Le Chantier, kafé - bistro - virtuel

Selections from

Crazy Denizens of the Lost World

by Todd Temkin

 

1. Crazy Denizens of the Lost World

2. Yahrzeit

3. The Capital of Nothing

4. All Those Inuit Names for Snow

5. I Am Not Coming Home

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Crazy Denizens of the Lost World

 
It seems every Chilean has seen at least two UFOs.
Lucy and Mario, for instance, glimpsed sixteen oblong discs
hovering over the coastal cordillera at dusk.
They went home and made love, while
street kids played soccer in the lamp-lit night.
 
I stare from my window at the illuminated masts
of the fishing fleet shimmering back and forth
in the evening tide. I wonder what superior beings
must think of us, the last utopians, reciting Garcia Lorca
over beans and rice, crazy denizens of the lost world.
 
My wife is a sky searcher, and she's been lucky twice.
The first time in a taxi after midnight mass
the night they put Grandma Elisa into the ground.
The blue and orange flash flickered like a dervish
dancing to flutes only dogs could hear.
 
Everyone saw it but my father-in-law, Jorge.
He spent his life selling Patagonian lamb to the
predecessors of supermarkets. Now he seduces himself
to sleep counting blissfully butchered sheep
in a world that couldn't care less about economies of scale.
 
Meanwhile, the economy of my life is spinning out of control.
According to my calculations, every cell in my body
is regenerating so fast that by the time I finish this
I will no longer have the same esophagus, bladder,
toes, or lungs. I see myself plummeting
 
from life to life in an inter-dimensional void,
testifying to the divinity of human pestilence and rot,
stacking the toenails I pluck into little piles
that drive Pilar crazy. I explain I am leaving a trail
for advanced civilizations to find.
 
I see it happening one night after making love,
curled up by candle-light, musk oil burning in the lamp,
musing to the vicissitudes of the slope of her hip.
The world inverted, our tenderness
exposed, our wills evasive.
 
That is how I want to be found: naked, my cells
regenerated, my semen off and running in search
of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
At the threshold of a new life I will sleep like a baby,
my soul dancing that limp gig with a smile on its lips.

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Yahrzeit
 
My mother savors a taste laden with dew,
heavy in ochre. She shrugs among
the pink carcasses of hoofed snapdragons,
disentangles disembodied hydrangea.
 
She has come to calling her Rosy,
the sandy yearling doe who has been
eating her roses, a chubby mélange of brown
belly-spots and baby fuzz behind the ear.
 
Now she kneels into the silt and digs
at the earth with her long white hands.
Will she find my lost sister there,
dead nineteen years on Thursday?
 
Or will she excavate the lost scales
of violin melodies she ceased to play
when Robyn was born, baptizing the lost recitals
Bib Lettuce, Basil Sprigs, White Asparagus?
 
She kneels into the silt and digs
at the earth with her long white hands.
Last night, at dinner, we began
arguing about spirituality again:
 
Mother said God is a memory. I agreed. Only
I insisted that some memories linger in the air
since before we were born. Mother rolled
her eyes. Then I tried to slip her some techniques
 
I'd learned for listening to the music
of the spheres. She asked me to pass the salt
and plucked out a cardamom pod
I had left in the lamb curry.
 
The first week of August she gets religious
again, stepping into the synagogue gift shop
for the first time since Yom Kippur.
The tiny white candle burned
 
amongst a backdrop of yellow crabapples.
Now she kneels into the silt and digs
at the earth with her long white hands.
Rosy was back last night and brought three friends.
 
We stood and watched while the curry went cold.
In the waning dusk we froze, caught
in the headlights of that deer's motionless air.
We marveled at that pudgy yearling grace,
 
the patient timidity. So this is God,
taking away the fruit of our lives:
so scrumptious, so delightful, so much
more beautiful than we had ever imagined.

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The Capital of Nothing
 
"This tree supports my great distrust
for all schools of thought."
 
John Engman,
One Way of Looking at Wallace Stevens
 
My father was too young to fight in the Great War.
He received experimental contact lenses instead--
huge gray discs the size of a nickel, stolid convexities
reeking of self-sacrifice, wholesomeness, and the National Trust.
 
He practiced his principles pouring over Texaco street maps
that guided him through the seventies, exploring
every small foundry in a five-state world defined by oceans
named Rhinelander, Moline, Sandusky, and Kalamazoo.
 
Five states were big enough for me then. The smells of zinc
shavings, brass alloys, and burned silica sand the a, b, and c
of a syllogism purporting a hierarchy of logic designed
to support gray days and black winter afternoons. In 1971,
 
my parents studied ballroom dancing on the Pacific Princess
and I have been dodging my mother at weddings and Bar Mitzvahs
ever since, pummeling my soul at thirteen with cheap champagne
and Maneshevitz sucked down in shot-like gulps.
 
I was the last one in my family to suffer from myopia
and the first to read of the exploits of Copernicus
as explained in the 1964 World Book Encyclopedia,
my Old Testament and savior.
 
I was compiling a list of famous Poles, but quit
upon pondering the sweetness of my grandmother's lips
captured in a family portrait snapped somewhere
near Krakow in the 1920's. I have spent twenty-five years
 
recapitulating the glory of my greatest achievement:
having memorized, at age seven, every state capital
and the population of the world's great metropolitan areas:
Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Calcutta, Tokyo, Peking.
 
Little does it serve me now, except to emphasize that,
although Atlanta, Phoenix, and San Antonio have doubled
in size, Milwaukee has stayed the same, defeating philosophers
as great as Blake and Whitman who believed that life
 
is change revitalizing energy whirled into a multiplicity
of forms. Milwaukee is what I imagined Poland to be, constant
and stoic, underwhelming and cold. My life could be summed up
the day the city paved over my favorite creek:
 
it's about good drainage and waste removal, little lives
that dare to step out of their silent shelter and
into the light. It's about finding a snow plowing service
that doubles as a landscaper in the summer.
 
It's about cheering silently for the doe who lunches
on my mother's tulips. My father taught me
we were the capital of beer and outboard engines.
He said, "Harley Davidson, now that's a motorcycle."
 
I memorized the width of the world's largest four-faced clock,
calculated the percentage of the world's fresh water
contained in Lake Michigan. At sixteen, Schlitz moved
to Detroit, and I began the slow pilgrimage toward knowing
 
that Copernicus was right: it is better to be starry-eyed
and insignificant, a dot in an infinite field, the capital
of nothing, than to cling tenaciously to our own delusions
whose deaths will go unnoticed by the stars.
 
My grandmother was no more beautiful than yours.
Dance. A foundry is as good a place as any to measure
the state of the universe, the railroad tracks of dreams,
the silent, invisible symphony of the sky.

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All Those Inuit Names for Snow
 
My mother is watching her mother die.
Gravity has declared war against the lower lip.
Salt has worn to fine gauze the threads
 
sprouting from the inner ear. For each one
that goes, we must learn a new word
for what we think life is, what we dream
 
it will be. Among our tricks and screams
and flowered boudoirs, we must all wear once
the wedding gown stained with mother's blood
 
or dance the implicit waltz while meandering
to victory with a swollen hand.
I will feed the cat when you're gone.
 
This is my promise.
The first one to wake whispers to the other:
poinsetta, aspen, sweet fig, dream of orchid, rose.

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I Am Not Coming Home
Con Con, Chile, 1998
 
My father strokes his foundry-chiseled chin
with the tender flesh of an unclenched fist.
For him, the crespular light is an atom split
to the core, a fire in the hole of a blast furnace
 
breaking the black-sooted bowels of dawn
into morning. We are walking a beach of dead fish
and crenellated bones. The swells rise into the
rivulets of promontory rocks like a dog's tongue
 
exploring the soft flesh of everything.
I am not coming home. My father does not know
which of the emerging stars will descend
its iron-ladle arm and scrape the last gasp of slag
 
off the twilight, plucking him out like an ounce
of pure gold--or liquid silver--into the night,
where his mother waits, knitting patiently
the frayed tips of solitude's broken wing.

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All poems by Todd Temkin.
Copyright © Universidad de Valparaíso-Editorial 2004
All poems reproduced with permission of Todd Temkin and the Universidad de Valparaíso.
 
Copyright ©2005 by Claymont Publishing Company