Sometimes the heart has more to say
than the head wants to hear.
In the wake of your three score and ten
the heart wants to confess your life.
What is there to say
that would not be better left to tongues
other than yours?
In Paris the Virginia gentleman
wanted to woo the English beauty
in what Virginians called "the worst way,"
meaning "fully" . . . you know, "passionately."
She was, however, married
and his head said, You are a widower,
isn’t one dead wife enough?
His heart replied, You must accept your fate.
Therefore, Eleni Rallis lived in Athens,
ex- husband by the Pacific Ocean,
and I with my most stubborn love, Cathleen,
in the snow and ice country,
for Seattle was too rainy
even if it was where we met
more than fifty years ago.
Lelli’s "ex" married an Englishwoman
and that too is over . . . but why go on?
Eleni lives in New Orleans now.
Roberto would marry her, but no,
his black-hole cancer will swallow him whole
and she will be left a widow.
. . . Juan overprepared this event:
re-read Thomas Jefferson’s dialogue,
his letters and Maria Cosway’s;
remembered Sally Hemings
to be sure
to not forget her lover-master's means
to buy and sell human beings . . .
Juan thinks of Leila Shulamite
networking for a job in New York,
served canapes from trays that come around
balanced on ten brown fingers,
and though her skin’s the same shade and hue
as the servants’, she is dressed to the nines
and on paper more educated than they.
If "irony" now squares with "agony,"
what passes through Leila's head
on the way to her heart?
(7 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Raices
Irene Castenada, with a tilde
over the "n," and Floyce Alexander.
Mexican girl and poor white Southern boy
learning to love the other to be first
in their lives, should they look back on their lives,
and Juan knew her later, he too loved her,
and she told him of the first time she loved,
long ago, with the boy who read and wrote
and with his body made enough money
to go to college in the big city.
Ten, twelve, fourteen hours of labor in fields,
orchards, canneries, warehouses, his grapes–
and when they married Cathleen watched the tape
of the woman giving fellatio
and she sighed, That’s hard work, for Cathleen knew
what Irene first did only for pleasure.
What Irene started, Cathleen completed.
It is the destiny of Seattle and other cities,
San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston,
Manhattan. It is all amour fati.
Irene went to Seattle. She wanted
to marry him, but said no, I must work
in the canneries and the warehouses
for my father whose life was spent in fields
and my mother who brought me into life
before my sister died, like your brother
before you were born. I can speak English
and they can’t, and I read both languages,
the one in the house and the one from school,
and except for them I would marry you
in Seattle. I love you. I will miss
everything I know and all I don’t know
of what you are now and what you will be . . .
if only you would work with your vineyard,
our children could help us live through old age.
It was not their roots, it was the future
did them in. He was as happy to leave
as if he’d never lived there. She followed,
she stayed long enough to know this city,
she loved Seattle as long as she lived,
and she is still alive in that small town.
And Juan met her in Mexico City,
her father and mother gone. His mother
knew her. She loved Irene’s laughter, brown eyes
on fire with joy. Her long legs, lithe body,
beautiful as only the hopeful are.
She told Juan about Floyce Alexander.
The love of her life. The ruin of her.
She married, bore children, but never loved
the same way again. Juan listened and loved
her in San Angel, and in the hotels
Londres and Ibero, London and Spain
living across the street from each other
where calle Mina joins Buenavista.
Juan loved her so well he would marry her,
he told her, but for Cathleen, his first love
who would be his last, though God knew he tried
to leave her, but only she knew his heart
and what it said in the only language
time, not eternity, taught them to speak.
(6 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
over the "n," and Floyce Alexander.
Mexican girl and poor white Southern boy
learning to love the other to be first
in their lives, should they look back on their lives,
and Juan knew her later, he too loved her,
and she told him of the first time she loved,
long ago, with the boy who read and wrote
and with his body made enough money
to go to college in the big city.
Ten, twelve, fourteen hours of labor in fields,
orchards, canneries, warehouses, his grapes–
and when they married Cathleen watched the tape
of the woman giving fellatio
and she sighed, That’s hard work, for Cathleen knew
what Irene first did only for pleasure.
What Irene started, Cathleen completed.
It is the destiny of Seattle and other cities,
San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston,
Manhattan. It is all amour fati.
Irene went to Seattle. She wanted
to marry him, but said no, I must work
in the canneries and the warehouses
for my father whose life was spent in fields
and my mother who brought me into life
before my sister died, like your brother
before you were born. I can speak English
and they can’t, and I read both languages,
the one in the house and the one from school,
and except for them I would marry you
in Seattle. I love you. I will miss
everything I know and all I don’t know
of what you are now and what you will be . . .
if only you would work with your vineyard,
our children could help us live through old age.
It was not their roots, it was the future
did them in. He was as happy to leave
as if he’d never lived there. She followed,
she stayed long enough to know this city,
she loved Seattle as long as she lived,
and she is still alive in that small town.
And Juan met her in Mexico City,
her father and mother gone. His mother
knew her. She loved Irene’s laughter, brown eyes
on fire with joy. Her long legs, lithe body,
beautiful as only the hopeful are.
She told Juan about Floyce Alexander.
The love of her life. The ruin of her.
She married, bore children, but never loved
the same way again. Juan listened and loved
her in San Angel, and in the hotels
Londres and Ibero, London and Spain
living across the street from each other
where calle Mina joins Buenavista.
Juan loved her so well he would marry her,
he told her, but for Cathleen, his first love
who would be his last, though God knew he tried
to leave her, but only she knew his heart
and what it said in the only language
time, not eternity, taught them to speak.
(6 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Bright Light
Irene and I walked to the river’s edge.
It was the river you crossed on the way
out of Granger toward Toppenish. The carp
slithered through water as brown as they were.
Still, it was good to see them moving well.
She had a theory they were happier
if they could see what was looking at them.
All the same, we had to keep still to see
what they did. They came nearer to the bank
where we sat on the blanket from the car.
Irene said, Hold your breath, let them come here,
then let it all out. She liked to say how
they loved to play games, getting us quiet
by getting so close, waiting for our breath
to exhale, diving down deep as you go,
not for good but for now. She took my hand,
it was dusk, we were alone, I had lived
through the accident, Jess and I racing
from Zillah home and I was in the lead
until the right-angle curve where I lost
my 1951 Chevy hard-top,
but O so very slowly as time feels
when it’s out of your reach, comes to a stop
before you go upside down, the top crushed
against your crushed skull and once you are dead
you can pick up your check early and wait
to start your next life another season . . .
Irene loved to tell me I should take care
of myself and end the day in her arms,
she could pick me up and take me to bed
and even my Chevy’s top would stay hard.
What would it be like to be dead? She said,
Who would know? No one dead ever answers.
What about that bright light that goes straight up
when you lose your body to keep your soul?
She said, You came back, you don’t want to see
what’s up there until you see what we can make
between us; and I: My brother is there,
and she: I have a sister there. In town,
June bugs fell on their backs under bright light.
(5 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
It was the river you crossed on the way
out of Granger toward Toppenish. The carp
slithered through water as brown as they were.
Still, it was good to see them moving well.
She had a theory they were happier
if they could see what was looking at them.
All the same, we had to keep still to see
what they did. They came nearer to the bank
where we sat on the blanket from the car.
Irene said, Hold your breath, let them come here,
then let it all out. She liked to say how
they loved to play games, getting us quiet
by getting so close, waiting for our breath
to exhale, diving down deep as you go,
not for good but for now. She took my hand,
it was dusk, we were alone, I had lived
through the accident, Jess and I racing
from Zillah home and I was in the lead
until the right-angle curve where I lost
my 1951 Chevy hard-top,
but O so very slowly as time feels
when it’s out of your reach, comes to a stop
before you go upside down, the top crushed
against your crushed skull and once you are dead
you can pick up your check early and wait
to start your next life another season . . .
Irene loved to tell me I should take care
of myself and end the day in her arms,
she could pick me up and take me to bed
and even my Chevy’s top would stay hard.
What would it be like to be dead? She said,
Who would know? No one dead ever answers.
What about that bright light that goes straight up
when you lose your body to keep your soul?
She said, You came back, you don’t want to see
what’s up there until you see what we can make
between us; and I: My brother is there,
and she: I have a sister there. In town,
June bugs fell on their backs under bright light.
(5 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
Monday, July 4, 2011
Manufacturing a Life
I used to wonder, masturbating, why
love was so hard to come by. Then Irene
showed up on the line above where I was
keeping the one-hundred-pound sacks secure
under the mouth of the machine jigging,
the word was, filling each sack to leave space
to sew it shut, which was a high-paid job,
you could bloody your fingers, had to be
a lifer, the old ones who could avoid
getting their blood on sacks ready to ship,
while up there the women with rubber gloves
sorted the bad from the good, throwing out,
culling was the word, what went to the bin
emptied by the youngest boys twice a day,
and over the conveyor belt there came
cascading the edible ones, each sack
filling with the ‘I won’t get in your way’
potatoes ‘if you give me ample room
to sleep while awaiting with our brethren’
the night shift, when Jess Maltos and I stay
until at least midnight filling boxcars
whereupon more hours pass until daylight,
locomotive coupling with cars for lunch
–while the back room is filling up again–
and Jess goes one way and I another,
he sits with Martha and I with Irene.
People talk. (I can hear and so can Jess.)
What’s that spic doing with that white girl there?
He ought to be doing what he’s doing
with that Castenada woman instead
–who’s only a girl herself–that white boy
is wooing. I turn to her, kiss Irene
on her neck, she chuckles leading me on
and I would love to lift her dress and dive
between her legs, but no time for dessert,
and we return to that dimly lit room.
Irv Niedermeyer pushes the button
to start all the machines in his warehouse,
he has that much power and never smiles;
his partner Frank Young smiles for both of them.
Because I smile back I am made head man
of the night shift charged with filling boxcars
until the back room is empty, and Jess
helps because I was asked to choose a man
and I chose him, and the two of us fill
our time cards between eight in the morning
and midnight but only five days a week,
an hour off for lunch, an hour for dinner,
a dollar fifty an hour, twenty one
dollars a day, one hundred five per week,
in a month four hundred twenty dollars
and after a year five thousand forty . . .
but Martha and Irene are paid much less
because Irv and Frank pay their wives nothing,
why Irv is a prune and needs Frank to pick
up spirits to keep from paying down
their profit margin, what makes them happy
when each six-week potato harvest ends.
Six hundred thirty dollars in the bank?
No way. They take plenty out and blame it
on the government. It’s gone, that’s for sure..
We get our checks here, at Niedermeyer’s
Warehouse each gloomy, potato-smelling
Friday after work, when the banks are closed
and we have to pretend we have money
Saturday, when Martha and Irene pay
for hamburgers and Cokes at the drive-in
where they contemplate working as car-hops
to make more money working nights, like us.
Nobody drinks? You gotta be kidding!
Masturbate? Who needs to? I don’t know where
Jess and Martha go after mass, but I
come up here with Irene, who shows me how
much we learn from life just by living it.
Up here you can see the lights of the town
come on, you stay that long learning to love
each other, but come another season
boys go off to college and girls marry,
and in the meantime we count off the years
until life turns magically happy.
(4 July 2011: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s birthday)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
love was so hard to come by. Then Irene
showed up on the line above where I was
keeping the one-hundred-pound sacks secure
under the mouth of the machine jigging,
the word was, filling each sack to leave space
to sew it shut, which was a high-paid job,
you could bloody your fingers, had to be
a lifer, the old ones who could avoid
getting their blood on sacks ready to ship,
while up there the women with rubber gloves
sorted the bad from the good, throwing out,
culling was the word, what went to the bin
emptied by the youngest boys twice a day,
and over the conveyor belt there came
cascading the edible ones, each sack
filling with the ‘I won’t get in your way’
potatoes ‘if you give me ample room
to sleep while awaiting with our brethren’
the night shift, when Jess Maltos and I stay
until at least midnight filling boxcars
whereupon more hours pass until daylight,
locomotive coupling with cars for lunch
–while the back room is filling up again–
and Jess goes one way and I another,
he sits with Martha and I with Irene.
People talk. (I can hear and so can Jess.)
What’s that spic doing with that white girl there?
He ought to be doing what he’s doing
with that Castenada woman instead
–who’s only a girl herself–that white boy
is wooing. I turn to her, kiss Irene
on her neck, she chuckles leading me on
and I would love to lift her dress and dive
between her legs, but no time for dessert,
and we return to that dimly lit room.
Irv Niedermeyer pushes the button
to start all the machines in his warehouse,
he has that much power and never smiles;
his partner Frank Young smiles for both of them.
Because I smile back I am made head man
of the night shift charged with filling boxcars
until the back room is empty, and Jess
helps because I was asked to choose a man
and I chose him, and the two of us fill
our time cards between eight in the morning
and midnight but only five days a week,
an hour off for lunch, an hour for dinner,
a dollar fifty an hour, twenty one
dollars a day, one hundred five per week,
in a month four hundred twenty dollars
and after a year five thousand forty . . .
but Martha and Irene are paid much less
because Irv and Frank pay their wives nothing,
why Irv is a prune and needs Frank to pick
up spirits to keep from paying down
their profit margin, what makes them happy
when each six-week potato harvest ends.
Six hundred thirty dollars in the bank?
No way. They take plenty out and blame it
on the government. It’s gone, that’s for sure..
We get our checks here, at Niedermeyer’s
Warehouse each gloomy, potato-smelling
Friday after work, when the banks are closed
and we have to pretend we have money
Saturday, when Martha and Irene pay
for hamburgers and Cokes at the drive-in
where they contemplate working as car-hops
to make more money working nights, like us.
Nobody drinks? You gotta be kidding!
Masturbate? Who needs to? I don’t know where
Jess and Martha go after mass, but I
come up here with Irene, who shows me how
much we learn from life just by living it.
Up here you can see the lights of the town
come on, you stay that long learning to love
each other, but come another season
boys go off to college and girls marry,
and in the meantime we count off the years
until life turns magically happy.
(4 July 2011: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s birthday)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
Sunday, July 3, 2011
The Unfinished
He needs to finish what was started. The ancestral journey from Glasgow to Belfast, the reward a ship to the New World and indentured servitude that led to a sorghum farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The flight from Virginia to Arkansas; Ira on to New Orleans. Adore’s story, the way she told it to him. Where his heart claimed entry, other lives better left alone, perhaps fragile from his solicitude, intense and known mostly only to himself now, going nowhere, and if two were here, one in Manhattan, one whose man sacrificed his art to heal her soul, and his first love a widow in a cock-fighting town inland from the Pacific, why should he remember what he did not need to brood over–how he had been the man whose affections were paltry and swept over and under by his vain effort to do art with words, what no one in his family save one had even attempted. He thought of Carlos, then: another need, to prepare the novel his brother left behind in his van when he walked into the Chesterfield gorge. He needs to finish what he started.
Adore said, I kept that little bird until it died. I took it everywhere. I was called Bird Girl, then Lady. No one gave me grief. I was in the company of the gods who measured life not in altitude but in the way you soared high, then low, landing on both feet at once; you saw eye to eye with the fates. Mama Ju-Ju taught me. I started doing gris-gris in her back room. That’s why I always go to the back of my house with a client. Same place the bed is, but I only make love with men I love. Never women, I’m not made that way. Besides, a bed means nothing, it’s there only to enjoy, where it can keep you warm, even safe. I can count on two hands the men who were in bed with me. It took a long time, but you know that. I felt I was robbing the cradle with you, at first; believe me, you disabused me of that notion, or I you. What do you think, Juan Flores? Juan was listening hard. He still needed to know more about Madame Ju-Ju and her back room, so he asked, and Adore said, She let me live up to the name I gave myself. Adore. As in: The loas adore you so you will be unsure if it’s you they are riding or you riding them . . . Madame Ju-Ju maintained the candles and said it was the loas who did it all. All you had to do was leave the back door open and entice them through.
Adore kept going back to that house in the bayou, after she had sworn she would not return. She had to have a home of her own. The bird felt at home: She would set it free and it would fly and always come back, landing on the sill of the open window where she waited, saying the words over and over until she knew she had by heart what Madame Ju-Ju had taught her in the city. She wanted the boy to come back, but he was afraid now he would lose all he knew to make his way in New Orleans. She wanted to tell him he had nothing to fear, this was New Orleans too, just the outer edge, that was all. She saw the boy in town and he always wanted to talk, but by that time she was visiting a man in the Quarter who was willing to pay her top dollar to talk him back to health.
Cathleen came in and made love to him, not with him but to him. She always recalled for him his mother and her mother and her mother’s mother. She was far more beautiful than any of them and she may well have been a better lover. She made him think about Adore, and thinking of Adore and how she made love to, not with, him, led in a circle back to Cathleen.
(3 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
Adore said, I kept that little bird until it died. I took it everywhere. I was called Bird Girl, then Lady. No one gave me grief. I was in the company of the gods who measured life not in altitude but in the way you soared high, then low, landing on both feet at once; you saw eye to eye with the fates. Mama Ju-Ju taught me. I started doing gris-gris in her back room. That’s why I always go to the back of my house with a client. Same place the bed is, but I only make love with men I love. Never women, I’m not made that way. Besides, a bed means nothing, it’s there only to enjoy, where it can keep you warm, even safe. I can count on two hands the men who were in bed with me. It took a long time, but you know that. I felt I was robbing the cradle with you, at first; believe me, you disabused me of that notion, or I you. What do you think, Juan Flores? Juan was listening hard. He still needed to know more about Madame Ju-Ju and her back room, so he asked, and Adore said, She let me live up to the name I gave myself. Adore. As in: The loas adore you so you will be unsure if it’s you they are riding or you riding them . . . Madame Ju-Ju maintained the candles and said it was the loas who did it all. All you had to do was leave the back door open and entice them through.
Adore kept going back to that house in the bayou, after she had sworn she would not return. She had to have a home of her own. The bird felt at home: She would set it free and it would fly and always come back, landing on the sill of the open window where she waited, saying the words over and over until she knew she had by heart what Madame Ju-Ju had taught her in the city. She wanted the boy to come back, but he was afraid now he would lose all he knew to make his way in New Orleans. She wanted to tell him he had nothing to fear, this was New Orleans too, just the outer edge, that was all. She saw the boy in town and he always wanted to talk, but by that time she was visiting a man in the Quarter who was willing to pay her top dollar to talk him back to health.
Cathleen came in and made love to him, not with him but to him. She always recalled for him his mother and her mother and her mother’s mother. She was far more beautiful than any of them and she may well have been a better lover. She made him think about Adore, and thinking of Adore and how she made love to, not with, him, led in a circle back to Cathleen.
(3 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Bird House, Cat House, Down the Road a Piece
Even if the world is your oyster, you are probably not its pearl.
The creature who eats too fast pays out its orgasm like rope.
Always looking for something to say that never needs to be.
Spare key’s concealed in the bird house abandoned by birds.
Human house also known as cat house, its woman the keeper
against the winds, the ice, the black earth missing from seeds,
her man disobedient in the snake’s modus operandi, the apple
between his legs can’t flourish above its root in seasonal time
because, is it? there’s no help for him being a lover of women
and helpless because now his heart is ticking like any man’s,
or so his gay doctor informs him, his stethoscope amazing her.
Juan wants to fuck Judy Ewing. Cathleen wants him to herself.
If fucking is a kind of solution to love’s mysteries, its drunken
wonder, how you do it with your clothes on, then clothes off,
and no one stays the night but her, she can sleep through Hell’s
door banging shut under Abandon Hope, the drunkard’s alibi.
Judy Ewing gives what she must to Hubbard, her daddy now
Frank’s in Mexico; still in jail? Juan’s down the road a piece,
engorged with her image, all he knows the way she looked once.
Cathleen comes to the house in Lagunitas and knocks on her door.
She tries the key, dead bolt’s on, she goes around to the bathroom
window, climbs through it with alacrity, her body lashed, scarred
by her imagination: she’s blind and remembering Paradise Lost
reputed to have been dictated by Milton to whom? a secretary,
she knows, one foot bared by her sandal lost in the night’s dew.
He sleeps on the bed in the living room, where she takes a pillow
for herself; when he wakes he places it under her warm buttocks.
A spare key’s useless when the dead bolt slides into place. So:
The birds fled because the woman of the house mimicked flight.
The continuing invasion of cats also needed to be considered.
(2 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
The creature who eats too fast pays out its orgasm like rope.
Always looking for something to say that never needs to be.
Spare key’s concealed in the bird house abandoned by birds.
Human house also known as cat house, its woman the keeper
against the winds, the ice, the black earth missing from seeds,
her man disobedient in the snake’s modus operandi, the apple
between his legs can’t flourish above its root in seasonal time
because, is it? there’s no help for him being a lover of women
and helpless because now his heart is ticking like any man’s,
or so his gay doctor informs him, his stethoscope amazing her.
Juan wants to fuck Judy Ewing. Cathleen wants him to herself.
If fucking is a kind of solution to love’s mysteries, its drunken
wonder, how you do it with your clothes on, then clothes off,
and no one stays the night but her, she can sleep through Hell’s
door banging shut under Abandon Hope, the drunkard’s alibi.
Judy Ewing gives what she must to Hubbard, her daddy now
Frank’s in Mexico; still in jail? Juan’s down the road a piece,
engorged with her image, all he knows the way she looked once.
Cathleen comes to the house in Lagunitas and knocks on her door.
She tries the key, dead bolt’s on, she goes around to the bathroom
window, climbs through it with alacrity, her body lashed, scarred
by her imagination: she’s blind and remembering Paradise Lost
reputed to have been dictated by Milton to whom? a secretary,
she knows, one foot bared by her sandal lost in the night’s dew.
He sleeps on the bed in the living room, where she takes a pillow
for herself; when he wakes he places it under her warm buttocks.
A spare key’s useless when the dead bolt slides into place. So:
The birds fled because the woman of the house mimicked flight.
The continuing invasion of cats also needed to be considered.
(2 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
Friday, July 1, 2011
Fete
We will now blow our brains out
celebrating the beginning of the end.
Everyone knows holidays kill people.
The goat path goes along the edge of the canyon where the Sphinx could see. Is it a he or a she? Legend has it one way; history is never involved, the way is too narrow, the steep air makes you dizzy, you haven’t even been reading, your habits are changed from the days when your heart rebelled, then acquiesced thirty years and now, forty years later, what does it say a drum doesn’t? The woman inside the city’s walls was waiting, she said. The news reaches her before he enters the gate. A price is on his head, though no one knows whose head. You don’t kill your father without regret, even if you don’t know it’s him when he staggers and teeters on two feet falling under him on the goat path. He has a guilty conscience not knowing who the man was, only that he was threatened without cause, much less reason. The city is made up of those who go about their own business as long as it does not implicate others. The law is the law, life is not lived until it’s over.
The Fourth of July. The Concord Bridge.
If you believe the people’s biblical priests,
it is here the dinosaurs finally vanished.
Sophocles can have his story back. I could at least have looked into his source. Promiscuous? A lady without a gent has no reason to be otherwise unless she is living in the open, and Jocasta never has exposed herself to the fellaheen (to cop a word Ishmael learned from Queequeg and Melville learned about, finally, reading Ahab’s journals–what was left of them in the coffin the kid was riding when the Rachel came back days after first meeting the Pequod and now . . . Holidays are for blowing your brains out, he said. No one suspects suicide on a holy day. Only the undoubting believers comprehend the gravity a body encounters when God says, Go ahead, get it over with, I’m open all day, all night, and if I’m not here an angel will be.
I was aghast. He said he knew the word
would mean nothing if anyone listened.
He didn’t even want to think about it.
The sun glinting off the surface of the lake. Birds know how to fly upside down to measure how far they’ve come. Those who don’t look back never seem to be able to see what’s ahead. The Greek music is as old as the amphitheater carved out of stone, filled by those who already know the story and are curious how this performance will justify its existence. The sound of cars. A cacophony of voices. Some semblance of the power of sanity to prevent the disappearance of souls from sight. Be grateful, the judges of all actions decide to say, then turn it into a threat. Don’t bother to appear before us if you can solve the riddle yourself. We have so little time.
(1 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
celebrating the beginning of the end.
Everyone knows holidays kill people.
The goat path goes along the edge of the canyon where the Sphinx could see. Is it a he or a she? Legend has it one way; history is never involved, the way is too narrow, the steep air makes you dizzy, you haven’t even been reading, your habits are changed from the days when your heart rebelled, then acquiesced thirty years and now, forty years later, what does it say a drum doesn’t? The woman inside the city’s walls was waiting, she said. The news reaches her before he enters the gate. A price is on his head, though no one knows whose head. You don’t kill your father without regret, even if you don’t know it’s him when he staggers and teeters on two feet falling under him on the goat path. He has a guilty conscience not knowing who the man was, only that he was threatened without cause, much less reason. The city is made up of those who go about their own business as long as it does not implicate others. The law is the law, life is not lived until it’s over.
The Fourth of July. The Concord Bridge.
If you believe the people’s biblical priests,
it is here the dinosaurs finally vanished.
Sophocles can have his story back. I could at least have looked into his source. Promiscuous? A lady without a gent has no reason to be otherwise unless she is living in the open, and Jocasta never has exposed herself to the fellaheen (to cop a word Ishmael learned from Queequeg and Melville learned about, finally, reading Ahab’s journals–what was left of them in the coffin the kid was riding when the Rachel came back days after first meeting the Pequod and now . . . Holidays are for blowing your brains out, he said. No one suspects suicide on a holy day. Only the undoubting believers comprehend the gravity a body encounters when God says, Go ahead, get it over with, I’m open all day, all night, and if I’m not here an angel will be.
I was aghast. He said he knew the word
would mean nothing if anyone listened.
He didn’t even want to think about it.
The sun glinting off the surface of the lake. Birds know how to fly upside down to measure how far they’ve come. Those who don’t look back never seem to be able to see what’s ahead. The Greek music is as old as the amphitheater carved out of stone, filled by those who already know the story and are curious how this performance will justify its existence. The sound of cars. A cacophony of voices. Some semblance of the power of sanity to prevent the disappearance of souls from sight. Be grateful, the judges of all actions decide to say, then turn it into a threat. Don’t bother to appear before us if you can solve the riddle yourself. We have so little time.
(1 July 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
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