Saturday, December 31, 2011

After Seattle

We were sitting in a coffee house named Dylan’s
when she walked in, her body so ample
I imagined her naked. She was from Red Bank,
New Jersey. I asked if she knew Edmund Wilson
was born there. She replied, Who? Her mother came here
for a man, Jacqui tagged along to see
Seattle.

We slept together from the beginning. Jacqui
asked me no questions I could not answer.
She was resolutely promiscuous,
word was. One guy said he finger-fucked her
to Sketches of Spain. Because he loved all women
he never refused any woman in
Seattle.

Once I was hired by the university in
Pullman, across the state of Washington
and next door to Moscow, Idaho, she moved
to Portland, Oregon, following her mother
and getting hired to be a Kelly girl.
Once a month Jacqui flew north to stay the weekend.
Seattle

lay behind her, in the studio apartment
above the bar where she was plied with drink
and let herself be led upstairs by the next guy.
She said she missed the place. I said I would not miss
any place I lived where I’d been that poor.
When I married the redhead, Jacqui knew
Seattle

was long ago but she needed a man.
Once she had called me Scott, herself Zelda.
Jacqui was not one to ask why, but said:
She must be quite a woman for you to marry.
By then Irene was long gone. The redhead
lay with me all night awake in a hotel in
Seattle.

(31 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Friday, December 30, 2011

After the Burial,

which meant, according to the instructions of the deceased, no funeral was permitted,
Jim’s friends high-tail’d it to his dad’s restaurant, the only one worth a damn
in that near-worthless town, and because we were men and women by now,
we drank the rest of the afternoon and as far into the night as sobriety would allow,
the boys taking the girls into the bedrooms of Elaine’s father’s house, and doing there
what boys and girls have always done in the course of a wake, namely, fucking.

In the kitchen some guys sat at the table in the middle of the floor so everyone
who entered had to go around, one way or the other, and we told stories of Jim,
never mentioning his women, only his relentless desire to excel on the gridiron.
I told the story of how I ran down the sideline barreling into the quarterback
returning our punt, he fumbled, Jim watching calmly before reentering the game
to score the decisive touchdown, an eighty-five yard run–no, more like a piledriver . . .

You don’t know about Elaine unless you heard what came before here, how she swam
in her father’s pool naked and invited the workman to shuck his duds and come in,
and he did, and now she did the same thing after all the people left, Irene went home
after asking me if she could give me a ride, I said Sure, then once I was home I drove
back and Elaine invited me into the pool, just like Jim said she’d invited him in,
and right then and there we made whoopee, just a rich girl and poor boy doing it.

After we lay by the pool drying with dawn giving way to sunrise and the summer sun
warming our bodies, Elaine told me she really had loved Jim but he didn’t love her.
She knew about Patsy and Mary Lou and I told her about Emily now, it helped her,
she said, to know Jim could love a woman both shy and proud all in the same body.
I tried to make her understand why I loved Irene, she said she thought she knew,
then I followed her to the bedroom and slept with her after we made love again .

I don’t want to go too far and tell everything at once, but my dead are everywhere
now, they are legion as the Good Book says, and it will all get told in time, wait
around if you want. Irene and I went to mass next day and you know how that was,
how we drove to the overlook and made love and then stayed there long enough
to make love again and again, and pretty soon it was night once more, the moon
looked full like a face could fit inside, the stars glittered like little coals in the fire.

Elaine and I saw each other once more, and then she went off to study painting
in Seattle, where I happened to be by then but neither one of us knew the other
was around, which was good, we would never have accomplished what we wanted.
Irene stayed in Granger. That first year she visited more than once, riding the bus,
then I never saw her again. The city took me over. I turned archaeologist, I said
to Jacqui, the girl who was faithful from then on and until I married the redhead.

(30 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Thursday, December 29, 2011

For Those Who Die Too Early: Call-and-Response

Call

How late will the season of apples be?
In winter they were thinned to grow larger
all spring, summer, and through the early fall.
Love all weather that engenders true growth,
the patience that will not harvest too soon.

Pluck apples with quick fingers, but only
while their bodies are firm, their juices sweet
to the tongue lest they be sour, left fallow
among leaves. Yet do not wait too long lest they fall
to the earth and rot. Find them where they drop
before harvest ends and winter begins.

Believe, above all, in the generous orchard,
the bounty of its trees beyond measure.
Husband charity that is also love.
Cherish her flesh whose tenderness you wived.

Response

Where, then, do we cross into harvest time?
Are there fountains that feed paradise roots?
Do their waters fall from the sky whose clouds
welcome souls and send rain? A body’s breath
echoes what we call wind. We suckle heat
so long we dread the sun’s disappearance.

(29 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Troy

Then the dinosaurs came. Papier-mache, some said.
Cast iron and steel, of course. Who knows why
such kitsch made it to that town now called a city?
We had advanced to Troy, or was it Toppenish,
its main street of taverns like Gallup’s jails
with bodies stacked high, they said, like cordwood;
or Sunnyside, founded by Walter Granger too,
with its Memorial Gardens outside city
limits. Granger had no cemetery,
it had the Spartans, young men named Troy
bedding wild girls and six months along wedding them,
a smoldering hatred of Christians for heathens
upright citizens called Mexicans, Indians.
Trojans broke, the new born fled, no longer insane.
I left after my friend, the Spartan, was buried.
I returned first to bury my father
and later to mourn my mother’s illness,
though her Irish humor sparkled like old,
I had hoped to see Irene Castenada, love’s
mental tentacles still firm in my schoolboy’s mind,
though I meant no harm, she was married, but to whom
and where? Hector and Maria Camacho knew
no more than I. They cared for my mother
widowed in her uprooted vineyards outside town.
Hector loved my father, Maria my mother–
something between poor whites and landless emigres,
what my father and mother had learned in the South,
that light and dark skins were only a shade apart,
at least in childhood. My friend Jess Maltos was home
watching over his mother, his father buried
and because he knew no English his son
taught Spanish an hour away going and coming.
Once he picked up a hitchhiker, who pulled a gun
and ordered him into the trunk, and drove
for miles before stopping and opening the trunk,
then walking into the Rattlesnake Hills,
firing his gun once to show Jess it was loaded.
Jess had not seen Irene since she married.
Many years would pass before I found her
ten miles above Toppenish, outside Wapato,
where Jess’s father fought his gamecocks Saturdays
when we were young and thrilled by love and its contests.

(28 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Yo, pobre hombre!

At the grave’s four ends were Jim’s four lovers.
Patsy taught him the art of making love,
Elaine got naked in her father’s pool,
Mary Lou took him for a ride bareback,
Irene introduced him to Emily,
pure beauty whose embrace meant everything
to him. She kissed him when he tried to speak
her father’s tongue: Yo, pobre hombre!
If he told her he loved her she would tease:
Ay! el saber no ocupa lugar . . .

Dale and I were his brothers, his sisters
were his lovers. His father and mother
brought him up in that small town, their flower
and leaf trembling with music and loud cries
of drunkenness rising from down below . . .
Saturday night like a scar in his heel.
He dreamed: Go, keep going, earn a good sleep!
His body’s power bent against the wind.
He knew he could see farther in the rain,
and when the moon was full he would sleep well.

(27 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Monday, December 26, 2011

History of Youth

We all three believed in women, in luck,
and what the mind told the body to do.
We listened sometimes. But only rarely,
we were still too young to follow our hearts,
even if heart was what we had most of.
I had words, Dale farm labor, Jim football.

I also had Irene, who taught me love.
Dale had more than one woman, the lover.
Jim had one woman after the other,
though there were four he never stopped loving.
He was the star, the chosen one, the brute
on the gridiron, also in bed, I heard.

I loved only one, they loved many more.
Irene sucked my cock, fucked my cock, loved me,
she said: or I would not have learned with you
the art of pleasure
mejicanas know,
even I, who was born in this country
and will follow you anywhere you go . . .


Dale cared for his father’s farm. His women
vied for a place in his arms, this handsome
shepherd of the soil. He never told us
any of this, each woman was her own
story. He was poor, more poor than we were,
though we also labored the year around.

We both played football briefly, to please Jim
who had learned from his father that a man
was idolized if he risked his body
and the boy who was father to the man
(a way of speaking I learned much later) . . .
the boy became his father’s buried dream.

When Jim drove the car off the coast road cliff
plunging into the Pacific, drowning,
we suddenly spoke of him in past tense,
Dale recalling how Jim had saved his life
and I how much his father and mother
loved their warrior son, even more than we,

and his father choked on difficult words
like death, his mother’s tears bathing her cheeks,
the women I recognized Jim loved most
looking like sentries stationed at each end
of the open grave, and it was these four
Jim loved most who guarded his memory.

Patsy, Elaine, Mary Lou, Emily . . .
the first with a reputation for sex,
the second the banker's painter-daughter,
third, the horsewoman, the last, Esquivel
like Irene Castenada, but loved the man
Parker, Leonardo, Larson loved too,

all unlike Irene feeling free to love
the first man who took her to bed, the next
made her see new colors, the third adore
the sport, the fourth . . . Irene would know, she too
spoke espanol, now it did not matter,
the gravediggers covering the coffin,

Dale and I walking away to follow
the mystery of manhood wherever
it took us. Dale inherited the farm.
I went to live in the city. Years fled
like leaves in a billowing turbulence
that left the history of youth behind.

(26 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Sunday, December 25, 2011

The First Time

He ran like butter through the line
into the backfield churning this way, that . . .
So much was invested in each motion
of head tucked, arms crossed with the ball, both legs
propelling the way forward without fail,
those who watched remember him and weep
but not I, with whom he was a brother,
yet only Dale Walker, who crashed with him
and should have died, being the passenger,
was the sole witness of such will to live
Jim shouldered his friend and stumbled the mile
to a farmhouse, its yard light coming on
to be the moon that was absent that night,
the aging couple bathing the deep wounds
before the ambulance arrived. They lived.
Dale said he would have died except for Jim.
Dale was out in time to work hop harvest,
Jim in Seattle on the seventh floor
of the hospital. I saw him through glass
and his head turned as he was walking past,
the mask that was now his new face seeming
to smile, our abrazos first and final
though how could we know the grave would open,
its stone door immovable. Then I wept
days, that day and who knows how many more
on the other side of the great mountains
I saw from the air last time I was there
after bidding both our mothers goodbye.
Jim and Dale stayed on the West Coast, I left
for the East, where we hear the first star shone.

(25 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Patroclus

Jim and Priscilla Dills gave birth
to one child, a son
they named Jim. He was known
as Achilles

His parents ran the restaurant
Circle Inn
on the curve out of town
that crossed the bridge

This was before the dinosaur
became the town mascot
this was before thought
when we pursued girls

in the dimly lighted dark
dancing to country
played by Hawaiian guitars
in a land of no leis

That was when football
was everything
for him and one year for me
Achilles said I was strong

like Hector, say,
concubine curled at his feet,
my wife a legend more than I
in that Troy of love

Jim liked to drive
until he slept, he should have
stopped the car
but no, we met in hospital

he with scars lining his face
from plastic surgery
and I with scars in mind
and body only

His football days over
he joined the marines
and driving north on
the coast road he crashed

and died
I went on reading
the Iliad
my war football

Jim and Priscilla came to visit
and wept
Our son would not stop
to sleep

(24 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Friday, December 23, 2011

Souled

after Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 21 Grams

And what of the dead whose bodies are lighter for the fall?
Think of the lead-up, how the legs sway, the hands grope
for an edge to cling to, the body a rebuke to gravity
which wants its power back, its old apple, . . .

And snow filters the sun, ceiling fans turn warm air down.
The dead may be alive now but know they are here
only for a respite, the parks of paradise too clogged,
the Old Man walking in his own shadow of an evening.

(23 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Alma

Alma was my mother’s grandmother and a madam.
She worked in a post office later and died in Paradise,
California. Why did she ever run a brothel?
Mama didn’t know, anymore than why her grandma
felt compelled to change her name from Alice
to Alma. My father’s mother had a love affair
with a Mexican troubadour named Manuel
(she died when their child was stillborn). That came later.
When mama’s mama met a fisherman from Alaska–
Mister Smith she liked to call him though his name was Floyd–

she left her house to a woman whose actual name was Alma
but until then had gone by the name of Alice.
Alice moved with Floyd Smith to another town, my mother said.
She worked in the burg’s post office, at the window,
sorting mail, keeping citizens happy with conversation.
My mother said her mother’s mother got bored easily
and would take time off to go see Alma. The house prospered.
It was in Missouri, on the Arkansas state line,
the post office in eastern Oklahoma. Alma asked
Alice, who called herself Allie after that, why she left

wanting her own name back. “A house needs to keep one soul
at least," Allie replied. “My name may be Spanish," Alma said,
"but it doesn't always mean what it says." "Honey,"
Allie said, “you're the real thing, what every good house needs
in a madam, and the more girls with soul the better.
Not like that guy selling his soul to the devil to learn all there is to know.
Neither girls nor madam need to be that greedy,
and even if you were Lady Faust you wouldn’t want more.
Because men sell their souls doesn’t make you
Mephistopheles. Soul here keeps the devil home."

(22 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Awaiting the Orchids

I can tell you what it’s like down here, I’m not the first,
and I will tell you in time, when the orchids bloom again,
I don’t know why I must wait so long between the flowers:
When I take his little stem and let it blossom in quick time,
he purls his breath against my nakedness and it’s his own
I fold between my folding skins, I am like a long life’s love
he could never know if I had insisted on staying home
with its reassuring silences, memories, caresses
of a body with body, mine, and who knows, it can’t matter
whose the other is, I have only the climb up, the climb down
to complete and the light that went out will come on again
as I sashay from bed to city and back to bed, but no,
I’m not home, I’m in the deeps of a city with no laws,
I can tell you its streets empty when I dare to come down here.

(21 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Kali's Samsara

Once you are inside, alive in a world
of tenderness, touching what no one fears,
moving through years of samsara with wind
like a scar on your skin saying Beware,
this world is not a place that loves your kind,
but the wheel keeps turning and at the core

of stars are lips that tell galaxies, Feel
the absence that was a body brought down
to ride soul’s heaven one way to the hell
where it vanishes in ashes with bones
tumbling from the fire and sounding the knell
of bells, all you remember of women

who have been purchased by Kali the whore
of taxi dancers' all night all day clubs
each dance a dime with their kisses like crumbs
disappearing through black holes, how you wear
eternity, for even Forever
smolders, coals stir in madam Kali’s womb.

(20 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Monday, December 19, 2011

Plunge

When half a century ago the last poem flowed like orange crayfish backward up Little Sand Creek
and that part of Idaho was isolated from others who might see you fucking the woman you loved,
I was at the rolltop desk next to her loom in the study behind the light where white bowl and pitcher
set beside the red settee in front of the window with ivy trellising the wall above the flower garden,
mostly bougainvillea and jacaranda in the jungle we knew once in mexico where we were loving
as well but not as furiously, as relentlessly, as pleased as now, emerging with my white skin brown
as the stand of late autumn trees overhanging the water, cock wet from your pussy's tangled nest,
and we were ready to go our way, once or twice meeting again when we were no longer married.

(19 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Picture

The abandoned barn under the enormous cloud
has a field of water to cross to get to it.
The barn has a red roof, the cloud is white,
the dirt with too much water to hold more
is a muddy plot of earth–you know the color–
surrounded fore and aft by a green field
glowing under blue sky, the barn under water.
There is no body in sight, not even a bird,
and because I am so far away it takes all
morning to imagine being there in deep snow.

* * *
–for my longtime friend Dale Jacobson,
and especially for his love Therese Masters Jacobson,
whose painting, After the Rain, inspired this

(19 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Deathblow

Reading Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy make
Apollo freeze and Dionysus play
gets all wrong what’s true and begs the bland lie.
Apollo’s heart moves as much as music
or song, fingers or voice, Dionysus
dragging the mind down into the body
to break its heart. No wonder Homer lives
in language plucked now by poets living
to specify how warriors die. That’s why
eight, nine centuries expired when Christ died.

Rap’s cadence turns language into music.
Maenads who once followed now lead the dance,
no more mad than their brothers. Not madness
but sanity’s in peril when war cries
whip up hurricanes to sweep a nation
into deeps no ghost survives. The mass starts
with music meant to reassure the flock
it weighs the soul that must praise St. Paul’s Christ.
The slaver blinded on the road takes slaves
to build twenty centuries of churches.

Let mad Nietzsche die without his sister
changing his work to prophesy Hitler.
Turn up the music to swallow her shrill
rant. The lost traveler under the hill
once walked the peaks debating his masters
until he sat in a cabin to tell
the story he would live after he fell
on the man with a whip beating a horse.
Syphillis ravaged Nietzsche, whose remorse
suicided him who asked why we kill.

(18 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Circular Drive

When morning came we drove to Monterey.
You called your husband to check your oven,
and after I interviewed for the job
I bought champagne and you bathed for the night
to come. I sat on the side of the tub
reading aloud what you had not yet heard
because I was north pruning Concord grapes
by day and writing these poems at night.

Your husband. There was always one of those.
Or I was with wife. The moment I said
I would teach Walden to first-year students
the interview was over. I drove back
to the motel where I read you poems.
It’s all I did then, it’s all I do now.
Over dinner at the wharf I declared
I would get a job fit for a poet.

In San Rafael you opened the oven
as I was answering the phone,
man in Manhattan saying I could have
two thousand dollars scholarship a year
if I came to Columbia to write.
I had already said no to Tucson
and when Amherst called I said I would.
What did I know? We drove to Canada.

Everything we owned was stored in the back
of the International Carry-All
that broke down somewhere in Ontario
so we stayed the night in a forest inn
and next day a car passed another and
death’s fingers brushed life gripping one shoulder
with the god-forgiving air in between.
Turned south, back to the States, to Saginaw.

What was I / there then, or / who . . . or / was I?
Where was the greenhouse when the father lived,
his only son in returning defeated
by nerves, old habit of straining the mind
to breaking when only words could save him
amid doctors and glamorous nurses
who nursed wounds the doctors advised shocking
from his system and would if he’d let them.


He was no father with a bastard son.
He ascended the iron stairs, perplexed.
Growing old, how much longer could he say
he had now he was confronted once more
with the son inside his dear father dead,
but if the poems kept coming he knew
they would stop only if God asked them to . . .
At home, his own, rain. Green out the window.

And resumed our passage east, to Walden
where beer cans and contraceptives littered
the shore of the pond, and in town a shack
by railroad tracks, a facsimile, stood
that summer it was time to return west
to seek employment where I knew the ground,
and in Sleepy Hollow cemetery
Thoreau slept, yes, he slept “the one-way sleep,”

Vivian Benz told me the Nez Perce said.
Her laughter was contagion to living.
I took claims at the window. She took them
to the capitol and brought back money
for the unemployed. By then I knew what
the poor need. Emerson’s house was too tall,
the one Hawthorne rented from him too dark.
Make me anonymous, let me shed light.

(17 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Friday, December 16, 2011

What Would You Do with What You Know

The mad ones shinny down ropes from the roof,
scatter through aisles waking the audience.
Sade steps on stage to introduce the cast
milling back of and before him, curtains
wrapping women’s bodies to shield men’s eyes.
These are the throwaways decked out in rags.
Sade’s mother-in-law put him here. He debauched
her daughter and lured other women here,
holding out his arms to seize whomever.
He roams his cell in Charenton and shouts
at the man with keys passing by, and talks
with himself. The asylum inmates hear
him speak to them. He insists upon vice,
the authorities say, Why give him quarter?
Their vice he calls his voice. He is a saint
commissioned by the imagination
to do the devil’s work: Only he knows
Charlotte Corday. Jean Paul Marat. Bastille,
guillotine. Let the rabble have its way.
Sever the heads, throw the baskets away,
there’s blood enough to float a ship at sea
through the arteries, out the veins, and dock
in Pandemonium. He’s making art
in the wings, goading his players to reach
the heights he assigned to them from the start.
Priests buggering nuns and their acolytes.

A century ends, another begins.
Sade stays mad. Peter Weiss writes his play
and hires Sade to direct Corday's dagger
as it penetrates Marat in his tub.
Peter Weiss leaves Prague to die in Stockholm.
But first he keeps seeing, hearing the known
couple by instinct with what’s unknown. Mad
Artaud among the Tarahumaras
moved over the mountains crossing his mind;
Brecht survived alone the studied slaughter,
teeming inferno of dying Europe.
The twentieth century was enough,
but God damns us now with the twenty-first.
Determined innocence everywhere, fools
in their dotage fawning in blue-black gowns.
What can anyone know who knew nothing.
The torture chamber lies in the basement.
How do you think such souls came to be here.
Slavering freaks of nature no one fears.
Nor is there crime enough to go around.
Disbanded armies are hired to clear streets.
The few prosper most with the rest fearful.
Hear shrieks and screams come from the other side
of towns platted and built to hold such hell.
First to protest have been drawn and quartered.
Last to flee follow footprints through the blood.

(16 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Were You Gone and If So, Where?

The war never ends, it’s in the cells.
Mind cells mixing mud to lay down the steps
back to life. O you did? and who were they,
the pleasant ones who never raise a voice
in answer, being no questions remain.

Someone read my rights not moving their lips.
What’s that scar buried inside one eyebrow?
Do you walk with all your weight on one side?
Where were you when you went missing from here?
Why’d you go to war, you didn’t wanta . . .

Left for the woods, found shelter, an old house
with mice, a slatted floor, the walls porous.
Blankets sufficed. What of silence? All sounds
were from those native to place and season.
What war did this body bring me home from?

Who needs more? I do. I want my mind back.
I squirrel away nuts but can’t crack them
open. I wash in the creek, then lie down
to die, I mean dry. If I had a gun
with bullets I’d turn the deer into prey.

In town the vets meet. How to end the war
is all they talk about and then go drink
to stir up as much laughter as venom.
This one doesn’t care if the war goes on,
that’s why he misses meetings. He went home.

Home is the word the beloved goes to
when he’s no longer here; or her, the loved
one staying on, what’s there for her to do
but follow the decline and fall of hope
which rhymes with Rome if you can catch the fire.

Chile falls. Kissinger taking orders
from Nixon.
The Constitution gutted
today. Iraq over, Afghanistan
when? . . . Obama makes war his centerpiece,
I want to fly with you between owls' wings.

(15 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Shapes

Nothing to remember what came before.
Wind against the bare arm out its window.
When I was alone I drove until I slept.
Troopers made their daily quotas with me
and my kind, supine across the front seat,
awaking hungry, sourdough, salami,
a beefstake tomato, in the rich days
of my youth. We were dark and are white now.
When I drove with a woman companion
we did not always find a bed, like now.
The miles mounting under the turning wheels.

Annette walked with me in San Francisco,
on Wool Street smuggled me into her skin
the night before she left for Mexico.
“It will be said in time,” she wrote at noon
in Li Po’s over a beer and egg rolls,
and handed me the book she’d bought for me,
How to Travel the City’s Seven Hills.

Elsewhere it was red hair on her pillow.
Wilshire, where John shot himself in the head,
his paintings accumulating unsold,
unseen. Betty with me at L.A.X.,
“The Second Coming” scrawled in cursive hand
and memorized before the plane set down.
I knew why “the best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of a passionate
intensity.” Yeats was, in a word, right.
The shadow of those dying in the war
Hiroshima’d, Nagasaki’d in shapes
we could not see, we were blind to shadows.

Crossing the border I heard the wind say,
Stay. The incorrigible was over.
It would come again. There would be no end.
Stones over graves still etched in braille. The moon
full, sun gone south, white rainbows in the north,
a tangle of nerves in houses, the wounds
of love opening to release the blood
the leech of power loosed over the earth.

(14 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Configuring

I live up here out of reach
of what passes for truth
down there. I could go down
to get my bearings
before the story returns.

Where rain walks lame
ice sleeps under snow,
birds fly home to get warm.
There old men are rare
who tell wild stories.

My love says, Go, I’ll go too,
and here we are, in transit:
I can’t say yet, I don’t know
what words need, but not about.

(13 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Monday, December 12, 2011

Home Cooking

Sky looks full of snow.
Here is no hoodoo:
too far north to work
its wily way with luck.
Music offers succor
to raise the temperature
where sun’s so bright
bodies shine all night
dancing, happy now,
no need for voodoo.
Rustle up some beans
and rice, let’s sit a spell
before we lie down
to make a body wail.

(12 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Ship's Log

The dash and lope and zeal and warp and woof,
scrape and trawl and . . . we were out on a lake,
I returned a fish to water and followed you
to learn by watching how to use my arms
to swim to shore and there freed our wet skins
to find what was inside the other’s, warm if wet.

Poetry’s provenance seals your body with mine.
This verse I mean. Red sky at noon, a sailor’s home.
Go throw your soft arms around a father’s shoulders
that navigated many shores to find your kiss
but he does not know I mean to take you from him
and the eternal story continues: love ends.

You have given what you knew to loving me here.
The words are restless in their briny skin and shells.
Endless task you can’t approach the way you grew up
hearing your father play guitar and fiddle while
your first heart and last place more than fingers
on two-toned keys where you sang when I would not.

After you, before you, women with red hair, eyes
Osage, exotic one, each one entwined thereby
with your men, the Viking, the suave one, the elder . . .
how we endured our youth but ah! we loved it so
what we could do with our whims and passions
in a wild circle where we were more than at first.

Rise in the morning and discover what you think.
Better than shouldering shovel or hoe or scythe.
Be glad you no longer wear your mind over skin.
At the end of my graveyard shift you were sleeping.
How good to give away the toil and take the road
where the sea churns the dark into a feast of light.

(11 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Saturday, December 10, 2011

The World

Let’s go see the gentle one.
Maybe she will have fresh flowers
from her earthly garden.
She says hers flourish
in winter, all you need do is look
out the upstairs window
to see pages of the world’s book
turning slowly over,
little scarabs hooded against the snow
taking the place of summer bees.
I believe her, and you will too
if you listen long enough to know
her world inside is Egypt,
the world outside Amherst.

(10 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Friday, December 9, 2011

Gypsy Scarf

In the other world this one is well known.
The story goes like this (so I am told):
Clouds open to rain, rain soaks into earth,
earth is the flesh that holds bones together.

All the stories go like this. They bore me.
I enter the street to look for trouble.
Trouble finds me, for I look everywhere.
It kills me, it defeats me, it haunts me.

It unshackles my unforgiving soul,
lifting it to the world above the clouds.
Trouble filling the soul was my first look
at death. I held close to all that I loved,

the four-footed, the winged, the bodies
within their bodies beautiful women
carried, choosing to send their fetus back
to the other world. There was one I loved,

whose seed was not mine, and when it was gone
I came to love her. How good our love was
at first, she said. Then days unlived were years,
and all because I left her home alone.

As a last resort, she showed me her kit:
needle and syringe. She told me how to fix.
I saw what her words said might happen now.
She did not implore me to stay. She left.

I smoked marijuana more than you should.
Her Lockjaw Davis, Shirley Scott Cookbook
played over and over, and then Coltrane’s
Ole! before his Live in Seattle

I found in San Diego. I observed
men age getting high, the two worlds closing
with their lives between. I refused offers
endlessly: they turned into slithering

snakes speaking: Listen to this, try this too,
one little taste, the music comes inside.
My first love lives with animals, birds. Womb
gone, she can bear no children. I find her

in California, where I live, if you
can call it life. Her gypsy scarf I kept
when she traveled south on her ten red toes . . .
I return the scarf. Trouble leaves our bed.

(9 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Miles Alive

There’s a video of Miles in his brown suede jacket tonguing his muted horn as he walks every inch of the stage. It is a study in energy. You get up to do this. You don’t know how to stay down. It must have been in Florida, the sky was clear and the sun bright, the crowd alternately hushed and letting go, the band behind him waiting for their cue and when he wanted something extra he walked back and told them with one hand making a sign that spoke clearly through the silence between sounds.

Walked all over, to the edge and around, until he could say later, I was poised on the edge of each piece of that floats out one note at a time, and all of it was there, on the lip of the bottomless air. Then all he hears is honeycomb, woman, he must taste what's between her legs. Sure, he'd like a taste of the other too, but he gorged himself on enough smack to kill him one day. He sees no need to die tomorrow. He doesn't have to buy a woman. He could swear he saw a lady with cornrows wave out there.

You don’t have time
between notes to smile,
you know her already,
she’s waiting for you.
She will stay for now.
The music is too rare.

There’s no going back.
Life can’t do tricks
like that. Your body
takes a charge from
her body, your horn
electric, how she shines.

(8 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

"Midway through this life"

He said, I’m beginning to see the problem. We are miscast in these roles.
She replied, It was your idea, you courted me without a letup.
He said, I couldn’t help myself. You were more beautiful than any woman should be.
She replied, I have no reason to contradict you, but you have too much confidence.
He asked, In what?
She replied, In me.

I walk it off. The cold sieves through long underwear. Bad trip for a Southern boy reared in a valley between mountains. Just couldn’t get past temptations to live in Massachusetts, northern Minnesota. He sees the day exhale, what will the night be like without the sun? Some years you can see Aurora Borealis nakedly etched against the sky and what can you do but stare? She has no time for you. The moon has closed the door, he loves his taste of rainbow, it’s all he craves, he has no need for northern lights, he knows better, Aurora is a woman and by God he could love her.

I become someone else. It’s ideal evasion. Better than labor. No need to sweat, the work is even sedentary.
So what do you think, sweet? Are your questions formed? Do you want to take the time to talk?
I don’t know, I hesitate to risk so much . . .
Who am I now? A chickadee at the bird feeder? A blue jay in the tree, waiting? The woodpecker so huge it needs a name no one knows where it came from, it sounds manufactured . . . pileated.
I was someone else. I kept seeing in my mind the way I should follow the curves going up the mountain, or was it simply the treacherous way uphill from town?
There were so many words. They all needed to be said. I couldn’t speak anything but poetry
:Not in those days. She was too sweet to stay so long. I had many opportunities. She said so.

Let it all go in the winter wind. Learn to walk on ice again.
I have no need to play this out, what I feel in a shudder with you is a body of knowledge. I call it love. I won’t guess what you would say.
The world is frozen around me. Or was. The wilderness is worse. But I hate small towns.
There were the same little turns, they never changed unless the county commission called change necessary, which it never was, there were so many other things that might have been proposed.
What’s the play? Long Day’s Journey into Night? Krapp’s Last Tape? The Homecoming?
I’ll write my own, he said. And I will write mine, she replied.

(7 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Speech

Obama at Osawatomie Kansas High School
A hundred years ago Theodore Roosevelt

The television cable costs so much per month
you can’t afford what rabbit ears don’t reach

In winter you can’t fish if the weather won’t let
you drive to Ottawa to see the Braves play

basketball. Now you don’t know what to do
with your newfound leisure but you worry

Obama says tax the rich but will never say
you should have made money beget money

Now you can’t find work nor will your children
Robber Barons are back more than before

The television tells people what they must think
you could see for yourself before despair

Every time he launches his words a little fear
must dry his lips being out where Kennedy was

Not in Kansas but in another place haters
took law to become beasts and murdered him

What will it be in fifty years
What happened the last fifty

Obama’s skin is black because his father’s was
His mother’s white skin from Wichita

Imagine the love and hatred that circulate
like oil to feed the fire the desperate require

Don’t imagine but find out what is true
at the end of the line that leads where here

is. This could be home. Its endless distances
and the dreams and the nightmares between.

(6 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Monday, December 5, 2011

Bear Life

Bear sleeps in his haunt as long as bear can.
If not snow it’s thunder, lightning, and rain
keeps him there, it’s the dam bear draws him out
to run the gamut.

Not another bear
wears her fur the way he does in his love fevers.
The old man fucks the old woman, he fucks
until he sleeps with his head on her haunch.

In the hollow log, the house the bear haunts,
he turns when light illuminates his hair,
and who should be waiting where the door
would be? He thinks

this forest is his
to run and roll and paw the trunks of trees
for scratching post. Here she is young again
and he is young with her out of the rain.

Envoi: Go, bear, stay free, be all you want
once winter gives way to spring and the year
takes root. Before the fall there is summer.
Roam as is your wont.

(5 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Sunday, December 4, 2011

The Afterworld

Splice this world with limbo to see the strong
suffer the will of those they called the weak.

This is where you turn and find Dante was
right. Half right at least. Here are demons
whose bed of ice is as far from hot springs
as you are from poverty in your dreams.

If you want to get a few things straight, ask:
Why can’t I believe only Eve was wrong?

There’s no one here who answers to that name.
There was only one Eve and one Adam,
though many facsimiles . Nothing grows
in the afterworld; of course nothing dies.

Weightless? How can you remember the earth
where the world is on the same plane with sky . . .

(4 December 2011 / II)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Limbo

Begin again, dreamer, listen to life
around you and fit it to what you see.
You thought you would be bodiless, but why?
There are limits to the eternal life.

Where are the very old, the very young?
Do you know now, at last, Dante was wrong?
Here the mountains are level with the plains,
only where you climbed you now descend

but not on a road winding down and up.
There is no hell or heaven, nor a leap
of, say, faith, no, it is too late for this
tomfoolery of confessional bliss.

And what of the great ones? Do they suffer
or prosper? And why are they not great here?

(4 December 2011 / I)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Saturday, December 3, 2011

The Great Ones

The great ones wave goodbye but no one smiles.
And their boat labors over the rapids.
The doors that open are too far away.
They will close once the boat reaches the sea.

The afterlife is a house without walls.
The house has no windows but there are shades.
The shades rise and fall with the folding waves.
The boat nears the shore and enters the bay.

The great ones were here but they left today.
Where they are now they must be shown the way.

(3 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Friday, December 2, 2011

Words Well Worn

Each of us dies a little each day
and at night in the act of love.
Such worn remarks are true,
and wind here is more than cold.
When snow becomes a blizzard
in a whiteout on the Great Plains,
find a shoulder to stop the car,
get out the emergency cache
before the trunk freezes shut.
It will take a while to wait it out,
for the full darkness to return
so you can see where you were
going, and finally you get there.
With luck your beloved is home.
Happiness is a word that’s worn.

(2 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Thursday, December 1, 2011

My Ship Now

To whom do I go, to whom do I owe
this new life? This woman who is my wife
has kept me aloft until I can thrive
doing what I could not do until now
without breaking this hip that holds me up
though it be the hull of my only ship,
white glow in the dark ocean of X-ray
hammered into the bone with two long screws,
I but one of two or three in a day
this surgeon opens, empties, fills, closes,
and after the foaming christening blow
that helps lift the spirit to sail the waves
stormy or calm, only the ocean knows
the bones that guide my ship with their bright glow.

(1 December 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Einfuhlung

If there were stories that could take the place of life,
What would you need? Not even a house or wife.
Let the air resound with words and nothing else,
Not the earth, not water or fire, not even a face.

All our lives are given over to what’s human.
Animals can’t speak so they must listen.
I wanted to know how she spun and weaved
and cast a spell. It was not because she could.

She told me to go back and read John Keats.
Learn how he sees a sparrow at his window,
and finds himself pecking among the gravel.
You concentrate like him, you learn from her.

She was a hoodoo, ju-ju, gris-gris conjure woman.
She let the loas in. They gave her a lesson
then two and three and four and she learned how
to make what she never told when she could show.

Pretty soon the lungs begin to rupture, his blood
spilt on the Spanish steps, no telling what could
save him, not Marie Laveau, not even sparrows,
for he lived too soon, death was in his marrow.

The mother and daughter had the same name.
I could go back and live there but what would
I do? The wraiths say I need to start over.
I will when I find the words I never learned.

Mother gives daughter all she needs to know.
The daughter does all her mother taught her.
When the mother dies what of the daughter?
She does what she will. She cannot follow.

(30 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Egg

When of course you read Mother Goose
you’re in the back seat of the 38 Chevy
your daddy’s driving, mama by his side
many miles to get from Mother Hubbard
to the next tale and one before bedtime
you hear from the source.

My folks know everybody on the way
and some they never knew become old friends
and I can’t wait to get to Grandma’s house,
I go off and make sculptures out of mud,
we go on, and here we are, where the air
smells warm in slow rain.

The riddle of life: what happens to whom
and where the sky opens you always are.
The surgeon who lives in the countryside
goes each year, for two weeks, to aid the lame
in the jungles of Peru. Here at home
is his happiness.

Childhood is an egg that will break open
and who steps into the endless wide world
will go away and stay where the city
reveals what was never seen on the farm.
Could you have foregone this course or that one
and stayed innocent?

When I drive I tell my love the story
of lost children finding the only soul
is only half enough until lovers
learn to live where cold rain drizzles, runs down
window glass, falling upon the threshold
of the floating house.

(29 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Monday, November 28, 2011

Over the Lake, along the River, to the Sea

1.

Here’s the lake, there’s the river,
I don’t have a boat, I can’t drive a car,
In public I drink,
By myself I think.

It was before the flood,
We were in the mood.
When the pillar of salt was gone
I was alone.

You’d have thought the town was on fire
How I drank myself into the mire
Sleeping by the bayou
Where I woke without you.

If I could cross the bridge,
I'd be at large
Yet safe in Algiers
Under the rule of Leander Perez.

I drank and danced and found a love
I didn’t deserve, was lucky to have,
And I took her out of town
In the car she drives she owns.

2.

Here we are in the white city
Shimmering under the blue sky.

St. Francis feeds the birds,
Virgin and child here from Lourdes.

When we played by the shore
I can’t remember what you wore.

The war was over, I was free,
But who knew why?

I don’t recall which war,
I can’t remember saints, only sinners.

(28 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Names of the Cities

Where rain is ice the feet take steps
knees bending slightly staying close
to the earth not even a squirrel dares
such weather I’m learning to walk in
and wish I could stride like my young
legs carried me twice into Mexico City

I wanted to see the flowers in the lake
Xochimilco and climb the pyramids
at Teotihuacan not even a child’s foot
regards with elan such steps so small
you would need to be goaded by spear
to the top where hearts were sacrificed

A hundred miles south of Winnipeg
I am most happily married to my soul
and she with me though days were long
fifty years from sun to dusk in her eyes
to the quickening body she gave to me
that long ago loving in the city Seattle

I found her finally in San Francisco
you know the song You left her there
and she was with me in New England
where Manhattan and Boston were
though New York is its own not for
everyone say those leaving Santa Fe

She carried me here when I wanted
to stay she said I was with her or I
would be nowhere and here I thrive
as the ice melts and the legs bounce
along steps quickening toes to heels
my body a wand when it is with hers

(27 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Mnemonics

People I know don’t fuck nearly as much
as they say I do. I’m in it for the music.
I may drink and smoke and ogle the girls
but I know a major from a minor,
a sharp from a flat. Girls take off their clothes,
I take off mine. Who would want to say no?
They are not groupies, I’m not a rock star.
People say I gamble and fight too much.
I’m a pussy decked out like a tom cat.
I get hit, swallow my Adam’s Apple,
who could hear me sing? like a red rooster
early mornings, even though it’s pitch night
when I work myself up to reach the sky . . .

Lonely women take me home, love me good,
say I can fuck them all night if I want,
and I do but I’m older now and sleep
the day away, don’t come until the moon
appears. She’s been waiting, she comes along
when the sun kneels to get a good night’s sleep.
On my back, her face above, I’m alive.
The music never lasts as long as life.
You get older you shoot up so your world
comes down to enter hers. Then you can sleep.
People know her music is all I have.
We fuck through our clothes by the baby grand
she plays. Priests forbid you to come undressed.

I lose track, snow covers the years, I want
to keep going until the winter ends,
I smell warm air, tires lay down their slow beat,
horns find the melody, music begins.

(26 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Friday, November 25, 2011

One Way

I figured the time was ripe: I went home.
My father was dead, my mother alone.
She told me stories no one else would know.

My sister took her off to live alone.
I had no business there: My last trip home,
Mississippi headwaters my new home.

. . . that old home gone, polluted with shit stench
of Bar S cattle fattened by Mammon
on their one-way journey to perdition
wrapped behind the counter, beef same-day fresh.

(25 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Thursday, November 24, 2011

War and Peace

Cops fracture one’s skull,
lacerate another’s spleen.
Scott needs a third tour
of duty, but Iraq's near over.
Send him to Afghanistan.
Kayvan fought both places,
so he should go to Iran,
though he was born here.

I should go home to Glasgow
or Ulster. Maybe Cardiff,
even the Blue Ridge . . .
I got drunk to take the bus
out of San Francisco over
the Bay Bridge, then walked
through Oakland’s dull yellow
shadows to the Berkeley line.

Men kill men in the line
of duty. You become a man
that way, I was told, young.
Don’t blame women’s soft
loving bodies, their lips
on yours, the world’s reason
for bringing you into earth’s
orbit where only we say love,

or so we believe. Someday
creatures from a galaxy
yet unnamed will be unable
to go on. Poison, ours,
flooding their planet, they
elect to put us in thrall
to make peace where war was.
Ask God why He didn’t know

they exist. Maybe God doesn’t
either. That would be news.
Nietzsche walking mountains
looking everywhere gave up
searching. He knew God
was in the mind or nowhere,
saved a horse from the whip
the day he took God’s place.

(24 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

War and Peace

WAR AND PEACE

Cops fracture one’s skull,
rupture another’s spleen.
Scott needs a third tour
of duty, but Iraq is over.
Send him to Afghanistan.
Kayvan fought both places,
so he should go to Iran,
though he was born here.

I should go back to Glasgow
or Ulster. Maybe Cardiff,
even the Blue Ridge . . .
I got drunk to take the bus
out of San Francisco over
the Bay Bridge, then walked
through Oakland’s dull yellow
shadows to the Berkeley line.

Men kill men in the line
of duty. You become a man
that way, I was told, young.
Don’t blame women’s soft
loving bodies, their lips
on yours, the world’s reason
for bringing you into earth’s
orbit where only we talk love,

so we believe. Someday
creatures from a galaxy
with no name yet will be
unable to go on. Poison,
ours, flooding their planet,
they elect to put us in thrall
to make peace where war was.
Ask God why He didn’t know

they exist. Maybe God doesn’t
either. That would be news.
Nietzsche walking the hills
looking everywhere gave up
searching. He knew God
was in the mind or nowhere,
saved a horse from the whip
the day he took God’s place.


(24 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

The Long Run

Instinct tells the dog, Run!
One leg slows him down.
Winter slows everyone.

People catchers are in
the mix now dogs are in
the pound. People close in
on other people drawn
inside the kettle, thrown
into the torture salon.

Why do men torture women?
Is the world theirs to own?
Why was God a man
and lived alone?

Cats run with tails down
into the alley, then down
where they may drown
when the street darkens
and dark waters begin.

Who can stop to listen?
It’s no time now to mourn.

Know: Killers never win
in the long run.

(23 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Never-ending Conspiracy Theory

They shot him in Dallas forty-eight years ago today.
The shots echoed all the way to the Poultry Science
building in Pullman, Washington, where Roethke
was dead two months before, while the hens slept
with the roosters and those donning white coats
checked room temperature and humidity.
Eggs hatching under the bare warm bulbs faced
the door the roosters strutted through to see
who was where . . . even, some theorized, why.
The bar downtown filled with alcoholics who knew
roosters know to mount hens with requisite fury
to reproduce. Even where hens lay alone, cocks
were always strutting through the door, their bright
red coxcombs sheltering a short life’s mirth
between their wings. When a rooster dies a thick line
is drawn with a straight edge through his identity,

I always believed there were assassins on the ground.
Over the years you were told to give up such beliefs.
Witnesses died one after the other, strangely,
even the assassin of the assassin via cancer.
Conspiracy theory fell through democracy’s cracks.
Oswald took the rap, even Mailer said he was alone.
I know even less now than I knew then. I know
I shouldn’t care, but remember others who died
for no good reason. I never gave up. Some hens did,
some roosters stayed. Even Cathleen came home.

Yet every hour this time of day Americans die
somewhere, a death labeled natural or murder.
Where I was it was noon, we wore white shirts
when his wounds ruptured the one pulse a body needs.

(22 November 2011)\

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Monday, November 21, 2011

Down at the Park

Charley looks at his contemporary Elmer and mumbles hello, he’s none too happy to be here with his old friend who’s gone over to the other side now that the lines were drawn long enough ago to be considered at length before taking the crucial step across. Elmer is wearing his tea bags off the brim of his baseball cap.

Elmer replies Yo! as though . . . He looks a little stunned to find himself in the pockets of the Texas oil billionaire brothers: What’s their name, Cocaine? Reactionary politics is life blood to the comfortable couch he sits astride catching up, yes, always catching up, with the latest report so generously provided by Fox News.

If you can call it news, Charley says, echoing the admirable one on another channel no one who has only basic cable can ever see, and if they have no computer capable of running video clips who would even remember Countdown had nothing to do with Cape Canaveral back when little boys could participate in Reagan’s America by eating that well-known vegetable ketchup, which has now regained its former fame with Godfather Pizza (to be followed by TM) . . .

Elmer went over to the other side the first time Reagan quoted Tom Paine’s We have it in our power to begin the world all over again, which dovetailed nicely with John Winthrop’s desire to make Puritan America (don’t forget that adjective, Elmer, Charley insists) a city on the hill for all the world to see. It’s a wonder, Charley tells him, you didn’t volunteer for the Contras.

Charley goes into the streets. There he adds his voice to the voices around him that fill in for the absence of a sound system dismantled and done away with by the city’s Finest (during one of their first visits, all of which are invasions, the right to assemble to redress grievances being a highly contested part of the Bill of Rights since . . . when? Maybe always.) The city’s “finest” so-called: Who needs them to break your fucking skull, rupture your goddam spleen, run over your leg with a hog and claim you put yourself under it to call attention . . . Charley doesn’t have a job so he can find time to be where there are others who have no jobs and unless these people are heard and their needs met even partially, there may never be anything to do but go into the streets and exercise your franchise that way, after the baggers have given the Supreme Court permission to go the rest of the way in disenfranchising the poor by denying them the right to vote, having no photo ID, and No, Elmer and his ilk like to say, To step behind the curtain and take your own picture won’t do. And Charley replies, Even that takes money, Elmer.

Elmer is standing on the edge of the crowd. He’s frowning, of course, his hands are fidgeting with themselves, he shifts back and forth from one leg to the other.

What! No Fox News? Charley jibes. Not even watching TV?

I thought I’d find out how many hippies are here, Elmer says, . . . and pick up on the drugs and sex, man. He sounds like a time warp, if one were audible. Yet Elmer is as serious as a cop with a club.

Well, Charley says, there are unwashed hippies and drug addicts and ne’er do wells of all persuasions here. Por ejemplo, the sex is flowing like a river and you know damn well that’s why you hung out at the communes back in the day. Furthermore, the cops come in to make sure we don’t trespass on clean folks and get too near them and leave our stink on them, it might change them if they got too close to what’s actually here. At worst, they would risk beginning to think.

Tea bags swinging from the brim of his cap, Elmer moved through another crowd, sauntering up or down a street risking his skull and spleen if not for badges of belonging dangling. Elmer is taking a little time off now from Fox and imagines himself as one whose self-respect includes the need to go out among ’em, blend in as best he can (tea bags carefully removed before final descent into his own version of Sodom and Gomorrah) and hang around until he finds a little action he can’t refuse and thereby acquire another perspective, this time from another point of view, which is not to say “from another persuasion,” for men and women are in all this together, Elmer likes to say. Or so he dreams.

Charley lends his voice. He holds a sign. He moves with the others. He gives the bastards shit that have it coming. He has a birth certificate but doesn’t need to prove it. He was in Nam and made it back. He smokes dope every day. He goes home with women if they want, and that’s not to say he doesn’t know what to do without having to go up and down the street and hover around its edges looking for what can easily be mistaken for love.

Elmer didn’t have to worry about Nam. Now he receives a little money every week. His daddy not only knew a way to keep Elmer out of the draft and then the lottery but supports him now with Texas oil money, and it’s more than enough to keep Elmer watching Fox and changing channels during commercials and thereby discovering what Pat Robertson and his brethren have to add . . . Then there’s always the Playboy channel if you need to get off without going out. Elmer has a rich, full life, he always says.

Charley brings his own bag, to sleep in. Here he doesn’t do his own dope. He never drinks now. He showers on Mondays, not always at his mother's but mostly. When he lost his teaching job he found kindred souls who'd also lost theirs and between them they pooled their meager savings and kept going until now. Now much of the time they all live down here. Here the people he knows he considers, each one, a brother or sister he's working with to be and to stay free.

His mother lives alone and Charley sees her once a week at least, to be where he can help her get by, even if he can’t help financially. She has a pension, from when his dad retired two years before he died, and social security . . . as long as it may last now that the country seems about to experiment once more with being led by the man with no dog now, not yet, on the end of his leash.

Charley loves dogs and lets them run free. What he doesn’t love has no name but the old ones. Slavery: Let that stand for the rest. End the wars. Open the borders. What would you do if your people were brought here shackled from Africa? Or indentured to the rich man who lets you go free once you put in your time . . . White boy, you never knew the worst. There were too many masters here when your daddy arrived dirt poor, but at least he knew one day he’d be free.

(21 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Passe?

Where are Tasers now that pepper spray is the fascist rage?
Was Malcolm right to say nonviolence would become passe?
Does the cream rise to the top so it may be bullet-skimmed
like Malcolm, King, Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner, Viola Liuzzo?
Cattle prods are as passe as high-pressure hoses in the streets?
Where did Sheriff Rainey, Bull Conner, George Wallace go?
Look wherever the word Occupy occurs: there their kind converge.

Up and down the line of bodies the cops pass one at a time
pumping pepper spray in orange clouds covering those
whose right to redress grievances is contested by privilege
and ready-made laws stacked on judges’ desks ready to pull
when the call comes from the mayor to rid the city of vermin.

At the beginning of the third month of Occupy Our America
the hireling cops pass back and forth calmly in Davis, California,
and when canisters are empty they take another from the cop
charged to refill in readiness. Do they know how much it takes
to exterminate with pepper spray? stack and burn the bodies?

My friend from our Seattle days, circa 1960, living now in Berkeley,
asks, What would Mario Savio do? Bettina Aptheker? Bobby Seale?
In one held breath of years Jerry Rubin went to Wall Street,
Abbie Hoffman bought the farm. Angela Davis keeps the faith.
Let’s vindicate the octogenarian rebelle pepper-sprayed in Seattle!

(20 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Passe?

Where are tasers now that pepper spray is the fascist rage?
Was Malcolm right to say nonviolence would become passe?
Does the cream rise to the top so it may be bullet-skimmed
like Malcolm, King, and Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner?
Cattle prods are as passe as high-pressure hoses in the streets?
Where did Sheriff Rainey, Bull Conner, George Wallace go?
Look wherever the word Occupy occurs: there heir ilk.

The cops go one at a time up and down the line of bodies
pumping the pepper spray in orange clouds covering those
whose right to redress grievances is contested by privilege
and its ready-made laws stacked on judges’ desks ready to pull
when the call comes from the mayor to rid the city of vermin.

At the beginning of the third month of Occupy Our America
the cops go up and down the line calmly in Davis, California,
and when canisters are empty they take another from the cop
charged to refill in readiness. Do they ask how much it takes
to pepper-spray a body to death? stack and burn the bodies?

My friend from our Seattle days, circa 1960, now in Berkeley,
asks, What would Mario Savio do? Bettina Aptheker? Bobby Seale?
In one held breath of years Jerry Rubin went to Wall Street,
Abbie Hoffman bought the farm. Angela Davis keeps the faith.
Let’s vindicate the octogenarian rebelle pepper-sprayed in Seattle!

(20 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Father

I revere tales my father told me to spare me
learning them on my own pulse. I have no children
and who would listen now, an age of emptiness
girdling the globe and the poor have only increased.
I was splitting a stump in his garage
the last day I saw him alive. And when he died
I kissed him on one cheek and knew he’d say, I’m dead.
As it was, I threw my back out wielding the adze.
For it was sculpture my father sought in his dreams
of bloody fingers from picking cotton so young
he should have been in school but his father was dead,
murdered in Sallisaw, his widow penniless
as all widows of tenant farmers . Still, there were
the mines where my father evolved into a mule
rather than remain a mole. Mule dragging the coal
up the tracks and all the way to the earth’s surface.
Invariably he woke riding the flatbed up
they rode down. Then all their coal-black faces emerged.
And one day he walked away and never returned.
The man for whom I was named, Floyce Been, was down there
in the mine exploding, my father surviving.
That was not the worst: He wanted me to tell him
why his mother and father could not get along,
not even loving seven children, two more born
to be buried one at a time next to his grave.
Having sired no children myself, how could I say
why they fought until a child was born and he left
to be alone with the sins he never confessed,
leaving behind the only book their children read,
the Bible containing family births and deaths.
He moved away from that God-forsaken country
starting over after the war with a homestead,
taming wild vineyards, building an auto garage
in his backyard, where he could be a boy again,
like he’d been when he happened not to be working
in the fields. With as many of his six brothers
strong enough to help him hike up the Model T’s
front wheels on a tree trunk, back wheels scotched with big rocks,
he worked until dark to resurrect the engine
from below, and day come again he bent over
the engine giving it gas to spark combustion,
all four wheels planted on the earth he also loved.

(19 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Friday, November 18, 2011

Of the Masters

Naked woman lying on the settee
Recalls the Goya, Modigliani
Adorning the walls of an old man’s room.
The old woman embraced by his two arms
Possessed twice their beauty in her long youth.

She was born in the North, he in the South.
They found one another in a city
In the shadow of mountains by the sea
Whose name Pacific betrayed its nature.
Where either dies one can never be sure.

His fingers are brushes to carry paint
To the canvas to trace her body’s tint.
Goya’s Maja, Modigliani’s love . . .
You see her, she sees you seeing . . . then love!

(18 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Thursday, November 17, 2011

No Poem

The swan is not a goose,
a goose is not a duck,

we fuck in water
and languish on earth.

To be among the trees
of my childhood,

to look across the plains
to your mountains

is to imagine home
your body as my own.

Too many die too soon.
They are abandoned

far from the laughter
licked by orange fire.

(17 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

First Snow

When the first snow falls
horses go through the corral
to munch on hay cast down
to the dry floor of the barn.
They huddle together warm
as a body is with a body,
stallion nosing the mare
switching his tail in cold air
hoping the earth will hold
their hooves like summer did.

(17 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Amor Fati

What happened to him in Roanoke?
Was he seeing Reynolds too far off
to call to? He read Greek and Latin
in translation: Homer and Horace.
He fought wars, came home, farmed
after serving the emperor: like them
in all but style, their words evaded his.
He quit reading, did nothing but write.
Blanche went above Memphis finally.
She found him waiting out of his mind.

(15 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Monday, November 14, 2011

Envoi

So I may call myself sane, I end my part in the story.
You will find what follows blessedly bereft of me.
I stayed another year at THE SALOON.
I lived in HOTEL HOTEL until that year ended.
I left New Orleans and will never return
now that Roanoke and the art of poetry are mine
to claim, to relinquish, to be in and with, to be alive.

(14 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Sunday, November 13, 2011

From Fort Smith

Ira said, Go to Fort Smith and see if my brothers are still around.
Adore had heard none of their names until now.
I said I might take a break from work and see what I could find.

What I found was nothing I could see, except old photos;
nothing I could hear but what one of Abe’s sons said;
nothing I could smell but the water dank in its well;
nothing I could touch but what little was still there;
nothing I could taste but the peanuts in his garden.

Ira’s need was to keep learning his horn, loving Adore
without children of their own.
They were already too old.

In Fort Smith I heard of a cigar-store Indian
standing many years next to a liquor store’s door.
The man who owned it was the only son of the father
of the woman Abe married. One brother, two sisters,
all from up around Tahlequah, but not from that town.

It was all gone now. But the words in the sidewalk
would last as long as the sidewalk.
TOM TAYLOR’S SALOON.

I came back and told Ira, who said he never knew
Fort Smith could be so prosperous,
and his brother’s lineage no less.
I told him about Pearl Taylor, Abe’s wife’s mother
and everything else Abe’s son told me.

The talk returned to New Orleans.
Ira was obsessed with learning to play his horn
maybe as well as that dark legend, Buddy Bolden.

Ira knew twenty years here had been everything.
I’d heard from Abe’s son that his nephew
was living in California. Called himself Juan
but was half gringo. Ira said he would be grand uncle
to this guy. How could he be found?

Adore said she had always wanted to go west.
I said I would go with her.
I knew who they meant, I could find where he lived.

I had never been to California but Betty had gone back
and she would know where he lived.
He would be with a woman named Irish Cathleen,
to whom he had been married all his life,
it seemed. And he would be seeing Betty on the side.

Adore also wanted to go along to make sure this Juan
was the same Johnny they knew from here.
Adore was not that careful, but she was skeptical.

(13 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Saturday, November 12, 2011

When Johnny Goes Back

She said she was going, but she didn’t, not right away. She kept the room at Mama Doll’s with Johnny’s mother’s blessing, even knowing her son was thrilled he would get a change of scene where he planned to see his wife and his mistress on alternate days . . . or in some such pattern. Nor did his mother mind when I started sleeping with Betty, especially since I discovered I knew one of her girls already. Blanche was there, had been there, she said, since moving out of “our” hotel room, as she remembered it, more than a little fondly, it seemed. Blanche already knew Betty and had shared her memories of J. C. before I finally visited the house on St. Charles Avenue. I never understood the way women shared their men, if they did. I damn sure never had been shared, so-called . . .

I kept my room in HOTEL HOTEL, just in case. Redhaired women were said to have hot tempers–how could they help it? wearing on their heads hot coals smoldering in ashes and liable to erupt in flames any moment . . . Betty was my first redhead and most likely would be the last, in fact maybe she would be the last of all. I wasn’t exactly Lothario incarnate, Casanova reborn . . . Anyway, I kept drawing from memory and writing letters in my bandbox of a room, and working every day at THE SALOON except one. Ray said he was having a great life with Allison–that was the only name I knew–though he still went to his mother’s house every night, getting in late usually and laying it off to working after hours at the bar. Allison was from one of the city’s better-known families. He was amazed he was getting by with as much as he was. They checked in to the St. Charles Hotel in the afternoon, had dinner and drinks downstairs (where many different languages were spoken casually and sometimes, it seemed, all at once. . . ), and upstairs, as he said, “fucked our brains out.”

After Betty was overdue to arrive, Johnny started calling and his mother set him straight about expecting Betty to put up with him when he’d be living with his wife on California Street, by Golden Gate Park, across the bridge from Betty in Sausalito. Doll had been there, she knew Sally Stanford very well–this was a spell before the retired madam was elected mayor of Sausalito--and her own son wasn’t fooling her one bit. Johnny wrote Betty short, sometimes mournful, always whining letters, or that’s how she put it. I didn’t know, she never showed me one.

After another month Betty said she had to go back. She’d taken more time away than she’d planned. Her roommate would be wondering why; she’d never been gone this long before. Even now, she declared, she wanted to stay. Later on, she wrote to me about her life in Sausalito, living with a man considerably younger than her. But maybe that was another man, a later one, I really didn’t care to know about any of her men after that, and said so, though she kept on writing and I kept on replying. I stayed in New Orleans and when I wasn't here I went back to the mountains to see my sisters for a few days at a time, at most. Sure, I missed Betty, but Blanche and I took up company again, during her off hours.

I worked for Ray another year and then started planning to go back to live at the homestead, where I’d grown up. Roanoke wasn’t far away, and I thought I would have the best of both worlds, and now that I’d lived in New Orleans a while I never knew where I might take a notion to go next. I might even talk Blanche into coming with me.

(12 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
WHEN JOHNNY GOES HOME

She said it but she didn’t do it, not right away: she kept the room at Mama Doll’s with Johnny’s mother’s blessing, even knowing her son was thrilled he would get a change of scene where he could see his wife and his mistress on alternate days . . . or in some such pattern. Nor did his mother mind when I started sleeping with Betty, especially since I discovered I knew one of Doll's girls already. Blanche was there, had been there, she said, since moving out of “our” hotel room, as she remembered it, more than a little fondly, it seemed. Blanche already knew Betty and had shared her memories of J. C. before I finally visited the house on St. Charles Avenue. I never understood the way women shared their men, if they did. I damn sure had never been shared, so-called . . .

I kept my room in HOTEL HOTEL, just in case. Redhaired women were said to have hot tempers–how could they help it? wearing on their heads hot coals smoldering in ashes and liable to erupt in flames any moment . . . Betty was my first redhead and most likely would be the last, in fact maybe she would be the last of all. I wasn’t exactly Lothario incarnate, Casanova reborn . . . Anyway, I kept drawing from memory and writing letters in my bandbox of a room, and working every day at THE SALOON except one. Ray said he was having a great life with Allison–that was the only name I knew, except she was from one of the city’s better-known families--though he still went to his mother’s house every night, getting in late usually and laying it off to working after hours at the bar. Allison was from one of the city’s better-known families. He was amazed he was getting by with as much as he was. They checked in to the St. Charles Hotel in the afternoon, had dinner and drinks downstairs (where, as I recall, everyone seemed to speak a different language . . . ), and upstairs, he said, “fucked our brains out.”

And after Betty was overdue to arrive, Johnny started calling and his mother set him straight about expecting this woman to put up with him when he was just across the Golden Gate from her in Sausalito, and his wife living by Golden Gate Park, on California Street. Doll had been there, she knew Sally Stanford very well–this was a spell before the retired madam was elected mayor of Sausalito--and her own son wasn’t fooling her one bit. Johnny wrote Betty short, sometimes mournful, always whining letters, or that’s how she put it. I didn’t know, she never showed me one.

After another month Betty said she had to go back. She’d taken off more time than she’d planned. Her roommate would be wondering and she’d never been gone this long before. Even now, she declared, she wanted to stay. Later on, she wrote to me about her life in Sausalito, living with a man considerably younger than her. But maybe that was another man, a later one, I didn’t see either one because I never went to California, I stayed here and when I wasn’t here I went back to the mountains to see my sisters for a few days. Sure, I missed Betty, but I enjoyed Blanche’s company again, during her off hours.

I worked for Ray another year and then I started planning to go back to live at the homestead, where I’d grown up. Roanoke wasn’t far away, and I thought I would have the best of both worlds, in addition to a world I already knew and now that I’d lived in New Orleans a while you never knew what you might take a notion to do next. I might even talk Blanche into coming with me.

(12 November 2011)

When Johnny Goes Back

She said it but she didn’t do it, not right away: she kept the room at Mama Doll’s with Johnny’s mother’s blessing, even knowing her son was thrilled he would get a change of scene where he could see his wife and his mistress on alternate days . . . or in some such pattern. Nor did his mother mind when I started sleeping with Betty, especially since I discovered I knew one of her girls already. Blanche was there, had been there, she said, since moving out of “our” hotel room, as she remembered it, more than a little fondly, it seemed. Blanche already knew Betty and had shared her memories of J. C. before I finally visited the house on St. Charles Avenue. I never understood the way women shared their men, if they did. I damn sure had never been shared, so-called . . .

I kept my room in HOTEL HOTEL, just in case. Being a redhead, women known to have hot tempers–how could they help it? wearing long red hair a lifetime--wearing it short might make them more a handful. Betty was my first redhead and most likely would be the last, in fact maybe she would be the last of all. I wasn’t exactly Lothario incarnate, Casanova reborn . . . Anyway, I kept drawing from memory and writing letters in my bandbox of a room, and working every day except one at THE SALOON. Ray said he was having a great life with Allison, though he still went to his mother’s house every night, getting in late usually and laying it off to working after hours at the bar. Allison was from one of the city’s better-known families. He was amazed he was getting by with as much as he was. They checked in to the St. Charles Hotel in the afternoon, had dinner and drinks downstairs (where, as I recall, everyone seemed to speak a different language . . . ), and upstairs, he said, “fucked our brains out.”

And after Betty was overdue to arrive, Johnny started calling and his mother set him straight about expecting this woman to put up with him when he was just across the Golden Gate from her in Sausalito, and his wife living by Golden Gate Park, on California Street. Doll had been there, she knew Sally Stanford very well–this was a spell before the retired madam was elected mayor of Sausalito--and her own son wasn’t fooling her one bit. Johnny wrote Betty short, sometimes mournful, always whining letters, or that’s how she put it. I didn’t know, she never showed me one.

After another month Betty said she had to go back. She’d taken off more time than she’d planned. Her roommate would be wondering and she’d never been gone this long before. Even now, she declared, she wanted to stay. Later on, she wrote to me about her life in Sausalito, living with a man considerably younger than her. But maybe that was another man, a later one, I didn’t see either one because I never went to California, I stayed here and when I wasn’t here I went back to the mountains to see my sisters for a few days. Sure, I missed Betty, but I enjoyed Blanche’s company again, during her off hours.

I worked for Ray another year and then I started planning to go back to live at the homestead, where I’d grown up. Roanoke wasn’t far away, and I thought I would have the best of both worlds, in addition to a world I already knew and now that I’d lived in New Orleans a while
you never knew what you might take a notion to do next. Hell, I might even talk Blanche into coming with me.

(12 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Friday, November 11, 2011

What It Takes to Get Happy

I kept a pad of drawing paper behind the bar and sketched people from memory. Mostly my mother and her three daughters, my only siblings. Also, some characters I recalled from around the home place, all neighbors except for those who appeared nowhere but in my dreams when I was living there, and they were most visible to me now. Not much got done but work, as you can imagine: I was working full time now with one day a week off, when I took Betty out to picnic and make love and talk about what she was going to do when Johnny returned, when she planned to tell him she was in love with me. We also saw Ira and Adore at the café one night a week sometimes, but mostly one night every other week; we were too busy discovering one another when we had the time.

Ray had this wonderful woman who was a widow with two children, and he was wildly in love with her, and she with him, it seemed. He’d bring her by for dinner at the Absinthe House and afterward they’d cross the street for an Old Fashioned, for her, and a Jax for him. If the place was too busy they had one and left, but usually now, with the fall approaching, the clientele grew sparse before and after dinner time. A lot of drunken tourists were still coming around, but fewer now. And, as you know, dear reader, Hurricane Betsy was not far off.

I got a letter from home from one of my sisters saying our mother was ill and not expected to last and she would surely love to see me before she died. So I was gone when the hurricane arrived. And stayed to settle matters after the funeral and see to it our two most trustworthy neighbors would help the girls around the farm when they needed it, which wouldn’t be too often but still, it was good to get such assurance by the time I left.

The pumps had recovered the two weeks of flood waters Betsy unleashed. Gentilly, the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards, among other places (as you may remember), were inundated. Talk was the levees were intentionally breached to safeguard the Vieux Carre. LBJ came to town and swore the city would be protected by its levees next time: he would build new ones . . . The amazing part was how no one I encountered talked much about what had happened to them personally, though it was big when it was going on, or so I was led to believe. And forty years up the line, as you know, Katrina was waiting (by which time I would not be around to witness it either . . . )

Johnny was back in town almost as soon as I left, or so I learned later, and Betty was suddenly unavailable again, and after all that planning . . . Word was they spent the two weeks of Betsy at Mama Doll’s. Now I put myself into my work, taking over almost completely for Ray, to the point where he only worked one day a week, the day I took off and now I simply kept working every day and he seemed happy to be free, even raised my pay so I could move to a little better place, but I didn’t; for the time being there were too many memories in that dump, and I hadn’t sorted out yet what had happened while I was gone.

One night I entered the café where Ira was playing and Adore standing by the door, as she invariably did when he was on. I walked in and she took my arm and nodded to show me the table where Johnny and Betty were. Now, mind you, I hadn’t had a drink yet. I walked to their table and sat without looking at them and with no invitation. Neither one of them said a word. I sat with my back to them while the set continued to its finish.

Ira came over and Adore too. Johnny and Betty said hello to them and I turned around, as though surprised to see them sitting at the same table with me, telling Johnny I didn’t realize he was in California until I ran into Betty on the street one day. He said, Yeah, J. C., I heard all about it. Rather than ask what he’d heard, I let it go. Ira said I should come around to Adore’s and visit. Adore whispered she could fill me in on what was happening anywhere here. And with that Ira and Adore went outside to take the air. I turned to Johnny and said, Welcome back, and to Betty, I’m happy to see you happy. Neither responded. I didn’t give them much of a chance, I was gone that quick.

Outside the three of us had a great laugh and that night, after work, I went by Adore’s and recognized the place, like she’d said, by the chicken’s foot she’d have hanging on the door. We three got drunk and Ira and I told stories about the mountains and Adore one or two about growing up here. Oddly, Johnny and Betty didn’t come up again, not that night. About a month later Betty left town. No one knew why, but I, for one, guessed Johnny’s wife was somehow involved. I heard this from Ray, mind you, the last person I’d have expected to tell me, but then, he’d known Johnny far longer than either me or Betty. He believed Johnny’s wife was the reason. She wanted him back in San Francisco . . . so when Betty said she’d go back to Sausalito Johnny was all set to have things the way he wanted.

(11 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Thursday, November 10, 2011

What's What, Who's Who

1.

Betty said she was from California, Sausalito. I said nothing all the time she was talking about it, I was tracing the aureoles around her nipples with one hand’s fingers and with the other hand massaging her vaginal lips. Of course I had been taught to say “tits” and “cunt” or “pussy,” and so on . . . when I was a strapping boy just learning what my penis, rather “cock” or “boner” or . . . was for. The neighbor girl was older than I was, but she taught me good, I mean “well.” And she took me out in the trees and lay down and pulled me down by my penis and put it between her legs and even though I had masturbated to prophesy this moment I was surprised to be so surprised that a woman felt so very good when she replaced the imaginary one . . .

She said I ought to come with her to her little house on the hill in back of the town where you could see all the boats as well as the restaurant called Trident and the people crossing the street . . . I started to tell her about Roanoke but she did to me what was unique to each woman who blessed me with her favors, I mean what she did with her mouth and her tongue and what has gone down in the history of lovemaking as one more tool in a girl’s bag of tricks in her crib. Betty did it differently than my first lover and differently than Ruby, and after Betty I would make love with a woman whose mouth and tongue would feel and make me feel more differently still. Betty also taught me how to slide my tongue between the vaginal lips and find her clitoris, . . . and I could go on but why bother? This is history every human learns on his or her own.

I asked her questions she answered about Sausalito and San Francisco and she told me about Marin County and Sonoma County and took me to the Virgin Islands, St. Croix, where she’d lived . . . but I was doing with her what HOTEL HOTEL was intended for, or so I figured, seeing the women guiding the men up the stairs from time to time . . .

Betty said she wanted me to see Mama Doll’s, but I was uneasy thinking about men paying for it. The girls with their guys going up the stairs were too appealing to my, what I learned early on were labeled the “baser instincts.”

I was more concerned about ol’ Johnny and how he’d take what was happening here when he returned to town.

2.

Once Ira and I got to talking in the café he told me his brother killed a black man (he didn’t say “nigger,” nor did I say it or let it go uncorrected, it was after all 1965). That’s how I got to New Orleans, Ira said. Then he told me about what happened and about the child his brother had sired that he would never see now, and I asked what the black man’s name was, I knew a black woman from a town called Woolwine whose brother was murdered by her lover, and sure enough it was Ira’s brother, Rich, killed Ruby’s brother Rufus . . .

Eventually Ira told me the whole story and how he kept going south when he reached Memphis and his three brothers took off to the west, bound for Fort Smith, Arkansas, the toughest town in Indian Territory, where they could lose themselves among the thieves, murderers, and other blackguards who disappeared there until Isaac Parker was sent to clean up the place and became notorious, he’d heard, and came to be called the “hanging judge.”

So Ira knew Ruby and I told him all about her and her daughter Delia, whose father was his brother. Ira’s woman listened to it all. I suspected she’d heard worse and had seen worse still, and may even have suffered more agonies than I knew Ruby carried with her everywhere. Adore, was the only name she’d ever had, she named herself she said. I said, You have a beautiful name, it’s the only one you will ever need. She didn’t smile but then I didn’t expect her to. I was nothing if not honest, and I sometimes wondered why I stole my brothers’ money while they were sleeping and took off south and got away scot-free, that wasn’t what I called honesty, it was more like necessity.

But I didn’t say a word about that to anyone, I was ashamed of myself for doing that and if there was a God I didn’t have to tell anyone else, I didn’t even have to handle snakes to see if they could find out what nobody else knew, I did know they would because I was brought up that way, to know the snakes would kill you if you tried to hide your sins, and so I steered clear of church after that. I didn’t consider the cathedral in Jackson Square a church. I had to go to Roanoke to find out about Catholics and when I came home to visit and told the folks about it they didn’t have any time to listen, so naturally I started hanging out with priests. They always made time for me and I remain grateful to this day.

Betty and I fucked all the time we were not eating and drinking and listening to music, and she thought Ira and Adore were a lovely couple and she wanted to be around them as much as I was, which meant they got to know her and heard about Johnny through her and about his mother’s whorehouse, which Adore knew about too, being a child born and reared in New Orleans, though she was careful to add she’d never visited . . .

(10 November 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

The Man from the Blue Ridge

Johnny left town to do business with his wife in California, Betty said. She was sitting on a high bar stool: I was admiring her rose-colored toenails and her long legs tapering near visibly beyond her thighs, as well as her animated accent she said was inherited from her Prussian grandfather who rode the rails to freedom . . . Ray had been so happy with my progress he gave me a day off if I put in my request at least a day early; which I did now, after Betty said she’d be delighted to have dinner and drinks with me night after next.

To make it clear, this need I was feeling after weeks since Blanche, I took her by HOTEL HOTEL to show her the room, the bed that virtually filled it save for an end table where I was stacking my near-daily, no, -nightly, drawings and writings, mostly letters I was working on and unable to send until I was satisfied; a closet full of too few duds was next to the window two floors, walk up, above the street. I screwed up the courage to say she was welcome to stay here any time she wished, and she replied, What about tonight?

Dinner and drinks went well but surprisingly quickly. Two hours gone by, we were in bed and I was fucking one of the finest women I’ve ever known, a truly passionate lady with a repertoire of lovemaking gambits she introduced me to, including her demand that I pull out and orgasm on her belly, a feature I admitted to her I would have to practice before it came easy to me. She laughed and slid down between my legs and we were going again . . . After two hours there we went to the café where I wondered, to myself, if the beautiful brown lady might have returned.

There she was. The horn man was a new one, he was the same guy who’d started working the docks the day before I quit. He was riffing on an old beaten-up bugle, but how he could make that thing talk. She was standing more transfixed than usual, her back to the wall beside the door and at break time she walked toward him and he toward her and I said to Betty, That guy’s from back home, I'd bet. I heard him talking on the job and he sounds like he's from the mountains. He just met one of the more beautiful women in New Orleans.

Next night I went back alone and, as it happened, I met them both between sets, sitting at a table holding hands, eyes locked. I sat at the table next to them. When I got the chance I remarked about his down-home accent and he verified what I thought: He was from a little town not far from where I was born. his name was Ira and hers Adore. I couldn’t help but mention the bugle. He’d been playing that thing since he found it one day and got it in shape to learn to blow when he was something like ten years old.

Now that I’ m making good money, he declared, I’m going to buy me a real horn. His woman just smiled and never took her eyes off him and she held him with a long kiss as he left the table to begin the next set. I offered to buy her a drink, but she said one was enough, thank you just the same. She said she was from here and had never lived anywhere else, adding, Where else could you hear music like this and be a black woman who can’t help but fall in love at first sight with a white boy who can make an old bugle do sweet talk?

(9 November 2011)