An American Papyrus: 25 Poems | Page 6

lank
and curved; the appearance of his face
With its facial tip of the nose and its greased


Separation of hair like a wet muskrat in a metallic
reflection.
His face moving away,
he sees an old Hispanic man
Who walks from the area of cars carrying two bags
Of
groceries in an embrace that could be
For weighty children; he thinks "The senescent,

Carless, careless baws--turd! A campesino!,"
And he envisions himself as that:
having to pull out
the thorns
That pierce through his tennis shoes as he shovels

scattered cacti leaves from out of the back
Of the pickup to his animals;
And living in
the dry ravine surrounded by houses made
of wood
That had been patted loosly
together like adobes,
beside
The families of the kiln workers
Whom with him eat
out Land's blessings
And piss and shit out onto her graces,
But himself happily not
knowing the language of the
Mexican people...
Himself not wanting to know the
language
Of any people that his sister, Cindy, and college pal,
Dave Broom-Up-The-Butt
Echo.
He does not wish to think of them
Or the vaginas that are not his to put on
Or the
illusive woman who would be sick with him
like a child lying on the sofa in fever and
hoping
That in the shadows on the wall and the
Passing sounds that are concentrated
on her mind
One will bring deliverance--only placing the
deliverance
On him and

yet loving him for himself
Beyond that need. And while unlocking the door of his
car

He feels that the recreation in life is also a
routine:
A routine of sharing and parting,

And at the end one is grounded and tossed
Before the validity of his own

Perceptions is resolved. But he is alive,
Now; and he will put away his groceries;

Read a chapter of his Biblia,
A cenotaph of the dead..
maybe a verse; think of
forgetting mass
and mailing in his tithing
And to veg' himself away a few hours

Before he would have another night
Of throats, lungs and
The air of the masses.

Come
(Camp Wonderland for the Retarded, Lake of the Ozarks)
Grabbing the already read letter,
Slipping out hot and wet
From the bare mattress--

Like Sweet Pea's turds
Right before
His psychomotor seizures,
Only without a
softness to stub myself
Into--stiff and hard I drop
From the cold rim of the bunk

(Even if I awaken
The idiots below).
With non-syllables and vowellessness
A pitch
that is language enough
To keep this man, Jim,
From wherever
The unassimilated
disappear
Howls "He does not want me here"
While its flesh of Jim beats the plastic
urinal
On the walls barricading a pillowed head.
The joke is on him this time...
All
over him for the next hours.
The letter's impression
Writes and rewrites in my mind:
Come, my sister calls to our
father
Like Ronnie's suppositories butting back.
Only suppositories are meant to do so.

Come, she speaks to me,
And the shrink

Shall put in touch
All that he did to us.
Tripping over Keith's mattress
I step out in humid silence
And wipe my cheeks.

Two cabins, beside ours, simultaneously fry
Bugs in blue, electric lights.
Keith, a crippled rocking horse of autism,
Scrapes the feet of his vibrating body
To
the bench where I sit.
Sit, Keith; go back to bed, Keith;
Go to the bathroom, Keith:

In this camp I shape the minutes of his life
To some acceptable pattern.
He rubs his
hands together
As if trying to spark fire
For the inhabitants
Of his imaginary world.

Stop that, Keith, I say. Sit, Keith.
keith sits: There is no coming out
For him after
twenty years
This way,
Or perhaps for me.
The pale gas lamps are strewn around

A small area of limbs
In a corner of the sky--
All but patches are aflame
Like a roof
of a tent around
The stakes, ready to break off
And fall.
Rock, Keith,
As the sun is stroked
So far into the lap of the night,
Suffocating and
as good as gone.
The folding and unfolding
Of a crinkled letter into squares;
The
imagining of the counselor
Of cabin four
And what a pulse would have created
If
her head had drowsed
To my hand on the back of her seat
On our way here;
The
general silent howling of "Come!"--
Keith does not cripple to this.
He has no sister
that calls a stranger back
To erase and draw back
Them both.

He does not say

"come!"
All hours.
He comes.

A Gentleman's Right
He must have thought
That there was some covenant of the old
That bound each to
move around it
In a square orbit.
he was fifty now, so there
Must not have been any
question:
Lessen the speed at the train tracks;
Stumble his car over their ribs;

Swerve closely to the drive
At a slower pace, and hope
That where men dodge the bumping
Of their tails from Parks
For a private club,

That one would come
Out from the doors, partnerless.
If not, he would have
To go
around the block
Another time
Like other old fags before--
The railway crippling
with
Its iron in each return raising,
Cracking up from the skin of the street;
Limbs of
that bar's tree
Waving down (some
To the windshield), warning.
Thoughts that the
energy of youth
Had some pivotal focus
Made each imagined man to him
Like a
lollipop,
but the parks would not do:
There the man with the smashed fender
Might be obligated to 69
A winner without a
face--
a drag race ending in the winner's backseat,
And on his tools which would