Points on Staying Alive During That Old War
1. In the window teddy bears & alarm clocks sold themselves.
2. The gridlock stars of the night went invisible with uncertainty.
3. He asked me, Where are you going, kid, so slowly?
4. I had a way of looking back at him that made everything else clear & empty.
5. I grew tired of tongue-kissing disintegrating soldiers.
6. Like a ship’s captain he wore so many buttons & so much beard.
7. His expressions showed up in the lenses of his glasses.
8. With me on the handlebars, he bandied the bicycle about dangerously.
9. Cars wrestled us on the pavers.
10. A lion and a lamb ogled our course from the lintel of the church entry.
11. Gargoyles read the palindromes of streetlights.
12. A plane raped through the low clouds of the sunset.
13. At the bar a gun stretched the distance between us.
14. We drank martinis, watched the clouds deform, and swallowed swords.
15. In general, his mouth spoke my vision & his eyeglasses circled one specific area of my brain.
16. What he ended up looking at were the places where the lace peeked through to my skin.
17. Beyond that, in a parlor, ladies wove through the crowds of wealthy men like roots looking for water.
18. Women with jazzed-out tits handed us drinks.
19. The patchwork burlap shadows listened to everything we said.
20. We walked out the door, wobbly with drink & his whistle splattered out.
21. Everything spiraled & curved like an arpeggio on the staff.
22. We played anarchist hopscotch, in the night, removing cobblestones from the sidewalks.
23. With the structure beside it felled, I could see the concrete description of the inner stairway of his apartment building perfectly.
24. I was so lost that when he put a wineglass in my hand, I held it like a map.
25. Later, drunk in his bedroom, it was as if we had hooks for hands.
26. We languished in his garret under the precarious moon.
27. We snuck down to the dark kitchen, skinned tangerines & shocked each other.
28. We were shoved full, slopped over.
29. Sweat spots metastasized on my blouse.
30. Our hands overlapped, while above us careful ghosts measured the value of appearing.
31. My bare ass on a heavily patterned carpet, designed to hide stains, and then his hand nearby.
32. We had been warned not to move from this quadrant if we knew what was good for us.
33. I was one of many who had laid herself out beside him.
34. The nights were jagged & multiple, like falling down a distracted rabbit hole.
35. My eyes exploded like stars, my lips blew wild screams his way.
36. The last of the fireworks faded. When closed, our lids replayed the whole night in negative.
37. Then nothing.
38. In the morning, with flashlights, megaphones & broad daylight we began our search again.
39. Mothers sat at home, knitting it together, the radio blaring.
40. A crowd of men judged what to do, one after the other.
41. Soldiers inflected their gunshots with meaning.
42. Two trails of smoke snuck from the same mouth.
43. A chinstrap, a seat belt, a stray hair.
44. Murky fingertips like elephant cysts.
45. Tally sheets.
46. A skull kissing a stone lion.
47. The spider web of numbers breaking down.
48. He was told to bury them where he could.
49. So many jaws pulled open by hook & key punch.
50. The general dozed while his buttons stayed alert.
51. The tentacles of his power strained wily & long.
52. Surely the planets that orbited his brain would align soon with an answer.
53. The tyranny peered over the frames of his low-slung spectacles.
54. At the dump, the pure volume of discarded motors, mechanics, coils, made my mind twist like a paper bag.
55. It never took long for the trash to gray, for the fluorescence to grow liquid brown.
56. I recorded bits of the long drawn speeches to spout back to him later.
57. He had the job of telling mothers to sit down, please turn off the radio.
58. The arthritis curled their fingers like fans of scorpion tails.
59. Each television broadcast colorful disasters.
60. Then even a kaleidoscope was too logical for what I saw & I could think of only the words “scattershot.”
61. The stories he had to tell each evening to purge himself in that scrum of an attic apartment.
62. The difference between inside & out had always been tenuous for me.
63. The glare off his glasses had been mirror-slapping me for months.
64. And then that nothing.
65. His dark shadow against the window at night when I thought he was beside me.
66. A couple hours later, the bars on the windows striped his face against the pillow & I wondered how I was back here again.
67. Lately I’d been seeing even the narrowest things in panorama.
68. That was what it was like to stay alive then.
69. Those were the things I saw.
70. That was the way I moved.
Felted
The story begins realistically, with bread and wood and yarns spun.
Though hungry, the elders feed the children one fig, one filbert apiece.
After the children are reined in and sleeping under wool, the parents speak of what to do once hunger has bruised even their care for each other.
They’d been frugal, Mother argued with Father. They pulled spider webs down and packed them along the cracks in the wall for insulation. What more of a gesture could be made?
And despite all, end still stretched for end.
The children woke in the night and heard their parents come to a decision.
They knew fear when they met each other’s glares; but home was not yet a place that could be left.
They knew they only needed to sleep through the night to wake up again.
So into an unlulled sleep they went, willfully hopeful.
They woke to their parents’ lifting arms. Their expressions appeared stern, but behind their mother’s eyes they saw that gossamer love they wanted so badly to prevail. In their father’s brow they saw the prayer that this was the right decision.
And into the forest the children were driven by their parents’ resignation, by the wet spring wind, by the snagging branches of the black hickory and alpine ash.
Their wool trousers blistered and their skin grew loose. The loaves of bread they carried against their hips left a trail of crumbs behind them, though they knew they would never return.
The steeples and spires and minarets of their fantasies fell through to the gutters and sewers of marshlands, the trenches of nature.
And wading through all of this circumstance, the children made this rhyme about the past:
Roll it over gently.
Twist it on the spot.
Pull it out and pull it through.