Yesterday’s
Out
on Webster Pike in East Tennessee is a fenced up
vintage
garage where weeds poke through cracked
asphalt,
little sky seeking vegetative rockets amid
a
kingdom of old cars full of rust.
An
apt name, Yesterday’s, as it belongs to a vanished
time
where it sits like some forgotten refugee camp,
rusted
automobiles old, from the time of Sinatra,
James
Dean, Bogart, Marilyn.
The
cars were meant for restoration, to make them live
and
sing again the melodies of the day when they
first
hatched from the assembly line, but they have
no
owner who must have passed before the initial
sanding
began to strip them down to gleaming metal
and
prepare a new coloured skin, like some brilliantly
painted
Pharaoh’s sarcophagus waiting resurrection
to
fly on gilded wings toward the sun.
The
cars sit with their silent stories. Did some young man
court
his girl in the 56 convertible T-Bird, her hair blowing
in
the wind while from the radio Elvis crooned “Love Me Tender,”
and
her eyes coated with love’s crust?
Did
the Chrysler Saratoga once spin its tires on the way to
LA
on Route 66, pausing in the Arizona desert to watch
wild
horses, descended from the time of the Anasazi
gallop
past their empty pueblos?
Or,
the Bentley Mark V, a car built for the luxurious rich—
the
tuxedoed gentleman holding the door for his lady
dressed
in white evening gown, sequined pearls, neck
long
and slender, elegantly walking into Carnegie Hall.
The
1940 Ford truck seems an odd, out of place dinosaur
nestled
amid American classicism. Was this to be the
owner’s
proud gem, one where he would tool
back
country roads in remembrance of his father?
The
sun falls into shadow, the cars silent, still. No matter
the
many roads they had travelled, here they sit on
concrete
blocks, final resting place, and they know
that
almost no one understands any longer.
Of Bird and Man
The
cat killed a dove and left it on the front doorstep
as
a gift. Hardly a mark on its soft, slate-gray plumage,
eyes
closed in finality. Yesterday, I saw its mate looking
for
the lost love, and I wondered if birds pondered the end.
Did
they dream of some afterlife bird paradise, where seeds
and
bugs and worms littered the ground like gifts from the
bird-gods,
or was there no conscious awareness,
only
a flight moving from season to season?
I
felt sorrow for the doves, and an ache for lost humanity.
For
us, does an eternal paradise lie through a door
following
our passing? Would we walk through green
fields
with loved ones who had gone before?
Dance
beneath metaphysical stars, glowing skies,
hand
in hand with those we spun on ballroom floors,
transcending
Bergman’s final dance in The Seventh Seal,
victory
promised since ancient times.
Or,
will it be like not remembering before we were born,
the
soul or spirit or Plato’s forms prevailing in some celestial
realm
unaware of the moment, existing from infinity’s
doors,
the time before time, before our time?
Shall
we look upon the doors of his face, the lamps of his
mouth,
once and for all know the riddle of existence,
solve
the puzzle of materialism, the fight with idealism,
and
say we knew this world was not enough?
Eschatology Over the Airwaves
The
apocalypse has been modernized.
No
longer the gothic, the baroque, the prophetic,
starving
desert hermit dehumanized by the power
of
the machine, the pocket cell phone microwaves
the
Revelation instantaneously at the speed of light.
Conspiracy
theorists’ fingers fly over touch screens
elated
about signs of the Second Coming.
The
texts went like this:
Michael, where would you say we are right now
in Revelation?
Plagues.
Some think Trump is the Rider of the White Horse
in the Four Horses of the Apocalypse.
Could
be that. He sounded the horn.
Electronic
Johns of Patmos eating a different apple—
Dionysian
excitement emoted through tiny screens,
angels
in the circuits, scrolling seraphim, cherubim
in
the chips—should I tell them the end has always
been
near?
Should
I mention that they walk with Freud’s
Eros
& Thanatos? Or, could be Fenrir in a Marvel movie
snarling
his way
through
Ragnarök,
the
Lion King wearing a white hat,
Hitler
waiting for Götterdämmerung?
Three
horses yet to come, feminist Jezebels tamed
the
red horse, the black horse, the pale horse—all
ridden
as romantic dream by different dreamers
miles
apart, connected by modern twittering
to
ancient prophecy.
Should
I tell them that Rome is built on seven hills,
&
these late-night texts algorithmic allegories
for
feasting on the parchment in medieval monasteries?
Will
the final trump card drawn be the fool?
These
are my signs I would say.
Best Song
He
said that he sang the best songs being a
Chicago
Jew, that all would be kosher between us
even
if what he ate wasn’t food. That was over
bad
Yugoslavian wine after he came up to me
on
Burnham Park and told me that I looked like
a
young Mara Corday, and said yes, I’m inside
your
head and know that you don’t know who
she
is, but no matter, all things forgotten are eventually
remembered,
resurrect like geese migrating south
over
the lake.
That
was only one of the stories he told.
He
was a history professor specializing in the Holocaust.
I
was from Appalachia and we didn’t speak the same
language
even though we knew what the words meant.
Slightly
drunk, he laid out narratives like a winding staircase
with
missing steps.
He
played the Wise Man like in the Bethlehem story or
Obi
Wan fingering the Force.
I
played Damsel not in Distress, all on a dark barroom stage.
Look,
I said, I’m not the temple priestess that laid with
Enkidu
for seven days.
It
rained longer than that, he said, in the deluge.
He
admired my skimpy red skirt, long black hair that looked
like
Grace Slick singing “White Rabbit” at Woodstock.
Yeah,
I said, but mother wouldn’t like the pill you carry.
He
garbled a Yiddish poem and I told him that growing up
too
much Patsy Cline had spoiled my head.
These
stories, like the clichéd pen spilling from a third rate writer,
always
end up in a room. But no, I told him stories of my own:
of
the missionary beheaded outside Mecca, the actor who hung
himself
because he was emptied out, a girl without milk singing
goat
songs, the Depression bum who stole the apple pie and was
tarred
and feathered, Ophelia who drowned for false love, the real
King
who died before Slick slicked up her song.
There
are many ways to lose yourself if you only listen
to
your screwed up nerve endings.
This Mirror, this Moment
Know
your origin, the dark love circles
that
afterwards made you a penumbra.
That
is not the first foundation, merely
happenstance
of chance, an underpinning
where
feet will tread on asphalt or creek beds,
rock
or carpet, hear songbirds in morning or
rushhour’s
blare. This choice was made for
you
like a night’s electrical storm terrifies
while
illuminating the dark walls, skeleton
limbs
waving in the dusky moment that
you
try to peer through.
When
sitting at the glass after morning’s
coffee
combing your long hair woven by
a
spider’s thought, reflect also on the shadow
before
shadows, moon’s umbra that spit out
the
nervous sweat between sheets that set
you
on the path toward staring in the glass
like
a scryer’s daughter knowing that the
space
between the stars holds the secret,
riddle
unarticulated that your red lips
cannot
ask, oval eyes cannot see.
Your
parents knew not what they did.
They,
too, were spit out by the same forces
that
splits the crow’s tongue, sets the
panting
breath of sad animals in the spring
tumbled
toward the other’s origin for
seasonal
respite in the penumbra enveloping
them
like the slow crawl of desert dunes
building
and collapsing, or stars that wink
out
at dawn, rivers once wet run dry.
Comb
through your hair like cornsilk
with
slow, deliberate strokes. Watch your
hand
and brush become one. At the back
of
the mirror all is recorded for someone
else
who will one day sit at the same place
unaware
of your lost shade, sensing that
there
is something that needs to be known.
Dr. Ralph Monday is a Professor of English at Roane State Community College.
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