http://www.thecoachellareview.com/blog/?p=692
Inteview with The Coachella Review
http://www.thecoachellareview.com/blog/?p=692
It was one of those rare tap dancing accidents – I broke both feet while transitioning from a Cincinnati time step to a maxiford with toe. As I love the sound of metal on wood floating through a quiet theater, I was rehearsing in the early morning, dancing next to the curtain where the sound is richer, muffled by the thick cloth. My feet tangled. I fell like a clown wearing bulbous red shoes rolling out of a car in a circus tent. A janitor who was about to begin mopping the aisles called for an ambulance. The driver was an amateur medical historian who had just authored an article on bone density in tap dancers and took me to Doctor Timothy Charlton, one of the few orthopedic surgeons in Los Angeles who specialize in tap dancing injuries. Doctor Charlton shook his head over the x-rays. The calcaneus in each foot pushed into the talus with such force that the nerve endings had been unalterably reversed. He had seen this many times, but only as a result of a faulty double stomp buck time step. My only hope of ever again dancing was for both feet to be amputated and sewn on the opposite leg. Doctor Charlton drew a foot on the x-ray showing me what my right foot would look like on my left leg. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I think people are admiring my shoes when they look down for a touch too long while standing next to me in an elevator. Sometimes I dream of that morning. They wheel me into the operating room. Gene Kelly is there wearing green scrubs. A mask covers the bottom of his face but I recognize his eyes. As he picks up a scalpel he begins to tap his foot and is soon doing a paddle roll. The doctors and nurses join in.
I’ll be reading from my new book, Death Obscura at Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd, on Nov 5th a Friday night, 7:30. I'm reading with two other wonderful poets, Diane Martin and Millicent Borges Accardi. I think they charge seven bucks to get in, but it's well worth the price . Hope to see you there.
Here's one of the poems I'll be reading
The Silences
for Deborah
She didn’t speak for twenty-four hours.
This was the first silence she insisted on.
Everything she needed to say was stored
in the cupboard with the thin-lipped
wine glasses that we never used.
Though I don’t remember if she did
actually need to say anything.
The second silence was mine,
not a word for twenty-four hours.
I should have mentioned it earlier, this was her idea.
I should also mention this wasn’t meant to suggest
that she was tired of my voice,
at least this was the last thing she said
before saying nothing. I tossed everything
I needed to say in the corner of the bedroom
with the dirty laundry. And like the dirty laundry
it was soon cleaned. The third silence,
this silence, we shared. Remember,
this was her idea, not mine.
Mine was to sing to each other during sex.
Didn’t even have to be the same song.
I was planning on Italian folk songs.
Early rock and roll would have been her choice,
something by her favorite, The Del-Vikings.
The first time I disrobed for her
she sang, “who am I, the voodoo man;
who am I, the voodoo man.” Thus my guess
on what she would have sung.
But she preferred silence.
(All four poems first appeared in Poem, Huntsville Literary Association, No. 86, 2001; and are also in The Soup of Something Missing.)
Everyone told him he was crazy:
the boat’s own weight would shatter it in the harbor
or the first swell the size of a tall man
would break the bow as its face slid down the windward side.
If his glass boat survived long enough to catch
a large fish surely the thrashing strength of dying muscle
would smash the boat like a dinner plate flung into a fireplace.
That was thirty-one years ago.
Now he only fishes when the late afternoon sun
slides beneath the hull,
flooding the boat with a silver light.
On the voyage home he stares
through the glass bottom
at the darkening ocean,
the resting place of every drowned man.
Standing on the deck, surrounded by dying fish and ocean,
he looks like a man walking on water.
Sunlight flattening across the bow confirms
it’s glass, not faith that he pilots to the harbor.
He once broke a leg; one foot on the deck,
the other on the dock as a swell lifted the boat.
Another fisherman set the injury in wooden planks
and newspapers wrapped with old netting.
For the next sixteen days he lived in a public house
above the fuel dock. His wife worked the boat.
The fish didn’t know the difference,
not even when she shoved her fingers in a mouth
to pull one from seaweed tangled on the propellers,
nor did the ocean looking through the glass bow
when she tied her long skirt around her waist
to keep fish guts from knotting the lace hem.
The differences between the fog, an ocean
and a glass boat are indistinguishable.
A fisherman on an approaching boat could see
the weather and nothing else until he notices
the dark smudge in the gray. At first he believes
it’s the church at sea priests spoke of,
a soul’s life preserver rescuing it from the weight of flesh.
His belief is like candles stocked for stormy nights.
Coming closer, the glass boat becomes clear,
forcing the approaching boat to turn away.
The man in the glass boat just watches
steam from his coffee rise, pleased
by the way it becomes the weather.
The fisherman’s wife looks at the glass boat
from the dock and sees only the ocean’s
heave and sigh and calls it Grief.
The fisherman looks down at the glass deck
and sees only the vein-like currents and skeletons
knotted in sunken ships and calls it Faith.
Fish make names, too, names with long sounds,
familiar noises inside a shell or a hand
rubbing the three-day stubble on a tired face.
When fish look up at the glass boat they see heaven;
and hear its sound, net descending into ocean.
No seagulls follow it on the journey home,
just the foamy wake growing from the stern,
furrows of a freshly-plowed field.
I’m doing a reading along with four other people at the Jancar Gallery in Chinatown on August 14th, 6 pm. The address is 961 Chung King Road. The other readers are Mike Alber, Karani Leslie, Ben Loory and Rachel Kann. If you come I promise not to be boring.
Night
In 1889 it snowed twenty-three times in Cleveland, Ohio, and each time only at night. Yet newspaper articles from that year make no mention of this. One hundred years later, 1989, it snowed exactly twenty-three times in Cleveland, and again, only at night. Professor Beth Wingate, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, wrote in a scientific paper, “the author unfortunately is unlikely to be alive in 2089, but if in that year it snows twenty-three times in Cleveland and only at night, this will be a phenomena not a coincidence.” Where science ends faith begins. This never changes, and is the reason most ghosts are seen in the dark.
The Democracy
The election is finally here. Once and for all, it will be decided which pencils will be legal, the softer lead number four or the hard number two. The count stands at 763 for the soft and 879 for hard. If the number fours become illegal I’ll move to a place where the smudge of a word won’t make a man a criminal. I can’t understand why some prefer to write words barely dark enough to be read. This is the same way we decided the size of napkins in cafes, and learned to drink without spilling, not even a drop.