The idea came to me in the kitchen while I was cutting cilantro for the black beans and my friend and I were talking while the sea outside remained the sea holding its mysteries in the dark tempting us with its surface dazzle. The idea came as if a theory of war Id been working on though in truth it just bubbled up like the first disturbance in a pot that means the soup is about to boil. Is there something in us, I asked him, my friend who was waving the celery tops at me and asking with his eyes if they belonged in the soup and I was saying yes with my eyebrows and by us I didnt mean the man and woman feeling the man-and-woman thing while cooking together in the kitchen by the sea where the wind carried salt into our every breath but I meant our animal selves, our mysteries-in-the-dark of mind and body that doesnt feel balanced without the threat of dangerous animals, the African brain of us, the sinew and blood longing for the bond between predator and prey that weve tossed with the entrails of farm-raised salmon and beef.
Mine was an amateur theory of war that we wage itnot our kind? so its fine to kill them? mindless of the mechanism ticking and cranking and blowing up beneath the surface inside us. We dont even know what were doing when we do it. What lesson in being human did we not first learn from the animals? The cheetah was the first domestic cat. In ancient Egypt the keepers asked, as we ask, can we please make the violent lie down and go to sleep and when it wakes to lap calmly from the saucer? And then the something that was in us was soup, a liquor that had blown from the sea right into our bowls.
THE MIRROR
Once I had a cat who studied himself in the mirror. He didnt know what it was in there staring back at him but he couldnt stop looking because the face never turned away and eyes meeting eyes want more seeing.
Its already dark. No moonlight. No whip-poor-will the bird that tormented my childhood refusing to take on the night without incessant song. That bird must have been the size of a fire hydrant I thought then but learned later it was just a pip of feathered life with a voice insistent as the news, that continuity of disaster and argument to which we all belongbomb in recruiting office, stoning in public square, crude oil in everyones hair, to mosque or not to mosque. Dont turn away. Its just the brute world that will outlive us, the lean hard muscle of it flexing.
But the birds dont belong, they are settling into the night, their feathered quilts ready-made. Some of them are rising out of their bodies, whole categories of bodies, and into the being of non-being where of course were all headed after a few more parties and fixations of eyes upon eyes. But first who doesnt want to make something of it, the clutch of childhoods solitary rages and the way the face begins to cave in on itself with age so that it looks like an Arizona landscape, all contour and defile, telling the outcome of its story to everyone, leaving out a few details, so that a person might stare at himself and say, Dont I know you from somewhere? You look so familiar and yet... for Don Bachardy
THE TOOTHBRUSH
Im trying to remember you without nostalgia thieving your words and hoarding them because all that Im getting is the toothbrush you carried in a mug every day down the corridor heading for the mens room to commit a small act of resistance against breakdown. I always laughed: you have the best hygiene of anyone in the department, which was a joke because the stink of cigarettes surrounded you like the fry oil of a prep cook. Still something like tenderness inhered in the mug and its rigid little daisy.
Heres how we met: me on job interview fresh from New England trying not to sweat in desert heat, you after friendly dinner with Gail and studio tour and poetry talk driving me downtown in some big junk car with no AC saying Barrio Hollywood and Hotel Congress and the Shanty. Then came the test: the story about a whore in Nogales who had a spider web tattooed around her pussy. Im sure that was the wordoffense was the point and I understood implicit was the question does your poetry trump your politics? This was in those years when women were correcting men as if sex were a policy that could be rewritten in a pencil stroke. I passed, laughing it off: Oh my god youre kidding thats incredible. A poet can find wonder anywhere and I did wonder how strong a woman had to be to take that kind of pain. Heres how we said good-bye: I came to visit you, the nurse recalibrating your drip as you asked, have I got any time? And you, thumbs down, facing it.
I saw you catch your breath hand to throat beneath the black t-shirt, some event the hand would contain, some moment of self-consolation, like air was alien. Aurelie called it the weird majesty of death that had come over all of us, people gathering in a circle, each face reorganizing itself through the eyes of anothers grief as if to be animated were to violate the pure encroachment of the inanimate. There was a kiss, me walking you to the bathroom and then to bed where you lay in shuttered afternoon light, others in the room and you seemed nothing but this invitation to tenderness. And what kiss was thisnot familial peck, not lovers open-mouthed encroachment, not parental seal of approval but the mouth opened by the final so quiet need to say there is nothing between us that needs to be cleaned away. for Steve Orlen (19422010)