What other days from my life have gone? After a week, I can’t remember five. After a year, how many days in it will you never think of again?
But Faust was walking ahead between the shadowed presses. “Here,” he said. “This is what you want to see, isn’t it?”
I stepped up to the work table. Battleship linoleum glittered with lead shavings.
“There.” He pointed at a full-page tray of type with a yellow index nail.
Raised grey-on-grey proclaimed:
“But…?”
“That’s you, ain’t it?” His cackle echoed among the ceiling pipes.
“But I haven’t given Calkins the second collection! He doesn’t even know there is one!”
“Maybe he’s just making a good guess.”
“But I don’t want him to—”
“They’re supposed to got obituaries too, prepared on all the famous people around here who might die.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“You keep askin’ me to show you where they printed the thing…”
I started away from the desk. “But I don’t see any rolls of paper around. The presses aren’t going. You mean a thirty-six-page newspaper comes out of here every day?”
But Faust was already walking away, still chuckling, his white hair—sides, beard, and back—covering the bright choker.
“Joaquim?” I called. “Joaquim, when do they actually print it? I mean this doesn’t look like anybody’s been in here since before the
going out along Broadway. The smoke was as bad as I’ve ever seen it—rolling from side-alleys, gauzing the streets in loose layers. Down one block, the face on an eight-(I counted)-story building was curtained with it, leaking out broken windows, to waterfall to the street, mounded and shifting.
One section of pavement had been replaced by metal plates (some incomplete repair) clanging when I crossed. After another half hour the buildings were taller and the street was wider and the sky grey and streaked like weathered canvas, like silvered velvet.
On the wide steps to a black and glass office building was a fountain. I went up to examine: Wet patches of color on the dusty mosaic at the bottom; rust around the pentangle of nozzles on the cement ball; I climbed over the lip to look in what I guessed had held plants: dried stem stumps poked from ashy earth; beer and soda-can tabs. I stepped once on a wet patch of green and yellow mosaic tiles with my bare foot; took my foot away and left a chalky print.
The bus came around the corner. It didn’t scare me this time. I vaulted the fountain edge and sprinted down the steps.
He feels the experience whose detritus is interleaved in the Orchids’ pages/petals has left him a perfect voice with which he can say nothing; he can imagine nothing duller. (For that sentence to make sense, it must be ugly as possible. And it isn’t—quite. So it fails.
The doors flap-clapped open even before it stopped.
“Hey,” I called. “How far up Broadway do you go?”
Do you know the expression on somebody’s face when you wake them out of a sound sleep with something serious, like a fire or a death? (Small, bald, oyster-eyed black man, obsessed and trundling his bus from here to there.) “How far you going?”
I told him: “Pretty far.”
While he considered how far that was, I got on. Then we both thought about the last time I was on his bus; I don’t know if the little movement of his head back into the khaki collar acknowledged that or not. But I’m sure that’s what we were thinking. I also thought: There are no other passengers.
He closed the doors.
I sat behind him, looking at the broad front window as we shook on up the street.
A sound made me look back.
All the advertising cards had been filled with posters, or sections from posters, of George. From over the window his face looked down there; here were his knees. The long one over the back door showed his left leg, horizontal, foot to mid-thigh. A third of them were crotch-shots.
The sound again; so I got up and handed myself down the aisle, bar after bar. The old man—pretending to sleep—was so slumped in the back seat I couldn’t see him till I passed the second door. One brown and ivory eye opened over his frayed collar slanting across the black wrinkle of an ear. He closed it again, turned away, and made that strangling moan—the sound, again, that till now I had suspected was something strained and complaining in the engine.
I sat, bare foot on the warm wheel case, boot on the bar below the seat in front. The smoke against the glass was fluid thick; runnels wormed the pane. Thinking (complicated thoughts): Life is smoke; the clear lines through it, encroached on and obliterated by it, are poems, crimes, orgasms—carried this analogy to every jounce and jump of the bus, ripple on the glass, even noticing that through the windows across the aisle I could see a few buildings.
The falsification of this journaclass="underline" First off, it doesn’t reflect my daily life. Most of what happens hour by hour here is quiet and dull. We sit most of the time, watch the dull sky slipping. Frankly, that is too stupid to write about. When something really involving, violent, or important happens, it occupies too much of my time, my physical energy, and my thought for me to be able to write about. I can think of four things that have happened in the nest I would like to have described when they occurred, but they so completed themselves in the happening that even to refer to them seems superfluous.
What is down, then, is a chronicle of incidents with a potential for wholeness they did not have when they occurred; a false picture, again, because they show neither the general spread of our life’s fabric, nor the most significant pattern points.
To show the one is too boring and the other too difficult. That is probably why (as I use up more and more paper trying to return the feeling I had when I thought I was writing poems) I am not a poet…anymore? The poems perhaps hint it to someone else, but for me they are dry as the last leaves dropping from the burned trees on Brisbain. They are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing.
They stuck at me for two weeks? For three?
I don’t really know if they occurred. That would take another such burst. All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.
The bus stopped. The driver twisted around; for a moment I thought he was speaking to the old man behind me: “I can’t take you no farther,” gripping the bar across the back of the driver’s seat, elbow awkward in the air. “I got you past the store.” He pauses significantly; I wish he hadn’t. “You’ll be all right.”
Behind me the old man sniffled and shifted.
I stood up and, under George’s eyes (and knees and hands and left foot and right tit), stepped on the treadle. The doors opened. I got out on the curb.
The pavement was shattered about a hydrant, which leaned from its pipes. I turned and watched the bus turn.
From the doorway at the end of the block a man stepped. Or a woman. Whoever it was, anyway, was naked. I think.
I walked in that direction. The figure went back in. What I passed was a florist’s smashed display window. At first I was surprised at all the greenery on the little shelves up the side. But they were plastic—ferns, leaves, shrubs. Three big pots in the center only had stumps. Back, in the shadow, by the aluminum frame on the glass door of the refrigerator, something big, fetid, and wet moved. I only saw it a second when I hurried by. But I got goose bumps.
The reason the bus driver hadn’t wanted to go on was that Broadway grew ornate scrolled railings on either side and soared over train tracks forty feet down a brick-walled canyon. A few yards out, a twelve foot hunk of paving had fallen off, as though a gap-tooth giant had bitten it away. The railing twisted off both sides of the gash. From the edge, looking down, I couldn’t see where any rubble had landed.