I know how it is, it's late at night and you're at your parents, sleeping in your old bed, the room that was yours and that your mother always intended to make into a craft room of some sort, she said so when you left for college, but then you were coming back, summers, working at the Baskin Robbins and staying with them to try to save money. By the time you finally moved somewhere permanent, you left such detritus in your wake that the makeover seemed like too much effort. Anyway your parents sit together most nights, staring at the TV, no time or energy for crafting. So the room remains something like a time capsule, an homage to the person you were when you moved out, the kind of person who still bought posters with inspirational sayings on them and slept in a single bed. And now it's late at night, and you're under the cartoon bedspread (you took the black one you bought as a teen to college with you, where Shannon spilled beer on it and ruined it, so all you have at home is the bedspread you got for your eighth birthday). The noise from the television has stopped, your father snapping off the lights as he climbed the stairs behind your mother, and the only sound is a branch tapping occasionally on the window outside. So just you now, awake in the dark, the tapping branch, the creaks that an old house makes, your thoughts.
Author: tuckova
Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O'Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden
Jumbo
tramples humans
knocks over trees for fun
tears your eardrums with its trumpet
but don't let's mention it,
it's nobody's fault
lumbers in with that musty smell
breaks the floor with its natural weight
shreds the drapes with its tusks
but please don't say anything,
it didn't mean to
stop acting surprised
you've trained it to do this
Not that it deserves Orwell's gun
or Edison's electroshock
but if we put it in the circus
we can only expect it to perform
younger then than now
Oh, this one I remember. Curly mop of copper hair and eyes that saw so much and could hold you still until everything around you faded. He was an artist, a photographer, a sweet heart. He took pictures of me, all eyelashes and cheekbones; I wrote him poetry. We traded scar stories, cooked together, played like a basket of kittens. He wanted my heart and I showed him what I had, still beating but ragged around the edges where it had torn when I tried to take it back from the last love.
We sat in the kitchen one morning, that last love and I, laughing over coffee. Meanwhile, the photographer squeezed under the bed where it was too dark to see anything, not even a way out. I brought his coffee into the room, surprised he hadn't come into the kitchen for it. A hand sudden around my ankles and I fell, he crawled into me, sobbing and choking while he ate his own heart. You need to be a little braver to love someone than I was then and I felt my ragged heart locking itself away from him.
I saw him years later, and he still looked the same, a little less hair. Softer around the eyes, too, but still able to hold me in place. He'd won awards, toured. I hope somebody loved him really hard. I am sorry I couldn't, but I was so much younger then and even my coffee was weaker.
Why I Didn’t Want to Go to the Toilet at 4 a.m., age 46
- I had the covers tucked around me perfectly.
- It was that magic temperature between warmth and cool.
- I was in the middle of a perfect dream and I wanted to go back.
- I didn't want to wake you.
- Once I turned on the hall light and my eyes adjusted I'd be up.
- The cat makes such a racket and I didn't want to feed her so early.
- The hands that snaked out from under the bed and grabbed my ankles.
- I still so much wanted to sleep that I thought I could make it work.
- But if I don't turn on the light I will stub my toe on something.
- It's actually only number 7.
Aristotle
by Billy Collins
This is the beginning.
Almost anything can happen.
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.
Think of an egg, the letter A,
a woman ironing on a bare stage
as the heavy curtain rises.
This is the very beginning.
The first-person narrator introduces himself,
tells us about his lineage.
The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.
Here the climbers are studying a map
or pulling on their long woolen socks.
This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.
The profile of an animal is being smeared
on the wall of a cave,
and you have not yet learned to crawl.
This is the opening, the gambit,
a pawn moving forward an inch.
This is your first night with her,
your first night without her.
This is the first part
where the wheels begin to turn,
where the elevator begins its ascent,
before the doors lurch apart.
This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross-purposes –
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack
here and pitches his ragged tent.
This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,
where the action suddenly reverses
or swerves off in an outrageous direction.
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edward's child.
Someone hides a letter under a pillow.
Here the aria rises to a pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.
And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.
This is the bridge, the painful modulation.
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle –
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,
Russian uniforms, noisy parties,
lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall –
too much to name, too much to think about.
And this is the end,
the car running out of road,
the river losing its name in an ocean,
the long nose of the photographed horse
touching the white electronic line.
This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,
the empty wheelchair,
and pigeons floating down in the evening.
Here the stage is littered with bodies,
the narrator leads the characters to their cells,
and the climbers are in their graves.
It is me hitting the period
and you closing the book.
It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen
and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.
This is the final bit
thinning away to nothing.
This is the end, according to Aristotle,
what we have all been waiting for,
what everything comes down to,
the destination we cannot help imagining,
a streak of light in the sky,
a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.
that feeling
when you've made a change to your appearance and every time you walk past a mirror you don't recognize yourself for a second, and then eventually it becomes normal, like looking the other way when you cross the street in London or Japan, and then you can't remember the way you looked before.
Why these mountains. Why this sky.
Whoa I'm sorry, boy I stepped into some kind of alternate dimension where time wasn't moving and when I stepped back out again time had moved. Here we are.
Working so much. I have cried from the sheer weight of it but on the plus side I'll have money for the hot sandy beach calling my personal name this winter.
Doing stuff with other people. Sometimes with other people's children, but then aren't we all other people's children? We are, we are.
Tomorrow I'm going to Prague to a garden party at the embassy. As one does.
A weekend in London. This time I think I'm going to touch the art.
Next week I'm going to see Laurie Anderson in Budapest. I almost can't articulate my love for her except I totally can because somebody asked me yesterday and it poured out.
The next week my sister's coming. I just can't even do my anticipation justice here. It's been five years.
After that, it's hermit time. I'm… I don't know. Dancing as fast as I can. No drugs and no dramatically bad hair, just trying to make my body outspin the dervish of my heart.
inlaid
In 1994 we went to Telc for the first time; there's a beautiful castle there. This was before Western tourism had really hit the country and we pretty much had the run of the place (now it has the red ropes that all castles buy in bulk). We posed in embroidered chairs at the dining hall table, slid around on the ballroom's parquet floor in the ubiquitous Czech slippers, took flash photos of the sgraffito which was not a misspelling. There was, in one room, a puzzle box. According to the guide, the box had 20 hidden compartments, of which they had only found fifteen. We fiddled with it for a while before zooming off, high on kofola and drunk on antiquity.
In this room now you arrive. With your wide eyes you open one drawer, with your careful mouth you speak and open two more. Clever fingers open the velvet drawer where a woman could store her jewelry, find the hidden latch and the lid flies open, and music pours out of the puzzle box, all the secrets but one revealed now. It is part of your genius that in this moment you pass your hand gently across the lid and stand and walk away, leaving that one last mystery for later, or for someone else, and go on to join the others while the music plays on behind you.
on the way
A beauty in white, heels clicking on the sidewalk, matching white bag slung over forearm, ducks around the corner and pulls down at the sides of her very short, very tight dress. At the edge of the parking lot, a tall police officer is on his walkie talkie while the middle-aged seller packs up the cheap pajamas and underwear and two people lean over the railings at the tram stop to watch in what can only be described as extremely passive fascination. A tie and shirtsleeves absentmindedly rubs at his generous belly, waiting for the light to change. A woman leans down and whispers in a baby's ear, and the baby's face lights up in joy at the warmth and tickle, the flow of words. Two bent elderly women get on the tram and the rush to give up seats is like a sudden wave of kindness, and one of the people who sits back down starts talking with the too-loud voice of the mildly retarded, asking the ladies how old they are, and it's lovely, flirtatious and the ladies, both ninety, are coy and visibly pleased. A green shirt and shorts pacing on the sidewalk, muttering angrily, though whether to himself or his demons or his phone is hard to tell at this distance. In another parking lot, a police officer in mirrored sunglasses is talking to a driver, also in mirrored sunglasses, their faces versailles as they talk, endlessly reflecting.
losing the plot
I've always been good at seeing below the surface, the shadows in the water, the fingers of seaweed pulled and pushed by the tide. Human behavior, too, has generally been a matter of standing very still and just watching until the sparkles stop dazzling you and you see the fish that disperse and then swim back with cautious curiosity or the perfect curve of shell at your feet. Even when the person doing something doesn't know why, if you are quiet and watchful it generally becomes clear. We are animals, after all, and a little study is all that's required. I think sometimes one reason I like television is that the actors are told what their motivation is, and when you watch a good actor they telegraph their intent even when the words contradict that. He tells her he loves her but we know he's lying because of the way his eyes flicker away from her. For example. And now when I see your eyes flicker away even as your lower lip kisses your top teeth, the V of love, I know it's a lie. The thing I don't know is the motivation for it; that's hidden from me still. Lately I find myself increasingly lost, and I'm confused because this used to be my strong point. Why because money. Why because death. Why because shame. Those were the most because causes, so obvious, but I used to be able to see the subtle ones, too, as clear as water. But suddenly the water is always murky, clouded with garbage, my feet cut into ribbons with sea glass and I can't hear anything but the roar of the waves.
tuckova 