| RE-READING ULYSSES … by Louis Gallo RE-READING ULYSSES IN MEDIAS RES AFTER MANY DECADES WHILE STEERING THE “SANTA MARIA” WESTWARD INTO THE DYING SUNAs Leopold savors his kidney with relish, his eye also cocked on an advertisement for Plumtree’s Potted Meat, and Molly murmurs yes and Paddy Dignam returns to life, I scan the flaming sky for traces of god and find god nowhere and everywhere, the mechanic’s monkey wrench aligning strips of Victorian wallpaper, as Stephen converts the Paraclete into a mythic aviator who defied Olympus, as, as . . . as I fry a filet of catfish in Bertolli’s extra virgin olive oil with minced roasted garlic, a pinch of sea salt, sprigs of parsley and chives, a sprinkling of capers, smoke from the pan rising, smoging the kitchen, we two choking, she switching on the exhaust fan because the fire burns too bright, and Leopold’s bar of lemon soap begins to speak in Nighttown as Circe turns us all into swine and I turn to embrace her thirty years earlier because she has just walked into the room, outside a snow storm, the cold reddening her cheeks, her eyes glittering like warm ice, and I, chef wearing a splotched apron, tug her forward, remove the peacoat, kiss her chapped lips, and she, yes, we can eat later, burned fish, as Stephen seeks succor from the Virgin, as Leopold grieves his Rudy, Paddy’s coffin sinks and . . . as everything exponentializes, the heat heatifies, the universe expands and begins to freeze, and Boltzmann unhangs himself from the rafters and renounces his equations, and we consummate, yes, nothing else matters, and Horace repeats dulce et decorum est but scratches out pro patria mori, and information exceeds its digital allotment, we become one and the fish is delicious though the cat goes blind and a book drops to the floor and Aeolus, that windbag, blows out our candle, and yes, she says and I say yes and we know yes means no to time, to clocks, to the centuries and eons, to Hades & Hell and rigor mortis, deliquescence, entropy and grave wax and Icarus falling. OCCASIONED BY THE OKLAHOMA TORNADO 1.I hear blasting from the television in the next room Wolf Blitzer’s “devastating” on the Oklahoma tornado And of course recall the tsunami, Japan, Haiti, Kansas, Sandy, Tuscaloosa, Katrina, Pompeii all of it, ever and ever, and much of it, as Isaiah verilies, as if upon an instant sudden an instant sudden whereas what instants are not sudden? Who not unscathed? And upon the next instant sudden a commercial for extra testosterone that women and babies must avoid and men, well, podner, that hormonal charge might just destroy the liver, jolt the heart awry, induce seizures, cause blackouts and−, and−, and− stir up the lowest chakra, Abdomen, as its fumes rise intensify, whirl, concentrify, spew squid ink as the Oklahoma in their minds explodesThing is, I can hardly bear such old news tomorrow much less today, too much of it, Pater, too furiously paced, the slaughter of the usual innocents misericordia misericordia misericordia I thought Katrina had done us in already my family stranded in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, en route to here of all places that gas station vibrating with the big winds sold out of plastic wrapped sandwiches out of Planter’s out of gasoline, cars lined up for miles, stalled, the sky behind them a whorl of misery and evilthinking they had lost everything save their lives, but everything else?Remember, you’re in good hands with Allstate. And Nationwide is on your side. Which side? Right or bent sinister? My hands are empty.Heidegger asked, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Does something include everything/or the reverse? I am not seeking answers. There are none. I howl at the stolid walls of this house, baying, a wolf at the moon. Wolf now hugs a family of survivors. “Devastating,” he repeats because there are no other words, not even that one. Sometimes we can only scream. Children buried under rubble; Sandy Hook; Boston; the Amish kids gunned down . . . ever and ever as if upon an instant sudden.2. I have seen too much, and unlike Tiresias who saw more, learned nothing. The great diagnostician of the malaise, Walker Percy, declared that grandiose searches, which he deemed “vertical,” lead nowhere, that it is more profitable to stay horizontal and examine the scurrying of dung beetles in a trench in Korea: id est quod estThus I burn all of my books on the vast (the General Theory, black holes, the twenty-billion light years at the edge of the universe, the Heat Death, the gargantuan macrocosm . . .)Burn all my books on the miniscule (the collapse of the wave function, the wave/particle nature of light, light itself—photons!−, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty, atomic and sub-atomic shenanigans, quarks, the microest microcosm . . .) AND DO WHAT? how bout some nice white rice, some Woodchuck hard cider, some aged, smoky Merlot, a cathode-ray blitz not of Wolf (Blitz)er but Vanna White spinning her Wheel (Pat doesn’t count) Because . . . why? Because. Ragged claws? How ‘bout the serenity of a carrot burrowed in deep, ancestral, dark, wet, chothonian mud?3. I have a feeling I’ve said all this before More a premonition but can premonitions go backwards? I think I’ve thought all this before but memory is a most unfastidious worm leading always us astray I know I’ve felt all this before the heart does remember, the skin too even the bones But I’d prefer not to, not to . . . Krishnamurti: Time is Sorrow. I have this dream . . . this vision . . . this− mirabile dictu! as I type a small white spider descends from a filament onto this computer screen . . . and, as we all know, Spider is emblematic of Soul so can we hope that all is not lost? and pray when we can’t pray, can we? We Are Oklahoma (but not that cheesy musical) . . . we’re buried too 4. . . . underway too much history, my friend, the rubble of which strains, a ziggurat, toward heaven and by heaven I don’t mean what you mean . . . I mean the mind’s aspiration, the gift to transcend because the heaven of olde doesn’t cut it, doesn’t rectify or compensate for such woe which may be finite but so what? one iota of such finiteness does not, I swear, pay for an eternity of bland harp music from choirs of eunuch angels5.Footage of a metal interstate guardrail twisted and mangled, grotesque, a section about eight feet long, blown to a spot nowhere near the interstate, the reporter bending over to touch it: “You can imagine what a dangerous projectile this would make, slicing everything in its path. Enormous shrapnel.”But where is Wolf? Catching a wink. What a show! Like Boston! This is entertainment! Who can distinguish one program from the next? Like the child who asked decades ago, “When will the president be shot again?” Look, the Geico gecko! “Stop that, don’t make me laugh.” And Embrel . . . of course, don’t use if you have tuberculosis or leprosy.Oh, they’ve replaced Wolf with Anderson Cooper. Cooper, Cooper, he’s our man, if he can’t do it nobody can. Yeahhhhhhhhhh, Cooper! Brought to you by Fred Thompson of AIG reverse mortgages. THE ARROW OF THE TIME I saw the straight arrow of time streak before me, a blazing flame with serrated forks or tongues igniting the darkness, and I saw that each fork demarcated a moment then a day, month, year, each of which signified a duty, an imperative, a mission, and to veer meant disgrace, ruin, failure, these glowing notches of accomplishment and triumph . . .but as if upon an instant sudden I heard music, sweet yet dolorous, enchanting violins, harps, flutes, dulcimers, a temptation I could not resist even at the utmost peril, damnation, and I so veered, stopped to listen, broke my bones, lacerated my skin on those barbed tongues which screeched infamy, sedition because I could not resist its lure and I knew the tongues bore lies, that they hated such delicious diversion from the prescribed arrow, its abstract fire and its gnarled, skeletal claws, but I chose to listen and behind me now the ashen, smoldering remnants of rash irresponsibility, incomplete tasks, wasted time, a deluge of wasted time that had no power to smother that arrow of fire . . . because the music mesmerized me, seduced me, tantalized me, made me unwise. IN THE WAITING ROOM AS MY CHILD UNDERGOES SURGERYA small flat screen mounted on the wall across from where I sit digitally posts the stages of surgical progression for each patient. This is, I assume, meant to comfort those of us here waiting. Below this glowing bulletin board, a massive television screen— Kelly Ripa chatting endlessly about nothing. An aquarium to my right, home for two bloated goldfish who with lidless eyes that seem more like fashion buttons than eyes gaze through the glass. Mostly they float and so gaze but every so often the larger male prods the female along her flank and the two circle their cramped confines. Then they gaze again beyond that glass impediment at us and some of us return the gaze though most of the waiters either nod off or read magazines or work smart phones. I had brought along a useful book to help diminish the gulch of time these affairs usually consume, but I could not concentrate. The chosen magazines did not interest me and Kelly Ripa . . . what is the point of Kelly Ripa? So I commune with the goldfish, reddish stationary verbs, either unaware of their captivity or all too aware with no option but to float and stare and every so often dart about in frenzied circles. And what if the glass shattered? Would they plummet gladly to their deaths in a cascading wave of liberation? Or prefer an eternal status quo? I lift my heavily lidded eyes to the information screen to learn that my child has now been put under the knife, her flesh being now opened. Now. As if at a moment sudden, I know what the goldfish know. About the Author:  Louis Gallo’s work has appeared or will shortly appear in Wide Awake in the Pelican State (LSU anthology), Southern Literary Review, Fiction Fix, Glimmer Train, Hollins Critic,, Rattle, Southern Quarterly, Litro, New Orleans Review, Xavier Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Texas Review, Baltimore Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Ledge, storySouth, Houston Literary Review, Tampa Review, Raving Dove, The Journal (Ohio), Greensboro Review,and many others. Chapbooks include The Truth Change, The Abomination of Fascination, Status Updates and The Ten Most Important Questions. He is the founding editor of the now defunct journals, The Barataria Review and Books: A New Orleans Review. He teaches at Radford University in Radford, Virginia. |