WHISKEY AND THE RAKE OF MOURNING
James Tolan
Copyright Š 2011 by James Tolan All Rights Reserved ISBN: 978-0-9838418-0-7 Published by Deadly Chaps New York, NY 2011 Cover Design by Deena Acquafredda Book Design by Joseph A. W. Quintela http://www.deadlychaps.com
C
ontents:
1: Foolish Heart 2: Roll, Shoot, Skull 3: Into the Drink 4: Icarus by another’s insistence, 5: No Quarrel 6: Delivered 7: I love a dead boy 8: Each morning he sighs, 9: A Favor 10: Lloyd Grebbs, 11: Waukegan Harbor 12: Reverie 13: Fire and Water 14: Home early for once, 15: My dad, a freckled 5' 9" 16: When my father’s father died, 17: Stopped at the corner of Lewis & Grand, 18: I hated myself 19: The Wrong Ones 20: Red Walls 21: Before the old man bought the Buick,
22: On a fall day in Vegas, strong winds 23: Elegy 24: Breath Robins 25: Vintage? 26: Something fine and floating 27: Meat Course 28: Sacrifice 29: In remembrance of wounds unhealed, 30: Returning home 31: Acknowledgements 32: About the Author
1
F
oolish Heart
My father says he loves me but acts just like he don’t. And I, with my foolish heart, believe him just the same.
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2
R
oll, Shoot, Skull
At the Grayslake Bocce Ball and Gun Club lakeside seemed the only almost sanctuary from the intermittent cock and fire, from the graveled pitch and clink of old men at their sport. A boy too short to shoot and wary of the water, all that was left for me was to watch the flutter kick and loose-armed skull of my father slipping methodically into the distance.
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3
I
nto the Drink
When someone taught me how to sink, snuck up behind and chucked me yelping into air, my legs reeling, arms flapping, astounded by trajectory and its descent, I dropped into the drink. Like a dancer flung free of the stage by a wayward god, I waved goodbye with both arms to the sky and watched the unmade promise of a life to come tumble and lurch to pratfall and plop.
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4
I
carus by another’s insistence,
I sank without fight to my uncontested death until my father swooped in and saved me, plucked me up and plunked me back onto the dock. I should have been thankful, but the way down—life quieted, every thing became its own vast moment—the heft of water wafting me down, my lank and webless feet, the bubbles born and rising overhead.
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5
N
o Quarrel
It wasn’t the dying I wanted so much as to live like that slow sinking. Yahweh could have his heavens and Lucifer his flames. The meek, awaiting their inheritance, would find no quarrel with me.
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6
D
elivered
back to family and air, I stood, stunned and dripping before my grandfather, red handkerchief tied atop his antic brow. A matador feigning surrender, he dangled his smart, white towel my way. I shook my clammy fist and charged him who dared me not to drown and now was snickering, Toro! Toro! as he capered cocksure along the dock.
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7
I
love a dead boy
who will not breathe. Each morning I feed my breath to him. His sigh is slight, but it is all I need to go on. My breath, no longer mine, I save all I can for him and have forgotten what else there was to love.
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8
E
ach morning he sighs,
or so it seems, and I am happy in my way. And I am not. It is all we have, all a man who loves the dead can reasonably hope.
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9
A
Favor
At Edwards’ Field, in the middle of the marsh where the Pony League played, ours was the blood mosquitoes sought. The city sent a truck to spray malathion to kill them as a favor, while the games went on. I remember us at dusk—time called, the lights not yet on—twirling slow circles in the mist.
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10
L
loyd Grebbs ,
in seventh grade, showed off pictures of a kitten he had buried up to its chin in his backyard, a black and white calico, doleful eyes shocked wide. Passed them around the locker room. We were supposed to laugh. Most did, until he pulled out photos of what was left after he ran over it with a mower, God knows how many times. Nobody thought to turn him in, imagined an adult could fix or protect us from that child so badly broken.
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11
W
aukegan Harbor
—with its view of Zion nuclear plant and coast strewn with dead alewives, their six inches of silver cast before smoking lakeside silos—was our bespoiled bank of Hades, where we would roam, shades without coin for the ferryman— the hollow furnace of his keen gaze—to bear us across, where we heard tell of water clean and dunes unfolding, expanses of litterless sand, where girls sunned and dove, glistening into the wash of tide.
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12
R
everie
Steve Satterfield claimed once to have traveled those Elysian shores across the estranging sea. Allied against his merciless and all too certain lie, we bore what arms were given us and fired. Ringed and bombarded, he cowered and flailed, snarling himself free, bristling, fish-slapped and beaten, from the beach. We were a pack and his doubtful sojourn from our hometown purgatory smacked of lone wolf holiday.
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13
F
ire and Water
Schmo was the first to hear the wobble and late night ping of the board. The O’Reilly boys were taking wordless turns, fire in their mouths as they sprung and dove headlong into the public pool. It was Skevless who saw the carton of smokes through the chain link. Pack at a time into a brother’s mouth, lit then doused in the pool. We watched them finish the carton off, dry, dress then climb out under the spotlight opposite us, walk away without even a grunt. Sodden packs of Pall Malls bobbing in their wake.
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14
H
ome early for once,
he found me lobbing snowballs onto the roof, plucked a lump of snow, squeezed and flung a perfect strike at the bird feeder planted twenty paces deep into the yard. Put a nice crack in the nearside plate glass, then packed another tight one that smelled faintly of Luckies and handed it to me. Have at it, kid. I’ll cover you inside.
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15
M
y dad, a freckled 5' 9"
was topped with what was once curly red hair he didn't have cut till he was four. Banana curls his mother saved in an envelope. I used them for an art project in seventh grade, a voodoo doll that never made its way home.
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16
W
hen my father’s father died,
my dad didn’t cry a bit, just grabbed a fifth of whiskey and a rake all bent to shit then dragged himself out the backdoor to do what he did best, work and drink till the drink was done and the work was put to rest. And when he was through what he had done was sheer instead of rake. The lawn, like a black sheep greened, was gone for a dead man’s sake, and the earthen wounds left behind gathered a still life of waste, broken rake and broken man, blue-nosed and redfaced.
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17
S
topped at the corner of Lewis & Grand,
he flings open his door and lets loose all over the road. No usual drunken puking, this one’s laced with lots of bloody coagulum, olives, bifocals, and false teeth. I throw the two-tone Dodge into park, fish his specs and teeth out of the mess and drive him to St. Therese and two weeks in detox before the next new lifetime of Hi, I’m Hal T and I’m. . .
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18
I
hated myself
for loving the chance to see what he’d been hiding and holding inside all those years, what he’d been watering and drowning in turn.
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19
T
he Wrong Ones
There are those who make us sad because they’re only second chances to love those we had neglected to love somehow before—our mothers and lovers, fathers and strangers, ourselves, and maybe we were right not to love them the first time; maybe our love was holding out for a world of its own choosing.
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20
R
ed Walls
Where I come from we take our bricks red and muddied from the earth. Where I come from people build walls to protect what we’ve been given, to make special those they invite in. Where I come from the stank of one city mixes with others on the wind that finds its way. Where I come from walls are a kind of flesh and it’s a blessing to be invited in.
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21
B
efore the old man bought the Buick,
before he changed to dust, before my mother scattered him along the highway to Lake Mead beside a scrubby desert tree, before I didn’t buy the whiskey, before I didn’t hoist a glass, I didn’t tell the grandson he had never seen, his grandfather was anything other than dead.
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22
O
n a fall day in Vegas, strong winds
whipping in, some hospital joe wheeled him to the ambulance that drove him slowly to where fires blaze, hot enough to roast flesh and bone to scrap and ash. Tourists went on laying down their bets. Showgirls continued powdering their breasts. And the Lake Mead carp still churned and flopped over each other, rubbery lips agape, for the popcorn thrown their way.
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23
E
legy
The ragged beauty of our skindraped meat, the marrow of our sigh, what little we know of recompense and this, love’s blackest kiss.
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24
B
reath Robins
You lie down on a lawn of fresh-cut grass and bury your face among its sculpted blades. Rising you are one among a subdivision. Robins nest in the gutters behind your ears, cukking for the tender meat of worms. The wind breaks and your skull cleaves open beneath the razor of its cutting breath. Robins flock to the teeming attic above your eyes where they feast on the fleshy morsels cluttering your new airway.
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25
V
intage?
It’s beautiful, they say. It was my dad’s, and I let them assume what they will, inheritance or gift, that he was a man of taste who shared it with his son. Not, I thieved it from the top-drawer fortune of a man with little occasion to let such manmade grace into the ritual sameness of his days. Not, I craved beauty from him so much I was willing to pillage his dresser in search of what I could not find in him, willing to claim what I had not been given, to let others believe what I wanted to believe but was no longer able. Some lose faith and mean only their god.
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26
S
omething fine and floating
without feathers or sweet sigh, the thing we loosen from our hands to become what we will in the end. Miracles do not cease—the mandolin and summer peach. Old roads that lead to what remains, the beauty of these meated bones, the clay of palms well seamed.
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27
M
eat Course
The fork rising to my mouth is something more than etiquette, more than its exquisite balance and tapered tines. It is the tool I employ to nourish my fatted flesh, the four-pronged stake that carries the remains of another whose life becomes my own, a pitch fork diminished in the service of we who cull sacrifice from a menu of palatable tropes, the minor edifice of civility we impose against the plain necessity of death and the digestion of its formidable corpse.
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28
S
acrifice
There is a man, who has been saving his communion wafers for years, holding them in his mouth until safely back at the pew, where he seals them in Baggies he will smuggle home in hopes of piecing together the mystery of his lord's body on a cross laid out in his garage.
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29
I
n remembrance of wounds unhealed,
in communion with consonance and pain, as a benediction for the tongue rent across my mouth, hands, smearing the provinces of a word made flesh in a thin film of mild brine, fingers lingering amid the wash of memory and dis-ease, salvation and release— the second coming of ecstasy, the resurrection of the body.
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30
R
eturning home
after long work, two corbies and a dove cut a pale sky. A second dove nowhere in sight, the world is still too dark. We must begin again.
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31
A
cknowledgements:
Much of this work appeared, often in markedly different form, in the following journals: American Literary Review, The Fourth River, Gargoyle, Lilliput Review, Luna, Many Mountains Moving, Margie, Paterson Literary Review, Quiddity, and Short, Fast, & Deadly as well as The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Family Matters (Bottom Dog Press).
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32
A
bout the Author:
James Tolan writes because the other things he makes don’t last. The food, eaten. The house, renovated then sold. The life, invented yet again. He writes because he knows no other way to lure the dead, because the words romance him still.
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