Black Water

Let's go, you and me,
as the morning comes up sharp and bright
like a foil flower trimmed with scissors.
Let's go
through the bright broad busy streets. Where
tall women with red leather purses speak on chrome phones
and plainfaced cops on quiet horses direct the tourists
to the clean rooms of the hotel chains on 8th Avenue.
Let's go
up these streets that lead like a maze to
a revolving door, a desk, and
a piece of cheese.
Let's go.
Quick. This is important:
they will talk about it on television.
Let's go.

Downtown the girls wear their pants low on their hips
pressing bubble-gum lipsticks firmly to their lips.

A black car with waxy doors glides along the curb,
a black sedan with livery plates scrapes its tires along the curb,
pokes its grillwork towards a townhouse,
beeps its woodwind horn towards a bolted door,
and, realizing that its passenger is
tucking in a golf shirt or tugging at a stocking,
circles once about the block
and flicks on a pair of amber hazards.

Because there is no time
for belting up the khakis and bounding down the stairs.
No time to paint your face or brush your hair,
no time for place settings from magazines and restaurant ranges,
no time for private schools and books by West Coast sages,
no time for on-line shopping and mortgage financing,
no time for tandori chicken and lessons in ballroom dancing.
And no time, you say, for that rental by the sea.
Certainly no time for people like me.

Because there is never time
for the driver to drive you to the airport or to the train.
No time to check your messages and no time to complain,
no time for your husband, no time for your wife, your golf game,
no time to clean your closets, choose shoes for the rain,
no time then and no time still for your babies to play
among the meetings, the therapists, the 401(k).
And no single minute, filled with seconds like seeds,
to contain your appointments, your catalogs, and your dreams.
Do I dare disturb
you?
In this moment past there was more time to destroy and adore
than in a thousand thousand hours in a Ford Explorer.

Downtown the girls wear their pants low on their hips
pressing bubble-gum lipsticks firmly to their lips.

But you had it, you must have, had it when you were a child,
must have touched it along rivers, roads, and streams,
smelled it when the moon shone through dark woods in dusty beams.
You must have heard it in the music on the radio and read it in the pages of a book,
you must have seen it on the sides of tall buildings and you must have tasted it in cakes.
But then you cut its head off like a snake's.

I should stop?

You played with it in sports and fought with it in school,
kissed it after dates and stroked it in the dark.
You raced with it on highways and puked it up in parks.
You wished for it on rainy nights alone in bed,
and were sure you could reclaim it on an airplane to Madrid.
But then you sold it for a lobster bib.

Should I stop?

You bartered poorly for it at a graduation party, and
saw it one last time before a mirror (you were dressed quite smartly).
But then you sat down with it on a cold Christmas Eve,
stared it coolly in the eye across the empty table,
and at last you killed it, as best as you were able.

I should go?

Should I stroll down balmy cul-de-sacs and stare into the voids of
three-car garages, listening to the white noise of air conditioners,
breathing the semen-scent of swimming pools hidden behind
the garden stones painted white, and the chainlink fences?

I should have been a rusty seaside crane, clawing at the cargoes of foreign holds,
standing silent guard across the black water of a deep-sea bay.

The morning flies violently through the slits of Rockefeller Center.
Red and brilliant, it hisses, sizzles, and engenders.
A derelict rifles through a garbage can,
a cyclist cycles through the plaza to deliver master plans.
Should I, after a strawberry frosted and a double cappuccino,
work so hard to be someone else's hero?
And although I have seen Seinfeld, although I have
seen Oprah and Survivor (and all with digital reception)
I still turned off the television, so here is my suggestion:
After you stand in the lunch line with all the others,
when you reach the counter ask for more than bread with butter.

And would it make it any easier,
would it make any more sense,
to drink from the cup of sickly, sweet pretense,
to lay out the universe like a map,
to smooth it with manicured fingers,
to close my eyes and shake my head,
and say, I am confused, I surrender?
Would it make it any easier,
to say, tell me what to do! What should I do?
if one, pacing by
in high-heeled shoes, should mention:
just keep quiet: This is all
for the sake of discretion.

And would it make this any easier,
after the mountains that serrate the sky and the cities like sextons,
after the sunny days and the satin thongs and all the heavy boxes lifted,
after all this and all I still expect
(You know exactly what I intend:
the sensation of movement just after the journey ends.),
would it make this, any of it, any easier at all,
if one, flying overhead in a short skirt on a chartered jet,
trailed a bright blue banner that clearly read:
YOU ARE NOT I REPEAT NOT ALREADY DEAD.

Yes I am MacBeth, Othello, Brutus, and Lear,
and I want Ariel and I want Kate and I want Titania too,
but not Polonius, not Cassio, not Ophelia, and not the Fool.
Abrasive, yes, and pathetic, even pitiful, certainly at times.
But also decisive, forward, and talented,
and at least I write my own lines.

I grow old, I grow old:
still I have so few stories to be told.
Should I book a passage on a Caribbean cruise?
Should I wear long sleeves to cover my tattoos?
I will park my car in New Jersey
and pay for the ferry with coupons from a coupon book.
I have seen one billion faces, floating silently below the black water of the river,
while you complained of the cold and waited in the pilothouse,
afraid to look.

At the rail of the boat the wind blew in my face.
I saw the city reflected on the ripples of the waves:
the long streets and dark alleys, the high glassy spaces
where a soaring Valkyrie sang to me of endurance and of grace.
But then the tourists with their cameras took pictures with flashes
and they burned my Valkyrie to ashes.

Sincerest apologies to Mr. Eliot.

Copyright © Christopher Miller 2003