sus huesos yacen
caidos en el povo
—Eugenio Montejo
At 5, I picked up French with ease
attending a parochial school
my parents couldn’t really afford—
le morceau de gateau!
I knew a table from a window,
the book on the desk from the stars
in the sky—le livre sur le bureau
de l’école a patri des etoiles
dans le ceil, voila!
I was almost sure of things.
30 years later, in Paris,
I’d held onto just enough
to know not to order tete de veau
from the menu, to be able
to ask for un demi-kilo
fromage des Chaumes
at the market, spending
my first meager grant money,
convinced I was investing
in the future.
As I
understand it now, we are
conglomerates of small strings
more invisible than air,
than light . . . even the leftover
parts of stars, everything
there is on this side
of the dark, or some other
parallel side—all that
is finally nothing you can hold
in your hands. . . .
We have only
a fresh consignment of clouds
to fill the afternoons,
to subsidize our speculations—
and yes, I was an over-serious kid,
pulling my white pant’s pockets
inside-out, turning my palms
up to the sky, showing
they were empty
as those clouds, as
I waited outside the store
while others dispensed with
their discretionary income—
allowances, or pocket change
filched from the bureau-top
in their parent’s bedroom—on
Mars Bars or Milky Ways.
But
those were short-term dividends
and soon we’d race our bikes back home
to fish sticks and Franco American
Spaghetti or Spam and canned peas;
this was, after all, near the bottom
drawer of the lower middle class
who spent their income dressing up
as entrepreneurs, a word my father
invested with specific moral gravity
as he inserted staves into the collars
of his starched shirts.
We had,
as models, members of The Junior
Chamber of Commerce,
John Foster Dulles who
refused to shake the hand
of Zhou Enlai, Eisenhower, and Nixon
in their bad suits, playing golf,
cutting deals to sustain
General Motors.
No one
talked about Korea anymore
or the deficit—there was
just a short intermission
before Vietnam. In passing,
Ike mentioned the Military
Industrial Complex on his way
to retirement and the first tee
at the Club, waving from the back seat
of his Eldorado.
On our porch
above the creek, I held talks
with my white tom cat, TJ,
and we listened to the wild peacocks
register their complaints
from the oaks . . . it was the ‘50s
and we were the last ones still
running free in the foothills.
In earlier socio-political quarters,
Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe
were just making trouble
as they worked out the laws
of planetary motion
while they played cribbage
each evening beneath the peg board
of the stars. I later saw it
as a toss up between
Spinoza and Pascal—
God is the free cause of all things,
or, the flip side, Atheism is not
a good wager. Your odds set
against the ontological clock
ticking in the middle
of nowhere with no hedge fund
to back up your bets.
In Prague,
The Communist Museum
is right between McDonalds
and the casino. Now my childhood,
my house in our seaside town,
seems further away than
the haphazard and residential
stars . . . for instance ARP 273
in the constellation Andromeda
300 million light years from earth;
what looks like a perfect merger
in the shape of a rose is actually
two galaxies connected by
a thin bridge of stars 10s
of 1,000s of light years apart?
Go figure how long until
the pay-off?
When our bones
lie fallen in the dust, what remains
of you or me is at best
some recycled light,
some depreciated chemicals.
For now, guns or butter,
metaphysical puts and options?
The account balance of the sky
still looks empty. My poor cat,
Cecil B, died a year ago this
August—his last days on earth,
or only all his days on earth. . . .
What can I take away from that?
