They Typewriter
(for Philip Levine)
Out of bearing blossoms, out of wearing badges,
out of loaded shelves, out of empty trashcans,
out of the coins of boredom, the metals of deafness,
out of dictionary, thesaurus, primer, computer,
they typewriter ring.
Out of writing workshop,
out of workshop writing, out of Ph.D., out of wine out of cheese,
from the confession comes the endless digression,
from dingbat comes nit wit, from ding
comes line break, ding ding stanza break,
they typewriter ring.
From the bloat of the resume,
from the unread books come they jobs,
come they judges sitting on hands,
from the capital P to the o, to e, to the t-shirt
come they words from the printed keys,
come they jobs come bad dreams,
they typewriter ring.
From my millions of fingers and each of my hands,
from my windshield wipers swishing under the stars,
from all of this anger forgotten, I feed,
from my parents inherit, and type, and read
from the whorled mind that hits the keys,
my wastebasket filled, my books empty,
I touch my typewriter and it rings.
The slow pan and zoom from crucifix-belt-buckle
to torso, girl (short and proportioned),
then scan of face and back to folk sign of christ
first century palestinian jew who died of Rome’s oppression
the sign above her crotch like a bull’s eye of piety
then all the layers of abstraction piled up around it:
baggage claim, airport, Houston, July, America, and so on
world, line, poem, and so on.
The trip where you didn’t pack light, but dark,
the recent burial of ashes, the taste,
the way a preposition strives
to be a verb: to, on, from, above, below,
the whole flight a long vowel of grief,
an engine in the background,
a baby gargling like a machine gun in the foreground,
but here on land, in this now
the girl at the baggage claim, too,
is waiting for things to carry.
I find mine, heavy
with the business of choosing.
pain’s anodyne
it turns out:
to feel it
my pin number sleeps in the fetal position
across the street,
the willow-legged girl
speaks Portuguese
what happens: is
a bowl holds a wheatfield
Try not to force it
the wind is a river the pelican swims in
To refer to the unknown, unconscious contents of the mind, Freud chose the personal pronoun "it"...
-Bruno Bettleheim, Freud and Man's Soul
So what is this it that was and is
before language had words to teach us love,
even memory? The words don't remember that far back,
though still we can speak of this thing:
I remember my friend talking
of the girl he had that semester, when shyly,
almost imperceptibly, he offered her to me.
I was young enough to say no.
And he, to tell me what was difficult,
standing in that doorway
he or she or both had opened,
speaking of an animal that
once fed, learns better its hunger.
I remember an English professor I loved
in that time, in that person I was,
though he mostly professed in French
his critical facility to rhapsodize
structure and meaning, to construe or
deconstrue the simplest human act
in all its awesome and beautiful complexity.
Once I watched him waltz his wife
through their kitchen window. The man
who had taught me Donne that year,
his last before moving from academy to city,
teeming too with that simple human act
in all its complex variations
risen up around us like cathedrals
wherever the mind has permitted it.
When beauty sits in the next seat,
you (meaning I) do not notice her
the length of the short flight
wrapped in her chrysalis jacket, asleep.
Only when plane touches runway
and she coughs, sniffles, unfurls
do you see. Her phone rings
the instant she turns it on.
I have it with me, she smiles.
And it’s true: she always
has it with her, is exactly
an age, has someone who knows
exactly what he has.
And in the exacting world,
it is always a short flight to leave,
long to connect, locate
all the unseen and noticed gods.
I wait in the place where I wait
on the gravel road by a rise
in the dusk where time
becomes sky, and this time
there are birds,
white and utterly silent
as they pass between me
and the non-symbolic end of the light,
one, no two, three echelons
on black-tipped wings,
and it’s just me for the moment
with the kind of company we kept
on the mind’s flickering screen
those thousands of years before
my drive home to watch
another kind of screen,
no longer with sky, though
its analog inside me,
the thoughts that fly across it
here on the edge of something ending.
My parents were married sixty years. I’m fifty-four, single, though it’s only felt that way the last two years. With time to spare after the breakup, I visit, helping my mother in the aftermath of Dad’s illness and dying. I need to cool something in a bowl of water, and find a dish down in the bottom cupboard in the kitchen. It’s a clear Pyrex dish that’s been in their kitchen since I was a kid. When I pick it up, it feels like their marriage. When I write the poem, I realize it’s my lack of one.
sixty years of marriage
the pyrex dish so scratched
it’s translucent, moving to opaque
still works fine
they never did need to see through it
Brian Cochran lives and writes in University City, often simultaneously.
"Mexican Crucifix Belt" was previously published in The Squaw Valley Review 2009.
"They Typewriter" was previously published in Ironwood (Winter 1985).
