| Ralph
Angel
USA
Breaking and Entering Many setups. At least as many falls. Winter is paralyzing the country, but not here. Here, the boys are impersonating songs of indigenous wildlife. Mockingbird on the roof of the Gun Shop, scrub jay behind the Clear Lake Saloon. And when she darts into a drugstore for a chocolate-covered almond bar, sparrow hawks get the picture and drive off in her car. Easy as 8th & Spring Street, a five-course meal the size of a dime. Easy as vistas admired only from great distance, explain away the mystery and another thatched village is cluster-bombed. Everyone gets what he wants nowadays. Anything you can think of is probably true. And so, nothing. Heaven on earth. The ruse of answers. A couple-three-times around the block and ignorance is no longer a good excuse. There were none. Only moods arranged like magazines and bones, a Coke bottle full of roses, the dark, rickety tables about the room. And whenever it happens, well, it’s whatever it takes, a personality that is not who you are but a system of habitual reactions to another light turning green, the free flow of traffic at the center of the universe where shops are always open and it’s a complete surprise each time you’re told that minding your own business has betrayed your best friend. But that’s over, that’s history, the kind of story that tends to have an ending, the code inside your haunted head. Easy as guilt. As waking and sleeping, sitting down to stand up, sitting down to go out walking, closing our eyes to see in the nocturnal light of day. “Treblinka was a primitive but proficient production line of death,” says a former SS Untersharfurer to the black sharecropper-grandchild of slavery who may never get over the banality of where we look. Only two people survived the Warsaw uprising, and the one whose eyes are paths inward, down into the soft grass, into his skeleton, who chain-smokes and drinks, is camera shy, wears short-sleeved shirts, manages to mumble, “If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.” “Breaking and Entering,” Neither World. Miami University Press, 1995
In Every Direction As if you had actually died in that dream and woke up dead. Shadows of untangling vines tumble toward the ceiling. A delicate lizard sits on your shoulder, its eyes blinking in every direction. And when you lean forward and present your hands to the basin of water, and glimpse the glass face that is reflected there, it seems perfectly at home beneath the surface, about as unnatural as nature forcing everyone to face the music with so much left to do, with everything that could be done better tomorrow, to dance the slow shuffle of decay. Only one season becoming another, continents traveling the skyway, the grass breathing. And townspeople, victims, murderers, the gold-colored straw and barbed-wire hair of the world wafting over the furrows, the slashed roads to the door of your office or into the living room. The towel is warm and cool, soft to the touch, but in another dream altogether a screen door creaks open, slams shut, and across the valley a car’s headlights swing up and over. And maybe you are the driver with both hands on the wheel, humming a tune nobody’s ever heard before, or maybe the woman on the edge of the porch, grown quiet from fleeing, tough as nails. “In Every Direction,” Neither World. Miami University Press, 1995
It Takes a While to Disappear The city purrs, it hums along, the morning hardly risen. A well-dressed drunk smears her finger across a doorman’s lips and whispers. Someone stumbles. Someone curses. Someone hoses down the pavement. We must have made a mess of things again, all fuzzy black and white and greenish at the corners. Some final thing that put us in our places. You’re still standing in your winter coat alongside everything you wanted and deserve. But you were thinner. The desk clerk looked right through you. The cabby didn’t listen. You were out of sorts back then, you say, but you’re still frowning! In vain a shrieking siren repeats itself and fades. The quiet idles there, a crosswalk signal chirping. You’re still standing in your winter coat, but I don’t know you. Someone scrambles down a fire escape, his shirt a flag that’s shredded. A boy salutes. And then his mother, too. She stoops to smooth his collar. She makes a sculpture of her packages. You’re a different person now, you say, but you will never happen. “It Takes a While to Disappear,” Twice Removed. Sarabande Books, 2001
Man in a Window I don’t know man trust is a precious thing a kind of humility Offer it to a snake and get repaid with humiliation Luckily friends rally to my spiritual defense I think they’re reminding me I mean it’s important to me it’s important to me so I leave my fate to fate and come back I come back home We need so much less always always and what’s important is always ours I mean I want to dedicate my life to those who keep going just to see how it isn’t ending I don’t know Another average day Got up putzed around ‘til noon took a shower and second-guessed myself and all those people all those people passing through my my days and nights and all those people and and you just can’t stay with it you know what I mean You can’t can’t stay with it Things happen Things happen Doubt sets in Doubt sets in and I took a shower about noon you know and I shaved and thought about not shaving but I shaved I took a shower and had a lot of work to do but I I didn’t want to do it I was second-guessing myself that’s when doubt got involved I struck up a rapport with doubt I didn’t do any work and so and so I said to myself I said well maybe I should talk about something but I didn’t learn anything I couldn’t talk about anything there was lots of distraction today a beautiful day Lots of distraction It had to do with all these people all these too-many people passing through my days and nights But I don’t get to hear about ideas anymore know what I mean Just for the hell of it Talking about ideas Takes the mind one step further further than what it already knows Doesn’t need to affirm itself It’s one step beyond affirming itself Vulnerable in a way that doesn’t threaten even weak people Those nice-guy routines They come up to you because they know how to be a nice guy “Man in the Window,” Anxious Latitudes. Weslyan University Press, 1986
Tidy I miss you too. Something old is broken, nobody’s in hell. Sometimes I kiss strangers, sometimes no one speaks. Today in fact it’s raining. I go out on the lawn. It’s such a tiny garden, like a photo of a pool. I am cold, are you? Sometimes we go dancing, cars follow us back home. Today the quiet slams down gently, like drizzled lightning, leafless trees. It’s all so tidy, a fire in the living room, a rug from Greece, Persian rugs and pillows, and in the kitchen, the light fogged with windows. “Tidy,” Twice Removed. Sarabande Books, 2001
© All Copyright, Ralph
Angel. |
