His job was a novitiate where there was no operator's
manual
With which to have faith in, and no rules
But to move with the dustmop pushed before him
Along the empty corridor, and then down a staircase
Where he could descend to more passive depths in
cleaning.
At home he would smell the odor of his bare feet
coming to him;
Would see the blue under his toe nail that looked like
marble;
And these would be dominant sensations
Though he would be vaguely aware of them.
Beneath his bended legs he would sweep his hand
To capture a fuller scent as his fingers would flick
To capture a fuller scent as his fingers would flick
His unshaven face. Then in his only room where the
bare mattress
Was lain along with his leather jacket
And the dirty underwear cuddled around a clean
toilet--
Where the Rosary hung on a wall
And the guitar leaned in a corner--
he would do his push-ups.
Most of those early mornings some train
Would pour its breath to the weeds
At the edge of the tracks, losing them
In sound and mist of a voice
Screaming out, alone,
Through the cold and the living.
His arms would tremble
With the body weakening, and then demobilized, to the
floor
Before the count of fifty.
Through the fogged condensation
Of the upper corners to a window
He would glance up at the train--
Each car imagined as the girlfriend, Cindy,
Or the seminary, which he never
Grasped or rejected and so
They slipped away;
Or his mother, who with cancer
Began to close herself off to him--
Grasping one of those trains appearing at the time
With the familiarity of two strangers
Who recognized each other's desire to remain such.
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Oracion A Traves De Gasshole
(Patron Saint of Respiratory Therapy Workers)
Saturday. All the same:
A silvery grey
Thin and undistinguishable
From skies to parking lot
In exact shadow; and he finds his car.
The lid, laced in rust,
By the turn of the key,
Parts the grey as it pulls up;
The grocery bag is dropped into the hole;
And the ground beef slaps down on the floor
Of the trunk as if a second slaughter,
Its grounded nerves convulsing it
A couple of inches nearer the oil stain.
That meat, in body, that last moment
After consciousness has severed itself;
Skin peeling under the fur, hidden,
But not from the last hot beams ahead
Of emerging dusk, becoming crisp
And then soaking up the hot blood, as the trachea,
With the last of the air drawing in,
begins to fold its walls; and he could imagine it
Like he could imagine, from unexact memories,
The woman, last night
At the hospital, whom he began to like--
her body pulling cell by cell
Apart before he had a chance
To finish the rescue with the hose
Descending the nostril as a rope,
and then flushing out mucus.
He gives the ground beef an air-born somersault to the
bag
And closes the lid that is connected to the vague
light bulb of the
trunk.
The Gasshole's reflection on the trunk lid
Is lank and curved; the appearance of his face
With its facial tip of the nose and its greased
Separation of hair like a wet muskrat in a metallic
reflection.
His face moving away, he sees an old Hispanic man
Who walks from the area of cars carrying two bags
Of groceries in an embrace that could be
For weighty children; he thinks "The senescent,
Carless, careless baws--turd! A campesino!,"
And he envisions himself as that: having to pull out
the thorns
That pierce through his tennis shoes as he shovels
scattered cacti leaves from out of the back
Of the pickup to his animals;
And living in the dry ravine surrounded by houses made
of wood
That had been patted loosely together like adobes,
beside
The families of the kiln workers
Who with him eat out Land's blessings
And piss and shit out onto her graces,
But himself happily not knowing the language of the
Mexican people...
Himself not wanting to know the language
Of any people that his sister, Cindy, and college pal,
Dave Broom-Up-The-Butt
Echo.
He does not wish to think of them
Or the vaginas that are not his to put on
Or the illusive woman who would be sick with him
like a child lying on the sofa in fever and hoping
That in the shadows on the wall and the
Passing sounds that are concentrated on her mind
One will bring deliverance--only placing the
deliverance
On him and yet loving him for himself
Beyond that need. And while unlocking the door of his
car
He feels that the recreation in life is also a
routine:
A routine of sharing and parting,
And at the end one is grounded and tossed
Before the validity of his own
Perceptions is resolved. But he is alive,
Now; and he will put away his groceries;
Read a chapter of his Biblia,
A cenotaph of the dead..
maybe a verse; think of forgetting mass
and mailing in his tithing
And to veg' himself away a few hours
Before he would have another night
Of throats, lungs and
The air of the masses.
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-
Come
(Camp Wonderland for the Retarded, Lake of the Ozarks)
Grabbing the already read letter,
Slipping out hot and wet
From the bare mattress--
Like Sweet Pea's turds
Right before
His psychomotor seizures,
Only without a softness to stub myself
Into--stiff and hard I drop
From the cold rim of the bunk
(Even if I awaken
The idiots below).
With non-syllables and vowellessness
A pitch that is language enough
To keep this man, Jim,
From wherever
The unassimilated disappear
Howls "He does not want me here"
While its flesh of Jim beats the plastic urinal
On the walls barricading a pillowed head.
The joke is on him this time...
All over him for the next hours.
The letter's impression
Writes and rewrites in my mind:
Come, my sister calls to our father
Like Ronnie's suppositories butting back.
Only suppositories are meant to do so.
Come, she speaks to me,
And the shrink
Shall put in touch
All that he did to us.
Tripping over Keith's mattress
I step out in humid silence
And wipe my cheeks.
Two cabins, beside ours, simultaneously fry
Bugs in blue, electric lights.
Keith, a crippled rocking horse of autism,
Scrapes the feet of his vibrating body
To the bench where I sit.
Sit, Keith; go back to bed, Keith;
Go to the bathroom, Keith:
In this camp I shape the minutes of his life
To some acceptable pattern.
He rubs his hands together
As if trying to spark fire
For the inhabitants
Of his imaginary world.
Stop that, Keith, I say. Sit, Keith.
Keith sits: There is no coming out
For him after twenty years
This way,
Or perhaps for me.
The pale gas lamps are strewn around
A small area of limbs
In a corner of the sky--
All but patches are aflame
Like a roof of a tent around
The stakes, ready to break off
And fall.
Rock, Keith,
As the sun is stroked
So far into the lap of the night,
Suffocating and as good as gone.
The folding and unfolding
Of a crinkled letter into squares;
The imagining of the counselor
Of cabin four
And what a pulse would have created
If her head had drowsed
To my hand on the back of her seat
On our way here;
The general silent howling of "Come!"--
Keith does not cripple to this.
He has no sister that calls a stranger back
To erase and draw back
Them both.
He does not say "come!"
All hours.
He comes.
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