One Use Only

The one good thing about disappointment

is that it always happens at the end.

It’s the fantasy that walked into a wall,

a promise that goes lame,

the new railroad,

tracks running from the north and

from the south

that don’t quite meet.

Grace Kelly, when she opened her

mouth and sounded stupid,

Marilyn when she opened hers and

broke your heart.

At the ball

At the punch bowl

At the line of coke

At the zoo.

What’s good about disappointment is that it’s

never a surprise.

You kind of hear it coming

even before the fun sets in.

cause you’ve done this all before.

The real deal though--

it never disappoints.

The wave that knocked you on your ass

raked your face and filled your mouth

clouded your vision and showed you fish,

all for the first time,

means that the next one is bound to disappoint.

Help Is On The Way Out

So someone might turn and see her. If that should happen, she was sure she ought to feel ashamed. If anyone had spoken to her, they might have said, “don’t be caught this way” because she’d just been standing, looking at the books, seeing enough with just the title to know the time when the book had arrived and how she got it. Tucked inside some pages would be a picture, a note, a recipe and she’d been glimpsed looking at these.

Stalled again, like on that street corner, not knowing which way to go, or standing too long at the rows of canned tomatoes, sure her life was still hiding inside pages, canned goods, street signs. But shame had worn itself out leaving her at ease and finally, exactly choiceless.

Time Slot

I could stand in the same spot all day

the sun never moving off the rectangle

it’s taken over on my ankle

I’d be found at day’s end

in the same place I’d started

our conversation taken up where it had ended

in between

goodby and hello

In the meantime an entire day

has sloshed patiently back and forth

lukewarm and soapy

smelling of overuse and triumphant decay

We Master Featherless Flight

Peel back the cabin foil

there we sit

forward facing

like petit fours.

In the crash

all machine and body parts return to earth

and in a week or two

are just debris.

When traffic slows

the things we’ve left

on the side of the road

really show;

baby’s car seat

a shoe near the guardrail

a hank of hair

a dead Chihuahua upside down.

Since earth and air can strip our skin

feathers for one

and scales for the other

make the bird

a good idea.

Battery Low

Oh, boy! I can have this. I can have it in two days. This is a battery operated corkscrew. It will tell me how many cork pulls are left from the digital read-out on the handle. It looks so good and handy. It will do many bottles of wine, at least two cases…maybe four. It is brilliant. I suppose I could wait until the improved edition comes out. How good can this get?

Maybe the next model would have a remote control. Then I could fire off a cork when I’m driving home and the wine could air a little before I get to it. I could pop off more than one at a time; aperitif, white, red, after-dinner. I could blow a hole through the shed if I commanded several bottles at once. And for neighbors who may not be expecting a drop-in visit—for them, I could uncork a bottle in their own cellar just as I ring the doorbell, saving them time and embarrassment.

Also, rather than me having to decide if I want a glass of wine—dealing with the pros, the cons, the guilt—I could just pop a cork in the middle of gardening or folding laundry or even lying in bed. Later I’d wander over... kind of come upon it. There it would stand, cork tilted, looking as if I was the one it had wanted and been waiting for all along.

TAMER

What does this old panther do now? Today some fur came away in his hand as he scrabbled for the change stuck in his lint-boogered pocket—a fifty- cent piece and a good find. He palms it to the old man clumped in the doorway of The Alley. The fifty-center pleases both of them--real money and a good thing to pass along on a sunny afternoon.

He leans against the hot wall next to the bum, surprised to feel his tail still does a neat pirouette and settles around his ankles. The scent of dog shit floats up, laid down a minute ago by a slouchy, loose hipped old Lab. It glistens like a coiled slug as the dog ambles away, his patent nails scraping the sidewalk like the brush on a snare drum.

I am actually encouraged by this afternoon, the old boy thinks, looking at the house he owns just across the street. Although he’s not going home today, he thinks of earlier days when living still troubled his mind and he spent too much time in bed. This was after he took a sharp left out of the big field; quit the job, stopped smoking, then just stopped. He’d lie in bed until noon dozing, his hands folded on his chest. He says he never sleeps at night, just lies there. His wife amuses her friends, saying “as if he were his own sarcophagus.”

Later, he’d dress—always like a good lad—in decent gabardine trousers, a nice sweater, and sit at the cumbersome mahogany dining table, part of the heavy ensemble passed down from his Irish mother. This is the good time; shame’s still hanging out in yesterday, hours yet until today’s assignment. This is a grand time when a hangover feels like a stopover in Nirvana; the warm sense of suspension like when you leaned against the barrel centrifuge at Playland, before the bottom drops away.

Sometimes, when he does fall asleep, he’ll lope into the woods. Nosing around, scattering mice, crouching to pee on grumbling leaves; take a rabbit too scared to move along. But then, the misstep. A trap springs and staples his big paw to the earth. The sweet, dangerous prowl is over and he screams with surprise, then yowls outrage. The sound ricochets down the hall, into bedrooms, bringing the jungle down on all the sleepers’ heads.

But right now he’s browsing the cards, the cribbage board, and the dice cup with the green felt lining. He loves how the dice rumble and avalanche across the table; the sound the cup makes when it’s slapped down. The sun shines across the glossy sprawl of cards and the glass of wine. The evening widens; it seems infinite and endlessly companionable.

Meat

If you travel east from San Francisco toward Southern California, you’ll pick up Interstate 5 near Tracy. It is a dull, dull drive with just one way to counter the boredom—go 95 mph in the 70 mph zone. Driving like this does make the most of a dreary stretch; pacing and ducking, cutting in and out. It’s almost like an interactive video game with the flat countryside rolling past. Nothing else much happens, except that halfway to the Grapevine, the smell of an immense feedlot blooms and smacks you sentient.

Hundreds of cows, heads lowered, are jammed together along feeders near the highway fence. The lot is huge, a filthy stretch of acidy shit and dirt that flows to the eastern horizon and beyond. The beasts are caked to the knees with their own insides and though they have plenty of space, they do not lie down or nose the ground. Their hooves must be wet all the time, burning and festering. They feed at the long troughs, munching listlessly, but with a terrible doggedness on food their mouths, teeth, guts, do not understand. And they reek of disease.

Inhaling, my nostrils constrict like pinched soda straws and this condenses the stench. Everything in me recognizes and resists this smell. It is rank and full of sickness, with a dash of sweetness, like rotting flowers. Pretty soon, the cows will be packed into trucks and if you see them on the highway, it will be a speed-by glimpse of soft muffiny noses searching the air, eyes wild and bulging. When the trucks stop, the animals will be unloaded and funneled into a narrow, inescapable ramp. They’ll be mostly terrified in air laced with the smell of their own decay.

Here’s the dilemma—I like meat. At its most toothsome, it tastes spicy, bloody and dense, with a little bit of jungle, a whiff of groin. So, after driving a few miles beyond the buzzing smell of the feedlot, I’ll sever any connection with my appetite and what I’ve seen. I’ll begin to wonder how a chunk of cow might next arrange itself on my dinner plate, forgetting that almost all of it now tastes as dull and lifeless as a wedge of tofu.

But if I could be braver, more truthful about what I do and what I want, I’d meet my Ferdinand in his own sweet, green pasture, lure him with soft words, press my head against his dry, bristly throat and feel his heart thumping through hot flesh and hide. Could I be like a lover and slit its throat? No. But, could I be halfway like a Masai—nick the flesh just deep enough and drink, just enough. Each of us would be standing, still and taut—both of us throbbing with suspense and utter forbearance.

(Illustration by Sue Coe)