Matt, Leah, Twins, Fontanelle, Cigarette, Elbow

On the lam from Colonial America, the MLA and Lisa, Matt

found himself in a room with somebody's maps and forgotten lines and Leah.

Sound-fade: contented sigh over shot of shrieking twins—

the boy, Gabriel, slams his fontanelle

on my kitchen floor. Matt heads for a cigarette,

through spilled formula and fresh blood and an elbow.

And whose, you will ask, is the elbow?

If you figure it out, please tell Matt.

Having finished his cigarette,

he’s back, all smiles, hails Leah,

who is still dabbing a near-ruptured fontanelle,

still comforting her begrimed and roaring twins.

And without comfort herself. I thought they were twins

when first I met them—Leah bending an elbow

with the booziest of our boypoet friends, tendril fontanelles

and spinning bonnets blooming on her rosebud lips, as Matt

looked besottedly up at her, his only Leah,

his second chance, and lit his umpteenth cigarette.

I woke in the morning to a desolation of stubbed cigarettes

and couples and friends tumbled like twins

in the womb of their headachey dreams. And Leah

made breakfast and then, steering me by the elbow

to a room where sat the man himself, said that Matt

had grown unrecognizably dark. Ah, such a fontanelle

is fragile hope, and love is a fontanelle—

so exposed while growing together—or again it's a cigarette,

newly lit and soon stubbed out. And Matt

sat dark with having stubbed Lisa. How shame twins

love, how love and burden entwine and hang heavy from your elbow.

He and I nodded and looked across at Leah:

girlishly blond, astute and womanly-wise Leah,

who knew Milton and knew what a fontanelle

was already, and could tell her ass from her elbow

in matters of love, and was not adverse to cigarettes

or good Guiness, and was willing to bear Matt twins.

She smiled like clear water, and we looked back across at Matt.

Back in the kitchen, my admiring gaze holds Matt and Leah,

the stout twins and their fucking fontanelles.

Matt lights a cigarette, and I pick at my elbow.

Not Tonight: Anti-Erotica To Keep You Out of the Mood

Beneath the Denny’s grease traps the two heavyset women leaned into one another until their sweaty brows touched and the stiff hairs from their nostrils intertwined, like squid tentacles on a plate of boiled spinach.
_____

The surgeon began to have second thoughts about the mixed species transplant he had performed on himself. At first, the thought of replacing his penis with a live banana slug had filled him with an exhilarating sense of completeness. Now that it was a reality, he began to harbor doubts—the constant slime trails on the underside of his corduroys, the late night leaf feedings, and now this burning, foaming, mucus filling his swimsuit. He high-stepped from the salty ocean, ran into his beachfront condominium, and quickly dipped his slug-genital in a glass of cold milk. He sat on the linoleum floor and watched the frightened black eyes as his “penug” stretched its tiny puse face, struggling to breathe. He reached down and gently caressed its slimy head, “There, there little buddy. There, there. Daddy’s gonna make it all better.” Suddenly all the doubt and uncertainty was lifted and the surgeon realized he would make mollusk love to himself that very afternoon.
_____

When their mouths finally parted, she looked down and noticed her tiny feathers of flaking skin were now dangling from the herpes boils at the corner of his mouth, and she knew, just as she’d always known, that this was true love.
_____

Some of the nurses speculated that the two men with Alzheimer’s were unaware of their actions, but the young gay nurse had seen their hand-holding and knew that Earl and Mortimer were finally coming out of the closet. That night, as the rest of the orderlies drank coffee in the lounge, the male nurse gently removed the catheter from Earl’s penis and attached it to Mortimer’s. Then, while the two men looked on, the nurse detached the colostomy bag from Mortimer’s side and, after a small incision, inserted Mortimer’s tube into Earl’s colon. The nurse beamed, “There. Now you two are truly a couple.”
“I can’t find my cows!” Earl called out.
“I’m late for work,” Mortimer whimpered, “they’re going to fire me.”

"We die of too much life."

This is an actual memory, I think. It seems completely real, anyway. I am looking over the side of my father's small motor boat. His gold(-painted) watch sinks away from me into the water, crystal face up and fish-tailing its shoulders deeper with each clear moment. The watch is the only thing that catches light and the only thing that marks distance into the great light-and-depths-swallowing, eddying greenblueclear of the ocean. It falls for much longer than I would have thought possible, marking off seconds of depth, bearing sunlight, oddly clear and still in the way it occupies its receding. As if seeing is not, after all, a function of distance but a function of light and focus. I reach farther over the side of the boat, into the water, and trouble the surface with my fingers, because something about this seeing has become too much.

There is this incredulous moment just after you cut yourself and just before the cut begins to well up with blood, or just after you've misjudged the roadway and just before you collide with the guardrail, when the always-present, neatly chatty potential for (at least minor) disaster hangs dumbly open. And the natural desire is to try to reknit the clean slice of the sudden aberration by not believing that what has just happened has really just happened. That it's now good and finally and irrevocably done: become what they call "a fact". This moment when fear and regret and hope and resignation and total attention find themselves, for a moment, having exactly the same thought. This moment is so deliciously vivid that almost no one would revisit it ever again if they could help it. And almost everyone longs for it in spite of themselves, at least a little bit.

Last night I hardly slept, and when I was sleeping I was actually turning certain images from Moby-Dick over and over in the upper waters of my mind, at that depth where things are beginning to get dark but where slender receding illumination is so oddly vivid. I kept having this image of an enormous dark whale rising soundlessly towards me out of the blackness of the ocean. And in the dream I was terrified and totally absorbed. But I kept thinking that the depths were not foreign to me and that it would be silly and maybe also dangerous to look away. And then I kept waking up and thinking of my dad's fake gold watch falling the other way. I thought something like this, only without words, but more as a feeling that I should do something about it: The ocean is unfathomably deep, its depth is composed of fathoms, no one of which--no dozen of which, no hundred of which?--resists the eye. The ocean would swallow your gaze if the mind didn't know to teach the eye the trick of iconic seeing: see not what cannot be understood; instead, see a flat black surface, see the image we have rehearsed.

There is something falling through the ocean, a gold becoming green and then blue and then the all-color, black. There is something rising out of the depths of the ocean, finding outline and light and then words, and--too quickly--polite words, rehearsed, inert words. But the place where they cross paths, you can see that place, and that's somehow where joy comes from. Joy would swallow your gaze.

Starting Over

One time we made a boat.

I woke up in the rail yard on a floral quilt pulled from a Motel 8, my brain swollen thick, my chest anchored in silt and shame. I sat up to relieve my sore hip and the sun skipped off the Bacardi Gold and struck my eyes blind. I raised my hand, picked up the half empty bottle and hurled it with a powerful self-hatred. I had never been to the abandoned rail yard and yet the place was familiar—the disorientation, the head full of tears, the dull repetition of failure. I stood, buckled my jeans, and spotted the freeway duplex where I’d once dropped Wantu. I stepped through the weeds and junkyard earth, climbed the bank, and knocked.

He came to the door grinning in his orange winter vest. I inquired about the bird and he pointed to the overpass. I narrowed my eyes and saw a flutter of grey just beyond the railroad cars, alighting in the narrow space between concrete supports. I asked, uncertain, if I could come in. He turned and walked, leaving the door wide. I followed him through the bare gypsum hallway into a dining room with red brick linoleum, a pinewood children’s table, two pine children’s chairs, and a chain link chandelier with pentagons of plastic amber. He sat in a chair that fit him and poured chocolate milk into two tarnished baby cups. I sat into the other seat, my oversized body squatting like some kind of obscenity. He slid a silver cup. I held it and deciphered the engraving: Julia Margaret Campbell 5-23-52. We thank God for you this day!

I emptied the tepid chocolate and suddenly lost all purpose. What was I doing? Why had I come here? What did I want? I blushed, feeling lost in my being, when Wantu said, “You want to build a boat?” I stared at him not knowing how to react. He stared back. “Sure,” I shrugged. He stood and we walked downstairs through a darkened garage that smelled of burnt leaves and orange peels and headed through a hand-cut doorway out to a field of star thistle, glittering glass, neat stacks of railroad ties, and wrappers fluttering like racing flags. We followed a thin rabbit trail down to a creek I never noticed before, a creek with clumps of cattails and wild willow branches growing thick along the level bank. The water was thin and sickly, clotted with plastic bottles, a clump of faded panties, a leg of jeans, submerged shopping bags, and other signs of the careless human beast.

We stepped like cranes until we came to a clearing bordered with tilting oaks and clusters of washed-out foxtails. He pointed to a log--a clean, skinned, beeswax trunk--sitting in a nest of its own golden shavings. “It’s cedar,” he said with pleasure. Once he said it, I tuned my senses and noticed the warm fragrance. It was like breathing a mother’s prayer, and it gave me a sudden urge to surrender tears. I walked over and placed my hand on the primitive vessel. The boat was seven or eight feet in length, shaped more like a bathtub then a canoe, it’s edges heavy and thick, the inside pounded like a copper kettle, the heartwood as red as sunset.

Behind me, Wantu stood sticks within an ashen circle of stones. He gestured to the oaks and I walked over and collected the dried branches. He made a cone of kindling then placed a ball of dried grass at its center and lit it with a cheap yellow lighter. The grey branches were soon aflame and Wantu walked back along the trail returning with chunks of splintered ties. He placed the tarred wood on the kindling until the fire turned tall and blue and smoke billowed thick like a steam engine. Wantu stood back and smiled. We then walked to the water’s edge where he showed me an aluminum stock pot, the lip as tall as Wantu’s waist. We filled it halfway and then I waddled it back to the fire where Wantu helped me position it on a platform of cement blocks until its bottom was wrapped in flames. Then Wantu gathered stones as big as cantaloupes and dropped them into the pot. I looked at him questioningly.

“To soften the wood,” he said and pointed to the boat. He stood and waited for me to piece it together.

“We pour this into the boat…,” I started. He nodded. “Then we dig out the wood?” I continued. He held up the sharp rock and smiled.

“Ah-ha!,” I grinned, grateful for a plan.

We sat and waited for the water to boil. Wantu pulled out two dimestore, corncob pipes from his vest. They were new with tiny stickers on the stem that read “Made in Taiwan.” He pulled out a red foil bag and poured a mixture into each bowl. I looked closely in my bowl and noticed what looked like dried apple, splinters of cinnamon, and clove spikes. Wantu handed me the plastic lighter. I lit the concoction and took a hard draw. It burned my tongue, bit my throat, and fumigated all the oxygen from my lungs. I stood reflexively and began to cough. “What the hell is this?” I sputtered. Wantu, pipe stem clamped at the edge of his mouth, looked at me, eyebrows raised with concern. He reached out and handed me the foil bag. The red package had an ornamented pine tree and read: Christmas Seasons’ Old World Mulled Wine.” “Wantu, this isn’t tobacco! This isn’t for smoking,” I admonished him. “This is for wine. At Christmas time.”
“But I like Christmas,” he said apologetically. I was stunned.

“You like Christmas? Fine. It doesn't mean you have to smoke it." Wantu looked down. “You are right. This is terrible,” he shook his head with a pained look. And then, for no reason at all, I started to laugh. And then Wantu looked up at me and laughed. We laughed and looked at one another and before I knew it, I had started over again.