November 22nd

Rabbitman

The teacher gave lessons
We could use later

Against shiftlessness and sloth

But he couldn’t look us straight in the eye

Me in the front row with the longing mouth

Hot for Miss Caron’s slipping buttons

He was called Rabbitman almost to his face by the Italian punks

Who left carrots on his desk on Mondays
The greens of which he tweezed between

His index finger and thumb

His eyes were low as a beaten dog’s
Staring down for some time after them

Into the metal garbage can
Near his tasseled shoes under the desk
He cried when Kennedy died

In front of me

His shoulders collapsed
The back of his pant legs

Rumpled on the edge of the desk
We couldn’t look

His soft heart digging a desperate hole

His shoulders shaking his suit

Me who didn’t know what to think about anything—

God, I’d never seen his pants so wrinkled

A neighbor

Phenomena

It snowed in August.
I was barbecuing; a neighbor stood at my fence.
“Is that snow?”
Usually the neighbors don’t talk to us
Nor we to them; we nod if they pass by.
If they don’t wave back we nod again
At an airplane or a chipmunk rummaging over privet roots.
“I think it’s just ashes from the charcoal,”
But to myself I noted they were windlessly falling,
My nose was wet, and white dots fogged my glasses.
“What next?” he said, his shoulders slumped.
He was a tallish man who another neighbor,
An Italian ex-nun, told me
Had once suffered a nervous breakdown.
“Maybe we’re both seeing things,” I said.
I didn’t say going crazy.

The snow was like summer flies.
There were no clouds in the sky;
It fell from the trees two yards away
Where a lady had just died;
It fell from the golden eagle
Atop the umbrella protecting my picnic table.

“What next?” and he scratched at his bare knee.
I flipped a burger and rolled a dog;
A piece of charcoal hissed and smoked
As the snow started coming down now like it really meant it.

The 22nd century

 A friend of mine’s son appears to be gay. My friend loves his son and secretly hates gay men, although some of his close friends are gay men. My friend is a football fan, played football in Pop Warner, broke a few teeth, his own and others, broke a leg, was really too small for the sport, but overachieved until concussions made playing impossible. Aggressively he pursued the arts instead, wrote stories about physical oppression and unlikely heroes. His stories were very funny and bleak and thin; they lacked humanity, they smirked. He himself had a complexed need to overachieve as a man, to please his own father, who is dead and even if he were alive would never admit to being pleased, a creature of the mid-20th century, his son, my friend, bridging the gap between centuries, would simply help his father to his feet, try to make him a hero; while the grandson, the truth teller, the young boy who appears to be gay, will someday shine, have sons of his own, and life on earth in the late 21^st century will be so much his, so different, and his children, our children's children, will be afraid of nothing.

Recovering

She slept on the floor, which was fine. She had been sleeping in the recliner, the bed being so high above the ground, so precarious waking up and staring down from its edge, tipping, her arms useless, her nightdress against the sheets like water on glass, sliding, and inside her head everything lopsided, leaning to the left and down, down. The recliner was like the arms of a big gentle daddy, her solid big-armed daddy and she slept so sweetly in those arms. But the floor, where she now found herself, seemed fine in its own right, she wished she had thought of it before. No use wondering how she got there and why she was wearing a green party dress, it's just where she was, no looking back, only forward to where she would now spend her nights, and days.

Twenty years ago

Church in Aravaca

I stood outside;
a narrow street was swallowed in its shadows;
I watched a boy with many bags
seated on hard earthen steps
behind the rectory.

A sullen man stood
beneath a late-flowering tree
overgrowing the churchyard
against the fence, smoking.

In a tobaca I slowly ordered
postcards of the church
and a beligraphica.

Hoping for some stamps,
I was given a choice
of cigarette lighters from a
cardboard box.

I sat, on the park
bench, a  pew beneath
the spires, church swords clenched
with sunlight;
the tobacconist washed
the stones around my feet;
I wrote home,

-A sad boy with many bags waited
for the rectory doors to open.
A man, angry and thin, dark,
in flowering trees, the street of Aravaca, the closed Church,
he smoked away, the shadowy morning-

Posing

The platform against the wall in the middle of the studio was framed by a semi-circle of stand-up easels and stools, with flat tables on either end of the room. A thin, rough-shaven man with a slight Euopean accent fussed with drawing paper and signup sheets, a bit unsure of whether he had enough determination to settle everyone down and get the life-drawing session underway. The model was a small woman with braided grey hair tied above her head; she sat beside a space heater in a checkered bathrobe; her brows and shoulders showed wear or perhaps worry, as she quietly removed her slippers and prepared to disrobe; she stretched her arms in the air above her and bent her back and her hips. I felt that beneath her unsmiling expression was curiosity as if she wanted to make eye contact but it wasn’t what she did as a nude model; eye contact would get in the way; from the very first moments of the gathering of nervous sketchers she was to be a pliant body, holding 1 minute, 5 minute, 15 minute, and 30 minute poses, in charge not only of what we would draw but how we would feel about her. Every pose included a downward glance suggesting melancholy but really showing only superiority and control. Yet her naked body—the thin crease lines in her skin above her hips when she twisted in position, the short sharp line of her backside curving up toward her spine in repose, the dark wrinkled nape of her neck below her hair—told its own story without words. She was being paid to expose her arms and ears and breasts and belly and braids; her choices of position, her tilted head, her delicate fingers and ankles, her frowning lips, exposed her as well, and it was that which I missed in my awkward work.

Father Time

In a dream I needed consoling, so she consoled me at first with a hug, which was normal, and then with a kiss, which was unusual, her lips yielding, full of forgiveness and anticipation, then her eyes, rueful, apologetic. I awoke and drew a Father Time without passion, without anger, not even a face, just an arm with a hand covering a head.