private | folks | currently | previously | mail | profile | g-book |
|||||||||||||||||||||
2002-07-06 - 10:46 a.m. |
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
My first thought this morning, it's too late now. He's gone now. Quick dodge: I went to the movies last night. Third time in five days. I saw Insomnia and partway through Bathsheba said, "is this a remake of a movie? I've seen this." Which gave me deja vu because catboy wrote the same thing in an email to me a few days ago. Not deja vu, actually. Repetition. Or reincarnation. That movie made me sleepy. I want to live in the movie theater. My friend is gone and therefore I could not meet anyone new last night. Impossible, I thought. Quick dodge: Normally I hate Al Pacino--he's all Al Pacino shtick and you can't for a moment forget who you're watching. In this movie, though, I did forget. He reminded me of Frank Church, actually. The way he walked and talked, the way he put on a bit of the dumb-witted old man act, when really he knows precisely what's happening, when really he knows better than anyone else. I feel like such a phony, not calling him. Thinking, well, that will show him. Quick dodge: When I think of Frank Church I think, first, of two readings I saw him give. In the first, he read a poem that was lightning quick--too smart by half. He was showing off. He had a photograph of some hideous piece of art projected behind him as he read his poem, a pantoum. I hate pantoums. Then he talked about the painting. Then he read the poem again. It was all a great joke, beautiful and brilliant and mean. I think he put a lot of people off because he had us all so convinced of his Southern good old boy thing, that when he suddenly showed his cards, showed that he's smarter, more with-it than any Northern Ivy League ho, quicker than a cheetah, it felt a bit like he was having a joke at our expense. But I loved that. The next year he read a very short story whose name I cannot now recall, damn it, (coalminer and strike are surely in the title. I think. Ah, thank you Frances--the story's called "The Children of Strikers") but it was so short and quiet and went straight down to the truth and pulled it up and put it right before us. Knocked us clean over the head with it, he did. Frank wrote me a letter once and I just tried to find it and I can't and oh damn. I was so proud of that letter, but now I've lost it like I lose everything I love. Here I am, I'm going to be a pirate and write down this whole poem by Sherman Alexie. (To salve my conscious, please note that you can buy his book One Stick Song and have this poem, as well as all the other greatness contained therein, for yourself.) The American Artificial Limb CompanyMy sister, my phantom limb, I reach for her using her as the tool by which to remember her. I wake at four in the morning with her fingers on my throat. "Run now," she says. "On one leg or three, it doesn't matter which." As the years pass she becomes vestigial, an archaic organ whose only purpose is to be removed. Today, I saw a legless boy in a wheelchair, two women with hooks for hands, and a man playing basketball on two prosthetic legs. Grief attaches itself to my legs with bolts and screws; grief crushes my ribs beneath its weight; grief creates new joints, new elbows and knees; grief removes my hands and replaces them with more grief. Drunk with grief and its whiskey, I once told a pretty white woman she looked exactly like my sister, but I lied. I also lied when I said I only told one pretty white woman she looked exactly like my sister. In truth, I have lost track of the number of pretty white women who looked exactly like my sister. I must have said that to a dozen, to dozens. And, in truth yet again, I must admit that none of the pretty white women looked anything like my sister. I wanted them to rescue me. I was lonesome. On the highway, I was the abandoned shoe that keens for its mate. When I say she was my sister, I mean she was my sister. You have to understand that white people invented irony. I drive my car to the Veterans Hospital and watch them lug pieces of men in and out, in and out, and in and out. Remember, the photographs only reveal half of her beauty, the other half being her dirty mouth because she cursed as Whitman might have cursed if Whitman had decided to curse the world instead of praising it: Fuck the world, fuck the inadequate body that housed my sister, fuck the arms and legs, fuck the fire that took her away, fuck her for leaving, fuck the shovel and glove, fuck the sheer competence of fork and knife and spoon, fuck memory, fuck the clock, fuck oxygen, fuck the amputees and their loneliness, fuck the inadequate body that houses me, fuck beauty, fuck the shoe, fuck the song, fuck irony, fuck this war and that war, fuck this war and that war, fuck this and fuck that, fuck this, fuck that, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. "Sir," says the salesman, "Our artificial limbs come in three different colors: white, black, and in-between." |
|||||||||||||||||||||