Archive for April, 2007

I’m not looking you in the eye. I know your office is down the hall from mine and I see you at least once a day. I’m not looking at you. Maybe I notice you on the train platform three times a week. I’m not looking at you. You might be the librarian who did some work for me last month. Or the cashier at the deli on my corner. I’m not looking at you.

I have my reasons for avoiding your gaze. Perhaps I consider the intersections of our daily routines, however frequent, to be merely coincidental and insufficiently important for the disturbing of my privacy. Maybe I don’t want to give the impression of inviting even a nodding acquaintance between us because I don’t have the time. Maybe I just don’t trust you. I may not like the way you dress. My reasons are none of your business.

I’m perfectly entitled to ignore you, no matter how familiar you are; it’s my right. The trouble is, you’re incapable of simply allowing me to enjoy the privacy of my own gaze without judging me. You think I’m the worst sort of snob or dangerously neurotic. You suspect I may have a personality disorder. Your opinion of me sinks lower and lowers until you want to knock me over and push a pencil up my nose—and you don’t even know me, for god’s sake. It’s rank injustice. I’m not looking at you.

You and Dad wore rusty raincoats
and rode desk chairs
around the airport atrium,
while being chased by a bat.
You’re forever relocating, don’t ask me why.
The new place has lots of potential,
once you remove all those wires from the ceiling.
And for that big front room,
a helpful friend offered,
“Why not a big round table
with the insignia of every nation around the edges?”
You said you’d think it over.

The lovely and brilliant Katie O’Toole,
who kissed me in Japanese class,
pilots a biplane through barrel rolls
to study the play of light and shadow
across the contours of an egg
mounted in the cockpit.

We disinter an unpleasant neighbor
from a temporary grave out back,
bag him and leave him on the lawn,
looking horrible through the plastic.
Sue me, but I’m not taking one bite of that guy,
no matter how well he’s barbecued.

Meet Manfreddo, hair stylist extraordinaire.
At his modest suburban ranch he displays
his collection of architectural ashtrays.
Here’s one shaped like Wright’s Guggenheim.
Over brunch Manfreddo dispenses bon-mots,
such as, “On the Internet nobody knows
you’re not an Eskimo.”

You excuse yourself to rinse an eye
in the bowl of the bathroom sink.
You insert it back in its socket;
you can see better now, you think.

The ice floes on Manfreddo’s pond
are like some kind of Arctic farm,
and yet the water is surprisingly warm.
In their clothes the women go wading
while you stand at the edge, hesitating.

This summer you plan to be rootless
and wander the camping grounds.
You’ll wear big rubber boots,
assemble the documents,
store the diskettes in cigarette cases,
have your hair done in unusual places.
If it snows, you’re coming home.

Quick! Hide your old coat
in the factory tool shed
before we take the guided tour
of the full-scale facsimile of the flood.
The Sailor and the Indian
from the Great Seal of the State of New York
sag like deflated parade balloons
on top of half-submerged skyscrapers.
We’ll skip out of the office
to practice baseball in the ruins
of the Broadway show palace.
We’ll tootle on trumpets
missing their mouthpieces.
We will be sad but not sour.
Our zest for life will be undiminished
even at this, the eleventh hour.

Our homes will be always in rehab—
new door latches and light switches.
We will ride Venetian gondolas
on wheels through wildernesses.
Our organization will undergo
a vast transformation
and then we’ll go on vacation
to another city, where the men wear straw fedoras
and beautiful cotton print short-sleeved shirts,
the colors nearly faded away
as if sanded to shades of grey.

Beneath the plaster angel on the ceiling
in the corner of the hall
you sat at a schoolroom desk
and scribbled.
The second-best binoculars
and the spare sunglasses were strewn
all about the lawn.
I was going to bring them to you
and wag my finger at your carelessness
but I took them to the campers’ cabin
where all the beds were connected
and I said I slept alone.

A poor bird trailed a string
like the tail of a kite.
A prankster tied cigarettes
to the window frames.
When the smoke drove everyone else away,
I caught the dark boy with the faint mustache
and asked him why he would waste his time like that.
He said nothing but flicked ashes at me.

Another night, another hairdressing show. It’s either that or we’re in school. And not back in school, either; it’s not that old second-year algebra exam again. Jeezus. These are entirely new hairstyles and educational institutions.

There’s a slide on the stairs
and you’re there at the top, baby,
where they cut your hair
before the concert begins.

Summary: The Knowledge Manager
will be responsible for ensuring
that the company maximizes
the value it achieves by partnering
with internal knowledge experts
and then working collaboratively
to disseminate that knowledge
internally and externally.
The Knowledge Manager
and the internal knowledge experts
will eat lunch in the library.

Then it’s on to a golf tourney where Jack Nicklaus (slouch cardigan, plaid pants) has to ricochet the ol’ pill off a tree trunk in the slanting red light of sunset. Jack lives for shots like that, the whispering announcer assures us. And once again we’re on the water, boating around Jamaica Bay (that’s in Queens), riding the waves in a houseboat like a fishing shack with only three walls. Are you seeing this?

Popular Portable Puzzles
Proving Positively Perplexing
and Perpetually Pleasing
Presenting Persistently
Provoking Problems
Providing Profuse Pleasure
and Producing a Palliative
or Placid Panacea
to People Possessing a Propensity
for Persistence, Patience
and Painstaking Perspicacity.
Plus you, kid. How do you like your haircut?

Spinning ever more deeply into the long winter’s night
I was stuck in a creepy trailer park
lacking the necessary oomph it took
to squeeze out of the cupboard-sized bedroom.
On top of that predicament the day’s events in the campground
cast the possibility for world peace in a singularly dismal light
what with all the black magic conjured
by an unwelcome exhusband
his grinning face hovering disembodied above the picnic.
Why did we submit to the strange pose with intertwined limbs?
Why continue to go along as we spun awkwardly through the woods?
A small black snake slithered close without biting.
Our friends were in the basement bemused by my ruined experiment
with the enormous jellyfish and the waffle iron.
I should never have left them so long on the heat,
And who was driving me home, anyhow?
I sure as shit wasn’t getting behind the wheel of that dune buggy.

You like bits and pieces of things. Not for you the clear, clean dramatic arc, the Aristotelian purity. You like stories filled with loops, digressions, minor epiphanies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. When one door closes, another opens. It’s drafty in here, but not uncomfortable.

We’re in an impromptu singing trio with Bing Crosby. We call ourselves The Mongooses, and do sloppy versions of Negro spirituals, like Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.

We feed the wild boar whiskey;
that seems to calm him down.

Fred Astaire in full drag
swans around an enormous bordello ballroom
like a cavern or a cathedral.
Mel Torme’s electric oboe
malfunctions in mid-concert.
It’s a rainy night on the football field.

You wake up with the baritone voice of Robert Goulet in your head, belting out I’ve Gotta Be Me. He’ll go it alone; that’s how it must be, but what about you? Will you ever be free from the metaphorical mailroom? Luckily the answer is yes, though your ghost lingers among the letters, the heartfelt sentiments and statements of concern.

There’s a column of air
between your belly
and your brain.
Replenish and don’t complain.

Like a hairdressing exhibition
at the bottom of an empty pool,
the garage is in flames,
the car is gone,
and the cemetery is your school.

In fact, the center of the campus is a hillside crowded with rococo mausoleums, gilt encrusted pagodas and pergolas you literally have to climb over to get from class to class. It seems ridiculous, but what do you know about college?

Inside Count Dracula’s tomb
all the dead presidents are kept alive
in perpetual decrepitude.
Kegger in the catacombs! Wa-hoo!

All aboard the Letters Department Express!
The whole gang’s here
from the days before the layoffs:
Thin Lizzie, Sad Sal, Weird Jane and Smart Alec;
only now we don’t handle the mail,
we peddle books in a smart little shop
in the last car of a shiny new passenger train. Cute?
I hang out in the staff-only lounge at the back
and watch the scenery roll by:
elaborate ice sculptures
and a querulous old woman
who chatters at her aged black manservant
about getting her breakfast
while he gently makes fun of her impatience.

While lounging at lunchtime in the piazza
I was worried about the wear
on the knees and elbows of my charcoal pinstripe suit.
I was visiting my fifth-grade teacher,
Mrs. Kells of the pronounced Kentucky accent.
She said the last time I came to put on a play
I brought the kids candy and shiny brochures
so why was I empty-handed today?

Remember the cute navigation officer
with the Russian accent
and the hair from Rubber Soul?
He reappeared on the Unconscious Channel,
but the years had taken a toll:
in the middle of his forehead
he had a gaping black hole.
Even so he was chipper
as he lent a hand
to some teenage sleuths
straight out of Scooby-Doo land.