Thu, 19 May 2005

Various Kisses
The past is exactly like the future, only in the other direction.

The members of my family seem to all possess defining moments, single decisions which speak as much of who they are as years worth of more incidental moments. My uncle John once saved the lives of two cabdrivers and their fares, midwinter, steam rising from their mouths and wounds, pulling them from flaming wreckage. John hadn’t saved anything before in his life, and wasn’t particularly good at this particular rescue: not only did he cut his hands to ruby-red ribbons shattering a side window with his fists, he broke one of the cabbie’s arms trying to pull him free of the seat belt without unbuckling it first. Nevertheless, this city sought fit to claim him as hero, and the cab company publicly offered him free rides for life. John now spends his days riding around in various cabs, attempting to sell hand-bound books of his own poetry to paying customers. This is problematic for the cabbies, as fares often find readings of The Mellonberry Cantos: A Cycle in Twenty-seven Parts Based on the Practice of Shelling Mountainsides to Cause Avalanches as Attack Tactic in World War One both oppressively dull and overly derivative of early William Carlos Williams, a criticism John tends to respond to with screams and threats. John is now assigned to a rotating list of cabs each night, so as to evenly distribute the potential for attack (and bad press) amongst all on-call cabbies. This isn’t family knowledge, John having fallen out with his brothers prior to his becoming a heroic figure; I only know because Yusef’s cousin, to whom I had to deliver an incredibly suspicious package to on my return to the states, works for the same cab company John haunts. It was only halfway through his telling of the story I realized I was related to The Ghost of Carter Cabs…but this is not a story about my uncle John, or about cabdrivers, but about an entirely different poet, who had wares of her own to sell.

The German architect Albert Speer developed a system by which the buildings he created would decay and fall in specific ways, so as to create magnificent ruins. Speer was a National Socialist, however, and the majority of his buildings were Nazi offices and camps, which were destroyed at the end of the Second World War. The effectiveness of Speer’s plans, thus, remain unproved. The time I spent with the poet in question was brief and long past; my memory fills with new holes each time I think back to those days. No matter what is lost, however, what remains is undeniable, something I cannot…lose. I nearly said escape. Something I cannot escape. Perhaps this is how a defining moment is defined.

My uncle John sold all of three books of his cantos in the first year of his new job as in-cab salesman. The first two were to drunk couples who most likely didn’t understand it was his work he was selling and not the work of a — I’ll say it, with all due love in my heart for my uncle — a real poet. The third was to his father, my grandfather, who made his living as a failed escape artist. This would be the last time the two of them saw each other, as later the next year my grandfather performed his final escape act late at night, in his workshop, with a twelve-gauge shotgun. My grandfather lost three of his fingers and eight of his friends in the Alps, at Mellonberry Pass, a fact I did not learn until after the funeral. My grandfather bought his coffin twelve years before he was laid in it, and each spring he filled it with cuttings from his lilac bushes so as to prepare the interior. The lilac bushes were planted by my grandmother just prior to her death by ovarian cancer. When he died, he left nothing to his sons but his debts; he is not spoken well of in the family now.

John did manage to barter off a fourth collection of his poems to a woman who seemed to wear circles of small stones around her eyes, sapphire, royal blue apatite. I believe this now to be snow melted into the kohl she lined her eyes with, refrozen in the distance from her doorway to the cab. John, however, is adamant. The night we discussed this I began to understand the problems my family had with him. John traded one of his cardboard-bound books, twine-tied and inked with borrowed and stolen and found pens, for a kiss. This was not a woman of this earth, John told me, this was someone celestial, and her each motion was by divine appointment. Ever the poet, John.

“In the pathway, a drift of leaves;
one searches but does not find source, no tree nor wind.
I feared, then,
and did not even hear the crack.”

I was to meet this woman myself, not much later, and though I saw no stones circling her eyes I knew her instantly. I knew her from voice, from the things she had written and read aloud, from the roof of her building, each Sunday night for as long as I could remember. I knew her because she was reading from John’s work, which I had slugged through one weekend sick with some deranged recombinant flu. A blue-violet opium dream, this woman, whose kiss (I imagined, then, watching her from the edge of the room) seemingly dusted with narcotic sugars, the muscles in your chest falling downward, your skin misting with juices from where her fingertips met and held your body, now aching to lose its rigid boundaries. I couldn’t understand how my uncle John could press his lips to the mouth of this woman and still retain the ability to speak, to breathe. What I did not know, at the time, was that his lips had never met his. The poetess has kissed his hands.

From finger to palm, the muscles in John’s hands were torn into a red pulp like the insides of overripe peaches. He had regained some muscle control after he saved the cab-people, but the actual tendons had not grown back correctly. John can only hold a pen with a special rubber support slipped along its sides, and even that becomes intensely painful after more than a few minutes. It’s because of this that John receives disability payments each month, leaving him ample time to pursue his new profession. I asked John how he could bear to write and copy his poem, all 298 lines, over and over. John didn’t answer me, instead offering me more lemon-tea and asking me about my sister Angela. I asked him this question again, later, under entirely different circumstances, and he told me “This is what I do.” There was to be no further discussion.

I had decided, in a conviction I never told even my closes of friends, that I was going to pursue a life of celibacy. This was not for moral reasons, necessarily, and certainly not for religious reasons. I had made this choice after watching what relationships had done to others, how they had pulled themselves off from the world, filled with what D. H. Lawrence called “egoisme a deux”. I watched them have the same discussions, over and over, endlessly delighted with the same tired clichés, the same humorless jokes. I watched them fight each other, break each other down, becoming the flat average of two perfectly interesting people. And I said no. I most certainly did this out of fear, and with rather flimsy reasoning, but the times are rare I regret my decision. Because I want for nothing I can be trusted; I serve no master. Each word I speak is mine, each decision mine, and I stand or fall on my own terms. And yet I ached for this woman, for the proper steps by which to cross the room to her, the proper words to say. I wanted her to know my thoughts, where all lines were clear, the geometry simple and elegant.

I left, terrified, and once I was home I attempted to write a poem. I had never actually put words on paper outside of utility; I had no idea how exactly one went about writing a poem. I thought the same thoughts over in my head, lost scenarios, if only I were more brave. A heat I can feel against her cheek and neck, the coming apart of her clothing, the smell of fresh-formed juices. The skin of the body is so different in so many places it’s hard to believe we can call it all by a single name. The more I thought about her, the farther I was from a poem. I sat there for hours. I began to develop a nausea which I keep with me to this day. There is a trembling in my right arm, at times, which I first felt that night.

It’s quite possible there’s something essentially wrong about lusting after someone you don’t know. Perhaps that’s what finally convinced me to stand on the sidewalk one Sunday night and ask the poetess if maybe she’s like to come down and eat a bunch of pixie-stix and work off a mad sugar binge by teaching me how to write poems. This was winter, and the air didn’t particularly smell of anything, and the sky pretty much just looked like the sky, only with it being so cold it seemed like there were more stars than usual. I remember none of the surrounding details. What I do remember is her coming downstairs and out to the street , walking up to me, and saying “You don’t know me.” “Exactly. That’s the whole point.” We substituted fresh strawberries for pixie-stix, but essentially the evening went according to plan.

I’d like to tell you there’s a conclusion to this story, that the end closes the remainder of what I’ve said like the lid of a well-made box, but I don’t think there is. I was originally hoping to finish with a poem, my first poem, but even with all the years gone by, all the things which have happened, I still haven’t finished the poem. Sometimes, at night, I can feel things shift inside of me, maybe memories, maybe words, maybe something entirely different, and I feel like I’m getting closer, but when I awake in the morning I remember nothing. I’m no closer than when I began. Perhaps someone else is writing my poems for me.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #