Albert Goldbarth / The Book of Speedy

1.
The far trees bristle up like a hairbrush.
Overhead, the sky is a wan blue.
Two clouds look as if they’re sharing
cellular material through a mutual wisp. I suppose
we could speak of the sex of clouds,
their combinative ways,
their freight, their fume-edged separations. We
could speak of ourselves through anything
really, any mask or mannequin our happenstance provides,
komodo dragon, moray eel,
laser surgery, pee from a rocketship freezing and
circling Earth forever, rain, no rain,
the rotunda skullbones of whales,
the chain-gang ants in the grass . . .

  *

The universe
wants to talk to us, I’m sure of that,
it wants to and it does,
though we perceive it as the white talc
over thumb-plump purple grapes,
as the shakos of dust below the bed,
the umber fronds of rust up a bumper.
Even the universe’s most stentorian proclamations . . .
it isn’t the hog hit broadside,
it’s the dusklight in the rearview mirror
dwindling to a needleprick.
                                                   The High Gods
are my theme here, or whatever
psychic monologues, or everwiffling red-shift edge
of energies we call “the Gods” – but
fallen, from such aboriginal nebulousness,
to language:
                       something common and
salival, something, anything, though
by that I mean the Gods have been recorded as speaking
as well through thunder and fiery orbs
as the picked-apart scat of the peacocks.

  *

“The tree that I was thinking of was one we always stopped to look at. Often there was a black donkey tethered to it. When the donkey opened wide its jaws and brayed it made the most tremendous heehaw, it was like the creaking of the door of the world. It was much too big a sound for a donkey to make, it was as if something else was making itself heard through the donkey.”

2.

Among the stunted duns and tans
of the print tacked up above his study desk, the donkey
is lavender-black; the woman at the well,
while based in grays, is fleshed in umber-pink, and
even the clay of the jar she holds against this background drabness
shows the rosiness of life – she holds it
upright on her shoulder like a tiny child lifted there
to better see a parade. The woman, the animal,
the mouth of the jar, and the relatively cavernous mouth of the well
would have a four-way conversation
for the proper person, each a different Biblical passion
rendered, from the bedrock of this uninviting landscape,
into speech, into perhaps – who knows? – prodigious,
chthonian, luminous speech; but not
now and not here: not for him.

  *

“Jee-zus,” he’d muttered. “Oh
just don’t give me any of that Jesus shit,” she’d
spat back, “money is your God.”
That was a year ago.
                                     Now
he’s reviewing the tax shelter’s rolled-over funds,
and the dividends. Was she right, that day?
She’s in the bedroom, the door closed: some kind of burbly
synthesized music leaks out.
The boy’s in the playroom, kabooming and zooming, POW!,
with his plastic figurines and tacky gag shop items.
It’s a happy house, isn’t it? Almost
blessed. Devotionally, he tic-tac-toes
six-digit figures into his pocket calculator, thus
calling them down to shush around benevolently
in the calm night, on their greenback wings
– his Lord’s host of pecuniary angels,
the Angel of Daily Compounding, the Angel of Wall Street . . .
he can hear their rigid, numerical madrigals.

  *

The boy’s in the playroom, kabooming and zooming about.
KASHMOOSH! He’s four. His (chewed-on) Captain Cosmo figurine
is headquartered in his Captain Cosmo Choco-Drink for Lunch mug.
That’s the good guy. The bad guy is Borneo Joe the Wrestler
who lives in the Tiki-God mug that his parents brought home
from Tiki Gardens Dinner and Drinks. In alternation,
Joe and C. C. decimate each other – WHOARRR! – with dropped
eraser bombs and lobbed salvos of broken-up crayons, one
of the primary pleasures of being four. I’ll tell you
                                                                                         this
about the ethereal tether that, though thin, still
links our lives to timelessness. The Gods
– the unimaginable patterns in the atoms of stars
and nervous systems – need to be imagined; we
provide them Masks: Ahura Mazda, Mithra, Jehovah, sometimes
sculpting lesser masks for these Masks: out of soapstone,
coral, marble, clay-with-seeds-and-pig-tusks . . .
Sandalwood was the material for Hawaiian gods,
like ku-kaili-moku, the “eater of land,” but
trade, and visiting Christian missionaries,
halted the production of these ancient holy images
by the early 19th century. “Today,
Hawaii is visited by millions of people hoping to find reminders
of a Polynesian paradise where unspoiled people once lived
beside idyllic lagoons. So the tourist trade has fitted out
the old gods with new names and bogus legends. These
are called ‘tikis,’ a Maori name
that has nothing to do with Hawaii . . .” Tiki
party lights in red, white, green and yellow,
Tiki key chains, pop bottle openers, vases . . .

  *

How do you measure the fall of a God to Earth?
In units of bathos.

  *

SCHWACK!
one excellent souvenir Tiki mug in moss and chocolate glazes,
in pieces – uh-oh. This is a price paid
in our endless war against the forces of darkness.
Oh, he knows there’s good and evil, it’s just that
evil for him is a cartoon man with mellerdrama sneers
inked in. He doesn’t understand it can be corporate,
that people somewhere hate his father for merely
institutional allegiance. He doesn’t understand, not
yet, the ways that tragedy can be the size of a node:
                                                                                           his mother’s
in the bedroom, the door closed. Goopy synthesized music
washes over her rolled-up body in waves, in nearly
oceanic waves, and what she’d like to be is something
smooth and fetal heaved up on a beach. So she could start
over then, without the cancer. Shhh. She hasn’t told him
yet, she’s waiting until he’s done for the night
with his goddam stock market pedantry, yes or maybe
she won’t tell anyone at all: the radiation therapy
will work, it will work, then this momentary flaw
in her system can be her secret. “Radiation” – whatever
that is. It’s her religion for now, as difficult
to picture as the subtleties and precepts of religion, and
the mask that makes it personal for her
– she can’t help it, she knows it’s a joke – is the logo character
used for years in his company’s advertising campaigns:
the beaming bulb head and zigzag voltage body
of Mr. Light-Brite. “Hey! All day and night,
It’ll be all right . . .” (and then he tips
his zillion-watt derby) “. . . with LIGHT-BRITE” – his tune,
his mnemonicy tune she needs so much to believe in.

  *

“These are our modern mythological figures, avatars of Another Plane: Smokey the Bear; Elsie the Cow; Mr. Clean; Snap, Crackle and Pop; the talking Kool-Aid Pitcher; Speedy Alka-Seltzer. These are the icons, like it or not, of Cleveland and Pocatello and Philly and Jacksonville. And under their trademarked, tutelary scrutiny, with the cultic theme-music and slogans appropriate unto each, the organizing rituals of our American days take place. The Dutch Maid Cleanser Girl is helping us, in advantageous units measured by single scrubs, to keep back the legions of disarray and besmirchment. Charlie the Tuna (tuna), Tony the Tiger (corn flakes), and the M-G-M lion (movies) remind us: once we lived as equals among the Animal Powers, only later shaped them to our Neolithic needs, and in our blood we keep in vibratory concert with them yet. I mean this tongue-in-cheek – and seriously as well. For who are we, to say their presence functions less than mythologically because their other purpose is commercial? (Isn’t any religion a part of its economic times?) Yes, who are we to say to the supplicants thronging at various niches and altars: this mouth is an oracle, this one not?”

3.
And the future is read in the slippery knots and inclines
of the raw lamb liver. Deity
has written in the liver, where a few will claim to understand
a language otherwise spoken in effluvia, photons, and genes.
And the future is read in lees, in heated cracking tortoise shells,
in cast beans . . . Divination:
                                                  the divine
rising out of our marketplace stuffs and shuffling its
schoolroom flash cards. This is the moon,
the cock, the coffin spider, the cesium atom . . .
repeat after Me.

  *

Once, sitting in on anatomy class, I saw
an intern stretch up fatty strings from the torn-open purpled dough
of a woman’s body and, an impish seizure,
tauten them with one gloved hand
to play them with the other. Not
that there was really any sound, except I remembered,
when I was a child, seeing the distant shapes in a room
through the vibrating side of a harp.
                                                                 The lesson,
the music lesson, is everywhere.

  *

“Of composts
shall the Muse disdain to sing?” James Grainger
simply asks: The Sugar-Cane, a Poem,
his 18th-century verse treatise
on efficiently running Jamaican sugar plantations.
Johnson’s critical response is droll,
of course, and Boswell reports a performance at Reynolds’s house
one night occasioned witty scoff; but, still . . .
the slipknot signatures of flies in the air around it . . .
then a season, another season, and then the earliest
pale-green shoots of the sweetness . . .
Grainger knows where in a person
murmurs of poesy oft first stir their effects. “Now,
Muse,” he continues, “let’s sing of rats . . .”

  *

I once heard a blues harmonica player
insist his soul was in his spit.

4.

Thunder
breaks out of the deeply fulminous clouds . . .
Then later, nascent sun breaks through . . .
And when a Tiki mug – SCHWACK! – breaks? . . .

  *

then Jiffy Boy yodels his famous Sponge-It-Up jingle, bows once, and nimbly glissades (on jet-blast rollerskates) down a mountain of glop and rubbish toward our own telltale mess: his eyes, like cat eyes in a car’s beams, are electrified henna; he has the dancing fantods, in excitement over the mopping ahead; his hands, in fact, are whisk-brooms, and his torso is a scouring pad. He lives with Mr. Zip (the Post Office), Little Oscar (wieners), and The Chicken King (cluck cluck). And Betty Butane (with those ooh-la-la red lips and inky lavish lashes) has a gas flame for a head, and so is perpetually her own natty wimple, plump and bunsen-blue. And Skweezme is a tarantella-frantic roll of paper towels. The Keebler Elf presides over cookies. Mr. Goodbuy, Mr. Goodwrench, and Mr. Goodmeat each is the potent genius of his domain, and has it bad (I mean the spasmic cardiac pitterpat of sexual yearning) for Penni Wise, and Cora Gated, and Bar-B-Cutie, and maybe even the bluesy chanteuse for The California Raisins (raisins). Need I belabor the dapper, top-hat-and-monocle charm of Mr. Peanut? The onomatopoetic panache of that snazzily gnomic triumvirate, Snap, Crackle and Pop? And Mr. Clean says: “dependable power.” The Curity Nurse says: “comfort and ease.” And Pinky the Salmon is leaping with our happiness in mind. And the Pillsbury Dough Boy, homuncular, promising. Tee and Eff, the Tastee Freeze ice cream sprites. The thousands of years of vernal, panurgic clutter that thinly attends, but does attend, the Jolly Green Giant, busy overseeing his demesne of fresh June peas. The Michelin Man has survived since 1895. Perhaps the reigning bey of these winsome schlockorama eidolons is yes, of course, Speedy Alka-Seltzer (effervescent analgesic tablets “for relief”) – with his hillock of carroty hair below the tablet hat, with his wand, his wink, and a smile so sturdy it might be wielded like a shield . . . who else could so hopefully lead us in battle against the ravages of – remember Peter Pain? He looked like a pickle with three-day stubble, with a troll’s schnozzola, a thuggishly slanted gauchoesque hat, and a cruel if miniature trident, for the implementing of “muscular aches and pains.” As if we need to be reminded that we live in the vale of woe and we exit it dying, loss is writ in us as soon as the umbilicus is cut and from that moment never ceases, darkness blocks the way, our sicknesses can fit in a thimble but truncheon us to our knees, it’s night, nobody cares enough or at all and a woman is curled to a monstrously diagnosed ball of hurting flesh in this poem, in this city, at any moment you think about human suffering, there’s suffering.

5.
That night there’s a “scene” in the bedroom. She
tells him. The “growth” – the fire – inside her is past all
masking over, and so she tells him. Not understanding
and understanding vie for control. She weeps, he
tells her their money will buy the best care possible.
Millions of years slip by, and finally they sleep
on a raft of exhaustion and mutual fright. That’s
all. I won’t reveal the long-term word from the lab.
What I want is studying them, where they’re fit together
like soft tongs until morning; studying them, in their
unit-of-two unconsciousness and inarticulation; even
the rise of their chests is invisible now,
they could be a painting.

  *

Yes, and
in the tacked-up print in the upstairs study, it’s much
the same: the woman at the well
is singing – grief? or exultation? we don’t know, but
singing, surely singing: in her world. For us,
outside of that plane, the room is silent,
dark now and silent, the woman is silent and still.

  *

She
whaps the donkey’s scabrous-yet-eloquent rump
– which right now signifies Animal Churlishness; and then they’re
off, across the mallow dust of the plain, to the foothills.
The water jugs are stoppered and lashed to the pack-beast’s ribby sides,
the sky is striped with cloud too thin to be anything
other than decoration . . . a day, an ordinary day
as it should be and usually is.
                                                     The priest
of the foothills is waiting at the cave-mouth. He’s also
a mouth – that is, the Mountain God and the Bull God,
the Unutterable, the Tempering Flame and the Slayer of Infidels,
speaks through him: he wears the mask of a bull,
of beaten gold applied to cedar, as if to say the human medium
has been in contact intimate enough with the deific
to resemble it, as cast in human terms. He is one
of the “sensitives,” one of the holy schizophrenics,
of his people. At night, he wanders from his body
through the abode of demons and guardian seraphs, only
a tendril of phlogistonic substance connecting him
back to his sleeping form; by day, he is known to fall
to the rockfloor like a man who’s had his ankle-tendons severed,
and writhe there foaming, later to rise and deliver
the wisdoms of the Flame and Bull.
                                                                And so she
is come for counsel: let’s say a pain, let’s say a mustard-grain
of pain, in her belly won’t let her sleep, and what
does it mean? He stands in the smoke of the brazier,
the mask becoming even more life-like to her eyes.
It gleams – the Flame. He bellows – the Bull.
He bellows, he charges around the hill-floor crazily,
stumbling, smacking into the cave walls, overflowing
with his roar and gesturing wildly, like a hurt thing, like
a vessel touched by contents from a different world,
until even the far birds, even the stunted grasses, seem to her
to be symbolic of a level of Birds and Grasses
paradigmatic to ours . . . And then he drops, and cools and quiets, and
then repeats what he was told in his trance.
                                                                             The donkey,
even – she’d tethered it at a nearby bramble –
is braying, with the desperate edge of some ubermatrix message
to its simple yowl, a message larger than it is.

  *

It’s winter. Pipesmoke snow
skirtles over the blacktop.
The new moon’s only a bone sherd
dug up out of the ungiving cold.
By now – how many poems do we need
to read, before we’ll admit one thing
says another? that even the hummingbird skull,
the cigarette paper, the thumping cranberry heart
in the caked-over runt of the litter,
says another?

  *

Nor is the initiation easy, into the shaman-like role of American Costumed Critter. “One contestant kept tripping over his Hula-Hoops. Another seemed dazed inside the costume, reeling like a top on its last spin. Another removed the Hugo head and vomited . . .” These failed acts are try-outs for a new Hugo the Hornet in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Every day, minimum wage or the glow of a Higher Calling beckons hundreds of Americans into becoming human-sized owls or collies or spritzerbottles of underarm deodorant (ambulatory, sequined, googoo-eyed) and parading the theme parks, astroturf, tv sets and neighborhood streets of this country.

There are, though, as Ned Zeman admits in American Kabuki, “pitfalls to walking through midtown Manhattan dressed as a giant white rabbit.” Costumes can weigh up to 40 pounds. “Imagine that and oversize stuffed feet and hands and a head the size of a beer keg, a head that has no real eyes, allowing you to see only through a little hole in or near the mouth.” The heat inside can be hellish (so can the odor of earlier occupants). And often enough, mosquitoes dervish circles through the head.

For those who demonstrate the Calling to Assume the Role – to be, not don but be, the hallowed Lotta Bull (roast beef) or Michaelangelo (a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle) or Dottie Drop (a glistered bead for the city water monopoly) – these hazards are only further spurs toward epiphany. This is the beauty part. “It’s what I was put on this earth to do,” says the man inside Cocky the Gamecock, “It’s a gift.” A man inside Bugs Bunny: “After a lot of practice, it all clicks. You actually become the rabbit.” A voice from out of the lime-green shag-rug megaphone-snouted body of the Phillie Phanatic: “It’s what I am.”

Whole stadiumsfull stand cheering with the synchronized rise of hackles. Grandmas let go their crutches, accept a rubber paw, and boogie. Toddlers fasten themselves to carpeted legs and, out of love, like any of us, refuse to let go. The wish of dying 7-year-olds is often to spend a day with such as these, the roosters and alligators and frolicsome mice of an alternate Earth where comic and karmic are wedded as one.

“Explains the Chicken, ‘I want the Chicken to supersede the man.’”

  *

She can’t sleep. Much too much
floods in. Amid it all, she remembers
holding the boy to her shoulder once, at a parade;
he was as easy to hold as . . . the jug in that picture
up in the study. Captain Cosmo rode by
in his Cosmobile, the boy liked that. And,
near the end, not so important a figure
as all of the various Mickeys and Goofies,
Mr. Light-Brite slowly rolled past on a float of tinfoil wattage.
“Look,” she’d said, “from Daddy’s office.”
The boy didn’t care at all. But she,
refusing to think of safety in terms of money,
could think it as “Yes,
he’ll protect us.”

6.
And the battle is fought in the filamental flash
up someone’s nerve-connected dyed-to-match
prosthetic hook-of-a-hand; in the shoptalk of light
and leaf sugars; the battle is on our bedsheets, is
in gamma rays, is sifting through the charged ennui
of the video-games arcade . . .
                                                       the battle of wholeness
versus flying apart, the battle of the universe itself,
and of its planisphere: the beermug rings and their
shotglass moons, complexly staining a bar top.

  *

A hush falls over the mallow dust of the plain.

  *

And then he awoke, and arose, and smote his keepers,
and like the reeds of the waters he broke his chains,
and unto him called his (plague)mates
Weal and Woe, and then did he walk the lands
of the people once more, P-t-r Pain
       for I shall fear him, I dread his (evil eye) (?)
And then did he seek out conquest
    I shall fear him, I dread his green step
P-t-r Pain, the in-my-bowels-the-stabber
P-t-r Pain, the in-my-chest-a-jackal / (lion) (?)
Up is down, and every hand is turned against another
And then there was no safety for the people
from his three-prong-lance
       for I shall fear his three-prong-lance

And then did the cries rise up, and the people
beseeched. And it was heard; and from
the central plain, and thereupon the temple
of the central plain,[*] did Spee-d-Alka stride forth
with the Tablets of Relief
       it is ours to swallow (? see “ingest”)
with works-like-magic
    praise him
    it is ours to take as directed
Spee-d-Alka who rallies the forces that stay our anguish.

Then did the battle ensue

  *

It’s summer. The air is smeared with summer,
the drone of the bees is a fat sound, and the long day thins
away like trickled butter over the lake.
                                                                     The waves
are involved in the project the rows of aspen boughs
continue: trans /
                              substantiating the light, into another
one of the fragmented bodies of Earth.
                                                                     And
the flowers close, and the awnings furl,
and the alley becomes a lushly-stocked thesaurus
read by the whiskers of rats.
                                                    Everywhere,
the intangible is verified through its messengers.
The stars speak spectra. Moses
understood the announcement out of the bush.

  *

The prayer is the same in any language:

Thank you. Help me. Look upon
our plight and daily striving, Absolute of Absolutes,
and rain down armies of Your fierce and invincible Righteous Enablement.
Heal us.

  *

And thus did Alka make war on Pain, and
(here the script breaks off)

The battle is daily waged, the cosmic battle
of Order versus Entropy
If you would deny it
a place at our table

try telling this woman curled in her bed despairing
tell the biopsy slide

7.
“The Reverend Patrick Brontë, wishing to know more about the minds of his six motherless children than he had hitherto discovered, placed each one behind a mask to make them speak with less timidity than before . . .”

I’ve turned to watch her undone face in sleep
become the spokesface

for the morphic fields of sentient life
in the air, for the presto-chango
physics of void and matter, of matter and void,
and for the lovely broken continguity
of mind and flesh . . .

and needed to kiss it halfway wakeful, back
again into being her face.

  *

The house was charged with . . . he didn’t know
what, he was four. He was four and
awake in the gravid darkness.
This had happened before, and he knew what to do
to quiet himself: he went to the upstairs study
and turned on the light there. This was his father’s room,
the light was Mr. Light-Brite most
especially here, a personal, watchful light.
And even at four he wasn’t immune to the sexual
stamina held in check in the skin of the woman
at the well – the way her simple gown was shadowed
at an angle from her hip-swell to the lifted vessel,
over her breasts. And in the silence
he can hear, or sense the possibility to hear,
that world – to hear,
not the clay, but the crystalline grid
in clay, not the donkey, the Donkey,
the prototypical wail, the first condensing gas
this plain of mallow dust with its grief and brief pleasures
descended from in the time before time,
and was mixed to an iffy stability with the spit of stars
and baked to crazing under our own relentless sun, and
now out of the mouth of clay pours forth the water;

and out of the woman, a song

[*]Scholars currently believe this was the Miles Laboratories, Inc., in Eklhart, Indiana, where a statue to Spee-d-Alka (sometimes Alka Sel-T’zer) was honored.