Stephen Vincent wrote:
> Tom Mazzolini, the SF Bay Area Blues impresario, - used his Saturday KPFA
> radio show to say he had just learned that Bo Diddley had suffered a heart
> attack (apparently this was preceded by a stroke last Spring).
Be he alive (I hope) or be he dead, Bo gave me an image and a title into
which to fit pseudohistory circa early 2001: a nightmare I've recycled
forever and probably shall again. And yes, like Bo said to Bo Jackson
the athlete, "Bo, you don't know diddley."
"WHO DO YA LOVE, OH BABY?"
Prologue: Homage to John Webster
Start anywhere. Enter through any door. No.
Enter through my door, the one I have drawn, then
cut from the artificial wall, the door of remembered
insanity and my latter-day madness. Come through
this portal on my terms or just get lost.
Don't tell me I'm savaging the memory of love,
pouring ice on the embers until they reek of winter.
For I will say "Amen, amen, the natural job of poets
is to be grave makers, but verily, I have improved upon it,
for I'm exhuming someone else's."
If you don't like my door, find another.
The exit will always be the same.
Everyone in here is dead. Her. Me.
John Webster could do this in 1612--
populate a world with the dead who'd not lie down,
who spent five acts drinking, scheming, fornicating,
then got 'round to catching up with themselves by
killing each other off: husbands, wives, sisters,
brothers, children. It was like vaudeville in
the back room of a butcher shop. As for me, now?
I'm not that talented but I'm at least as warped.
1. Night Of The Living Dead, June 1967
Begin then. Begin with how we sat
in the bar of a Cuernavaca resort hotel,
lapped margaritas by candlelight
and mariachi music after an afternoon
in the Xochimilco Gardens, probably
sweating out last night's cerveza fria binge,
or whatever it was we snarfed instead.
I don't truly remember the music.
I'm less a liar now than then,
but still you can't take much I say at face value.
Even music by now has the hue of fabricated memory.
I remember the candles because I lit our cigarettes
from them and burned my hand. It's all so Now, Voyager.
I cast myself as Paul Henreid, but through the fog
of Sauza, Triple Sec, and gasoline I saw you
as Ingrid Bergman, not as that bitch Bette Davis,
which probably is closer to the truth.
As long as we're doing Bergman-Henreid movies,
cut to Casablanca: "The mariachi band wore red,
you wore brown." Brown your hair, brown your eyes
that flared after the third margarita--
I slithered to sprawl by you on the banquette,
buried my head in your tank-top, licked your nipple.
And you, who loathed the PDA, didn't give a damn,
instead massaged my cock through my shorts.
We were greased at last out of the armor we wore
and into this perfumed candlewax air, away
from the 72-hour screaming-fight drive on biphetamines,
grass, and no sleep from New York to Mexico City,
smack into the tropospheric looniness
of tanked-up passion, where we were almost good together.
No, not quite even then.
For when we stumbled back to our room,
that is where I probably raped you because
by then I was toting a bassoon between my legs,
you passed out and I kept on going.
Not that I took any longer than usual,
I just gushed into you, then shriveled to nothingness.
And if you'd forgotten as half the time you did
to pop the Enovid, you could have claimed
if you'd been Catholic a Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe
Miracle Conception because you wouldn't have remembered
a thing of that night.
Except that maybe this was really Rosemary's Baby
and I was some stroboscopic vision of Satan
--what I really wanted to be when I grew up--
implanting Hell and Death in you because I had you down
and was for one night all Power on Earth.
Because I could.
Because I knew the child of that night
could be the true Significant Other,
come back one day to kill me.
Because I believed for years
that it would be a mercy killing.
Because our lives, the seasons that followed,
were Advent.
2. Thanksgiving Day, 1990
My wife hates you.
Not a wonder, you are the Other
whom every woman dreads beyond mere fear.
You are Rebecca De Winter herself, your presence felt,
a part of the man that cannot be dispossessed.
Years beyond the event, sex is more than mere strokes.
The creaking beds of ancient failed loves haunt us:
and women know as men perhaps do not that Knowing
endures beyond cylinders and pistons.
Respectability cannot keep down the beast
who lurks subterranean, who
bursts forth at inconvenient moments to demand
the full run of our private nuthouses.
We become imperfect dangerous legends.
I, Aeneas, who moved on to an earthbound woman,
to marriage, children, smugness with the weight
of a persona whose collar is a half size too tight.
And you, Dido, a klutz who mangled her own best tries
to whack herself, let the demons overrun
her life, finally was brought to ground instead
by love and marriage in an Oklahoma trailer park.
Oh, but my wife hates you!
She hates that I fly to Tulsa
to sit with your husband (we are all so mature)
after your penultimate try at a last meal,
a main course of lithium carbonate,
Dinner of Champions, followed by the dessert
of slashing the crooks of your elbows with a hunting knife.
"What the hell" my wife cries at last
"do you want to do with a man who goes hunting?"
She hates that I've given him my phone number
so you can use it.
Always this litany from an expired Missalette of lies:
It's long over, she's still my friend,
we went through hell together,
we put each other through hell, she's sick.
God laughs at self-delusion.
So I sit, Thanksgiving morning, thankless,
nervous and unnerved, in front of a computer,
awaiting an unwanted family. It's 10 AM,
I'm already back from buying the wine,
a cup of coffee and glass of Stoli arrayed before me,
up since 5 AM watching the sun rise like a
fireball over the lake (Venite, Nagasaki!),
and there you are on the phone,
all manic sheets flapping in your own private typhoon,
your soft voice turned to an Exorcist belching growl,
my wife waving her hands at me like a broken semaphore,
I shaking my head like a bobble-head doll with a twisted spring,
you talking through it all in a parody of sexiness
about how you are really a channel for Maria Callas,
graphically--pistons and plugs--about
how we made love like Maria and Ari,
I hearing your husband moaning "For Jesus' sake, shut up!"
and I can't get drunk enough to wipe out
lust-memory or anger at memory
or the screech of brakes on the street
or my kids in the next room watching the Macy's parade
or my wife's furious gesticulations
or the smell of turkey mixed with your smells
or the remembrance of your mouth at the end
filled with curses at me, remembrance
of your mouth filled with me,
your worst insults spat out like semen made of lye,
me a moment later beyond control desiring, entering, you
wanting only your single blinding blind eye,
screaming, laughing, holding you down, pouring
whiskey you did not refuse down your throat
to wash down the meds you could not mix,
then gagging down the rest over the meds
I could not mix, then plugging myself into you
on the floor, against the wall, wherever we fell,
praying for this at long last--Oh Jesus please,
let it be the Liebestod!--the Ultimate Coming,
they would find us years later,
Quasimodo and Esmeralda passed beyond the mortal stench,
wrapped in one another's arms, non-matter,
non-being, non.
But we weren't that lucky or there was a Someone
who decided that one of us had to walk away.
So the music ended, we ended, finally you ended.
And I hitched my wagon to my ass and a star
and followed them in a fog, dropping wife, children,
lovers, overweighted globs of life along the road:
except for when they led me toward the morning
past Advent when the promises finally were fulfilled.
3. We All Fall Down, Christmas 2000
Strindberg, with his Northern lack of humor,
called it a Danse Macabre, but it wasn't always so.
Ballet vertical, ballet horizontal,
tango, twisted sheets and limbs,
passion and late afternoon sunlight
when time drained itself out through the skin,
there were those times, too few,
when the battle stopped just long enough
for our bodies to sing a song of truce,
fitted one to the other, and gold flowed
out of me into you, you were a mine
I drew from and refilled inexhaustible.
But there was no child, not then, not of us:
not a rape-monster, an Incredible Hulk risen
from the Newark sewers out to wreak vengeance.
Not even fantasy and alcohol could conjure such a being.
Instead, our Advent ended with a sad, dead wreath
floating in a puddle, and with the thought of you,
newmade with each turning of this season,
of two percent of your body weight on a mantlepiece,
remembered on a cold birth morning when I knelt
in damp socks from the life-chore of carelessly
cleaning up behind my unknowing cats,
then walking through a drizzly dawn, slipping,
falling on black ice, cutting my hands
so I looked like a well-fed, middle-aged, surviving
version of the figure on the Cross who stared at me
with (I'd like to think) a special kind of sadness,
because he got to cash it in at thirty-three
while some of us--cursed, blessed--survived even
the nails we tried to drive into ourselves.
KTW/2-1-01
--------------------
Ken Wolman rainermaria.typepad.com
We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow...
Bernstein/Wilbur, "Candide"
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