....From The Tree Of..................Pain Around Us
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_______________________________________________________ Still Life With Fruit I've begun the long decline of years. I've opted out of love, sometimes I doubt there ever was a youth that I should mourn. There was a horn of plenty, turned away from me. I was too polite, too shy, too wrongly wrought to seize a piece of it; I studied others, did what they did, but not an honest salivation have I known. I'm like the wife who, in her mid-years, will not tolerate the weight of her man upon her. Tired of spreading for a poke of him, who poked but into what, she wonders. Tired and weary of disconnection, feeling more sovereign saying 'no', and let the wind blow through the both of them- I'm one of those gorgons now. Some women stay juicy, pliant, joyful- I am a desicating husk, and if you must know what manner of corn those green leaves held, it was of a drier, angrier hue than you ever knew; it just looked golden. If you've sap inside, may I suggest you just uproot and go a-roving. I am re solute. Turning into something new something simpler but more wooden. Like a decoy. The Few Despite what Gray's Anatomy says, two chambers has the heart. One closes in and out, the one marked love, while the second one's for hate and once a thing has entered, even God could shout like he did for rag-wrapped Lazarus, and nothing's gonna fly up, stupid, blinked with life, so help me; the only way to get there is by passing through the other first. Ain't nuthin meaner than that: to enter and end up that way- I've known a few, and been one once or twicest. Gone No four year old girl child, brown eyes lit up like Christmas- all angel high and in the clouds with Grammy, should feel her death come dragons; fire and flames and pushed through walls of towers she used to dream were silver, sugar fairy tale but up to God she went her mouth an 'o' her life went liquid then a gas and gone... Period Of Mourning Like clouds passing the moon there is a change, a veil, a more opaque light, an elemental weight felt as the head moves side to side. The eye is heavy, shifts slowly in its socket home, as soft lip presses harder to the one below. The mouth, tight. Closed. Disposed to smallest opening of sigh; the last to leave the heart. The last that dares to go. There is so little left. There are comparisons: the sound of a theater after the last actor is gone, door thud swallowed by drape. The bleat of a lamb without a tongue, calling from hill to an earless sky. Crickets with legs mud-stuck, and still and there is the scream rising up like steam that never becomes one. Like A Painter To write at all is like being pulled along ground glass, naked, by the feet, leaving a ruby trail behind like red confectioner's sprinkles; sometimes that is all I have to show where I have been; that is how I make my mark, in smears of bright pain. Others try to follow it interpreting the bloody lines: why the turn here, the stopping there, as though they read a cardiogram of episodic almost deaths, heart stalls, restarts, wondering what the causes were and where the weakness. I wonder right along with them and drag the pretty words. The hurt is fine; it's how I know that I'm breathing. Hard Times Rockefeller Center, alit with Christmas cheer this year so odd and New York snow takes on a sooty look with bits of bloody September in thick air. The smoke is not an effect to soften the colors in the trees of peppered light that ring the rink where skaters loop- it's coming from the grave that never closes and those angels blow their golden horns in vain. They'll be no excelsis deo and no getting up again. There Are Such Creatures Toothless, save for one black nub in front his snail of tongue pressed down and round and teased as he would tease the dying slit the aristo cratic lady forced her urine from- a head held up, her lifeless trunk still kicked at Madame Guillotine's dark floor. And in his pants there burst a brief crescendo with the bladefall. This I know: there are such creatures then, there are such creatures still. The Warhol, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania's current exhibition is 'Without Sanctuary'- Lynching Photography in America. The lighting low, the photographs are framed and small and show one, stretched-neck negro after another. Women, too, and victims burned alive. The photos are a standard size the reason is that all of them were sent as postcards- sent from friend to friend, from loved to lover. Their cheerful words are scrawled behind, framed so you can read them: 'Dear William, Look. I had a barbecue. Love, Jack.' December, 1941. I'll bet they never stopped to wipe the smile or note the blood-empowered secret down inside the pleated trousers, cuffed- the Zoot Suit generation or wondered at the awful, spreading tundra of the soul. There were such creatures then. There are such creatures now. Strays It was a frigid April morning- I could see my breath. The cold I felt went deeper, knobby knees were knocking, one against the other as pigtailed, I set off for school, my dog behind, a puppy with distemper who had sprayed the cellar walls with watery stool he couldn't help. They didn't call a vet, they called the pound to come and get him, my first and only pet- I knew they'd kill him just as I knew from the day he followed me home that some things are terrible gifts. I used my legs like pistons. I ran back home for one last hug, my dress a mess- I had to change, was late for school, smelled faintly of his sickness. I remembered how the first month that I had him, I searched with silver flashlight in the blue and winter evenings through the snow for piles of dung, looking for the evidence of worms. He'd scoot his rump across the floor, I was afraid they'd let him go if he had parasites inside. And each chair leg that showed his little teeth marks I would crayon over, brush him till he gleamed. They never got the shots he should have had; 'Too much money'. I didn't think that it was true but more like a concern they'd rather not have had. I never got my own shots as an infant. Too painful's what they told me. Through the whooping cough and measles when the bleakest March and Aprils rolled around, I just wondered when the watery shit would start. Strange Valentines Albert Fish, a dour man of dark suits and sour mind walked upright, like you or me read newspapers, his watch and looked at clouds. Combed his hair slicked neat and lived in a house next to the house of a darling child named little Grace Budd whom he fried and ate; Albert would have called it love. Flesh of the child was like a tulip, pink and sweet- no doubt, requiring salt. Albert removed her precious meat with such rapt reverence, he remarked to her parents by letter later, what a delicate morsel her ass had been. Years afterward, he thought of Grace with every straight pin pushed through thin testicular skin; an X-ray showed all 32 were still inside, reminding him of just how wide the heart will roam to find its awful ease, to keep a love contained, love fed on love. Albert Fish ate a dish of monstrous worship- 'Bt Grace Beguiled'- but never doubted, for a moment his devotion to that child. Her skull lay somewhere, picked by birds. Hung On A Hook Of Grief There are the simple tasks, the hair wash, making of toast and bed and merry, too- a joke comes hand-standing, silly pants and seltzer to wet its way past grief. The sun rolls round and round, and you hope time does its work as it always has; you rely on that. Then, there is an update. Montage of faces covered in ash and you realize there's no getting past this one. An interview with transit workers, heroes all who helped the in first mad rush of fleeing, describe how when they brought them up from basement levels before the first collapse, what they saw as they looked at ground floor glass, were bodies hitting, splashing in impossible deaths to escape flames- the glass was red, running. They told the folks behind to look at the stairs: look down 'so they wouldn't trip'- but it was to protect them from what the mind will fasten on the rest of life if they lived through it- an oozing sore that will not heal, that sickens the entire host. There are ghosts down there and the smoke rising, all they have to say. You feel the hook pierced through the belly pull, take on the weight of it four thousand times more heavy than before. What the mind cannot shake free of it will field dress, leave to hang and horrify and you, with it. You know there is a price to be paid, there is no silence anymore that lets you sleep. On To Page 14 .............. Return To Contents This site sponsered by 
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