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Thunder Sandwich #23 |
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Robert Bohm |
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Elijah's Mindset after Rudy Slurs a Customer Now exiled more, or less, he retracts his turgid divinity, returns to harsh temporal streets where uncertain crossings reflect his true country. -- Anthony McNeill Whoever said raindrum first, I like them. Remembering my only trip to the Philippines where among stony hillpaths language is the stones monsoon storms beat upon, I hear what isn't here: mud sliding through a hut's doorway, the bittern's beating wings, foam at the storm-whipped river's edges. To return home that year, I worked in a boiler room on a freighter to Madras and then further west. Finally back in Baltimore, I heard the raindrum's wild rhythms as I snapped my fingers and danced in a wharf-front bar, whirling away from anyone who tried to touch me as I honed my skills as one of the sidestep's most talented choreographers. And so, as in the species' evolution, movement comes first and only later language -- but when it came, it took control. Even now, I still love how it's improvised from anything -- maybe Amy's baby lying dead in the Newark motel dumpster or the smell of olives near the train station wafting from David's slit wrists, 1961. Or was it '62? If you steal a harlequin from Miss Sarah's storefront and take it to the prom, this is what you get: less than what you should. And so tonight, Amy's baby dead for months now, the infant whispers "This is for you," which is when in The Charmers Rudy throws his best punch, misses by a mile, gets floored , then heaved out the door. Lying on the street he yells bastard asshole neighborhood-ruiner! at a passerby whose prissy gait or was it his Jewish-looking nose or -- Rudy loses consciousness now, which is when his mind's eye, a tomato plant trapped in the only plot it's ever known, dies, done in at last by the hornworm's birth into an unjust world where it's the killer in the veggie patch and yet in spite of this sometimes a bully, beaten to a pulp, is left squirming on his belly on the sidewalk late a night while the moon sheds light on things the bully never could and still can't figure out. Leaving Eyes half closed against noon light. A seagull flies into the wind above a Martinique beach's black sand. Up all night and in a few hours the plane leaves. Days ago the tanner told me, as I listened eagerly, how he confessed his craving for pineapples to the priest. It's you who interests me most, though. Your wrist pulse is the Warsaw ghetto: so much going on but soon deadly quiet. Low blood pressure. Maybe today the newspaper vendor will sell me a paper in which I can read about what happens next -- "It's impossible, completely impossible," you insist. " No, it isn't," I reply. But I wonder. Most of the Jews are slain, and most of the Sioux and your great-grandmother too and great-grandfather. So who's the seer who'll foresee the unseen? Hickory, dickory, dock. I wish I knew what calculus is but I don't. And you? Your disappearances: more real than your presence ever was. When I reached out to touch you two mornings ago you'd already gone to the Bata church to pray to the Virgin of the palm frond and spoonbill -- your distance was, then as now, less like the water I'll soon fly over than like this veranda with its potted orchids rotting in the sun. Beyond Exegesis Gale winds hurl snow from creaking poplar branches, window glass rattles. Unable to sleep, I sit at my desk, staring at a page in dim light. Above and below the sentences and in between words, snow piles up, wind hisses along stone fences. In my dead father's stories, skilled tradesmen bang tankards on wooden tables in Bavarian beerhalls while the lost mountaineer dies in 1911 on an alpine ledge. My wife sleeps in the next room; my children, grown up and gone. Dark snowdrifts block the doors and cover everything. |