The Monster Loves His Labyrinth, page 7
The plot thickens. Nadine barges in wearing a new black bikini. She wants to know what we think of it? We think she ought to turn around, once, twice . . . except for Z, who continues to regard the ceiling with a beseeching air.
Early one morning a young woman in black dress and high heels fishing from a bridge on the way to Portsmouth.
I only have my king left on the chessboard, and he is cornered, while my invisible opponent has all his figures still in play.
“It must be one of the World’s Great Masters I’m playing?” I shout.
“It’s your fate, dummy,” the naked woman in bed says.
“In that case,” I tell her, “come over and sit in my lap. After we get nice and snug, I’ll think of some clever move.”
I shared the solitude of my childhood with a black cat. I sat on the window for hours on end watching the empty street while she sat on the bed washing herself. When night fell, I lay on the bed and she watched the street.
Round about midnight, the phone in the booth on the corner would ring a long time, but no one ever came to answer it. After that the cat’s tail would flicker a long time until it put me to sleep.
On rainy days, I played chess with the cat, who pretended to doze. Once, when my mother turned on the table lamp, the silhouettes of the few remaining chess figures could be seen clearly on the wall. I was afraid to move. I didn’t even take a breath.
When I finally did, the cat had vanished, taking the chess set with it and leaving me as I was in the same mean little room with its one window and its view of the empty street.
Child of the night, hold a mirror in your hand like an open book and call out the names of your father and mother, first name, last name, as they were called out long ago on their first day of school. When your neighbor bangs on the wall, shout even louder, shriek! while watching them stare back at you out of the dim mirror.
A cold, clear night, good for radio reception of distant stations, some peddler of the divine from across the continent.
I remember soaping the crotch of a certain Miss L. in the sea at dusk, while she soaped mine. The water was cold, but we were burning. Our kisses made the sun take its time setting.
Eye to eye with the fly on the wall. “My luck quit for a while,” he says. “I see yours is holding still.”
I ran into the poet Mark Strand on the street. He immediately challenged me by drinking a glass of red wine while standing on his head. I was astonished! He didn’t even spill a drop. It was the same bottle that the great French poet, Charles Baudelaire, never got to finish because his mistress crawled into the room on all fours looking for one of her hairpins.
“Is this what is called magic realism?” I asked him. Years ago this same Strand translated a Quechua poem about a man raising a fly with wings of gold in a green bottle, and now look at him!
In B. everyone’s first name seems to be Homer. The local pastime is slapping mosquitoes on each other’s foreheads. The blind photographer sits on the porch snapping pictures of his barking dog. The mortician’s young wife sings like a bird in a cage when she hangs her laundry.
“I suffer from a rare variety of bad luck which has an occasional unexpected happiness in store for me,” the beggar said to me.
My bad luck, on the other hand, loves to entertain me with its practical jokes. I had just learned how to say, “more cookies Mom,” when a German bomb fell on the house across the street. No sooner had I learned how to ride a bike than luck decorated the trees along country roads with men hanging from their branches. And so it went.
You’re fifty-eight years old today. It’s Sunday, so school is out except for a couple necking in the front of the classroom. Their tongues, which go around each other, are savage with ink.
You close your eyes to make sure. You open them again to verify the wiped blackboard, the wall clock for some reason cadaverous to read, while the two of them exit, the girl on crutches, dragging her foot behind.
It’s raining and the sidewalks are slippery. He walks quickly with a Schoolbook over his head, the one on crutches, falling behind with each step, shouts to him to not worry, to hurry home . . .
A hearse with a coffin stopped by the movie house so that its driver could shoot the breeze with the ticket seller. The movie showing was called Diabolique.
A complete stranger came to me one night on Forty-fourth Street and said I reminded him of his dead brother. Every night I go down on my knees just to say this in your keyhole:
“Peddler of falsehoods, lover of death’s latest gadgetry, murder’s helper, instigator of lynching mobs, gourmet of other people’s sufferings,” etc., etc.
“Hey, fart catcher,” he shouts from the inside! “Small-beer philosopher, king of bird shit working yourself into a fit, your kind was born only to be stepped on like roaches,” etc., etc.
The infinite riches of an empty room. Silence makes visible what now appears to be the most interesting grain of dust in the whole world.
Miniature philosophers: the kind you keep in our pocket. “Are you Pico della Mirandola?” I said to the tip of a toothpick lying in the palm of my hand. “If so, make me think big thoughts on subjects the world regards as being of no consequence.”
It’s so quiet, I can hear that something which is always eavesdropping on my life make a slight noise, the kind a letter makes sliding into a mailbox that has no name.
Better knock on wood, I thought, making the stopped clock on the dining-room table jump with the three loud knocks.
My philosophical views were shrouded in obscurity. My only true disciple was a black cat who kept crossing the street in front of me, making me stop dead in my tracks.
Every day a nervous fit. “Why do you keep staring at me like a professor of algebra?” I asked my conscience. “Go back to your seat, dummy,” he ordered me, while I kept mulling over new ways to insult him.
“Why is it that we never laugh when we tickle ourselves?” I shouted from the last row. How come some girl only has to wag her little finger at us and we plop down cackling on the floor, begging her for mercy?
“Think about it, too,” I said to the puss coming over to rub herself against my leg on the street.
V
ROUND MIDNIGHT
I like the black keys better.
I like lights turned down low.
I like women who drink alone
While I hunch over the piano
Looking for the pretty notes.
In my dream, I took a taxi to China to see the Great Wall.
There’s a picture of me when I was five years old. I’m grinning while some unknown grown-up’s hands cover my eyes.
The hope is that the poem turns out to be better than the poet.
We live in nameless present convinced if we give things names we will know where we are.
Tate: “It’s a tragic story, but that’s what’s so funny.”
Consciousness: The light bulb we are handed at birth.
As far as I’m concerned, it is not a contradiction to say that God both does and does not exist.
Paintings and photographs on the walls of a bar in Berlin. One is a photo of a woman giving a man a blow job. Seated at the table directly underneath, two elderly ladies chatting over their drinks.
The President says: “Let’s drop bombs on some country until they start loving us.”
A brightly-lit cash machine in a slum.
Looking for a cure for a dead horse in Iraq, politicians, generals, newspaper columnists all offering their miracle cures.
Even prisoners look back and say. “Ah that was a great day. We were all out in the yard. The sun was shining, I was sunbathing, and I said to myself, ‘God, I feel so good!’”
It’s not like people anywhere are jumping around and shouting, “Oh my God! Another poet! Aren’t we lucky?”
If you asked my grandmother any question about the past, she would reply this way: “Of course, I remember the day the war started. The night before your grandfather said to me, ‘Mitzo, it’s been a long time since we had veal chops. Why don’t we have some veal chops tomorrow?’ So I’m thinking, ‘Well, let’s see, veal chops, I used to go to so-and-so for them, but last time the veal was so tough, I’d better go to see another butcher tomorrow morning.’”
With its bloodshot eye, the window searches the evening sky.
Kenneth Patchen: “like a mirror held to music.”
Back numbers of girlie magazines at the dump chastely covered with new snow.
A runny, red nose on the subway, dripping into Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.
Grim Reaper is now my chaperon.
A pimpmobile parked under a palm tree outside a desert casino.
A man on all fours chasing a little dog in the park.
Don’t snore so loud, my love.
Drinking vintage Chateau Margot from a Hellmann’s mayonnaise jar in Rosa’s kitchen.
I used to have a few imaginary friends. We used to lie in bed at night and tell each other about our travels to Africa.
Miss Brown, long-legged like a chicken coop.
A window thick with exotic plants. They live in a jungle, I think. They have a tiger for a sofa; use an alligator for a coffee table. Their children run around like monkeys. When father opens his mouth to speak, the air fills with fireflies. When his wife lifts her skirt to show him her purple stockings, the parrots shriek.
Those smiling faces one saw at lynchings a hundred years ago are back among us and are still smiling.
That must have been Ivan the Terrible I saw playing the accordion on the street corner in Berlin.
A book of love poems that will put Viagra out of business.
In the park yesterday: A body-builder on roller skates, young mother pushing a pram, Chinese waiter whose shoes pinch, lovers sharing a slice of pizza, old lady who used to date Dracula, teenage Jesus and his friend Elvis, a cutie in short skirt and combat boots, the lone bongo-player with wrap-around shades.
A moonbeam in a letter office. A postcard faded beyond recognition with someone like Persephone on the postage stamp.
As for my insomnia, it was like being led to the gallows each night and asked to say a few words.
My only friends, my playmates: the little thoughts in my head.
This morning, rummaging through a drawer, I found one of my baby photographs. The little fatso looked happy. With the few dark hairs on his head carefully combed. One could see he was itching for some lady to pick him up and show him a good time.
Faulkner somewhere defines poetry as the whole history of the human heart on a head of a pin.
Where words fail and amazement takes over: the silence of the night lit up with stars. To speak of God at this moment would be a blasphemy.
The secret ambition of any literary work is to make gods and devils take notice.
She was like a snake-charmer in a thrift shop mink coat.
Clever flies,
all abuzz
‘round the president’s
brand new turd.
Desdemona, Juliet, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth and me painting the town red.
Gods have poetry to thank for finding themselves in heaven.
Was that the gravedigger I saw you run from? He left his muddy fingerprints on your white dress while we stood around holding our wine glasses and laughing. Then, you both vanished and so did we, making our way in silence up to the dark house on the hill.
They were cutting someone’s throat in a field across the road. “Can I go and watch?” I asked my mother, God forgive me.
A poem is like a bank robbery: The idea is to get in, get their attention, get the money and get out.
Don’t you hear me bang my head against your wall? Of course, you do, you cowards! So how come you don’t answer me? Bang your head on your side of the wall and keep me company.
The horrors of our time will make us nostalgic for those of the past.
Pere Simic’s advice: Treat yourself, son. Drink a good bottle of cheap wine.
What an outrage! This very moment gone forever.
Illegible scribble, tangle of unfinished thoughts, tell me, is this God’s thumbprint I’m lost in? Or some demon’s late night coffee dregs?
On a night like this, one ought to serve hot soup to oxen. In the village church, the saints have forgotten all about God and are watching the snow fall.
The orchestra conductor has lifted his baton. Since then, it’s been hours. Once in a while there’s a cough, a sneeze and more discreetly the sound of someone snoring.
In the shadow of murderers at work, we kicked a ball made of rags. My friends, my old playmates, we didn’t see the gallows, only crows storming the sky as we ran home to our mothers.
He could read the mind of a lit match as it entered a dark room.
The wind is bored with the trees; the sea is bored with the rocks; the children are bored in school; their parents are bored in church.
“I had a bellyful of your love,” a man shouts into a cell phone as he passes me on the street.
The devil is always scribbling something. Neighbors try to peek over his shoulders, flies, and even God himself. When people ask him what he’s writing, he tells them nothing. And yet, they say, his pockets are full of worn-out erasers and pencil stubs.
And as for you, grandma, what have you done with the truth? The one you held once by the kitchen sink, like a drop of water in the palm of your hand.
We are blind beggars with arms linked making our slow way on a crowded avenue. I play the guitar, and you rattle a tin cup as we sing in high-pitched voices, Dark is the night, cold is the ground, Oh Lord, please remember me.
And there you were, father, with your white hair, white shirt, white pants, all alone in mid-day heat on a street of white buildings with no one else in view, except someone lost like me, too spooked to ask for directions.
Pious hypocrites, windbags for sale, firebugs with global ambitions, inventors of scapegoats, money-grabbing clergymen, thieves of poor children’s lunches, cowards penning war editorials, millions of soulless bastards, let this little old lady and her old dog cross the street.
At the dive where Orion is the bartender, the usual crowd of insomniacs munching salty zeroes from a peanut bowl while watching some girl do the bump and grind to the silence of the infinite.
What can the white screen be thinking as the movie ends?
Here’s an idea. I’ll borrow money and hire a pretty young actress to stand in my room shouting night and day, “Free me from this hell!”
People tell about a blind man who rolled dice on the sidewalk and paid the neighborhood children a quarter to read the numbers for him.
The tuba in the pawnshop window misses the marching band and the long-legged majorette twirling her baton out in front as she steps down the avenue. She may turn up some day yet, with a radio under her arm or a double-barrel shotgun.
My friends, my playmates, the thoughts in my head, and you dear ghosts, everything outside this moment is a lie.
In times of lies and violence, the dire necessity of going mad, a question of honor I do not expect to be met with understanding.
Long ago, misfortune made me her dreamboat, befuddling my wits with questions. What makes me deserve all this? My playing hard-to-get is no use.
One mad idea after another let loose upon the world as if they were soap bubbles and we small children running after them.
The lizard stares unblinking at the rocks as if they were a row of TV sets all tuned to the evening news.
My white hair in a store window like a wind-thumbed Bible some street preacher tossed in the air.
In bad luck’s auction room you always draw a huge crowd of bidders.
Of course, God is equally clueless why we are here. Henrietta doesn’t believe me. She nods to the clergyman on his way to make pastoral visits in the neighborhood. Does this make me sore? You bet it does.
As for S., he now found himself face to face with things, which, if they consented to be understood, did so with great reluctance. Like growing old.
Insomnia. A lifelong dereliction of duty. A form of rebellion against the whole of eternity. A spit in its eye, as it were.
Gluttons of other people’s sufferings, the time of fabulous feasts is coming.
An Assyrian stele in a museum depicting prisoners of war in a file whipped by their guards as they march. They all have identical beards, identical expressions and clothing and are completely interchangeable.
Finally a just war; all the innocents killed in it can regard themselves as lucky.
This must be the window where Edgar Allan Poe used to peek out on dark and stormy nights.
He read the papers with mounting satisfaction that everything is going to hell, fust as he predicted.
