We cradle the precious things

and place them carefully upon our lap

the miracle of newness is like a sacred prayer

it is hands raised high and heads bowed low

yet always in that moment eyes opened wider

we marvel and bask in the wonder of it all

it is a full moon in a hungry sky

hope’s whisper of a million questions

before the answers will ever reach our lips

a blooming garden at our feet

a child’s hand clutching ours

yet still we walk too fast

as time brushes by.

the wolf howls, no reply.
the clock ticks but never chimes.

who outlasts the tomb?

we walk the halls
to remember footsteps,
shout at the walls, why!

who do walls remember?

whispers and laughter,
the weight of every sigh.
the shadow that weeps
and the child who cries.

the wolf howls, no reply.
the clock ticks but never chimes.

what do windows see?

faces pressed close, lovers kissing.
the tears from a bleeding sky
when the rain
taps gently for all lovers.

walls echo laughter and longing,
and windows dream
of time gone.

the clock is ticking.

who outlasts the tomb?

the wolf howls....
each heartbeat a plea against the void.

"And now! What did we wish to say, that we were not able to say?" --St. John Perse
"Love is a stranger in an open car" --the Eurythmics



When love is a stranger, things can get twisted.
A girl can get sick, being the McDonald's drive-thru of eating ****.
She may cop an attitude, or hear the cop say
to his partner, "That chick might as well just shoot herself."
That stuff sticks.

When daddy and his strophe wife, the replacement who shoots up Thomas Mann say,
"We'd like you to move out," after just a month of nervous dumbshow confusion,
the mulligans are running out and the road calls.
Where else you gonna go, baby?

When love is a stranger, there are still poets, painters,
failed academics, leering dittybops, locust nutjobs
and grandfathers walking with canes into
the roaring pandemonium of downtown San Antonio.
There are still stricken drunks on pulpit stools
to tell you, baby,
let's get out of here,
I know a slaughterhouse on the south side
where a girl like you could see god in fumed gold Krylon.

When love is a stranger and the bones bend
like spines of books with pages knifed out
to hold some lack-rent new straw man's works,
it's time to get knocked up with an idea,
blood out a new plan and join the shanghaied sailors
at the 12-step dock in the free lunch church downtown.

When some oxford-cloth **** tells you not to come back,
You come back anyway, you find a new high,
you start scudding down San Pedro with no idea
and no wheels, but a sacred heart, a votive candle,
and maybe a shine-ghost mirage of something better.
Slide into the Olmos Theater,
start tatting together the film edges until you spill
out with the rest of the film buffs,
find a tarantula on the pavement on the way home and say,

"I will not die here."
That's when you pick up some pride, some Spanish
and some mom and pop Texican deliciousness
before doing the dishes to pay.
Hey chica,
it doesn't have to be this way.
New friend Jake tells me that til it rings in my ears.
He buys me the leather jacket I was jonesing for,
and suddenly it's my world too,
holy ****, I have the right to be here,
and I am walking down Alamo towards the cenotaph
thinking maybe being a live coward or dead hero

are not the only choices that I have.

When I first met Skully,
I was an ingenue in a silly fragile plastic body--
a nursery flat, a starter bed,
not yet Anne Of Queer Gables
magnificently not giving a ****.

Back then,
I believed that Skully was stuffed like a bell pepper,
jammed to bursting with thoughts, dreams and
wisdom on every subject;
I didn't know, as we lay together under the ceiling fan,
that he was as vacant and distant as outer space.

He PEZed me kisses, bought me roomsful of useless junk,
and twisted me silly like a bonsai tree.
I let him.
Daydream starlets and archery targets both have curves,
and sit still for the incoming--
I spent a decade with Skully that way,
as if I'd done it with a porcupine and was proud of the damage.

Now, he sits like an unfortunate date brought to dinner--
big-eyed as a girl, smiling too much,
and adding nothing to the conversation.
Still, I can't bear to throw him out,
and so the dogs lug him around like a trophy,
scoring and striping him with their joyful teeth marks
and losing his mandible under the fold-out sofa.

My girlfriends tolerate him.
After all, he's dead, and won't start any stupid crap about threesomes.
The next door kids ask for him sometimes,
and they bowl him at empty pop bottles in the driveway.
I confess, though,
that late at night, when it's stormy, and I'm alone,
I pause before bouncing him down the basement stairs, and I say,

"Thank you, Skully,
for keeping me from having to be alone
in the years before I bloomed into my need for heart, flesh, soul,
and not just solid bone."
Then I lay one on his grinning kisser
and even add a little tongue
just to tease him
for the lack that made me leave him like a southbound bird

I fold the silence into paper,
address it to your absence,
and let the ink wander
where my voice could not.

Every word is a bridge half‑
built across distance,
collapsing into the river
before you ever arrive.





.

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                                          “You in the West…”

“You in the West don’t know what it’s like to be ruled by peasants.”


                                              Oh, yes, we do.


Cf. P. 138, Balkan Ghosts, Robert D. Kaplan

With this Parthian shot at our kakistocracy I say good-bye for a week or so to you, dear fellow scribblers and scriveners and dreamers and artists and intellectuals (that is a fine, useful word) and lovers of freedom, for like Bilbo I’m off on an adventure!

Jenny Mechanical is too mecha for the main house
but too human for the tool shed.
She can turn stripped screws, whip up a perfect grilled cheese,
provide power during an outage and mow and mulch while she's at it.
She also dreams of a recharging kiss and poems appear at her fingertips.

Jenny had a little lamb whose fleece was made of synthetic polymer
and everywhere that Jenny went, the lamb was sure to follow her.

See Jenny Mechanical, stopped in the middle of the front yard,
telling her lamb to look at the new leaves with its LED eyes.
She has always been a perfectly average 5 foot 3, can open any jar, pick any lock,
but she is leaking into its faux wool because of something beyond utility.

Jenny Mechanical can eat no fat, nor either any lean
and yet between the two of them she knows her grease from cream.

Still, as Jenny could tell you, mere maintenance is not love
and the poems at her fingertips have diverged from factory settings,
glowing pink
then rose
then lavender
then blue
then indigo
to create from refraction a lovely illusion, a rainbow or so it seems.
___

I could have gone to the cemetery,
or back to my high school lab,
find him lecturing from a podium,
bony finger raised,
demagogue of the dead.
I could break him down piece by piece,
cram him in a duffle,
a femur jutting the zipper.
Ignore the groan-
Skeletons are
by nature
never satisfied.

Instead I found myself
in the carnival lot,
The dog was long dead,
the sign kept guard.
Rusty rides slouched like tumbleweeds.
Cotton candy in memory-
blue tack crunching my teeth.
Lewd.

Skeletons fixed on poles,
spiked up through pelvis and spine.
Use ****.
Grip shoulders. twist. lift.
When one slid free,
he collapsed into my arms
all bone-light, lovely,
mine at last.

I just brought him home.
Sat at the kitchen table.
Named him Curly.
Zoom howled: WAG’s gone weird!
What’s his name? What’s his name?

His name is Curly,
I said, but I knew
his name was You.

We drink wine by the pool.
He never sips.
Sometimes I pour a second glass for the glint.
Sometimes he tells me Danny Elfman
wants to play his ribs like a xylophone.
Sometimes he sighs,
he hates Oingo Boingo.
I laugh. Obliging.
So do I.

When the wind kicks up
he smells of sugar and rust.
Sometimes he rattles the glassware.
Sometimes he won’t sit still.
Skeletons are
by nature
never satisfied.

Hello, Doctor.
Welcome.

What a relief to see your bag.
No, not your tiresome shirts and socks
and your dime novels;
I mean your black bag, filled with the shining apparatus of life.

Follow me up the stairs, if you would be so kind.
Do you like the dark oak?
We find it somber, like a casket.

This is why we need you so desperately.
We have nearly given in!
So used, are we, to the predations and the despair,
that we women wear black, even at Easter time,
and the men drink, and are sick on the front lawn.

I apologize, Doctor.
You've only just arrived, and I haven't asked you about your trip.
Did you have a nice seat on the train?
Were there porters and cooks,
solicitous conductors?
A woman across the aisle, saying her rosary and weeping?
Monsters and archangels in your fitful dreams,
shooting it out like they do in the moving pictures?

I'm teasing, Doctor.
Forgive me for my familiarity.
Forgive me for trampling upon your necessary reserve.
Do you know why I was the one chosen to meet you?
It is because I am the sanest one here.
I am the limb that can, perhaps, be saved above the knee.
I have a nice singing voice,
but can no longer afford the risk to indulge it.

Are you good with severe injuries, Doctor?
You're not just some kindly old hand-holder, are you?
Here, one has to have eyes in the back of one's head.
We form fierce attachments all in a single afternoon;
a glance becomes a kiss becomes a fevered coming together,
and all before the dinner bell.

Don't look so disapproving, Doctor.
In this place, life isn't a game of whist in the stuffy parlor.
We must rip at it, and at each other, as one would a carcass,
or we starve,
gnawing on fear as if it were a rib.

Have you seen our Wolf yet, Doctor?
Were you uneasy, sitting on the box seat on the way in?
As a physician, you know how the organs and sinews are knit together...
did a tremor run through yours, like doomed babies holding each other?
Let me tell you about our Wolf.
After you've unpacked and taken tea,
I'll take you to the graveyard,
where the earth is always freshly turned.

Our Wolf is large, the same off-white as the doilies on the table downstairs.
The hired man we keep insists that there are no wolves here,
the last one having been shot years ago.
He swears it was a bear, or a cougar,
that gave him that ugly scar across his face.
He admits he didn't really see it, though,
and that was when he could still see, at all.
Now he sits polishing the silver, like an Irish servant girl,
fuming under his breath.

I saw our Wolf myself, Doctor,
when I was out gathering tomatoes from our vines,
just feet from the main house.
There he was, standing as still as January,
staring at me from next to the smokehouse.
Something in me shriveled, like a frost-struck bloom,
and I thought, "Cook will have to improvise her sauce tonight."
The fresh red pickings rolled out of my apron and onto the ground
like so many drops of blood.

It let me walk away, Doctor.
I've been distracted and unpredictable since.
Some wolves eat the organs first, did you know that?
The heart, the liver, what have you.
Tell me, what is it in these bodies that makes us animate?
Are we just some accident of chemistry, when we hope, dream,
fall in love?
Are we nothing but green vines with red eyes,
dumbly waiting?

Once again, I apologize, Doctor.
You're tired and want to unpack.
Will you think of your wife and children,
or does your head fill like a well bucket with the stuff of achievement,
overflowing?

Come down to dinner when you're ready.
We eat on the veranda,
because we have to keep the big table clear
to lay the injured on.
After dinner, relax a while, enjoy a cigar, read your journals.
Then, take a walk in the evening air, just at sunset.
Watch for our Wolf, though,
and I'll watch for you, from behind the curtain.

Goodbye, Doctor.
I mean for now, of course,
but I wouldn't unpack everything, if I were you.
Don't tax yourself the way our previous doctor did.
I don't think he really understood the things that come upon us here,
sudden and hard,
and always from an oblique angle.
Rest now, Doctor.
I'll let everyone know you've arrived,
except for our Wolf
who already knows.
__