The Great Maternal Chasm

I am remembering this for someone else, someone who wishes to remain anonymous, so if I fudge some parts, bear with me, I am remembering, too, and not always in the correct order of events, far from it. Perhaps I am the man in the hat, the shamble leg man, the alms woman, harridan and bow-legged man, perhaps not; after all memory is not always reliable, even when one thinks one has remembered correctly, gotten all the events in the right order. A blue sky can be a cerulean sky, a sky so blue that it seems black, a sky so cobalt, Prussian or azure, navy, indigo that it can be mistaken for something else, an ocean, perhaps, even a blue overcoat or a bruise. Sometimes bagels are a woman’s underwear, or the mouth of the great maternal chasm, the very same place I was pushed out from when I was too young to know the difference between a blue sky and an overcoat. As with most things, things we remember and things we forget, these things aren’t worth the bother, so I best leave it at that and get on with fudging the story.

Caudal Pins

The bow-legged man’s parents wanted to call him Jesus but the name was already taken. They decided on Harriman, finding the name unobtrusive and available. The bow-legged man, not wanting to grieve his parents anymore than they grieved themselves, dropped his Christian name when he left home and was old enough not to care anymore. Once his father finished chiding his wife for causing a birth defect in they’re son, he threw out all the sweets and Gin and started fucking the counter-helper at the Cantor’s baker next to the aqueduct behind the A & P. The bows in the bow-legged man’s legs increased in bowing until he could only walk at angles and with the aid of a cane, a rattan one with a silver swans head on the upside. When he was five years-old the doctor solder a pin between his legs, a three inch girthed piece of metal that kept his legs from meeting in the middle. The pin was attached to two plaster casts, one for each leg, that reached down as far as the top of his ankles, had they reached any further he wouldn’t had been able to walk at all, not even a trundle. He volunteered to play in-nets for the bantam hockey team, as he could cover the goal crease without having to move very much or exert much energy. Every Saturday his father drove him to the outdoor rink, dropped him in front of the clubhouse then drove across town to the Cantor’s Bakery, bought a dozen bagels, half poppy seed, half sesame, drove the counter-helper to the parking lot behind the A & P next to the aqueduct and fucked her in the backseat, the still-hot bagels steaming up the windows.

Proper Footwear and Cheese

The harridan met the alms woman at the church bazaar, who in turn met the bow-legged man who had run into the shamble leg man who was busy eating a smelt sandwich on pumpernickel bread, three slices, between each slice boned smelts soggy with fish oil. The harridan accused the shamble leg man of eating fish on a Sunday, a sin worse than buggery, and not wearing the appropriate footwear. The shamble leg man rebuked the harridan for being a sorry crone, offering what remained of his lunch to the bow-legged man, who was clearly in need of a proper scoff, even were it squelchy with oil and spittle. The alms woman removed her blouse over her head, catching her thumb in the selvage, and yawned, her mouth forming a perfect O. The shamble leg man said, ‘footwear and sandwiches and small oily fish, the makings of a fine and middling day indeed.’ The alms woman, having freed herself from the selvage said, in reply to the shamble leg man, but to no one in particular, ‘I much prefer sardines.’ The bow-legged man, with a hint of irritation to his basso voice, said, ‘Cheese, a Roquefort or a Camembert, aged cheddar or Colby, farmer’s cheese and anything blue, these I prefer, with smelts, of course, therein lies the key to a fine sandwich, smelts and cheese, any cheese, just don’t forget the cheese, dare I say, the key to a good…’ Before he could finish, the harridan, her sunbonnet sandwiched between her elbow and ribcage, yammered at the top of her lungs, ‘Shoes, for the love of God, what about proper footwear, have you no respect for the Sabbath, none at all, goodness me!’ The shamble leg man, not wanting the harridan to get in the last word said, ‘We, Madame, are Christian, not Jews.’ To which the alms woman replied, ‘Oh dear, a Jewish church bazaar, how strange indeed, indeed very strange indeed.’

Yvonne Petkus

yvonne.petkus@wku.edu Baggage, 2003oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk

Anthropomorphic Savant

There is a mercenary of birds milling about, flapping and tweeting in the tree outside my bedroom window. I like birds. Whether or not they like me is another point, one only an ornithologist or anthropomorphic savant could possible address. Our dog couldn’t speak, preferring to bark and yowl. My father traded it to a farmer for a shotgun and car fender, the left-hand side one if I remember correctly, which I seldom do; remember anything at all for that matter, so I guess being correct is moot. I put on my trousers this morning one leg at a time, just as I was taught. There was a time, not long ago, when this was not the case and I would try both at the same time, which caused me to hop and carom to one side or the other, which side is unimportant, suffice it to say I hopped and caromed and made a general nuisance of myself. A bird, a wren or a red--breasted pheasant just alit on my windowsill, its tiny clawed feet clutching the sill. My window is open, or a jar, so I can hear its warble and twitter with unhindered alacrity. I like birds, but I already told you that, so the point is moot, repetitive at best. It’s going to rain; I can smell it with unhindered alacrity.

Delousing the Muse

Four-twenty-eight in the morning and I’m thinking about the Husserl/Walser connection, or is that the Walser/Walser connection, it’s like being in a frigging windstorm, or is that sandstorm, seems rather silly to be cutting hares, so I’ve taken a sulpha, a pillory, or is that a poultice-sulpha, who knows, or cares for that matter, really. I have no idea what a pillory is or isn’t, nor care to, so I guess I’ll cut some hares and be done with it. Okay so we’ve got the log-legged Miss Jeffery’s kowtowing it down, maybe up, the middle-school hall, high heels clip clopping like a Bedouin on PCP, a Bedzin might be more appropriate, okay a Bedzin with a tasselled fez, that sounds good, clopping down the hall with a tasselled fez on, a ream of freshly mimeographed pluses and minuses and mathematical crap, insufferable crap, in her arms, cradled like a sleeping, okay, not sleeping but a jumping and wriggling child, a Bedzin child, a waif let’s say. This is going nowhere, the sulpha must be working, or is it the poultice, who knows, who really knows, anything, really, that’s the question really, when you separate the wheat from the shaft, my namesake in fact, that kickboxing blackjack wielding so-and-so, what’s his name, my name, my goodness me, I’ve forgotten my own name, maybe what I thought was a sulpha was actually PCP, a tincture of angle-dust, a seven-percent delousing, gosh, this is terrible, what would Miss Jeffery’s say, indeed, what would she say?

Husserl and the Walsers

One thirty in the morning and I’m thinking about Husserl and Martin Walser, trying to figure out if the latter was related to Robert Walser, the Swiss madcap with an ear for cant and Kant. There is a north-westerly breeze breezing through my bedroom window and the smell of rot and wither, signs of Spring and foul weather to follow; and as I have an arthritic neck, a titanium shoulder, hinge and mortise, and an encroaching headache the answer seems simple, more so, simpler than simple, simplest simple, yes, quite facile, hackneyed and banal: who gives a rat’s ass Werther the two were related, Husserl perhaps, but he’s dead, rotting in some lime pit, which by all appearances, has neither a middle, end or beginning, just one run-on sentence that reminds me of Miss Jeffery’s high-heels clopping down the hall in fifth grade middle-school, which had neither a middle, in between or centre of gravity, or was that a nativity scene, hayseeds and bootstraps and Husserl counting to one-hundred backwards, or was it forwards, the point seems moot, stupid at best, inane, perhaps. So there’s a breeze, an east-westerly breeze breezing in through my boot-room window, Miss Jeffery’s high heels clipping down the drainpipe spout, or is it the eaves, who knows, certainly not I, the I that is I but not I, the I-I, or some such nonsense. Oh yes, thank you from the bottom of my poetic heart Octavio, you were a blessedly grand writer, and take a good picture to boot, or was that bedroom window, maybe it was boot-room, I’m reaching here, spouting off at the ears, with neither a middle, end or in between, just one long sun-on my face run-on sentence, Miss Jeffery’s, well you know where this is going…one fifty-seven in the morning and I’m thinking about Husserl, carrot cake and the Walser’s, and not necessarily in the order, or Kant for that matter, which really matters very little now does it, I mean really, does it?

Octavio Paz Lozano (March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998)

The Romanian Busboy

Abraham Zimmer, awaking from troubled sleep, placed his feet nimbly on to the floor, pulled on his trousers, Kaki’s with cuffed bottoms, a shirt with blue twill stitching, double-tied his shoes and shot the dog. He’d been thinking about shooting the dog for some time now, but it was this morning, a morning like any other, that he did it. He made a fried egg sandwich, Turkish coffee with rosewater he’d bought the day before, opened the morning paper and began to read, taking small morsel bites of the sandwich, which he held to his chest on a small tea-set saucer, and equally small sips of coffee. His wife ran off with the busboy from the Romanian delicatessen, a rakishly short boy with an air about him that unnerved people, many of whom were Romanian. Abraham Zimmer, being of unsound mind and decrepit body, hated the idea that his wife was fucking a man much shorter than he, a busboy, at that, with rotting teeth and yellow eyes. The dog never saw it coming, nor for that matter did Abraham Zimmer, for whom life was a random series of reoccurring events, many of which reoccurred more often than he would have liked them to. It was either him or the dog, and as the dog had no common sense the choice was simple, quite simple indeed. Abraham Zimmer awoke from unsettled dreams and yawned, another morning he’d be late for work, another day figuring out ways to stop the reoccurring from occurring again. He’d dreamt that he’d shot the dog, or was it a Romanian busboy, the difference seemed negligible, so he placed his feet on the floor, nimbly, pulled on his kaki trousers, double-tied his shoes and shot himself.

Prohibitions and Latex

A pork shoulder grey sky severed just below the copse-bone. I am witness to nothing, said the man in the hat, at random and with little need for acknowledgment. Once the syphilis had gone, the Witness left behind traces of himself that would not be evident until well into the tertiary stage. Those who had been touched by the Witness’ hand now played witness to Bedlam, a scourge that flattened their foreheads and softened their brains. No amount of prayer or witnessing could abet the progression of the disease, lesions and wets and roily skin that itched and crabbed, and night sweats that soiled the bed with surge and boil. In the pamphlets he left behind there were prohibitions for sodomy and beastly sex, self-pleasuring and extramarital sex, and sex with lubricants and latex sheaths.

Black Kitchen Shoes

my grandmother
boiled potatoes and cabbage
in the same pot, ladling the fat from the simmer
with the same spoon she used to lay welts
into the corm of my back

she used the flat
of her hand to pit bulgur mewl
and a gar to well the crusts, the one my father
used to stave apples from the top
of the neighbour’s tree

my grandmother
fed us blood pudding and rice
barrowing cows’ tongue in cheesecloth, and wore
the same black kitchen shoes to church
summer through fall

Trumpeting Ass

Were I to sleep I’d ruin a perfect record of sleeplessness, and that I will not be privy to, not when the birds will soon be a-twitter and the sky bluer than azure stones. I will await the bluestone blueness of the morning sky, a blue that summons up moraine lakes and oceanic blues, a glacial blue, perhaps bluer. Furthermore, I have tasks and attendants to attend to today and sleep will simply encourage battlement and confusion, which I have more than enough of for one day, two perhaps. ‘And he made a trumpet of his ass’. Dante, my dear man, you have made my day yet again. You never fail to amuse me, something, I fear, I have little time or patience for, or battlements and addled thoughts, both of which, as you know, I have in vectors and droves. I think I hear a twitter, perhaps a shrilling; it’s simply a matter time before the sky turns a bluestone blue, perhaps bluer yet.

Lucien

Fen and Slough

Mired in thought I sit in front of you, not a moment’s reprieve from the thought that thought the thought antecedent to this thought, to and fro, back and forth, the seamless thought that thinks in the dark, awaiting the march forward that will bring an end to the mire and fen. I thought an answer, but I was sorely mistaken, the thought I thought, the one antecedent to this one, was mistaken, a thought, thought out of line, a thought without a thinker, mired in the slough and peat, such is my Gomorrah in life, my fen and spoil.

The Vanity of Thought

thinking
we have answers
to life’s atrocities, thinking
we have anything worth saying
at all, two breaths from
silence, we the vain
life’s alley cats
yowling

Curbstone Slush

A killing frost of Snow White white snow. A killjoy of snowy snowed snow. Kilocycles of snowed snow snowed then heaped in Snow White heaping heaps. Snow White sniggering credit card cants of snow white snowy snow mitered with a Visa, no, an Amex, with a curlicue beveled edge. Eyelids like moth’s wings, flypaper and velum, no, tarpaper, oily and sebaceous, shanty shack and unwholesome. Curbstone slush sluiced into mounds of slushy snow, not snow white or ivory caste white, but brownstone, blotchy and unseemly to the eye, the beholder of the eye-I. March snow is mercenary, white whitest snow clubbing it into a gored-red skin, seal pelt bloody red snow, an insanguination. Snow and blood are selfsame, cut from the same bolt, skinned from the same eviscerate. Bogspore: paella of castoffs and mealworms, bowels and tripe, intestinal linings and pancreatic slurry. Milt and pensile carrion, left to molt and scurvy into bread ends and black mold. Pennicillin for the sugar weary and insulin pale. It is snowing, yes indeed so it is.

Dogsbody Toting an Ashplant

The air is miserable with it, flying rats and juice heads with anemic sucks for faces and indents for cheeks, not a bone or railhead in sight. This is no man’s land, the paper doll cut from cardboard and crape. You live here, perhaps O, or E or I, but we’d be damn hard pressed to admit it. I live in the cave with the guano and mice feces, a welter of a dam place it is. And he him with the purple scold on his face yowling rice paper. Shreds of the stuff, like fucking millet, fucking papyrus and end bits and nugatory. Never a dull moment, so Seth the rector rectum. Rams’ bladder, some say, with onions (skins boiled on) and dead men’s finger nebs. Fancy that, a dogs’body toting an ashplant with a cherry on top. Dogs lick each other’s rectos in the hopes of discovering something new and savory about themselves. Fucking curs and bowwow knockabouts, not a brain amidst ‘em. Who in their slight of mind would think such things? I, for one, would be hard pressed to admit it, of that IOUE can assure you.

Tight Skeins

moment’s wound
into blankets and throws
early winter solstices

the spoon burnt
blackened like the bulbs
under her eyes

An Early March

chaffing millet from bone
gutters with ox mallets and pike

separating skull from hank
the talisman, they say

of an early March slaughter

bridles of hair sheared white
dunning axe and razor cut

fratricide culls the bone
from chaff and marrow

life takes root in mud
not wine or dry biscuits

millet and bone separated
from host and shoulder

the Talisman of a rising
or an early spring slaughter

Burgees Curative

I am deteriorating, a corpse with organs, viscera decomposition, an inchoate otherness that creates its own misfortune and drudgery. Skin loosening around waging and neckline, halter-skin, made from cow’s hide and smear, clove oil, Burgees curative; waiflike: sherbet lollopped into outstretched bowls, shaky-hand and jimmy-legs and a woman with a rebus of my six-year analysis on the primal screen of her forehead. Tomorrow is another day: repetition ad nausea.

Fetal Clinch

In Sarajevo they found a children's body burned beyond recognition, stickle with gasoline and shrapnel. The mother couldn’t identify the body, the child’s body, bowed into a fetal clinch, singed black like oilman’s tar, the eyes gout with flies and ash. What had he witnessed before his death, before the flares lit up the sky, and burning gasoline clung like a fever to his skin? I will never understand the war, she said, or why they left the body out in the rain like a dog, the eyes bloated with flies, the smell of gunmetal, and his feet pulled tight into his chest.

Temperance and Prohibition

Should you care to listen, I will tell you about the grisliness of alcoholism, the Dantean declension into hell. I have been there, crawling like a child on scabby knees, without a Virgil or a poet to show me the way back up and out of the horror of Dis’s hell. I climbed on the back of a behemoth, a monster, an obsession to repeat, to become again that which I feared and reviled, the colossus within, the ogre whose thirst is never slaked. I am here to tell you the story, the story of my ascension into hell, my fistfight with the beast, the colossus that seeks revenge for temperance and prohibition

Clabber and Free-base

I am the excrescence that fills the void, the syphilitic ulcer that skirls the skin of your lips, the gonorrheal wetness at the back of your throat, the skimpily dressed debauchee with the machicolate smirk and wee misshapen feet. Why are you like that? She said, so crudely indifferent to feelings, people’s feelings? I’d rather, I’d much rather worry about upsetting an animal, I said, a beast, than a people. People heal, beasts don’t. You’re an imbecile, she said, her lip curled around the chisel of her teeth, whiter than free-base and bed sheets. I know, I said, that I know, perhaps nothing else but that. I wrapped my arms around her waist and held my breath, her breath, hers that she held, not mine, pitted with a soft almost imperceptible wail. I murmured something, something lilting, into the conch of her ear, her ear, not mine, and closed my eyes. Life’s a waste of time and time is a waste of life, I said, nothing more. I said nothing, nothing more. That means nothing, she said, her waist clabbered in the shank of my arms, my fingers, not hers, but mine, tightening, cinching in around the manse of her hips. Fecal nonsense, she said, and not very good at that.

I loosened my fingers around the camber of her waist, not mine, but hers, and opened then closed my eyes, once, then a second time, then none. What if I were to pickaxe my eyes, these, I said, pointing at my eyes, not hers, mine, and be done with it? Like Oedipus, the bad and mealy son. Would that make you happy, change things, as they are, make things more, better than? I opened then closed my eyes, her eyes, not mine, remaining open, not shut, all the while, for the while, while I closed and reopened mine. Maybe, she said. Maybe it would, it would and wouldn’t hurt, couldn’t hurt, would it? Now you see, I said, if you were an animal, some beast, I would pay you more respect, care more, at all, for you feelings. As it stands, I could care less, less than more than less. I hate you and your, you and… I kissed her softly, with a passion broaching on madness, on the cant of her head, where the front of the head meets with the eyebrows, and whispered, softly whispered, I know, yes, I know. That I know, perhaps that, but nothing else.

Blackmail Here on Earth

The man in the hat as a boy didn’t understand witnessing or handing out guides to heaven door to door. If there was a place called heaven he’d find it on his own, without the aid of pamphlets, choirs or snake handling. He thought about pilfering the Witness’ pencil case, but couldn’t put himself up to it, even if the Jehovah was wrong in the head and full of fire and homilies. The Bible his grandmother kept in the Crown Royal bag in her bedstead table, the very one grandpapa stole pages from for roll-your-owns, was something he feared worse than death, even though dieing, so the Bible said, was a good thing, a reward for all this nonsense and blackmail here on earth. The way he saw it the Bible was blackmailing those it was suppose to save, telling them that all this sinning and frigging around wasn’t their fault, but something handed down from the Garden of Eden, so really none of their business anyways. The Bible was like that, full of half-stories and false witnessing, and all those places and dates and consonant names. His grandfather burned a bush once, but with a stray roll-your-own he’d snuck behind the back shed while grandma was busy washing one of his grease-shirts. After the Witness left the man in the hat burned one of his pencils in a grassfire in the copse back of the mile-fence, then stomped the burnt up lead and wood into the dirt with the heel of his boot. He witnessed very little of importance after that, or chose not to remember whether he had or not. Fear does that to a young boy, more than a Bible or a snake handler with one thumb and a missing eye.

Blotches and Flay

The midday sun cut a furrow in the man in the hat’s head, just below his hairline and above his brow. As it was ten past eight, he stropped his razor against the scabbard of his trousers, and holding his face in the palm of his left hand ran the razor a hairs-width from his face. When he was a boy a Jehovah’s Witness told him that shaving encouraged hair growth, so if he wanted smooth skin he best put off shaving until he was well into his twenties. The man in the hat, thinking this incurably stupid, and having little time for witnessing and handing out pamphlets, shaved until his skin was red, and then applied a balm that claimed to do away with irritableness, flaying and blotches. The Jehovah’s Witness left behind a Bible, a wooden pencil case and three dollars in nickels when he left to go witnessing again. He stayed in town for a fortnight preparing pamphlets and waiting for the shoemaker to remove a nail from the heel of his shoe. He had to shift his pamphleteer’s bag from one hip to the other, mindful of the nail in his shoe, leaving him little time for homilies and witnessing. He claimed that Birkenstocks with Mayflower buckles were for the modest, preferring a two-eyelet loafer with perforated wingtips and calfskin liners.

The Two Berbers

These are the times in between, the not quite days, the days left out and forgotten. He lived in the days in between, those days that never amount to anything. There are days that go unnoticed, remain outside. The man in the hat lived in such days, too many to remember. When the shamble leg man told him about the tortoise shell, which he did the next time they met, he said, ‘I’ve seen my fair share of porch roofs’. To which the shamble leg man replied, ‘me too, but I’ve forgotten most of them, or so I remember.’ The shamble leg man told the man in the hat that he knew a Berber who shaved two-by-fours into toothpicks. The man in the hat told the shamble leg man that he, too, knew a Berber, but this one made sailing ships out of toothpicks and ate nothing but tinned sardines on dry toast. Both men acknowledged the other, and shaking hands went about their business, the one to buy sardines, the other to find the Berber who made toothpicks out of two-by-fours. Such are the days in between that amount to nothing, and even if they did, would be quickly forgotten.

Tortoise Shell

The year his grandfather gave him the fifty cent piece the shamble leg man found a tortoise shell latticed into the sewer grating behind the aqueduct. It was emerald green with flecks of opal and brittle round the edges where it had run up against the wire fencing. He kicked it with his boot, releasing a hackling of flies that have woven themselves into the soft underbelly. He kicked it again and the flies scattered, a coil of intestine snaking round his ankles.

Nana Mossoro

Night fell on the shamble leg man’s head. He felt the pressure building up in his ears, the stirrups hardening, calcium pressing in on his ear drum. There was much in the world he didn’t want to hear, like bawling children or old people complaining. He cared little for symphonies and choral arrangements, detested opera and jazz, flugelhorns or anything played on a trombone or alto-sax. He hated Edith Piaf and Nana Mossoro, and men who used pocket combs and hair salves. An elm tree grew behind the Waymart. An oak tree grew beside the apothecary. Three bushes grew next to the grocers. A hedge grew along side the aqueduct. A blue spruce flourished in front of the post office. The shamble leg man counted the change in his pocket, three dimes, two nickels, seven pennies and a fifty cent piece his grandfather had given to him when he was twelve.

The Surplus Value of Rainwater

The alms woman sat in the rain with her tongue out wishing she was somewhere else. As she had nowhere else to go she stayed put, calculating the rate of precipitation against the surplus value of rainwater. When she tired of this, she did pluses and minuses and divided roots into fractions. When she tired of this, she recalculated the surplus value of rainwater, counting out the dividends in her head. Her thoughts crowed in the part of her brain that processed mathematics and common sense. She remembered her uncle Jim cleaving his arms around her like snakes, his breath bitter with pipe smoke and humbugs. His porcelain eye was wet, even though the ducts had dried up and the socket was pushed inwards. The sky cawed at her, a black crow with yellow eyes that follow her every move, even when she sat still doing fractions and calculations in her head. Her uncle Jim lost a finger whetting a grass scythe, a spurt of blood stinging his good eye. He tamped his pipe with the nub end, the one he kept on a string attached to his shirt pocket. He had no mind for fractions, square roots or common sense. He preferred mumbly pegs and cards, things a man could do without having to think too hard or pretend he could read.

Sty-gate

Bailing Wire

He pulled the spliced end of rope through the crown and fastened it to the halter. With his free hand he swung the felling-hammer over his hip and across his chest, snagging the flap of his shirt pocket with the claw-end, the shirt grandmamma had washed and pressed for him the night before. He hankered down, freed his right hand and swiped the felling-hammer across the top of the cow’s head, taking it out at the knees and hobbling it to the barn wood floor, its head split clear down the middle. Grandpapa never once made any excuses for the felling-hammer, even when he missed the mark and shored off the side of a cow’s head, or it took two swings to bring the animal down. The man in the hat never felt the need to fell dogs, even when the hunger ate away at his belly like a cancer. He remembered his grandfather yarning bailing wire around wet hide and the smell of hurried death and fright. He used catgut to shore off the weight-bags, flaps of skin and muscle settling to the bottom. He sold the innards to a pig farmer who lived beyond the one mile fence. He ground them with millet and dry suet, heaping bucket-loads of it over the hopper and into the sty pen. He preferred the lower guts and bowl as they stiffened the blend, making it easier to hoist over the sty-gate. The man in the hat’s grandfather used the money from the weigh-bags to buy whisky and Indian shag, and rock candy for the children that came round to watch him fell cattle. The pig farmer traded his manure for credit at the grocer’s, where his wife bought food, winter blankets and lantern oil. The man in the hat never spoke to the pig farmer, and never once saw him smile or unlock his jaw.