Copyright (C) 2002 by Steven SillsAN AMERICAN PAPYRUS: 25 POEMSby Steven SillsPost Annulment 2Afferent, the city bus cramps to the curb and brakesthroughSolipsistic mutenessWith an exhaltation startled and choking.As the sun blazes upon the terminal'sScraped concreteThe shelved rows of the poor menHear the sound die on the pavementIn a gradual dying echo.A cigarette succumbs to the voice asCarrion brought to life; all the tattered peopleawaken;And a man spits toward the tire of the bus,But misses.And as he watches his own spit vanishFrom the hard crest of the world,And silently scrapes his lunch pail againstA corner of a metallic bench as if expecting the paleto bleed...And hoping it would bleed...he tries to remember theanglesHe and his wife stood to projectThe intermingled shadows that bothHad labeled as their marriage.He enters the second bus:Its coolness sedating the skin thatOverlaps his troubled mind.His thoughts pull togetherLike the light, cool flow of the air conditioning.He feels a little pacified.He knows the shadow's intangible depth:Its vastness having overpowered him these monthsUntil he could not reach the logic that told himTo find himself outside its barriers.As he stares out of the windowHe wonders why she has left.How could she have left without indicationWhen he has remained angled toward workSo that he and his wife can stay alive?In the bus window he sees his diaphanous face--thewindowsOf the Hilton, where he has a job in maintenance,Piercing solidly through its head.He rings the bell.The idea of her not home, and legally annulledFrom his life--her small crotch not tightened to hisdesperateThrusts--makes him feel sick.He gets down from thebus.He goes to work.He suddenly knows that being in loveis not love.------------------------------------------------------------------------------EarthI use her earth to plant my seed--My limbs twisting around the collective molecules,Trying to dig in.Only the obscurity of my bodyPresses so fully that it is neitherBody nor bed nor the intersection of both,But euphoric traction;And then, planted and repulsed,Only the seam of backbone minutely faces her,That bed of earth.With all conscious forceI breathe the aloneness that intangibly defines theAir.I swallow its ambrosiaOf depth and ask myselfWhy I ever married the woman.There is void.Then a hollow answer calls my name and says "it wastime."I realize myself in movement, parting the scene.I use what has been planted for the reaping--My suit tucks me into its structure of cotton;And soon a building will be again the structureAround men of cotton suits, pushing a product.Lost, I drink my coffee alone on the stoop.She had asked to fix me breakfastBut I would not let her.My miniature is one and black.I drink me in when I am notPressed by the coffee's steam.Cars' casketed phantoms of peopleChasing up and down Dunlavy Street of HoustonAfter something--their whole lives after something--Come and go from consciousness like respiration.The people plant and reap.Who can count all of theirInsignificant names?--Animals that are not created sensible enoughTo propagate unless lost to frenzy,Caught in structures without meaning.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Bar-Room BuddiesWe Mongoled Human experience.We pushed it into our mouthsAs the crisp pretzels of which the shape became saltydustAt our tastes: the crispness of life,And we Mongoled human experience.The tequila, that Sandras or Cassandras, or whomeverit had beeenAt the moment of malevolently blessing our heated andMaddening consumption, was what we leftOur wives for; and then hardened ourselves onThe springless cushions of the sofas of our friendsWhom we eventually forgot the names of:The wetness of human experience that we Mongoled,And felt the bladed emptinessOf stomachs that could not consume foodOn mornings after.But the Angels of bar roomscontinuallyAppeared before darkened stages where, in front ofguitars,We played.They apppeared at various stages to theweeks of the years.They came, silently whispering themselves offAs Sandras or Cassandras;Stared up at us for two hours; and disappeared.The reappearance of their light enamored us, and weleftAnd followed but found bats that offeredNo shelter, and often caves we could not fit intoOr were forbidden from entering.We invested our capitalIn the Silicon Valleys of this great nation.Third-world bitches, in factories, became sick for ourchips.We held power.We bred metals and bought the ownership titlesOf properties, but could not find a home of the world.We married again and brought forth childrenWho were duplicate strangers of ourselves.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------The RetardedLegs clamp around the rim--The whole seated body sticking slightlyAs moaning howls come from hisParalyzed mouth.It is after havingPut him to bed for a nap, and then the pot,That this woman who would dab the bileFrom his bed like one who napkins a spill fromA tablecloth, does not clean awayThe substance behind the smellWhich predominates over the bathroom urinalAnd aggravates his senses.No woman to do these tasks,And then to rim her handUnder the butt;No woman to drag him fromThe pot,After she has had his body bentToward her for the wiping,And flop him onto the benchIn the shower; no woman...She sits, cigarette limp in her mouth,Thinking that the day has almost ended.And the stars she stares out atFrom the living room of the group homeShe remembers are other earths limpingHalf-free in the grips of otherDying suns.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------HoustonIn Houston's summers the godsUse the clouds as urinalsFor three minutes daily.In Houston the Boat-PeopleCome from planes.Inner-city--intermingled and aloneLike its green Buffalo-BayouStrewn only in the imaginationsOf those who run along it briefly.A mile from the bayouThe settled imagination of aNine year-old Vietnamese girlAllows a mangled brown horseTo elongate and flatten outTo the reality of the rolled up carpet(All because of the rain).She feels the wetness now beginningTo seep into her clothes;She raises herself; she sees the old CubanWalking from the house with handsTo the sky, as if to make the heavens appear a littlelongerIn the manner that the downtown buildings,From Dallas Street on, by theirStories of windows draw downthe sky's enormity from measurementBoth extensive and inadequate;And she follows him.ApartAnd yet they both think about the VietnameseTeenager with curlers in her hairWho yells "boo" behind doorsThat are entered;The Cambodian boy whoTo the view of the Montrose areaPours on the bare shrubs,And then strips and pours upon himself,The water from a hose, and that both animal and plantGlisten in the sunAs if they have been greased;Falling into Houston's world of high buildingsFrom the descending planesWhile hoping that the big world wouldNot overpower their memories;And the Cubans, in house #2 always yelling of "Miami."They believe that Cambodian refugeesAlways clean house #1,That Africans never clean themselves,and that Laotians often pour rice down the drainsCausing the faucets of the house to stop-up;And that the welcome-center ManagerDoes not care to bring over a little clothingAnd a little food or take them on little tripsTo the Social Security Office or the doctor's officePast 5 p.m.--But of different seconds in that minute,Different lengths, and various perceptions.She remembers the ugly manIn Vietnam that ran from the policeAnd then a scar around his eyeOpened from the clubs and the bloodTried to escape him completelyAs the body attempted to pull itselfFrom the street, and could not.He remembers thinking that theCranium of an old man is always heavyOn the neck, and that hisIs becoming like this.He desires to clasp the gateThat is around the Hispanic cemeteryAnd watches the cars on Allen Parkway, below,Curve and toward the sunBecome a gleam moving endlesslyAnd instantly gone.He desires to arrive there andRead a few tombstonesBefore and after watching.She desires to imagine horsesCarrying her away from here to the West,And other horses following with her family behind.She desires to follow the Cuban that she fearsSince he is moving away from the refugee houses.There are no horses in inner-city; andThe Hispanic cemetery cannot be foundTo souls wanting to rest there."Este cerca de calle Alabama?"He wonders,.The rain stops.The hammers and sawspeel their sounds from a roof.And he notices her stepsDespite the stronger sounds; halts;And glances behind him as shingles fall ahead,While wanting her to completely leave himAnd wanting her to come with him.In Houston's summers,At certain areas, shingles likeThe god's shit falls from housetopsAnd the dung dries in the air,Flattens, and ricochets to sidewalks.In Houston Cubans packFrom refugee housesAnd plan to fly away into America, and departFar from the Castilian hot-dog venderOf Herman Park waiting forThe thirsty and hungeredAnd those ignorant of what they wantBut know that they want somethingAnd so come to buy from herWho wants people to come to herFor more than the chipsBecause the hotdogs are overpriced,Who formulatesThat she is unskilledAnd that a computer course would answer it all;Far from the Netherland psychologists whoStares at her ebony reflectionIn Rothko Chapel's dyed pool;Apart from others, and no-one, allPulling alone for humanity to bothCome and go from their lives.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Politics of Herb's WomanWaitresses lightly frisbeeing outDishes of breakfastsCatching glimpses of Colonel North'sPhotos on the front sidesOf customers' papers andFormulating judgmentsOf rebel or martyrFrom an appearanceAnd a few words thatDrifted in when theHands relaxed plates to table mats;Farmers wishing the seedsTo suddenly open to be plucked up fasterSo that they are notThe last ones laid inBy their hands;Little "third-world" nations of people hopingFor the great debtor nation to continental-driftTo bankruptcy, painless and alone;And nearly empty of thoughts--Herb's woman, Jeanie,Behind the Ellison Building standingWith concrete drilling its stiffnessThrough her soles.There had been a time--With face raised from her age-smelted poseTo the ever firm stories of that building--That she would think of receivingher paycheckso she couldGo to K-Mart and have something.But now years on top of each other,Uncountable to her,She continues guidingThe few of the masses of carsThat turn into the lotWhere to park: in wintersConscious of the visibilityOf her cold breathing,And summers with the scentsOf greased telephone polesAnd sights of light gleaming offCar windows, she thinksOf buying old junk from garage salesFor her yard sales, with the same prices,So as to recall the sounds of human voicesOther than her own.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------BrumfieldHis job was a novitiate where there was no operator'smanualWith which to have faith in, and no rulesBut to move with the dustmop pushed before himAlong the empty corridor, and then down a staircaseWhere he could descend to more passive depths incleaning.At home he would smell the odor of his bare feetcoming to him;Would see the blue under his toe nail that looked likemarble;And these would be dominant sensationsThough he would be vaguely aware of them.Beneath his bended legs he would sweep his handTo capture a fuller scent as his fingers would flickTo capture a fuller scent as his fingers would flickHis unshaven face.Then in his only room where thebare mattressWas lain along with his leather jacketAnd the dirty underwear cuddled around a cleantoilet--Where the Rosary hung on a wallAnd the guitar leaned in a corner--he would do his push-ups.Most of those early mornings some trainWould pour its breath to the weedsAt the edge of the tracks, losing themIn sound and mist of a voiceScreaming out, alone,Through the cold and the living.His arms would trembleWith the body weakening, and then demobilized, to thefloorBefore the count of fifty.Through the fogged condensationOf the upper corners to a windowHe would glance up at the train--Each car imagined as the girlfriend, Cindy,Or the seminary, which he neverGrasped or rejected and soThey slipped away;Or his mother, who with cancerBegan to close herself off to him--Grasping one of those trains appearing at the timeWith the familiarity of two strangersWho recognized each other's desire to remain such.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Oracion A Traves De Gasshole(Patron Saint of Respiratory Therapy Workers)Saturday.All the same:A silvery greyThin and undistinguishableFrom skies to parking lotIn exact shadow; and he finds his car.The lid, laced in rust,By the turn of the key,Parts the grey as it pulls up;The grocery bag is dropped into the hole;And the ground beef slaps down on the floorOf the trunk as if a second slaughter,Its grounded nerves convulsing itA couple of inches nearer the oil stain.That meat, in body, that last momentAfter consciousness has severed itself;Skin peeling under the fur, hidden,But not from the last hot beams aheadOf emerging dusk, becoming crispAnd then soaking up the hot blood, as the trachea,With the last of the air drawing in,begins to fold its walls; and he could imagine itLike he could imagine, from unexact memories,The woman, last nightAt the hospital, whom he began to like--her body pulling cell by cellApart before he had a chanceTo finish the rescue with the hoseDescending the nostril as a rope,and then flushing out mucus.He gives the ground beef an air-born somersault to thebagAnd closes the lid that is connected to the vaguelight bulb of thetrunk.The Gasshole's reflection on the trunk lidIs lank and curved; the appearance of his faceWith its facial tip of the nose and its greasedSeparation of hair like a wet muskrat in a metallicreflection.His face moving away, he sees an old Hispanic manWho walks from the area of cars carrying two bagsOf groceries in an embrace that could beFor weighty children; he thinks "The senescent,Carless, careless baws--turd!A campesino!,"And he envisions himself as that: having to pull outthe thornsThat pierce through his tennis shoes as he shovelsscattered cacti leaves from out of the backOf the pickup to his animals;And living in the dry ravine surrounded by houses madeof woodThat had been patted loosely together like adobes,besideThe families of the kiln workersWho with him eat out Land's blessingsAnd piss and shit out onto her graces,But himself happily not knowing the language of theMexican people...Himself not wanting to know the languageOf any people that his sister, Cindy, and college pal,Dave Broom-Up-The-Butt
Copyright (C) 2002 by Steven Sills
AN AMERICAN PAPYRUS: 25 POEMS
by Steven Sills
Post Annulment 2
Afferent, the city bus cramps to the curb and brakes
through
Solipsistic muteness
With an exhaltation startled and choking.
As the sun blazes upon the terminal's
Scraped concrete
The shelved rows of the poor men
Hear the sound die on the pavement
In a gradual dying echo.
A cigarette succumbs to the voice as
Carrion brought to life; all the tattered people
awaken;
And a man spits toward the tire of the bus,
But misses.
And as he watches his own spit vanish
From the hard crest of the world,
And silently scrapes his lunch pail against
A corner of a metallic bench as if expecting the pale
to bleed...
And hoping it would bleed...he tries to remember the
angles
He and his wife stood to project
The intermingled shadows that both
Had labeled as their marriage.
He enters the second bus:
Its coolness sedating the skin that
Overlaps his troubled mind.
His thoughts pull together
Like the light, cool flow of the air conditioning.
He feels a little pacified.
He knows the shadow's intangible depth:
Its vastness having overpowered him these months
Until he could not reach the logic that told him
To find himself outside its barriers.
As he stares out of the window
He wonders why she has left.
How could she have left without indication
When he has remained angled toward work
So that he and his wife can stay alive?
In the bus window he sees his diaphanous face--the
windows
Of the Hilton, where he has a job in maintenance,
Piercing solidly through its head.He rings the bell.
The idea of her not home, and legally annulled
From his life--her small crotch not tightened to his
desperate
Thrusts--makes him feel sick.He gets down from the
bus.
He goes to work.He suddenly knows that being in love
is not love.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Earth
I use her earth to plant my seed--
My limbs twisting around the collective molecules,
Trying to dig in.
Only the obscurity of my body
Presses so fully that it is neither
Body nor bed nor the intersection of both,
But euphoric traction;
And then, planted and repulsed,
Only the seam of backbone minutely faces her,
That bed of earth.
With all conscious force
I breathe the aloneness that intangibly defines the
Air.I swallow its ambrosia
Of depth and ask myself
Why I ever married the woman.
There is void.
Then a hollow answer calls my name and says "it was
time."
I realize myself in movement, parting the scene.
I use what has been planted for the reaping--
My suit tucks me into its structure of cotton;
And soon a building will be again the structure
Around men of cotton suits, pushing a product.
Lost, I drink my coffee alone on the stoop.
She had asked to fix me breakfast
But I would not let her.
My miniature is one and black.
I drink me in when I am not
Pressed by the coffee's steam.
Cars' casketed phantoms of people
Chasing up and down Dunlavy Street of Houston
After something--their whole lives after something--
Come and go from consciousness like respiration.
The people plant and reap.
Who can count all of their
Insignificant names?--
Animals that are not created sensible enough
To propagate unless lost to frenzy,
Caught in structures without meaning.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bar-Room Buddies
We Mongoled Human experience.
We pushed it into our mouths
As the crisp pretzels of which the shape became salty
dust
At our tastes: the crispness of life,
And we Mongoled human experience.
The tequila, that Sandras or Cassandras, or whomever
it had beeen
At the moment of malevolently blessing our heated and
Maddening consumption, was what we left
Our wives for; and then hardened ourselves on
The springless cushions of the sofas of our friends
Whom we eventually forgot the names of:
The wetness of human experience that we Mongoled,
And felt the bladed emptiness
Of stomachs that could not consume food
On mornings after.But the Angels of bar rooms
continually
Appeared before darkened stages where, in front of
guitars,
We played.They apppeared at various stages to the
weeks of the years.
They came, silently whispering themselves off
As Sandras or Cassandras;
Stared up at us for two hours; and disappeared.
The reappearance of their light enamored us, and we
left
And followed but found bats that offered
No shelter, and often caves we could not fit into
Or were forbidden from entering.
We invested our capital
In the Silicon Valleys of this great nation.
Third-world bitches, in factories, became sick for our
chips.
We held power.
We bred metals and bought the ownership titles
Of properties, but could not find a home of the world.
We married again and brought forth children
Who were duplicate strangers of ourselves.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Retarded
Legs clamp around the rim--
The whole seated body sticking slightly
As moaning howls come from his
Paralyzed mouth.
It is after having
Put him to bed for a nap, and then the pot,
That this woman who would dab the bile
From his bed like one who napkins a spill from
A tablecloth, does not clean away
The substance behind the smell
Which predominates over the bathroom urinal
And aggravates his senses.
No woman to do these tasks,
And then to rim her hand
Under the butt;
No woman to drag him from
The pot,
After she has had his body bent
Toward her for the wiping,
And flop him onto the bench
In the shower; no woman...
She sits, cigarette limp in her mouth,
Thinking that the day has almost ended.
And the stars she stares out at
From the living room of the group home
She remembers are other earths limping
Half-free in the grips of other
Dying suns.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Houston
In Houston's summers the gods
Use the clouds as urinals
For three minutes daily.
In Houston the Boat-People
Come from planes.
Inner-city--intermingled and alone
Like its green Buffalo-Bayou
Strewn only in the imaginations
Of those who run along it briefly.
A mile from the bayou
The settled imagination of a
Nine year-old Vietnamese girl
Allows a mangled brown horse
To elongate and flatten out
To the reality of the rolled up carpet
(All because of the rain).
She feels the wetness now beginning
To seep into her clothes;
She raises herself; she sees the old Cuban
Walking from the house with hands
To the sky, as if to make the heavens appear a little
longer
In the manner that the downtown buildings,
From Dallas Street on, by their
Stories of windows draw down
the sky's enormity from measurement
Both extensive and inadequate;
And she follows him.
Apart
And yet they both think about the Vietnamese
Teenager with curlers in her hair
Who yells "boo" behind doors
That are entered;
The Cambodian boy who
To the view of the Montrose area
Pours on the bare shrubs,
And then strips and pours upon himself,
The water from a hose, and that both animal and plant
Glisten in the sun
As if they have been greased;
Falling into Houston's world of high buildings
From the descending planes
While hoping that the big world would
Not overpower their memories;
And the Cubans, in house #2 always yelling of "Miami."
They believe that Cambodian refugees
Always clean house #1,
That Africans never clean themselves,
and that Laotians often pour rice down the drains
Causing the faucets of the house to stop-up;
And that the welcome-center Manager
Does not care to bring over a little clothing
And a little food or take them on little trips
To the Social Security Office or the doctor's office
Past 5 p.m.--
But of different seconds in that minute,
Different lengths, and various perceptions.
She remembers the ugly man
In Vietnam that ran from the police
And then a scar around his eye
Opened from the clubs and the blood
Tried to escape him completely
As the body attempted to pull itself
From the street, and could not.
He remembers thinking that the
Cranium of an old man is always heavy
On the neck, and that his
Is becoming like this.
He desires to clasp the gate
That is around the Hispanic cemetery
And watches the cars on Allen Parkway, below,
Curve and toward the sun
Become a gleam moving endlessly
And instantly gone.
He desires to arrive there and
Read a few tombstones
Before and after watching.
She desires to imagine horses
Carrying her away from here to the West,
And other horses following with her family behind.
She desires to follow the Cuban that she fears
Since he is moving away from the refugee houses.
There are no horses in inner-city; and
The Hispanic cemetery cannot be found
To souls wanting to rest there.
"Este cerca de calle Alabama?"
He wonders,.
The rain stops.The hammers and saws
peel their sounds from a roof.
And he notices her steps
Despite the stronger sounds; halts;
And glances behind him as shingles fall ahead,
While wanting her to completely leave him
And wanting her to come with him.
In Houston's summers,
At certain areas, shingles like
The god's shit falls from housetops
And the dung dries in the air,
Flattens, and ricochets to sidewalks.
In Houston Cubans pack
From refugee houses
And plan to fly away into America, and depart
Far from the Castilian hot-dog vender
Of Herman Park waiting for
The thirsty and hungered
And those ignorant of what they want
But know that they want something
And so come to buy from her
Who wants people to come to her
For more than the chips
Because the hotdogs are overpriced,
Who formulates
That she is unskilled
And that a computer course would answer it all;
Far from the Netherland psychologists who
Stares at her ebony reflection
In Rothko Chapel's dyed pool;
Apart from others, and no-one, all
Pulling alone for humanity to both
Come and go from their lives.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Politics of Herb's Woman
Waitresses lightly frisbeeing out
Dishes of breakfasts
Catching glimpses of Colonel North's
Photos on the front sides
Of customers' papers and
Formulating judgments
Of rebel or martyr
From an appearance
And a few words that
Drifted in when the
Hands relaxed plates to table mats;
Farmers wishing the seeds
To suddenly open to be plucked up faster
So that they are not
The last ones laid in
By their hands;
Little "third-world" nations of people hoping
For the great debtor nation to continental-drift
To bankruptcy, painless and alone;
And nearly empty of thoughts--Herb's woman, Jeanie,
Behind the Ellison Building standing
With concrete drilling its stiffness
Through her soles.
There had been a time--
With face raised from her age-smelted pose
To the ever firm stories of that building--
That she would think of receiving
her paycheckso she could
Go to K-Mart and have something.
But now years on top of each other,
Uncountable to her,
She continues guiding
The few of the masses of cars
That turn into the lot
Where to park: in winters
Conscious of the visibility
Of her cold breathing,
And summers with the scents
Of greased telephone poles
And sights of light gleaming off
Car windows, she thinks
Of buying old junk from garage sales
For her yard sales, with the same prices,
So as to recall the sounds of human voices
Other than her own.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brumfield
His job was a novitiate where there was no operator's
manual
With which to have faith in, and no rules
But to move with the dustmop pushed before him
Along the empty corridor, and then down a staircase
Where he could descend to more passive depths in
cleaning.
At home he would smell the odor of his bare feet
coming to him;
Would see the blue under his toe nail that looked like
marble;
And these would be dominant sensations
Though he would be vaguely aware of them.
Beneath his bended legs he would sweep his hand
To capture a fuller scent as his fingers would flick
To capture a fuller scent as his fingers would flick
His unshaven face.Then in his only room where the
bare mattress
Was lain along with his leather jacket
And the dirty underwear cuddled around a clean
toilet--
Where the Rosary hung on a wall
And the guitar leaned in a corner--
he would do his push-ups.
Most of those early mornings some train
Would pour its breath to the weeds
At the edge of the tracks, losing them
In sound and mist of a voice
Screaming out, alone,
Through the cold and the living.
His arms would tremble
With the body weakening, and then demobilized, to the
floor
Before the count of fifty.
Through the fogged condensation
Of the upper corners to a window
He would glance up at the train--
Each car imagined as the girlfriend, Cindy,
Or the seminary, which he never
Grasped or rejected and so
They slipped away;
Or his mother, who with cancer
Began to close herself off to him--
Grasping one of those trains appearing at the time
With the familiarity of two strangers
Who recognized each other's desire to remain such.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oracion A Traves De Gasshole
(Patron Saint of Respiratory Therapy Workers)
Saturday.All the same:
A silvery grey
Thin and undistinguishable
From skies to parking lot
In exact shadow; and he finds his car.
The lid, laced in rust,
By the turn of the key,
Parts the grey as it pulls up;
The grocery bag is dropped into the hole;
And the ground beef slaps down on the floor
Of the trunk as if a second slaughter,
Its grounded nerves convulsing it
A couple of inches nearer the oil stain.
That meat, in body, that last moment
After consciousness has severed itself;
Skin peeling under the fur, hidden,
But not from the last hot beams ahead
Of emerging dusk, becoming crisp
And then soaking up the hot blood, as the trachea,
With the last of the air drawing in,
begins to fold its walls; and he could imagine it
Like he could imagine, from unexact memories,
The woman, last night
At the hospital, whom he began to like--
her body pulling cell by cell
Apart before he had a chance
To finish the rescue with the hose
Descending the nostril as a rope,
and then flushing out mucus.
He gives the ground beef an air-born somersault to the
bag
And closes the lid that is connected to the vague
light bulb of the
trunk.
The Gasshole's reflection on the trunk lid
Is lank and curved; the appearance of his face
With its facial tip of the nose and its greased
Separation of hair like a wet muskrat in a metallic
reflection.
His face moving away, he sees an old Hispanic man
Who walks from the area of cars carrying two bags
Of groceries in an embrace that could be
For weighty children; he thinks "The senescent,
Carless, careless baws--turd!A campesino!,"
And he envisions himself as that: having to pull out
the thorns
That pierce through his tennis shoes as he shovels
scattered cacti leaves from out of the back
Of the pickup to his animals;
And living in the dry ravine surrounded by houses made
of wood
That had been patted loosely together like adobes,
beside
The families of the kiln workers
Who with him eat out Land's blessings
And piss and shit out onto her graces,
But himself happily not knowing the language of the
Mexican people...
Himself not wanting to know the language
Of any people that his sister, Cindy, and college pal,
Dave Broom-Up-The-Butt