Cyrus Console
from Brief Under Water
00001
I was sad for the
birds. The gym was no kind of sky. The window was too clean to see. The wind feigned injury, circling the
nest. The wind's cry was less pained
than afraid. The song in the wire sped
out through the perfectly empty holes it sped in through, and the hills, the
hills rose and fell under the bullets, whose path truer than a line of
sight. They are blind. All things are
as liquid to them. God grant them a
warm breast / to bury their faces. And
so on and so forth. Imbecile.
10001
With a single pistol shot to the head, South Vietnam
police chief Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, and then you
came in, wearing your hat that said POP'S BOY, with my picture there, and that
of the catfish. I heard my brother throw
back the bedclothes and repair to the kitchen, moving a chair to gain the
counter, whereupon he opened the cupboard door, opposing its progress with one
hand while he pulled with the other, so that it made almost no noise.
01001
Many years later
these bedclothes would retain the power to cheer me, both by the inimitable
distress of their fabric and by the illustrations they bore, done in the
boy-and-beagle style of Schultz, faded to the tonal consistency of a wash,
exhorting those who would become the teens of the eighties to see America
first, nor backpack through Europe like the glum trio depicted slinking over
the Bosporus, guitar-slung and buried in hair, rank with hashish and innocent
of water.
11001
Why will I not
return home.
Why will I not clean up and settle where I may be reasonably assured of
gainful employment and make of some eminent institution a touch against the
exigencies of my teeth and eyen. Moreover why I will not
return, why I will not provide in your stead for Jenny Lee and the boy.
Lilac, such as
you so loved when M__ was alive.
00101
In Kawase Hasui's woodblock of
But it was in his
Pond at Benten
Shrine in Shiba, August, 1929, his Pond at Benten
Shrine, Dad, where not a glimmer of water pierces the carpet of broad
leaves, that I got my first real taste for submersion; submersion and its
irresistible lure.
10101
Do you party. Look at me
when I'm talking to you. Yes. Is there anything else. I have become 'active'. Since when. Wednesday. Do you have any plan for how to make money. An alternative to money.
How long do you plan to stay here. Pass.
Don't those old hangings embarrass you terribly. The truth is that they have become important
to me. Well, we absolutely have to
change the. It's for you. Hi.
Hi. Look, I have to change. Of course. I've got it.
Jesus that was loud.
01101
We beat the
donkey with sticks and we beat it with rope.
To a joist we tied it, its swollen belly we beat until it crumpled,
until its head hung and swayed as if it read something in the balsam sprays
strewing the floor, though its eyes were useless. Give it to him, we were shouting.
My new friend
stumbled around in his new black blindfold, begging cigarettes.