AUTHOR, AUTHOR
AUTHOR,
AUTHOR
Always this light tinged green by the
crowns of sycamores when my cue is called.
Once again I’ll abandon this pastoral in the windows, each time more
sadly, and each time she will appear more distinctly, not as if the light which
has always glowed from her has been turned up, but as if, inevitably, twilight
is gathering to leave the rose last lit. The bell’s clangor will not fall, the
clock will not strike the hour with its martinet’s baton, and I will pull the
drayage of this never plucked moment through the eras of its withering.
I owe her a homework assignment for one I
missed, unintentionally, I believe, but if this debt is not renewed then I will
no longer see her lounging in fabled suggestion on this stool, her chestnut
hair swept cursorily across her forehead and cinched above her nape by a rubber
band or her large amber eyes with their focus displaced in some inner chamber.
So I follow my original premonition begun when she made this classroom
anonymous to her, leaving me and maybe others no choice but to love her as a
way to continue to exist while she disregards us, memorizing her unkempt
appearance in detail, loose strands of hair, cheeks without rouge, lips without
lipstick-signs of how little we mean against a life brimming with emotion or
wise reclusion, how little time it leaves over to prepare for us-in order to
fill ourselves with indelible certainties that prove our title to this hour
and places notes in the foreclosing
future that will open in dreams.
The light from the windows, tinged green
coming through the crowns of sycamores, lead hued on cloudy days or-when
settled above the over waxed floors-the color of an old person’s toenail.
Pastoral in the leaves, the piebald branches’ bare sections stained a tender,
tea green. I purposely did not hear her,
drifting self-consciously out in the woods, a show of poetic pre-occupation
forcing her to say my name again. Always the feeling with this teacher that I
have made no impression on her, while from me she deducts chestnut colored hair
and amber eyes. She is barely surfaced
from currents of reverie, her dispassionate expression bathed in Lethe’s
waters.
I forgot, obviously, I had told her,
referring to my homework. “Obviously”,
she repeated nudged awake a little, which was my intention. It was like using a foreign word in this
junior high classroom. “Obviously” was a billet doux. She steps from her stool and
offers me her hand as an education in sentiment. Across the years when I take
her hand that recognized the letter being placed in it, our brushing fingers
echo in my bones. It is the same long second when I bobbled passing the make-up
assignment to her because time was flooding into my life and she looked at me
with a teasing smile.
The bright strip of yellow light slicing
past the door that has been left slightly ajar.
A fabric of shadows withdrawing leaching the sad, uninhabited mask of an
old man’s face floating alongside a train window. The queasy undertow of the
platform pulled backward as the car settles into fathoms, the call of the
whistle, clarion for the dead. The girl, her hair painted chestnut by the single file
of station lights, her hand still upraised as it had been when it slipped
irresistibly from his clasp, running in place, her sweater flapping in a
sardonic comedy of motion as she slides backward into the rooted crowd.
Plopped down between my legs, stretching a
section of blanket tight over my thighs, my cat, Salome, gazes at me, always
seeming to anticipate my waking as if she has followed my dreams through her
still eyes. Alive in me, vibrating throughout,
I feel my life, racing headlong with me in tow towards any and all
intoxications of spirit. My toehold here
is the premonitions of a thirteen-year old that age will bring mastery of the
black arts of introspection. This
expectation suits the romance and shame I have towards my privacy since
sexuality arrived. Just this day I would
have tracked the Chinese girl from school to
If I had not been possessed by a lost
sixty-year old, I would have waited until my parents shut the light in the den
to re-play that chase. On those re-imagined streets she discovers me. Little by little, she has been able to free
herself from the intoned setting. A month was needed to pry her breast from the
mental snapshot of it dozing on her notebook without making her disappear
altogether, a month when I applied all the scavenged technology of a ghost to
catch her attention and make her turn. Another month spent removing her blouse.
Until then I had to chase her in dreams. I woke myself late at night in order
to be imagining her before I drifted off again, hoping she would be waiting for
me on the other side. .
It is probably at this moment when I am
impatient for my parents to leave the den and the door to my private theater is
already ajar that the old man has slipped in.
The dappled green well where pure desire first slipped away has never
been sealed, and it may be the nocturnal wanderings of the adult that make the
child fear the dark.
“Sally”.
I sit up to take her in my arms-sit up without the sighs wrung from age,
at thirteen movement gleams when unsheathed-but I hesitate. Between my actions
and me is this world whose suspended existence is tuned to my regret. If I wiggle around loosening the chords, this
song of necessary notes might tatter.
Just the added weight of my listening seems to shift the key.
The backboard is hanging again on my
bedroom wall, and the cat mask I made in primary school from paper mache covers
one of its corners. This I can do: wander down the byways opening with every
glance. What words have I chalked behind
the mask? The name of my dream
tryst? Best to hold my breath should I
peek behind lest I announce myself with living breath on the black pane. Delicately, I try to slip out from under
Sally, hoping to plant her in the warm shadow where I have been laying without
her abandoning the bed and beginning an avalanche of discordant events. I see the night light in its socket by the
bathroom door, glowing behind its plastic shell. To my left are the two clunky blond veneer
dressers. I draw my index finger through
a thin film of dust on their surface; the room holds. I have no way of knowing if this will work,
but I decide to follow the law for labor on the Sabbath, at least if I fail it
is not because I was reckless with this second chance. It seems to me that the
measure of gratitude is the measure of clarity to the memory, and the deepest
gratitude cannot be added to with a word.
As on the Sabbath, I will be allowed only what labor can be undone,
leaving in tact creation as it is.
Then a close call. The light in the den suddenly goes off, and I
scurry to the bathroom because my dad will now open the door. I would love to see him in his horn rim
glasses, his hair still black, dressed in the somber clothes of an accountant,
but I can not risk his seeing the mortal grief on the thirteen year old kid who
probably went to bed somewhat sullenly a couple of hours before. If he has, as is his custom on arriving
home, removed his cufflinks and left them on his dresser and hung his tie from
the wooden rack with the relief carving of an Airedale’s head along with its
fellows where together they drape like the tail feathers of a bird of paradise,
then with his sleeves rolled back, there on his wrist will be the square faced
watch with its second hand having its own tiny orbit on a separate axle, and
only four numbers marking the hours and the rest indicated by mere dashes,
depending on his remarkable foreknowledge, as far as a six year old was
concerned, of the random positions the hands would fall into, and too, the
alligator belt with the groove warn in it where the buckle sits each time over
the same hole dictated by his proudly constant and again alive girth, a
waistline that will never vary through his life and is a proof to him of the
soundness of deliberation and premeditation in action. All these things (key
chain, wing tip brogans and argyle socks held up with their ankle garters, the
slacks with their shiny seats, and the white shirt that only this morning he
would have removed from the cellophane bag with blue backing it had returned in
from the laundry its sleeves folded back and tightly tucked with the geometric
legerdemain of a flag for a dead soldier, its collar and cuffs chastely
starched) all of them irrecoverable but now in place. How could I resist them, or warning him that
his years will begin ticking off when he is talked into discarding these
amulets in favor of transient fashions?
I make some noises with the toilet seat,
and allow myself only a stolen glance at my shadow in the bathroom mirror. I do open and close the small, fogged glass
window that opens onto the back stairs, leaving it closed again as I found it,
and I can not resist tracing my finger over the chip in the tile in front of
the toilet, feeling its familiar canine tooth shape. I go back to my room and
search out the flash light from my blue bookcase, the one with the red plastic
around the glass that glows when the light is on and can be used for signaling
by thumbing a button on the flat switch in case of a fervently wished for
adventure. It has done service as an
x-ray device to see the blood in my hand glowing through and as a chisel to
carve my face into totem by holding it under my chin, and now I pry with its
beam behind the mask hanging on the black board to read the word I have left
there to incubate its materialization from my tense recital. Because it can be erased I used this space
like a ouiga board, trying automatic writing of erotic fragments. The board
itself becomes a transparent membrane through which the boy in the mirror
writes me messages by guiding my fingertips with his. The flashlight finds “breast” somewhat
tremulously scrawled there. And overlaid
on my memories of women’s breasts and most particularly over their relative and
fading wonder is his complete faith in the mystery of their sanctum, a
reverence honored with rueful and furtive glances that has enshrined the image
of a brassiere projected through a blouse by a beam of light and the strap of a
bra on the fat shoulder of an older woman whose casual tawdriness felt near to
an initiation.
This place! This place nowhere, where once was, is
always, and which is made of the things which overflowed the world. Lucky, since age has scoured every sense that
all first perceptions that flowed from love can never be capped or else this
place would be barren and all the grief that is here would taste of ashes
instead of sweet gratitude.
“Salome, it’s me.” Countless hairs make up her white fur and I
don’t know what sum of infinitely fine contingencies are expressed in their
present configuration and what new throw of auguring bones is cast when I pet
her, but I take that chance for the opportunity to feel her again, and trust
that the lyrics along with the melody compose the amalgam of memory, and Salome
having only meows for marking discrepancies is here in a continuous present and
will keep my secret safe. She was always
given safe passage to the kingdom of the dead.
A joy to hold her again and feel her purring to my touch, to note again
the small tear in her right ear from a fight, the tight digits of her front
paws, the long shanks of her rear legs and the coils of her flanks, the two
high shoulder blades when she lays in this sphinx position, the ever cursive
mood notes written by her black tail.
I am searching for the telephone book, the
residential catalogue, who’s title “The Grey Pages” may be a consensual agreement
to not expose this Zohar of sexual numerology, a map of the city’s hidden
alleys of desire. For me, filed under
“A”, “L”, and “S” respectively, are a blond girl I have loved since grammar
school, the Chinese girl I follow home, and a girl I will meet in science class
a year from now. In two cases I will
make trembling passes past their burning addresses. For the Chinese girl whose
last name might be the Asian equivalent of “Doe” amidst columns of other
families similarly cloaked, I am helped by having followed her. In the case of
“A” she has one of those Eastern European last names that are nearly unique and
I can winnow out what are probably her relatives by the grace of school
districting. The little blond, her name never does turn up. I am left with
jumbled synonyms squeezed tight into the space where she should be. Instead of
a confirmed stairway heading to a heavy front door, I am left with the small
consolation of the two telephone prefixes around it, at that time names, one of
them Crestview, conjuring an estate, the other “Orlando” which might be a city
of gold or dusty barrio. Over the next
few years, I will get as far as dialing all but the last digit for both girls,
pecking digit after added digit at the tissue between a bursting bladder of
anxiety, hope and rehearsed dialogue, and the fatal act of releasing the dial
to freewheel back.
The telephone is locked onto its own
awkward metal stand, a mutation from function to luxury typical of the era, and
has room only for a note pad, and it takes some hushed rummaging around the den
to locate the phone books on a bottom shelf of the dictionary stand, classified
as a tome along with the Atlas. I find
the schoolteacher with the chestnut hair under “M”. The era of women hiding their names from
would be stalkers or sad hierophants like me, has yet to dawn. In the bright circle of the flashlight’s
beam, there she is living on South Cochran, an Irish woman within walking
distance both of my junior high and my house, dwelling among a colony of old
Jews. Lucky for a thirteen year-old boy
that she is close by, a journey through miles of this sprawled city might
ripple the haunted ether it lies under at night.
I choose blue jeans. My pants from this time have a buckle in the
seat, and I couldn’t wear them without feeling satirical about my
situation. Bad enough the thin belt with
the two gold bands that I once thought was slick, and it takes some sliding of
clothes hangars to find a long sleeve shirt, burgundy colored, the inside of
the collar slightly frayed that feels appropriate to some averaging of my two
ages, more or less. Now that I have started pushing ahead with a plan in this
place of wonders I have to contend with absurdity. I gain a slim advantage for unity by picking
high-topped canvas tennis shoes over the leather school shoes with their thick
salmon colored rubber soles. The school
shoes are so freighted with symbolic meanings about preparation for a
successful future or at least surviving it as envisioned by my mother-the sure
grip, the hushed footstep, the grand modeling of a pencil eraser nearly into
architecture, their fixed duration since they can not be re-soled-that lacing
them is to be indentured. I am obligated
to maintaining a spit polish on their topsides with a shoe polish kit my dad
bought me. It includes an application brush (a bit like a big toothbrush with a
round tuft of bristles, two buffing brushes, and wooly sided polishing straps
which I learn to saw with an audible snap to complete the molting into sheen. All
this dressage simulating training in a miniature military academy and
instilling leeriness in me for a career of petty regulation and constant
scrutiny would never allow me to budge, while the tennis shoes mean freedom to
both the man and boy.
I did not anticipate such a struggle to
remain here. I dress in the dark to
avoid a fatal dissonance. Last is a sport coat, a little short at the
wrists. I only wear it for special
occasions, or did. I must already have
switched to the stripped cardigan; I could never go anywhere with my wrists
sticking out like this. But, it’s an
ageless costume, always studiously casual.
I feel less of an imposter inside it.
There are marvels all around me but instead of epiphanies I am grinding
away at punctilious paradox.
I slip out the back door, reasoning that a
curfew breaker will be less noticed in the relative underworld of back yard and
alley. As soon as the door has rattled
close, I remember the landlord’s dog is kept back here in his own penal colony,
supposedly a proud Eastern European sheep dog but to my eyes a shapeless pile
of matted fur without visible legs or face, starved to insanity for affection
and vocal about it. Too late I
reconsider my route, but the door is closed and I never thought to take my keys
that are probably on the dresser. I spend the first few minutes of iconoclastic
liberty sitting on the dusty rear porch regretting the treasure trove I have
locked myself away from, starting to dread what I now conclude is the
beginnings of my transformation into a plausible citizen of this place-one who
is not dreamed by me-via the active inertia put on every necessary but
sometimes forgotten detail I observe, an inertia even placed on details I might
argue are unique to me and exist only by the associations I have tied to them.
I feel this fabric is thinning once outside the door where things dilute me
with my transience through them, time lifting, threatening to leave me in the
amnesia of the present, the whole life I have led fading from memory, the world
become secular again except for the curious occurrence of a sleep walking
episode-assuming the collective weight of this place can not squeeze me back
into the bed room either having not awaken or staring at the ceiling with
strange ideas whirling in my mind. Or worse might happen if I cannot completely
forget. I might be left a looking glass
creature, a thirteen-year old boy too quiet and introspective, suffering the
melancholy of an old man, but for the future.
And why should I be treated even that courteously? Is this a rare event, or are the asylums
filled with those who could not keep the vow of silence and blurted out the
apostasy of beauty, driven to acts of deformed truth by loneliness and by the
constant harassing of the holy, waiting to awaken into a lost time or to forget
it, forever tentative between these two opposites that can only be resolved if
the soul should disappear? There may be thousands, even millions who have
returned because of a broken heart. They are a surplus of souls capsizing the
math of re-incarnation all because a creature composed mostly of dreams and metabolizes
them into the ether as readily as a plant frees oxygen is subject to nostalgia
and ends up pacing in the cages of what has already passed.
. The key chain which I forgot to put in my
pocket, a band of silver bent into a “U” with two fake purple jewels at the
ends, one of which unscrews to thread a key, is not missed by me simply because
I am locked out or because it is a relic of the past, but is missed already in
the way I would have missed it had I lost it at thirteen when I ceded to it
protective power, which made it feel different, tense and warm with potential.
I missed it as present magic. And its
magic is literal here, made from the same periodic table as the rest. The fantasy is realized. Things like the key
chain already refracted through time, lagged out across years and the time they
stretched across was guaranteed to me just so long as I had them, like a marker
in hopscotch opening the route. Before
the key chain it had been a big button from a pea coat that could cover my
whole palm and that I kept in my pocket at such an early age that the evening I
lost it is the only memory I have from that year and the only means I have of charting
the living configuration of my child’s mind. This button had the shape and size
of the pocket watch I really wanted because a pocket watch would have anchored
time and location of hours-a time compass-for a kid who got lost in daydreams
and nightmares. The evening I lost that button in the near transcendent ecstasy
of throwing it into a darkening sky and having it slap back into my hand after
the thrill of risking it, the thrill of honed craft and of its loyalty and the
conquest of gravity, our dog was scratched on the nose by a cat, a fig tree
spread out its branches, long grass grows by a wall , a little boy tripping
forward with his head tilted back to follow the flight of a button pops out
fully formed from his permanent exile in the agar of memory, the button lands
irretrievable on the roof of his grandparents’ house on Adams Street, free fall
ends and time begins its relentless march.
How many times have I returned and left
myself clues that I have already passed this way so this time I might remember
that my only chance to find what I have lost is to become apocryphal and let
beauty author me into new pages? So, I
set off, a typical chimera of my species, cobbled from spirit and beast, set
off again as I must have at least once before when time’s circle breaking
outfitted me for the migration with sea legs-the legs of my race, my fledging
finished when time began to empty out of me and the path ahead became
compelled.
Change in tactics. Tip toe down the splintery back stairs, quick
turn and out the near gate that opens to a cement path running along the side
of our building leading to the street.
Frenzy of the hassock aborted by the gate closing on his black button
nose, the only sense organ protruding from his clumpy fur. The white stucco wall to my left, neighbors
pinkish wall fifteen feet to my right, then the super structure of our front
porch and stairway making a ceiling over the approach to our landlord’s front
door. Turquoise painted iron banisters
with minimal filigree. Dragging nets of
associations behind me like Marley’s chains and padlocks. The copse of unruly banana trees and the
birds of paradise in their semi-circular plot below our mailbox exerting a
particularly heavy drag, until the whole block comes into view, the front
windows lit even near midnight to dissuade courteous thieves, the fragrant
lawns blotting up shadows, the sidewalks, the distant sound of a car door
closing, and the blunted sting of fog.
I have a plan and I have to stick to it or
be sucked under. I project my route on
the seductive streets, boring a mine of preoccupation. At this hour I won’t need a signal to cross
The streets are wider south of the
boulevard and these are single-family homes in a Spanish style with front
gardens behind iron fences or stucco walls. Rose bushes line walkways their
color muted in the dark but their fragrance stronger, small fountains can be
heard trickling. This is the city a
serenading minstrel sees, grown from seeds of light planted at night. All the
dogs seem to have been muzzled, none clamor.
A few cats approach to rub flirtatiously against my ankles, others watch
from porches, lying near flowerpots. I
cross another empty boulevard and now I am on her street and beginning the
count to her address.
A
rubber tree has thrown its roots over the ruins of the garden in front of her
building, warping a knee-high brick wall.
The crown of the tree spreads above the roof three stories above and
hangs over the sidewalk and nearly across the street. The trunk is huge and freakish, three smaller
trunks bound together under the annealed bark, The house, too, is peculiar, the
first floor clad in flagstone painted brown with high arched windows, but the
second and third floors are miserly clothed in stucco, and the sharply peaked
roof with its missing shingles looks pulled down too far like a borrowed
hat. The building looks as if the owners
had decided to abandon it before it was even built, defeated somehow, and the
tree claimed it. This decay seems an omen. The time I have entered is going
stagnant and will soon close around ruins.
I move quickly down the short path to the
entry hall, intending to find her apartment number on her mailbox, but no
sooner do I enter the shadowy garden then I see her in a first floor window
correcting papers, sitting by the opened pane watching the fleecy smoke from
her cigarette unravel and be whisked away.
I don’t want to startle her so I take
several steps back and call out to ask her if she’s seen my cat, and then step
into view. “She’s Siamese, a seal point.” By this time I am in front of the window, a
thirteen year old boy in a too small a sports coat, with close cropped hair,
rather long eyelashes, still years away from needing a shave, a harmless figure
at worst, and given the late hour which if it does not imply mischief might
poetry, a sympathetic one. She, in blue
jeans herself, turtle neck sweater and mules, dowdy, dreamy, her hair down,
ever a wonder the transformation a woman summons just by letting down her hair,
here to her shoulders, a memento of bohemia, I suspect, and of literary
aspirations.
“You’re a little dim off there, a little
more into the light if you please. A
familiar face, and the eyes don’t glow.
Not a relative that I know of, though you can never be sure. They pop up like mushrooms. Another step,
mind the fern,”
When I reached the window she took
my hand and studied my face. She took a
long draw on her cigarette, released the smoke towards the ceiling and then
stubbed it out. “He would come looking
for a cat, some such a lad would, a sensitive, moon struck boy, yet shy as ever
he is brave. Then come in, cat boy, you’re shivering a bit out there. Up you go, a self respecting cat won’t be
stopped by a wee fence like this.” It
was an ornamental grate across the bottom foot or so of the high window, and a
long step up brought me to floor level from the garden, and when I was there on
the threshold, hanging by the sill she brushed my face with her
fingertips. She had a bemused air, not
too different than she wore in the classroom. She took both my hands and pulled
me away from the window, as if she were waltzing me off a dance floor.
“Mister Jed Canto, so conveniently lost,
and isn’t it possible that if I leave him by the bulwarks he just might fall
overboard again? Plant yourself right here lad, and let’s see if you disappear.
No, he doesn’t. An evocative last name is Canto. I admit,
young man, that it caught my eye.
Thought myself, what manner of sarcasm or doggedness might incite Canto
out of the Slavic broth, or were the boy-o an Italian, a rare bird in our school? All no fault of your own, young Mr. Canto”,
and led me to a couch which had student papers piled across the serapes which
she used as slip covers, pressed me down into a corner of it and sat down a
small distance off near its other arm.
“And you can’t be blamed for the school
teacher who corrects your papers by the open window in respect to both cats and
moths, little souls themselves all aflutter out there, and who has been known,
to herself alone, to cast fortunes on the names of her pupils, the brave
Demurgian wrapped in most runes to this date, destined to romance, again
through no fault of his own, but fated nonetheless by those irrevocable
syllables which have framed his eyes with long lashes and put a smolder in
their deeps. May he rest gently in this
good night, the same as brings Canto, perhaps once a Cantor, vain subterfuge,
but fell chance that makes the singer the song, and he mis-crowned with dark
locks who bears the name of the unwelcome red-haired step children of the arts,
poor Pound’s spawn of cobbled squawks, caws, and the occasional melody cribbed
from the Asian wind, and not to forget Dante, through no fault of your own you
have to carry the address of the Inferno, and so, Mister Canto, the lad named
for the darker vein runs through music, tune
I confess, whose sweet air I have left open my window to receive, sad
passing strain, and set the cockles of my heart to echo, what has Pound-Dante
brought the schoolmarm sits by the window at mid-night to see what the cat
might drag in? Will it be a poem we
make, a bit out of rhyme and reason and filled with mischief as red-haired
Pound would have it, Canto, or have we been permitted by the light-of-hand in
your name to make a pun of mischief and compose a Divine comedy ending in
Paradisio?” she said, a woman of erudition who like many others of her kind are
filled with deep passions that could frighten the young acolyte were it not for
the quality of mercy not strained that guided her actions, and her Druid beauty
that generations of forever young students loved at sight and shyly worshipped
from afar’. ”
And with that she moved across the couch
and took me in her arms, then drew back for a moment and arranged my left arm
around her waist, my right palm behind her head, twisting me not too
comfortably in the process, sighed ”sweet breath of youth”, and kissed me. Her mouth was cold, even her lips, and I
don’t know how long the kiss lasted, I may have fainted. Her cats, as cats do, hopped up on the couch
while we embraced; they are inveterate voyeurs.
I shuddered and shuddered within her hold, an irredeemable grief fell on
me, and with my eyes closed I sensed all details of her room, the pottery, the
Navajo rugs, the posters of European art shows, a book shelf made from raw
boards laying on piled bricks, the brass four poster bed with curtains of
gossamer tacked to the ceiling and books piled on the end tables, and for the
longest second I saw her hair left long to the base of her spine all gray, and
the old woman in the apartment creped by dust,
filigree of cigarette smoke rising towards the ceiling, staring
entranced into the monitor of her computer, where glowed a long, run-on
sentence under the title, all in capitals, MEMOIRS OF THE MUSE.
