Copyright © 1999 Rachel Loden.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-8203-2169-9
Excerpt
THE KILLER INSTINCT
No one can quite
get over it. It is summer and revenge
lies sweetly in the fields
with her legs open,
her Bo Peep
petticoats in ribbons.
Et tu,
cutie? Not
far away, alternate worlds
queue up
to be auditioned,
chatting
despairingly among themselves,
but nobody's called back. Revenge,
our wretched darling, shakes the straw
out of her hair
and shines herself
into the reddest apple
on the highest bough.
Hanging tough
through hundreds of such afternoons,
worried into life
by lightning's play
on elemental soup, her stalwart heart
will rise again, slough off
loose brilliance
; ; like a firecracker,
and pack more melodies than Mozart.
Love, revenge, remaindering...
is this the end?
—The world pumps on,
with all its gently pitiless muzak.
MY EXCHANGE
"irrational exuberance"
—ALAN GREENSPAN on the markets
Still, the path of the tango was not strewn
with roses. Five thousand years
might pass without a single dance, the dejecta
of great cities rolled out on a plain like dice
or jewels. And on my roof
the sleighbells of the gods, their tchotchkes
curled inside a broken jar at Qumran, painted
standing armies in the vaults of heaven.
*
See also: TIMELINESS/UNTIMELINESS.
Was it some corporate Sturmführer
saw a need for spreadsheets
in a town like this, with seven central bankers
to look at; the sweet sea air buffeting
the NASDAQ? Oh irrational exuberance,
you make me weak! Let me lie among
the fallen orders, vermilion petals at my feet.
THE DEATH OF CHECKERS
Grant that the old Adam in this Child may be so
buried, that the new man may be raised up in him.
—The Book of Common Prayer
This is the new socialist brain. This is the statue
of Dzerzhinsky falling over. This is my wife Pat.
This is an ode to the Bratsk Hydroelectric Project.
And I just want to say [abort, retry, fail ... ]
the kids, like all kids, love the little dog.
This/is/your/brain/speaking.... So I want you all
to stonewall it. Because gentlemen, this is my last
dance contest, last waltz with Leonid
around the Winter Palace. This is the Kommissar
of Moonbeams, this is the Soviet of Working People's
Reveries. This is the new man born out of Adam.
These are the new world order mysteries—oh,
Republican cloth coat. Oh gallery of Trotskyist
apostasies. Tricia and Julie do not weep for me—
I live and flourish in the smooth newt's tiny eyes,
my new brain fizzing with implanted memories.
A CATECHISM FOR IMAGINARY VIRGINS
Sex, food. That much is hard-wired
in the skull, and in the softer lobes
a tangled skein of flashing lights
announces random lusts
and loose despairs, like any preening
set of cocktail party characters.
No one I know has cooled those fevers
yet. Nor walks some pristine
neural pathway in a swirl
of freshly-driven snow, thinking
the new thoughts, cold as stars,
that only mint condition virgins do.
Oh, no. Stay as bewildered as you are.
Fall for the glimmering lure
of playing dead, of offering the god
these small propitiatory piles
of raveled hair and fingernails,
and other things that can't be said.
RECONSTRUCTED FACE
Surely this face—generic, blank—
betrays no terror. But her other face
is lost and floating on the river,
upturned like a lily in the air.
The police artist has slapped the flesh
back on her, wants us to know her,
makes her smile in that special way
a reconstructed woman smiles
after she's found without her face on
in a river, as though she tried
but failed to save us from the trouble
of her being there, our having to admit
that yes, we know her, smiling in the clay
the way we know the face of our own mother,
the reconstructed face that never
fooled us, built as crudely as it was
upon the scaffold of the other.
GENERAL DUDAYEV ENTERS THE WORLD
General Dzhahar Dudayev, president of the recently declared
independent republic of Chechen, was asked about the money
that has disappeared from the state treasury.
—reported in Helsingin Sanomat
In nature nothing disappears, or appears
from nowhere. All money works
for the good of the state. How it works
is a secret, a mystery of the state. You
may want to say that it has disappeared,
but nothing has gone anywhere. It is true
that there have been some deaths, at last
report, among disloyal officials
at the Ministry of Oil. It is even true
that we have arrested the entire parliament.
The Ministry of Law and Order has grown
to seventeen thousand men, all sworn
to defend the motherland. The Ferrari
Testarossas and the Rolls-Royce limousines
around the Palace may indeed arouse
your curiosity, but they prove nothing, only
that our sons, our Chechen people, learn
to live creatively in a changing world.
CLUELESS IN PARADISE
Kenneth, what is the frequency?
—query to Dan Rather from unidentified assailants
Sometimes, when you shake your head,
it is like snow settling
on the little village in the paperweight.
Other times, it's not—and that's why
God made the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
He can't always put a plaque up
on the spot. Sometimes even He
is forced to settle for a souvenir. Perhaps
Flopsy the Bunny isn't what you want,
and yet you won her at the fair. Like we won
a great victory against Iraq (applause).
Tie a yellow ribbon `round my eyes,
whirl me in circles, send me careering
toward the map. I love humanity. I'll stick
a pushpin into any random dot, and smile
endearingly. I'm a consultant. And nude
—I mean, naked—aggression, is what this thing
is all about, plus Bernie Shaw
quavering beneath a table when the smart
bombs start coming in, and Dan Rather
looking itchy in his sweater. Kenneth,
what is the frequency? Men on CNN
are weeping and surrendering, kneeling
while they kiss their captors' hands.
PREMILLENNIAL TRISTESSE
Nixon is slipping
in and out of consciousness. My father
sputtering in Canada, forty years
after the blacklist—
We hear there is this love that moves
the world, the sun and stars,
that makes the apple on the Kazakh bough
fall for a reason. My age, my beast,
my fingered rosary of disbelief ...
It seems that something red as love
is bleeding through the centuries,
that a reservoir of silky human grease
is oiling those celestial machines.
I don't want to see the zeroes turn
as on a clock about to wake us
from a murderous dream, confetti falling
helplessly into the fissured past.
I don't want them to unload the gurney
from the festooned ambulance:
the revelers in all their unforgiving
fury, the new patient in her bandages.
LINGERIE ADS IN THE SIXTIES
She is not there, except her body
is the specter in her Living
Underwear. She is ether,
air. See how she struts
her stuff, unsuckled nipples
pressing up against the lacy gauze
that seems to animate
pure lust. Liz Taylor
and her honeymooning breasts
lie out with Eddie on a beach
in France, but do we care
about these fleshpots
of the idle rich? Their tongues
are dust. A cleavage opens
between what we crave
and what we (bluntly)
are. Which is, perhaps, to say
that our unsullied heroine
is just where we would
want her, out of touch,
the eighteen-hour support she
promised but a ruse. Recall,
Madonna's still
a glint of silver
in her father's eye. Our girl
is not material. Ours
is a wind, a slitted
sheath, a lie.
DCEASE
There are two Elvis Presleys in the Social Security Death Master
File (DCEASE). The King's social security number is 409-52-2002. His
death benefits zip code is 38116, a.k.a. Memphis, TN (so little Lisa
Marie won't be forced to sell matchsticks on Elvis Presley Boulevard
in that city, or marry Michael Jackson for anything but Love). EP #1
was born 1/8/35 and died 8/00/77. No matter how many mourners
come to Graceland on August 16, the Social Security Death Master
File will remain benignly ignorant and democratic. It will always record
that EP #1 died on the 00 day of the month, just like everybody else.
Just like his namesake, Elvis Presley #2. Who was this guy? We can
confabulate something of his mother's state of mind from his date
of birth, 10/24/57, after EP #1 left for Hollywood but before he went
into the army. Other than that all we know is that 425-11-0453 died
4/00/87, not quite thirty, in Nettleton, MS. No death benefits zip
code is listed. Ten years after EP #1 was buried, EP #2 apparently
died without heirs.
I am stumbling around in the electronic graveyard for another reason,
actually. I am looking for a missing uncle, my grandfather's
first son from a marriage he wished forgotten. The only picture I
have of him is photocopied from a book in the Newberry Library in
Chicago. I have the same book at home, but the page with my uncle's
photograph is torn out, missing.
I can't find him, though, under any of his six possible names. I do
kick over another stone, and immediately wish I hadn't: the very
daft and ravishing Christina Montemora, born 12/12/48, died
11/00/87, zip code of last residence 12401. Somehow I did know that
I would find you, obvious Ophelia of my derelict years, though still
hoping that this search would bring up NO DOCUMENTS. Your name,
the few clues you leave behind, float like a reproach in the amber-colored
letters on the black screen.