Lydia Lucid

"There'll never be an end to it!" I said angrily.
"Our hands will never be free!"
Simone de Beauvoir


The eyes protrude handsomely and not in a bulging way so as to suggest a goiter, but in a way intimidating--as if the woman who looks thru such eyes could see through any nonsense or falsehood.

He thinks the woman is probably (true to form, Earth wise) stronger than he, even though he, like her, has spent a large part of his whole life questioning reality. Imagining, then questioning, "reality." Maybe he imagines her falsely.

His eyes lend her eyes an aura (or mystique) that leads him to imagine a reality, a way of atunement with reality, or a way of valuing reality that is stronger than he is. Her eyes lend his eyes an aura (or mystique) that leads her to imagine a reality for him that is stronger than she is.

He closes his eyes and listens to the cartoon on Channel 18 about Saul, Jonathan and David. David takes the slingshot and slays Goliath.

He opens his eyes and looks at her photograph. The lips.
The earlobe. Is her hair auburn? Her eyes light green? Blue? Would she, could she, help him to improve his French? to edit out his (wretched) excesses?

She saw the falsity of trying to recapture the whole, but the still images still flashing annoyed her. They promised to deliver a tryst--a trust--more satisfying than anything that might come after the morning routine. She arose and stepped off the few paces to the sink, to gargle and brush, to put on the stiff, unpleasant shower cap. Was his hair blond? Cut in a mop? Had he mentioned something about his room? Had they held hands? Were they watching "Strangers on a Train" at the Bijou? Had she dyed her hair for him? Reddish brown?

But then he'd be starting a new friendship and his weight impeded his (once spry) gait and she was a two hour drive away. Once there, he could park two, possibly three blocks, from her brownstone, and could perhaps huff and puff, with pauses at sidewalk benches. Or they could meet at a bookstore.

She thought, "Say there is for both the me and the not-me no non-relative territory to invade or defend."

He thought, "Do these android appearing, insectlike kids who drive big-tyred trucks and go innocently forth to fight a desert war they will later grant was no piece of cake, do their genomes'roots extend deep into Euro-American history? Roots deeply tinctured with bellicosity?"

"Yea, though I weigh 300 pounds, and lack charity...."

Does she have enough stamps to post the cheques for the cable bill? the light bill? If she takes her umbrella, will it rain? She is annoyed that she did not get up before it became a burden and an annoyance, but it arrived late, and for a time it was pleasant.

Surely it were futile to sleep on past noon. She could drop the envelopes at the mailbox and just keep on walking. But where? And why?
posted by jim at 5:08 PM

Mayan Discontinuum

We have left an upstairs loft, the shape changer and I, and it is raining. I fear for my feathery hat (Rosellini, fawn/sage, like the dons wear in Sicily), for yes, in one of those infamous & universal bordertown passages, crossing the Street of Mud from the Celibate's Bordello to the Accountant's funeral, once I got soaked, but that was partly synthetic, though the corner church was Trinity, lichen-privileged stone, and that navy pinstripe suit--the cleaners made it like new.

I hasten to catch up with Mother. And then we probe the auld foggy narrow lane, slowing for shadowy passers by, of course, whitened in the tiny glow of legendary meagre headlamps : I drive from the British side. We stop and ask a trusty, "Is this the torment then? Just for pedestrians? And are there broader lanes, perchance, for motorized carts--as this appears to be?" His canny brow lifts above a Stevensonian eye: the trophy of a brogue: "I canna answer! Overlay, vanquished palimpsest--the humour!"

Guide, pensioner, translator--but who is this, welling up ashes from what bloody, unbroken--though broken, and rebroken--heart? I guess, or at least I gather, then, we abandon the car, certainly a bailiff of the other world accosts us for facts of origin, as from some subterranean template. Fallujah? Mexico City?

I stammer "Broadway," my mother mentions the Hill by its vernacular name, its alliterative moniker (even then I seem to recall not knowing the characters, the pronouncement), whereupon we escape behind or through some machinery, and there appears a table on a backlit lawn, some candles, a spread of midnight Lute Fisk picnic condiments mysteriously obtained, strollers chirping gaily alongside a picket fence to whom I whisper "To the east, no light, the birds not yet waking ...," whereupon they approach with interrogative eyebrows and penetrant gaze. "Hurry up, please, it's time--Let us away!"

My mother smiles as if to indicate, "No matter. Do not worry." Never mind, she seems to say, without need for actual remonstrance--and I suppose that's when we waken like metamorphic simulacra, or like some ectoplasmic form of human metaphors, in the big house, and my companion,
Tonto Frazier and I, we kick the punks in their butts and we flatten the toughs, the seasoned yard birds with Queensbury jabs, counterpoints, the occasional roundhouses. Money, a deed, appearing in my buddy's wallet, attracting the warden's interest--suddenly the friend, sly, almost Fieldsian-Falstaffian, reminds me out loud of our vagrant identity: "If we have no proof of residence and therefore you shoot us in the head, who writes you the cheque you so clearly--droolingly--desire? Hmmmm? The mullahs of mosques? Yes?"

I think I awaken to lights, the thermostat set at 55, the furnace fan still on and blowing, me making the usual inane memos for Easter reading in church: Matthews, Nabokov, Hamsun, Kabir,
Rumi, Baez, Kafka.

"The charred guest can speak. But barely." Mom said. "As from some cable or newsprint report. Through bandages." I omit to ask, "Was this bold volunteer of reconstruction jumped upon by several devils, from a liberated window ledge? And is he bandaged, then, beyond all recognizable and official boundaries of identification?"

Perhaps yes and in serifs--squiggles of injured marine (life-) ink, italics of impotent sarcasm--I likewise forget to ask, "how do we spell Sunni? Shiite? Kut, Najaf, Karbala?"

And how does George W. Bush?
posted by jim at 3:39 PM

I have returned (2-23-2005).
But I have biomedical ethics class upstairs so I had better skeedaddle.
So this is just to say, i have eaten the plums that you left in the ice box,
but I shall return, with Mayan Discontinuum & other poems. Soon!
adios,
Old Dog
posted by jim at 1:56 PM