THE STAMMER
Torturous to conjure that Dodgson, his sodden face lit by the smeared window
he peers through, Alice Liddell fleeing gaunt-legged across a lawn
set up for croquet. No loopy flamingoes there, hedgehogs unfurling in
stiff-bristled apathy--just the dark-haired child drawn
from imagination more forcefully than from memory. He braces one palm trembling
against his desk, photographs whirling through his mind, black-
and-white imprints of desire, tenderness, flooding his throat closed, rendering
the stammer's uprising so omnipotent it speaks silently of his slackening
wants: witnessing her aging. But if the world crowds in to accuse him,
only he senses how powerfully some mechanisms grind their rusting
gears, tempt him into a cage of mathematical improbabilities, limiting
him to glimpses of a dark hair-cap shining in riverbank sun-splashes, urging
his shaking hand to reach for what he needs then precipitously yank it back,
the stammer taking him over more shudderingly than orgasm.
CHARLES DODGSON'S BED
I haven't read about it. The voluminous volumes remain mute.
Yet it must've been white, with four tucked corners, ironed
to a stiffness that suggests renunciation. And the hands, yes, hands, brutish
with their desires (or so the decorous claim), must've been wrestled quiet
every night Alice's tiny face drifted dreamlike into his mind.
I respect his integrity. Even in the midst of masturbation. Sublimated passions
what drove him to a window blank of white stars to gaze across a moon-bright
lawn Alice didn't play on. The mind selects its loves, perhaps, in a darkening
dance of reason, emotion, we're not privileged to witness, except to watch those
shadowy figures' mock-consumation.
And loneliness, palpable as a palm, pressing his breastbone silent. Not naked--
he wouldn't dare--he leaned in his red-silk dressing gown against the window
until it fogged with the cold somnolent circles of his breath. To love her
had been easy. It meant--simply--losing his life.
BEAUTY AND NECESSITY
1.
Listen: there was an automaton walking in circles
beneath a tree. I know, because I stooped,
coat dangling, outside that restaurant
where minutes before you'd declared our love defunct
to watch. It was a Monterey night, the orange-
lavender haze over the bay, the flat gray rocks,
the spume cresting and cresting until its opaqueness
buried the idiot anvil heads of sea lions
a gorgeous and jubilant necessity to me
who was emotionally cauterized, who stooped
in her ragged red coat (moth holes dotting
its shoulders) to observe with the clinical precision
borne of exquisite pain the automaton,
a tiny dark-haired man,
blackening eyes luminous as slits of gold moon,
meander in a circle increasingly ovoid in its orbit
while I expected him to tumble, trip,
wander into the Pacific
shedding its last succulent sheen of azure and drown.
I couldn't say what motivated him. Why
he was able to persist without even a key
shoved into his spine to guide him.
I watched him stride away, undelirious
from the murmured appreciative responses
of onlookers. Then I clutched my coat shut,
the cold breeze winding up my thighs
clenching them closed...
forever, it seemed.
2.
Oh I was thirteen when it began, the hand
slipping into me silvered by moon
decreased to the shadowiest slit
fluttering curtains cast,
for I needed to conceal the power of five fingers
from parents nodding and blue-headed in the no-light of TV,
needed to twist, shape, transubstantiate, retain
what motivated me to hunch in insouciant succulence for minutes,
nearly buckle with that ecstasy and oblivion and wet,
that hand rising sleek and sheened
as any sea lion I'd observed preening itself
on an arc of flat rocks our old gray Buick
meandered past perpetually
on the perpetual Sunday jaunt,
my mother's head leaning against the seatrest,
set into pin curls that looked as if they'd split
from the Dippity-Do that had fossilized them.
I wanted to lean, grasp them in my fist,
feel their tautness and rigor dissipate
in a slow but inevitable forcing-apart
that would leave us sentient beings.
But what did I know about life. I who
thrashed in utter darkness celebrating the glorious
messy wetness of existence,
forcing its stained teeth into a wide
and widening grin as it peered down at me
hunched like the dumbest and least conscious of animals
while I came and came again.
THE MUSÉE MÉCHANIQUE
We'd been married a month. And if I can't remember mornings
of stiffness, reproach, I remember the Musée Méchanique.
Crouched on a hilltop wrapped gray in fog, a battered building mortared
in the unlikeliest places, its every seam shone visible. "Unique"
not the word to describe it: rather, homely, deformed, a hunchback
of a shack. In the Musée, anachronisms thrived: fat blondes strutted pantalooned
for peepshows; "darkies" plucked cotton on a board's flat
display; jolly Jolly Jack, a sailor howling himself to orgasm, twitched doomed
to pseudoecstasy twenty times in a single hour. The horror of that place
was its appeal, as if the mind, turned upside-down thrashing, had jettisoned
its profoundest, dirtiest secrets, offered them up for consumption. Complacent
in marital bliss, I hadn't understood the loneliness of a white, straightened bed,
hadn't believed I'd summon the San Francisco Bay in all its spume
and splendor every night until you left, project myself into tough-beaked gulls
peering down as they scavenged, battled, for hardening hot-dog buns, the rule
that claims empathy fuels a mature perspective more dull
than perspicacious, Jack's howl profoundly human.
Brown-Davidson home page
Poetry, Part II
Poetry, Part III
|
Poetry from The Literary Review