H.M.

What’s the big ideation?  Telescope.  Teeth.  Giant scissors.

Two second grade classmates dropped Adolph out the window.

Our ancient rising sun spews forth the god of silence.

Yellow and maroon flannel shirt with sheriff’s badge

that spins.  Two mechanical monkeys.  But he jumped right up

off the schoolyard grass, finding himself standing outside

science.  Insomniac, he woke little Minnie up, to play

jacks on her bedroom floor.  Its terracotta finger on

its lips.  Hatchet and table for cutting cards.  Walks in and does

something funny.  Facing a tree in bloom, facing him

as the tree it was.  This deity hushes as it

considers suffering humanity.  The Algonquin

Round Table, where he spoke.  Rubber carrot.  Signs for sewing

on singers’ rear end..  Why he became Arthur.  Why he became

the Stage Irishman.  Harp string case with tuning keys.  Lots of

fake money.  Babe in the Egg of Blue.  Not an idea,

not a word buzzing around in the head.  Or did the tree

anticipate him and come before him?  Did the tree come first

to stand so that he might come forward face-to-face with it?




M.D.  

Did tiny Daisy race to hug Joel Chandler Harris’s knees?

Did Cratylus disappear into his own dialogue?  Did

Wittgenstein love his language-mistress?  No trace of Brooklyn,

hardly any of Atlanta.  The echo of a thought

in sight.  Scarily upright, sequined.  Who would dare throw her

into the briar patch?  Julie, why are they laughing?

Not the gown, but the amount of clothing under the gown.

Odd that the terrifying leap should land us on

the ground where we already stand.  She could have made drinking

poo tea look coldly elegant.  We frequently change the names,

and the newly-imposed name is as good as the old.  And then

Uncle Remus came knocking, to draw her back into darkness.




C.C.  

In those credits, Charlie’s ‘A Factory Worker,’ and food

is everything,  Pray observe how I gallop away when

I get on smooth ground.  Paulette Goddard, look up! He, himself,

celluloid spooling through the machine.  The tongue is most

agitated and least at rest in the pronunciation

of the letter R.  The blessed bossy comes right up through

the garden, bearing its milk to their back door.  ‘Guten Tag,’

his first words into a mic.  The letter P is used in words

introduced by the giver of names to imitate what is

windy.  Blindfolded, he skates to the abyss and back,

except for all those extra curlicues.  In the liquid

movement of the letter L, the expression of smoothness.

He feared that by talking he’d become just one more

comedian.  For the name giver was a great enemy

of stagnation, to that which hindered the flux.  Episteme,

meaning just the motion of the soul accompanying

the world  —  which, once he’s  bumped it off his heine,

he holds, whole, in his hands, until it explodes right

in his puss.  ‘Let’s go,’ he says.  And they get up and go.




M.M.  

In the background, telephone pole, gritty building, a tall man

with towel and sombrero.  Things which have nothing

in common cannot be understood, the one by means of

the other (wrote Baruch, publically banned grinder of lenses).

‘All I see is one big varicose vein.’  Daughter and

mother, in the foreground, sitting on sand; three years old,

Norma Jeane scrunches her eyes and points ahead, outside

the frame.  Whereas the only truth substances can have,

external to the intellect, must consist in their

existence, because they are conceived through themselves.  Gladys,

in profile, stares down at her daughter as if trying

to comprehend her, so that what and all they share is that scowl

of curiosity.  ‘Especially when one is tired, hurt, and bewildered.’

The more reality or being a thing has,

the greater the number of its attributes.  

‘But you can’t curl up with it on a cold night.’




C.J.P.  

Charles Parrott; Jimmy Jump:  cursed ordinariness of

his face.  Not the truth of geometry, but the

geometrical process.  And as Chase  —  ‘We Mooses never

give up.’  Meaning, he has to pummel his new cad self

for picking up, after her nose job, his own wife…The reason

for the non–existence of a square circle is

indicated in its nature.  ‘I only know the polka ;

I haven’t danced since 1888.’…who has picked up

her own husband.  But then you know that the original

names have been long ago buried and disguised by peopleÉ

‘Beware!  The girl you are about to marry has a

wooden leg.’…sticking on and stripping off letters for the sake

of euphony and twisting and bedizening

them in all sorts of ways.  ‘Then I must break it off!’


© Joel Chace 2015