Innocent Nine

My mind breezes between things. Tring tong goes the bell, then a fist – leather gloved – pounding, pounding. Innocent Nine and I scuttle across dark carpet, try to peer between pulled drapes, but the crack left onto our corner of the world reveals nothing. Bam bam bam. The door, solid core I think, withstands another onslaught, but the hinge brasses blanch and shudder at the barrage. Innocent Nine and I exchange wide-eyed silence. Peripherally, I pick up the cheap steel deadbolt. In an instant, Nine is there sliding the bolt into place, without even a sound.  He holds his head low under another volley of bams and tring tongs. Then, the noise stops. Nine bellycrawls back to me, whispers that he heard muttering, footstomps receding. Outside, a door muffles shut; a truck grunts and peels away. Innocent Nine looks up to me and he asks, “Dad, why do we hide from Swan?”

I ease back a drape in time to see the ice cream truck round the corner. Knowing he’s gone, I settle down for the moment to try to explain what Schwan’s represents, but my mind breezes between things and I find maintaining coherent thoughts to be a lot like Eskimo pies. While Eskimos have 381 descriptive words for snow, Baskin-Robbins has only 31 flavors, though that’s still more than Schwan’s offers at the door, but they do have those pies and Baskin-Robbins only deals in scoops. “Eskimos have only 1 word for pie,” I say, thinking it meaningful, but Nine, not even yet a teen, has already stopped listening. 

Sky People

Boarding the Bus

The month of June in ‘92 was a scorcher. The sun had more than doubled in size, air conditioning was prohibitively expensive, and I was sharing an apartment near Lake of the Isles in South Minneapolis. My roommate was a young woman who regularly overindulged in smelly liqueurs. Back then I was an oil painter and my roommate, alcohol permitting, was my model. Jody and I would drink day or night, sometimes even finding some time to create art. More often, Jody and I would frequent one of several of the Uptown neighborhood pubs, spending our afternoons perched on barstools, watching sweat beads roll down highballs. By sundown and paychecks permitting, I’d be floating in a vodka tonic and Jody would be sinking beneath the bubbles of a fizzy green on the rocks with maraschino squeezings.

            This one afternoon I was sitting alone in the apartment, Wink Martindale grinning from the small black and white TV. Jody hadn’t been around all day, but I was hoping that she’d call. I was itching to get to the bar. Just then the phone rang. Two minutes later, I was standing on Hennepin Avenue, waiting for the bus. Jody was in Uptown. Her parents had given her some cash to help her get by, and so, drinks were on her until the tap sputtered out.

            I boarded the bus and dropped my change in the meter. Only a few sweat-stained riders were scattered about inside. I plopped into a seat as far from any other person as geometry would allow, and I leaned back and smiled. I imagined that Jody was already ordering me a cocktail. I could hear her voice calling the bartender man. “Hey man, can I get my friend a drink?” To my left, on the unoccupied seat across the aisle, was an abandoned paperback. As the bus arrived at my stop in Uptown, I grabbed the book and went to meet Jody.

            As we got loaded, we read the works of Arthur Rimbaud. Years earlier, Jody had briefly grazed the periphery of the college-aged literati of Austin, Minnesota.  Jody knew Rimbaud’s work somewhat, but poetry was a foreign language to me. Throughout high school, each year’s English class poetry unit was complete torture. I never liked the sense of disquiet and confusion that poetry raised in me. Mr. Leitie taught me to avoid poems whenever possible. For the first time, however, a whisper seemed to come off the weathered pages in the subdued lighting of that Uptown bar. Across the swelling Atlantic and half of the United States, the voice of a nineteenth century teenager spoke to me:

Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed. One evening I took Beauty in my arms—and I thought her bitter—and I insulted her.

Rimbaud was eighteen years old and he already spoke with an air of wisdom. How many young people mistakenly believe that they are wise with the accumulated knowledge of their few years?

I have seen archipelagos in the stars,

Feverish skies where I was free to roam!

Are these bottomless nights your exiled nests,

Swarm of golden birds, O Strength to come?

True, I’ve cried too much; I am heartsick at dawn.

The moon is bitter and the sun is sour...

Love burns me; I am swollen and slow.

Let my keel break! Oh, let me sink into the sea!

If I long for a shore in Europe,

It’s a small pond, dark, cold, remote,

The odor of evening, and a child full of sorrow

Who stoops to launch a crumpled paper boat.

Washed in your languors, Sea, I cannot trace

The wake of tankers foaming through the cold,

Nor assault the pride of pennants and flags,

Nor endure the slave ship’s hold.

Jody and I shared Rimbaud that one afternoon, but afterwards, the young man belonged to me alone. My years spent as a painter were in a long slow decline from a highpoint of mediocrity, and I knew it. For me, needing a life model was more an excuse to get girls naked than serving any nobler purpose. If Jody realized that, she never called me on it. To her credit, she allowed me the fantasies I constructed to give my life a greater sense of purpose, and to get laid. I had very little that I could call my own back then. I had my paintings, such as they were. I had Jody with me. And on that South Minneapolis bus, the great spirit of the clouds passed me a freebie:

—Sometimes in the sky I see endless sandy shores covered with white rejoicing nations. A great golden ship, above me, flutters many colored pennants in the morning breeze. I was the creator of every feast, every triumph, every drama. I tried to invent new flowers, new planets, new flesh, new languages. I thought I had acquired supernatural powers. Ha!

. . . I called myself a magician, an angel, free from all moral constraint.

. . . I am sent back to the soil to seek some obligation, to wrap gnarled reality in my arms. A peasant! Am I deceived? Would Charity be the sister of death, for me? Well, I shall ask for forgiveness for having lived on lies. And that’s that.

                                                                        Arthur Rimbaud

June, 1873

Jody and I read as the sun completed its rounds and dipped its orange blaze behind the trees and urban skyline. I didn’t tell Jody that evening, but by the time we were drunk enough to board the bus heading back to our dirty little apartment, I had already become a writer.

Twinkle Twinkle

Caesura Coda

Wiener.

Sister’s wiener lay on sand.

Beach fire and burnt stick. Wiener in hand, she ran.

Cold wave took away. Sister stand.

Watch wiener

float slow.

Potato.

Wrap in foil.

Burrowed into beach. Loaded mortar:

Dropped potato into hole. Covered over.

Piled driftwood dry.

Hour fire.

Sand sear.

Little feet. Sun scorch.

Frolic jaunt over blister burn.

Run for water. Pause a bit.

Wee paws on beach towel.

Teary sear abate.

Old log.

Exhumed. Rolled.

Floated out. Little paddlers.

Little riders. Ladybugs.

Log near going under.

Pulled back to shore.

We have mallow.

Slow sloth seep.

Descend from stick tip.

Mallow sizzle on glow coal.

Tear sear now

slow abate.

Dead father.

Made ash in oven.

Made mix with sand.

Made ash on hand. Sister’s son ran:

Cold lake wave rinse. We grown,

wipe paw. Lemon-scent

wetnap.

About to Pop

Due Uccelli

We birds

in dense lament

for metal moss stream.

Over the bridge fly in sight

we will have shape, scrape

the burn marsh grass, the blazing terse,

and frost the leg pipe darken jewel

egg collapse like sea foam, like

battered cake apron.

Through parchment,

the hang edge orchard

we breathe the jelly egg: bread

and butter smear. We’re a wheat bellow

bride the cold of which forever

prickle. Wine and twilight and we tip

the bluer hats pasted soon

of the portico.

Harder salt touch

rock the straw stalk.

I scent your heart lonely

dazzling corn and naught

but the pone. And we’re limp things,

naught but sedge cheese left to the satchel,

elusive beaver moon dream

and brush knife.

We’re damp

and decadent whisper

snatch of mutual increase.

Savor the saucer jaunt. I’m a post.

You whisper glass poemies and grasp

the swipe board promise hold

and keep, lift and back high

and drink dark violins.

Emerge blue, superb,

bottle the taste straggle

and too tall hum for under

the flap of rainbow moth utter fall, light

the match and grasp damp, made much

for edge shapes and flat pour

cobble reach stitch. I’m strung

now by blur of whisp.

We birds,

tussle tic cupped

such adequate, sugar sweet

shrivel and unctuous slag. Any

brittle mantle horizon and bobbling under

where wounded throb from the cloth

hook harness clock. We strip

slice mill and beak out

to the dark.

First published in 3:AM Magazine.

Leg

Cloakroom stand of suckling fur 

and clear the moist blueberry folds.

Liquids crinkle kiss of a fuzzy pebble,

the flaming underhide. Succumb.

Clouded innards thick 

and lonesome. 

Shoe.

Clogged mâche mouth drool

through the razor wire paper 

cache, left. Stay low little finger,

placate face in my ear. Heavy lids 

draped and soften, brown bear, 

stomach in twisted layers.

Thick and lonesome 

impinge.

Hat.

Nancy - acrylic on canvas

Crutch

Shriveled cloth

that too, did you.

Comma blossom conversation

drop, jump in the moon,

skimming the nightjar of what is now mist.

We danced on train in. Gaunt

fruit glaze mud of sluice mill and scissor.

Spooned the glad man's gabardine plant nuggets

to light trail pack and bent. Find him late

in the iridescent algae at the farthest edge

from the track. We paste grim on the rack.

Like your kernel nub on the amble contour

of a nightshirt, a grasping bramble

of slander hand. Heart buried spindle. Poke

a bonnet switch cloth snagged in briar

duct under fungus lump burl and dally.

Fugue. 

Dissolve a gilded lump as dusk slump. 

Look. Poach. Acorn oak. Splendid

crutch of naked and murk.

James and Storm - Minneapolis, July 1994

James - Hoyer Heights, Jan. 2011

In Sheets of Rain

I dream in styles of offstage weather edge

and the white distress bonnet. Suspend

in linen drift. Decoupage. Hide

a holdover bag by someone’s

daughter leave to rain pause

like a similar church and

the resined pew in memory.

One discovers bird flurry and

necessitate claw, she at a time

smiles so slight, her kindness

to make the outline seldom garden.

There’s a certain obstacle to that texture.

Drawing in crayon and pen - by James, Donna and Paula

Such Cut

Out in creosote

heather pulverize moon surround

and curve retraction, woolen girder exhales

continual dusk and barge among sky sofa wells.

Palm under. Forced down the blazed out

lull bonnet, and under flank, sparkle emotion.

Spry lidless you, pre-sleeping in blank tubes,

your brocade retract and mended lift aloft, now

hat out with your cramp claw rake the air.

The form possibility and prolonged contortion.

As a forgotten gem, fog, horn-hem, lock and moon

rose lattice, at twelve bristle drop, chatter at the edge

a gasp back the swipe board and keep promise hold joist.

Reach the water sank, and pram back below partition.

The gully hedge if dark clam stipple sieve ferns

and black candor made usual plain mill

splice, while what’s left out, while when

only the tin crane remain.

Flat cotton. Lavender

grown linger. Mango

skillet and such.

Fasters

Just like a buddha in the dome hut of ironwood, blunt

cornice hook breeze, squeeze and feel the drop. He pull

the caesura curtain, spark kinickinick hash

and icy splash of see tap in a coffee can, comb out

the etch cloth foggy naïf bristle gap. Be here crochet.

By twilight soon of the portico, he go beaver moondream

and knife clutch. He would terse beating on strict

margin of sky, ready for battling of sparrows, tight snitch

in the unscuff glove lift and back high, sweet rise

of a drink for the night moth utter fly and like

a saucer jaunt, whether supposed mercy

mutual increase, match and damp,

and go nifty with the magic bone,

or go back.

detail - acrylic on canvas

digital photo

detail - acrylic on canvas

Le déjeuner sur l'herbe

Chatter bloom on the edge

where mulch egg thatch collapsed.

Fetch a sedge cheese and butter bread

in a patio satchel. Birds beak wide

at metal moss stream near the hang edge orchard

scrape the dead marsh grass on a bridge fly.

I pull you en plein air on red plaid [breathe],

smell of your heart lonely, jelly egg. Dazzle

an oat bellow bride the cold of which forever pickle.

In sight you will shape, pass sea foam and kitchen

body being. I tip a blue hat and elusive

tally lull between dense laments. Bird.

Under ache of harder sun, I leg pipe darken

the blazing terse and faux drip the rinds

into the salt path [we breathe].

Beacon Slurry

Broken slurry of a wobble fantastic girl. She needed I

was not so. Hoist jam in the dark early and passed descend

collate slurry, yet much of the mallet turner I see finally

haste blister theft and fixate for the bone paddock.

Freak for fishing pole putty jar squish in the brainpan.

Eat green apples. Cleft there in the camel boot pontoon

molt, furred knock over not sieve. Who it is.