she was well-folded cloth
breathless coffee mornings
she was bits and bits
grey cotton sweater
fat fingers
linoleum
rat traps
she was cold floors
beneath the sink
bare white windows
in the cellar
a door
she was 10th grade tshirt
almost ugly
soft fat belly
cheeks

she was awake
on monday
to the supermarket
washing clothes
painting her nails
she was new shoes on wednesday
thursday’s blind sky
like tuesday’s
already underneath her
at the computer moniter
at the kitchen table dreaming
she was dark friday night breathing
at twilight
little grey stereo songs
in the living room at sundown
locking the doors tightly
alone
smiling at the television
at something it said

she was awake
on saturday
on sunday night
cleaning her room
dinner plates
takes a shower before sleep
touching herself in bed
when she needs it like a friend
or a new house

and when it was morning
illuminated
beside the door
beside the kitchen cabinet smoking
without thought
the way she feels music
while driving to work
heals her
the way she sees the curtains
move forward
so that it’s sometimes a hand
when it isn’t

she was plastic gold frames
with pictures
and lottery tickets
and old receipts

she was a bedroom
where the cracks
like inverted trees
on the ceiling
open their branches as if to say something
in a loud voice
to everything
to make it known

then sits back down
to study the patterned walls
sketched with rough flowers in a rope
tracing their path around the house
around her

“The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in getting into bed. The windows of the house in which he lived were high and he wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning. A carpenter came to fix the bed so that it would be on a level with the window.

Quite a fuss was made about the matter. The carpenter, who had been a soldier in the Civil War, came into the writer’s room and sat down to talk of building a platform for the purpose of raising the bed. The writer had cigars lying about and the carpenter smoked.

For a time the two men talked of the raising of the bed and then they talked of other things. The soldier got on the subject of the war. The writer, in fact, led him to that subject. The carpenter had once been a prisoner in Andersonville prison and had lost a brother. The brother had died of starvation, and whenever the carpenter got upon that subject he cried. He, like the old writer, had a white mustache, and when he cried he puckered up his lips and the mustache bobbed up and down. The weeping old man with the cigar in his mouth was ludicrous. The plan the writer had for the raising of his bed was forgotten and later the carpenter did it in his own way and the writer, who was past sixty, had to help himself with a chair when he went to bed at night.

In his bed the writer rolled over on his side and lay quite still. For years he had been beset with notions concerning his heart. He was a hard smoker and his heart fluttered. The idea had got into his mind that he would some time die unexpectedly and always when he got into bed he thought of that. It did not alarm him. The effect in fact was quite a special thing and not easily explained. It made him more alive, there in bed, than at any other time. Perfectly still he lay and his body was old and not of much use any more, but something inside him was altogether young. He was like a pregnant woman, only that the thing inside him was not a baby but a youth. No, it wasn’t a youth, it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight. It is absurd, you see, to try to tell what was inside the old writer as he lay on his high bed and listened to the fluttering of his heart. The thing to get at is what the writer, or the young thing within the writer, was thinking about.

The old writer, like all of the people in the world, had got, during his long fife, a great many notions in his head. He had once been quite handsome and a number of women had been in love with him. And then, of course, he had known people, many people, known them in a peculiarly intimate way that was different from the way in which you and I know people. At least that is what the writer thought and the thought pleased him. Why quarrel with an old man concerning his thoughts?

In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew somewhat sleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear before his eyes. He imagined the young indescribable thing within himself was driving a long procession of figures before his eyes.

You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques.

The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering. Had you come into the room you might have supposed the old man had unpleasant dreams or perhaps indigestion.

For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it.

At his desk the writer worked for an hour. In the end he wrote a book which he called “The Book of the Grotesque.” It was never published, but I saw it once and it made an indelible impression on my mind. The book had one central thought that is very strange and has always remained with me. By remembering it I have been able to understand many people and things that I was never able to understand before. The thought was involved but a simple statement of it would be something like this:

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.

The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.

And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.

It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

You can see for yourself how the old man, who had spent all of his life writing and was filled with words, would write hundreds of pages concerning this matter. The subject would become so big in his mind that he himself would be in danger of becoming a grotesque. He didn’t, I suppose, for the same reason that he never published the book. It was the young thing inside him that saved the old man.

Concerning the old carpenter who fixed the bed for the writer, I only mentioned him because he, like many of what are called very common people, became the nearest thing to what is understandable and lovable of all the grotesques in the writer’s book.
“

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

“His evenings were his own; and he pored over a ragged translation of The Count of Monte Cristo. The figure of that dark avenger stood forth in his mind for whatever he had heard or divined in childhood of the strange and terrible. At night he built up on the parlour table an image of the wonderful island cave out of transfers and paper flowers and coloured tissue paper and strips of the silver and golden paper in which chocolate is wrapped. When he had broken up this scenery, weary of its tinsel, there would come to his mind the bright picture of Marseille, of sunny trellises, and of Mercedes.

Outside Blackrock, on the road that led to the mountains, stood a small whitewashed house in the garden of which grew many rosebushes: and in this house, he told himself, another Mercedes lived. Both on the outward and on the homeward journey he measured distance by this landmark: and in his imagination he lived through a long train of adventures, marvellous as those in the book itself, towards the close of which there appeared an image of himself, grown older and sadder, standing in a moonlit garden with Mercedes who had so many years before slighted his love, and with a sadly proud gesture of refusal, saying:

— Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes.

He became the ally of a boy named Aubrey Mills and founded with him a gang of adventurers in the avenue. Aubrey carried a whistle dangling from his buttonhole and a bicycle lamp attached to his belt while the others had short sticks thrust daggerwise through theirs. Stephen, who had read of Napoleon’s plain style of dress, chose to remain unadorned and thereby heightened for himself the pleasure of taking counsel with his lieutenant before giving orders. The gang made forays into the gardens of old maids or went down to the castle and fought a battle on the shaggy weed-grown rocks, coming home after it weary stragglers with the stale odours of the foreshore in their nostrils and the rank oils of the seawrack upon their hands and in their hair.

Aubrey and Stephen had a common milkman and often they drove out in the milk-car to Carrickmines where the cows were at grass. While the men were milking the boys would take turns in riding the tractable mare round the field. But when autumn came the cows were driven home from the grass: and the first sight of the filthy cowyard at Stradbrook with its foul green puddles and clots of liquid dung and steaming bran troughs, sickened Stephen’s heart. The cattle which had seemed so beautiful in the country on sunny days revolted him and he could not even look at the milk they yielded.

The coming of September did not trouble him this year for he was not to be sent back to Clongowes. The practice in the park came to an end when Mike Flynn went into hospital. Aubrey was at school and had only an hour or two free in the evening. The gang fell asunder and there were no more nightly forays or battles on the rocks. Stephen sometimes went round with the car which delivered the evening milk and these chilly drives blew away his memory of the filth of the cowyard and he felt no repugnance at seeing the cow hairs and hayseeds on the milkman’s coat. Whenever the car drew up before a house he waited to catch a glimpse of a well scrubbed kitchen or of a softly lighted hall and to see how the servant would hold the jug and how she would close the door. He thought it should be a pleasant life enough, driving along the roads every evening to deliver milk, if he had warm gloves and a fat bag of gingernuts in his pocket to eat from. But the same foreknowledge which had sickened his heart and made his legs sag suddenly as he raced round the park, the same intuition which had made him glance with mistrust at his trainer’s flabby stubble-covered face as it bent heavily over his long stained fingers, dissipated any vision of the future. In a vague way he understood that his father was in trouble and that this was the reason why he himself had not been sent back to Clongowes. For some time he had felt the slight change in his house; and those changes in what he had deemed unchangeable were so many slight shocks to his boyish conception of the world. The ambition which he felt astir at times in the darkness of his soul sought no outlet. A dusk like that of the outer world obscured his mind as he heard the mare’s hoofs clattering along the tramtrack on the Rock Road and the great can swaying and rattling behind him.

He returned to Mercedes and, as he brooded upon her image, a strange unrest crept into his blood. Sometimes a fever gathered within him and led him to rove alone in the evening along the quiet avenue. The peace of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart. The noise of children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others. He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how, but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured.

He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment.
“

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“I don’t tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.”

Also

“Life isn’t mysterious,” said the old man, sipping at his juicebox, “not an ounce of mystery to it. Start to finish. Here to there. Nothing mysterious at all” He was begining to cough more frequently, the hugging tightness in his chest pulling his thoughts closer together.

Lisa offered a cracker but he refused. She sat down beside him and lit a cigarette. She paused and took a drag, blew out. “My favorite artform is mosaic,” she said. “All those little stones, one after another. I saw a documentary once. There’s these guys in little rooms filled with tables full of rocks of all different colors and sizes, and they riffle through the rocks for the one they want, or need, and take that one rock and put it, stick it onto the picture. Then they go back and look for the next one. Little rocks and shards of glass, one after another.”

“Over and over,” he said. “Not a bit a mystery to it.”

“May I have a buttered roll, please.” he asked. Lisa went to the kitchen and obliged. He sat nibbling the crust gently, thinking. “Thanks.”

Sloan walked in the front door and started describing his day at work: “We made clocks for ten hours. I had to be careful with the gears. They were ultrathin watches for the young jet-set crowd, stylish things, so some of those gears were skinny as paper. I was afraid they would melt if i held them too long. I don’t know where the watches went. They took them away in boxes.” Sloan blushed, looked down, and seemed about to weep.

“Forgive them,” the old man said between a fit of coughing, “they are only human. Everything they make must be sent away in a box.”

“Yeah,” proclaimed Lisa, nodding with exagerated sympathy.

Sloan began to pout openly, mumbling about the fragile little gears he once fashioned into a ticking machine. Everyone became embarassed for him, and looked bleak.

After some silence in which everyone attempted and failed to find something else to do that didn’t involve communication, Lisa looked up, half shyly and half exasperatedly, and decided to continue. “Those mosaic stones,” she said, “come first as big blocks of a solid color. the artists chip off what little bit they need and set the rest, the huge leftover bit aside.” Her tone became more astonished and fascinated. “Such a tiny tiny bit, such little pieces, and one after another they fill up a wall with unicorns or roman soldiers or whatever. Like painting, just as colorful and detailed as one, but coming from everywhere. It’s just so. I mean, my God. Jesus. My God. God damn. Jesus.”

The old man was getting a little tired, but figured Lisa couldn’t help herself. He bit a big chunk out of his bread and chewed pensively, listening piously to the woman’s enthusiasm. He tried to feel it too.

“Jesus,” she said. “My god. Jesus Christ.”

“Shut the fuck up already,” said Margaret. “Who gives a shit about rocks and fuckin whatever. Damn.”

Lisa shut up. Sloan had stopped pouting and was now fiddling with the cuff of his blazer, loose threads being tugged and flicked or chewed on. He eyed a new hole in at the edge of it, and penetrated it with his index finger. “Hm.” he said. He wiggled his finger inside.

“Last night some naked african guys somewhere in africa made a drum and beat it for hours before going off and hunting rabbits in the dessert while fully clothed American salesmen on vacation stared into their dark eyes and saw something like their mother and became frightened and ran off with all the money and the african guys laughed and ate their rabbits with brown sauce and had a conversation as best they could with their inferior african brains,” the television said, matter-of-factly.

“I would like very much,” said Hubert, “to live in a far away island where I could raise a family without the displeasure of having them fuck anyone without my permission.”

Somehow this rubbed Sloan the wrong way. “I’d fuck your whole family” said Sloan, bitterly, “in front of you. I’d kill them and fuck them again. I don’t care.”

He was thinking of his clocks again. Poor sensitive Sloan.

Hubert turned deep blood red all over. “You motherfucker,” he said in a dangerous whisper. “You cocksucking motherfucker. Did you just. Oh my fucking god.”

He began to breath heavily, and deep dark wrinkles could be seen now under his eyes, as if his eyeballs were casting shadows. Suddenly he was screaming and pounding his fist with loud booming crashes onto tables and walls, breaking glasses and scaring the pets and children.

The whole room woke into bloodshot awareness, all eyes on the rampaging Hubert, who was at this point heading towards Sloan.

Sloan was slumped on a bench chewing his cuff. He was thinking about all the clocks he had made and would never see again. Tomorrow he would’ve had to go back and do it again, but Hubert fixed that when he used the nails he hadn’t clipped for at least a week to dig into the flesh on the side of Sloan’s neck and rip out a nice sized piece of skin, deep enough to loose the jugular blood in a magnificent spray. Hubert dug a couple finger into the gap and ripped more, tossing the flesh aside so as to rip again. the right side of sloan’s neck became a giant red hole pouring blood onto the ground.

The old man was outraged. So close to the end of his life, so close to having to piece his life together into a package he was willing to send off in a box, and here was a guy soiling his last page with bodily fluids, with blood. “What do you think you’re doing? How could you do that!” he screamed. “The poor boy was just angry and sad! He had a bad day at work is all! You asshole!”

Lisa was crying loudly behind the old man. She held onto his robe at the shoulder, and peered over at Hubert, who’s starched collar shirt was completely stained red. She trembled.

Hubert panted and stared with sleepy eyes at the old man and Lisa, like a giant bear with a bloody mouth, carcass at his feet, staring at another opportunity to feed. He considered. The blood on his hand began to cool, and Sloan ceased to leak. Tendrils of Sloan’s juice spread on the tile flooring, breaking into long branches and rolling streams of scarlett across the room.

Margaret, all this time having stood observantly, chewing gum, polishing a set of glassware like a waitress at a diner, blew a bubble and popped it coyly, as if she were the coolest bitchgodess on the planet, and said “What a bunch of bullshit. Hahahaha!” Then she walked away, and the lights went out. No one knew what to do, or felt like figuring it out. They all pretended to be asleep.

——

Probably written around 2007

Courtesy of me. Uploaded it since I don’t remember being able to find it.

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