| THE DOORS by Kevin Cahill The Doors Amid a bust-up of bell-bottoms and police-dogs and a flashing skink undoing himself in view, the song starts. Keeps in the hand for a minute, composing itself, wiggling, disbanding into beer. This is a bunch of banned guys in a beat-up jalopy pulling into the back yards and back gardens of Tallahassee, Tuscaloosa, Yeehaw Junction, earning fiddy dollars a show, and crates of hoochy – the daughter in every house bloody-minded with scruples, slamming a mid-Sixties’ stiffish door into their open jamb. It is the arriving into town of a public pan of crawfish, and soul food, skinfuls of snifters, Freudian slips and skinflicks, escorting a countrywide tantrum into the capsized croon. LeRoy, Boy, I mean Jim, jazz underneath him, kept steady, kept steady, then turned way up…helping everyone in the revolution to the slap-and-tickle rippling from his tuning-fork… passing through the clack of grasshoppers and hula-skirts, gathering in every school – maidenhairs wafted with winds, a transpierced bedsheet decorated with the Kabbalah. Fifteen minutes before the end, the end grasps at its chest, a chunk of blood chucked up on a cop-car, and takes one, maybe two turns at saving itself – Waxahachie, Bagdad, Berkeley, Natchez: divots of tumbleweed, and DTs, a standing legless and reciting of Eliot facing the music with music, now touching the event each calamitous song foretold. Mythically, trillingly, unthinkably, these chiselled minstrels step uncertainly from the jaguars and wildfowl, the trees thronging in attendance, birds of paradise paying in (or more likely blagging in through the bathroom window) the lions with the teeth of women tearing them up hit by hit – these maggots in the bottle of mezcal tilted over into the matchsticked mouth at the other end, gorged and chewed – their heads spat out into the river plunging downstream – afloat –still singing. Hush MoneyWhen I went to the circus the girl there dressed like a clown smiled and I went white in my seat. For no one smiles where you live – no one smiles if you look, they turn like theatre into their houses and only a handkerchiefof fuchsia someone put on a door beams from this place like a bride. Something so stupid that means so much: like God said Let there be birds, and every single personbolloxed and botched, Let there be soap suds He said on the cheap car in the sun, like Christmas, like All Hallows Day,like the Resurrection. Exposure‘To turn every It was into an I wanted it thus, that alone would I call redemption’ – Friedrich NietzscheThe summer penthouse, the gazebo, the speck of feast-days revel on the lens, and relax themselves at last into briers. But the rained-out August – its perpetual cloud – turns tails in the Nikon and becomes a sunbather. Our cameras market us as yachts. Rottweilers patrol the gulag of our memories – walk with rococo writers spinning the memoirs, the recounting of everything like nothing we remember: the phoney, self-deceiving snaps developing in the one-hour, fiddled like history. No, we’re not suggesting we’re accountants, but we’re accountants, cooking the books: though the tripod holds, the mirror is true, and the photograph freezes when at last we collect ourselves sitting on the shutter – like a flu – the disinclination we felt, the not wanting to be there at all, whoever we are – wet blankets who wanted all this – deep down, after the gnashing, all the love we wasted, the joy we felt, only in ourselves, and to stand here now in our inconsolable losses – stubborn, aloof, hard, unhappy, selfish, completely redeemed. About the Author:Kevin Cahill was born in Cork City, Ireland. He has been publishing poems for over ten years, and has been published in Berkeley Poetry Review, The London Magazine, The Stinging Fly, The Lonely Crowd, and Oxford Poetry, among other magazines. He is seeking a publisher for his debut collection. |