WINTER’S TALE By Timothy Robbins Wichita7 miles above Wichita, 19 years from Julie saying, “If he breaks your heart, he’s dead meat.” And me thinking, “Who eats my heart, eats lean meat.” How to convert years to miles? The equation is longer than the route from doubt to faith and back. What about the conversion from lousy boyfriend to poem fodder? 19 years over Kansas, wondering how low we’d have to dip to drag impalpable dark across wheat, to harvest/behead the crop with our wings. Having screwed me once, Tyler gave my belly a gym tap. My navel was neat as an isolated grain. Words in the plane are tight as my form pressed to the curving wall. Why did I never notice before? Julie’s the stuff of jet fighters. Winter’s TaleThe snow is clean, dinted in few places. Too few, some would say. He calls himself Cory. It’s the usual story insofar as it features a Trojan that hinders circulation, unusual in that he’ll stay all night, if I give him a lift after breakfast. His middle and index fingers are like a child that goes naked wherever it wants. My head flops on a broken neck. At the Probation and Parole Division everyone’s been waiting too long: a white kid doing his best to spread the flu, two black men who seem to know each other and a third black guy who comes in s tamping snow off his boots (they seem to know him too), a heavyset white guy in overalls with heavy metal in his ears, a woman dandling a plump pink bag on her knees. Cory leans close, (our heads on the pillow for two hours’ sleep) mutters his real name, says, “If I’m not back in 30 go to the window and ask what’s wrong.” “40,” I think, “then I make my escape.” He’s freeing the car from a snowbank with a swagger that says I had nothing to fear from thugs at the jailhouse. Four hours later his voice on the phone wears the same assurance. His father has barred him from the prison of home. He thinks I’ll be his next warden. Ways1. He tried to be blind. A sleep-mask appeared temple to temple. The right lobe asked the left lobe, “Is it time to get up?” “Not yet.” He lifted the left side of the mask, opened his left eye just enough to see the red numbers on the clock.
2. I’ve come all the way from Sodom I wrote before I went there.I thought installing The Joy of Gay Sex on my dorm room shelf would bring luckthat would embarrass Simon Peter’s haul (Brent in a black fishnet tank-toppulling the taut net to the boat). Grandfather of many waters.What Muir said of lordly chickens I say of poems that find themselves“discussing the wonder in charming chatter.” The way to a city burningnot from judgment but from passion: Never tire of taming his cowlick,of pulling the beloved comb from his rounded pocket (what fatuous foolslove combs?) and sailing it like a grad’s cap into the very sunthat worried Ben Franklin.
3. The phlebotomist hurt my vein. I call her the Bruiser. The phlebotomist hurt my vein. I call her the Bruiser. She’s mad at me because I am both beggar and chooser.My mother came to visit. She pushed my man to tears. My mother came to visit. She pushed my man to tears He’s never forgiven what he’s kept hushed all these years. VulgateHappiness is embodied in the cat, a stray or a neighbor’s pet, that crept in from the balcony, knocked the lowest hanging ball from the Christmas tree, batted it across the carpet without breaking it, lost interest, tilted its head back and, taking me for Jerome, (I was reading at my desk in nothing but a towel) did its best to sprout a tawny mane. I love Genesis. Like me, it is inconsistent and mysterious. Like me, it is the echo of ancient psychologies and fallacies stitched together. Its beasts make me think of the fox puppet my grandmother sewed from corduroy and felt. The seams are like my scars which I like to feel with my fingers, imagining they are the stitches on a purse which hides coins struck from the first sunless day’s light. At the brewpub, I loosen its mouth and pour primordial dimes on the bar. The clatter catches your attention. One Summer in BloomingtonOn the front porch swing, keeping time mid-air, Brent sings The Tennessee Stud. The Tennessee Mare shudders in my withers, Boone’s Farm is passed around, and Zot square dances on the empty cans. At the attic window Tim releases a stream, amber unseen in the dark, pooling in the grass with a calming plash. He wakes as night shivers into day. A woman who wandered in from the street is riding him Western style. I crouch in chiggers outside a room where two guys talk of eating pussy. Ever since they were boys they’ve longed to eat pussy. I picture them lifting their faces from half disks of melon, pinkish water dripping from their chins. Robin adopts a dumpster cat. At night, nourishing its fleas, it scratches for a teat in my hair. The cross-dresser (one of the pussy-eaters) filches chloroform from the Chem lab — passes out with the glass stopper like a diamond in his palm. “Dead meat in a skirt,” the others laugh. Then they pass out too. The kitten kisses the abandoned rag, goes berserk and is prophetically blind for two weeks. Natalie and I hike to the quarries. I brush her hair. She brushes mine. We strip and lay clothes and limbs on the rocks to sun. She shows and explains her anatomy much as my father once tried to elucidate the Impala’s engine. Across a quarry wall a townie has painted in momentous letters SATAN’S BATHTUB. Cain’s Cathedral is more like it — rocks that were rejected, rocks that long to burrow back into darkness, their saint, a boy who, diving to the bottom, wedged his head between two blocks, releasing blood that rose like smoke through contaminated water. She was not beautiful, but it was Tim’s duty to love her. I was not a woman, but it was his duty to love me. I try to remember being inside Suzanne. I remember the blacklight and waiting on the floor while she inserted an IUD. The blue dim, her posture, her pallor taunted the poster of Picasso’s Old Guitarist taped to the wall. I remember the honed edge of her pelvis, the nicotine on her lips, the uncertain shape of her breasts, their disturbing shiftiness, like faces in dreams or groceries in the trunk. The spasm was instantaneous, unworthy of the word spasm. She must have felt even less than that tickle and loss in my groin. I remember thinking later how gentle life would be if that’s all there was to it. (It was Ted, Robin and the Tennessee Stud at the top of the stairs when Ted sighed, “I’d kill for a blow job.” And I thought, “No need to be rash.”) I used to say it took days to prepare to drop acid. I was as strict as a Catholic when it comes to communion, reading Ginsberg and Eckhart and fasting beforehand. We retreated to winter woods, vaguely evoking a mini ice age, squatted in a teepee and waited for the white man’s senseless re-ordering of the senses, like spring coming, like leaves appearing. Seeing no difference between evergreens laden with snow and orange trees heavy with fruit, we plucked and ate. The handsome pussy-eater and I wandered off together and lay on a ridge, lulled by swaying branches, pantheists at a strip show, for once excited by the same nakedness. About the Author: Tim Robbins teaches ESL and does freelance translation in Wisconsin. He has a BA in French and an MA in Applied Linguistics from Indiana University. He has been a regular contributor to “Hanging Loose” since 1978. His poems have also appeared appeared in “Three New Poets,” “The James White Review,” “Slant,” “Main Street Rag,” “Two Thirds North,” “The Pinyon Review,” “Wisconsin Review,” and others. His collection of poems “Denny’s Arbor Vitae: Poetic Memoirs” was published by Adelaide Books in 2017. |
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