Not in the News Today

When you look down your lonesome road
We all know you’re terrified
Join the club, feel at home
We’ll meet you out in the unknown
Where a little green and yellow finch
Sails down to take tiny sips
From the melting ice

Another thing I wanted to confide
Was about the moments when
Everything is drained
Of color, texture, shape and volume
That nauseating void is not without value
Not a hole in your pocket you carelessly overlooked
Nor a punishment for weakness or lack of will
In our gang we call it
A window and a wing

Watch the baseball game while perched on top of a ladder that rises from the on-field grass to the tier seats’ airy reaches.

Some teenage pranksters give you a push and the ladder sways out and away to carry you over the top of the stadium and drop you on the perilous pinnacle of a tower across the street.

You manage to climb down by using your trusty Swiss army knife to puncture the plastic bags between the levels of the rooftop pagoda.

When you are discovered in the basement particle physics lab an angry white-coated technician sprays you with green anti-freeze. You protest you were only saving yourself from certain death.

And why on earth shouldn’t Yvonne DeCarlo be reunited with Fred Gwynne? Something to do with the discontinuation of tape cassettes. Ridiculous! We will make tape, tape and more tape, if that’s what it takes.

Darkest winter morning with only the blinking lights on bridge tops and the usual helicopters hovering over the expressway traffic, until the birth of blue on the dome of the sky, and another December day begins.

I’ll take you out, but I don’t want to throw
My money in the street.
That used to make me mad, but not now.

Somebody stole his suitcase
A vintage pale green Samsonite
That his mother might have taken
On her honeymoon to France

The goddess appeared again,
Cheerfully offered to explain
How to arrange the pieces of the game
In the little mirror-sided box.

Naturally he was relieved to learn
There’s no such thing as the self.

The way you stumble through crowds when you run from the gunman.
The way you wear the big pants cinched up with a belt.
The way you drive the bus without knowing which pedal is the brake.
The way the alley is too narrow to turn around.

You can play the blues
On your plastic flutophone.
Wander around the airport.
Peek out at the parking lot.
But if you go outside
Security will have you disqualified.

If you make the ladders part of your treehouse
You won’t have them to climb up or down.
Still they are very pretty,
Lashed across the branches,
A bridge in the upper air.
I often want the wrong things, too.
Misguided choices may have led me here,
Though I still have most of my hair.
I try not to judge the partridge by the pear.

I die with melting ruth. That’s what Queen Dido says after hearing Troy’s sad story. I’ve got a bag of props. Gore-spattered swords, Louis Quatorze wigs, juggling balls and the like.

Like a hyperactive birthday boy whose frazzled pale mother breaks his hockey stick over her knee on the subway platform.

Like being misdirected to cross the river on a side ramp and ending up at the wrong school altogether.

Like valuing ideology over creativity.

The original hit was a musical but we were doing an adaptation without singing or dancing, retitled High School Straight Play. My role was the Simpleton, and though I’d never rehearsed or even been on the set I wasn’t worried about what to do in my Breughel-meets-Bugs-Bunny tunic and tights.

Like watching TV alone in a room while your family watches through a doorway in the next.

Like the hard-bodied young woman doing her homework who had been my mother a moment before.

When you see his old Volvo wagon skid sideways in the parking lot,
The U-Haul trailer smash into the boulder in front of the bank,
And trigger a pink granite avalanche,
You can only marvel at how fast Eugene grabs the rubble
And is on his way again.

When you see the climb to the top of that rock
As probably not such a hot idea,
And put-upon clerks in their cubicles
Peer out at you, suspicious,
You wonder how the hell to get back down.

Close your eyes and feel
For the footholds with your feet.
You’ll nearly float to the ground.
As for the direction’s to Eugene’s
In a Los Feliz of your mind,
You’re on your own. Get in line.

In the years following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln gifted adepts known as mediums offered the bereft and grieving the opportunity to communicate with the late president via séances. In one particularly inept instance of the operation my partner and I were concealed in a small compartment beneath the floor of a special chamber designed to facilitate contact with the dead. Jimmy provided the voice of Venus, sort of a receptionist to the spirit realm, and I impersonated the late president by reciting what I could remember of the Gettysburg Address.

Back at mom and dad’s bathroom my young son was taking a bath. The water was full of soggy disintegrating toilet paper and huge crawling beetles. Yikes! I didn’t want him to freak out, so I didn’t point out the bugs, but when he saw them he didn’t seem to mind. I poured water from a bucket into the toilet tank. It had a lot of dirt and green paint in it. Yuck. In Boy Scouts they taught us that, in the event of an emergency, the water in your home toilet tank would be potable. Cold and tasty, too! But not this stuff.

I was doing research in a college library with my editor, Juno, a stout woman of a certain age, as they used to say. Many of my supervisors over the years have been women. I’m a man who is comfortable with that.  As we moved through the open stacks, an old friend and mentor from high school, the drama coach we called Mrs. Z, happened to pass by. It was strange because I knew that she had died many years before. She recognized me, smiled, and went her way. I turned to Juno and calmly said, “That woman in the pink sleeveless sweater was a ghost.” Somehow I decided I not to be alarmed by the apparition. Juno, whose unflappability in the face of trying workplace circumstances was well known to me, cheerfully wondered what might have brought my old teacher back from the dead. But when Mrs. Z wordlessly walked by us again her smile had become threatening. I began to feel afraid of what she was up to.

Venus had a great indoor pool—diving platform, underwater lights, the works—and I went right in, fully clothed in a dress suit, something I only wore for weddings and job interviews. I swam right to the bottom and surprised myself by being able to stay under, breathing easily, where the watery light played on the white tiles. This is pretty cool, I was thinking, when I noticed that I had accidentally knocked a tray with the remains of my dinner into the pool when I jumped in. Risotto drifted around and I tried to collect it, but the crumbs kept squirting away from my fingers.

That if a piece of sheet music, a Chopin etude, say, with a pale yellow cover, was placed at the right spot on a piano bench it could be a portal to the future. I could touch it and go to a moment three days ahead. Venus let me in on it, but didn’t say how I could get back.

I gave the goddess her real name. Why be cute? Hear that bell? It’s the knife sharpening truck, either the green one or the red one. Word is the red guy doesn’t know what he’s doing, but they’ll both screw up your blades, so what’s the difference?

I ended up on the bus, passing the door of the Broadway Mall, multi-globed in various brightnesses with a layer of black dust on the tops of the bottommost tier. If I could concentrate and crack the mystery of the fixture I might just understand the meaning of life. I also felt this way about a cactus in a pot on the windowsill of a restaurant on Hennepin Avenue once.

At the start of the semester the stadium was a burnt out ruin like a recently destroyed Colosseum. The kids were making a movie melodrama in which the villain, an unspeakable cad, forced himself on a nubile classmate. The two of them struggled on an open flatcar at the back of a moving train, just like in the old days. As they crossed a trestle over a swampy creek, a creature, half girl, half alligator, some cursed female Caliban, rose up and pulled the malefactor beneath the muck, drowning him. Her face was all you could see above the water as she moaned, “Too late, too late. Too young and too late.”

“Let’s go to the trench, where we can talk,” said the assistant principal to the dean of studies after the school play. I tagged along. My first scene with the ingénue had gone well. All I had to do was stare lovingly into her big brown eyes. But even though I frantically studied the courtroom scene, I didn’t know my lines at all. As per usual. We descended into sub-basements and sub-sub-basements, past mildly wondering assistant engineers at old metal desks until we reached a small café offering white wine from boxes, stale cake and cookies. The rest of the student cast was already there.

When a monarch butterfly
Launched itself on the breeze
Above New York Harbor
Heading for Jersey City
I worried its wings wouldn’t make it.
I watched until it disappeared
Like a plane growing smaller in the sky
Except a foot above the water.
What a crazy thing, I thought,
It’s going into the waves for sure.
But then another butterfly flew off
In the same unlikely direction,
And another and another.
They obviously knew something I didn’t.

I missed the morning meeting because the office was being moved. So sue me. I was walking in the woods and when I got there it was like they were hauling out the files in cardboard boxes. Some special event was on. Families were all over the grounds along with campers on field trips from other towns. They had the familiar tenseness of people relaxed and having fun. I looked everywhere, up and down, tramping in bare feet past rows of lodges and cabins. A baby was stuck up in a tree, crying where she climbed. Jesus. It was that kind of day. My mom and dad were visiting but I didn’t want to see them because I was so embarrassed.

Lines of cars drove by the garage workshop where I sat at a machine I didn’t know how to operate. I just turned it on and off. As if through transparent plastic I could see the vessels and veins beneath my skin, and a dark red rock of what I believed to be dried blood in a pit in my chest. At my touch it fell out and bounced on the floor.