American Papyrus: 25 Poems

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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