[Section 5 ]
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Click on the blue title to go to poem 46 John J. Percivalle Walmart Parking Lot Christmas 48 Pit Menousek Pinegar Cleaning the Basement with my Daughter 49 Charles Rafferty West Virginia Colorado 51 Jody Reed Holes 53 Russell Rowland My Daughter the Napkin 54 Danielle Sellers Counting Mississippi 55 Dana Sonnenschien Aunt Fern’s Birds Padre Loco 58 John Terenzi Ariadne Dreams VI The Back Garden 59 Richard Tietjen Independence Day 1959
John J. PercivalleWal-Mart Parking Lot, Christmas
The glint of the box cutter drew my eye, then her voice: Doesn’t fucking deserve it. At first I thought she was securing the tree to the car top, but an angry slash at the twine told otherwise. Fucking two-timer.
Before I could help, the tree was down with a thud and propped against a carriage rack, garlands of twine in manic loops. You want it, take it. Won’t do me no good. When she jumped in the car I braced for back-up lights and a tortured tire squeal, but she emerged trailing a store receipt that she impaled on the tree. Then she cleared out as quickly as her exhaust ghost.
In thick pencil strokes the receipt read, Don’t come home! exclamation point slashed clear through. Boyfriend I was sure, would be back shortly finishing up the cigarette he shared with the young cashier out back, but I couldn’t wait.
Days later I returned to pick up what I neglected that afternoon. There stood the tree, a kind of roadside memorial to holidays gone bad, I suppose. Many pilgrims had come bearing store receipt ribbons, six-pack ring icicles and plastic shopping bags, balled and looped over branches. A greasy red scarf coiled from the top, ended at the note, its frayed edge like fingers reaching.
As I walked into the store I remembered a story I had heard after 9/11 of a woman who couldn’t bear to reclaim her dead husband’s car from the train station. For weeks it sat, covered in candles, letters and photographs, yellow ribbons and palm crosses.
They towed it away just before Christmas. Cleaning the Basement with my Daughter
Hey, I shout through dust and the clatter of a lifetime, I found a box of your father’sletters. I know, she says, I’ve read them.They’re pretty boring. I thought they’d belove letters. We weren’t a couple yet, I say. I don’t think they’re boring. I guess it’s all in what you expect, she says. I was expecting romance. I want to tell her that came later, lasted a long time, might have lasted forever, though it didn’t. I want to tell her everything I know about romance, about love: that after the first adventures and leaps of faith, it all comes down to curiosity and kindness. Curiosities satisfied and satisfied, and in their place, always something new to wonder about: why the hair on only one forearm whorls, the depth and shadows of old sorrow, what he’ll say about this movie, that book, what that will tell me about who he is, what new unknown will come from that. And kindness: determined refusal to use anything you discover to cop an advantage—the ultimate kindness, it’s failure deadly. So what do I do with this history? I ask my daughter. Give it back to him, she says. Those letters are who he was. They don’t have much to do with you. I wonder if she’s found the love letters in the attic and what she’d suggest I do with them.
West Virginia
That’s where we tumbled from the hotel bar to see a comet overhead like a chip of fog in the sequined dark. Our first comet. But where was the tail? The wagging flames? What future could this inspire? It was hard to see how it could frighten a continent or be blamed for any of history. Somewhere within a block’s radius a magnolia tree was blooming, the unmistakable stink of beauty. We finished our drinks and kissed our way to bed. Early the next day, we headed back for Connecticut—the sun unrisen, the magnolia scent still splashing the air like a recently ripped-up skunk. The comet stayed with us for weeks slowly brightening as it climbed into the horizon. Strange how it never exceeded the grandeur of that first night in West Virginia, however paltry it might have then seemed. It is the same with love and death, I think— the powerful talisman of the first nude woman or the first empty bed, how we can’t stop sleeping with either.
Colorado
After the birth of our first daughter my friends called from the top of Colorado. Two time zones away, it was still light on Mt. Elbert—the only storm still distant, the temperature holding. They said they might have an hour before things got dangerous. They were giddy. They said their view wasn’t possible back east. (Someone was opening wine in the background.) They said they would climb back down, that they would hunker in tents where the trees began again. It was dark outside my own window, the blaze of autumn maples invisible, the baby crying from another room for my wife’s delicious body. I was straddled by small mountains. My friends had no children of their own, and didn’t understand how hard I took their call. A job that didn’t love me waited at the end of the driveway—pinned on the slope of something that seemed to have no summit.
Holes A peep hole in a blue front door in Swiss cheese and my right shoe donut holes holes in socks and my favorite jeans warm from the dryer the hole in a ring or link of chain
In a shirt— fifty-nine percent cotton forty percent rayon one percent hole Holes in ears, eyebrows belly buttons and tongues Holes in my grandmother’s orange afghan a loop hole a hole in an alibi the black hole a hole in the ozone layer in a family one in the ground a movie my key A cow a mud puddle three in a notebook a hole in one one in my homework Rearview Mirror In the little framed rectangle are reflections- of old 45’s played backwards where ski slope orange slides over lifts of red and yellow where eyes stare into eyes a car wreck—in my steel box Where objects may appear closer then what they are it’s a doorway to closed infant lids and open mouths or the agent who found criminal fingerprints between two blue lines It’s the place where fog hits when breath makes contact with glass and on rainy nights bright lights will follow close behind It’s distance equals rate multiplied by time but not speed equaling distance over time It’s the noise of trains falling off tracks when wheels forget to roll and steel is slammed shut all mirror images seem to disappear My Daughter, the Napkin
Colleen is cast, in Beauty and the Beast at the University, as A Napkin. With other Napkins, she explores her motivation for the dinner scene.
Is it not to guard a ladylike bodice, a gentlemanly codpiece, from any slip of spoon or sharper utensil that’s consequence of Original Sin?
Or, simple payback for many years growing up at our table, her damask on the floor, my reproachful eyes downcast? Become what was spurned.
Onstage, she will signify everything gracious and of good report: Gardens of Versailles, Couperin sonatas de chiesa, the complete Voltaire; all who cast down cloaks before queens, who appreciate excellence as of old: ballerina’s ankles, castles built to last, dishes washed and dried, Dad’s poetry.
Counting Mississippi I peeked around the doorframe. My grandma was still, slouched in the same position for one whole day now. Over the phone, the nurse asked me to count the seconds between her breaths. She said the pauses would lengthen, the measures grow faint, then stop. At first, there were ten Mississippis between each breath, then twelve, then nine. It was late. I wouldn’t sleep. I laid on the couch in the living room, staring at the Memphis news, then Leno’s muted chuckles, I learned how to patch a roof, the history of beer. Infomercials from the 80s— I’d seen them all before. Those Friday nights, some fancy torte of hers would keep me up shaking my foot and tossing my long hair, I’d listen to her sleeping next to me. After Dynasty, after Falcon’s Crest, Miami’s news, the Johnny Carson show, the ads began: the clapper, chia pets and hover rounds. The late-night crowd is old, they want to stay around. Some twenty years since then, in Oxford, Mississippi now, I listened to her breath catch, thought it might be the last a hundred times. I wanted sleep. I thought of that weenie roast at her house in 1987, playing hide and seek with my Biloxi cousins—we wore masks— Fat even then, I was Cat-girl sans the tights. I hid in the foyer behind the gold lamé mirror and no one found me. I peed myself. She gave me clean underwear, black panty hose. I was through with counting states, alone. At dawn she was taking forty seconds between breaths. Two days since her last response. I lost count, had to wait for her to inhale again. She wore her rattiest gown. My mother cried. Grandma’s breath became a rattled, bubbly snore. I laid down on the bed with her. Her hand already cold. She was technical, administered to. The nurse slipped morphine between her pallid gums, she was dead weight wheezing-- I counted fifty-three. She gasped three times in short succession and no more. Aunt Fern’s Birds
She called the neighborhood magpies and scrub jays “dirty birds,” but she liked the factory porcelain, hand-painted artifacts her sister, my mother, does not wish to dust. So I inherit dozens of hummingbirds, bluebirds, robins, chickadees, cardinals, finches, orioles, even blue jays that meant we don’t know what to a working-class woman who spent her entire life in one city— perhaps that she could buy anything she wanted, perhaps that her husband loved her this much. I still flip past those ads in magazines, the monthly installments, shipping, handling, birds on branches where they would never be seen, the scale off, a swan in spring with her cygnets, forced lilies, autumn-dark cattails— at her feet, bright moss instead of mud, a world without dirt or all the labor that pays for these petrified dreams.
Padre Loco
The stories I could tell you about Trailways, the old man said. Pecos is the most beautiful place, I had my grandson buried there. Year-round is water in streams and ditches, agua linda. Winters there, en invierno, I'd open the doors to the patio, hang chamois on the trees: my garden was a tent. One day I came out, and the Father, Padre Loco, was sitting on my bench, feeding a rabbit. So still he sat, holding a leaf in his hand, quieto, like the creature. He’d been sick. For two years the Father couldn't say Mass, but this he knew. I said, Padre, we don’t go to hospitals when we’re sick. We have no money.
Where do you go?
To the healing church at Chimayo, San Juan de la Porta. It’s not so far.
Take me there.
Spain sent her priests to our mountains for hundreds of years, but a prayer in Chimayo is enough, I know. We were a long time in the church, then Padre Loco touched my arm to ask for subrogato, someone to speak for him; this person has to be pure in faith. So I went out and found a woman hanging the wash in her yard; I gave her thirty-five dollars, all I had. She brought out her boy, a little niño, and I said, The Father has lost his faith, he cannot ask for himself, can you pray for him? The boy nodded, he said he did this for his friends at school, and, once, for a logger, pinned under a tree and drunk on the mescal. The father cried out: Your hand burns me.
All night on the bus,
the old man talked of missions, mesas, and piñon trees, the land-grant wars, the station wagon Padre Loco drove too fast for an ambulance. Once he winked, smiled, and said, Why, I’m half-darkie myself. I thought of heat, how the sun burns out even the red offerings of plastic roses, and the body drops away from wounds, and the mind leaves flesh to itself to heal, to scar. He turned a phrase in Spanish, in English, as if that music could change our past. But who can ask for herself? Who can speak for another? Dusty, down at heel, and far from his blessed Pecos, he leaned across the aisle, touched a palm against my forehead. Be well, he said.
Ariadne Dreams V. The Back Garden
It was the plants in the back of the garden That interested her—the few only the gods saw.
When they strolled there, hand in hand They traded secrets: how deep To bury the roots, how to train the vines, Where to prune, when to harvest. Gods and priestesses. A god And priestess. They laughed At the dinners they could create—the meals Until dawn, the plants for drinking. Of course, up front were the grapes As everyone has come to expect But here, behind the gates Were the plants from the other gods: Barley, rye, the agave plant.
Ariadne’s dreams were vivid that evening— The sensations inched down her spine, Lingered: this island would be home. Brusing sensations against a placid heart: She imagined then sending Theseus away, Clouding his mind, darkening his sails.
Richard TietjenIndependence Day, 1959 Time is a lie. It happens when we're sleeping. They were always mending things Partly thrift. But more The story was Aunt Peggy They put us kids in the parade. Evidently I got old.
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