China Blues Read online

  It makes me think of Gerald Stern’s poem where he talks about swimming off the coast of Babylon, and stretching out his hand to someone who knows a lot about the desert. The desert is very beautiful, all that sand. We’re both serious basketball fans, so I’m not sure which one of us does/does know/does know a lot about the desert. But what did Zane Grey know about the desert? He was a fairly sensitive guy, and intelligent, and he made it up as he went along.

  PALE BLUE SHIRT, WHITE SLACKS

  We sit in a large open bay window

  in a summer living room on Indian Grove

  drinking chilled white wine

  in the middle of about 40 people we know vaguely.

  I watch John acting like a Hathaway ad

  for What kind of man would buy The New Yorker?

  Welcoming guests & introducing people,

  saying, Come and eat my chicken salad,

  drink of me,

  in his light blue shirt & pleated white slacks.

  “Look at John acting like Harry Christ,

  now that he’s got the assistant’s promotion,”

  I say to my friend Bill,

  “they don’t realize that he’s just a Xerox salesman.”

  You look at me & raise one blond eyebrow,

  “Yes, but it’s definitely a fucking colour Xerox.”

  And we both start laughing until our faces turn red.

  Life is easy.

  Tanned & athletic & young

  slapping our thighs our legs spread like cowboys,

  I have $3.45 in my pocket but the B&G tastes good,

  you have a new Jeep outside but it’s not paid for yet.

  We laugh until our ears burn.

  Our eyes almost burst with bizarre tears.

  “Jesus,” we say simultaneously,

  “he does look just like Christ, doesn’t he?”

  Until our hearts flutter like turnips.

  Neither of us is the new 4800 computer of sincerity,

  but these people are all like automatons.

  They all say – Really;

  the girl can’t help it;

  the opera isn’t over until the fat lady sings;

  never give a sucker a Perry Ellis suit;

  that’s too bad, darling;

  why don’t we just go home and take a shower?

  But they don’t do anything except model expressions

  & flaunt their 5 sentences about the weather.

  Maybe we’re buddhists & we don’t know it

  but our big hands show it.

  We just want to go to Tom’s, put on some pasta,

  smoke some dope,

  & watch Saturday Night Live.

  It’s an institution because Lorne Michaels

  is from Ontario.

  John comes over with a large

  bottle of red & fills our glasses, “What are you two

  clowns laughing about this time?”

  I shrug & he leaves for more wine. All I can

  think of to say is, “Nobody here has any real ideas,

  but John does look good in those white slacks,

  just like a straight guy pretending

  to be Perry Ellis.”

  CALL IT A DAY

  My friend Moira

  is tall & thin & with small breasts & a beautiful

  excitable face.

  We get up around 7:00

  & go to Andrew’s house on Indian Road for breakfast.

  This is Saturday morning before the ball game.

  & Phillip says,

  “O you must try these waffles, Queen

  Victoria would have gained 100 lbs on these

  but they’re wonderful.”

  So we have waffles

  with chocolate ice cream & champagne. It’s a

  celebration

  of something, & it’s a great combination.

  At the ball game Moira is all over me,

  she likes French kissing in the periods

  where there are no runners on base,

  Tony F isn’t stealing

  2nd with one hand in his pocket,

  & the batting is a bit

  slow. Moira is a computer engineer & knows her stations

  & her stops. She would be a big Jays fan but she’s

  from Seattle

  plus she can’t help cheering for Boston

  because that Roger Clemens is so ooo good-looking.

  Baseball is a way of relaxing. It’s great being down here

  with 46,572 fans & lots of sunshine.

  Slow 5th inning.

  Boston 3, Toronto 0.

  I love Boston so much I even like the word. Bah sten.

  Toronto breaks the rule for well-formed names,

  names

  should begin with a clear consonant,

  then a good vowel,

  then another clear consonant. Listowel

  is good. Penetanguishene is great. Los

  Angeles

  breaks the rule a bit but it survives. New York is

  good.

  Bath, where Chaucer rolled in the hay with merry

  women of the church, is a great word. Florida breaks

  the rule but it has that terrific D in the middle.

  Bell

  hits a nice pop-up fly about 415 feet. They don’t have

  waffles with chocolate ice cream at the Sky Dome

  but they do have a great restaurant called The Founder’s

  Club, it’s about $150.00 for 2,

  & they have truffled steaks

  & foie gras with brilliant

  green asparagus that makes your pee bright yellow.

  We leave in the middle of the 7th. Hot sun,

  not much action,

  & walk up to Queen Street. The

  Horseshoe Tavern has great BBQ wings. Moira drapes

  gracefully at the bar. Too much sun. Here in the cool dark

  of the old Triangle where so many greats

  have belted out the hits of our childhood,

  my wild

  Seattle girl seems

  almost shy,

  or tired, or tacit. I lean over & say,

  Dessert?

  “Yeah,” she says, swings one tight jean leg

  over the bar stool. We drink 1 beer each,

  sipping it slowly & noticing how much better it tastes

  here in the cool dark than the Labatt’s tastes

  at the Dome.

  Then I pay the bill & we drive up to

  Bloor Street for some fresh peaches

  & take-out chicken.

  CLARITIES

  Nothing could be much simpler than this blue and clear white

  nozzled bottle for misting plants

  ficus bengamina elephant umbrella or avocado

  sitting like a vase or a salad bowl at the centre of a plain

  table supported by orange-

  crates against the bright sunny red brick wall of our second-

  floor sun deck.

  I could go to the museum this afternoon or

  the new show at the art gallery

  but this simple industrial misting bottle holds my attention:

  the sunlight frames it

  illuminates it

  fills the clear blue & white half-full bottle with light,

  although it would somehow contain light even in a dark room

  sitting on the pine floor beside the bengamina

  or on a shelf in the bathroom beside some clean towels.

  Part of this may be phallic and another part may be the

  classic Bauhaus argument for functional form.

  Phallic is possible.

  I muse over this sitting sprawled in my khaki shorts on a

  square cloth chair in the bright sun on the deck

  looking from a distance like a clear object in space myself.

  My left arm photographs the waters of my heart.

  My right lobe is full of tobacco and peach trees.

  The d
eep blue & white nozzle of the bottle is attractive

  but the nozzle doesn’t spurt water

  it sprays, it mists

  and is inexhaustible;

  North America is full of phallic-shaped tins and bottles:

  wine bottles

  beer tins

  bottled beer

  most olive oil bottles and vinegar containers

  even a tin of fava beans could be called phallic.

  Dark blue is one of my favourite colours,

  Galt night skies and union jacks and stars & stripes.

  The bottle doesn’t rival Rembrandt’s The Old Warrior or

  Vermeer’s Head of a Young Girl, but it makes short work of

  bad painting and schlock television alike.

  Whatever it is sits honest as a piece of limestone

  or a loaf of fresh bread.

  Limestone and bread aren’t phallic. I muse on the da/dunh dunh

  dunh with which Beethoven begins moving to climax in his ninth

  symphony and on the tragedy of Mark Rothko’s butchered

  throat.

  Crane died young.

  The human body is composed of one functional

  shape after another. Stones down a hill. I am grateful for this

  mass-produced $1.79 bottle: it is both pleasant to look at

  and a perfect simple stimulus. It is clear the way I want to be

  clear myself, although some parts of my mind are like the dark

  water under a bridge.

  My shoulders are red. The sun on the brick

  wall and the orange-crate are also parts of this picture.

  MASSAGE

  She kneels over me and massages my neck

  the thick red curls of her sex brushing against my back.

  I don’t feel like telling you how beautiful her face is

  her thighs against my sides are as smooth as butter.

  I lie on my elbows on Carol’s bed with my head bent

  calm but tired of being erect all the time.

  Horses, an old girlfriend told me, can’t last more

  than 2 minutes; I told her I can do it for 2 hours

  but I get tired after a while.

  She massages my traps like a baker kneading dough

  or the way you might play with a greyhound puppy.

  There are myths all over America like sprawling farms

  separated by highways and rows of trucks.

  Plus I saw Phantom of the Opera last night at Pantages

  and after the play we went for pizza and a 260zer.

  I am boyish she says and as irresponsible as a dog.

  She strokes my bruised shoulder where I smashed

  into the glass door throwing the fat bouncer

  out of his own bar;

  and I walk onto the moon

  yellow Edam with white paper plane messages,

  rich friable black earth west of Stratford

  effulgent with corn, cattle and wild flowers

  burning like fire along the edge of fences.

  Our flesh is the light of this world

  and I am bathed and healed by that flesh.

  But I think now I will go back and plank my bahoola

  in the steel seat of the John Deere tractor,

  violets in my beard & a six-pack of cold Blue

  under the wheel with the bright yellow corn

  all around me

  & almost up to my head. Her hands move

  & darkness floats in dark water. For this moment

  the white pillows and her touch are endless.

  BORDERS

  Board is one of the oldest words. Pale natural brown with a hint of pale green or yellow before they are seasoned. Sweet, they have a sweet fresh smell stacked in piles of 100s. The Romans made boards with axes & saws, stone ground axe heads, not the axis on which the green & blue world rotates. Boards are clean, rough & evenly splintered around the edge, and precise. Draw a line with a piece of lead. Cut along the dotted line. From Julius to “Little Boots” they had very vague concepts of borders. Gaul looked a lot like England, there was a Bay of Naples but Sophia Loren wasn’t there.

  The Romans knew nothing about America, or Norway, for that matter. America wasn’t even on their maps.

  TANGERINES

  THEY WERE MAKING LOVE. BUT THEY HADN’T QUITE STARTED YET. She was being a little cool. Not cold or rigid, or playing rigid like the other one, the snoot, but just cool, almost absent-minded, as if her mind was temporarily at a distance. She was sitting on the edge of the bed with her long legs spread out in a V, like one of the back-up singers for Billy Joel, and he was kissing her shoulders. But he relaxed. She had great shoulders, feminine, sloping, but not too diminutive.

  “You would just as soon not make love right now?” he asked her, not with his mouth against her ear, she had great ears too, but standing. The little girl was swinging in his pants. He stretched his back, shaking his head, and ran one hand lazily across his chest. He didn’t want to get upset about nothing.

  “No, of course I do, stupid,” she said. With affection to him. “I’m just not clicking for a minute.”

  He told her he was sorry, that he shouldn’t have put it in the negative like that. Then he said, “Is it okay if I go to the kitchen for something? I just feel right now like something wet and sweet.”

  She had nothing on except blue jeans. She was sitting on the edge of his bed with all this gorgeous black hair in corn braids and these long soft sloping shoulders catching the afternoon light from his bedroom window. She said, “Sure that’s okay.”

  “Can I get you something?” The glossy hardwood floor in his bedroom looked as if it had been created, sometime way back in 1910 or so, what people referred to as 1st World War years, just for the purpose, or could you perhaps say the honour, of framing her long slender feet. She was barefoot, and she had dark hunter-green polish on her nails. The same colour as the Jag that he liked.

  He went out to the kitchen in his briefs. That’s all he had on, white, those ribbed cotton briefs that HOM make. The apartment was cluttered. He was living by himself for the moment. The kitchen was full of light, the geraniums out on the back deck looked like gobs of bright perfect China-red paint. He got a tangerine from the kitchen table. There was always a small row or sometimes a pile on the table, off to one side of the middle. Of tangerines, maybe one big fat lemon, 2 or 3 limes perhaps. So he picked up one of the tangerines, juicy and sweet, it was a big one. That gorgeous faintly-weathered, fine brown lines deep orange just a bit, a splash of pale green. He liked the shape of the tangerines, they were round and sort of elliptical at the same time. And they were juicy and sweet.

  When he went back to the bedroom she was sitting almost exactly as she had been when he left. Her hands were clasped and relaxed and resting between her knees. She was looking at the floor. She glanced up as he walked into the room and smiled at him, a lovely slow lazy smile. The bulge in his cotton briefs had diminished a bit, so he looked respectable. He had the tangerine in one hand, half-peeled, 2 or 3 sections sweet in his mouth.

  “Sure you don’t want some?” He proffered the half-eaten tangerine.

  “No. I want your tongue in my mouth. I’m just not quite ready yet.”

  She put her hand palm flat against his chest, it felt very warm and smooth to her, in such a way that her elbow was brushing slightly against the bulge in his cotton briefs, the kind that HOM make. The bulge increased. It felt good, he was in love with her, not always sure of exactly what she thought, but it didn’t seem to matter.

  “What do you believe?” she said. She took a small piece of the tangerine peel, playing with it with her thumb and 2 fingers.

  “About what? About women?” He thought maybe she was talking about love, or the destinies of 2 people, or something like that. It was natural for him to say that. He was always thinking about women. His friend Jack understood that about Tom. He said to their mutual friend Henry one night sitting around at Paupe
r’s, “Tom’s a terrific guy. I like Tom. But he’s just the way some guys are about alcohol or being busy all the time. He’s no good without a woman.”

  “No, silly,” she said. “We’re not the only thing that’s happening in our lives. I mean,” she said, drawing herself up, pulling one foot up on the bed and resting her head against her knee, “what do you believe about things in general?” She studied him. She said, “You know, you read a lot more than I do. I know a lot about music. I read magazines because I’m interested in clothes. I don’t read books very much. But I have beliefs,” she said.

  “Yeah.” He rested one arm against her shoulder. He could feel the soft heat, subtler than the quick yellow Toronto summer heat outside, pulsing against his arm. “Like right and wrong. Basic stuff.”

  “Umhuh,” she said slowly, “okay, sort of.” She ran her hand up and down his thigh. Her hand was the colour of pale chocolate. It stood out against his hand the way an image you might see on a computer colour-modelling screen might stand out against some other slightly more industrial colour.

  “You have terrific legs,” she said, “strong.”

  “Not half as great as yours. Nobody would pay very much attention to me if we were at the beach,” he laughed, he thought it was vaguely funny. “I have to put things between myself and the world, like books.”

  “O yeah,” she said, drawing it out with her mouth, she was in love with him, no two ways about that, he was so bright and so dumb at the same time, how could you help loving him, she had said to her friend Susan at a place called Woodlands, a restaurant which is just down the street from Pauper’s, but on the north side. “You just pick it up and do it. I guess that’s how simple it is with us,” she had said. She lay back on the bed very long and perfect and amused and wrapped her legs around him at the ankles, with her hands under her head, and studied him.