Alone in my room I lay down and at once plunged into dejection. It was as if my earlier hopefulness had been a consequence of upright posture. It seemed to me that my good fortune was entirely delusive; that utter solitude would have been preferable to being a stranger among an alien race; that food and shelter, far from being boons, were actually the sinister means of prolonging a futile and miserable existence at the bottom of the mountains of the moon; that even if I mastered the language of my hosts I had no certainty of leaving the valley; that if I did find my way out, I had little chance of discovering the island, which in any case would probably by then have flown away; that my hosts, although interested in me at the moment, and apparently kindhearted, would certainly tire of me in the long run, and find my presence not a diversion but a nuisance; and that the sole object capable of giving me pleasure, and to some extent reconciling me to my lonely fate, namely, my journal, had fallen in the moon-meadow. These thoughts impressed themselves so deeply on me that my cheerfulness at the garden table a short time ago seemed to me a form of raving; and with a sense of desolation, as if sleep itself were only another form of disappointment, I closed my weary eyes.


- Steven Millhauser
From the Realm of Morpheus

World's Greatest Comics, 1946
Ben Shahn

Their mother was small and thin with slightly hunched shoulders; she always wore a blue skirt and a red woollen blouse. Her curly hair was short and dark and she would grease it with oil to try to make it lie flat; every day she plucked her eyebrows, turning them into two little dark fish darting towards her temples, and put yellow powder on her face. She was very young. They didn't know how old she was but she looked much younger than the mothers of their school friends; the boys always stared in amazement when they saw their friends' mothers, who were all so fat and old. She smoked a lot and her fingers were stained by smoke; in the evening she even smoked in bed before going to sleep. The three of them all slept together in the large double bed with the yellow quilt, their mother on the side nearest the door; on the bedside table there was a lamp with the shade wrapped up in a red rag because she liked to read and smoke in the evening. Sometimes she came home very late, and the boys would wake up and ask her where she had been: she usually answered, 'to the cinema' or 'at a girlfriend's house' - they did not know who this friend could be as no friend had ever come to the house to see their mother. She would tell them to turn their backs while she got undressed, and they would hear the quick rustle of her clothes, see the shadows dancing on the walls, and then she would slip into the bed next to them, a thin body in a cold silk blouse. They kept their distance because she always complained that they would crowd her and kick her during the night: sometimes she would turn the light off to make them go to sleep while she smoked in the dark.
   Their mother was not an important person. The important people were their grandmother, their grandfather, and Aunt Clementina, who lived in the country and came to visit every now and then, bringing chestnuts and maize flour; Diomira the maid was important, and so was the frail porter Giovanni, who made cane chairs. They were all very important to the two boys because they were strong people who could be trusted, who knew the difference between right and wrong, who were very good at everything they did, and were always full of common sense and strength; they were the sort of people who could protect you from storms and thieves. When the boys were left alone in the the house with their mother they felt scared just as if they were all alone; how could they know the difference between right and wrong when their mother never said what was right and wrong? At the most she would complain in a weary voice, 'Stop making so much noise, I've got a headache.' If they asked whether they were allowed to do something, she would say at once, 'ask your Grandma,' or she would first say 'yes,' then 'no' and it ended up being a muddle. When they went out alone with their mother they felt uncertain and uneasy because she always got lost and had to ask a policeman for directions, and she had such a timid and silly manner when she was in shops asking for things to buy. She would always leave something behind in the shop - her gloves, her bag, or her scarf - and they would have to go back to retrieve them and the boys would feel ashamed.
   The clothes she kept in her drawers were all of a muddle, and she left everything strewn around, and Diomira would grumble about her when she tidied the room in the morning. She would even call their grandmother to come and see, and together they would collect up the stockings and clothes and throw away the cigarette ash that was scattered all over the place. In the morning, their mother would go shopping: when she returned home she would bang the shopping bag on the marble table in the kitchen, get on her bicycle, and rush off to the office where she worked. Diomira would look at the contents of the shopping bag, feel the meat and every orange one by one, grumble, and call their grandmother to see how awful the meat was. Their mother would return home at two o'clock when everyone had already eaten and would eat in a rush with a newspaper propped against her glass and then slip away again on her bicycle to work; they saw her again for a moment at dinner, but after eating she would almost always slip away somewhere else.

- Natalia Ginzburg
The Mother

    I could never really understand what we were doing there, or in any place like it. I knew one was supposed to go away from the city in the summer. I knew people went to "resorts". People fixed themselves in resorts. There were Edgartown families. Northeast families. Certainly Homestead families. My father and mother seemed rather to move through these places like émigré royalty, the innkeepers (and guests) vaguely conscious that somebody unusual was among them but not quite sure what currency they would be paid in, or when; my mother and father diffident, remote, not so much bored as disconnected, and with small gift for camouflage. I can remember us gliding into that wretched Homestead dining room each evening - it was one of those American resorts where the dining room was only open between some ridiculous hours like 5:30 and 7:30. My father dressed in dark evening suit, well dressed, too well dressed, a boutonniere, a cane. My mother really very handsome. Hair up high. Jewels. My sister and I trailing along, each conscious of the Detroit and Memphis eyes on all of us. And then would come the dinner scene: my father disdaining the relish tray. Each evening my father would disdain the relish tray, would look at it in fact, held in the hands of some hopeful moon-faced Virginia girl, some girl whom I would have paid money to like me - would look at it as if it were some joke being played on him, which in some ways of course it was, a joke to which he had been an accomplice (which must have made it worse). My mother (very regal, but trying to be creative): What are those little things in red? The waitress (not very bright, but trying to please; never run into this kind of rum crowd before): They're candied crab apples, ma'am. They come from right around Covington. A lot of the guests . . . My father (as if waking up): Candied crab apples? For dinner? I should certainly hope not! My mother: You've never tried one, Dikran. My father: I don't intend to. (Smiling sweetly, like a cougar, at the poor girl) Can you bring us an Old-Fashioned and a whisky right away? The waitress: Oh, I'm sorry sir. I'm only in charge of the relish tray. My father: Etc., etc. He and my mother would complain their way through dinner.

- Michael J. Arlen
Exiles

   The next weeks rushed by at a hectic pace. In the day Maskelyne worked on the preparations for the transit expeditions and during the cold nights he observed the skies from Greenwich, no doubt sporting his brand-new 'observing suit' - a quilted outfit including a waistcoat, as well as trousers with all-in-one-feet and an enormous padded bottom made of thick flannel and fine gold-, red- and cream-striped silk which reputedly Maskelyne's brother-in-law Robert Clive had sent from India. Described by a fellow scientist as a 'small invisible man', the chubby Maskelyne must have lost all remnants of authority when he waddled towards his observation room squeezed into the golden emsemble - the armour of an astronomer.


- Andrea Wulf
Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens

- Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque
American Vampire

- Chris Ware
The Acme Novelty Date Book 1986-1995

Dearest Jane:
   In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me. I'm just as glad they haven't consulted me about the tiresome details. What they have worked out is this: I awake at 5:30, work until 8:00, eat breakfast at home, work until 10:00, walk a few blocks into town, do errands, go to the nearby municipal swimming pool, which I have all to myself, and swim for half an hour, return home at 11:45, read the mail, eat lunch at noon. In the afternoon I do schoolwork, either teach or prepare. When I get home from school at about 5:30, I numb my twanging intellect with several belts of Scotch and water ($5.00/fifth at the State Liquor store, the only liquor store in town. There are loads of bars, though.), cook supper, read and listen to jazz (lots of good music on the radio here), slip off to sleep at ten. I do pushups and sit-ups all the time, and feel as though I am getting lean and sinewy, but maybe not. Last night, time and my body decided to take me to the movies. I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which I took very hard. To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That's all right. I like to have my heart broken.


- Kurt Vonnegut
Letters

CHARM SCHOOL


Madame Gabrielle, were you really French?
And what were those heavy books
You made them balance on top of their heads,
Young women with secret aspirations,
We saw strolling past the row of windows
In the large room above Guido's barbershop?

On the same floor was the office of an obscure
Weekly preaching bloody revolution.
Men with raised collars and roving eyes
Wandered in and out. When they conspired
They spat and pulled down the yellow shades,
Not to raise them or open the windows again

Until the summer heat came and your students
Wore dresses with their shoulders bared
As they promenaded with books on their heads,
And the bald customer in the barbershop
Sat sweating while overseeing in the mirror
His three remaining hairs being combed.


- Charles Simic

   Louisa sang as she came over the crest of the hill from the white folks' kitchen. Her skin was the color of oak leaves on young trees in fall. Her breasts, firm and up-pointed like ripe acorns. And her singing had the low murmur of winds in fig trees. Bob Stone, younger son of the people she worked for, loved her. By the way the world reckons things, he had won her. By measure of that warm glow which came into her mind at thought of him, he had won her. Tom Burwell, whom the whole town called Big Boy, also loved her. But working in the fields all day, and far away from her, gave him no chance to show it. Though often enough of evenings he tried to. Somehow, he never got along. Strong as he was with hands upon the ax or plow, he found it difficult to hold her. Or so he thought. But the fact was that he held her to factory town more firmly than he thought for. His black balanced, and pulled against, the white of Stone, when she thought of them. And her mind was vaguely upon them as she came over the crest of the hill, coming from the white folks' kitchen. As she sang softly at the evil face of the full moon.


- Jean Toomer
Cane

   I returned to my father's sagging chair, in the silent living room, and sat looking at my mother as she remained upright and unmoving in her corner of the couch. Despite the change I sensed in her, since out time on the porch, she seemed calm, in her way, sitting there with the afghan on her lap. It was like the old days, when I would come home from wherever I was and my mother would take up her position exactly there, in the corner of the couch, with a book and her reading glasses, while my father graded papers in his study and I sat in the armchair with a book of my own. I had liked coming home, liked sitting in that chair with the sound of pages turning and of children playing in the street, liked, above all, the sense of something peaceful from childhood still flowing through the house, and I wondered how it was that I had let it all slip away. And as I sat there, in the drowsy warmth, I seemed to hear a humming sound, a spectral tune, drifting up out of my childhood. It was something my mother used to sing, a song from her own girlhood. "I remember," I said, because I wanted to talk to my mother, I wanted to tell her that I remembered a tune she had once hummed, when I was a boy, but the sound of the humming crept into my words, and only then did I realize that my mother was sitting there humming that tune. And I was stirred that she was humming a tune from our two childhoods, as she sat in the darkening room with her eyes closed, a tune that ascended in three leaps and then came slowly down, like a feather falling, but at the same time I wanted her to stop humming that tune so that I could speak to her, before I was no longer there. After all, it was only a short visit. When my mother stopped humming I said, "I know I haven't been back for a while, but if we could just talk a little, a little talk, talk to me - " The words sounded louder than I had intended, as if I had shouted them in an empty house.


- Steven Millhauser
"Sons and Mothers"

   It was hard to understand the Brain because he really was a brain. He knew all kinds of big scientific words. He read Scientific American magazine, and had a small chemistry laboratory. The reason we called him Agony Flea was that he always seemed depressed about something, we never knew what. He was always moping around like a sad sack, and when he talked he always whined. He put on an English accent, too. A whiny English accent. But he was very smart. He showed us lots of chemistry tricks and made small bombs for us. Some chemical that when you spilled it somewhere it didn't go off for about fifteen minutes. It just sat there like some water or something. It didn't do anything. But after some time went by it exploded into flames and set everything around it on fire. We had a lot of fun with that chemical.
   Brain also insisted that he could make an atomic bomb if he had enough money to get the parts. We believed him and planned someday to raise the money for him so he could build the big one.
   Brain spoke: "Here is our report. The first thing we did was assemble all the old Captain Marvel comics we could find. A considerable quantity, I must say. Fifty-five editions, covering most of the period between 1940 and 1948. The significant issues all came out during that period. C.C. Beck maintained control of the operation until the PTA got after Fawcett Publications."
   "Yeaahhh, scream, yell."
   "There is no better source, as I am sure you are all aware, than Captain Marvel comics for matters, uh, occult, shall we call them? OK, now, Captain Marvel comics did have several stories about Satan in them. I place them here as exhibit A for your inspection."
   "Hooray, scream, yell."
   "We also went to the library and found numerous entries under 'Satan'..."
   "Oh yeah," some kid yelled. "Who is this 'we' you're talking about?"
   We all loved to tease the Brain. And he enjoyed it.
   "Oh, alright," the Brain answered, "if you insist then, it was I, just I. Nobody would go with me and help me. Honestly, I don't know why I come to these club meetings."
   "Neither do we, Brain. Why do you come?" some kid yelled.



- John Fahey
"Neighborhood"

...and, as usual when I drift off, I was joined by a tiny Gypsy girl in the form of the Milky Way, the quiet, innocent Gypsy girl who was the love of my youth and used to wait for me with one foot slightly forward and off to the side, like a ballet dancer in one of the positions, the beautiful, long-forgotten beauty of my youth.
     Her body was covered with sweat and a gamey musk-and-pomade-scented grease that coated my fingers when I stroked her, and she always wore the same dress covered with soup and gravy stains in the front and whitewash and woodworm stains - from carrying rotten boards she found among the rubble - in the back. I met her near the end of the war when, on my way home from Horky's where I'd had a few beers, she latched onto me, tagged along, so that I had to turn and talk to her over my shoulder, and she never tried to pass me, she just toddled noiselessly behind, and when we came to the first intersection I said, "Well, good-bye, I've got to be going," but she said she was going in the same direction, and when we got to the end of Ludmila Street I said, "Well, good-bye, I've got to be going home," and she said she was going in the same direction, so on we went, and I purposely walked all the way to Sacrifice and held out my hand to her and said, "I've got to be going home now," but she said she was going in the same direction, and on we went until we came to the Dam of Eternity, and I said I was home now and we'd have to say good-bye, and when I stopped at the gas lamp in front of my door and said, "Well, good-bye now, this is where I live," she said she lived there, too, so I unlocked the door and motioned for her to go in ahead of me, but she refused and told me to go in first, and since the hall was dark, I did, and then I went down the stairs and into the yard and up to the door of my room, and when I'd unlocked it, I turned and said, "Well, good-bye, this is my room," and she said it was her room, too, and she came in and shared my bed with me, and when I woke up in a bed still warm with her, she was gone. But the next day, and every day thereafter, the moment I set foot in the yard I saw her sitting on the steps in front of my door and some white boards and sawed-off beams lying under the window, and when I unlocked the door, she would leap up like a cat and scamper into my room, neither of us saying a word. Then I went for a beer with my big, five-liter pitcher, and the Gypsy girl would light the old cast-iron stove, which boomed even with the door open, because the room had once been a blacksmith's shop and had a high ceiling and a huge fireplace, and she would make supper, which was always the same potato goulash with horse salami, then sit by the stove, feeding it with wood, and it was so hot that her lap glowed gold and gold sweat covered her hands, neck, and constantly changing profile, while I lay on the bed, getting up only to quench my thirst from the pitcher, after which I handed it to her, and she would hold the giant pitcher in both hands and drink in such a way that I heard her throat move, heard it moaning quietly like a pump in the distance. At first I thought she put so much wood on the fire just to win me over, but then I realized it was in her, the fire was in her, she couldn't live without fire.
     So we went on living together even though I never really knew her name and she never knew or wanted or needed to know mine; we went on meeting every night, even though I never gave her the keys and sometimes stayed out late, until midnight, but the moment I unlocked the main door I would see a shadow slip past, and there she was, striking a match, setting fire to some paper, and a flame would sputter and flare in the stove, which she kept going with the month's supply of wood she'd laid in under the window. And later in the evening, while we ate our silent supper, I would turn on the light bulb and watch her break her bread as if she were taking Communion and gather up all the crumbs from her dress and toss them reverently into the fire. Then we switched off the bulb and lay on our backs, looking up at the ceiling and the shimmer of shadow and light, and the trip to the pitcher on the table was like wading through an aquarium filled with algae and other marine flora or stalking throught a thick wood on a moonlit night, and as I drank I always turned and looked at my naked Gypsy girl lying there looking back at me, the whites of her eyes glowing in the dark - we looked at each other more in the dark than by the light of day. I always loved twilight: it was the only time I had the feeling that something important could happen. All things were more beautiful bathed in twilight, all streets, all squares, and all the people walking through them; I even had the feeling that I was a handsome young man, and I liked looking at myself in the mirror, watching myself in the shop windows as I strode along, and even when I touched my face, I felt no wrinkles at my mouth or forehead. Yes, with twilight comes beauty. By the flames in the stove's open door the Gypsy girl stood up, naked, and as she moved, I saw her body outlined in a yellow halo like the halo emanating from the Ignatius of Loyola cemented to the facade of the church in Charles Square, and when she added some wood to the fire and came back and lay down on top of me, she turned her head to have a look at my profile and ran her finger around my nose and mouth. She hardly ever kissed me, nor I her; we said everything with our hands and then lay there looking at the sparks and flickers in the battered old cast-iron stove, curls of light from the death of the wood. All we wanted was to go on living like that forever. It was as if we had said everything there was to say to each other, as if we had been born together and never parted.
     During the last autumn of the war I bought some blue wrapping paper, a ball of twine, and glue, and while the Gypsy girl kept my glass filled with beer, I spent a whole Sunday on the floor making a kite, balancing it carefully so it would rise, and I tacked on a long tail of tiny paper doves strung together by the Gypsy girl under my tutelage, and then we went up to Round Bluff, and after flinging the kite to the heavens and letting the cord run free for a while, I held it back and gave it a few tugs to make it straighten up and stand motionless in the sky so that only the tail rippled, S-like, and the Gypsy girl covered her face to her eyes, eyes wide with amazement. Then we sat down and I handed it to her, but she cried out that it would carry her up to heaven - she could feel herself ascending like the Virgin Mary - so I put my hands on her shoulders and said if that was the case we'd go together, but she gave me back the ball of twine and we just sat there, her head on my shoulder, and suddenly I got the idea to send a message, and handed the kite to the Gypsy girl again, but again she froze and said it would fly away with her and she'd never see me again, so I pushed the stick with the twine into the ground, tore a a page out of my memo pad, and attached it to the tail, and as soon as the twine was back in my hands, she started screaming and reaching after the message as it jerked its way up to the sky, each burst of wind traveling through my fingers to my whole body, I even felt the message making contact with the tip of the kite, and suddenly I shuddered all over, because suddenly the kite was God and I was the Son of God, and the cord was the Holy Spirit which puts man in contact, in dialogue with God. And once we'd flown the kite a few more times, the Gypsy girl screwed up her courage and took over the twine - trembling as I had trembled, trembling to see the kite tremble in the gusty wind - and, winding the twine around her finger, she cried out in rapture.
     One evening I came home to find her gone. I switched on my light and went back and forth to the street until morning, but she didn't come, not that day or the next or ever again, though I looked everywhere for her. My childlike little Gypsy, simple as unworked wood, as the breath of the Holy Spirit - all she ever wanted was to feed the stove with the big, heavy boards and beams she brought on her back, crosslike, from the rubble, all she ever wanted was to make potato goulash with horse salami, feed her fire with wood, and fly autumn kites. Later I learned that she had been picked up by the Gestapo and sent with a group of Gypsies to a concentration camp, and whether she was burned to death at Majdanek or asphyxiated in an Auschwitz gas chamber, she never returned. The heavens are not humane, but I still was at the time. When she failed to return at the end of the war, I burned the kite and twine and the long tail she had decorated, a tiny Gypsy girl whose name I'd never quite known.

- Bohumil Hrabal
Too Loud a Solitude

- Gabrielle Bell
The Voyeurs

"Fairchild Tropical Garden"



My fifth-grade teacher took our class on a tour of a potato-chip factory. Her uncle was a manager there and made sure we got the best treatment - a free bag of Red Dot Chips for each of us, along with a red Red Dot baseball cap, a red Red Dot balloon, and a red round Red Dot plastic change purse you squeezed to open and close. We saw crates of potatoes poured into machines that washed, peeled, sliced, and sent the glistening discs on conveyor belts to boiling vats of oil. We saw fried chips draining and drying. The men and women who worked there were so covered with grease - it misted the air - that they seemed ready for frying themselves. Not doing what they had dreamed of doing as children, they took no pleasure in being observed by us. They understood that we kids were hoping we would never be them. Our teacher had arranged the tour to get herself out of the classroom in which her own dream was dying. She had always wanted to be beloved by her students. But none of us did love her - her gestures were stiff, her voice failed in the afternoons, her eyes wandered out the windows as often as ours did. Now, in the chip factory, as our cheeks swelled and reddened from humidity and oil, she nibbled at a new strategy, displaying the consequences of indifference to teachers and their lessons. You grew up and took readings on grease vats while kids watched.


- Lawrence Sutin
A Postcard Memoir

Hardcastle Crags

Flintlike, her feet struck
Such a racket of echoes from the steely street,
Tacking in moon-blued crooks from the black
Stone-built town, that she heard the quick air ignite
Its tinder and shake

A firework of echoes from wall
To wall of the dark, dwarfed cottages.
But the echoes died at her back as the walls
Gave way to fields and the incessant seethe of grasses
Riding in the full

Of the moon, manes to the wind,
Tireless, tied, as a moon-bound sea
Moves on its root. Though a mist-wraith wound
Up from the fissured valley and hung shoulder-high
Ahead, it fattened

To no family-featured ghost,
Nor did any word body with a name
The blank mood she walked in. Once past
The dream-peopled village, her eyes entertained no dream,
And the sandman's dust

Lost lustre under her footsoles.
The long wind, paring her person down
To a pinch of flame, blew its burdened whistle
In the whorl of her ear, and like a scooped-out pumpkin crown
Her head cupped the babel.

All the night gave her, in return
For the paltry gift of her bulk and the beat
Of her heart, was the humped indifferent iron
Of its hills, and its pastures bordered by black stone set
On black stone. Barns

Guarded broods and litters
Behind shut doors; the dairy herds
Knelt in the meadow mute as boulders;
Sheep drowsed stoneward in their tussocks of wool, and birds,
Twig-sleeping, wore

Granite ruffs, their shadows
The guise of leaves. The whole landscape
Loomed absolute as the antique world was
Once, in its earliest sway of lymph and sap,
Unaltered by eyes,

Enough to snuff the quick
Of her small heat out, but before the weight
Of stones and hills of stones could break
Her down to mere quartz grit in the stony light
She turned back.

- Sylvia Plath

   Dwayne's only companion at night was a Labrador retriever named Sparky. Sparky could not wag his tail - because of an automobile accident many years ago, so he had no way of telling other dogs how friendly he was. He had to fight all the time. His ears were in tatters. He was lumpy with scars.


- Kurt Vonnegut
Breakfast of Champions

     Trout asked himself out loud what the people did for amusement, and the driver told him a queer story about a night he spent in West Virginia, in the cab of his truck, near a windowless building which droned monotonously.
     "I'd see folks go in, and I'd see folks come out," he said, "but I couldn't figure out what kind of a machine it was that made the drone. The building was a cheap old frame thing set up on cement blocks, and it was out in the middle of nowhere. Cars came and went, and the folks sure seemed to like whatever was doing the droning," he said.
     So he had a look inside. "It was full of folks on rollerskates," he said. "They just went around and around. Nobody smiled. They just went around and around."

- Kurt Vonnegut
Breakfast of Champions

16A:





The apartment on Francis Avenue
We lived in for three years in graduate school
In the nicest - or maybe second nicest - part of Cambridge,
On the third floor of Joe and Annie's house


Just up the street from the Divinity School.
John Kenneth Galbraith lived next door;
Julia Child's Kitchen was across a backyard fence
I'd hang around trying to look hungry,


And emulating her we rented a meat locker at Savanor's,
Where I'd stop to pick up a pot roast or a steak
Before coming home to Jeepers waiting for me in the window.
Everything happened then, in two or three years


That seemed a lifetime at the time:
The War and SDS and music; the confusion in the streets
And Nixon; poetry and art and science, philosophy and immunology,
The dinners at Bill and Willy's loft in Soho -


Yet what still stays with me is the summer of 1973,
The summer before we moved to Milwaukee, with my dissertation done
And time to kill, suspended on the brink of real life.
I would read the first draft of "Self-Portrait"


John had let me copy, and Gravity's Rainbow,
And every afternoon I'd ride my bike to Bob's house
Where I'd watch the hearings on TV. And on a Saturday in June,
With the living room awash in the late yellow light


That filtered through the western dormer window,
We watched, just out of curiosity, this horse I'd read about
- And what I knew about the Sport of Kings was nil -
Turn what till then had been an ordinary day


Into one as permanent as anything in sports or art or life,
As Secretariat came flying through the turn with the announcer crying
"He's all alone - he's moving like a tremendous machine,"
And Susan shouting "Look at that horse! Look at that horse!"


The summer sort of dribbled away. We took a last trip to New York,
John and Rebecca stopped over on their way to somewhere,
James and Lisa too, whom I hadn't seen in years,
And then we packed our stuff and took the cat and drove away.


Nixon hung on for a while, and then - but that's history,
Real history, not this private kind that monitors the unimportant
For what changes, for what doesn't change. Here I am,
Living in Milwaukee twenty-nine years later.


Susan lives about a mile away, and just last Saturday
The latest wonder horse, War Emblem, stumbled in the Belmont Stakes.
What makes a life, if not the places and the things that make it up?
I know that I exist, but what about that place we lived? Is it still real?


- Of course it is. It just gets harder to see
As time goes by, but it's still all there. Last month in Rome
The first thing Lisa said was that I looked just like myself, but with
    white hair.
And there it is: look at the tiny strawberries and the


Flowers blooming in the garden of the house next door.
Look at John Dean, still testifying on that little screen, and Rogers,
Who died in May, still talking in our small blue dining room.
Look at Savanor's, the unkempt lawn, the mailbox by the back porch,


Jeepers waiting for me in the window. Look at that horse!




- John Koethe

Marriage

Should I get married? Should I be good?
Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?
Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
and she going just so far and I understanding why
not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel!
Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky -

When she introduces me to her parents
back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie,
should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa
and not ask Where's the bathroom?
How else to feel other than I am,
often thinking about Flash Gordon soap -
O how terrible it must be for a young man
seated before a family and the family thinking
We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!
After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a
                                                                                                                   living?

Should I tell them: Would they like me then?
Say All right get married, we're losing a daughter
but we're gaining a son - 
And should I then ask Where's the bathroom?

O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends
and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded
just wait to get at the drinks and food - 
And the priest! he looking at me as if I masturbated
asking me Do you take this woman for your lawful wedded wife?
And I trembling what to say say Pie Glue!
I kiss the bride all those corny men slapping me on the back
She's all yours, boy! Ha-ha-ha!
And in their eyes you could see some obscene honeymoon going 
                                                                                                               on -

Then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes
Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers!
                                                                                                        Chocolates!

All streaming into cozy hotels
All going to do the same thing tonight
The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen
The lobby zombies they knowing what
The whistling elevator man he knowing
The winking bellboy knowing
Everybody knowing! I'd be almost inclined not to do anything!
Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!
Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon!
running rampant into those almost climactic suites
yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!
O I'd live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls
I'd sit there the Mad Honeymooner
devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy
a saint of divorce - 

But I should get married I should be good
How nice it'd be to come home to her
and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen
aproned young and lovely wanting my baby
and so happy about me she burns the roast beef
and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair
saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf!
God what a husband I'd make! Yes, I should get married!
So much to do! like sneaking into Mr Jones' house late at night
and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books
Like hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower
like pasting Tannu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence
like when Mrs Kindhead comes to collect for the Community Chest
grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky!
And when the mayor comes to get my vote tell him
When are you going to stop killing whales!
And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle
Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust - 

Yet if I should get married and it's Connecticut and snow
and she gives birth to a child and I am sleepless, worn,
up for nights, head bowed against a quiet window, the past behind
                                                                                                                         me,

finding myself in the most common of situations a trembling man
knowledged with responsibility not twig-smear nor Roman coin
                                                                                                                 soup -

O what would that be like!
Surely I'd give it for a nipple a rubber Tactitus
For a rattle a bag of broken Bach records
Tack Della Francesca all over its crib
Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib
And build for its playpen a roofless Parthenon

No, I doubt I'd be that kind of father
not rural not snow no quiet window
but hot smelly tight New York City
seven flights up, roaches and rats in the walls
a fat Reichian wife screeching over potatoes Get a job!
And five nose running brats in love with Batman
And the neighbors all toothless and dry haired
like those hag masses of the 18th century
all wanting to come in and watch TV
The landlord wants his rent
Grocery store Blue Cross Gas & Electric Knights of Columbus
Impossible to lie back and dream Telephone snow, ghost parking - 
No! I should not get married I should never get married!
But - imagine If I were married to a beautiful sophisticated woman
tall and pale wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves
holding a cigarette holder in one hand and a highball in the other
and we lived high up in a penthouse with a huge window
from which we could see all of New York and ever farther on
                                                                                                        clearer days
No, can't imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream -

O but what about love? I forget love
not that I'm incapable of love
it's just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes -
I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother
And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible
And there's maybe a girl now but she's already married
And I don't like men and - 
but there's got to be somebody!
Because what if I'm 60 years old and not married,
all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear
and everybody else is married! All the universe married but me!

Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible
then marriage would be possible -
Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover
so I wait -  bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life.

- Gregory Corso