The Flying Tiger

Take us back to the pink house
Where we were the happiest
With its single front door and four windows
Where the carpet was never wall-to-wall
But stretched bigger
And everything felt mountainous.
Take us to our beds and tell us of the men
Who howl at a papier-mâché moon
And crawl on all fours
In the dust sniffing out blood.
Show us with shadow puppets
How animals convey affection
And fear
And how we sweat but pigs bleed
In the hour before we die.
Sing us the song we imagine you sang
Yanking rye from the fields on hot summer days that buzz.
It’s the one you gave
To his body and others
When we didn’t know what else to do but squeeze
Our hands into fists
And wail
And throw rocks at the house
To change its color to red then black,
Like a stain in the dirt, we said.
Do it again
Even though by our breath
You know we’re asleep. At the end
Lay yourself down on the rug
Between all of our beds
And listen for when the night’s wind comes
To trick your ears and ours
With the thump of a boot heel
on the porch.

The tabletop sylph clasps
Both hands in prayer
Like those unused to long talks
With the self or deities.

Yogi Master commands
A deepness, reaching marrow
And sinew alike. What fractal
Wonders does one see
Through shut-tight eyes?

Paracelsus scrambled to pluck
His old devices from under
The dust and ash of corners.
He mixed elements into unctions,
Dribbled potions down
Her parted lips, intoned
Mumbles to the folds
Of her ears, swirled
Blue smoke in revolutions
Round her toes,
Spread metallic crumbs
Across the plateau of her tongue.

Always the posed question
Through his strange
Way of speaking.
Should we inquire, Yogi,
Or lift heel to crotch,
To balance as warriors?

Paracelsus named her his “Porcelain
Princess,” massaging her knotted chakra
But when she breathed shavasana
He saw she’d found out where
(At foot the glint of detritus)
To brace and stretch a bit—
The hue and cry was all a way
Of never letting go.

She figures small tombstones
From pebbles and gives them to the lake.
Not for fish, like salts
In the wash basin
Which readily dissolve
But like a waxed keel unprepared to sink
Displacing in defiance
A translation of weight.
Concentric wakes roll out,
In them stars waver
And reconstellate—
A little less sure this time of fixed positions.
She recalls
She’s walked these banks
Before; not alone along the rim
Between the shore and lapping
Water but where his callused hand
Then had pressed to hers a band all gold.
A loop, these days loose, slips off
And is given also to the silts.

My mom brought my younger sister to visit me the fall of my sophomore year in college. Upon arrival I, the bachelor, was instantly at the mercy of her maternal instincts. Having seen the no-man’s-land interiors of my fridge and cupboards she took me grocery shopping.

Strolling down the toiletries, magazines, and miscellany aisle of QFC I noticed it. It’d been on her all day. The way she stood—weight on one foot, hand on hip, the too-large leather jacket encasing her shoulders—was what resonated; image of a father embracing his daughter and imparting a kiss to the top of her head. That it was my dad’s jacket didn’t register. She told me when I asked, “I got it from the closet in dad’s office.” Tense had always felt uncanny when speaking of the departed. I asked if I could borrow it but she relented, saying that I’d never give it back. She was right, I haven’t.

The stunt I pulled to seize it wasn’t exactly morally sound. But to my credit my mom had said years ago, just after his passing, she’d offered the bomber jacket up to me, but I refused. That was all the reinforcement I needed. Though in the end it proved excessive. My sister proposed a trade: I was to give her my green military jacket, the one I’d purchased in Japan and in return she’d give me the leather bomber which had been our father’s. A bartering of mementos, an exchange of sentiments. Hers to wear in the turbid final months of high school, invested in the garb symbolic of where I am and where she plans to go. Mine to wear as a ward against a city of damp cold, a testament, a buffer to the wake of a passing.

Hovering sylphlike she prayed
To be let down from there while
Paracelsus scrambled to pluck
His devices from floating about the vaulted room.
He mixed elements into unctions,
Dribbled potions down her parted lips,
Intoned mumbles to the folds of her ear,
Swirled blue smoke in revolutions
Round her toes,
Spread metallic crumbs
Across her tongue,
But nothing weighed her down.
He called her “Downy Princess”
Massaging her knotted temples.
Even once he sat atop her
His generous rump only making her more breathless.
“Relieve my condition, doctor!” she pleaded.
And he saw her yearn for a place
To brace and stretch a bit—
The hue and cry was all a way
Of never letting go.

The fish his wife caught was almost too small to keep. She asked several times if they should not just throw it back into the lake. Each time he responded by saying “We have to eat, too.” The brown, silver-speckled thing—a mackinaw—lie motionless on the cutting board. It had stopped flopping halfway up from the lake to the campsite. She picked up a stick and poked at the fire. A small flurry of sparks burst up toward the low-hanging branches. He asked her to be careful and to grab a couple dry logs from under the tarp by the camper to throw on the fire. On the card table he began to lay out an assortment of cutlery. One knife for decapitating, another for deboning, setting each one out parallel to the previous. She returned with two sizable logs and dumped them onto the fire sending, this time, a large plume of sparks rocketing into the branches. Upon seeing him sliding from its slender cork sleeve the paring knife, she stuffed her hands into the pockets of her red puffy vest and said she was going for a walk. In the light of the setting sun the lake resembled a plate of orange tempered glass. He observed her for a while through a small copse of trees as she threw rock after rock into the water, disrupting its placid surface. He selected the larger knife, lined its edge up just below the gills and pressed his full weight into it until he felt a thud against the wooden board. He did this again at the tail. Next he picked up the elegant, needle-like paring knife and made a slit like a surgeon down the length of its belly from truncated tail to headless stump. He sloughed the guts out with his index finger and gathered them into a ziplock baggie along with the tail and bulging-eyed head so as not to attract predators later that night. He took pleasure in the methodology of gutting and cleaning a fish. She detested it. Glancing through the trees he saw that she had vanished. Somewhere through the bushes in the opposite direction an owl hooted twice then stopped. He wrestled with the fire until the coals lay flat; he hung the pan on the tripod above them. With a set of pliers and the paring knife he began to carefully remove the bones, twisting each one out and disposing of it with a flick of his wrist. He thought of his wife, perhaps she was upset. Stabbing the thin knife into the cutting board he clomped in his boots down toward the lake, stopping every few feet to turn his head and cup his ear with a hand to listen for the plunk of pebble dropping into water. 

“Ahem, you there in the gym shorts,
Didn’t sleep a wink, did you.
Dawn, she’s a gossip, told me earlier
That you were having troubles
Of the existential flavor,”
Spoke the silhouette—cast against the sun—
Gesticulating madly in its flares
Through my window and at my heaps of bedsheets
Which gathered round my ankles and buttocks.

“No, not a single wink,” I said shielding
My eyes from his glare,
“And how do you know anyway?
Where are you from?”
He stretched big and wide and gleaming
“You could say I’m just a guy
Who’s been around, set a few things ablaze,
Shed light on a huge monuments and truth.  
I’ve been called lots of names
But Apollo is my favorite—
So hollow, Palladian.
Echoes reminiscent of that dome,
Poor thing all crumbs and silt
In the bottom of a river.
Very unlike you and me.”

“If I got too close, say, to shake your hand,
Would you hurl me fathoms deep?”
“Only if you were silly enough to craft
Your wings with wax and straw,”
He guffawed and seemed to slap
His great belly at this,
Poor Icarus, I thought.
“Fair enough,” I said, “I know you,
You’re the sun!”

“I never did fool you poets,
You’re only the third, you know.
But yeah, that’s me.
It’s just that you seemed so bland
And sad in here at night,
So I thought I’d pop by,
Say ‘things will be alright’
Give you a parcel
Of rhyme
And meter, too—
I think you’ll like it very much.
Can’t stay long, though, I’ve things to tend.
Feeding forests is demanding work,
Toil too long and to dust they turn,
Not enough and they bloat, overfed.

We’re not so different,
In our two lines of work.”

I

There once was a garden here and a house on stilts.
We tended each at the edge of a wide ravine;
Myriad faults teemed pink-fingered thistles
From crags and under rock formations,
Cropping up even in the dusty riverbed.

II

The sun scooted along horizons,
Chasing to swallow the tail nobody ever saw
While star-clusters glowed and spun elliptic.
We had never owned a clock, our shadows reported time;
Circumscribing our feet, it was always dusk.

III

The stilts removed by unseen hands in whose wake
Clocks were deposited and tick incessant
On bookshelves and on bedside tables.
Weeds invaded the garden in frenzied droves,
Sapping vibrant juices from our own cultivations.

IV

Still, there’s a solace here settled
Among the thistle-down
From where we see dawn’s
Cold-flames template
Other horizons.

I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct.  

Perjury [pur-juh-ree] the willful giving of false testimony under oath or affirmation, before a competent tribunal, upon a point of material to a legal inquiry.

Even if we could turn back, we’d probably never end up where we started.

Prayer was compulsory back then, and you couldn’t just fake it by moving your lips; you had to know the words, and really mean them.

All the world’s a stage—

The choice prescription for homoerotic iniquity.
A slow permeating paralytic,
Or might they much prefer
I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Napalm
For the flesh of a non-believer,
Yet to be lit by righteous matches
I am convicted,
They shot my chances
Of beating passed these sundry pyroclastics.

The question: “So, what’s your favorite part of having sex with a woman?” left me at an impasse. How the fuck was I supposed to know? Female genitalia horrifies me and not in the kind of way it might horrify a 12 year old boy but in the kind of way a gruesome neighborhood murder terrifies but also fascinates him. So I told them “When it’s in,” and they laughed and cheered and toasted me with their pints of ale while I discreetly cleared my brow of sweat—it’s easy, pulling the wool over their eyes, so long as they don’t realize how bright a pink it’s been dyed.  

And all the men and women merely players.

One of the salient features of our culture is that there’s so much bullshit.

Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.

They have their exits and their entrances—    

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane.

Every time my family visits or I visit them I quit smoking for the duration. If they come to me I stow my pack and lighter in the back of my underwear drawer. Alone, in the shade of the night, I sneak out to blow some smoke.

Merlin wasn’t a magician, he just knew how to wear a dress and talk in haiku.  

Every time I “come out” they always say, “Oh, I think I always knew” or “We all suspected,” which is but shouldn’t be so mightily goddamn insulting.

And one man in his time plays many parts.

But a lie of omission is still a lie. Is that true?