E S S E N T I A L S   I N   C O N D U C T I N G

A prosimetrum by Jif Johnson, 2019





CONTENTS

Aphorisms ( I )    
Travelogues   
Celestials & Pastorals
Horror Stories   
Aphorisms ( II )
Fairy Tales & Feuilletons
Untrue Crimes
Domestic Causeries
Histories






A P H O R I S M S   ( I )





A bell is a prom dress that priests may look up.

*

Trees are always wearing the same dress as each other.

*

To look at the trees here you’d think the city had long ago planted cheerleaders.

*

The harvest has itself shaved.

*

A garden grows lavish in demands.
 
*

She’s like a tall beer glass that will eventually get knocked up.
 
*

Inside an oyster is the pirate’s missing eye.

*
 
Bartenders look like pirates in their wooden ships.
 
*

They used to make umbrellas out of raincoats.
 
*

At the center of our galaxy is a supermassive asshole.
 
*

On a clear night you can see all the angels sucking on their cigarettes. When they flick them away we make a wish.
 
*

As funny as a translated pun.

*

The sky isn’t the color of any girl’s eyes; it’s the color of a polo shirt.
 
*

We collected the sap from our books in hanging inkwells.
 
*

Nobody wants to hear what an unhealthy person has to say about sailing.
 
*

A sick man is a mouth with some guts hanging from it.
 
*

Referees look like sleeping convicts.
 
*

“Conniption” was coined in New Orleans by women too fed up to find the right word.
 
*
 
The desperate are “straightaway.” Yet never succinct.
 
*

You shouldn’t be bossy when your shoes squeak.
 
*

Why is no one surprised there’s a clergyman in the execution chamber?
 
*

A dog’s life has the radius of a chain.

*

He’s the sort of professor who laughs out loud, alone.
 
*

Hummingbirds hatch from flowers. They are like pins that keep trying to prick popped balloons.

*

 In the middle of the Sistine ceiling, Tolstoy is pointing at a porno.
 
*

The coffee maker has pneumonia.
 
*

A leopard is a machine with too many buttons that all do the same thing when poked.
 
*

Teeth are runaway bones.
 
*

When the building stops growing the workers climb off and go inside it to work.
 
*

People who smoke have ghosts.
 
*

A fan is a caged propeller.
 
*

When ill, my grandmother advised, eat a willow.
 
*

And then it happens. The ancient volcano farts.
 
*

The volcano produces a massive thought-balloon.
 
*

Earthquake: California’s stomach growls because of all the gold it’s swallowed.
 
*

March went to 31 this year.

*
 
Rorschach cows.

*
 
Cows all over the distant hill like they dropped from a dice cup.

*
 
She went on a rant. She went on a ranch. Always in a hurry.
 
*

Hawks are the sky’s eyebrows.
 
*

There are people who must proclaim a self-congratulatory personal philosophy by explaining to others under an overhang that rain is “only water.”
 
*

A thought experiment gone awry turned him into an infinite violinist attached to a cat in a cave on a twin Earth typing out Hamlet.

*

Cold dawn fizzles in the little village. The mud has gooseflesh in the drizzle.

*

Over the golden brains the headache breaks. Over the blue lakes the pins of rain.
 
*

Inside the unlit light bulb is a president’s illegible signature.
 
*

There’s one-day rights and there’s day-one rights. This we learned at the illegal meeting.
 
*

A spider is the point of a pencil, but writes in white.

*

You can type any quick brown sentence nowadays to test your keyboard.
 
*
 
A television is a mirror with a memory.
 
*

German sentences look like the Bavarian Alps.
 
*

The trails of snails are used to connect constellations.
 
*

The word “horrific” looks like a very scared fish heading toward the right.
 
*

At a certain age the naturalist must tire of the color green.
 
*

The sun is left-out butter.
 
*

A baby looks like a baby aspirin.

*
 
I dare you to walk down your street some morning and not be looked at through curtains by someone who has been up all night. What sort of parade are you?
 
*

The canyon yawns, the yawning emptiness yawns; their similarity is boring.
 
*

Eye-drops are the opposite of high divers.
 
*

Telephone poles are anorexic marionettes.
 
*

I do believe that all of us are basically annoying. Except for my reader who is charming.

 

 






T R A V E L O G U E S





(40.7128° N, 74.0060° W)
If you’ve never been, let me tell you about the Big Apple: It’s not too small to see, not entirely tiny, I wouldn’t even say “smallish” but quite substantive, if not rather large, in fact towering and, in retrospect, utterly enormous if not all-encompassing. It’s like pressing all the keys of an old typewriter with the palms of your hands, that skyline. I’ll mention a vivisection of a park here, but only in passing. The people are a scandal, pasty and gray-lunged, fed on rats, cauliflower-brained and fuming like manholes. You really have to watch yourself, and wash your hands as if you’ve been handling lead. If you can’t manage a visit, you should. If you haven’t the means, well that sort of thing is only adorable for so long.


(28.5383° N, 81.3792° W)
From the first day of our trip to Orlando we found that no matter which cobblestone street we took just a little further was something so promising, so interesting. We’d be heading for a specific museum or church when (“Oh, my God!”) we’d see a bunch of striped vendors’ tents among huge pink trees with people sitting shoeless on blankets all eating fried octopus and drinking wine! Or we’d try to head back to our hotel but see that just ahead was a parade of girls in beaded costumes playing music on instruments that looked like grandfather clocks and endless bins of cheap beautiful books! If it wasn’t for our dinner reservations and our wish not to offend, we would have wandered I think forever. But we’d have to tear ourselves away, “put on blinders,” and walk then run to our meal each night. “Orlando is really nothing like the rest of Florida!” “Right you are!” bellowed our host. It was on our last day we realized we had only been looking at the ground level of activity and that stacked on every labyrinthine market or vine-covered jazz bar was six or ten more stories of places to go with their signs of invitation in a neon language. Parks upon theaters upon shrines and massage parlors, deafening pachinko parlors in skyscrapers of clothes and candy shops all covered with trompe l'oeil frescoes. And what’s more, below us, under each subway stop were deep malls of gourmet food courts that stretched on and on until you missed your train and even further below (we found out only after our departure), reached by violet escalator, the real Disney World where the locals hang out after work. The beloved characters and rides among the illuminated catacombs of the earliest Christians. “Next time!”


(38.7223° N, 9.1393° W)
A throng of young men with long hair all in jeans and all with shiny faces like chestnuts walked over, smiling and holding pints of variously colored beer—all full to the rim—so close I feared they’d spill their drinks on my shirt—and herded me to a corner table. An older woman watched my approach with heavily shadowed eyes wearing a leopard-print scarf and constantly touching her face with childlike hands; a thin man of unguessable age sat next to her in a puffy vest and ski-cap with a tattoo of a galleon on his forearm. It was so loud it was quiet, and I didn’t know if they were deciding who was to speak or if they all agreed I was supposed to. The man with the tattoo must have seen me staring at his arm for he moved it under the table. The lady smiled but spoke through her ratty teeth: “It's possible I could speak to you for a few minutes and this choice of words would plant say a seed that causes you to occasionally dream of being tortured and you cannot wake up from what seems like hours and hours of pain and when you do wake you suffer in the daytime too from fear of sleep.” Perhaps I looked like I was hiding a smile when just then I took a sip for she shut down her face, hardened her stare, and continued quickly: “Now if this sounds strange, consider the silly hypnotist who for 50 dollars will charm a crowd by making a volunteer think she’s a chicken.” At this the youngsters standing behind me started clucking loudly. The man in the cap told me to please sit down and began a long, tedious song (perhaps a fado) about this old woman, who in her youth was known as the “Tiger Lady” because at parties she would crawl on all fours...I don’t really remember. It was the next morning that to my surprise I awoke in the below-decks of a Portuguese vessel. “É bom ter saudades.”

(13.7563° N, 100.5018° E)
I don’t want to—can’t—waste any space here so I will skip over how I came upon these foreign stairs, what I was told about the “mahjong game” upstairs, and barely mention the girl I met halfway up said stairs. She was exactly what you’d think—from an island I’d say—but I can’t waste time on her! When I sped by and flung the door open—the door at the top of the stairs—I laboriously said my hellos and understandably “reeled from the smoke”—no time or space here to elaborate! I fell backwards down the stairs—and suffice it to say, passing the Asian girl upside-down and somersaulting and rounding the corner at breakneck pace, asked out loud, “May I bend your ear a moment?” And you, sir, kindly said, “Yes, but hurry.” Or perhaps you didn’t tell me to hurry, but I know time is of the essence. Is there an elevator?


(43.7015° N, 6.9894° E)
The justly famous scribbler Francis Ponge, former insurance salesman, stated that people get lost atop elephants, but I’ve been on one (an elephant, not a salesman) and there’s really no chance of getting lost. (An aside: I recall very thick hairs and softball-sized yarny shits. Something about Marianne Moore. Or Bishop? One of them took scissors to the zoo with the plan of stealing a lock of elephant hair. Anyway, you sort of straddle the rank sad thing (the elephant, not the poet) on a suspect carpet instead of a saddle—which isn’t the same thing as being “un peu perdu.”) And yet always they call Ponge “meticulous”? He just loves horses if you ask me. (And you’ve read this far.) I understand he spent his last many years staring down at the kitchen table, an act I agree with and recommend because what is life? And for? Lost on a table, this I see. Once he got up on the table—somewhere in France, Le Bar-sur-Loup, I imagine. He looked around to see where he was and just said “...”
 

(50.1655° N, 14.9351° E)
The ladder is white hot. Hrabal burns his hands on the roof tar. The fat German typewriter is hot, teetering on a TV tray table atop his house. Someone had to make something out of all this. But now the paper flies away, sheet after sheet over the half-hearted fence. The neighbor swings open his cellar doors and the work rushes in like a cat. He smiles to tell us a “Czech story.” He begins, “The ladder is white hot. Hrabal burns his hands...”








POSTCARDS 1 – 10


Manhattan: You wave at the cars before you jump off a bridge. How typical.
——————————————————————
Sardinia: A garden dumb with blooms. Forgive me. An island like a palmful of pepper. Again, forgive me. A sky like a black eye. Let me put it this way: The cliff brushes the crumbs off its uniform.
——————————————————————
Prague: “It sounds bad,” she confided to her thesis advisor, “but what I want in a man is tuberculosis.” Carved stars peeking over the high stone wall of the old cemetery.
——————————————————————
Budapest: In the men’s game you can’t answer for yourself. We all wake up in a different player’s world. Now who’s the liar you have to figure it out. In the ladies’ game, every time you step in shit you get a year younger. When a woman gets too young she becomes a girl. Then a baby. Then a spot or discoloration.
——————————————————————
This isn’t the first time a frozen stowaway has rained down on the rooftops of Raleigh.



Copenhagen: She’s a soggy gift under the tree. If you warily try to shake the box, it sounds a bit like a heart. But inside’s just a lump of shredded carrot.
——————————————————————
After returning home, a haiku: A book of Japanese / poetry hops out of my hands. / The dog has found me.
——————————————————————
Crete: Talos the bronze giant in a lump of parts under the zelkovas. One boy kicks a ball into the heavens. The other boy runs to catch it. If you hold fate to your ear it sounds like electronic dance music.
——————————————————————
Athens: The print fades very slightly each page until you miss the ending of the book.
——————————————————————
Las Vegas: How much did you win or did you “take a beating”? As Ms. Martingale’s number of lovers approaches infinity, her probability of marriage approaches 1. Each time she shines her thigh-highs and hits the road she redoubles her efforts.






(56.2965° N, 43.9361° E)
I received a postcard by mistake. It said, “Hope I got the address right! Today I heard a knocking in my suitcase and thought of you. The hotel looks like the fingers of a lifelong smoker but is steps away from the Volga—or is the Vltava? Spent my last funny coin on a hankering, which is a type of jellied fish. Glad you’re not here, John, you’d hate the thoughtlessness. I’ll probably have to sell my slip for a stamp. Marianne.” On the back was a picture of a brick hospital. The next day, another postcard… My wife was not amused (my name is also John).


(37.7172° N, 122.4043° W)
Visitacion Valley’s where pregnant women and friends meet. Old Widow Bernal comes by with a Mexican pizza or other tailgate fare, to “fill the hungry with good things.” The youngsters do doughnuts in the intersections. Their crow-black tracks look like lake reflections of the plentiful telephone and cable wires. To the south, in the distance, the angels cross the bay on a white bridge, gossiping about the “showing” virgin. To the east, the Devil “hath been sent empty away” to his Candlestick Cove—his stadium long gone—for the Lord “hath put down the mighty from their seats,” and exalted those of the low valley.


(26.5867° N, 80.0520° W)
In Florida you can drive in any direction except East and West and soon hit upon “the largest Christmas tree in the world.” No misprint. Florida has no basements because it is built upon a reef of artificial teeth and cuttlefish bone. How else to explain the causes that lead up to the actions of its residents? I suppose they make up for cellars in after-hour waterparks. Girls loading sandy blankets, their moms displaying their melanoma in slow saloons. Something about salts, hotels, canals. Why don’t they all just go to New Orleans?


(52.2053° N, 0.1218° E)
She was novelettish, chiefly British, white but for her needle-mark eyes, her red mole, her Beardsley hair. When she bit her lip it didn’t matter that no one really must bite their lip. Her bosom was unrivalled north of the Alps. Childless, she often wrote about “curiously knowing" children. Once I married her but had to jump out the window, being constantly badgered by short, angry Bristolians. I survived to commit her to an asylum where the cold-water therapy was “just her cup of tea.”


(30.4515° N, 91.1871° W)
The marshes of Elysian Fields we dredged; great regrets now nest amid moss-hung cypress. Muskrats in the spider lilies, etc. But the plantations once built were again fashionable, the turned colonnettes and mahogany maids of color. I remember: our new idea of Death, as handsome as this stairway. But blame the heroes: the columns became heavier, the brick floors sunken, the Greek Key mantels tilted, gates wilted, the dormered weather boarded, and the floods, O the biblical floods! Now the swamp tours are full of snakes and a lonely bloom clogs the waterways and impedes boat traffic.


(38.5332° N, 123.0853° W)
It lies two hours north of the bay, a city of 400 called Cazadero. The mayor was a 30-pound woman who told charming stories only to herself. Her husband wasn’t sure about what he’d heard about anything; he wore a brown suit and straw hat. There was a creek behind the bakery and the residents of Cazadero would gather at the swimming hole and take off their shoes and then take off their fragrant socks. A big boy with eyes too close together might incline his head toward the sun. Every weekend a huge tree would come crashing down a hill and clear the highway of cars. There was a very old surgeon, Burton Holmes, a man they said practiced during the Civil War, who lived in the hills, swinging a rusty bone saw. The mayor of Cazadero would sit at the bakery porch with her hands on the handle of her cane and her face on her hands and bark, “Emergency effrontery!” at strangers. But with a smile. The city also boasted a firehouse. 


(50.9795° N, 11.3235° E)
Who had just been in this iron elevator? The perfume recalls women in Weimar, purposefully different: sand-colored, wearing sneakers and falling down open manholes reading. Everywhere their men are purposefully the same: white and fat, lying on their stomachs naked in the garden. The garden is a cemetery. The words “windswept blight” don’t do this town justice. You just put your head down and force yourself from museum to museum. The food is what you can lick off a sheet of cellophane and the language sounds like an underwater chicken coop. Stuck between floors with this toilet water.
 

(37.7749° N, 122.4194° W)
“Ready for the tour?” The skipper told me, “Collect the money.” Fifteen bucks. We motored past the dread prison, then under the bridge of 1,600 suicides, into and over a gray whale to everyone’s glee. No one lost even one sunglass. There was a serious splash; it was foggy but you had to put on sunscreen. The way back to the pier is deadly different. Like those little kids you saw bawling at Disney because all things must pass grew up and went on a fishing boat with no fishing left to do to do a $15 loop in notoriously chippy seas. Which is exactly what happened. Now they’re “cold,” now they want to “just go inside.” In the tiny cabin I started selling Coronas and Two-Buck Chuck so they could keep their fun going even though we were obviously “heading back.” Land ahoy! I had the rest of the day so I watched some people eat while fending off birds. Then I went to the park, followed a family home, and pushed my way in. “Rough waters! The life preservers are in the toy box.” I pointed gracefully, like an ancient sculpture, like the Apollo Belvedere, toward the toy box. A Dadaist play ensued. You have to make your own art in this world.


(43.9493° N, 4.8055° E)
Time was, a hotel room lit by candles was much cheaper than flipping on the light. There were places, by law, for you to spit, and you pissed in a sink. And you could “get a scarlet girl for the night” who was “just beautiful.” Although you should never trust an old European adjective. The chambermaid somehow performed origami on the bedspread while also holding a platter of breakfast dishes. When she’d done with the sheets, you’d think you could chuck the bed out the French windows and it would sail off like a paper fighter-bomber dropping air-to-ground hot-water bottles.


POSTCARDS 11 – 20


Cannes, 1955: “What sort of country has him on their money?” said the best legs in Hollywood.
——————————————————————
Kyoto: It took all night to undress her—in the morning I couldn’t make a fist. The forests were green shipwrecks and 20-foot high coral staples stitched up the mountain. When I got back to the hotel, she told me I was wearing shoes.
——————————————————————
Nashville is a Bachelorette party. Unmade bed of a body. Skin like fried bologna. A yawn of yellow hair. Harmonica breath.
——————————————————————
Dublin: The holy sisters cast down their eyes. They had been trapped in a train car for many miles now with the irredeemable and obdurate Mr. Flemming who kept opening cans of beer and each time calling the sound a “nun’s fart.”
——————————————————————
New Orleans: The man plays guitar the whole time but the wine in the glass by his shoe goes down. Indians playing three notes as they pass by the piano.




On an ocean liner: I regret apologizing for saying that you might need to start panicking. If you can’t sleep, be sick. Drink plenty of milk. Put a penny under your tongue and pick a fight with your husband or wife. Throw your eyes overboard.
——————————————————————
A fried Roman artichoke is like a balled up map. The oceans spread onto the tablecloth. Like Rome we eat it up as it falls apart.
——————————————————————
They say modern life has deprived us of epiphanies, but now we have oysters in months with or without Rs. You can eat a plateful of Cape Mays in May, which is just shy of miraculous.
——————————————————————
Under us Pyrene is buried. She bore a serpent and went nuts. She ran into the woods and died. Heracles piled up rocks over her grave—hence the Pyrenees.
——————————————————————
Ciao! The ancient ruins look like a furniture store. Everything eventually becomes something to sit on. Cats rub by us looking for a last crumb of caesarean blood. We close our eyes and smile into the constant sun.




(47.7842° N, 19.1352° E)
Oh there’s nothing like a “small village” to spur a postcard. Now, I prefer cognac in my coffee and in the village they offer coffee like handshakes. All the while the river washes our feet while we drink. The demons are deposited in the red-roofed castle and look down the peasants’ blouses. Demons in wide ladies’ hats drift down the river to deliver curses to the big city. Well I wave my handkerchief and the village shops lower their eyelids at dusk. The policeman makes his own problems. Workers like defeated soldiers march down main street bent as nails and simply think of home. The city can wait a night, I suppose! Reader, my heart was brought up by women. So understand me if across the hills I imagine another small town where the wives are virgins with black wings and the innkeeper is “passionate about pillows.” Now down the river goes this postcard: “Goodbye from my woodlouse window; all these lines around my eyes can’t fit on my face.” Goodnight and off in the mailman’s bag, a bag like the one they hang behind horses in parades.

 
(41.2565° N, 95.9345° W)
She, at a restaurant: “You’re making me look like a glutton!” Me: “So this is the heartland.” The baked potato was overloaded in bright green chives which covered bright salty bacon bits. When you forked into the potato these additions scattered over the tablecloth like hotels and houses from Monopoly. And the plate, the main plate. The thick innards gleamed like a slaughterhouse Jupiter with its endlessly ending gleaming bluish-pink storms. All in a room where the best dressed (the waiters) lose at musical chairs because all rest of us have knives.


(51.5265° N, 0.1079° W)
In the 3rd Yard of the Vagrants, surrounded by the Coldbath fields, you’ll find a line of pilgrims marching endlessly in place upon a sunken treadwheel. They are walking, in shifts, the equivalent of 10,000 feet in ascent every 10 hours and have already seen some lesser angels. When a pilgrim is relieved he is carried by children to the mass grave. If he ever awakens he climbs up one of the many rope ladders and returns to the mill yard in ecstasy.


(44.9778° N, 93.2650° W)
Never ever and then never argue with a dancer. The gloves come off, the clothes come off. Inside the lotus flower behind her navel crouches a tiny president. He squats and makes point after point into a gold thimble of a chamber pot. Then the dancer wads up her garments and winds up her arguments and you are left looking and then still looking at yourself in the speckled mirror of an airport bathroom. Perhaps in Minneapolis.

(coordinates unknown)
I had myself nailed inside a shipping crate by an untrustworthy stevedore. My plan was to live off its contents until the ship arrived in The City That Care Forgot. Troubles began when the crate was stored next to another crate with another stowaway. This became clear once I heard his snoring. Then I heard from another crate a woman’s voice complaining about the noise, in Catalan I think. By the next night I’d made out a multi-crate conversation between smugglers. And, later, was kept up by a boy and his impertinent puppy somewhere below me. (At least I’ll know if we start taking on water!) To think that wharf rat had me believing it was my idea to be nailed up in this box.


(49.3988° N, 8.6724° E)
When I visited Heidelberg 20 years ago they had this waterslide called The Philosopher's Waterslide. After you changed into your bathing suit you got to take an old funicular to the top of a mountain—I don’t know which—where the big slide started, and it was cold but the women all had their hair in pigtails which drives me bonkers. I just kept saying “Ich liebe dich” to them the whole ride up the mountain, me on one wooden bench and them all in a line wrapped up in their towels on the other side of the teetering car and they pretended not to understand my German. (Maybe I said “Ich lieber dich” by mistake, which would explain why they kept looking at each other.) When I go to a country all I learn how to say is please, thank you, beer, and I love you. Well, at the bottom of the slide you end up in the Philosopher’s Pool, which I don’t remember much about. I think I was only there for a day, maybe two. In the city I mean, not the pool. Let me fetch the photo album. I may be confusing this with Fort Lauderdale.


Onward plod!










C E L E S T I A L S   &   P A S T O R A L S





1.
MUSHROOM HUNTING

When the sequoias and pines close ranks
there’s no getting into the forest;

inside, all the animals are licked clean
of fur and slowly
digested by sprawling oaks.

Then a garrulous shaking
of needles and groaning
branches and the sunlight

breaks through again its countless searchlights.
Now we can enter with our baskets,

hear the forest’s sleeping
breathing and thin bones
snapping beneath the red leaves

we trudge through. You begin
to hum a song we just heard in the car;

I give a mean look and you
stomp off to look for mushrooms
on your own, inevitably

get lost, and call out my name,
and again, louder. It becomes cool;

the trees are awake now, crossing
themselves in the evening wind,
bending toward you over you.
 

2.
HOW MUCH SOUND

...passes its parentheses
through the ocean? What overlapping waves
of consequence and exasperation!

What alien ears pick up the scrape of a dock or the belch
of a thermal vent, bubbling waves, hoarse rain,
insidious sonar? What order of distraction is it?
 
From whales to shrimp comes a rallying response,
adding to the noise. Like an epidemic
of honking cars. You’ll say the dolphin whistles…

the humpback sings—well we all have our pet reactions.
But the tankers, the icebreakers, the tub and barge
of irreversible clamor drums out any

peace in the world. Even underground, miles
and miles down, the rocks scrape and crack;
the iron core of the earth squeals metal-on-metal.


3.
THERE WAS A MIRACLE

...during the mass
but everyone slept through it.
Someone in the choir dropped his guitar
and it bonged on the carpeted marble
but he just wiped the scum off his mouth and went back to sleep
while the room filled with gold thread.
Disembodied baby faces
with blue wings for ears
Swooped, swooned, sang.


4.
LATE SPRING

The rosemary bush was out of control and full of bees.
The pride of Madeira, invasive and swallowing the plum tree.

Tall grass choked the smoke plant and irises.
The artichokes looked like a tower of giraffes.

The immortelles just looked, with their aster eyes.
Potato vines, rife with morning glory, spread over the house.

The dandelions exploded. Cattails hid the gardening tools.
The palm turned yellow sharp and spiteful.

All spring the sun barked would not stop barking,
pulling at its leash, dragging the blanched moon behind it.


5.
SOME WEATHER

Clouded by clouds,
the sky looks a glass of ice.
Inside each cloud something black as a mussel struggles
behind a mist of mist.

The pale sun is a funambulist.
You see the bay is the color of sweet vermouth.
Tall panic grass frames our view.

And the moon is still a hundred miles away.
The mist grew so thick it emptied the bay,
scraped a tree branch,
and gushed down again in gallons.


6.
A HIKE ON RADIO HILL

Like a giant candy cane among little trees,
the radio tower dumbfounded us.
Perhaps the signals were affecting our navigation
but we walked all day up and around the hill without reaching it.
But you could see it from anywhere in town.
Tethered with wires like King Kong.
As night fell the moon bent
into a crescent when it got too close.
The tower just blinked codes from the darkness
and the dog went crazy from the obedient, approaching coyotes.
 

7.
Angels     sound     like
falling asleep on the bus.
Flags left on the moon
are held unfurled by them.
Angels    are what’s    foggy
when we say: “It’s foggy.”


8.
THE NIGHT THAT DIDN’T FADE

—it just got worse.
With a firm foothold the moon smoothed her clothes.

The Devil took heart, put on his once-a-year headdress.
Stropped on the Milky Way as the night fell down a well.

Now the trees, the houses really were black,
would always be. Black as the word “always.”

People would never be able to explain
to their as-yet-unborn what the light was like.

Women changed how they applied makeup.
Stars were the only surviving wildflowers.
 

9.
In the sky sit a moon and a dim moon. The moon
rows and the dim moon
sits in front obscuring the moonlight
in degrees. The rowboat drifts
behind my neighbor’s house where they kiss and kiss.
 

10.
“It’s expensive to run a farm, Honey.
The cows graze on shredded money.
The horses eat from bags of gold.
The blue-eyed goats fight over a fur coat.
The hens hide their eggs and peck at pearls.
And the tools in the shed shine like a diamond mine.”
 

11.
STORM AT SEA

A rumble-tumble of dragons inside the cumulonimbus cloud,
weightless mountain
far down-sea.

Tethering lines
thrown to the ocean (i.e., lightning)
are in a flash snapped

and the mothership
continues to slide toward the pier.
Between the gray billows and the water a dark thin veil (i.e., rain).

The dragons inside the ghost ship hiss and creak.
Behind the veil a woman walks
just behind the drifting disaster,

walks on the haggard waves,
blinking some warning code
with stinging eyes.
 

12.
A relentless run-downness. A “nailed down” future.
There was nothing, nothing
strange in that.
Dogs, mostly, dogs
cats and horses mostly
were tipping off the serfs. We found our rakes and drew lines
for God’s composition. Hungry for new music.
 

13.
THE MOON IS ALL WATER

The Chandrayaan-1 filmed a red girl
swimming in the Whipple crater. The Moon
Mineralogy Mapper employed a neutron spectrometer
and showed she was mostly naked.
Although no immediate spectacular plume was seen,
scientists are still really into her.
 

14.
PARADISE, &C.

Orb-weavers hung from heaven’s ears.
Serpents descended from webs in the trees.

As for me, I fell asleep in a bed of Eves.
“He’s asleep,” said my angel. The moon

descended on a thread of spit…
My good angel’s eyes were bad

with private looks, gray-blue as doom,
and swimming in aqua Tofana. Her skull was empty

except for spiders, smoke, hourglass sand, and music.
She wore her wings

in pigtails. A long curled banner hovered above her
that read, “Ecce mors supra caput est.”

(I’m pretty sure I know what “mors” means…)


15.
THE WHITE MOUNTAIN IN THE BLACK FOREST

...is always sloughing off ghosts.
From the clouds overhead, one can see the forest
as an enspiraled train
with the engine in the middle puffing its steam.
But from the foot of the Mountain,
it looks only like a slight upward marble slope
leading up to a night of fingers
which far away holds up the sky like a serving platter.
 

16.
PASSENGER LINER

In the compact case plops the anemone flat
into the pink powder of an ocean floor. Makeup
on the mirror of the surface of the sea.

The sun and the moon are the same size.

The days and nights click together
and hold us
like a tortoise shell.

Sunless abyss of Tartarus.
The stars spoil the clean smear of kohl.

(On the ship the lovers
rub each others’ faces onto each other.)
 

17.
A NOIR

A gashing of gloating rain, pouring over the houses like gasoline.
Lit by a seething Jovian fuse. Rowboats like bodies in the water
are visible for a flashing moment.

The forest in the background thunder with its rotten gap-toothed grin.
And you running around with your jacket pulled up over your head
like an old photographer—pop! To the darkroom!

As yet, no one was watching.
Elsewhere, a meeting in “the middle of nowhere.”

In the fog the moon is the swing-out cylinder
of a black revolver. In the clear we see
it has two rounds in the face.

The houses down the hill reach up
for the Milky Way’s beard. The sound of all the town gunfire
is Hera’s jealous anger.

Her mouse cult squeals in the fields like bedsprings.
We set up camp, listen to the police radio before prowling, long slow strides.
 

18.
MY WIFE WHISPERS TO ME AT SUNSET

“The sun is on fire forever,
to look at it is to go blind, yet no one believes in Hell.”

“The stars are fixed as in aspic.”
“Constellations are fishing nets.”

Then we quietly watch from the porch.
Silence drags like a comet: in front of itself.

“I wish the moon away,” she says, “faint thread...last breath.”
“This happens every night...”

My wife clung to my arm and whispered.
The pines bowed and then the wind hit me.

 
19.
There is a bee
inside of a bird. A bee is made
of wood. It cracks, wroth, with a shock.
The bird hops off
with its arms crossed
behind its back like a pacing man.
The head of the man buzzes.
A shock: he thinks,
inside the Earth is a moon.


20.
HOW TO ENTER A CHURCH
 
You have to look in people’s shadows and say, “Shh, shh.”
Then stoop to the stoup. Run your arm
around your body
like you’re putting on a seat belt. Look up.
Put a buck in the basket where the holy babe once slept.
Don’t eat anything.
Speaking of which,
before I was of age for the Eucharist
I thought the priest said to each, “Have a crisp.”
But he only says, “Body of Christ.”

 
21.
The rosemary bush is being too clever.
Its flowers too are merely clever.
The bees are little lost screws. The cruel bees
bother the purple flowers.

 
22.
AT THE SHORE

...the seasick wretch
that is the sea retches and drinks,

“waves of nausea,” on its hands and knees,
retches and drinks.

Children run up to it when it gulps
and run away when it heaves.

This survivor always just finding land.
And the land always losing its sand.
 

23.
A throb in the city
of sight. Flies rolling
their eyes. Stuttering clouds.
Blood in the moon’s mouth.

The moon shows signs of too much use.
Baroque, deformed pearl.

Moons are a planet’s dice.

The stars fall asleep in the morning,
pull the blue cover over their heads.
The fog sneaks around the woods,
blinding.
 









H O R R O R   S T O R I E S





THE GUIDE

The man is writing a field guide to mushroom hunting* so of course he’s going to get poisoned. Such books can’t be issued corrigenda (after some chef hospitalizes his patrons for example**). But the author did not expect, after cleaning a suspicious specimen (elfin earthball?) with his knife and taking a scientific bite, to slowly realize the location of a lost plane in the Indian Ocean or to clearly see that back home in Boonville his babysitter was right now rootling through his desk and dresser drawers. Then his ears rang and his legs went numb, which he jotted down as well.


*See entry #1 in “Celestials & Pastorals,” 2019.
** “Some reports have suggested that morel mushrooms may have been to blame, but officials told local media they were waiting for the test results to come back before singling out any particular ingredient.” —BBC


JUST OUTSIDE THE PENITENTIARY

We awoke in the pit. There had been a mistake. My wife and I took the stairs and dragged ourselves back to the sanatorium. The guard pretended to be apologetic and happy to see us but said our cells were already full of new “guests.” “Let us take the bus to town then,” I offered. “You two? Back to town!” My wife asked for her uniform—we were naked in that miserable weather. “You should go back to the pit and wait it out,” he said. “What? Where do we get out?” my wife cried, pretending not to understand him through his mask. I looked away rubbing my swollen neck. There was something hard inside, something sore but warm. The morning bell rang: cold!, cold!, cold! My wife started crying and the guard jumped back and went inside his booth. Her face was streaming with black ants.


THE SNAIL IN THE CONCH

The Major walked the beach with his true love, his “one true pairing,” and they came upon a large pink shell. “Put it to your ear,” he suggested and she blushingly and gracefully complied. As he watched her face expectantly, she suddenly turned ugly, dropped the conch and became horribly and terribly, frighteningly, undiagnosably ill. The Major stayed awake by her bed for days holding a bloody compress to her little, apostrophal ear until he was called back to the front where he was killed because of his understandable fatigue. The bullet went into his ear and fell out, a hundred miles away, from his dying fiancée’s. Her mom heard it tinkle off the floorboards and roll under the bed. She got down on all fours and looked for it. Under the bed, the blood rushed to the drained woman’s head: it sounded like the ocean.


THE GHOST HUNTERS

Ghost hunters in an abandoned hospital carelessly profaned the newborn nursery with a wild nodding of their headlamps. Large shards of the viewing window almost reflected the faint crowd of ghosts* with their lives behind them. The ones with spindly bodies and oversized heads were the souls of dead children. Oblivious to this, one of the ghost hunters, Franziska, thought she heard someone in the hall, but the other hunter named Jack didn’t hear anything. Then someone in the hallway started to scream. Franziska gave her friend an eager but sympathetic look, however Jack, arms akimbo, was pretending not to be convinced—he was shaking his head back and forth sending the beam of light across the walls. Out in the hall a white coat was sliding across the tiles like a mop.
 

*N.B.: The putrefying don’t sleep, don’t “rest”; they crawl about in the dust like a shackled anxiety for a hundred years until they turn into moths. If a moth should fly through your keyhole and land on your chest while you sleep it is best to turn over your pillow and make the sign of the cross on it.


AT THE OUTERMOST TIP OF CAPE COD

To be brief and plain…Half the folks in Provincetown were carried off. This palpably quasi-ritualistic oddity, this spiritually poignant phase of horror, sure of its sanity, must mean something. Bafflement would be difficult to describe. “They’s suthin’ ben thar!” convulsed Pastor Lowell Craft* between gasps. The unknown brooding sea dwelt for ever in its dark church, old as the cosmos itself. If this thing did happen as is rumored, then man must cross himself in fright when passing such blasphemy. We dare not form any conjecture.


*The pastor many years from now goes into his church, deep in, to plaster his bones into the walls. Years ago most of his town fell into the sea and the fatigue has not lifted. The stair wants to be an arch, he thinks, the night wants to be a cave. How many arches make a tunnel? All the churches are full of bones like a man sitting at the bar eating a plate of smelt. Then forgetfulness takes the people by the arm and puts each pastor to bed. Shh shh the ocean coos.


THE CURIOUS MOURNER

She was at the funeral for her husband’s grandfather* but as she passed some empty pauper’s coffins, she couldn’t resist. She stepped into one, sat down, put the seat back and the lid slammed shut. The casket flew up into the air, circled the graveyard three times, and then dove, crashing deep into the ground. They had to dig her up because she wasn’t a pauper. Her husband said to just throw her into his grandfather’s casket. He was a little pissed off. So they buried them together and for the rest of time the dead grandfather whispered inappropriate things to the horrified woman he was spooning.**


*We always kiss the dead “for the last time.” —Ed.
**Science has shown that when dark, graves kiss each other on the mouth. God can’t believe it. God can’t believe a lot of things.


HOUSE CALL

Bad thoughts have been tipping over a chair behind a screen. The chair has a hole in the seat and a bucket is rolling in a semicircle toward the wall. There is a gnawed step stool by the wall there, under the window. On the sill is a pot with a stick in it that used to be a plant. The drapes are held by hair-ties and the wallpaper is parting away below. In the bed is a bald man the color of beer with his face in a pillow and red bumps on the back of his neck. At the side of the bed is an end table with circles where little bottles used to be. A woman is in the kitchen perhaps drinking a cup of tea. Perhaps her hair is pulled tight. So tight her nose is flat and her eyes like slits. There are several spoons in the metal sink. Maybe a clock with its pendulum stopped. A dog crawls. The doorbell goes off: first an electric hum then a loud ring then the barking. Hold your breath! It’s Doctor Grosz! The dirty ideas giggle like lice. Knock knock knock! It’s awful nice! Is the master home? No shakes the wife.


FROM A SHREDDED COMIC BOOK

“Gaby, wake up.” “Hmmmm…?” “Don’t hear anyone following!” “Hey!! Wha—??” “I—I can’t run anymore!” “The cellar! It’s the only place left!” “No...not that!” “No Spot—don’t!” “Tommy leave the dog!! Tommy…” “Gaby! the keys for the truck!” “They’re not here! He must have them!” “The plant’s still growing—still spreading!” “Sam! The police! They did see us!” “Doctor?” “Wait! The plant’s stopped moving!! It’s shriveling up! It’s dying!!” “Gee! I’d better get the chief!” “Don’t let them fool you! They’re the—”


SPRING CLEANING AT THE HAUNTED HOTEL

A stairway climbs a stairway or its shadow does, spending its life. The hotel crawls with stairs, rises in the dust of rug-beaten May. Inside their rooms everyone starts over. In this hotel you can fall down the stairs forever. After a few hours you look like a skinned deer. After a few days you look like a rubber octopus. After a few weeks you’re just a beef shank bouncing down, floor after floor. There’s only so much blood so these stairways are quite clean. Perhaps you think you’re smart to take the elevator, but it’s a guillotine. In the laundry who scrubs the ghosts’ sheets? In the lobby the witch sweeps.*


*After work, the witch comes down the street to a rain of rocks. When it grows dark we light her on fire. When her hair goes up we hold our noses. (In the morning we sweep up the ashes with her broom. Among the ashes are little white teeth we use for dice.) The dawn rearranges things. Then the homeless rain-swollen river swells with dead mermaids. We collect from their mouths strings of small hooks.


CRYBABIES

The cry comes charging out the open mouth. The gathered adults show their teeth and clutch their ears; they collapse around the crib. You can’t hear them as they scream, “Christ!” The neighbors pound their walls and ceilings then they stop and you can’t hear the dishes crash and their bodies thud. And the scream doesn’t end so the police clear the area, then the whole block. The pigeons and crows on their sides in the road. And as these flattened homebodies begin to stink like diapers, a baby in a house far down the street just barely hears the call and now opens its messy trap to howl.


DUMPLING TIME!

One dumpling has “forbidden” hay in it that makes your mouth itchy. One has a real mother’s cheek. There is fried eunuch's nose and cilantro, “embarrassment toast,” and shark piss tea. When you get through the line to the entrance, look to your left—behind glass is a woman* in a surgical mask and shower cap hanging from a hook with fresh pulled-out eyes dangling like white taffy into a bamboo steamer. Behind her are three tired men doing something repetitively in front of a columbarium. You can’t get the check until you’ve burned your tongue fat and purple as an urchin’s test. There’s an extra bone in your neck and you have to let the waiter dig for it with sticks.


*Consort Zhen, aka, the Pearl Concubine. (Her personal name was not recorded in history. —Ed.)


THE LAST PRINCE

How long have you been in the bathroom? “Fifteen-hundred years.” came a tiny voice through the door. And it was true. Although very skinny, the prince had access to water, and you can live fifteen-hundred years without food so long as you have water. “How long will you be?” No answer. The Last Judgment crossed its legs and pounded at the door. “You’re out of step with policy!” The prince stood silver in front of the mirror, chin down, eyes up, and puckered his lips. His crown was lying on the tile near the tub like a bear-trap. Under the door the Last Judgment pushed a sheet of paper. It heard a weak laugh, a crumpling... and a flush. It was around this time Judgment started playing with a daring idea. “Prince, what can you see in the little window, the window over the toilet?” A thin voice through the door stuttered, “A p-p-piece of glass?” “Yes, but through the glass what can you make out?” “T-t-trees? R-r-redwood trees?” “Can you see the tops of the trees? And what’s up there at the crown?” And it heard the latch and the window crack open for the first time in fifteen-hundred years. And an opening is of course all Death needs.


THE UNFORTUNATE SISTERS

There once was a woman, let’s call her Kirsty Lee Allan, who couldn’t breathe unless she was talking. Her first husband told her to “shut up” and she passed out. While she slept she murmured the strangest stories about monkeys in submarines and navigating phone trees, white boxes of dread in the summer wet season off the coast of North Queensland.* She learned more and more languages when she ran out of things to say. Then one day she said something that left her speechless and she suffocated. All her husbands gave each other knowing looks at her funeral. Along the same lines, whenever her sister, let’s call her Saskia Burmeister, tried to speak, Champagne poured out her mouth, much to her mortification. She took to wearing raincoats. She would start dating someone and then drown him. Needless to say she was always drunk. She cried a noble rot wine. Didn’t say much. Her eyes always looked like she was walking down a spiral staircase. Retroussé hair; red nose. And vice versa. One day she slid quick up the side of a skyscraper and popped, a little gold bubble.


*Likely a reference to the C. barnesi jellyfish: “One unusual symptom associated with their sting is a feeling of ‘impending doom.’ Patients have been reported as being so certain they are going to die, they beg their doctors to kill them.”


AFTER THE MYSTERIOUS STORM

The sea fell flat under the crippled ship and her masts relaxed. With the sun, our captain came out bringing hope to the crew. Dolphins were leaping from cloud to cloud. He walked from his cabin all the way to the forecastle smiling through his black beard. “How about those oysters,* lads!” he laughed, “What a haul!” When he got to the bow he jumped. When we cried out to him, he came out of his cabin again. He said, “What? What?” And we all turned around. Now his beard was blue. When we all told him in an excited chorus what we’d just seen he was very condescending and explained that he wasn’t wet so it couldn’t have been him who went overboard. Even if we had a mirror onboard he’d probably say his beard was more black than blue so we didn’t even mention that.


*The oysters had been unholy huge. We had to kill them while they were in bed. Inside each were black organs. Iridescent dark slits in slimy pink fans. Fatty stuff. Our knives sank to the hilt and blue brine squirted into our faces as we tried not to scream, to hold our breath.


AFTER THE GUNFIGHT

He had the posture of a saloon regular. His heart jumped out his ribs like they were swinging Western-style doors. The heart looked like a skinned mole. It hopped into a pint glass and its blood filled the glass so you couldn’t see it anymore. The man’s ribs went creak creak creak and then were still. He looked down at himself then at the bar all covered in red sauce, and took off his cowboy hat, being in the presence of the Lady.* All the features of his face fell onto the bar and his scalp slid back and his hair it all fell down his back just missing the spittoon. “The usual.


*That night Death, Lady of the Night, licks his chin. “That’s for hesitating.” she says, and turns away to go to sleep.


THE LOCAL SAINTS

The celebrity saint! Her famous heart big as an apple, deep as a horse’s eye. Her famous, stained eyes that say, “May your name ring no bells.” When they martyred her on the wheel, her blood was white as a camera’s flash. Her sales rocketed to the oohs and aahs of all blesseds, venerables, and servants. Meanwhile, the burning house* of my town’s holy fool was not a happy one. The walls coated with ground glass. The oven clearly complicated, implicated. The odor often difficult. The bed illegal. The halls were decked with hanged maids who also served as curtains. And this saint contorted in the cupboard, anting his feathers.


*Years later, they filled all the houses and churches in town with cement to avoid another fire. Now we all live in tents. The demands on our engineers were great, but the mayor demanded the elimination of all space inside buildings, all “fire traps.” Once they’d “topped off” the last skyscraper, the chief made a dubious leap—every citizen had to have their mouths always full to the brim with water. Now, I’ve always hated the taste of water. Besides, I’m a smoker. What are they going to do, chisel me into prison?!


“WE ALL HAVE TO DIE”

There were compartmentalized plates and clay bowls of pink, orange, and yellow spice. Baskets of long wild mushrooms, sardines, impossible vegetables, and platters of raw fowl. Across our placemats were utensils never before seen: like dental or surgical hardware. There was powdered sugar in the air that made it hard to breathe and so much blood and tapioca on the floor we were glad for our chairs which were heavy and held even as our shoes slipped and squeaked under the table. Each seating sported no less than four glasses of different sizes with blue, clear, amber, umber liqueurs. When the triangle rang we each grabbed the wrong picks or tongs and were kindly but firmly scolded. The chandelier* exploded like spaghetti squash and we all started babbling from nervousness when the roasted beast was carried in on a dripping palanquin. I was blindfolded, helped to my feet, given something metal and heavy, maybe a hatchet. I heard my wife’s hysterical laughter being muffled and the hostess cupped my elbow with her calm hand. She blew in my ear when she spoke like she was cooling a spoon of soup: “Iche bitte...ich grüsse...wir müssen alle sterben…”


*German folk song: Alle Kronleuchter im Traum des Sterbenden waren hell verbrannt. Hell! Über seinem Körper waren die kreisenden Krähen ein Kronleuchter! (All the chandeliers in the dying man’s dream / were burnt bright. Bright! / Above his body the circling crows / were a chandelier!) The important text here is Die Sehlosen Haben Eine Trommel, die Sie Lesen, 2015.










A P H O R I S M S   ( II )





Birds have wings so we can describe angels.
 
*

Whenever I read about a fire under a bridge I get confused.
 
*

Serpents are all throats.
 
*

An inexact woman always falls out of bed. And also her knees are pinkish.
 
*

Some women you cannot draw without insulting.
 
*

She unlocks the door with her locket.
 
*

Blond women must drink white wine.

*
 
A face is a bowling bag.
 
*

The further back in time I go the easier I am to spot.
 
*

Not all armadillos cause leprosy. Nor oysters pregnancy. Not all Florida monkeys excrete herpes. Crickets, rickets. Not all melting icebergs preserve plagues.
 
*

How many witches can you fit in a tumbril? As many angels as fit in a thimble. We rattle over the road and the bitches mumble; to the public square where the timber is kindled.

*
 
I like to end my naps like a roughly opened desk drawer full of loose candy.
 
*

Our steps are the perforation sleep tears.
 
*

I don’t know how anyone who has watched someone eat a banana could eat one themselves.
 
*

A millionaire on a diet will take free food.
 
*

Her hands are handkerchiefs.

*
 
The clouds had a slumber party. They gathered around the moon to watch TV.
 
*

I only read so that no one will speak to me. I suspect this is why some people jog.

*

Bach sounds like a very lucky person dropping a silver tray of silverware.
 
*

When women are alone they screw up their eyes and rat their hair, whatever that means.
 
*

If non-fluent you might think Darwin carried a turtle on a dog across the sea.
 
*

I can make any part of me hurt just by thinking about it. I must learn to have this effect on others.
 
*

All waiters are tired.
 
*

When you make your waiter laugh an angel takes a shit.
 
*

The sun is unsparing in its use of superlatives, mutters the sleepy field.

*
 
Santa really is worried. And not about his unsustainable cheer. About you.
 
*

The atom: Windless streets wind around a gold zoo.
 
*

Adults do not eat flowers and only read at certain times of day.
 
*

Most people should keep to themselves. Insufferable sentimentalists may socialize.
 
*

Rebarbative barbarism baits the poor bastards out of their basements. We wait for their abasement.
 
*

Reckless, greedy, bullying, inept, I went to bed. Stupidly, indistinguishably, apparently I’ll wake up.

*
 
Weather + Victorian essayists + the woman sleeping next to you = your forgotten coat.
 
*

What magazines are in a psychiatrist’s lobby? What psychiatrists are in a magazine’s lobby?
 
 *

I want to sleep like the dead Christ in an Andrea Mantegna.
 
*

Maids sleep in a pile, on the floor.
 
*

What the maid sings under her breath will cure you.

*

Each morning the lights of the bar blink open with conjunctivitis.
 
*

How different at night is listlessness.
 
*

When I see a man in a trench-coat I feel he should be sawing away at something.
 
*

The audible smells of the hospitable hospital.
 
*

Teeth resent soup.
 
*

A forest is in all caps.
 
*

Explaining things to you is like eating a crappy steak with a plastic knife and fork.
 
*

Whatever a miracle is it probably thought you’d be in a “nightshirt.”
 
*

No matter how many people you push into the river the babbling never stops.

*
 
Fortune is all fingers, logic a glove.
 
*

Sleigh bells sound like a jewelry store robbery.
 
*

Like a rhinoceros or overhyped violinist I too toured Europe fairly frowned upon.
 
*

Wednesdays are comma splices.
 
*

You have to shake her off like snow, with a stiff hand.
 
*

If old men did not lose their hair there would be no clouds.
 
*

To begrudge: A heart full of worms like the inside of a baseball.
 
*

In the narrowest sense, I ate my salary.
 
*

After a toast the sipping silence is only broken by the ventriloquist.
 
*
 
A dog is the sort of frantic lady who prefers looking to finding.
 
*

Confidence fits me like a princely sarcophagus.
 
*

Working from home: Pajamas and alcohol—both Eastern words.
 
*

He always speaks in the tone we used in church when we said, “and also with you.”

*

Aphorisms make better suicide notes.
 
*

This is at least a story that ends very quickly.
 
 








F A I R Y   T A L E S   &
F E U I L L E T O N S





A certain emperor had four beauties. One girl made flowers throw up when she sashayed around the garden that’s how pretty she was. Another girl made birds smash their brains out against the palace windows. The third made the moon blush through its powdered face. And the fourth was also easy on the eyes, as they say. His Majesty would get drunk in his hyacinth hut or jade mansion and yell, “C’mere you!” and one of his beauties would flutter in, dressed only in tears and hairpins. The emperor would then do a little dance until he fell over a pillow. Then the fireflies in his old head would wake up and his eyes would glow. This is where the dirty little priest always woke up with the big brass bell ringing and his students laughing at what he must have been saying in his sleep.


I’d like to speak about being sick. One, avoid it. Two, you’ll notice it in your arms and legs—more specifically your forearms which will seem both cold and warm. Weak knees, weakness, etc. Being sick affects your handwriting. You get nothing done. It is the vacation of the layabout. Shivers on this lake are contagious. A jelly of joints, a milk for brains. And I must mention your nasally voice disgusts yourself. Having the shakes is like hugging God. Also being sick makes you short with your wife which is fine if you have a short wife. You forget what “day it is.” What’s also worrisome about being sick is that it changes your idea of what a “bed” is and blowing your nose seems important. Nurses will tell you that you have a fever so they can kiss your forehead. It leaves a red cross. Then again, no one is as cheery as a convalescent.


In all Sarah Harbinger’s films she portrays twin sisters, one thin and yellow and the other just English. She never actually appears for breakfast but you can hear her talking to herself in her room. The gardener’s daughter Ann looked like a Modigliani—so naturally she didn’t live long. Her sister looked like a Picasso—they keep her chained up in the attic. Gabby is like a flower but heavy and gray. So I suppose she doesn’t look like a flower, people just say that because they like to hear themselves talk. The poor woman smells like a cowboy hat. And big Bob with the weird facial hair; Bob walks splay-footed and is always eating something from his pocket. Perhaps loose popcorn. Let’s just say it ain’t mints. He claims he’s a book reviewer but I suspect he sells drugs. Anyway that about covers the people you’re likely to run into or hear about.


He pushed the other boy against the stuccoed wall of a middle school somewhere in Nashville or a suburb thereof (one of their classmates was the daughter of an American Idol finalist) and seeing in his eyes a fear and panic knew he did not know what was supposed to happen next for the initial “bullying” had been out of character and an impulse of “appropriated will,” pretend, not really him, and he knew that he would not be a guiltless bully, because he didn’t know, he now saw, the reason behind bullying, in fact had only always been bullied, and that this boy now reddening and yes now actually crying really ought to know this was posturing and not to be taken so suddenly, irreversibly seriously because this bawling child knew him, knew all about him actually, but was just a year, one year, younger, and allowed himself (now the attacker was getting angry), knew that this was not a real threat but was falling into his (their) role as a little picked-on bastard so easily, stupidly, unnecessarily, it seemed didn’t it that a smack across the fat carrot-face, perhaps cutting the inside of the upper lip on those embarrassing braces, would be in order, in fact absolutely necessary if anyone were to be able to move on from this afternoon and live their lives.


Forgetting what one has seen or read is the most charming. Children on the other hand remember everything. When I think about my first communion for example I can even recall the conversations in my pew. Whereas just this summer I read a book about Ancient Rome and now I don’t know my emperors nor whether this or that is before or after year zero! We had received the Eucharist and were lined up kneeling in prayer. I said my piece and straightened up a bit. Some passing instructor scolded me in a whisper to say my prayer. Before I could explain that I had done so the girl next to me who had apparently also finished her prayer said stupidly, giddily, “Again? OK!” and bounced her curly-haired head back down in what was at best a pointless addendum and at worst sacrilege. And being a child I remember exactly how I felt: embarrassed, indignant. I wouldn’t call this rehashing “charming.”


Then how do retired athletes spend their time? Creatively, lovingly, helpfully. Then they beat up young perfect drug-addled women then suffer meetings about it. Then they watch sports, I can only then assume. Then it pains me to say they get fat very fat until you can’t really be any more fat without buying a boat so he buys a boat by selling his share in a steakhouse and then sets off to sea and then so fat the Floridian sharks then just await him the new lady then long-since beaten up and overboard. Until the end he spouts, “fuckin,’” between “thirty” and “grand.” The clouds then and then collapse as perfect and pink as a conch as his heart splotches. Only people made happy by his death care. And that is how an athlete lives out his beastly and unforgivable life. There’s a bronze of an aging boxer in Rome. Inside it’s nothing. The idea of it is what we care about and even that’s not his. He thinks throughout time: Then, then, then.


We live in sinking skyscrapers, for now, and check the protractor each Christmas. We know on which wall to hang pictures so they’ll be flush. It’s been years since children all lost their marbles. But when the end comes we’ll crush the other half of the city that doesn’t live in skyscrapers so there’s no sense in moving. Only the slow tilting, listing, into the patient landfill, itself composed of sunken ships. What to do? And who to sue? Proudhon said property is theft but this is not what he meant.


Everyone in town woke up at the same time as if there had been an earthquake. But there wasn’t one; it was a coincidence. And no one knew this even happened.


First you paint a triangle the color of her dress. Then you tap it with the heel of the brush like you’d tap an egg with a spoon and the folds and seams appear throughout. Now you add the hands—every finger a different carnal color; and now the face with its plateau of torn hair. The features you add with quick care: two eyes, a dab of nostril, and paint your own lips pink to apply her mouth with a kiss. You put a dark halo around her to keep the background away. Last you flip the canvas around and paint in all her wet organs in order; then crisscross over them her birdcage-bones with a knife. Now a toast of turpentine, from Aphrodite to Xanthippe!


Once upon a date she was lovely, but this wore thin… Her apartment was sad, communist. Her roommate was threadbare, monochrome, with stale ice cubes for eyes. They both had complexions like cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwiches. One sign of life: They used to both sing the Hee Haw theme whenever a rerun was on, but then they’d sink back on the couch and pick at their nails. One evening I forgot which one was which, which offended them, so I stopped stopping by. It became tiresome to tell them apart. That’s what happens—absolutely nothing happens—regarding these girls, nothing ever after.


On a sudden a demon painted you and you became pregnant. You grew into a fruit, covered in teeth marks like an orange. That’ll teach you to stay in bed when gifted with depression. Your children suck on frozen poison and the demon praises nothing. Scoured with laziness, languor, liquor, the days they lose their courage. But time wakes up as we fall asleep and does its work in the dimness. The elderly gum their mushy grief and the demon doesn’t visit. Then who sets the pieces and goes back to the start? Or does the universe keep running away? In all directions from its stars?


When my famous uncle turned 75 he gathered together all of his journals, asked his friends for all of his letters back, and went to City Hall for his legal documents so that he might write his autobiography. He divided the work into four sections: his Rousseauian education, his years on the farm, his years at the firm, and his long retreat to a hermit’s cave in the Apennines where he did little but “cerebrate” for many years before returning to his Richmond estate to write his story at his old desk up in the “widow’s walk.” Because he expected his book to be published he omitted any information about his family except the very basic facts: of his mother, only that he had one, of his wife, only that he had married her, and he never mentioned his children by name nor revealed their number. As an extra precaution he wrote it in Early New High German, which he did not know.


In the Stinging Room she was sitting in seconds. She looked accusingly at the one-way mirror until the insects covered her eyes. Then she stood up and started flailing like they all do. The sacred whirling dance, the crash and tremble, the hum overcoming the scream. Like a god overcome with worshippers. But of course the stingers are only puny gobs of wrath, irreligious; and they leave the girl pink and pocked like a sponge or some other creature of the sea. Then I get the nod and slip in with my coveralls to gas the room and drag “with great care” the Sacrifice into the holy hole while the higher-ups perform devotions. What can you do? Five a day now.


I would like to be a character in a Russian tale so I could “shudder all over” and “hold my head in my hands” until an abject, pensive, bewildered, pitiful, sad, twisted, indescribable smile played on my lips, and with wet snow in my beard and a fear of God, I’d “drink terribly” with the sledge-driver, bow awkwardly, and finally fall asleep on the stove in my divided apartment, illuminated only by my wife’s frightened eyes.


Adam and Eve were eating apples when Adam’s ears began to pop. Eve suggested a decongestant. They were wearing little more than their rashes and pimples so a cold was not unexpected. Adam mentioned to Eve that the apples were rather mushy but Eve did not want to hear negative things, not today. Looking intently at his apple core, Adam saw a worm, which is just a little snake. Then he looked at Eve. There was something weird in her ear.


In my small town in the Blue Ridge, our grandfathers are loved and loathed by their nurses, for their pressed-cornflower eyes and pincers for hands, respectively. Their snowing minds are sad. Rewinding a few years they can be so cruel (“Looming cows!”); fast forwarding a few and they really can’t be blamed. Grandmothers lie on their backs and a tree grows up out of each one’s belly. The nurses run to these fruit trees on their break, crying and adjusting their clothes under the moaning branches. It’s nice to watch from far away the meadow full of trees and white dots of nurses all the way to the mountains and the mountains further on even more blue and hazy. At the end of the lunch hour the cavalcade of nurses march back to the gated rest home. And all the windows flash as the old-timers move away from their views (“The cows are back in the barn!”) and restore the curtains each with an angry little jerk. And the trees hoping no one sees cry their apples and plums. When will it get dark? It gets dark sooner and sooner each day, which is a comfort.


A shadowy foreign Devil only you can hear gives you a disease, much later in life. Your glands can’t take all these dashes down alleyways, these days disposable as clay penny-pipes, these “French exits.” Not over so many years. And now look at you, Devil-less and clutching at a heart that feels like a punch to the privates—you’re stung, turned inside out! What sinful fun the weeds will have after you cease to pluck.
 

That summer, all I ate were eels and pigeon pie. Around this time, I was confined to bed and began having strange dreams. Rereading them now from my “bedside notebooks,” I can see that as my confinement curtailed my waking experience I began to use past dreams as source material for new ones. This is why only the later notebooks are considered divine. Eventually I ceased to dream in the usual sense—I only saw suggestions of things, as if looking through many layers of bubbles—and I could only describe them in my book as “sour” or “dry.” When I was again able to leave my bed and take longer and longer walks in the world, my dreams returned to common anxious mishmashes, my interest in them diminished, and soon I was unable to (or didn’t care to) recall them.


This was to be my first time inside my neighbor’s house. There was tape all over the door from torn down warning notices. It was a pinkish house—except the side that was white from the sun—and in a sympathetic mood I once suggested it looked like a conch, but my neighbor, throwing out his Christmas tree, preferred a ruder simile. I saw him once or twice a year—the rest of the time I don’t know if he was away or locked up inside. And something about the house attracted enormous crows. I had walked right up, rung a few times, and then I just opened the front door, hoping it would be locked. My wife was sure he’d stolen our cat and she was right. But now I saw our cat walking on its hind legs, which I’d never seen before, and pointing a little white paw toward what must be the bathroom door because I just heard a flush.









U N T R U E   C R I M E S





 
MISS APRIL WIG-GLESWORTH from Sag Harbor stretched all the way back to her ancestors, which made her quite popular. She helped many-a-man de-cide against the priest-hood. So some religious, local mothers strangled her with apron strings. Or perhaps that’s just an expression for some-thing I’m not old enough to understand. Rescue workers found her “fully dressed” in Back Creek. There’s a photo in a dirty frame of April on the wall of the Grand Clam House. Some families still re-fuse to sit at that booth. In the picture April has a king crab leg sticking out of her mouth.

A JACKKNIFED 18-wheeler truck dumped hundreds of overdoses onto the turnpike. Each blue body barfed out hundreds of white pellets. Each pill had a letter from the Cyrillic alphabet on it that looked like a candelabra. We scooped up what we could and swallowed handfuls. Then we all got into another truck and were taken to the medical waste incin-erator. On the way, a motorcycle without a rider hopped the median in front of our 18-wheeler and the driver yanked the wheel to the left. We all spilled out onto the road like tablets. The clouds were pill bottle cotton.

HER SHRIEK MADE the cockatiel squeak. The red feathers on its cheek darkened. The red spot arose on her cheek as well, in the shape of a hand. It happened like this: her lover “brought her to her senses.” Her senses looked at her with pity and patted her on the bottom. Then her sen-ses asked her lover why he kept bringing this hysterical woman to them. Meanwhile the bird flew out of our reportage.

 
THROUGH THE KEYHOLE you see a man’s behind, a wo-man’s feet—but in the keyhole is a little dog that bites your eye like it’s a soup dumpling. 

A MIDTOWN MAN with rhubarb hair, he of no particular age, ate all of his pocket money. Because the bus was so loud and cold and the seat hard and un-friendly, he now saw things clearly. He did not quite achieve a “selfless respect for reality,” however. All he had needed, he instead surmised, was his pocket money. They found his clothes by the river.
 

BY SIX O’CLOCK, Lynn S— was smoking and drinking wine on the patio overlooking the redwoods and, bare-ly visible through them but easy to hear, the highway and, to the right and down the gorge, an outdoor church service was set-ting up on the redwood benches and tables, while she waited for the coffee to brew. She bites her fingernail. She pets her dog. A spy blimp comes across the tree tops and a shadow crosses the cabin. Lynn walks the 13 steps down to the bedroom and gets the shotgun from under the bed. And there, where it’s dark as a caecum, under the bed, a tiny woman is crying. There was a scraping sound as a cable dang-ling from the blimp was dragged over the house. “What are you doing under my bed?” A tiny woman always tries to find excuses. “I-I was looking for my barrette.” Then the dog bursts in and jabs its head into everything. The little woman pees like a toad. Lynn runs out front and takes a few shots at the receding blimp, which now she can tell is the first of a series of hot air balloons. One woman falls out of a basket holding a glass of champagne. She boun-ces off the covered hot tub and rolls into some bushes. Just then the PA cracks on and a priest is heard from below admitting, “Testing testing.” The dog bolts as if to fetch the fallen tourist. Lynn heads back to the city, leaving only her fingerprints.

THE GIRL WHO didn’t exist was pink as a doughnut box. Pink as the eraser that perhaps erased her. We didn’t find her on Mars. There is a blurry figure in a hoodie on a security tape that isn’t her. Someone came up with a way to make it seem like her. He said: “Something must have happened to her.” Be-cause if she never existed how are we able to talk about her, call her “pink”? I can’t answer. On such oc-casions I stop talking, put on headphones, and visit the shooting range.

A MAN HAD love in his heart so he had a heart attack and died. Similar story to the fellow with a big idea in his head. And the woman who had “your little sister in [her] belly.”

THE PRISON HAS always been here saying farewell to the world. Above it small and faint constellations of cruel instruments. Ugly e-vents. The pressing to death of the prisoners can take many days, the procedure elaborate, and is mandatory viewing throughout the country. Eventually the guards died or went crazy from drinking blood, wandered off leaving the gates open. But outside and around the prison was another prison and another. Some places you just throw your hands up and say that’s how it is here.
 

MRS. MOSS LEFT her mark. She left rosy lips on her husband’s cheeks. Her cheeks left orange on her pillow. She dripped pink drops all over the wash. Her hair turned her hat blond. And because of all this her husband split. No sensible man is willing. She looked down at her feet spreading white over the black rail of the bridge like droppings of pigeons and fell into the iced river which alas turned red all over.

I WAS BRIEFLY arrested—in fact I forgot all about it—actually I hadn’t no-ticed it—until I got home and my wife saw I’d gotten fingerprint ink all over the couch. They’ve been using fingerprints since the Qin Dynasty, I re-assured her, it shouldn't be so surprising. I had a drink. What was it all about? After all I rarely do anything. We watched the news with unspoken dread. The phone rang and some-one read off a series of numbers when I said hello. A murkiness spread, indelibly. My wife started listing all the things I may have said or read online to bring about my arrest. I decided to report her to the police just to knock her off her high horse.

A CERTAIN MAD-WOMAN wanted her arms tied together and wine thrown in her face. The obliging vineyard workers keep finding her but the authorities are determined to stop them when no longer furiously drunk. She was last seen tied to the tracks of the Napa Valley Wine Train.

DIGGING A WINE cellar, Ethan found an ancient girl embalmed in honey. It began raining bees when he kissed her and so he carried her into his house. What this did to the carpet his wife could never forgive.
 

WHATEVER SNARLS TRAFFIC gave my car ideas. My car snarled so I drove off the road and got out. No one would go near it. Eventually we just threw rocks at it. Other cars creeping by gave us side-mirror looks. Some motorcycle cops came by so we dispersed. Even my car stopped snarling then because everyone is afraid of the police.
 
 
THE BELOVED DISCIPLE was picked up by surveillance cameras running child-ishly with eyes closed through a peeling eu-calyptus forest. This not three days after being caught on camera stealing birds from the back of a pet store. The Beloved Disciple was reportedly one of seven fishermen involved in the “miraculous catch” and possibly the host of the Last Supper. The suspect is a beardless youth of undetermined sex.
 

THE IRIS STICKS out its yellow tongue, says “Ahhh.” One plant is caught with lemons; one gets spotted with rot. One is tied to a stake; one gets so big it annoys the neighbors. One is swallowed up; one dies standing up. One is eaten up by birds in a plot surrounded by marigolds minding their own business.
 

THE STEADY, ALARMING army of beauties made their way toward the bridge, driven out of town by spiders. If a spider touched your cheek, they believed, it became a hairy mole on your face. The bridge toll collector stood up in his booth with his mouth open like Bernini’s Saint Teresa.
 

SCRATCH-OFF LOTTERY silver un-der her fingernails and a headache like warm beer. A steak knife. She was hot, nauseated, thick-tongued, tired. For a while nobody on the 71 paid any attention to her. When she swallowed, her ears hurt. A little boy ran up and down the bus aisle up and down sounding like someone dumping an endless bag of potatoes and he would have run like that back and forth forever if she hadn’t stood up for herself and her rights as a passenger.
 
 
IN EARLY MORN-ING, an eyewitness reports, mulish Death crawls out of the ocean on his stubby arms and legs. His tail leaves a long snake in the sand right up to her door. By the afternoon the children have oblit-erated his trail with their play. But last evening, Death entered the woods with his hairless huge head and his yellowed undershirt, his baggy pants and hiking boots, and threaded as best he could in his other-worldliness through the sycamores and oak until he found a boy playing with some twigs. The dead branch above their heads creaked once, twice, cracked.










D O M E S T I C   C A U S E R I E S






The first thing I see when I wake up is a red spot. A red spot or a man in a dark coat running out the door. I try to put pants on but overthink it and wind up falling into the piano which always wakes up my wife, who always says I overthink things. Then my dog realizes I’m up and climbs all over me. My dog is very fat and covered in nipples the vet vaguely assures us will go away. Next I have a drink and find my phone. The first thing I see when I get to the office is my black chair. My ergonomic chair or a lady in a ridiculous outfit talking about coffee. I try to turn my computer on but overthink it and wind up falling into the file cabinet which always upsets my boss, who always says I overthink things. Then the coyotes realize I’m alone during my break and climb all over me. The coyotes in the park are very thin and covered in mange the Presidio Trust vaguely assures us will go away. Next I have a drink and call for a car.

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There was a beautiful house on a lovely street overlooking the nice bay. Inside was a white bed with a lonely couple and the man had a nasty disease. In the hamper the crouching devil lifted the lid slightly with his horns and made faces at the dog.

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The big questions were settled. The light slowed down. We thought in slowly changing alphabets, laughed at dead physicists. The men went to bed and the women took the razors from where they had been hiding—under mattresses, under tongues—and kissed them like icons. The compulsive kisses get quicker and quicker until the sun pops up like a piece of toast—Eureka!
 
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It was during one of our company’s happy hours when we found a stranger walking around by the unlit cubicles. Nancy had gone back to her desk to get her sweater and try to “cover up a bit,” when she started screeching. She told us a man was slipping laptops into a duffel bag and had run into the copy room. Our IT guy, who had been drinking Patrón for hours, went berserk and ran after him telling us to guard the exits. He tackled the poor bastard, tying him up with cords. We brought him to the kitchen and tortured him with wine openers and broken glass. I remember the shitfaced CFO sitting on his chest and pouring Wite-Out in his eyes. In the early morning the janitorial staff called the police when they saw all the bloody clothes in the recycling bin. In jail we made the best of things and treated it as a team-building day. We laughed at how the groggy thief started to claim he needed computers to tell what “the dreams are about.” Damage control amounted to sending all incoming calls to an automated message explaining the incident was a hoax. Tim from Strategy warned us research shows that even if confronted with a correction, it won't change people's minds. “No one wants to think they’re misinformed.” We’ll see! The big holiday party’s just around the corner.

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A certain writer sat on a stump smoking his meerschaum pipe. The bowl was carved in the likeness of the man smoking his own little pipe. When the writer thought of his wife, so did the pipe. The smoke even began to smell a bit like her. And when the man finally got up and knocked out his tobacco he got a headache and spit out a blackened tooth.
 
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There’s something wrong with my blood-flow. I have to take several pills some once a day some three times. My father’s face had a worm in it. “Who knows,” he said, “what your mother makes of the Pillars of Creation?” The maids were sitting on the floor erasing all the entries in my diaries, blowing the pink dust off the shaggy pages. They spoke a foreign language. My father was a connoisseur of salesgirls, maids, he could tell what color hair they had without looking. “Where are you from?” he asked each girl he met. Full of ideas and plans I went to the store to buy a new notebook. The salesgirls wouldn’t come to the counter however. They were in the backroom picking through my father’s wallet and laughing like lanterns. There was an announcement: “Attention shoppers, Charles’ mom is lost and looking for her son. She’s in cutlery.” I hurried to her. The blood in my ears sounded like noisy scissors. To begin with, she knows I hate to be called “Charles.”
 
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What can the dentist learn about you from an examination? That you curse? That you once smoked until your tongue turned black? Ach, him holding up the X-ray: “Jeffrey, I suspect you’re paying for sins of the past.” He’s such the sleuth I decided to scare him. For six months all I ate were teeth. Next visit, he quickly left the little office knocking the delicate hooks about and hiding an erection. I laughed about it briefly with his always-terrified hygienist. It made her day. That said, you just know everyone at a dentist’s office hates you and wants to sew up your mouth with that fancy floss. I believe in my heart that dentists hate when people smile. At least the hygienists must. Their poor boyfriends, boisterously uncomprehending, their drinks spiked with a splash of mouthwash, the disgust, the pill problem, the sitting on the cold bathroom tile and thinking about gums, tied tongues—poor ruined women! And the dentist sorry “doctor” of course detects and deduces it all each morning just from their tight lips.

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Mr. Kotter must have been drunk or something. Not the Mr. Kotter from TV, although he seems pretty iffy as well. No Mr. Kotter from Maplewood Elementary School. He was sitting on his desk with his feet up on the glass of an overhead projector when Mrs. Crabtree came in having heard all the crying. And she really was that Mrs. Crabtree so now she was so old, and as gray as if she were still in black-and-white, it just made the class cry out louder. Their faces all red and noses running. Then the bell rang and the children got confused whose winter coats and mittens and hats and scarves were whose and Mr. Kotter knew he had no chance of figuring it out and Mrs. Crabtree started smacking kids in the face which was so out of character that one by one the boys and girls shut up, got their stuff, and went to find whichever bus was appropriate.

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Will your face crack like a spider web, or tree bark, or ancient brickwork? Will you resemble a disassembled puzzle, a smoothed out ball of paper, or rough as a pineapple? A flock of birds’ prints in the snow, headbutted glass of a deadly crash, or a close-up view of a Renaissance canvas? A road map of Paris, a sac of spiders, a tortoise sell covered in Chinese writing? A litigious labyrinth? A Hegelian critique? Will you look like a dress somewhere between the washer and dryer? Or with a face like a painstakingly glued together vase?
 
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If you’ve ever had to listen to him eat an apple you know there are things in this world worse than death. The slurping the insatiable crunching, open-mouth chewing. The smell of watered-down apple juice in a slobbery sippy-cup. The short breathing, the browning tortured core in the basket.
 
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I want you to know that on the night of August 20, our neighbors Bill and Betty dragged their mattress out and left it on the corner in front of our house. It’s still there today, covered in snow. Now, my wife and I consider a clean sidewalk and yard the bare minimum of social politeness and congruity. In fact my wife spoke harshly with Bill when she saw him walking to his car while she was trimming the Box Honeysuckle. We don’t mean to be stubborn but this would not be our first “big trash” pickup request and they can just drag the bed in front of their own house and make a call to Sunset Waste Services. I think you’ll concede there are some people you just can’t talk to or rather reason with. Anyway, I bring it up because last night we saw from our TV room window Betty curled up on the ratty mattress outside, and I decided to call the police. I don’t know what happened next because we went to sleep, but now Bill is throwing chunks of concrete through our windows and I think as a neighborhood we should be very careful with Bill.
 
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I found the boxes of photographs when cleaning out my grandfather’s things—I discovered I’d always been alive. It came back to me, the war, the “old country,” my cave full of bones. Even now when I look closely at my face in the bathroom mirror I can still make out the old tattoos. My grandmother stuck a word in my mouth and twisted it. The white waves slipped out of my fingers. I returned at once to the hospital where I was “born.” I knelt like a zealot and spit all my happiness into the toilet. A beautiful nurse said, “Are you OK?” Who can answer such questions?
 
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Stores, like stories, are full of people. There’s one person with her foot up on the rack under her cart wearing tight white jeans with a split at the knee to release the pressure. Other people are leaving their carts and dashing for lemons or lettuce. One cart is slowly swallowing a fat baby like how a boa eats a rabbit. The baby’s father is maybe picking out a white wine. Stores sound like all the radio stations at once and smell like turkey. Outside there are roller skates, dirty blankets, and lots of cars with sore, expectant trunks. The metal rattling of the roller skates gets so loud and then the trunk is split open to the light and a bundle is put in like a reverse Cesarean.
 
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Mom’s olives, hand-stuffed with bullets, arrived in an armored UPS truck. Out pops a robot in brown polyester shorts who zips up the stairs and sticks the box in my face. I’m like, “OK OK.” My drone signs his tablet and I slam the door on him, shattering him into little gears and bolts that roll themselves back to his truck which zooms off and over several children, the sort too poor for jetpacks alas. Inside, the olives go right in the trash. When I turn on the compactor it sounds like a western down there. Something between a western and a pachinko parlor. Then comes the “thank you email” I force my auto-correct to crank out.
 
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While you were out: The dog starts to think. The cabinet starts to think. The fan gets down and rolls around the bed. The radio stops singing and softly cries. God’s heart falls off its chair drunk. The security camera, always so difficult to persuade, turns away. Until the dog runs to the door roaring like a disco, to warn of your return.

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We invited Kevin Hummel over for dinner to meet his new girlfriend. My wife had prepared shabu-shabu so we’d have a nice leisurely meal to catch up—we were afraid of losing touch with Kevin since his divorce. He used to be one of our closest friends—he was “my best man for heaven’s sake.” At the door, he walked in first. “She’s deaf,” he said immediately, careful to be looking away from her, “but soon you’ll be able to understand what she’s saying. And she’s pretty good at lip-reading.” Making the best of things, my wife tried to give directions for adding the vegetables and holding onto the slices of meat so as not to lose them in the hotpot, but the girl was busy looking at the platters of food and dipping bowls and ended up fucking up the whole thing. And after two hours we still never understood a word she said—we just stopped asking her to repeat herself. I practically pushed them out the door with their coats in my arms. We couldn’t get over what an inconsiderate asshole Kevin was and made snarky remarks about how that’s why Sabina left him and laughed at how he always complained that she never listened. My wife used to say how handsome Kevin was so I added it would have been better for the poor girl to be blind what with his aging so terribly. My wife didn’t respond so I got drunk and watched her clean up all the little plates and sake cups in silence to punish her.
 
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My aunt is not visiting. How could she? She sits on a couch somewhere in space wearing her clothes and smiling. My cousins orbit her in widening ellipses. She always looks like that.
 
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If you knock on the table, a woman will say, “I’m sleeping down here.” If you bend down and knock on her head, she’ll cry. “Why won’t anyone answer the door?” That’s what I’m dealing with here. Lesson learned: Never tell someone to “Take it easy.”
 
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Anyway, once my whole beard fell out in my sleep—how gross! It made the maid cry. At her age! As usual she fell down dead. My infant son crawled into her mouth. My wife called from the bathroom in vain, making herself ridiculous in the mirror.
 
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The boss is very fond of 5 o’clock, not 6, not 7, good Lord not 8; you have to think “5 o’clock.” It’s pretty much all about 5 o’clock here. Some puzzled pianist once spoke of “3 o’clock” well I thought I would die laughing.
 
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The windows cling to their frames; the house swings by a corner. Unseen women laugh in impossibly high notes. The house flies away now over the other houses and tumbles down the street. But it’s not a street, it’s a hallway. The rain goosesteps after it.
 
#          #          #

We cut down the boring bush in the corner, got out the shovel to pry out the suckers, and put the branches and clump of roots in the green bin and put the bin out front. The next day we put the empty bin back in the garage, drove out to Lowe’s, and bought a camellia bush to plant. When we went out back the boring bush was there in the corner. We dug and tugged it out again and planted the pink camellia. We put the boring bush in the green container again and now we had to wait a week for the Recology truck to take it away. How boring! I got up early the next Monday and met the Recology guy while he was dumping our bin. I asked him how it could be that the boring bush turned up again in my yard. He said it’s simple: sometimes the plants put themselves back together and sort of snake their way back to their holes. Well, I said just take half of my boring bush this week and half the next, and he vaguely agreed that was a good plan.
 
#          #          #

My negligent wife’s household crimes include watering the books and sweeping my pills under the rug. The liquor cabinet cleaned—bottles dried out on the clothesline. The kid in the basement playing in the litter box. My mother comes to visit just to scream at her, but my wife takes her sharp words in her arms and sweetly hangs them on the Thanksgiving tree.
 
#          #          #

This friend at work, Jeffrey, stops what he’s typing and says he has no idea how his computer works. This doesn’t surprise me—he finds birds “fast-paced.” But he then says that no one knows how his computer works, which is sort of true. It’s not like one guy made the software, etc. Hence “bugs.” I took him, this Jeffrey, to a “thank you,” which is where you take someone to a bar and pay for everything until they say “Thank you.”
 
#          #          #

Sitting mumchance with his bottle of wallop, he contemplated his wife as she gardened. She was standing by a low row of oleander, legs apart, arms out to keep the dirt off her dress, looking like she’d just arrived by parachute. When she turned to him her face was covered in bees. “How much have you had to drink this morning?”
 
#          #          #

On our couch we catch the landlord rocking and nodding in sympathy with the TV. He hasn’t heard us come home. His lips are moving as if working his way through the rosary, but he’s watching cartoons. My wife asks him what he’s doing in our apartment and he just says, “Shh!” without turning to face us. Sometime during dinner he must have left because when I go to answer the doorbell the living room is dark and the TV off. At the door is a frantic girl who says she lives down the hall and that someone’s sleeping in her bed. I tell her that is hardly my problem and hurry back to dinner.










H I S T O R I E S





9110 BC
The oldest known message was excavated on a huge 10,000-year-old pillar at Göbekli Tepe. Somehow the article I read said it was “found in a bottle,” which makes no sense. I know a guy who drank a whole bottle of whiskey at Stonehenge, but that’s not particularly hard to understand. Anyway, the message read: “Göbekli Tepe.” Which isn’t really exciting—it’s that “found in a bottle” that’s set me thinking.


1050 BC
King Zhou’s sinful pool was lined with mirrors. He had it filled with wine. At the center rose an island of gold holding up drooping trees made of skewers of roasted pork. The game was called "Alcohol Pool and Meat Forest" and he and his concubines would spend the day floating in their canoes dipping their hands to drink and reaching up to the branches to eat. When Zhou was in a temper, they played "Cannon Burning Punishment" instead, which made the queen laugh like a teapot.


800 BC
Of all the robots made by Hephaestus, my favorite was the silver and gold singing bicycle with a mind of its own. The god’s matchless artistry was evident in the little bell that translated Greek, named Richmond Lattimore.

495 BC
Pythagoras was afraid of beans. He said: Do not poke your eye out with a bean. Do not stand on a bean. Do not wipe a seat with a bean. Etc. He once whispered in an ox’s ear and afterward oxen wouldn’t eat beans. Pythagoras even thought that they tasted of blood and that if you buried a bean’s flower and dug it up again you’d find either an infant’s head or a woman’s you-know-what. He died trying to escape a fire his students set. The only escape was through a field of flowering beans, which he of course refused to enter.


8 AD
Why was Ovid exiled? Seneca the Elder wrote that he dug up some cobblestones and loosed poisonous snakes in the streets. This is now thought unlikely. Much later Pliny the Elderest said he wasn’t exiled at all. But then why did Ovid write about it? Perhaps Augustus just got tired of the frustrated-rape stories that followed “Amores.” In any case historians now believe Ovid spent his long last days eating zebra mussels on the shores of the Black Sea. So, as my father would say, “Should be the worst thing that happens” to him. Another exile was Casanova, but that was much later and we know all about his indiscretions. (An aside: I like how in the past people got venereal diseases, went to a mountain or lake, and then weren’t sick anymore after sitting around for a year. You just put a blanket over it and worked as an amanuensis.) Casanova escaped prison by gondola. He rowed from Venice to Paris in it, even carrying it over his head for 500 miles when he arrived at the shore at Marseille. Then he wore it as a black, waxed mustache. Many years later he wrote about his travels and the many mermaids he met. It was his “Amores.”


476
Ancient Rome was 30% marble. And 40% concrete. And 1% Egyptian obelisks that they sailed over in ships tailored to the task. Otherwise, it was pretty normal. Juvenal writes best about the day-to-day, so I’ll leave that to him. Once there were elephants, which made a big impression. Did you know Marcus Aurelius wrote in Greek? The Romans copied a lot from the Greeks, including most of their statues, which they then buried in their gardens once the sacks started piling up. That’s about all that happened, that and some big fires, but it took 500 years. Then people just covered everything with trash and built their churches on top of it.


1270
Thomas Aquinas once asked, “How many angels must dance in a light bulb per watt?” No one knew what he meant. Aquinas could also levitate. When he got frustrated by his students he would fly around tonsuring them from above with an electric razor.


1572
Where is the head of the English duke? It is lost. The Sea Beggars hang up the priests and Mary Queen of Scots rots. Gold horrors streak the benignant smile; rich rotten cheer. The king is hungry as a trumpet for a mute. Why is the queen chopping off her head? To stop the stink.


1590
On this day in 1590, a governor in New Spain was being tortured by the Inquisition for enslaving pacified Indians and having a Jewish sister. Into the room ran a captain in a dirty jacket who yelled, “What are you doing? What’s all this screaming?” At this the governor felt ashamed and quieted down. “Where is the saloon?” the captain asked the inquisitors. “Down the street.” “This street?” asked the captain holding the door open and pointing down the street. “Yes. All the way down and on the right.” And the captain looked at the governor’s legs which were each in a little coffin but then thought better of asking and ran out the door. Just when the governor was crying out the name of the Lord again the captain came back in. “Nothing’s going on in the saloon.
Where is the church?” “This is the church,” they said, clearly annoyed.


1670
Dueling in England was carried to its greatest extreme in the reign of Charles II. The seconds always fought as well, requiring thirds who were known to fire at will. The wives of the principals were called in as the fourths, unless they were indisposed in which case the mistress of a second was utilized. The principals, often embroiled in an argument over flirting or ridicule, or intriguing, would dress as horses and be compelled to drink a gallon of port each. The seconds would be dressed as gentlemen, the thirds as generals, and the ladies as battleships. Then they would drink a toast and switch costumes so the principals were costumed as the thirds, the seconds the fourths, and the boy holding the box of guns as a large box of guns. At this point the fifths and sixths would arrive with lunch. The generals (who began as thirds but were now the principals) would kiss the gentlemen (who were not of course gentlemen but ladies in disguise) and direct the fifths to pass along any special rings or wallets to the sixths in case of dire injury. The battleships (that is, the seconds) put out the picnic blanket. By the end of Charles’s reign however, the sixths began challenging the fifths to duels over lost property so the whole thing had to be outlawed because after all this is a Christian country.


1732
Ben Franklin always told everyone who would listen that everything was terrifically difficult to understand. Then he released some dopey book of rules.


1750
What did it sound like in the belly of Bach? Divine technology, technological teleology, untenable divinity. What will it sound like in the belly of Beethoven? A cellar full of owls. A torn horn.


1776
In the United States you can see the neighbors from out your window, but not all that much. It’s enough, trust me. American neighbors are very nosy. While we’re being traitorous, the American flag is silly. With the red stripes and all the stars. They add stars, not stripes. Silly. It looks like a headache in long-johns. Not to spread gossip, but Betsy Ross eloped with the upholsterer’s apprentice.


1783
Madame de Baeckeoffe-Garbure broke down and that evening all her friends, Monsieur and Madame Truffade, Madame Quenelle, the two Gougère sisters, Monsieurs de Fouace and Cargolade came round to comfort her. In order to provide herself a bit more company, she asked Madame Teurgoule if her “touched” nephew Ficelle might be allowed to visit and invited Madame Aligot and Monsieur Poire à la Beaujolaise to wait behind the Chinese screen while she prepared herself. She trembled as she helped Madam Pissaladière to dress her. All through Monsieur Clavecin’s performance she was on tenterhooks, off which she was helped by the Croquembouche children, Courgette, Praline, and little Éclair. She was being hoisted into the air when fresh from the hart hunt barged in the frères Croquembouche, smelling of the mossy cedars. She whistled for her poodles, Dariole and Macaron, and her feisty bichon Pêche-Melba, and watched them perch on her blue silk shoes—the ones with pinched toes and pointed tongues—as tears streamed down her face, leaving pink trails down her zinc cheeks. “Duc de Clafoutis!” she called out again and again, and presently he rushed into the room, full of froth and folly, all the way from Flaugnarde, still dusted with gunpowder as if with sugar, with her perfumed handkerchief. Oh, but poor Madame de Baeckeoffe-Garbure was still desperately lonely as she breathed in the orange blossom, and behind the creaking of her corset, blood could be heard gushing through the portholes of her heart and swallowed up in her desire for the comfort only God’s mercy can afford as her shining eyes fixed on the chandelier above. There was a silence now, except for the clock as it counted away the seconds in tiny sips, as if afraid to get tipsy. The year without a sun. Revolutions followed.


1799
Washington’s dentures were carved from whale ribs. His wife’s were glass. Jefferson had all his teeth removed and replaced with a fox’s. Adams’ mouth was full of seashells and when he died his son put them in his mouth too. Lincoln had one big elephant tusk that he removed when giving speeches. Nowadays dentures are made out of plastic.


1894
The bigophone is today well forgotten. An ovation greeted the procession of red dresses, on which were spread huge purple palms. A chariot preceded by cardboard horses, dragging a cardboard crocodile the color of the cognac they pickled Chopin’s heart in. The bigophonists played the tunes of the French neighborhood. Bigophony was raging. Where did it come from? The bigophone penetrated even the aristocratic British milieu. Bigophonic activity seems to have been important in Germany as well. Virtually all of this heritage is lost.


1897
How much lemon juice does it take to make one invisible? One what? Hold this page up to a light bulb for the answer. Did you know that in prison Lenin wrote in milk? I bet he ate roaches too. Trotsky didn’t eat any roaches. He ate Olivier salad. Do you know how Trotsky got that little beard? He fell asleep on a lady’s lap.


1900
Oh gee I saw this bee as big as Tolstoy’s beard! That won’t work will it? Chekov was on the next flower with his little legs crossed. Some old lady started swatting at them with a huge book. O spring! Look how fat the finches! A yellow cardinal alights.
 

1909
Things had gone poorly in New York. Freud climbed into the dunk tank somewhere in Ithaca and started insulting “the Penelope suitors” to get them to buy more baseballs to try to hit the target and make him fall in the filthy water. He was very good at insinuation—he could read the customer’s face and drill in where it hurt. After the carnival closed up for the night some customers attacked him. He lost some teeth, so to speak. The carnival moved on while he was unconscious in the hospital. He then went into advertising and was later in life largely responsible for making “pink” mean “girl” and “blue” mean “boy” in order to sell cigars.


1914
Made up with belle époque “powder of diamonds” and lunar caustic, bejeweled with great spiders, and graced with free manners, War approaches, screeches out a wrought iron chair and sits down at your table. She puts one silver thumb over each of your eyes. Look at you falling in love, at your age, with your bad heart! The café edged all round with widows.


1918
Kaiser Wilhelm’s pointy mustache was so famous, it had a name: Erhöhte Spannungen (meaning raised tensions or increased voltages). When he abdicated and let it droop, they called it Die Schwächste Idee (the weakest, or faintest, idea). Next, Hitler’s little mustache was all the rage. Its name was Der Nasenschatten (the nose shadow). After the war, Der Nasenschatten hid on a black square of a chessboard, then hopped from one paintbrush to another until it reached the deportation station on the edge of Grunewald Forest, sneaking at night to a tranquil cove on the river then blending in with the shade of birches in the Naturschutzgebiet, birdwatching. One gray bird it thought looked much like the old Kaiser’s mustache, alternating between Erhöhte Spannungen and Die Schwächste Idee as it flapped away:  }   }    }
 

1935
Elvis Presley of the Tupelo Presleys was born in an empty inground swimming pool. His hair was like a palm tree’s. They had to slice his eyelids open with a Swiss Army knife. Inside were eyes. His first words were: “The wind.” Then he got his first guitar and gal. Elvis thought of marcite basins as long as he could. Then he went into the movies. In his first movie he looked like an angel. After, not so much. Very orange and always on an island. Elvis wisely set sail and no one knows where he now swims. His castle and kingdom are rumored to be blue. The band can’t stand it anymore nor should they really.


1941
One night during the seventh month of The Blitz, only the Stranger Churches were bombed and so, by fluke or providence, condemned to the fire. Singed pages of “Goostly Psalmes” flew out the ruins and down the streets that morning like ancient enemy leaflets. That week all the rats in London were born without hearts and a new species of red cricket leapt from the air raid shelters. They were called “plonks” or “redcoats.”


1946
One person was loyal. Then he kissed a girl and she became loyal. Well you can see where this is going...the whole city of Paris is now loyal. Except very old men who only kiss hands; they are disloyal, in general, one finds. And the deluded deluders, who instead embark on academic careers with British generosity. This all happened post-war.


1956
Robert Walser is no more and we really can’t do all that much about it. Maybe a ladies’ hat shop has a piece of him we could clone. A smell of cocoa. Otherwise nothing. But this is childishness, petty, ridiculous, fearful. Yet I think we should look into it the world lacks well-starched gentlemen.



1963
Mrs. Happy Rockefeller’s father made his fortune in nooses. First she married Nelson Rockefeller’s best friend but then she married Nelson a month after her divorce—so you figure it out. Ten years later Happy found herself Second Lady of the United States, because of various arrests and resignations. That same year she had a double mastectomy just two weeks after Betty Ford, the First Lady, had a single mastectomy. So there. Happy dragged on until 2015, when she shrunk down to a pink walnut and rolled into the fireplace.


1977
Presidents are in the habit of flying. They dress like priests but with silly curled wimples and wigs and then go headfirst out the Waldorf window. At the UN there are air traffic controllers who get them all in the right pews. But alas at night they’re off again—this is the nature of human habit. Once Alphonse Massamba-Débat flew so far out over the sea that he fell asleep and they had to search for him the whole next day. That’s why his wife started to call him Icarus when she got a little drunk.
 

1984
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov in shirtsleeves gets up from his chair and his hung jacket topples it. The chair on its back wearing his coat looks like his own skeleton.


2000
By the turn of the century, the prince seemed to enjoy a painful silence. “It outstrips the imagination,” he would say, about everything: a turtle’s neb, a pornograph, this or that presidency. They blamed his father’s suicide on the side-effects of Folderol™. He was dark, the father, Dutch. I heard he hung/hanged himself but this was long after I was friendly with the prince, and I can’t imagine who told me that. Once, during a fever, I saw my old friend as king. I wrote him a letter and he replied immediately with a postcard. Which is all you need to know of him.


2019
There was a puzzling mechanism that broke a long time ago and a long time ago it was plucked from the depths where it had lain in a sunken ship. Years it sat in a storage locker in Florida. Now it’s just a rumple of rust and gears. My team of engineers decided to fix it, and when we got it working it turned out to be an alien clock that made time go faster. As we aged we repented of this and looked away from all men—their wrinkles shattering across their furious faces as we all bend, fall, wear away, while the sun becomes lightning and the moon streaks a ring around the end of the world.
 









San Francisco, 2018–19