowing it in another consciousness. 7 He strokes her neck at the junction where the occipital bone and cervical spine cross, engage, spark; coccyx tingles, cock rises toward her, not into her, through her, to her; rises as he plies the inside of her ass and thighs, or rubs the crevice where her right forefinger and thumb divide, stroking her cheek, or the hollow below her earlobe, ankle bone, clavicle, tonguing every millimeter, until sea dissolves into sky (their raft turns over in warm water and they are that water, and bob, afloat, buoyant; at rest in secret knowledge of each other’s darknesses… and now he could weep.) But there is no ice in the water where they would roil and tumble, and where avenues welcome those who walk hand in hand, gait easy, backpacks half-full, half empty— the sun coming out now, as if synchronized to their desires— and as the runners circle the reservoir they lower their eyes to adjust to the light bouncing off the water to ignite the cinders; the green through the dead- ice capped leaves; a small curve, an indent on the track gleams like a bracelet, before an azure haze takes over. 8 It gets warm. She has to peel her Anorak. She cups her hand over her eyes in the light and wind off the reservoir, to see the easy arcs the gulls make as they spiral upward over the all-angle roller coaster of the rooftops, in the comforting thud of other feet, as if lulled by the sound of a lover’s heartbeat; danger, in distraction; she must kick the chain-link fence in order to set off again, get back into the stream, put her mind back into her body; her body: slender; deceptive. There is a power in it she has always known. And feared. Or feared others would fear. But it’s difficult, with others, always—just how to say it? Necessary to hold some one thing back. Whom could she trust to let it out? It might scare her. (Scare him.) 9 Dawn, a smudge of charcoal, lifted by noon and his body, as if heliotropic, was drawn toward the flares of lilacs, and now he knew to move cautiously, keeping his eyes on the ground to not, as he has done several times, catch his foot on a stone or root cluster and fly off, gashed. 10 He’s relieved when night comes on. He doesn’t need his eyes to know swallows congregate on the stark, bare limbs. The darkness grows through the darkness of that winter tree. Soon they will be one and no one will see them.

Today's the rider's birthday. I see you're already lower-casing him... Would you rather I... What is this "I." You have none. Today's the rider's birthday. Except he's dead. In a contrary mood today? Not in the way you'd think. I'm you're friend, remember? And I can't hurt you. I have no body. Neither does Krang. K-----? The bodiless brain. The Ninja Turtles' nemesis. The guy who oversees all of their activities. And yet you carry him in your pocket like a good luck charm. You perplex your son who can't see the humor in your perversity because to him Krang is just, to put it plainly, disgusting.

Where the Story Leaves Off We had set out, the four of us, like pilgrims. It’s a quick jaunt to Guanajuato from San Miguel, over long stretches of restless earth, not desert, not valley, patchy green on tawny ground, head to head in the passing lane with a pick-up sprouting children and a blunderbuss fifties’ Chevy with no hood over its engine, with its insides exposed. A quick jaunt to the underworld, the gauzy mummies. But we lingered in the marketplace: the two women—my cousin’s wife, my lover— poring over shawls and serapes; my cousin clicking away with his Nikon and zoom at the gargoyles’ leering and capricious faces, while I lost myself among the hawkers’ masks— swinging like lanterns on the standards— blessed and damned with edgy, angular, yet impassive facades. And made of no special wood. I wanted one anyway and forked out eight pesos. It’s hard crawling through the crypt. You have to get down on your hands and knees and the openings were meant for smaller people, unless the getting down was part of a solemn ritual. It was a relief to be in the cool of the underworld, away from the tension of the light. The dead were well preserved. They stood upright. They stayed together. I couldn’t have known it then, but soon my cousin, his wife, my lover—soon we would all be lost to each other forever— not taken by death, just gone into another kind of dust.