Afloat On A Window

He first learned to apply poetry when he took the window out to sea. It’ll be a jinx, they said, but what fear has one who’s free. And when the waves rolled in, he had to taste. The gulls that harbingered land terrified him each night, in dreams, and the first one he was able to catch, he ripped apart with his teeth. It tasted like a long work day. Uniform, old coffee and one distraction after another. Take a train they said, but you know him. Window, tides and wind. What is strength in a straight line? What is destination? It’s all about the specific caress of a day. Remember when he named the band, “Lost Dog Reward,” because the signs were already posted all over the country? It’s like that. In the politics of nature, the voting’s done. The letters and words blow over us in wind tunnel test. They crawl us as if we were posted to our ears in ant hills. Stop for a while, and proclaim as prophet’s truth what has no meaning for you yet. Know it first. The cargo of the cruise ships is lost. In the hold of this window, is the chance of being here, he thought. As they watch from the deck, they only fear the sea’s vastness if he’s in it. They’re more food for the horizon, while he lets every day mark him, charcoal to a prison calendar, content to be so written on.

Muriel thought she could lose 85 pounds or marry the Marine. An unknown flu causes her weight, but his death photos freaked her out. It was not a night for deciding, though. Regis Philbin’s antic voice ran from the TV room wildly around the house. He had the huckster rhythm, that’s for sure, but it’s soothing, the sound of home, American prayer. The weather was quiet as a schoolgirl. No urge. Another night when you didn’t need eyes or ears. That sort of cruise ship. Without portholes. That sea. Without wave. She sheathed her arms into the pink, chenille robe, sashed it up and walked down the amber hall, ready to tell her Dad to go to hell again if he so much as whimpered. Lorca comes later, his hand pulling her to sleep.

“With darkness around her waist, she dreams on her balcony, green flesh, green hair, with eyes of cold silver. Green, how I love you green, under the gypsy moon...” Lorca allowed himself to know the thing first. Talking about why she’s green puts you on the cruise ship. There’s some weird, weird, unspeakably weird ‘how’ to Lorca. So big, it can be the basis for an entire culture, as pervasive and all-encompassing as the one we’re in. And if we merely tell the poet, “I like your work,” or we read it in the middle of the night and don’t say anything, we’re still on the cruise ship. We haven’t ‘read’ the poet, despite our desire.

He flagged a freighter to Galveston. Greyhound bus to San Antone. Build sacred objects for exiles. What else is poetry for? If only to unzip the skin down your spine and finger the thing that makes you feel out of place, everywhere: This is not my language; not my dress; not what I was raised to do. He knew this God, this Everything. Opens its eyes, perhaps asleep still. It probably didn’t even see him. And the eyes close. And that’s it for his life, because no one has the geo time, eco time, for the eyes to open again. But, he knew one thing: We are living in an era where exiles may hold the same, sacred object, and be vastly alone, with hundreds of miles between them. It’s the opposite of two long lines of refugees greying down a dirt road to the horizon. It’s why they don’t have a big Museum of Protest somewhere, although he’d travel 3000 miles to see it. Can’t surrender, can’t ever win. Travel in mystery. Only to find his country when he names it. It’s the shadow of the sacred object of exiles that serves as compass. Hold the thing in the sun. Search for the ground within it’s shadow. There’s our country.

At night, he practices sleeping in the bosomy hand of God.

Tatiania wore diaphonous fabric the color of twilight. Merely. Which is the physical nature of poetry. Brutely. As she walked toward the bed, light from a wall lamp rose on her face. Hands, arms, face lit warm as August wheat fields. Her body remained in dusk. Only. As if it is between day and night, only, brutely, merely, we can see in her sky Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, planets round and easily forthcoming as they are, with no need for the anxious sparkling of starlight. What would make him halt and wonder again with all his being? Oh, Tatiania. And there’s a wonder in everyone like this? Like a Sears store--wide open and busy with customers—housed in the dark of an underground missile silo. She sunk into his arms, and it wasn’t lyric.

This happened to him once in Laughlin, Nevada. Poetry makes you feel close to another real as the third red 7 in a slot machine stopped just above the payoff line. Perhaps this other real we sometimes sense in poetry is another culture, another way of living. The 7 hangs there long as a busted guillotine blade. And there it stays. No amount of want would deliver its announcement of real fortune. No rackety greed bongo solo in the slot machine well. We can ponder the promise of that hanging 7, but it’s still a planet suddenly and forever at mid-spin. The feeling of being that close to wealth. Lightheaded. Nearly swooning. But, what begins as wild desire or chance, evolves into objective. Same thing with poetry. Readers insert their silver dollars, pull the handle, and stay there until three in the morning because, occasionally, they sense a physical closeness to objective. An objective that has to do with what? Another culture entirely? He thought that was so sexy it made him want to fuck. The waitress’ flattened calls of “Cocktails...Cocktails...” could have been his name. A poet in Laughlin delivers two sevens to a jackpot, amen we pray.

He never saw so many emotionless faces as in the circus glow of slot machines. But, the casino will never deliver all those jackpots, and neither will poetry. The reader is not easily acquitted of a poem. To allow the reader to sit by the slot machine is to fail miserably in what poetry is about. Poetry is about movement. Poetry is about sudden disembarkment. Poetry is about embracing. And it is totally one-sided: Poet is owed everything. The price of a book of poetry is always nothing. Instead, the debt the reader must pay is always physical, or the reader remains barely human. The reader must feed the poet, house the poet, fuck the poet, dance with the poet, hand the poet another Bud, kiss the poet warmly on the cheek, or there never was a poem. Poets can’t allow people to be readers—dancers reduced to grazers alongside the abatoir.

Rain drops splattered green and crystal off the mulberry leaves outside. He had been alone for seven days thinking of what to write. Furniture, by now, had grown twice its size, leaving little space to walk between rooms. Doors had grown smaller, rounder. Walls murmurred yellow crowd noises to each other. Most contented moment: sliding his thumbnail down a wet Budweiser label, in a Seattle bar by the fish market, until it was fabric clearly torn for anger and sex. A fisherman’s wife watched over her husband’s shoulder as he drank, and the three had this ideal, immobile relationship for 10 or 15 minutes. Everything functions as it must when too far to touch. The guy paid the bill and the couple left. She looked back at him at the door; poetry is not the moment the body washes up on shore. This joy in finding, grief in parting, all the damn doors. Maybe he couldn’t write well enough to make her appear on the porch, what if he could? Her squirrelly thing is men fearless of the ocean. But, first, to announce his sea. It was Western Avenue. Full length of it. But how? Whoever had the smell of Ida Mae’s sweet potato pie boiling sweetly in the brain pan, eternal as Loaves & Fishes, that’s who, that’s where, that’s how.

“Lovers, stay!” When you arrive in the center of the ring, embrace, strip, fall to canvas, and things are licked, rubbed, sucked and entered, he doesn’t know what to call it. Yeats let it have one line, “How can we separate the dancers from the dance?” Why April is the cruelest month. That is his heartbreak, this referee’s voice, calling for so much to remain still, to just freeze in the corners until the bell. His arms outstretched, back bent slightly, head turning left and right to check this moment of apart. The hesitation can be explained, while the consumation relegates words to cupboards below kitchen sinks with detergents and cleansers, old sponges, potato cleaners, dish strainers. More than fraud--having no words for it. This life of yelling to stay still. This derelict constancy. What manner of monk—or cop--is this, and in whose employ? It is the easy poetry of war. In the end, immoral. But, poetry made him feel so close. To objective. Apple. “Don’t mind me.” Words were free, and they came fast and violent, street gangs in civil war. His death, now the same as any other. “Go ahead; crash. Form identity fronts on the weather satelites, then tornado. In minutes, in an hour, it is done.” Poets will grow criminal again.

Lorca gave her horse’s hooves. Gave her father legs, a tourist’s smile, easy manner of Spanish plains. Lorca wrote dirigibles. Flight with silky Eurotrash, diseased bohemians, genderless demi-monde one poem away. Lorca wrote sea water, not making her thin but buoyant, amid a cafe full of men who talked more and more of love in ample handfuls with each pull of their rioja. The ones who know up and down their chakras that dance is censored by hipless women. Until her only thoughts held snapping castanets. Lorca writes a Wild Animal Park for dreams. Lorca writes parrots into sleep sky. Lorca wrote Muriel no longer required dreaming of her father fallen to the floor, writhing in reptilian violence to get back up on his television chair. If only Lorca poems attached to the body--eels of night--to accompany her in daylight. Next day, Tuesday, she left the house for the poetry reading with her father shouting for new batteries for his clicker.

Macheechanga! And what the fuck! The revel broke to raven flight, a caw-caw-cawing from the bones, language but a dam holding surrender back. Our sole commerce was always thus, consume/consumed as one, the way it was milliseconds after the Big Bang, awareness, before it cooled. In words, you ride the brakes. Tatiana could forgive him for refusing the work of merchants and clerks, as long as he mesmerized her with the things here and not here, and stole her off politest avenues to salsa bars where bodies transcend merrily to hellfire. American men never allow their bodies knowledge, yet before her was poet and beast, with the mojitos beating a conga rhythm to driving snakes into the sea. Tonight, giving and taking would be the same thing. Some day, she’ll have to kick him out, as he too fails to be immortal. Tonight, spend it all, buy it all. Everything else is nuisance, clutter, detritus dipped in adhesive. Next day, Tuesday, she left for the poetry reading with nothing left to give except her most expensive tears. Afraid. Merely. Mostly.

Wait for churches, wait for beds. Impotent, angry over wordlessness, his only option, history. Better yet, first words of legend. Under the table, up her dress, tugging until she lifts her hips, and he strips them off. Words for this until she’s dead. Dear reader. Shoves the table. Arm across her hips, pulls and twists until she’s straddled in. Poetry, words alone that live like this. Her fingers stacked along both sides of his neck, mouths pressed as plumbing. Tremor. Slightest slide. Undulate. Slicker. Raise her up, unbutton his jeans. Her eyes high upon the wall as she lowers, crushes down. Her shoe heels pointed back at the crowd like new black guns. Whatever happens. Aware opaque. Unzips her dress. She pulls her arms from the straps, dress collapses to her lap. Music stops. Band leader yells. Word, “Couple.” Just like she was rolling bread. Her hands grip the red naugahyde until its pink. She releases in blacksmith bellows against his cheek. He releases in fingers tight around her waist. Applause. She moves, pulls on the straps, quickly gets a mojito straw between her lips. He does her dress. Lifts a mojito to the happy crowd. Horns strike out. They turn and dance. Next day, Tuesday, he’ll go to his poetry reading, German torpedo to a British frigate, you bet.

Next day, Tuesday, hold of a window, dark corner of the sea, he would read his poem aloud. Across an expanse of gunmetal waves, cruise ship portholes and deck rails painted with expectant faces, the castaway to save these luxe liner hosts. Except he set himself adrift to more poignantly, more prayerfully, more archangel-like, write of rescue. Why else is there to write? As if pleading most artfully would somehow transcend into something else. Only when he wrote did the ocean current course. Other readers said it baldly--“What about me? Witness me. Believe me for once.”—pathetic notes from kidnapped kids to alcoholic parents. One person’s efforts ended, “Well, fuck you, asshole. You can go to hell.” This frontal lack of discipline, determination, insight, care, guts, was surely the aggressive desert in voice. And more. Fault lines cracked the San Antonio bar, everybody grows separate. No one capable of quake. The reason he’d leave Tatiana would be visible tonight. She loved the trying, the getting close, and will despise him for his failure. Waits on a barstool in the back, her legs live eels dangling in bait. Everybody waits. No poem more powerful than the crevasses we make. No poem to weld a bar floor shut. With failure the most we can aspire to, here goes. A purple light shoved him to the mic.

Could I pleased be saved? Western Avenue flowed like a time chart for upper and lower Egypt, except for pool halls instead of Pyramids and a giant donut where the Sphinx might hang his head. The desert sure took it back again. There sure came the Valley of the Dead. Could my pleading transcend to something else? Waves and waves of Israelites. Once, man, it was green. Crocdile walk. Flamingo strut. Cormorants always aiming what they’re getting at. Maybe it was the way Immigration stole apartment complexes. Maybe it had something to do with the bust that night at Green’s. Who makes the drugs that turn everything to salt or sand. Maybe God just wants an all-night bowling alley, and He left when it shut down. Anthony killed by the cops for pointing with a cell phone. One bullet shoots through neighborhoods. Ida Mae closed her doors to grieve the days away back home in New Orleans, a liquor store in her place. The smell of sweet potato pie gone from the pavement, from the shadows, the corroded air, the cacophony of noises vollied out from somewhere. His first real girlfriend, Mercedes, gained brief fame as a murdered motel maid. Rafe caught a dime in Soledad. Munch got withered alive. He didn’t know how the darkness came, or how it took his friends away. Until the only artifact left of was, was love. His love. Big and bulky, useless as a sack of newspapers around a crippled paperboy’s neck. Tatiana sobbing at the back. A woman in yellow, at the side, shifted her 200 pounds to dream. Then, he cradled Western’s news. Hieroglyphics of the tomb. Civilization lost, archaeolgy of wounds. We don’t make amends with memory. We abandon it at a busstop. Doors open without trust. Hell, he didn’t get it right. Done.

Yes, there was applause, as for each before him. Eyes did not pursue. He walked out of the collective gaze, which remained fixed upon the mic. He couldn’t tell if this was an audience, or animated attachments. If it was up to him to make the difference, he had failed. Tatiana was wiping her eyes with her fingers. At least she allowed the poem to turn physical. Proof of something. And the poem would sure be there in bed when they fucked tonight—heaving sexual device. Yes, she would glory in his company for a while, but the night grows cold so fast. The woman in yellow, standing by a bar rail, took two steps back as he passed, although there was plenty of room. As if he was 10 times his actual size. When he reached Tatiana, she took one hand into hers. It reminded him of a nun a long time ago, before she begged him to stay in school. “You’re amazing,” said Tatiana. “There’s only one of you.” The next poet up began, “My telephone did not ring last night. But, you said you would call...” A planet turns to desert in that voice.

Tatiana had sworn off such temporary men, and so it was briefness that made her weep. She could spend a good part of her life listening to him read that poem again for the first time. Briefly, he was perfect. Briefly was his stay. She wasn’t going to be like her sister or her brother. Tatiana had the brains, the fortitude, the ambition. Build a life. Construct cathedral from your years. But, love is surely lava in the rock. Every living planet has its molten core. Her and him were destined for caldera. Just like the poem sort of said. Briefly, they were mountain range. Tonight, we’ll get so seismic, lava flows. Brief is the night carried with you all your life.

He wasn’t Lorca, but he had the body tension of a fireman who’s decided to knock down the door of a burning building. God, to even try to be Lorca. The brashness. He did hit some notes, in the realm of reflexes from music or laughter, a trueness that plucks at the strings and guts of who we might be. All the others offered no investment of themselves, as if poetry would somehow be available to them as easily and quickly as a new pair of shoes. He might give his whole life. Muriel would fall asleep with him tonight, instead of Lorca, but only for one night. The poetry reading ended. The poet stepped to the bar. What seized Muriel--a Spanish ghost? Her shyness, her reserve, her fear presented themselves as hothouse flowers, as she watched the jungle get a beer--gloriously green. And his girlfriend? Leave that up to him. A poet deserves all choice. Muriel moved. Whispered in his ear, “I want to blow you in the men’s room.” His head held a hotel room keyhole and the voice of the featureless girl moved as smoke from a hallway fire. Tat heard it, and smiled a rail station welcome to all. A willing mouth, and the respect of bended knees...the big girl isn't just cruising in coma. Maybe we all just have to share for peace, all the old rules constructed for the quiet of rubber rooms. He kissed the bold fan quick on the cheek; Tat long on the lips. Left it at that. Lapped by waves. Weathered fine by these elements. Knowing still he's only free from the current dead alone. And there's no animated maps on anybody's face to get there.