The doctor prescribed a device
To practice stretching my lungs.
I catch a glimpse of
My shark dead left eye,
Monocular, in the bathroom mirror.
What damage to my brain
Allows my right eye–believing
it is engaged in life–
To catch my dead eye?
I can’t breathe deeply enough.
I’ve been trying to argue lately that Joe R. Lansdale is not merely a purveyor of fine fiction. He certainly is that. I believe he is worthy of higher accolades. I compared the scene of a patriarch of a poor family of coal miners in To The Bright and Shining Sun, to the death scene at the end of Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I believe they stand up to each other very well. Here’s the link to that study if you like. http://stevedmarsh.com/review-burkes-to-the-bright-and-shining-sun/
So, today I thought I’d take a look at two descriptions of like intent and tone with another big prize winner. The first selection is from William Kennedy’s Ironweed, his 1979 novel which ultimately became an excellent 1989 movie with amazing performances by Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep. (And one of the oddest by Tom Waits). The book was a part of a triptych called the Albany Cycle. It was Ironweed which earned Kennedy the Pulizer Prize. The following is Francis, a profoundly alcoholic bum returning to the only place he ever thought of as home and to his wife whom he has not seen in years. The scene begins inside of Francis’s memory.
From Ironweed by William Kennedy.
And then they kissed.
Not just then, but some hours or maybe even days later, Francis compared that kiss to Katrina’s first, and found them as different as cats and dogs. Remembering them both now as he stood looking at Annie’s mouth with its store teeth, he perceived that a kiss is as expressive of a way of life as is a smile, or a scarred hand. Kisses come up from below, or down from above. They come from the brain sometimes, sometimes from the heart, and sometimes just from the crotch. Kisses that taper off after a while come only from the heart and leave the taste of sweetness. Kisses that come from the brain tend to try to work things out inside other folks’ mouths and don’t hardly register. And kisses from the crotch and the brain put together, with maybe a little bit of heart, like Katrina’s, well they are kisses that can send you right around the bend for your whole life.
But then you get one like that first whizzer on Kibbee’s lumber pile, one that comes out of the brain and the heart and the crotch, and out of the hands on your hair, and out of those breasts that are not all the way blowd up yet, and out of the clutch them arms give you, and out of time itself, which keeps track of how long it can go on without you getting even slightly bored the way you got bored years later with kids and almost anybody but Helen, and out of fingers (Katrina had fingers like that) that run themselves around and over your face and down your neck, and out of the grip you take on her shoulders, especially on them bones that come out of the middle of her back like angel wings, and out of them eyes that keep opening and closing to make sure that this is still going on and still real and not just stuff you dream about and when you know it’s real it’s OK to close ‘em again, and outta that tongue, holy shit, that tongue, you got to ask yourself where she learned that because nobody ever did that that good except Katrina who was married and with a kid and had a right to know, but Annie, goddamn, Annie, where’d you pick that up, or maybe you’ve been gidzeyin’ heavy on this lumber pile regular (No, no, no, I know you never, I always knew you never), and so it is natural with a woman like Annie that the kiss come out of every part of her body and more, out of that mouth with them new teeth Francis is now looking at, with the same lips he remembers and doesn’t want to kiss anymore except in memory (though that could be subject to change), and he sees well beyond the mouth into a primal location in the woman’s being, a location that evokes in him not only the memory of years but decades and even more, the memory of epochs, aeons, so that he is sure that no matter where he might have sat with the woman and felt this way, whether it was in some ancient cave or some bogside shanty, or on a North Albany lumber pile, he and she would both know that there was something in each of them that had to stop being one and become two, that had to swear that for ever after there would never be another (and there never has been, quite), and that there would be allegiance and sovereignty and fidelity and other such tomfool horseshit that people destroy their heads with when what they are saying has nothing to do with time’s forevers but everything to do with the simultaneous recognition of an eternal twain, well sir, then both of them, Francis and Annie, or the Francises and Annies of any age, would both know in that same incident that there was something between them that had to stop being two and become one.
Such was the significance of that kiss.
Francis and Annie married a month and a half later.
Katrina, I will love you forever.
However, something has come up.
Wow! I love that kiss. I might have had one like it once in my life. It might just be me adopting this memory as my own.
But now, consider Joe Lansdale’s comments on the same subject. Bear in mind, Joe adds some difficult social stuff in too. The main male character here is called a lot of names, my favorite being Deadwood Dick¬¬—former slave, former dirt farmer, former Buffalo Soldier, current sharpshooter, bouncer and spittoon emptier. He takes a fancy to a woman named Win. It is implied that Win is of no relation to the woman with whom she is traveling, but it seems to be that she is the daughter of a slave and “the madam’s” dead, slave-owner husband. It is just after the Civil War and the West is still trying to figure racial society. But none of that matters in the following paragraphs.
Paradise Sky by Joe R. Lansdale
I dropped down on the cloth, and when I did she grabbed my head and pulled my face to hers and kissed me. It was for me the finest moment in my life. That kiss was like fire. It lit my lips. It lit my head. It lit my heart. It lit my soul. I was ablaze with passion.
That first loving kiss, the one that comes out of you from the source of your personal river, and the one that comes from her that is the same, there’s never another moment like it; never another flame that burns so hard. It can never be that good again, ever. All manner of goodness can come after, but it’s different. And that’s a good thing, because if we burned that hot for too long, we’d be nothing but ash.
What followed some might think was better than that kiss, us taking off our clothes and all, bringing ourselves together with excitement on that picnic cloth, under that blanket with the weather turning cooler and cooler and there being the smell of pine and oncoming snow in the air, but it wasn’t better than that kiss.
Don’t misunderstand me. It was well worth doing, and if I was making me a list, it would be listed second in goodness and something that works better in repetition, but everything in my life from that point on lay under the mountain of that single kiss, and try as I might, I have never climbed that high again.
There, get that guy a gold medal.
You ask me about the drape of a dress,
or if your shoes work with an outfit.
I can answer without looking.
I know it looks fine, great, even wonderful.
Sadly, we both know my sense of fashion
does nothing to augment yours.
It doesn’t matter my protestations,
you still have to FaceTime a daughter.
But when I tell you how good you look
you may not tell me I’m wrong.
You do not see yourself through my eyes.
I have great eyes when it comes to finding beauty.
I see the silver in your hair,
sparkling just on top of the gold.
Shimmering.
I see the blue of your eyes
in sun and shadow
on summer sand dunes
and trying to dig the car out
of deepening snow in the driveway.
I see the grace in the curve of your jaw.
I see your skin, pale and vulnerable
At the base of your neck.
I watch you examine a thing
held hard to the sunlight.
I see the intelligence of your investigation.
Lasers.
I see your butt.
Don’t ever argue with me about the glory of your ass.
I know a thing or two about
Glory.
I see your carriage,
its poise,
Its grace.
I see your smile,
its warmth,
its quickness,
its generosity.
Kindness.
I see your lips when you kiss me,
When you kiss your kids,
When you kiss your grand kids.
I see your youest you.
Your purpose.
Beauty.
Ancestors in my family
(mostly women–the men are heathens)
believed that when the Turkey Vultures
roosted in the trees,
the lower they roosted
the greater chance of a death nearby.
It was not always a person.
Sometimes a pet or a milk cow.
I have been feeling a step or two
closer to death all winter,
but with the return of the Vultures
and the very late hints of an actual Spring,
I have felt Death’s silent retreat.
She understands her eventual victory
and she is satisfied to be patient.
The Buzzards have been working the back roads
now that the snow is gone,
especially in the ditches by the two lanes.
Winter has conspired
to preserve and to age
deer carcasses
and the hairy lumps of raccoons and opossums.
The Raptors survived the snow that lingered
after their arrival
on a predictable fare of flat squirrels.
The Old Ones are patient too.
All day they have wheeled high in the sky.
They constantly survey eight square miles.
They watch and they wait.
They understand their inevitable victory as well.
They come from miles to roost in loose communities.
They wheel in from on high
in tight arcs, left and right.
They depend on smaller currents,
Invisible to us.
A precise and studied aerial ballet,
they spill air from powerful wings,
which if provoked
can break a man’s forearm,
wheel tight through branches.
Again spill wind,
drop the back of the wing to slow speed, spill air,
drop the black curtains of feathers,
to hug the air to breast and
to stop
with no visible support.
To step
off the wind onto the branch
more than halfway to the top of the tree.
Folding wings, they squat motionless,
hunching their shoulders into the last fading rays of the sun,
black, slender lumps on the limbs of leafless trees.
They sleep
and dream Vulture dreams
of warmer days
and bounty.
Dear Grandchild,
(If we share a funny name for each other, put yours here ____________.)
(If we don’t have one, you should be called Farnsworth…
unless your real name is Farnsworth,
in which case you should be called Bingo,
like the dog.)
Time has gotten stretched in my generation.
Everything takes people longer now.
Childhood lasts a very long time.
When I was a child,
I couldn’t wait to be an adult.
Each birthday mattered. Even half-birthdays.
5 meant go to school
8 meant getting homework
10 was DOUBLE DOUBLE DIGITS DIGITS
12 was a dozen
14 meant high school
16 meant drivers license! Freedom! Buy gas! Pay tax!
18 meant adult. Move out. Go live your life.
But here I am writing to you when I’m almost 70
And I don’t know how long we will know each other.
One or some or none of you may not be BORN yet!
If you know me,
I hope I loved you enough and
Just the right way.
If you don’t know me,
Or you can’t remember,
I did love you,
Even if we didn’t say hello face-to-face.
I have held you as much as you needed.
I wanted each of you to need holding
As much as I wanted.
I smelled your baby head.
I can still smell your baby head.
I was there when you ran,
When you swam,
I was there when you scored in soccer.
And when you sang in the play.
I’m still there whenever you do something important.
Baptism? Yup
Wet your pants in school? Uh huh
Hit the ball?
Stopped the shot?
Wanted to ask out that special person?
Picked a puppy at the rescue?
I was there.
When you think of me,
I’m there.
I’m there
Any time you think of me.
Love,
PopPop
Drake Mallard leads her,
But she ducks into the woods.
Are they house shopping,
Checking out the neighborhood,
Looking for the fox’s den?
In the Before Time
the animals lived in peace
among themselves.
The forest was their home.
But the Sun lived outside the forest
and threatened to turn the forest into desert,
to singe the trees and dry the ponds and rivers.
The Animal Council decided that one of them
must deliver the sun high into the sky,
to hang it there so that all would be safe.
Turtle was selected
because of the armor on her back
and her ability to march all day.
It would be a long trip to the apex of the sky.
In the days before the Two-Legs Turtle had a lovely voice,
one that nearly purred as she thanked the Animal Council
for the opportunity to serve the greater good.
She took the Sun on her back
and sprang immediately to carry it aloft.
But before she could get even a quarter of the way to the heavens
she shrugged off the sun.
Her back was burned deeply.
She fell, screaming all the way down from the sky
and landed hard on all four of her legs.
She tried to run to the river to cool her burns
but her legs were so damaged from the impact
she could barely crawl.
To this day the outside of the turtle’s back is black and melted,
Her legs are mere stumps with claws.
The only voice she has left is a hideous hiss.
The long midnight conversations
of her kind are lost forever.
The frogs pitied her loss of voice.
The fishes swam under her as she rested on a log in still-too-hot sunshine.
But all was not lost.
Opossum was blessed with a great bushy tail in those days.
Her tail was the envy of Fox
and boastful, chattering Squirrel.
She could wrap the sun in her tail
and finish carrying it to the top of the sky.
She embarked, in the dark, the Sun completely shrouded
in her tail. The stars were her only guide
as she set off to the Heavens.
But only half-way there,
the sun began to burn out of her tail and
to spill light and heat throughout the firmament.
Opossum tumbled back to earth,
falling around her burning tail, screaming
until her voice too was gone,
reduced to a vicious, hissing snarl.
Opossum’s tail is a pink, hairless, burned worm to this day.
The Animal Council did not know what to do.
Things were only a little better, but it was Spring.
In Summer, the temperatures would rise.
Surely the forest would not survive.
Of her own volition,
the most regal of all the birds,
the Turkey Vulture, set off to right the world.
Her long, powerful wings lifted her slowly skyward
to where the sun hung half-way between Earth and Sky.
Turkey Vulture was the most beautiful of all birds
in those days.
A great crown of a thousand colored feathers
adorned her head
and a ruff of the same wrapped her neck.
When she reached the sun
she placed her head against the burning orb
and pushed with powerful strokes of her long wings.
She carried the sun to its safest height.
Here the sun could warm the earth
and the waters but the great scar of desert
would grow no larger.
All Turkey Vultures since have lived with
bare scarred skin on their heads and necks
instead of their birthright of the glorious crown of feathers
she had been given by the Mother.
She too, no longer speaks.
An angry, snuffing hiss through her nostrils is the best she can muster.
She still flies with no effort
riding the sun’s thermals and
the uplifts it sets in motion.
She no longer associates with the other animals
or the Animal Council. Some say it is her lost pride.
But the forest abides.
In the back pond,
while I am burning leaves
and winter-downed limbs,
two Red-wing Blackbirds
chatter “chuck” in the reeds.
I tried to join their conversation
and they went silent–
two black-eyed parts,
invisible in the wider sytax.
In the next door front yard,
the neighbor’s daughter
is standing in early sun with her new beau.
They also chatter.
Their eyes shine for each other.
I did not try to join their conversation,
although I know the language.
I always forget the vines behind the shed.
Every year they get pruned a day or two later.
Their beds are cleared last.
They are planted too near each other
so they get pruned mercilessly close.
This year I had to dig last year’s bird’s nest
out of the sheltering crotch of three canes.
Then cut the canes away.
Last year’s vigilance against the birds
showed a breach on the southern border.
This arbor could be more beautiful.
Today it is only less ugly–
less neglected.
Some days that’s the best I can do.
Memory slips,
neglect rises,
diminished man survives.
There’s your headline.
I must apologize to the vines this year.
I was much too late in the pruning.
Instead of my cuts coming in the middle of winter,
when cold and ice have anesthetized
their limbs on cordons of frozen steel,
I was in my own darkness,
wrapped in a blanket that hindered action.
I merely bore out the short gray days and
stared impotently into the black nights.
Winter shook me like a dog shakes a snake in summer.
Instead, I come to them in a time
more comfortable for me–
A warming day,
knowing
that the necessary cuts come in Spring–
that living sap will leak
because of my tardiness,
that I risk the health,
of buds,
of growth,
of flowers,
of fruit,
the wine.
I am sorry.
I will do better now.
Our chemistry is better applied this Spring.
I vow to better protect against living rabbits and deer,
against a thousand kinds of scuttling bugs,
against the single minded mania of birds
and greedy ground squirrels.
The end-of-the-season Autumn battle
will be fierce.
I cannot be certain of next November
or her cruelest shorter sister February,
But I can offer the summer, still with hope.