Charlie Brice - 2
Checked OutMom approached the hotel desk
and asked for Grandpa’s Atkins’ room number. The manager was sorry, but Mr. and Mrs. Atkins had checked out an hour ago. The problem: Grandma Atkins was back in Omaha, blind, obese, and drunk. She’d stopped traveling with grandpa years ago. My mother probably didn’t notice the intricate carving on the mahogany desk, or smell the mix of deodorizer and furniture polish, nor did she appreciate the plush carpet with the peacock design, or the cracked leather chairs that, no doubt, grandpa had sat in while waiting for the faux “missis” to arrive under the crystal chandelier in the grand lobby. No, I’m sure my mother recalled the day she returned home from fifth grade to discover her father had sold her pet pig, whom she loved so much she could never tell me its name. Just OnceAfter losing the big game,
I’d like to hear a star athlete say, You know why we lost? We lost because Bruno’s doing coach’s wife and Jesus is not just smiting him, He’s smiting our entire team; or some centenarian attribute his longevity to ardent atheism—my long life was possible because guilt never sat on my eyelids like the coins of the dead. I never worried that I’d burn in a metaphysical furnace run by a dork with a pitchfork; never fretted about sitting on an old bearded guy’s right or left hand, or, god forbid, one of his knees. The downside? I can’t hope to see again those I so dearly loved in this life. We’ll never talk about what we missed. I’ll never hold my wife again, stroke her silky hair, or feel her breath upon my cheek. Still, we die wrapped in the loves we were lucky enough to garner in this life. Whatever those last minutes I’ll be grateful for my time on this green orb. I’d gladly do it again and again. Maybe Nietzsche got that part right. DenialFloat down De Nile down
the psychoanalytic Lethe Dial back the shame Dial up the shaman Magical reality of a drowned polysemy Forget Nail down the den that ails Who but the inventor of denial could claim that a patient with several feet of gauze left in her nose was hysterically bleeding Or blow smoke rings of no consequences from twenty cigars a day Freud’s psyche was an ameba whose pseudopodia encircled the world There was no other RepressionFreud’s shirts
starched stiff arrested attire his dickey erect and shiny Press on the pleasure Refry desire Stoke the Freudian fire Repress son prodigal boy always returns It was supposed to be about liberation but turned out to be about how unfree freedom is Early on Freud pressed the foreheads of his patients forcing down what they’d exposed Freud’s trousers stood by themselves at night like a fireman’s uniform Freud slid down the panic pole to rescue us from what we didn’t know His pants stood alone like those awful elephant legs turned into garbage cans and proved once again what was erect eventually falls And those cigars A caesura in the preconscious precancerous mouth A vagina dentata that analytic floss can’t repair or prevent Only an opera of operations A prosthetic jaw that made the professor whistle when he spoke So he rarely uttered a sound which caused his American sycophants to ape a gaping analytic silence What they thought was psychoanalytic technique was actually the old man’s vanity MarmaladeThe porter with his tiny xylophone
calling passengers to breakfast or dinner, waiters in the dining car, white coats, careful articulation of the breakfast fare, shiny, sterling silverware-- rhythmic clatter of cups and saucers, boxcar acrobats balancing huge trays as the train sways and heaves. That first taste of marmalade scooped from a serving boat with a tiny silver spoon. Those fine black men making a fuss over my toast and tea. How did they regard we three fat pink people who boarded in Cheyenne and headed to Omaha in 1954? They made us feel like the queen, king, and crown prince of breakfast, helped us forget that none of them could travel the train as passengers, or stay in any hotel along our route. Centuries of indignities skittered across the tracks, our offal ravaged in the train’s turbulent wake. Something about the gap between that first step into the Pullman car and the track came after me at night for years. |
Poem for David AdèsHe dazzled us, this Aussie poet,
learned our seasons and taught us his. He wrote here monuments to his grace and graced us with the air he breathed. Our air became his air became our air again. We were dazzled by his words, his smile, his eyebrows lifted, curious, filled with wonder at our efforts, our fragments along the great frozen breath of poetic time. He opened for us a poetic season that honors spring, warms winter, praises summer, embraces fall. His dazzle, now our lament, cushioned by the breeze of his words, the swell of his oeuvre. So long, chum. Come back soon. [David Adès is an Australian poet who has returned to his native land after a period of time living in Pittsburgh, where he was a deeply appreciated by the poets there. David is a VerseWrights poet and you can read his work here.] Baking Bread ~In Memory of Frankie Curran
We all eat our dead, if we loved them, that is. They die and we carry them on our backs like flour sacks we take home, flour to knead into bread. Our kneading is physical, violent. We throw the dough onto the countertop, and pound it with our fists, a plaint with each punch, “Why did you leave me here?” We mold the dough into a metal baking casket, cover it with a cloth shroud, and sit down to worry it through. Will it rise? If it does, we wrench it from its resting place and punch and pound it again. “How dare you abandon me like this?” Our tears moisten the mixture while we heat the oven and wait for a temperature that will bake our memories and shattered hopes in the sweltering womb-bosom oven. The last time I saw Frankie he was Army bound. I was a conscientious objector in Denver—1969. I tried to dissuade him from joining the service. We sang Christmas carols in July. When the loaf arrives from the oven, the house breathes the fragrance of friendship, the kind that would lend a bed in winter, pay a lapsed heating bill, help a pal sing Jingle Bells in summer. Confucius1.
He was a small man and very old, old even at birth. He had many wise sayings, but he never cautioned to look both ways before crossing, or to not trust everyone you meet, or believe everything you read. He never taught a child to keep his hands off a flaming burner, or not to stare at someone who was crying, or not to ask a waitress to bring a glass of water, after she brought the juice you ordered, after she brought the side of blue cheese for your wings, after she took back the ranch dressing that came with the wings, after you changed your order to wings from stuffed mushrooms, after you cancelled the surf and turf to order the Dover sole without capers in the white wine sauce. And he never said, “Baseball wrong: Man with four balls cannot walk.” But he did say, “Wherever you go, go with all your heart.” 2. Robin Williams, as Armand, told his gay lover Albert (Nathan Lane) in the Birdcage that he’d have to buy a grave plot next to Albert’s so he’d never miss the laughs. That was Armand’s way of talking Albert out of killing himself. I wonder where Robin Williams is buried. Confucius said, “The funniest people are the saddest once.” MommyRemember when you beat on his chest,
called him a drunken sot, pushed him back into his old green chair, drunk, overstuffed, his eyes crossed, body limp and breathless? Ward, you screamed, and called an ambulance. Afterward you pulled me into bed, your hamarm vicegrip held me against monster breasts. Later your hamhands palmup witnessed to the bedroom ceiling: Please God forgive me! I’ll never say another nasty word to him, Lord. I promise. I was ten years old and squirmed for release, but you grabbed my face. Your father almost died tonight, you screamed, as if it was I who had slammed his cross-eyed maybecorpse into that chair. Inside your carpmouth lipstick deathsmile, your swirling bedroom purling toiletflush melting dresser dissolving ChanelNo.5stink deliquescing turquoise jewelry chrysallised chemicalpink cheerylava cough medicine vertiginous vortex of bedroom sucked into liquefying family crapper soultrap-- not enough of me left in your hamlock, not even enough of me left to puke. Two days before he died, you wished him dead. Had the Lord heard your witness? Had He felt your hammy palms cup His ether? Did He read your deathline there-- how, at ninety-six, you’d take two days to die, husbandforgot, sonforgot, and ask, in your deathchild voice, where has my mommy got to?
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