Indecipherable
The dictionary reveals that it derives from a Middle French word, not Latin, as I had assumed. I don't know who spoke Middle French. Were their harvests plentiful? Their winters icy cold? Were their joys my joys? What savage, gentle creatures populated their dreams of the future?
Indecipherable vraiment.
4/25/23
I'd be picking at the stitches,
fingering the lint.
there's a man at the door
pulling at the bell
dozen roses in his hand
blood red no thorn.
in the cooling bath
the steamy warmth clouds the room -
walls dripping sweat.
the bell don't sound.
there's a man sellin' mysteries
from a rickety card table.
I smile and walk away
touching lint in my pocket.
3/3/2023
I'm waiting for my kung pao chicken. The tiny plastic kitty sitting atop a small mountain of good luck coins is pumping her paw like a soccer fan almost in time to the strangely militaristic Chinese disco music, a deeply repetitive flute melody floating above a crunching mechanical beat.
Kitty purring: yes! yes! yes! yes!
3/1/2023
The roller coaster was the fair’s main attraction. Dead Man’s Fall was its popular name. It derived from a trio of loop-de-loops in quick succession, followed by the slow, so slow, considered climb, giving you plenty of time to count your sins, to a terrifying height, a seeming pause at the pinnacle, where the spindly structure swaying sings in the impossible air like a nest of misplaced sticks packed incoherently by some fuddled bird. Your tearful pleas unheeded, you plunge in your wheeled sheet-metal pod, leaving your internal organs somewhere behind, they won’t be needed, a blind wind-stripped screaming fall, to certain death, to a receiving pool that you knew from the start was there, shattered with an explosive splash. Shouts of red-tinged laughter all round. But the pod inexplicably falters then, stops unscheduled, sitting squat with a mechanical dullness in the stilling water.
Not meant for prolonged immersion, the insistent liquid invades the cracks, seeps around the rivets. The chilling reaches your shins, gropes for your knees.
The flat cracked leather restraining belt has no release that you can find. It’s tight, too tight. You look, you look everywhere but no. Your jerking, tangled tugs, rattling the pod like shaking a box of tools (is someone still laughing?) send tiny ripples across the now calm surface of the cold oily pool.
The back of your head… the hairs on the back of your head strain like the tentative apprehending hairs of an insect, sensing, before you hear. Then you hear: you hear the steady clanking chain spooling behind and above, far above, thin laughter and screaming; that pink cotton candy screaming, belly screaming from a full open throat that was always the very best part of this cheap paper ticket back alley puppet show.
2/21/2023
Some conversational topics are not worth exploring. Like first spouses, or expensive, ill-fitting clothing, purchased against your keenest intuition and the straightforward testimony of your senses. Best assigned to the very darkest recesses of the closet, later to be given up willingly to needy strangers.
Bolster yourself. Give these cloying memories no toehold in the hothouse of your imagination. Let them wither.
2/18/2023
let me not be explicit.
reach with a finger and thumb
pinch
into the wide moaning O
of your mouth,
your mouth, not my mouth,
and wrench with a desperate crack
(like the sound
of a billiards game in the next room)
the softn'd tooth
spilling spit and blood.
hold in your hand,
your hand, not my hand,
the decades old fossil
that was your friend,
your friend, not my friend,
and look for the ghosts
of all that pointed grinding.
when you're done,
(not finished because
finished rhymes with nothing)
when you're done
look once more, ease back
and sigh. there, right there
you'll find your poem.
your poem, not my poem.
2/7/2023
I want a clean slate.
it used to be easy. there was a formula. a few mumbled incantations, some time on your knees, all was forgiven.
none of the old gods talk to me any more, and who can blame them? honeyed up in their crumbling mansions of neglect, they snigger eternally behind folded hands.
my pockets are empty of miracles.
2/5/2023
Thursday
Left Lécamp just before eleven.
...Arrived Etretat in time for a big lunch at Restaurant Normandie. Local cliffs advertised as the most beautiful in France. Tourist resort. Lot of half timbered houses near the main square. One big plaque written in French and English expressing thanks to British and American forces for liberating the town in the two wars. Took the road to Ste (?) and arrived at Le Havre about five. Left our bags at the Customs and went to do some shopping. Evening meal at a restaurant near open air market. Explained we wanted a meal for no more than 1,000 francs between us as that was what was left of our French money. Gentleman inside who overheard, sent out 200 francs so that our last meal in France should not be without a dessert. Went in to protest but he insisted on the boys having 100 francs each to buy sweets. Said he had been in Britain for four years during the war and had been very well treated. Went back to the docks and cleared Customs.
The ship (Normannia again) left at about half past eleven.
The boys stayed on deck until we were clear of the harbour.
from a bicycle journal of Brian Hughes
At one time I lived in a small ghetto a few blocks from the Berklee School of Music. It was a dismal lodging enlivened by an unplaceable cornetist somewhere in the building, practicing at odd hours. You'd think that would be annoying, but it wasn't.
The softly muted sounds filtered into my rooms as a near daily reminder that my past held no sway there, the present was filled with a siren voice plaintive, unfamiliar, calling.
10/27/2022
For years I sent my mother cards that I'd made with photos that I'd taken attached. I knew that she saved them, at least the ones she either thought were "beautiful" or had touched her in some way. Mostly she saved them because I was her son and that's the sort of thing mothers, some mothers, do. Like grade school report cards, stick figure drawings, plaster casts of pudgy hands fully articulated; all proofs irrefutable of something, all worth saving. Some of the photos she carefully peeled from their backings and placed, with the help of small magnets, on her refrigerator door. As though sixty years had not passed and I'd just strolled into her kitchen in short pants, one knee scraped and scabbed, and handed them to her with candy-smeared fingers.
When she died, my sisters shouldered the task of winnowing through her belongings. And lucky me, some of them were sent my way. Now I know without doubt, having consulted a brittle, yellowing document, my exact birth weight, and the time to the minute when I abandoned the umbilical cord and took first gasp of breath.
And there in the box full of my mother's stuff, stacked and piled like all the other paper, were my photographs. Torn from their framing card stock backings they seemed thin, malnourished. Waifs, orphans. Too light, too insubstantial, easy prey to any harsh wind, unable to bear the full weight of unexpressed love.
I think they miss their magnets.
I think they miss the hum of the fridge.
8/30/2022
You're at a party. A person walks across the long room working around and through knots of people to get to you. This person is so attractive. The force of their attraction has no name. It is aimed at you. From a distance their gaze draws your breath from you, leaving your ribcage empty. Your lungs forget to breathe. Your eyes nearly close till what you see is the one, just the one. You can't really believe that hips move in quite that way. You can't really believe that this person, this paragon, is coming to you. Fingers tracing a heiroglyph indecipherable, hypnotic. The whole body carrying a message, a rhythmic mystery.
But you're not thinking of sex. You don't think that way. You are the chaste one. Clothes fall away. Limbs intertwine. But those are thoughts unbidden. You put them away from you. Pay attention. Pay full attention.
The person sits, begins to talk. You're a little confused. Can't make out why this singular person is sitting with you, chatting so amiably, so animatedly, with such intense interest. You reciprocate without hindrance, giving all, openly, quietly, smiling again, ignoring that cowed internal whispering voice telling you over and over without end of your unworthiness. You feel a deep rapport settling upon you both. But you are certainly not thinking about sex. You are the chaste one.
The person launches into a tale, the recitation of a recent dream:
There's a barrista, lithe, muscular and dark, dark as Kenya, ready to levitate, tense with a barely bridled eagerness to serve. Takes your order with a look of deepest sympathy. Listens intently with every fibre of their being. Understands what this drink means to you. Then crosses a line you hadn't known was there. Leans across the counter, closer than a barrista should be; in a low, breathy voice:
"I'm going to make you the best espresso you've ever had."
And it's not the anticipation of perfection that forces a short, nervous laugh from the back of your throat, it's that this dark little cave of a café (where are all the other customers?) has shifted, time has slowed to a spider's silent crouch, and you watch with a crystalline grain of hunger rasping at your stomach as the thumping scraping hissing suddenly stops. And there on the counter sits the whitest porcelain demitasse, nested on the whitest porcelain saucer, a thin line of cobalt just below the rim of the cup proclaiming as firmly as any incantation this locus, this altar, upon which sits this slightly smoking liquid offering. As you reach, the barrista snatches it away.
"No. I can do better."
Tends once more to the whistling metallic beast. Returns with a new cup. Again snatched from your seeking grasp.
This stylized dance repeats itself. Once, twice. Thrice. The blessed bowl of Java appears, disappears, appears, and is spirited away.
"No. I can do better."
Comprehension begins to dawn. You intuit, and then you know precisely that this is just a game. A game that could go on forever.
So you turn to the passing server, pluck a glistening flute of champagne from their platter, turn back to the person sitting so intimately next to you and say
But this is not a dream. I know that other people's dreams never fail to bore, and I wouldn't do that to you. I would never tell you my dreams.
I am the chaste one.
8/23/2022
One of the guys working on our house gave C a small deck of "collectible" trading cards. I think the series is titled Aliens Among Us. Each card in the deck features an artist's rendition of a particular space alien. On the reverse are one paragraph descriptions of the encounters with the pictured creatures, provided by the various humans who experienced the meetings. The full depths of most of these encounters were not adequately plumbed until the participants were mesmerised, questioned while under hypnosis. I picture federal agents gently twirling glittering pocket watches, but that's just me.
The giver of this remarkable set of cards explained to C that he wanted her to have them because he knew that "she was into space". He's the same person who often wears a t-shirt proclaiming his predilection for cannabis consumption in any form. Throughout the day he can be seen walking to his truck, and then returning to the work site, having retrieved a single tool. He can repeat this slow dance a startling number of times in a work day, often at five or ten minute intervals, each time returning with a necessary, different, single tool.
Because he's into space.
8/9/2022
I knew a man in Louisville in 1980. He was raised in the country, and came to Louisville as a very young man "to work for wages". And yes, he explained that his brothers and he when childrennever wore shoes unless there was snow on the ground.
The transition from lamplit life in rural Kentucky to city life was marvellous and difficult for him. Electricity and internal plumbing was the least of it.
Settling permanently in the city, he spent the remainder of his working life at the GE plant, a vast, sprawling production complex that employed thousands, and was about as far from a subsistence farm as you could possibly get.
He would tell with bald wonder and an unfeigned, easily admitted incomprehension of the grasping aspirations of people he'd come across. As for him, to be able to sit down to a chicken dinner more than once a month had somehow remained a minor miracle, if not celebrated with horns and cymbals, certainly looked upon with a deep, unwavering sense of something close to awe.
I never knew a gentler man, or a man less infected with the trait of self-aggrandisement. I never knew a man more filled with a calm appreciation and love of life. It radiated from him.
At the GE plant they paid wages.
for Marvin, 7/30/2022
I always thought
I knew my place in the story:
cowering at the bedside
clutching my useless basket,
asking fat, round questions.
but here my tail rips through
the rotten threads of
the faded nightdress,
my bloodshot eyes sound
ceaselessly
every cobwebbed corner.
my snout sniffs the honorable
stench of the huntsman -
and oh how sharp my teeth.
7/22/2022
In Bradwell v. The State, brought to the U. S. Supreme Court in 1872, which ultimately denied Mrs. Myra Bradwell the right to practice law in the state of Illinois, the concurring opinion of Justice Joseph P. Bradley read in part:
"...the civil law, as well as Nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. ...The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex, evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. ...The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother."
The Supreme Court has a long history of helping define the proper role of women in our society.
7/17/2022
tell me a story.
trace the stars in my hand.
convince me it's not rust
running through my veins.
show me my footprints
on the path trod by heroes.
riddle me a roma lie.
big hat, small ranch.
the best of old saws
wriggle and shift
to fit every need.
you'll meet a tall dark stranger.
he'll trample you under
flint sharp hooves.
6/17/2022
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