An American Papyrus: 25 Poems | Page 5

fly away into America, and
depart
Far from the Castilian hot-dog vender
Of Herman Park waiting for
The
thirsty and hungered
And those ignorant of what they want
But know that they want
something
And so come to buy from her
Who wants people to come to her
For
more than the chips
Because the hotdogs are overpriced,
Who formulates
That she
is unskilled
And that a computer course would answer it all;
Far from the Netherland psychologists
who
Stares at her ebony reflection
In Rothko Chapel's dyed pool;
Apart from others,
and no-one, all
Pulling alone for humanity to both
Come and go from their lives.

The Politics of Herb's Woman

Waitresses lightly frisbeeing out
Dishes of breakfasts
Catching glimpses of Colonel
North's
Photos on the front sides
Of customers' papers and
Formulating judgements

Of rebel or martyr
From an appearance
And a few words that
Drifted in when the

Hands relaxed plates to table mats;
Farmers wishing the seeds
To suddenly open to
be plucked up faster
So that they are not
The last ones laid in
By their hands;

Little "third-world" nations of people hoping
For the great debtor nation to
continental-drift
To bankruptcy, painless and alone;
And nearly empty of thoughts--Herb's woman, Jeanie,
Behind the Ellison Building
standing
With concrete drilling its stiffness
Through her soles.
There had been a
time--
With face raised from her age-smelted pose
To the ever firm stories of that
building--
That she would think of receiving
her paycheck so she could
Go to
K-Mart and have something.
But now years on top of each other,
Uncountable to her,

She continues guiding
The few of the masses of cars
That turn into the lot
Where
to park: in winters
Conscious of the visibility
Of her cold breathing,
And summers
with the scents
Of greased telephone poles
And sights of light gleaming off
Car
windows, she thinks
Of buying old junk from garage sales
For her yard sales, with the
same prices,
So as to recall the sounds of human voices
Other than her own.

Brumfield
His job was a novitiate where there was no operator's
manual
With which to have
faith in, and no rules
But to move with the dustmop pushed before him
Along the
empty corridor, and then down a staircase
Where he could descend to more passive
depths in
cleaning.
At home he would smell the odor of his bare feet
coming to him;
Would see the blue
under his toe nail that looked like
marble;
And these would be dominant sensations

Though he would be vaguely aware of them.
Beneath his bended legs he would sweep
his hand
To capture a fuller scent as his fingers would flick
To capture a fuller scent
as his fingers would flick
His unshaven face. Then in his only room where the
bare
mattress
Was lain along with his leather jacket
And the dirty underwear cuddled
around a clean
toilet--
Where the Rosary hung on a wall
And the guitar leaned in a
corner--
he would do his push-ups.
Most of those early mornings some train
Would pour its breath to the weeds
At the
edge of the tracks, losing them
In sound and mist of a voice
Screaming out, alone,

Through the cold and the living.
His arms would tremble
With the body weakening,
and then demobilized, to the
floor
Before the count of fifty.
Through the fogged
condensation
Of the upper corners to a window
He would glance up at the train--

Each car imagined as the girlfriend, Cindy,
Or the seminary, which he never
Grasped

or rejected and so
They slipped away;
Or his mother, who with cancer
Began to
close herself off to him--
Grasping one of those trains appearing at the time
With the
familiarity of two strangers
Who recognized each other's desire to remain such.

Oracion A Traves De Gasshole
(Patron Saint of Respiratory Therapy Workers)

Saturday. All the same:
A silvery grey
Thin and undistinguishable
From skies to
parking lot
In exact shadow; and he finds his car.
The lid, laced in rust,
By the turn
of the key,
Parts the grey as it pulls up;
The grocery bag is dropped into the hole;

And the ground beef slaps down on the floor
Of the trunk as if a second slaughter,
Its
grounded nerves convulsing it
A couple of inches nearer the oil stain.
That meat, in
body, that last moment
After consciousness has severed itself;
Skin peeling under the
fur, hidden,
But not from the last hot beams ahead
Of emerging dusk, becoming crisp

And then soaking up the hot blood, as the trachea,
With the last of the air drawing in,

begins to fold its walls; and he could imagine it
Like he could imagine, from unexact
memories,
The woman, last night
At the hospital, whom he began to like--
her body
pulling cell by cell
Apart before he had a chance
To finish the rescue with the hose
Descending the nostril as a rope,
and then flushing out mucus.
He gives the ground
beef an air-born sommersault to the
bag
And closes the lid that is connected to the
vague
light bulb of the
trunk.
The Gasshole's reflection on the trunk lid
Is