Wishbone

Our professor told us at the start of one particularly arduous
session that we had already examined all the formations of static
necessary to co-opt the rumor wedged in the starched creases of
corduroy. We saw when the second week commenced
that a class such as his creates myriad possibilities for the most
hypertrophied, not for us. We lived during that week on a see-
-saw, a tenuous balance at best. He maintained his control
while we carried crosses shoulder high after nearly every class.
A whole historical ethos informed our protested intersubjectivity
that he so pridefully thought his syllabus had constructed out of us.
We would have rebelled more forcefully, more violently
had we been granted the language for rebellion, but our course of study
does not consider the Oedipal until next semester.

---

Taproot

He can still recall that night, even now as he looks across the water to where a lone tanker begins its slow crawl out to sea. He can remember that little boy who watched a canal man pole his boat along its way. He wonders how that little boy in that distant house became the lanky, weary man that he is now, this man who stands and carefully brushes the seat of his pants and pulls his check blazer close about him as the wind seems to rise at just the moment that he stands, leaves here, and starts for home. He lives in one of those chic apartments etched inside the archaic, cavernous vaults of former warehouses. The carefully placed contents of the rectangular spaces that form his home might yet recall everything he would muzzle. He enters, hangs his check blazer in the closet and goes to the sink and washes his hands. He lights a cigarette and opens a bottle of wine. He takes a glass from a cabinet, some ashes from his cigarette fall into the sink. He pours wine into his glass and walks to his study. He looks briefly at some pictures hung on the wall, turns and looks briefly at some others placed along the outer edge of bookshelves. Now he steps toward his desk. He sits down and looks out the window, out across the water. He closes his eyes for a moment and considers once more those faces locked safe in their frames. He opens his eyes, places his hands upon the keys, and begins to type.

---

Apprentice-Work

He sits above the closed atlas, next to a history of opera. At his age he has neither rabbits nor hats. Frank is his name or Robert. His legs are crossed; his palms are up and open and waiting for something to begin – nothing in particular, not one moment or an other. The nets long ago have been sewn; the saws retain some infinitesimal sparkle. Winter follows summer. Any moment is so hard for him to remember now; any object, so hard to hold. Cravat, links, spats, even pants he's loosened to let flesh relax and unfurl. Would the grandson recall a magician's errand-less wanderings in the dark at night? Every house, after all, thinks of itself as bolted and distinct. Would that boy when grown and likewise in the trade sense – in his bones or in his genes perhaps (that'll have him wandering, too) - fear as he did the night he espied an ancient figure in modern dress ramble from cave to cave muttering something that the poor child could not understand? Though be sure of this, if it were a song, he'd sing it, too. At night he'd lift high his black jug, gulp, then bellow forth, and the next day he'd not recall a single note of it. If it were a spell, he'd be, as it were, himself sawn in two and then in two again and again and again, but never so small as to pass through the net: thin as a pine needle or flat as an angelfish.

---

Postcard

He comes out of his house every morning broom in hand. Jane Shore wrote a poem called "Washing the Streets of Holland", but this Dutchman prefers to sweep. He doesn't sweep the entire street, just one block. He seems to be king of it: his broom, his scepter. There's something regal about his back and forth movements, spine stiff and straight, a matter of state importance. Occasionally, he pauses and mutters disgust at small cigarette butts that defy the urgency of his strokes. He begins at one end of the block and advances toward his objective, its other end. Then he returns, satisfied, pats his small shorthaired dog on its square head, and goes inside. His work is gratifying, fulfilling, never halted by taxi or tourist. On your way to begin your work, he completes his. On your way to the university, the hospital or the office, on your way to the tram, watch him now. He pauses, bends, and, like a surgeon, slowly, carefully removes one particularly small and troublesome butt from the crevice between two bricks.

Copyright © Dennis Barone, 2003