Hazy Remnants of
a Curious Dream
My seventh grade
math teacher, whose name I forget, was doing something up at the board. I was
staring out the window, imagining escaping into the trees I could see from my
desk. A voice on the loudspeaker gruffly broke in on my daydreams. It said
President Kennedy was dead. A farmer plowing a field near Auvers-sur-Oise
unearthed a gun that is believed to be the one Van Gogh used to kill himself.
What jobs society inflicts on its artists! Kafka’s house in Prague is today a
museum. The gift shop sells Kafka mugs and T-shirts. Clouds drip water on the
floor.
River Run
A woman in
jogging shorts was writhing on the ground, her right leg bent at an unnatural
angle, her face contorted in pain. Leaning over her was her running partner
whose idea of help was to yell, “C’mon! Stand up!” This section of the river is
popular for suicide attempts. But if you go early in the morning, it’s not that
busy, and you can see in the pinkish gray water and the rosy sky the beautiful effects
of the pollutants in the air scattering light.
Cannibal Soup
A wound doesn’t have to be deep to bleed profusely. One day while I was
at school, my mom flushed my goldfish down the toilet. I didn’t quite believe
her when she said she found it floating dead on the surface of the fishbowl.
Murder is prohibited by the Sixth Commandment. Somehow killing isn’t. I have
now reached the average age of death for men. My days are shapeless; my nights,
claustrophobic. We haven’t had a wedding or bris in the family for some time. Mostly
we have funerals.
&
There aren’t
enough survivors to count all the dead. In some places, there isn’t even a tree
or roof remaining, nowhere for a bird to sit quietly and think. I attended a
school named for a tyrant. They took our memories and substituted canisters of
decaying film. Behind the tree is a police spy taking notes. Speak in whispers
and what you say will sound more interesting than it is.
&
Seashells – which are, in reality,
bones – crackle underfoot. Gulls swoop and swirl like scraps of paper caught in
the wind. When I was a boy, we lived in a house on Dunsinane Drive, named for
Macbeth’s gloomy Scottish castle. My dad drank, fought, gambled – broke
promises to God he never should have made. He took and used up all the money I
received in bar mitzvah gifts. My mom got sick. I was the oldest child still at
home. Poetry flourishes in the ruins.
The Mystery of
It was the day of
the school bus rodeo, the fall weather like cool jazz on the turntable. Bus
drivers were competing on an obstacle course apparently designed with
punishment in mind. Even with only one good ear, Vincent Van Gogh could hear in
the distance the aggressive grinding of gears. Looking down from his high
throne, God muttered, “Oh shit!” Van Gogh was drinking a jar of paint on a mad
impulse. Rachel, his favorite at the brothel, kept a donor heart in a cooler
beside her bed for just such occurrences. She had studied Buddhism with a bear
trainer in Bhutan and knew why the eyes of some animals shine at night.
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Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose poetry collections include The Dark and Akimbo, available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher.