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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819569738 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2012 |
| Series: | Wesleyan Poetry Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 201 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
SCREEN IMAGE
BIRTHDAY BLUES
Today's the rider's birthday.
I see you're already lower-casing him ...
Would you rather I ...
What is this "I." You have none.
Today's the rider's birthday.
Except he's dead.
In a contrary mood today?
Not in the way you'd think.
I'm your friend, remember? And I can't hurt you. I have no body.
Neither does Krang.
K — —?
The bodiless brain. The Ninja Turtles' nemesis. The guy who oversees all of their activities.
And yet you carry him in your pocket like a good luck charm. You perplex your son who can't see the humor in your perversity because to him Krang is just, to put it plainly, disgusting.
Just his brain. On the show and the Nintendo game his naked brain is always safely encased within a robot's body
where his stomach and not his head ought to be.
Ought? I thought we had done with the realm of could-have-been. The realm of shoulds.
Who is ever done with — anything? Just because I agree with Marie-Louise Von Franz's imprecation "no more shoulds" doesn't mean I'm freed from the actuality.
And just because the rider is dead doesn't mean that today isn't his birthday.
April 17. I'm fine, really.
I believe you.
But the week has been —.
I know. But think of it this way: you're lucky that you can break down.
I kept scratching my brain in imagination trying to remember if this was the week when B died a year ago. And J the same week the year before.
After each death something went wrong with your body.
All right, all right. Even though I had the flu I dragged myself to the gym to stretch out on the mats and listen to some calming music on my Walkman. This was going well. I had my arms and legs extended as far as possible in the opposite direction and I could feel my lungs release ..., but when I reached for my toes I ... convulsed and burst into tears.
Good thing you'd worn your sunglasses.
Yeah. I knew that the tears could have been mistaken for sweat and the groans for ...
and while it was days before the date, as if emblazoned (would stare me down-to-distraction) I just could not stop thinking about the intimate quiet moments we shared; our rare and wonderful moments of true solitude together ...; the unforced gentleness and sense of mutuality ...:
Buber ...
That's so unimportant. The point is that he had internalized the lessons; it was in his nature to be that way.
I don't see what's so strange. His birthday was approaching. You were sad. That's perfectly normal.
But what pierced me at that moment like an ax was the recognition that I never had a conversation with my (blood) father.
Don't be dumbfounded. My feelings about the two men are always in dialogue, crissing and crossing.
Lying in that relaxed position on the exercise mat listening to the intervals in Ry Cooder's mesmerizing Paris, Texas score, it hit me that as my father's birthday approached, or the hour of his suicide neared, that I felt mildly aware, mildly sad, but not remotely devastated and torn that I had lost
someone with whom I had an intimacy that could
never be repeated.
Nothing can —.
You know I don't mean it that way.
Then be precise.
Someone who, at least at crucial times, communicated a warmth and love and care without
competing with you and undercutting you at every instant like your blood father. And your grandfather —.
Thanks.
That's what I'm here for.
So I was torn by a new perplexity with regard to my real father. I never lived with him but we spent countless hours alone together and he was often, before he hit the bottle, quite friendly, easy-going, low pressure.
A compañero.
We liked to hobo around together.
But even looking at clusters of the best moments we had in each other's presence we still never had a conversation. He had his mind made up about me and, with his game-plan fully laid out, chose to employ this or that tactic to edify, or instruct ..., to lead me onto better paths
for I am in no way criticizing his motivation in trying to help me
GROW
it was just that he had no
EARS
He knew in advance anything I could possibly think or say.
But it wasn't personal. It was just the way he was. You brought a friend to dinner who was stationed on a ship outside Nankeng Harbor. Your father appeared to listen to his sea stories — and the thing that "most blew his mind" — when the missile, launched from the ship, landed "directly on" a peasant hoeing rice who "didn't know where the hell he was going" and blew him away completely and the sailors laughed
— and your friend came apart —
and while your FACE showed proper astonishment your FATHER just pawed the place mat
to rid it of imaginary crumbs
and with stern and solemn nods
that withheld surprise at all costs
and gravity of tone worthy of Lincoln!
told your friend that the gist of war was boredom
and he, perhaps unused to such practiced delivery during "informal" gatherings
took this in then whispered wide-eyed that he could not believe how your father could know everything he'd gone through when he'd never gone through it
and while his sadism was not in full flower in such isolated instances it was
a drag.
No wonder I was touched when Sam agreed to an evening of five-card-stud on one condition: "no poker-faces"!
Your father's mask was his face.
No — depth? Interior — life?
No — but that he cared more about the impression he made than about what you or your friend were undergoing.
He was always onstage, your father. Preening for posterity in a void of his own invention.
Ok.
He was never, or always and only, himself.
SCREEN IMAGE:
(ROYAL EMERALD HOTEL, NASSAU)
Viciousness incarnate. Meanness engraved.
Boneless, atomic, he leaned on the swivel
stool. His back to the bar.
To the gilded mirrors inhabited
by a jagged skyline, bottles;
gold labels: Chivas, Cointreau, Cutty Sark. ...
Anyone would have noted this presence even if the man had been
no one, but with his initials in red on shirt-cuffs, cuff-links,
lapels, blazer breast-pocket, and socks,
it seemed almost disingenuous
for the boy to ask "Are you —?" —
but it was the best he could do.
Sloe-eyed, conspiratorial, the actor spoke out of the side of his mouth
but his gravelly menacing bass carried kind words. "Pleased to meet you
son. Would you — mind — if I — bought — you a drink?
Bartender — get the boy a —'Shirley' —"
and then he winked! — a — 'Roy Rogers.'"
They drank in dark and blissful silence.
"Just do me one favor, son; don't tell anyone you saw me. I'm here ... to get away."
The warm and intimate way the actor delivered these words made the boy keen to keep a vow ... of silence;
to ignore his chance to shine in the rec-room among the jaded kids who'd waste no time making sure everyone who could know would know;
no, he would not tell that freckled snot from Great Neck who came to Nassau with his own ping pong racquet. ...
The actor's equally glamorous friends,
who'd entered without a sound,
pressed the rims of cocktail glasses to their lips;
knocked down their martinis in one
gulp; hissed: retracted their chins like cobras.
The leather armrests on the bar let out a gasp
which led the two women to exchange quick
I didn't do it, did you? glances,
as if their rigid posture and breathless diaphragms betrayed them, along
with their volitionless nylon rustling. ...
They were prisoners anyway:
of masklike makeup; tintinnabulating bracelets;
miniscule purses without shoulder straps
and strapless, tight-waisted dresses; umbrella-spined bras;
nylons, garters, girdles, high heels: glued hair.
(Was the woman who was "with" the actor reciting a silent mantra
that he himself would never do anything like hurl boiling coffee in her face
as he did to Gloria Graham in The Big Heat?)
Silken and silver were the hair and suit and voice of the man who uttered the actor's first name.
Wouldn't "our table's ready" have been sufficient?
The actor dispersed like liquid mercury —
too early in time to draw some wry pleasure from the uncanny resemblance
between the "special effect" on celluloid and his own flesh and blood.
The boy did not move but eyed the party through the speckled mirror; and though
he was as aware as any American that whatever the actor hadn't done
in real life or was yet to do,
like push the future
President out of a speeding coupe in The Killers ...
that he owed his renown to the brazen, indomitable cop
he played on M-Squad, the boy saw him repeatedly as the itinerant cruelty in The Missouri Traveller
who lashed that boy's back in the heat-stricken barn for feeding the skeletal horses extra hay.
He couldn't remember why he and his father had gone to this bleak, obscure "sleeper" anyway,
unless, alone together in a place he could not remember,
they had time to kill.
GRATUITOUS ACT
Dawn had scarcely broken when because those kids he went to school with in that hick town would kill to be in his shoes now, he said
"ok" to a day of deep-sea fishing:
his father's heaven, his abyss of boredom and panic, trapped among strangers hellbent on pleasure;
the ghastly sultry stillness,
the timeless, eternal, waiting —
broken only by a cry that went out every time we passed another rig, "catch anything?"
He had some Cherry Bombs in his pocket,
burning to be used: could he hurl one onto an approaching boat?
In the tireless, omnipresent dampness he set a match to the wick: it did not seem to react; sizzle, give off any light; yet some purposive silent and invisible flame must have crawled down the stem to get it to ignite in his hand —
which went instantly black.
Like charred paper.
The captain went below deck and came back up soot-blackened from the axle grease he'd scraped from the engine.
He rubbed it on the boy's palm.
The pain went away instantly.
The blackness remained.
How long would he have to wait for the hotel nurse to wind the white gauze bandage around his wound?
It should have been enough to earn him a night alone in their room ... but he was still recovering when he and his father, his friend and his father,
jumped into a rachitic taxi which hung an abrupt right onto an unmarked road and roared down a narrow, sandy path,
where thorns and branches closed in,
scratching, beating it back, so that his party could listen to the bongos and the castanets on the floodlit, open-air dance floor.
The boys drank "Roy Rogers,"
and chewed the stems of maraschino cherries.
The women, seated alone together, had all the right body language: it would never enter anyone's mind that they weren't having the best of times. Of course the boys
(two non-threatening pre-adolescents playing at being men) could join them.
They'd been alone a long time before the women thought to ask
where they came from, who they were with.
That was the boys' cue to guide their eyes toward the two bachelors through the smoke of the room —
(to which their "Havana's" were contributing —)
men who, "combining style and comfort,"
might have stepped out of GQ in their lightweight,
"tropical" blazers, white trousers, and Pima cotton shirts.
It had taken him a while to warm to Rube,
his new friend's lawyer father: his crewcut and bow ties;
his mimicry in the shrewd, digressive jokes he told where Jewish vampires scoffed in Yinglish as their hapless prey brandished useless crosses....
The tall Bahamian entered and scanned the room with the furtive expression of a man on the run.
He loped across the dance floor and knelt beside Rube.
"Are you —." Rube nodded. "Can you — help —?"
How could he have found someone who had barely deplaned — unless — unless —
it was someone whose face was known, like Melvin Belli, or the actor ...
and listened intently to the sounds he blurted underneath the fugal drumbeats.
Rube got up without a word. The two men walked
to a red column where the light was low —
but not low enough to subdue the stranger's disturbed flailing arms. ...
But who was the stranger?
Rube did not move. The others, as if bent on the boys staying put, exchanged sips from the spiked "punch" they guzzled out of porcelain coconut shells, and asked to hear once more about the explosion and the gauze bandage on his hand.
There was a wall between him and the mystery.
The floodlights and the dust of stars.
The paw of the ocean on the shore.
ROLE PLAY
1. On location. Set off from real life by an artificial world yet part of life —?
2. The set: a lovesick empire in the heat during the long shoot in the Spanish hills.
3. The stillness of waiting is broken only when a sunstruck actor, encased in his tin
shell of armor, clattered to the ground,
sweat oiling the skin from underneath the thin
film of Vaseline applied to simulate sweat.
The budget swelled like dropsy.
4. Excess without wisdom. And yet the public loved to hear about the real
love that flared on the world's stage between the long adored actress
(from the ingenue's "pre-erotic sentience")
and the upstart mercurial Welshman.
5. Love isn't a bad way to go when the cells of the body politic are still
stunned by a regicide in which the victim had no time to display
Cleopatra's uncommon courage ... and fix one serene final gaze on the reeling globe.
6. (Horace could not force the future to listen when he warned: wind shakes the tallest pine, lightning strikes the highest tower ...).
7. Why finish the film, why get out of the characters whose passion,
mythic, wild, unbudgeted,
rivaled their own
when they could go on falling forever in the
unsteady, giddy, delirious gleam of that freedom?
8. They became the roles they played.
But like those lovers who came before
they fell prey to ... magical thinking ...
and thought: if we ignore the world
and make a new life in a far off place it will ... leave us alone.
9. The tabloids covered their every move:
and from here on in, whether spear-fishing
the Technicolor coral reefs off Puerto Vallarta after Burton was done
with his whiskey-priest role in
Night of the Iguana
or taking each other on the hot white sand,
or whirling in the local cantinas, high
on atomic margueritas, (Cuervo Gold, Cointreau, ice and lime) nunc
est bibendum, they could not shake the uneasy feeling you get when you're being watched,
and your behavior, in ways you cannot measure, is ... : changed.
10. But learning how to make the best of it is the whole ... and there were
compensations; the small,
prelapsarian coastal town
was not a bad place to fall;
the streets smelled sweet after rains,
the noon sun shone through the emerald green of iguanas;
and the smoked fish on sticks hawked for centavos by peasant children
running barefoot up and down the beach could not be beat: at any price.
(after Horace, Odes, Book I, 4 and 37)
Excerpted from "The Millennium Hotel"
by .
Copyright © 1996 Mark Rudman.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
I SCREEN IMAGE,
Birthday Blues,
Screen Image: (Royal Emerald Hotel, Nassau),
Gratuitous Act,
Role Play (after Horace),
Distracted in Beverly Hills,
II THE MILLENNIUM HOTEL,
The Millennium Hotel,
1. Prologue and Lament,
2. Nothing Seasonal,
3. The Path,
4. Stormwatch,
5. The Millenium,
6. "Around this time you began making transcontinental flights alone.",
7. After the Storm,
8. "And What If It Had Been His Last Wish ...",
9. The Stewardess,
10. The Heights,
11. 1812,
12. "Our beautiful mothers! Death isn't ...",
13. Walker's Pond,
14. Semaphore,
15. Night Thoughts (after Heinrich Heine),
16. "Succulents subjected —",
17. "How far can we take chance, can chance take us?",
18. (Pause.),
19. March (after Boris Pasternak),
20. In the torrent (after Johannes Bobrowski),
21. Pool Hall,
22. Before Summer Rain (after Rainer Maria Rilke),
23. Poolside,
24. Gorge,
III MOTEL EN ROUTE TO "LIFE OUT THERE",
Wood Floors,
Love's Way,
Love's Mirrors,
Set Design,
Soho: The Early Days,
Easter Weekend in Denver,
On the Wheel Of,
Aesacus, the Diver (after Ovid),
Aesacus Risen,
Aesacus and the Dancer,
Mixed Messages,
Motel En Route to "Life Out There",
IV ABOVE AND BELOW,
Above and Below in Mexico,
Notes,
What People are Saying About This
"The Millennium Hotel enlarges upon the themes that appeared in Rider and includes several of the same players and personae. The books build upon each other to create an increasingly rich linguistic world. Rudman is writing a sophisticated poetry of polyphonic voices. He engages the questions of the subject position and the construction of the self obliquely, in poems that 'think on their feet.'