 |  |  | |
| john bennett |  | 1. We Do Our Work The light's changed, the odds have doubled, mounds of pumpkins everywhere, sleigh bells not too far off, someone walks into my house and walks back out again with a Bi-Mart safety deposit box full of a poor man's dreams, and within a half hour after discovering it I'm up on a ladder wearing my dead father's Korean War wool-lined army cap with the big ear flaps, a cigarette dangling out of my mouth with a half inch of ash on it, wetting down high glass on this three-million dollar home, and on the other side of the glass is another world, a technicolor world with a roaring fire in a fireplace and two fat children maybe ten and twelve lounging in front of it, watching a TV over it about half as big as a movie screen, spooning down mounds of ice cream, registering me and not registering me simultaneously the way the rich do around "the help", they learn early and I can't help but see the similarity, the core sameness as the scene in Sophie's Choice that I watched for maybe the sixth time on DVD this past weekend where Sophie, emaciated and shorn and dressed in a gunny sack is marched through the mud of the Auschwitz concentration camp and through a crude wooden door with coils of barbwire over it into the technicolor world of the camp commander, Rudolph Hoess, a lush garden with the Hoess children frolicking in it, into the small mansion of a house where Hoess' wife has pies baking in the oven, into the basement where she is showered and deloused and given a clean gunny sack to wear, up into Hoess' office where he paces furiously and gives rapid dictation that even in her degraded condition Sophie takes down to perfection in a language that is not hers. A phone call telling me my granddaughter has been busted for pot possession in Kentucky rounds off this fine day, and the first scent of snow blows in on a brisk mountain wind. 2. Hollyhocks & High-energy Young Ladies Make sense of a sunbeam, calculate a wave, calibrate a wolf howl, draw lines in the dust, go grim with a rifle defending the motherland, fatherland, land on your feet and start running, the hounds bay and the fox hunt is on. Back and forth between the particular and the germane like a praying mantis lost in a butcher shop, cowboys and cowgirls riding side-saddle into the arena, gladiators peering through slits in spiked helmets, who do you love? Is it me, could it possibly be after all these years of false starts, heaps of gutted crab piled high in the corner? I've got things gone amiss in life, a granddaughter gone astray, a lover with her arms crossed in a pout, a trick knee, heart, pony, imagination off in the ditch, tangled in carnage and confetti. I wake with a whistle, slap my head and hop to it, I've still got a trick up my sleeve. Secrets intact I skip out the door into my rat-trap conveyance and with lights blinking red all around me roar off. "Java, java, java," I think, my life reduced to a coffee bean. "Plunk your magic twanger," I think, my vocabulary shrouded in code, ancient kid shows on the radio displacing Nietzsche and Kant. Hi-ho, hi-ho, off we go with the first cigarette of the day burning bright like a blowtorch between my once kissable lips. The first rig at the drive-thru, the glass slides back and there they are, three blond, dark and tall beauties, a wild crazy perfection that drops death to its knees. "Ho!" I sing out and trigger delight in them. They all three dance and glide to the window like goldfish in a pond, as if we'd just met in a dream. "What'll it be?" says the tall one, and "Yes indeed!" I say. "What will it be!" Then we're lost for words as the universe sings all around us. I drive off with a 20-oz. drip and pass a row of pink, red and white hollyhocks along an old wooden fence just as the sun rises up over the ridge. I burst out in song and for a moment have the world by the tail. | |
| | | |