The Hell He Travels (3)

3

George and Nancy had a friend named John who loved to sleep,
though he was not afflicted with narcolepsy. Drinking instead.
Our antihero drank to stay awake. Hence the hell he traveled.
Let us call him Flowers. Faux Faust sounds too literary, forced.
Once he had lived by water passing by a willow that only wept.
He worked there nights and days. He could not sleep for weeping.

John crossed the border with Flowers and they walked the town
before finding the bar where the lovely woman waited at the bar
quoting her price, making conversation while Flowers praised
her beauty offering to write her a poem if she would let him love
without paying, but No, she said, I have my children to support.
Two men came in, quickly corralled her and climbed the stairs.

The rented car crawled past the vigilant eyes of border guards.
John slept sprawled on the back seat. Flowers increased speed.
That night John would sleep on George and Nancy’s frayed couch.
Flowers went off to encounter the girl named Joy, too young to be
a woman though she had been the Old Lady of the biker Fuck Up.
Flowers shared with her his dinner in the town’s best restaurant.

Together or alone, hell is a place that need not answer to its name.
Together is better than alone, but it is invariably hell all the same.
So say the wise men where women live only to pleasure and to be
pleasured. A wild man can’t stay home. He wanders all the streets
where the wild men with their wild women all become more crazy
once closing time arrives. Here Flowers unrolls his bed and sleeps.

In the park not far from the wild zoo he dreams where dew braids
sparkling grass, the pond’s watery eyes mirroring the moon’s face.
He is full of love between his legs. He finds a woman who is willing
to lie with him without payment. He grows happy to hear chorusing
under him and see the magical change in her face, her serene eyes,
and climb to his feet and help her to hers and stroll down to the sea.

(to be resumed)

(6 December 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

The Hell He Travels (2)

2

Where he is takes all but a little of the western part of the map.
Where he was is at the top, and between lies where she will go.
His car is parked next to a three-story house devoted to mother,
husband, and children–first floor, second and third, respectively.
Her children she counts on all the fingers of one hand. They romp
up and down the stairs and disturb the man who's not their father,
who works all day sealed off from everything in the house but joy,
sorrow, and all the colors blurred with a brush full of water.
Faux Faust misses driving a car, rents one, drives it night and day.
There is his Mephistopheles and Nancy, his faithful wife.
She cleans his wounds. She leads him where he cannot go
without her help in the plaster cast he has worn through panic
when the motorcycle failed his balance careening off the road,
accident that has marred his courage in small but corrosive ways.

He tells George the truth, that he wants to know everything now
his dream slides between his ears, memory like salt being mined.
George says he will take the main watch, but nothing else,
it’s all a creature with one good leg can do, and he must please
the ardor of his wife, whereupon Nancy cuddles in his lap.
Why don’t you buy a bike? George asks him. I have no money
to throw away on pleasure, he replies: I have work to do,
rainbows and ashes, a chorus of groans mistaken for love,
the body’s mutiny once the ship has sailed and all go hungry,
and most of all I want to know these forbidden things . . .
the value of the Maria Theresa coin; the history of bloody walls
whitewashed in the missions; how to cheat death to go on living.
Nancy interrupts: George, come to bed. She steadies his elbow
with both hands. His eyebrows grow solid with their horny dew.

(to be resumed)

(II: 5 December 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

The Hell He Travels

Several ladies saw him walking by one day. They were struck and a little frightened by his appearance, his face fixed in gloom and smudged as though by soot, his beard bristling as though tinged with fire.

1

The hell he travels follows a map he made himself.
He shoulders his bedroll. The way is long, circuitous.
He has studied the terrain so carefully he will know
where to step and the well-trod paths to avoid.
Once he is there, Here, he will gasp, are fabulous sights
I have heard priests denounce as the glamour of evil.
The nun was there when his wife came home and found him.
He who was always gone, who wanted to be a mustang.
He was too old now, already well shod at thirty.
Nothing availed, little devils climbed into his dreams.
His wife found another country, where he went missing
as he was never where she was when she was here.
He anticipates nothing but knowledge, a farmboy Faust
who turns the future in his head until it clicks into place.

(to be resumed)

(5 December 20012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Rara Avis

She smiles and laughs and thinks and talks
of what she thought. Her hair shines bright red
then black. Her blue nails chip. Her nose ring
traps silvery moonshine. At home she makes
cupcakes for her daughter who insists the cakes
be in cups. She ponders how the man stands.
She says, I like the way you make me think.

Before she moves one leg across its twin
where he lies on the mat, she says she should
remove her ring, and does, then puts it on
again. She finds a lower register 
to speak of politics. This town’s as ill
as he. Will his body escape its cage?
She says, I’m a rare bird! Peacock! he cries.

(4 December 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Sonny Boy and Her

“Dante in exile, walking in the streets of Verona–people whispered to each other that he goes to Hell when he chooses and brings back news from there.”
                                                                                                           –Robert Bresson

I know, he said, it sounds odd. Our life together was going fine until death found our door.
The little white cat snarled at the German Shepherd and was hurled with one paw to hell.
He said, I hope he’s in his little heaven now, my favorite, I called him Sonny Boy. He was,
as he was called then, just a cat. The same door you stood with nothing but your apron on
–I’m not her, I reminded him, but he kept on like he never heard me–and as I backed out
to the one-way street and shifted into low to begin the climb, she turned, bowed to the door,
and raised her apron and since we had just made love before lunch that was all she wore,
and as I paused she lifted the apron and revealed her lovely ass and wriggled it can-can
and sang out no words but her glee entered my memory forever. There: the frontal lobes
where everyone I ever loved circulates the paths that lead to and from the angelic avenues.

Did she die? I asked. He shook his head: That was where the pain entered, the same place
Sonny Boy is. He walked away, slowly but did not pause, did not turn, said nothing more.
It is much simpler to write this now. Forty years have passed. He would never come back.
In Chihuahua once he thought he saw her, but that was too far south and another Mexico:
I promised once to take her with me there and find with her my beloved, lost acacia tree.
It was not a terrain she would know. Nor had I expected Pancho Villa entering that city.
The old men dressed with rose handkerchiefs in the breast pockets of their suit coats arose
when I took the stage and read Memory of the Future, which was not addressed to her but
my first love, who sits under the lamp writing while waiting for me to complete memory’s
circle. I missed her then. I know I’m a romantic, sentimental, but I missed her like a man.

(3 December 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Show Me

I could go back then, like you.
There are always better beginnings that would not risk error.
I could go on from where I began,
let the beginning have its head and run away with my life.
Like you, I would live without appetites
I gleaned from the surrounding countryside.
Even the sheep would lie down with the wolves,
toothless wolves, sheep abandoned by shepherds,
though there you have the country
without the city and its open eyes
shutting when the crime occurs.
If there is an innocent beginning
whose origin is never corrupt and never turns to guilt,
show me.
The veil would be lifted.
Hands on my hands. No arrests.
Simply caution, patience.
Eyes steady, blinking only to shield sight
from too much brilliance, to humble the tongue.
Nor can the second time around not be the same as the first,
failing . . .

(2 December 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Money

     1

Paper coupon, counterfeit money. One more use
for the printing press, maybe the only remaining use.
Exchange for silver? No, pass it on to the trusting poor
unwary of sleight of hand, dishonesty, corruption.

From the kid who loves to look at nudes, tumescence
growing, the coupon goes to the photography store,
where it’s passed to the worker collecting his due
driving truck to fill the building’s heating-oil supply.

He’s the one will pay: go to jail, lose any future job,
then to prison, lose his daughter to death, his wife
who chooses a new life. The future now mostly oblivion,
he kills, he lives alone. An older woman takes him in.

If she were God, she says, she would forgive everyone.
Her brother slaps her for showing compassion, enslaves her.
Her boarder wants to help her break away. She loves life
despite the death she lives. Otherwise, where would he be?

He takes an ax, murders the brother, the woman’s family.
He raises his ax to her eyes with a glint of grace that his lack.
The bloody blade thrown into the lake brings up bubbles.
Bresson, as usual, stays where he was, in the world this is.

     2

No one confessed to passing the coupon on to others.
The others never confess. He does. There was nothing
to own up to, yet innocence is no excuse. Guilt lasts
forever once you can’t get hired after breaking the law.

He must forego every happiness to come because the past
is what we live by. After a man is bludgeoned by the state
he shrinks, or grows stronger, but stronger only with rage.
In Bresson’s film, at the end this man preempts the system.

He goes to the police where he finds them and confesses
without being charged, and the chain receives its last link.
I read Tolstoy, whose story it is. The structure is the same,
but not the denouement, which could only be Bresson’s.

Each morning now I wake with my debts in the forefront
of my brain’s lobes. I have everything other than money.
I have the gold of my longtime lover’s beauty and care.
I age with the bounty of what weds me to love’s companion.

I take Bresson’s cue: The world is swallowing all those
who do not make the money or the laws or climb the ladder
to heaven. The precipice lies in wait. The poor have no choice
but to continue as though they lived in a hell already here.

(after L’Argent, 1983, Bresson’s final film)

(1 December 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander