(from Writing Down the Bones)
14. Take a poetry book. Open to any page, grab a line, write it down, and continue from there.
(Jack Kerouac) 7 minutes
Harried Mexican Workers standing at the edge of the river looking across it as if it were Jordan and heaven was on the other side. Behind them the spoils of their lives, stuccoed homes, dirty children, angry wives, not enough money left for another meal. Their feet are swollen, purplish, punctured and splintered like cacti had been swallowed up and were now searching their way out, past the bone, through the meat, the skin. No hair, falling out, brushed to the bottoms of shoes they no longer wear. Cool water splashing at their toenails. They can feel the water on their toenails, cool, stinging relief, but their feet are numb, long walk, long walk left to go. Will there be alligators? Will there be snakes in the water? Is there danger in the River Jordan? Are there men on the other shore, hiding in the bushes, uniformed, fat, making minimum wage and making babies, happy wives, dinner table full to overflowing, cool iced tea with lots of sugar? Or will the angel gabriel be there to take them to a bigger glory?
13 minutes
Me that was. Squandering cash. Throwing money around, change and bills, fluttering up and clanging down, to the ground and in the trees. Soft leaves covering sidewalks. Crunch as I walk. Who was that? Me that was. Burning books. Old textbooks, nothing good. No bravery. Warming my hands. Butt cheeks flabby around the tombstone, butt bones grinding into the granite. Lying safe beneath this earth, my great uncle, not so great, a drinker, hardening of the arteries. Kooky, scary, reaching for the littlest children because they don't expect it. Now he's dead. Sleeping in silky sheets already deteriorating. My namesake. People say who was that I answer Me that was. But now there's only me, the living nephew, carrying on some sort of family trait, a name, a drink, a cigarette. A cough. A sickness. I'll die like him, grabbing at children, arteries stiff, muscles aching, bones breaking. Tired, running weary through life, visiting a cemetery every day of the week except Sunday because I don't want to see the others. The ones I don't know, occasionally the ones I do. They see me sitting, come to chat. I try to act insane. Who was this? Me that was I say and wet my pants. They leave me alone in my deep deep sorrow. They pluck the plastic flowers from the vase, sunburned and faded dull and replace them with a fresh bouquet, direct from walmart, little vines growing around an impossibly blue bunch of carnations, baby's breath growing out from the outer petals, They get in their Chrysler and crackle down the driveway, gravel and twigs. I pluck the flowers from their vase and put them somewhere else, not on my great uncle's spot because they're ugly, stupid flowers, but on the grave of someone with a German name, not because I hate Germans but because I can't pronounce the name just like everyone has trouble with my name. Come again, they say at introductions. Me that was. Withalwanowitcz. Can you try that again? Someday we'll all be dead and there will be nothing left of us but our names chiseled in cubes of granite. Or if we're lucky, a photograph behind glass glued to the middle. And maybe somebody will come and put flowers in a cheap vase. Cheap flowers from the corner walmart. Walmart convenience stores on every corner. They're they future.
(Emily Dickinson) 12 minutes
The day came slow, till five o'clock. The SUVs clogging the arteries of my neighborhood loosed themselves from the curbs and the bumpers before and after and made their ways back to Georgetown, San Antonio, La Grange, Katy. The UIL has come to town and I knew nothing about it till my neighbor instructed me a couple of weekends back to put my garbage and recycling bins in front of my yard on the street "if you wanna have a place to park when you come back." And then there's SXSW. Years ago, I rented an RV and drove from New York City with my partner -- musical and otherwise -- a good friend who was writing a play about a girl from Texas, though she'd never been here, another friend acquaintance filmmaker who thought it would be fun to do a documentary about the adventure, and four cats. The cats cried all the way to Philadelphia, then seemed to get used to their world bumping and rocking and swaying. The film never got made. And Suzanne just sat on the bed at the back window bouncing and reading as we ambled down the country highways, because that is really the only way to see the country. And now I live in Austin, back in Texas after eighteen years afloat. I never lived in Austin before, but I like it. I don't like sports but I like people watching and there's plenty of that in my neighborhood on the east side of the interstate wedged between it and the Oakwood Cemetery, the Capitol, the Erwin Center and downtown all in view. And it's fun to go to SXSW as a spectator. Not the music part, the films. If I play my cards right, I can see forty films in eight days for only sixty-five dollars. More realistically, if I see nine films, I've saved money on regular admission. And I might get to ask a director "What were you thinking?" You don't usually get to do that for eight dollars at a regular showing. I'm gonna see documentaries, feature length narratives. Last night I saw a remake of a horror film from the sixties that starred Margot Kidder and now stars Chloe Sevigny, and then a documentary about the Third Ward in Houston, where I'm originally from. It was good, about artists making a difference. And now I have to go see a movie at noon. I don't even know what it is. I'll likely be very bleary-eyed in six more days.
