Richard Garcia

I take my dinners alone, in my room, but I can still hear them through the door, my father’s false teeth clicking like a wooden gate with a metal latch, swinging open, swinging closed. In a water glass at night they float like an exhibit in formaldehyde of a stillborn child. The nightlight shining through the glass— a spelunker’s flashlight in an underwater cave illuminating the fossilized toothed beak of a fierce bird now extinct. My father’s false teeth, when he tries to spit in the toilet, fall in. Only my hand is small enough to reach underwater into the hole and pull them out from the pipe where they are wedged sideways, slightly open. Sometimes a woman expels from her womb something that is all hair and teeth. George Washington was said to always dine alone. His teeth were made of wood, whalebone, and mastodon ivory. My father’s false teeth, God’s first clumsy attempt at wings: two imprints of a horse’s hooves in red clay, hinged together, ringed with small square bones, too heavy to ever fly. My father’s false teeth in the click of computer keys in the tick tick of the eucalyptus outside the window as it twists out of its skin that falls on the pavement like sheets of parchment. A faraway splash in the middle of the night, I sit up in bed, startled— it was George Washington throwing something across the Delaware, not a coin, but his teeth.

There you are, at the gate of the memory palace underneath the rusted teeth of the portcullis, your hand raised in a puzzling gesture— is it farewell, come here, get back, no blame, or are you just trying to hitch a ride? But I’ve seen that gesture when you sleep, as if you were saying to someone, on the one hand . . . on the other hand. Here is a memory to store in the palace— You and I at the circus. The arena is dark except for one blue spotlight. In it, a clown stands before a table. On the table an array, crystal wine glasses filled with different levels of water. He’s dressed in white with a conical hat, tear marks on one cheek. With a wet finger, he plays music that was once forbidden because it made musicians lose their minds. There is a blank look in his eyes and he performs perfectly, as if he were a mechanical clown. Now look up, the lady on the trapeze is dropping large blue crepe-paper flowers. Maybe the palace is the size of a dollhouse and my eye at the window is the eye of a giant. Maybe the palace is in my chest and my heart is beating too loud inside. I remember when I woke but was still asleep and saw my chest rising and falling on its own and then I accidentally rolled out of my body and there were two of me lying side by side. In an alcove shaped like a scallop shell I’ve placed a list of the way lovers have said goodbye. Developer fluid heated up, passed off as consommé, is a standout. As is GOODBYE written in shaving cream on the dusty windows of a row of abandoned cars in Baja. Just as I begin to suspect what is wrong with this picture I notice how lightly you step over the grillwork of the oubliette, that terrible lace under which men are forgotten. You raise your hand again and now I understand that gesture— it’s how you erase the distant mountains, the palace, the sky, everything.

The Chichimecas are in the hills. They have built a huge bonfire. I am at my window with a telescope counting shadows flickering in front of the flames. There must be at least a thousand Chichimecas and their many dogs, for they are the dog people. Maybe there is only one Chichimeca and his dog pacing back and forth in front of the fire trying to make me think that there are one thousand Chichimecas in the hills. There are Chichimecas in the alley. They have taken down the street signs and built another bonfire—STOP, SCHOOL CROSSING, SLIPPERY WHEN WET, the Chichimecas are showing a preference for S’s slithering into smoke. The Chichimecas have broken into the abandoned train station from one of my poems. The one where the sound of the plastic tips of my shoelaces clicks against pavement like lobsters. They are cooking the lobsters in a steel drum. After they have devoured the lobsters, they lie down with their dogs. Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff the dogs. Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff the Chichimecas, for they have found aerosol paint cans and they are holding rags soaked with paint spray to their noses. This makes the moon come down. Chichi mommy,chichi mommy, chant the Chichimecas as they fall asleep in a pile with their many dogs. Chichi mommy as they snore and dream that the stars are dripping milk into their open mouths.

After Piranesi The faded remains of ancient advertising — captives on parade in native costume. Now the whangam, that imaginary animal led by Wharfinger, keeper of the wharf. And you, my puce, sitting between the paws of the mechanical lion, his brittle heart of glass. The regiments of holiday shoppers, in formations two-by-two, are borne along the sliding pavements between displays into the Pavilion of the Encrusted Compass. O hub of panopticon, each moment on display, from the central monitor there is no escape. This is all accomplished, even the symphonic wrecking of the antique locomotive, in silence. I have misplaced my whipcat and whinstone. I try to recall something that I know. A westing is a space of distance westward. Wheep: the sound of steel drawn from a sheath. What was the name of the Babylonian sidekick of Sir Thomas More’s lead warren? Time for the steam-driven, slow reckoning, for the chains and block and tackle dangling from the eternally unfinished dome, the chrome- plated waterfall and the ascension into the arcades, the arcades and their broken promises.

Both lying on our sides, making love in spoon position when she’s startled, What’s that? She means the enormous ship passing before you— maybe not that large, is it a freighter or a passenger ship? But it seems huge in the dark and it’s so close. That’s a poem you say, D. H. Lawrence—Have you built your ship of death, have you? O build your ship of death, for you will need it. Right here it would be good if there were a small orchestra on board, you’d hear them and say to her, That piece is called Autumn, that’s what the brave musicians played as the Titanic went under—and then you could name this poem “Autumn.” But no, the ship is silent, its white lights glow in the darkness.