Tipsy Imperial Concubine
It has been a brutal year. I am still performing garden triage every other day. Thankful that I haven’t lost a rose, though none have come through unscathed. The summer thunderstorms roll around us, as though some biblical hand were pushing them aside. We are over 20 inches behind, but August has come to a merciful conclusion with 2 inches of rain. I stood on the pavement with the steady drumming of drops around me, steaming off the sidewalk. Now I am standing on my side porch, my shirt soaked through, smelling of rain. I shiver as I watch the fat raindrops pummeling Tipsy Imperial Concubine, shattering her cupped blossoms into a cascade of petals, round. Pink luminous petals lying in the mud, lying on the ground.
The war drags on; going on five years. I am thinking of Tipsy Imperial Concubine, her soft luminous pink petals reflecting the evening sky like unblinking faces, upturned towards the moon in silent supplication. Tipsy Imperial Concubine, who can hear it without wondering at the name. How did you come to be so named? I am wondering if it was named for me in this moment as a metaphor for this horrible time marked by this horrible war. I’m tipsy with the daily unraveling of my naive vision of my America. We are tipsy with a hunger for vindication never satisfied. He is tipsy, drunk-punch love tipsy, for more of the same. What the hell are your origins? Imperial dreams starting out. Imperial dreams ending in this horrible conclusion. And then consider concubine. We the people, we the concubine held at his pleasure. I would call it rape but haven’t we given our consent? Isn’t it marked by our silence? It takes me long moments staring at my darkened fingers to reach lucid realizations, finally brought to the surface by the sticky texture well remembered. The silent humiliation never diminished as though I will forever carry those wads of toilet paper as protection. Bleeding through, I still fear bleeding through and the subsequent humiliation. |
The war drags on; going on 4000 causalities. But I am thinking of the Iraqi dead, her children bruised and bloodied, lying on the ground and luminous. Shadows, I am taken by how blood looks like shadows. Their battered faces upturned towards some god in silent supplication. The stench of warm blood all in my nostrils. It startles me, and it is a long moment before I realize that it is mine. A sudden nose bleed, almost as startling for its coincidence. The bloodied bruised faces fade into a pixilated fuzz and then re-focus. Screen artifacts. Screened artifacts. Screened from citizens eyes. Even flag draped coffins edited from our regard. I pull the tissue away and stare at the stain, in stark contrast but blurred along one edge as my blood wicks into the soft fiber. Silhouetted drops on the stark white, antiseptic field. If we only focus on the field we can manage to imagine those silhouetted shadows away. Shadows that look so similar to blood wicking through the whiteness of cotton briefs. Bloodied tighty-whities. Soaked through BVD’s.
First stark, then blurring as it soaks in…how like my memories. Searing pain rips right through me. And of protection, it has all seemed to fail, and only this wretched silence remains, but there is nothing like the protection of the silence of remains. His body makes a tent of the sheet. His body forcing my much smaller one down; pinned tight. His body urgently thrusting away. ‘Squeeze tight!’ squealed in an odd falsetto, his dick pressed tight between my thighs. False-fucking away. The force of his forearm against the base of my skull pressing my face into the feather pillow. I concentrate on the feather shafts pricking my swollen cheeks. A full 10 minutes this time until I’m chaffed raw and bleeding. And then he is spent and then I feign sleep. It has been a brutal year; but maybe we could all recover some measure of grace if we could only get some rain. |
Black Dogs The sky slung low and cloud wrapped; oddly like his slow building bad mood. ‘Black dogs’, he often described these spells as ‘black dogs’ and it was an apt enough description. Short days and bad moods, the sun barely condescending to shine. A boy rode by on a bicycle and they made eye contact with a mutual nod, a single moment of understanding and then he flashed by, pedaling hard, then cresting the slight hill. That flash of understanding at this moment before leaning into the handlebars and gliding away. It is December but warm still and the roses are in bloom. It doesn’t cheer his spirits but only reminds him that something isn’t right. The rooster crows somewhere off towards the campus, and this produces a wry smile. The bastard is still alive, after more than a year. I imagine him shimmering in the sun, sunburst orange and iridescent green. He escaped from the local FFA, a year ago this past fall. I see him on occasion, strutting around the side yard of an abandoned house on Wadsworth Street, or stalking the tall grasses of the drainage ditches across from the High School practice fields. One day I saw him perched on the hood of a lime green sports car, like some garishly oversized hood ornament. When the city gets complaints, a couple of city sanitation workers dutifully come ‘round with a catch and release trap and try to lure him inside with a hand full of scratch. One Saturday I watched them for a good half hour chase him down Ivy Street with a casting net. The men running hard and gasping while the rooster easily outmaneuvered their every comic move. I’m not sure we have it right, our assessment of what it means to be ‘bird brained’.
He thought about a girl with golden eyes that he had known once in his youth. It startled him, the sudden clarity of his memory, her smell on his mouth and all in his beard, and mostly those oddly animal eyes. How like the rooster she was, easily outmaneuvering his every comic move. A part of him still ached for her, an emotional echo that may have approached the resonance of love, now vibrating at some low octave that only he could hear, and then only during the ‘black dogs’. The Human Stain |
That was 15 years ago, he thought. What the fuck. He hadn’t consciously thought of her in years. Her face lurked around the edges of his memory, playing peek-a-boo, but for that one moment he had clarity, the pain standing out in sharp contrast, honest and clear.
The water spilled from the hose that he held, a chaos of dancing reflections arcing across space to land in a burst of droplets, scattered around and sparkling, set off in stark contrast by the dark velvety loam. On the peripheral of his attention he listened to a thrasher kicking through the leaf litter under the azalea hedge, on the hunt for scurrying bugs. It accompanied him daily and he admired its dogged determination. His oft enough dreamt for version of himself was very much like that industrious little bird. But today, the rhythm was all wrong he thought and then the realization that something was approaching through the leaves. He turned into the eyes of a dark dog…young and squat but heavily built and somehow off. Somehow strangely off, like his feelings about the day. It stood on the sidewalk, in the space between him and the front door, wagging it’s tail but full of a fierce tension. Time crawled as he watched the dog’s crazy golden eyes, the bristling hair along the arch of the dog’s dark back, like watching the strange confidence of youth. There were dark, wet smears around the animal’s mouth. He heard a sound like gravel deep and resonant and it vibrated through the bones. Deep, a half octave below what he should have been able to hear. As their eyes locked, the air between them vibrating, they shared an understanding….before he leapt, the growl building in his throat to a brutal, animal crescendo. He had animal in him in that moment. The Human Stain 2 |
The human stain, indeed. He stands and watches a scissortail. Elegant swoops and hairpin recoveries and now there are two, flying through an unseen swarm of unseen insects. I was thinking of a time when I shot a scissortail at the urgings of my cousins, 20 pumps of the pellet gun. A chorus of boys counting each one. “One boy is a boy, two boys are half a boy and three boys ain’t no boy at all.”, or so I’ve been told. Its silhouetted form free falling through space. One second, aerial acrobatics and the next, dead weight hurling down. The thud was a permanent sound. But he was watching in wonder, oblivious to this oh, so, transparent memory. I’m sure that if he was a little older he could have read this entire human incident in the moirés of my face, pulled, as it were, into a pained squint. But being only a boy he interpreted it as only the sun, low on the horizon too; soon to be dusk and then darkness down. Against the darkness of my closed lids I tracked it as it slid over the event horizon and imagined all my life smeared around its dark rim. All my life collapsed into this dense hope and entwining him.
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The human stain, indeed.
He looked over stacks of old photos and wondered at how shadows are frozen in patterns of silver nitrate, held in matrices of emulsion. An instant, not frozen but chemically fading across a century’s slow motion, to a pallor of faces, with only the darkest crevices remaining and even these slowly retreating back to radiant white. All of this long shadow thread, ever so, beyond perception slow, but erasing itself to light. It seems secretly apropos that these memories, born of chemistry and light, should fade from familiar forces. He was drawn to the familiarity of the resonance of this fragility, held for brevity, perhaps decades. He thought of raven’s stolen illumination. I don’t miss the man, but I miss the stories, he was a hell of a story teller, constructed with the ease of a deep breath, held for long moments, trapped deep down in his lungs, wrapped around his heart and then expelled like smoke, in one long ribbon. He argued that they were one in the same, but I could see that the stories were always better than the man, better than he aspired to be, held, as they were, to a higher standard. But they are all anyone ever remembers of him, except me, so perhaps he is right again, but never right again with me – no, never right again with me. I’m thinking of how he used to tell that one about the burning lawnmower, and how we’d laugh deep belly laughter broken by gaffs that in retrospect, in my mind’s eye, seem hysterical and maniacal, just shimmering on the edge of reason. Unreasonable, that man who now exists only in memory, though I suppose he has left his best and worst parts scattered across his words. Short breaths, but short stories. Now breathe deep and follow. I dug a set of false teeth out from under a cement vault in Holly Springs, Texas in my youth. Am I forgiven, this desecration? Mamma and Nanny were keen to keep up the family plot. The Adams, on my Nanny’s side, were somehow off a line from John Quincy and they gave the land for Holly Springs cemetery and built the original wood-frame church. That church is supposed to have the oldest continuing congregation in the state of Texas and it still stands today, under a canopy of black walnut trees that were not even seedlings when their ancestors were felled to lay the piles for that building’s foundation. They are primitive Baptist and meet every 2nd and 4th Sunday alternating with the brick 1st Baptist in Montalba, 4 miles southeast back towards Buffalo. A borrowed congregation, then. Mama swept the headstones with a bunch of pine straw ‘cause she had forgotten the whisk-broom - clearing off the spattered red mud from the early spring rains. Nanny sat in a green and white lawn chair and mostly watched, sweat standing out in beads on her withered brow and running down the creases of the wrinkles on her sun beaten neck. An angry looking sore stood out along the crease of her nose where the doctors in Tyler had taken off a skin cancer last week. A penance for years of pickin’ in the fields. Bored, I walked the lines of stones, some just field rocks stood on end. Mama said these ones, marked the slaves. Over here somewhere near the Magnolia was the stone for my cousin Jeff, killed by a drunk at only 10 years old. I was 10 now and I thought about his bones lying under the ground, under my feet. I remember shushed whispers that his brain had swollen and ruptured and he had died, barely recognizable to his own parents. His older brother WJ had vomited right on the hospital linoleum. That spilt supper landed like a wet echo of a body bouncing off of pavement. Somewhere in the whispering I had heard that he was thrown over 100 feet, down the centerline. Him and Mark were sleeping in the truck’s camper at impact. Mark survived with only minor scratches since he landed in a muddy bar-ditch. Mark’s luck would hold until years later when he was 25 and he fell off a roof and onto a piece of sucker rod that the force of the fall drove through his skull. Of the 3 boys, that would leave only WJ to discover the gunshot, 20 years later, that blasted uncle Dub’s head half off. His face scraped off his skull like the frosting off a red velvet cake. He had just come home from his sister’s funeral and while he couldn’t beat her to heaven, as was an older brother’s due, he wouldn’t be left behind either in his own hell. While thinking about Jeff and hunting for his stone I noticed something white gleaming in the sun. The glint was coming from a furrow carved out by the spring downpours creating a seam along one of the concrete vaults. Here, lying half exposed were an upper partial, all pearly whites streaked with red clay. I keep them in an old jar on a bookshelf as a reminder of that day. In the re-telling this sounds like the hyperbolic story of an old-time ballad, perhaps revised by the Kingston Trio. Hang down your head Tom Doley, Hang down your head and cry, Hang down your head Tom Doley, tomorrow your gonna die. My Grandfather Galloway died of a heart attack, while clearing a fencerow with a chainsaw. He was 72 and was late for lunch. My nanny found him, lying face up, staring into that Texas sky, pressed into the earth he had worked for over 60 years. His marker is just off the path, near the fence, 2 rows in and 4 markers over to the right. Cool, blue-gray granite, polished to a shine but like the man, left rough along the edges. My first stepfather was eaten alive by cancer. His colon taken a piece at a time, and finally he was sent home to wither away to a husk of a man, all the while watched over diligently by a hired nurse. I felt nothing as I looked down on his ashen face, but fear and regret and relief and love all smeared together around the void that I would nurse for years, watching diligently and standing by. I picked the color of his marker, black granite flecked with golden brown, and it is in the third row on the right, the first one that partially juts out from the rest of the row. It is double, with an empty plot for Mom. My second stepfather died in an East Texas thunderstorm, perhaps a hundred yards and a decade removed from where my grandfather was felled. This too, spoken in the void. His marker is self consciously oversized and a deep black, in an adjacent row. It is also double, the second plot unbroken. When I am old and withered and quietly alone, I plan to eat up life beneath, plumb down to the bone. Plumb down to the bone, I’ll knaw through leathered skin Plumb down to the bone, I’ll eat my ancestral kin. When I am old and withered and quietly alone, I plan to eat up life beneath, Plumb down to the bone. I’ll knash and knaw, And Grackle caw Through leathered skin And with those stolen ancestral teeth, I’ll suck morrow from my kin. |