Poets And Poetry Of New England
Eugene Gloria: Selected Readings
"White Blouses"
When the soul selects her own society,
She gathers herself like mist
From the rain-drenched earth.
She goes to Texas, orders a steak
With eggs and coffee, drives
A turquoise Cadillac heading for the gulf.
The angels of morphia want to make a home
In the dark cave of the soul's mouth,
They want to crawl
Inside a word, which looks more like a road
Covered with snow.
Once the soul lay down
On the snow to sleep. She was naked,
Weary of making.
Her mouth is pumice white-
Not snow, not Hiroshima ash-
But white as a room hoarding all
The neighborhood light,
White as a line of limbless blouses
And bedsheets running through the bluffs
Beneath a pale Nebraska sky
Where a girl with Scoliosis shakes-
Working a Hula-Hoop,
Like light dancing through a painted window.
"Mauricio's Song"
From Mobil Gas he emerges
Like a Mack truck from the desert horizon.
You might think of bluefin tunas
Coursing the algid sea.
A man with a singular purpose
Always walks with his best foot forward-
Leans in to dusk, moon heavy on his back.
Mauricio has punched out at the station.
If you happen to see him
You might remark on the butterflies-
The small cloud of yellow, speckled wings
Fluttering like wayward kites around him.
You might even reconsider
Your faith in miracles,
Your capacity
To comprehend the mystery.
You could be going to the market
And have already made a list.
You could be as still as a tinsel tree
Illuminated by a spinning color wheel
In a room of immobile silhouettes.
You could have your face
Pressed against the windowpane-
Your chest, a bodiless blouse
And puffy as our Winter faces.
You could be standing in a living room
Full of boxes with your fears in tight little bundles.
You could be Mauricio Babilonia
On his way to a rendezvous, his hands
Cracked and stained with axle grease,
Black as the night gathering at his feet.
And butterflies, impossible and constant,
Brushing against his cheeks
Like a hundred kisses, the papery wings
Of golden monarchs calligraphed
With untranslatable sonnets for one Mauricio Babilonia
On his way to meet his love behind a wall
He will climb, but not fast enough
For the bullet that would seek out his heart.
"The Driver Conrado's Penitent Life"
The scent of food was everywhere he turned,
The vendor stirring his flat black pan,
The scalding oil for the glazed plantains,
And the afternoon darkening like the toll of bells
Announcing: time to eat, time to go.
But the driver Conrado was steady
With each pop of the Chiclets he chewed;
A pocket of air would balloon in his mouth
While the boy fidgeted with the radio knob
For some new song his sisters sang.
Conrado, this piece-packing ex-military,
Lackey of a petty bureaucrat, Conrado
Whose stern eyebrows could answer
Yes better than his mouth, Conrado
Who would have served time if not for Sir,
Waits, patient as a sniper.
Beyond the driver was the moon,
And below its fat face stood the school
Where inside the bureaucrat was moonlighting
In front of rows of desks, his fingers dusted
With chalk and his mouth drying with words.
What he said to his pupils was difficult
And dull as the distant planets, while the moon
Hung brighter than the vendor's lamp.
When the boy's father emerged from the school,
The world turned slightly. Night
Became his father of secrets
And all the hard science the boy hungered to master.
The father slumped his wide shoulders forward,
Declared to his driver with the authority
That his own class enjoined: Time to go,
Conrado, the boy is hungry, it's time we go.
"Elegy for No One"
When the cancer took hold of Conrado's bad eye,
It flowered into a lump of raw flesh.
His old friends paid him a visit, then convened
With their expert diagnoses:
Probably a hot starter. We'll let his engine cool,
Then crank him up again.
No, the other chimed, his plugs are shot,
His points and condensers need tuning.
But the elder mechanic, a clairvoyant of sorts,
Spelled out his opinion this way:
My friends, it is the water.
Water has rusted through the core of his soul.
A short pause followed, then each one,
In his distinct gesture, reached for a stick
Of Kool or Camel and lit the fag end
With his Zippo or Bic.
I see…the water, the youngest of the three
Said softly with a cloud
Streaming from his ovaled lips
As if lost in some culvert of memory.
A black Ford station wagon ferried
The driver Conrado's remains
Like a barge on a river of jeepneys.
There was no vigil, no ceremony, no service,
No band of senior citizens droning a dirge.
No paper money scattered on the street.
No incense, no wax dripping
On pants and shoelaces.
No soldiers with shiny brass buttons,
No cops in aviator shades,
No slick strangers in long coats with epaulets,
No ex-nuns and ex-priests and ex-revolutionaries.
No Rubenesque soprano singing a Schubert song.
No ministers of finance, no father with fat asses,
No matrons with Coach handbags and cellular phones.
No college co-eds with bandeaux and scrunchies.
No hipster professor with arcane degrees.
No news on CNN, no report on the local TV.
No one to witness
And adjust, no one to drive the car.
"The Buick"
Inside the full center of afternoon, a man
Sets off toward the bridge arcing over gray water.
He grips the wheel, white knuckles exposed.
Two figures drawn in light, a man and his shadow
Locked in their careless moorings.
Years ago, he saw a woman hanging on to life
Quickly expiring like words taken by the wind.
She was in her Buick lying on its side
Like a beached seal, or a fat rabbit
Lounging L-shaped after its meal of hay.
The woman's lower lip nearly sliced off
Was suspended by a thin thread of saliva.
She was trying to say something
From her impossible position.
Down East,
In Ellsworth or Hancock, where she lived as a girl,
Stands a line of apple trees,
Empire, Granny Smith, Northern Spy,
Blossoming with white flowers.
And the man remembers a boy standing
Beside a car door swung open, his lips moving,
In what later he would describe as a prayer-
To be anywhere but here.
Within his empty hour, a man wades
Through a flood of memory, migrant and various.
A sister's dress translucent in the harsh afternoon light,
The neon fields of Scotch broom in Half Moon Bay.
A wall of tulle fog like blindness on the solitary highway.
Empire night, father of vague inheritances,
Mayor of lost souls, overlord of the invisible.
He eases his grip on the wheel,
Because the orange light has gathered in his hands.
And to no one, he mutters: I remain
In the stink of my skin, I lie on the back of a hyphen.
And what is constant and what returns
Like the thud of an old screen door is the woman's voice,
The wheels of her Buick spinning in the air;
She was trying to tell him something,
Say something incomprehensible and sad.
"Saint Joe"
after James Wright
When the choppers churned and swayed
the swift brown current like a field of cogon grasses,
we dropped a rope below,
but the native girl, no older than my daughter,
was too weak to hold on, and let go.
We had to leave her to refuel, although we knew
what the river would do. When my duty was up,
I chose to come here, for humid sheets over bamboo beds,
for some honey in a slip---
a ninety-pound rice cooker named Ronda
and the soap dance she's known to do. But hardly for love,
as I wait with this man bent in my arms.
When the Coca-Cola truck hit this pedicab driver,
you could see his rubber slippers fly
all the way up to the second-floor window.
His body thrown five meters from his cab.
I imagine the Lord Jesus descending from his cross,
a good marine saving the dead in limbo.
But on this god-forgotten street a crowd gathers,
crows peck and gawk, and name me "Joe."
Their faces tell a separate story, each one
ending with the sweet by-and-by, like the girl
whose hands slipped at the end of my rope
dancing above the fury of a bloated river.
A man in a suit slouches off, whistles for a cab;
a flotilla of rubber slippers converges on a two-inch lake of rain.
A pair of white hands, mine, reach for his limp body.
And from the swollen streets, an ambulance calls,
draws closer, louder. And I hold on,
listen to the children chant "Joe" in the rain.
"Sweet Talk"
The stone buttoned on your ear
is green as beans, and bright as fireflies.
It is Friday, May, dinner is on me.
You had snagged a job in a factory,
inspected commas and clauses
with overschooled spouses of preachers and clerks.
And the night sky I commit to memory
smells like sachets of purple violets
pinned on camisole straps of apologetic aunts.
Tonight, May blossoms droop like copper Slinkies
on hedges fencing the parish rectory
where the dopey prelate takes his tea and cake.
When we met, I confessed my mental block with tenses
something you , dear, mistook for ethnic time.
And as things happen,
confessions turn into sweet talk,
in the same way you recall your mother clipping lilacs
and stuffing them in clumsy jam jars
atop your father's console playing Schumann or Bach.
Lilacs on dressers, on nightstands, adorning toilet tanks.
I know all this by heart like stories we breathe.
Friday, May an occasion for joy,
random as grace; and on your ear,
the emerald's green light, a near-distance star.
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