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Two poems by Rick Hilles Larry Levis in Provincetown (June, 2007) So, this is how I am summoned from nothingness: in faded cut offs, moonlighting at Connie’s Bakery where I keep reading Rilke to Jenny, the pastry chef, who rolls her eyes, & blows flour into my tired face. Beneath my limp baker’s hat & stained white smock I still wear my favorite Hawaiian shirt, the color of bubble gum, absinthe & night. We are permitted to choose but one companion for the great journey, so Garcia Lorca is here with me;—we arrived last week as "guest worker summer help." You’ll be happy to know that our work continues, as before, in Death. Last night we finally had that conversation about the moon, & mirrors—why they can’t tell us everything they see. We stood at an ivy-lined gate two summers too late to deliver Stanley Kunitz our best vermouth & news of Roethke and the other immortal poets whose ranks by now, at long last, he’s joined. Instead, our poet of black notes took off his white tuxedo shirt &, facing Stanley’s last masterpiece, his front yard garden, which still revises itself in preparation for his return, Garcia Lorca revealed thumb-sized lavender crescent moons, the eerie constellation across his chest above the heart, the scars of bullet holes from Franco’s Guardia Civil; he told me everything— from the faces of the firing squad to digging his own grave. He says the landscape of his dreams has already drifted from the Alhambra’s gardens, wading pools, & almond groves to the salt marsh at Black Fish Creek & the starlit wisteria he affectionately calls, "These endlessly creeping vines of strumpet braids!" And the delicate braids of Challah we braid each day rise like old lovers awakening to our touch restored. You should see the lean, aristocratic hands of Garcia Lorca—they’ve never been so strong! I didn’t think such mortal progress was still possible for us. Or that I would again be permitted access to the knowledge that comes in a love amplified by the stirrings of the world. And then I recognized something in the insistent, winding taproot of an oak, which pierced me with the recognition that is holy, & I felt the tug of gravity’s widening spell. So that even if Garcia Lorca and I are just scraping by with all the others working for peanuts in high season, to be alive again and living in a hot seaside town is good as any afterlife & probably our best chance at happiness. [first appeared in Columbia Magazine (Winter 2007)] Flashlight Stories 1. The women in this family play pinochle, smoke, toss back salted nuts with the dregs of their drinks. Ethel, Gladys, Esther, Vesta, Effie—names you can’t imagine anyone being named again. One would say, Richard, would you like more to eat? The men are out back still taking turns grinding the ice-cream maker, their biceps swollen and warm from crushing the ice to slush. One by one, even the laughter of these ghosts becomes less audible. You want to ask them in, to tell them stories by flashlight to make them want to stay. You could begin with anything, anything— the smallest thing that ever made you want your life. 2. The air after rain. The sounds of lovers making love, tea and toast, and nevertheless going about their days. It has something to do with gravity. One moment you’re walking at the edge of a street, when your brother is taken from your hand. You go your whole life thinking, Why him and not me? You wake and are no longer young. Traffic is still insidious, but now the hours come apart like soft-boiled eggs. You spoon the round bellies out, pour on tabasco, grind fresh pepper, eating the moments so they sizzle in your mouth, so they burn as they go down. It takes a kind of courage, sometimes, just to say it. Whole days spent otherwise have proven this to me. Step forward, and the wind braces you on all sides. 3. Ghost Story In the tent, we point the flashlights toward the roofs of our mouths and flick the switch. Like wax heads from Grauman’s Chinese Theater my best friends become two terrifying African death masks. We shiver; the rain falls harder through the maples and our friend tells us how his father tore open his knees running home from school, went swimming anyway, and heard eerie muffled voices coming from the docks; how he moved toward them, and they pulled him from the water, pointing at a spot now teeming with shark fins. I pull the scratchy blanket around my neck, and another says that his great-grandmother’s body was kept uncovered in his mother’s childhood living room for days before her funeral; and one night his mother watched through tears as her bedroom door dissolved, her grandmother walked in and kissed her, once, on the temple, the way she always did. 4. Fender Strat with Wah-Wah, Fuzz Box, & Whammy Bar A smeared note swells and scatters like a voice inside a cave, tugging the vibrato till the sound divides like an egg yolk dropped in broth; inside you now, swirling like a geyser trapped in earth before the whole thing blows apart. As if the spirit-world will talk back, the more you face the amp and lean into yourself. You think, there are so many ways to pray. This being, of course, another lining up of hands, the way to take the vagrant silence in yourself and make it deafening. Now it is the whole house breaking in the sound of surf, the echoes rattling the bookshelves, even without the sound. 5. One Underworld My seventeenth summer, sweating all day long in the underbelly of a local Y, breathing in a boiler room’s dry furnace heat. The sun-scorched janitor tells me how the whores in Vietnam unclasped their necklaces and moved them bead by bead inside you; and when you came pulled out that headless rattlesnake so fast your entire body would explode. And something then would silver in your mind, and napalm would spill its orange acid from the trees. And everything, for that one moment, would be still and perfect and impossible to bear. 6. My Mother’s Bed on Fire First there were just a few zeros singed perfectly like nihilist monograms in her elegant nightclothes. Full moons blackened at their edge. A nightstand; the ashtray by her bed overflowing with a pile of broken doll fingers with lipstick at the ends where the life-force had been sucked away. When it finally happened, we were lucky: She woke up. And the insurance covered everything. Now it’s the best room in the house. We joke about it now; call it her Pleasure Dome. When I talk about visiting, she says: Bring your girlfriend, honey, and you can sleep in it. 7. Taking a Shower with My Father After I dislocated my shoulder the second time I stood in the shower of a local Y with my father, onion-bellied men lathering themselves, lemon meringue froth running off their bodies, inching across the tile and down the drain. When he saw me unable to wash myself, he spread a cloud of soap across my back. He said, The guys are going to think we’re queer, ha! Let them! And I’m the one getting nervous, eyeing the doorway, calming myself with thoughts of the house he had in Michigan with his second wife. When I had nightmares there, no matter what, he’d open the coverlet like a storm-cellar door in tornado season, still half-asleep, to let me in. 8. Arcana Mundi After the divorce Mom read every book she could find on the Afterlife, Divination, Atlantis, Lost Worlds. Ancient Cities. At some holiday party she discovered a gift for hypnosis, channeling. One by one she held the willing in waking sleep, walked them backward through their lives to who they were before they were. It came so easily. We sat in elementary and she taught Special Ed at a country school in Salem. By day, her kids basked in the glow of an incubator bought out-of-pocket, the speckled eggs warming until they hatched. At night she read Seth Speaks, roamed the darkest rooms inside herself to find the opening. When other voices came. As if some station buried deep inside our skulls broadcast a music you could learn to tune in. When the voices finally came for her, the flood of static never went away 9. The Temple Before they even knew what it could do to you, they pulled back my mother’s lovely midnight hair, a moon and its reflection rising at each temple, two strong men pinned her down, put electrodes there, a pincher here—cold metal on teeth on tongue—and fired up the furnace to her brain: the shock, electricity, shrugging through her body, oh, oh, she told me she heard the woman in the bed beside her moan, as if on fire, already bending at the knees. She still hears the woman screaming sometimes at night, the screaming wakes her and she says, herself, "My God, it’s me!" 10. Alarm By your thirtieth year they say it should manifest. If not, in most cases, you have been spared. But there are exceptions. Even two years beyond my third decade the dormant, snaky coil of DNA might hiss itself awake, snap its distorted spine and strike. But my mother says: Honey as long as you can point to a reason you feel a certain way you don’t have what I have. And even now I am afraid I feel the alarm about to go off in me, the harried beating in my neck’s carotid artery, the green branching veins inside my wrists. See now, if you can’t feel it here, the second hand ticking its true course, a heart pre-set to detonate. 11. Sometimes you have nothing left to say, and still you keep on muttering like a set of wind-up teeth. Other days, your eyes just glide across the words. Like a catamaran. What is it that makes this the moment you rise into yourself, a set of overalls that ripple into being? You watch your love hug what seems to be a beaten horse, just like Raskolnikov. But when you look later, she wants to console a tree? She can be so dramatic! Even the old Russian men playing dominoes in Golden Gate Park look on and scratch their heads. It’s just another fish wrapped in aluminum, they seem to say. Someone grown heavy with the world, not ready yet to speak. When my mother woke up from her coma, the first words to escape her were, I’m hungry! What if each moment opened up for you like this? 12. After so much build-up, who should arrive but the little Thai delivery-man with the white walrus mustache, the one you always overtip because he is so old and still delivering dumplings, chicken with lemon grass on a rainy Friday night. The strangers you’ve opened your doors to! How many times have you held off sleep just to think again of an idling car where you could fall in love. Or the jukebox in your favorite bar, how it shoots sparkling pink and green soda pop through its veins. You can never fill yourself enough with your beloved, you think, and it seems almost impossible to die. [from Brother Salvage, by Rick Hilles, © 2006. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.] | ||||||||||||
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