|
Reader Dear Reader
when you say you love me
turn away
i can't bear to see you utter
those words aloud
better
we draw pictures
and send them instead :: frail
pencil
portraits of ourselves now
and then
how we think we are or were
or the shadows of our
dreams
reader dear reader
when you say goodbye
turn around
let me see
it in your eyes
and look into mine when i reply
that i hate
your fucking guts and
pray you'll
die you slut, just die
reader my darling reader
take me with you
do
because i would choose death
over life
without the angel breath
of your shining
lies
© James Lineberger
2003
remember that old guy who grew orchids
in that movie in the heat of the night? i always
wanted to
grow
orchids. like that guy from the cia who spent
all those years
looking for the mole
that had snuck in and never found him, he
grew
orchids too. and who else
was it, was it churchill, seems to me
churchill grew orchids too and if he didn't he should have,
and if
i had ever had the time and somebody
around to get me started,
i
would have been one of the best orchid growers that ever was,
that is
just something i know in my heart,
the same way i know without knowing
that pablo picasso
never grew an orchid in his life. and neither
did
richard burton. great artists do not usually grow
orchids. and neither
do garbage collectors.
but garbage collectors would do very well with
orchids.
why that is i can't say, exactly, any more than
i can say
why it helps to be a racist if you want to raise orchids.
you take
that man in the heat
of the night. he slapped sidney poitier
right
across the face. but there is somebody else that
never raised
orchids either, sidney poitier. he isn't mean
enough or racist enough
or selfish
enough to raise orchids. go on, ask him, he'll tell you, no,
sir, no sir,
never did that, no. vic morrow, though,
vic morrow
was born to grow orchids and if he was alive right now
he would show
them to you daddy-oh
mister daddy-oh glenn ford mister hotshot
do-gooder
trying to teach us all to live together under the same roof
hah
vic morrow would say hah
and if you tried to get too close and
hold him up as some kind of example
of how not to live he might just
stick you
with his switchblade
or if he was sergeant saunders he
could use his bayonet
and when he got his head cut off
by that
helicopter he left his daughter jennifer jason leigh one hundred
dollars but not one orchid
because he wanted to show his disdain
for the way
she went and changed her name
and the way when
she
was just a little girl she used to say
the smell of orchids made her
want to puke especially the pansies
pansies were the worst and early
on
even before
she knew what it meant she would plant her
feet
wide apart and scrooch up her little fists
and sceam at
him
pansy pansy you are nothing but a rotten stinking pansy
© James Lineberger 2003
The Night I Auditioned for Kazan
it was at a dinner
to celebrate
the publication of his
second
novel, but by the time
we were introduced I'd already
had
more than my share
of bourbon, which gave me the courage
to say
that I hoped he would one day
put his fiction aside (good as it
was, I lied)
and return to the theatre.
Gadge gave a sad
smile
and took both my hands in his, rubbing the fingers
like a
printer savoring vellum.
"Since talent is so often
the scar tissue
over a wound," he said,
"a mouth like you got and fingers like
those,
you could really be a contendah,
no shit, kiddo, you ever get
a shot at a role
where they want you to sing, take it from me,
don't
worry about a thing
just go down on your knees and blow."
© James Lineberger 2003
the last dance
there will come a day
when nothing you see about you
will ring
poetic
when not even memory will be there to assist you
when no
matter how you beg
you will have lost
your way and the spirits you
cry out to
will not recognize
you or your so-called mission or your
password
and the last dance will be alone
tapping your naked
foot
in a wheelchair
with a blue-jacket aide looking on
© James Lineberger 2003
Color Negative
Oh Jorie Graham how
I used to want you those photographs
of you
back
in the seventies my God how lovely
you were but I know
now
it would
never do for here's this piece today about
your dog
catching
a bullet and you dance
around the body like an
Arapaho
calling out
to spirits from the past to
the smoke curling
over the crematorium to angels who
lie to the scent
of lilacs
to
childhood
to the ravens
cawing overhead and if I were
with
you if you'd
brought those pages to show me brought
them to the
chair
by the picture window
and knelt to watch me read them
watch
my lips moving after
the funeral after I spent
an hour on
my knees digging at the clay with the broken
shovel like a
trenching
tool raising it
and stabbing the earth stabbing
until
I'd gotten
three inches down and you
way up there
holding back
peering out from behind
the closed curtains
upstairs
and the
body
rigid in my hands like a piece
of driftwood
cradling it
carefully lest you
think I have no feelings
my back to you
lest
you see my face see
the body changing
already
to cardboard to a
charcoal sketch
mouth frozen open
the hairs standing out like quills
when I break
one of the legs
to make it fit the hole oh
Jorie
Jorie Graham we'll
never make it
how could we how Lord help
me
can I weep for your
dead dog
and the dead Jews you link him
to
the children the dying
children
you read about in your books all those
books
you
gather round you
like the quilted patterns on the bed
the scratchy
photographs
of the dead piled on top
of one another tumbling
into
the ditch
cardboard arms and legs sticking out
this way and
that
until the bulldozer shoves them
under and the dog in with them
your wounded
dog clawing
its way up over the shifting bodies
trying
to get home registration and name tags jingling
like a
bellwether how
can we do this Jorie how can we keep
it up are
you
saying you didn't
pull the trigger
you're not Mengele not me
Jesus
what about
if you had to back over two kittens at the
same
time one under
each of the rear wheels of the van
the left
one
dead at once the other
one flopping around for a
whole
minute
a year
chasing it like you would a chicken
Jorie
when you wring
its head off saying you never
did that it's
crazy no
sound
just these astonishing Buster
Keaton
acrobatics
and you're
trying
to hold it
hold back your
screams
cursing the
way
you used to pray crying out
be still
you little fuck hold
still I'll
kill you
scrambling about on your hands
and knees
grabbing for a bloodslick leg
just trying
to hug the tiny bones up
close
to you thinking my God
no that's not
me I never wore that
shirt
in my life but look at the markers
Jorie there they
are so
many generations scattered over the yard
there's no good soil left to
put them
in only
the hardpan and the roots
of the elms
three
dogs six cats and a couple
of wretched
starving raccoons who lost a food
fight with the dogs
rocks piled
on the graves till I ran
out of rocks their
names (those who had names) etched on top
with
a blunted magic marker
and Christ do
you think I never think about
history about
the teenage witchy
girls from
Salem about Nam about
the ovens
the Poles the Catholics the saints
on the wheel
the blacks
the
long trains to Treblinka and the Norfolk
and Southern
freighter that
hurled
my son's body eight-tenths of a mile
down the tracks
before
it could get itself stopped are you
telling me it's the same
are
you it's all
the same gerbils and missing children and things
that go
bump on the windshield
feathers and bones
and party
favors
scattered by the roadside
like sherds
of rice like the
left-overs from somebody's
picnic come on Jorie
don't squint say
cheese tell us
how it was how it really
felt when you bent to kiss
your doggie in the coffin
the hairspray deodorant on his
fur the
polished
fangs painted
nails the anxious attendant
at your side
adjusting and adjusting
the veil
fearful you might disturb the
ochre-
rouged flap
covering the hole where
what's-his-name's
brains
used to be no don't
tell me don't say anything at all Jorie
Jorie please just shut your
fucking mouth
and the next one that gets shot next week or the next
do the digging
yourself don't hide him in a sack
either just toss
him in naked and shovel the dirt
in his face and when
you
hear
the dogtags clinking from room to room don't come crying to me
take
your arms from around
me stop it Jorie there's no such thing
as
Auschwitz
you made it
all up the greenest pasture you
could
find to lie down in better than Dallas better
than Forest
Lawn
surrounded by the ghosts of little girls marching through the
snow
in their torn
shoes dying babies
wrapped in scraps of paper
and old men shuffling
to get tattooed
gutted
buried alive doing
it for you Jorie for
you inching forward
on your belly
to snuffle
the faded photos
digging
digging
like a dog till you've
broken
through to
the yellow powdered
bones
of all the grief
you can get your hands on crying choose
me me do me
take my picture
cheese
| 
