the poetrysheet

whimsy, subversion, bowling

Number 477, March 15, 2004

Saúl Yurkievich (1931- )

 

“Western civilization has made a pact with the Devil. I think the story of Faust has to do with Western civilization. You might say white civilization. The Devil or God said, ‘I'll give you knowledge to do great things. But you're going to use that knowledge to destroy the environment and to destroy yourself.’”

—Joseph Heller, "The Joe and Kurt Show," an interview with Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, by Carole Mallory, Playboy 39:5, May 1992

 

Nomad’s dis-ease

 

Poor kid. She’s sitting behind a stack of plastic milk crates, aching to leave town. She wants to go to the desert. Or to the mountains. She wants to take a trip on the river. But it’s cold and rainy.

 

Normally, her spring break might be an opportunity to break out, to really get away. Unfortunately for her, the bank’s empty. We stay in town. She stands behind a folding table in the back room of Redemptorist Social Services Center, where she fills the sacks of people who haven’t much and never had, or who once had a great deal and lost it all.

 

The people love her. She greets them with a smile, a joke, and a gentle hand. Other volunteers like her because she doesn’t just stand around waiting for things to happen. She has her hands busy in a lot of different things: packing plastic bags with bulk oats, sorting food, carrying boxes to the cavernous attack where she could disappear until next week.

 

But I can see it in the way she stares out the window at the rain when there’s no one looking. She only feels right when she gets away. She wants to go over the horizon and see what’s there. A backpack, a forest spring, a clear stream.

 

I did it when I was a kid. I yearned for summer vacation, my dad’s deer season (during which he never shot a deer), family holidays that took us to farmhouses with ponds. I had to wait for these special times. I knew my dad didn’t have the affliction.

 

But she knows I do, and that when she says we have to get out of town to an isolated piece of forest, the prairie, or another town where the languages are unintelligible, we’ll go.

 

So, we’ll get on the road soon and see what’s out there. But one trip or a thousand won’t cure what a couple hundred millennia put into your blood and bones. We’ll have to do it again and again.

 

Dirty George’s

By Bill Bauer

 

Where we went for Grain Belt beer

sat in an old box of a building

just across the Kansas state line:

a bowling alley of a place

lined with hags and duffers,

its only light a teevee showing old movies,

pickled eggs in a jar, beef jerky to offset booze.

During a John Wayne movie, a drunken witch cackled,

"I'd let him set his shoes under my bed any night!"

and we laughed at her for what we thought was her foolishness

that soon became ours.

The portly man we knew as George

always met us at his back door,

stray dogs begging for a bone.

We had crawled out of windows,

our parents in deep sleep,

to wander the streets of the night

to wonder about life.

George never got busted.  Neither did we.

The police couldn't catch us, we ran so fast.

Our parents never knew about our duplicity

but we still remember our lies.

Grain Belt was fifty cents a bottle.

We paid a lot more.

 

Carnival in Venice

By Philip Miller

 

St. Mark’s Square--

a Casanova’s gloved fingers

feeding the pigeons

 

on the window sill

of a shuttered house

a cat staring

 

we look through the masks—

a thin smile

on the shopkeeper’s face

 

young face painter

touches my eyelids

with a bit of red

 

you choose

a beaked half-mask—

flutter of pigeons

 

arm in arm through crowds

we cross ancient bridges

laughing and laughing

 

glitter on your cheeks—

above the cathedral

falling star

 

dawn—

in a deserted alley

a cat slinks into the shadows

 

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