Zina Bethune, her spellbinding death, and the predestined fate of the opossum

                  the impact / part one:

02,12,2012.

the first car to strike her catapulted Zina Bethune

into the opposite lane of oncoming traffic.

an interlude:

putting myself at the wheel of the first car

I might’ve been distracted by reaching into

the sloppy glove compartment for something special.

suddenly there’s Zina in the road

bending over the lifeless form of a lonely opossum;

there's the sickening thud on contact, and Zina

goes flying through the air toward oncoming traffic

as the breaks, no more useful than an afterthought,

are screeching tires across the pavement.

It smells like the atmosphere’s burning.

It sounds like the atmosphere's in pain.

It looks like Hell on Earth in Southern California.

the impact / part two: 02,12,2012.

the second car in the oncoming lane hits her in mid-flight.

an interlude:

putting myself at the wheel of the second car,

I see her coming at me like the freeze-frame

advance in a Muybridge sequence. 

I might've recognized Zina, now tumbling through the air

as pretty as a whirling dervish after kicking back a few drinks.

then splat!, as she hits the windshield then rolls

beneath the wheels of the car, at which time I commence

to dragging her some 600 feet before I gain control of my machine

and my senses. but floating in space on her approach she looked

like an angel. I thought she’d be taking it easy, living the good life,

part-time hawking nonsensical fitness contraptions between innings,

making a bundle with each 15 second pitch.

Zina,–– look at you, tumbling through the air in slo-mo in So-Cal.

Zina,–– why did you cross a strip of asphalt God itself had determined

to be reserved for the death of opossums?

                

                "Le Voyage Dans la Lune" is a film by Georges Méliés / 1902

                 original poem by: "The Consortium D'Quequechan." 

                 (my younger brother said: "It looks like a rocket ship!")

                   Requiem:

Our father died and

with our mother and older sister distraught and unable,

I drove west on Bedford with my younger brother

to make arrangements at the funeral home––

the one used to bury my father’s parents

the same one used to bury my mother’s parents and

just about every dead relative in the city.

So we entered the funeral home to pick a casket from three available,––

each ready to serve a worthy occupant.

The first was a bronze color and too flashy.

The second was metallic brown with all the flashy trimmings,

and far too celebratory. 

but the third was silver-toned, smeared in a heavily glazed lacquer.

My little brother said it looked like a rocket ship. It looked

like the one Flash Gordon would fly on his way to Star-dom.

That was it. That's the one. The one that’ll rocket the oldman

beyond the stacks and steeples of a hard, working-class landscape,

beyond the summer-sweltering saloons of "Buzzard's Bay" and

their proprietors eager to shell-out for the oldman's wares,–– upward,

far beyond the gloomy precinct of priests, and far beyond the craggy

Man-in-the-Moon with a lesser rocket run through his eye!–– 

Well, these are the things I would have liked to tell my sister and my mother

in order to assuage their grief, leaving them free to tidy-up, to set out platters

of Marcucci's cold cuts, and Marzilli's pizza for the hordes of well-wishers

pulling up to the curb in their Oldsmobiles and Studebakers and Pontiacs and..

and.. Wait a minute! What the hell is that?–– 

Who the christ do we know owns a freakin' Henry J. Kaiser?!

                  anthropology less than 101

a presentation to dear professor, Dr. Nadine Constantinople,

in the form of a question:

let's consider the first human being who had a thought

beyond the confines of instinct; the first, because

the initial ability to reason is not an immediate herd sort of thing.

before the millisecond it took for others to catch on,

there had to be... the first. 

where would he or she have lived? well,

Africa comes to mind, not Sweden as you've proposed, Nadine, 

in a time without drawn borders, and I say that because

it stands to reason that if borders were drawn consciously

and used to separate one's self from the unknown others,–– 

a lake, or stream, or hillside, (natural) or snapped sticks

pressed into soil to form a perimeter, (reasoned) those would be

defined as acts of thought beyond the confines of instinct.

I bet it was a woman.

but for this writing, I’m referring to "one's self " 

as a man,–– as in mankind, but a man, a creature

with more upper body strength than, you know,

the standard female of that era, and I say: “of that era”

because I'm familiar with a number of women of this era

who could easily, and would gladly, kick the shit outta me.

anyway, Nadine, back to this.."guy"––  this.. "One's self" who meets

all the criteria;–– has weight, occupies space, is capable of reason,

but doesn’t quite know what to make of it.

so this particular prehistoric "One's self"

decides to enlighten the dwellers within his locality

of this new-found wisdom, and as he does,

somewhere during the middle passages in the oral defense

of his dissertation on "thought beyond the confines of instinct,"

the community of fellow dwellers kill him with hand-held stones.

so my question, dear Nadine, is...

in your opinion, how much longer will it take for another guy,

like the above noted "One's self"–– to show-up?

                  The young castrati

It’s a mid sixteenth century line-up

and those who aspire

to sing the highest of the high notes

within the boys choirs are asked

to step forward as it was proposed

that this was a great honor bringing

the chosen closer to God. 

This is in praise and wonderment

of the young castrati,

suffering for the pitch of the song,

but I can’t get my head wrapped-

around their reasoning,

even when God is placed at the center,

not of the universe, but of the conversation,

and there's always the standard falsetto option.

What must the young, curious girls

have thought about the castrati,––

walking side-by-side on the shortcut home,

crossing the meadow behind the bakery,

sunset closing in, the atmosphere

more Venetian than Florentine, asking slyly,

their eyes passed down, if they might...

see it.

                   Navigating Ocean 

Last week I dropped in on Ocean Vuong.

I’d heard of him from somewhere, probably during

an accidental finding of a reading on a digital site.

Tonight, I've tracked him down on purpose.

He reads a poem from a volume in the manner,

he said, of his mother, in her voice, as if it was she

who wrote the poem. She didn’t.

Romance might say she had the poem in her,

and he simply fished it out. regardless,

who can dismiss the mother of the creator? Certainly not me.

He confesses that his mother is illiterate,–– 

but sweetly so, in the alto of his voice.

He explains that the war interrupted her education.

He says she works in a nail salon "as most Vietnamese women do"––

worked that way most of her life, believing her death was due

to inhaling the toxic chemicals of her profession.

We’ll negotiate prior to the purchase of this volume:

“Time Is A Mother” available only as a pre-order,

not due for release until April 5, 2022.

By then we’ll have come to an agreement, not over price, but to

acknowledge from reader to poet, that both are worthy.

 

 

                    -when the very old man walks / the 2nd poem-

he walks on brittle bone; short,

shuffling steps, but quickly paced, the hollow

caps of his knees bend awkwardly

adding a slight springing motion along the way.

his backbone is curved forward, his shoulders

compress the space between themselves

seeming to repel one another like magnetic

poles negative-to-negative, and his head

is held upright, straining under its own weight.

he won't have a dog alongside.

this is an observational phenomenon:

you will never see a very old man walking a dog.

his walk is solitary in its nature, and besides,

small dogs are quirky in their movements,

and large dogs easily overpower him.

the very old man walks to a place, a shortlist

in his thoughts which serves to remind him

he hasn't long to go before he's called to supper.

nothing it seems draws his attention, not even

the magnificent XtraMart across the street, glistening

in the way Heaven is perceived by the local congregation,

perfumed in (near) non-toxic household interior fragrances,

test-sprayed in the eyes of shackled animals, and

scented for a quick sniff to a firm decision.

see the old man walking, swaying his arms which bend

swaying at the elbows, the bone-weary 

left-right-left cadence,–– studied, disturbing, inevitable..

                   the new Pinsky

the new Pinsky arrives and all hell breaks loose.

my beauties form a tough horizontal line

elbowing their way for prime positions.–– once gained,

they don’t give-up without a fight.

if not for culling the line, the lamp at the table's edge,

like an ancient mariner, will drop to the maws of serpents and dragons.

last month a bruised and bloodied Plath, "The Collected Poems"

lost her place, and days later, Neruda's "20 Love Poems

and A Song Of Despair," left its slip of kisses and heartache

after years in good standing to a newcomer promising rejuvenation.

my beauties form a time-tested row, and not unlike the long-legged

Vegas showgirls, the closer you approach, the more time-tested they appear.

yes, my beauties !––  they too, have been around the block.

call me taskmaster, god of triage, a real cracker. my loves have work to do.

they come to me with the weight of the world exposing their spines

to eat me alive, and I love them all the more for it.

so, Mr. Pinsky, you outrageous smartypants, welcome to the line,

the backbone of my residence, and instigators of my craft, and

...watch y'r back. 

                

A white man's appreciation of "Reparations Now!" by Ashley M. Jones

Under a cloak of dry white

hands like to reach toward a foreign substance––

Opening the pages of a book. This one here

telling me what it wants, or at least what I think it wants.

Maybe it wants my understanding.

Maybe it wants me to recognize something beyond my self.

Maybe it wants a personal check.

Who’d I lynch in the dead of night under a cock-eyed Moon––

blow-up in church from Birmingham to Kingdom Come?

Tell me–– to whom did I place my bid with little more than cheap

money at the foot of the slaver's block?

I did not hang Mary Turner upside down 19 and done–– burn

her dress down to her skin, cut-out the child from her shattered

belly and stomp it dead as death should not become;

shoot Mary Turner more than once maybe fifty times more

when the first bullet hit couldn't find its way to kill her again, then

bury her with her unborn there at the site. This site. The site

of murder one. Two counts. Unresolved. The cloak of dry

white clings like an indelible afterthought.

This book. This one here.–– I don’t feel guilty. I don't have money

enough to make sense of restitution. I wasn’t alive on May 19 of 1918.

If I’m guilty at all, I’m only as guilty as sin.

 

-the sugar eaters-

1.

two brothers swirl across the slippery

scatter rugs of the house like whirlwinds

through a Dogpatch trailer park;

the ghost, howling from room to room,

the scissor-cut hem of its altered bedsheet, trailing.

the younger vampire follows dripping blood-
red from the rubbery fanged insert; its hands,
twisted claws as it growls like an animal. but the pink

ballerina sits on the couch without distraction

quietly peeling back the glitter of paper, releasing the sweet
aroma as she would the skin of a morning’s fruit.

the torn, silvery wraps of our goods,

strewn across the floors, tabletops

and the cushions of easy chairs, drift
upward in our wakes.

2.

our young mother sues for peace.
our young father threatens with baths,

neither recognizing their combined culpability.

grandmother prays the rosary,

her aged, agile thumb running
bead-over-bead ending in the distance
at the link of a nickel-plated crucifix.

grandfather rocks in his wooden chair
keeping time with the quickening

beat of his anxious heart and all, save

the ghost now gone.

Halloween / the early years

                 structures in common application

the scurrying centipede–– touch of adenine,

                    drizzle of guanine,

                    pinch of cytosine,

                    hint of thymine,

not far removed from the salt of man, scampers

mostly on a diagonal line–– doesn't turn on a dime,

and what's to be done is–– lead

the common swatter into it after determining

where the centipede will be at the moment of impact.

clean-up’s a breeze with a little spritz

of household bleach containing a salt of its own.

that would be: one atom each of

                    sodium,

                    chlorine and

                    oxygen.

Reading a poem

 
It’s Ross Gay
monologuing a white woman on Black
masculinity, and she's asking questions between accusations.
Seems a Black friend’s dating this particular white woman,
and it's boiled down to black and white as Ross sees it.
Ross says she says: “Ive seen you dance” to his Black friend,
and it wasn’t pretty.
Ross Gay has a Black friend who isn’t funky, who’s a bad
dancer dating a white woman who asks too many questions.

says:  you just as soon date a Black chick.
says:  just as soon eat pussy.

(I'm trying to understand the inclusion of this term as it's used here.

The juxtaposition of Black masculinity to eating pussy.

Is this still the needling white woman, or is Gay inserting

himself into the monologue?) Anyway,

after the reading I took to considering my history with
white women as a white man, the kinds of questions they’d ask
during certain contentious situations, of how I might’ve replied
to their findings, of how each of them stood their ground
to my counterattacks, but–– It’s not the same. It’s never the same.

Can’t be. It's boiled down to black and white.  But––

 
the unresolved situation regarding Ross Gay’s
"Black friend," and his caustically curious "white woman" would,
more likely than not, except for the pussy part, seem unfamiliar to me.