Selections from
Crazy Denizens of the Lost World
by Todd Temkin
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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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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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