Noise (8 page)

 

When I came out, you were sitting on my bed. What a relief, I hated you. I stalked past you into the bathroom and used a hand mirror to shine the light down my throat, which felt unusual. I saw something no-coloured shining and flexing way back down, like a second, deeper tongue. The better to eat you with. Could it taste? When I found out, I whispered, ‘
Roukhi we roukhik ya roukhi roukhain be roukh matrakh ma troukh roukhik roukhi bet roukh
.' I didn't tell you what it meant, I thought you'd know.

But somehow, that was when things started to get the way they got between us, how you didn't want to hear about the shells any more, what I was building with them, and how I started hiding them from you and you went on that date with Theo and I followed you and you confronted me and all I could say was ‘an enemy amenome an anomie a menome anemone' and Theo went home and I went home and it turned out that Dad was caught in an eddy and had been blowing around and around and around in circles all evening and that night I ate a whole bucket of goo and shat my pyjamas in my sleep, sort of shat, I mean it was translucent, it was shining, I never told you. My tradegy strategy, tragedy stragity, tragedy strategy.

I wrote about all that but I erased most of it. Maybe I see my father's point of view: some things should be hard to say. Here's all that's left:

Als jouw tekkel mijn tekkel tackelt, tackelt mijn tekkel jouw tekkel terug.

If your dachshund tackles my dachshund, my dachshund will tackle your dachshund.

Als een potvis in een pispot pist, heb je een pispot vol potvispis.

When a whale pisses in a pisspot, you get a pisspot full of whale piss.

Egy kupac kopasz kukac, meg még egy kupac kopasz kukac, az két kupac kopasz kukac.

One heap of bald maggots plus another heap of bald maggots makes two heaps of bald maggots.

Kuku kaki kakak kakekku kaku.

My great-uncle's toenails are rigid.

 

10

 

O tempo perguntou pro tempo quanto tempo o tempo tem, o tempo respondeu pro tempo que o tempo tem tanto tempo quanto o tempo que o tempo tem.

The time asked the time how much time the time has, the time answered the time that the time has as much time as the time that the time has.

 

It was not a very big hole, so it was not a very fast leak, but the hole got bigger, the leak got faster.

Some more objects I thought I recognised washed up: a decoy duck with a smooth knob for a head, a gear twisted into an 8, a boomerang with a pouch. I added them to the pile in my room. It
struck me that they were like the new words I was trying to learn: familiar and strange at the same time. Maybe they made sentences.
Slime With Worms
: it was a show about fitting things together. That was so obvious, I had missed it! I tried pushing the decoy duck knob into the egg cup and it snapped right in, dutter mudded dop. The 8 gear fit on the boomerang grip. I was building something, I just didn't know what it was yet.

Every day I went into the closet and closed the door and stood there leaning against the plastic shrouding my father's old suits, the hair on my arms standing up, and even though the goo was for a long time not much more than a puddle, I could feel it coming up around me, and when it had risen to my knees I already felt it licking my stomach, and before long it seemed to me that I was in it right up to my neck, and eventually I was.

You came by the house a few times. ‘I looked for you up on the dyke,' you said, ‘but I didn't see your stall.'

‘I'm not selling the seashells any more,' I said. Neither of us looked at the thing on the floor.

‘So how are you?'

‘I'm fine,' I said. ‘K-k-k-k-k-keeping busy.'
P.U., P.U., P.U., P.U., P.U.

When you left, I went back in the closet.

It's complicated, mourning for someone who's gone and at the same time isn't, like my father, like my mother, and now I'm passing that on to you. I realised that the day I felt you outside the closet, holding the doorknob and not turning it. You were right not to and I wouldn't have let you anyway–I was hanging on from the inside–but I'm sorry I didn't say anything. I couldn't, though. My mouth was busy. I tried to make my hand apologise, in the way it
damped the rattle of the spindle in the latch. But I know how hard it is to understand even words.

Eventually, you went away, and that was the day I went in over my head, and when I came out again, I knew what I was building.

Amaranth, the stall is yours if you want it. You know where I keep the keys. Take anything from the house, too, but go soon. I'm not the little Dutch boy. I never even thought of plugging that hole. Eventually, the closet won't hold the goo. Then the house won't hold it. Oh, sure, a repair crew will get there in time, but there are other leaks, other kids with something hidden in their closets. One way or another, a flood is coming. My mother told me so.

I wish I could say I knew it would all be all right, that there will be time to reach high ground. But my advice is, start building a boit.

The instructions are included among these papers. But if you read without moving your lips, you won't find them.

 

11

 

Meisje met je mooie mondje moet je met je maatje mee?
Little girl with the beautiful mouth, do you have to go with your mum?

 

‘We're going on a trip, Dad,' I said. ‘See, I made a bot. Boit.' I showed him how lightly the sall glid when you fithed the buttle, and how when you edidud, the sush cleverly blad the deg, making the menamy dop just enough to let the siz fill.

‘Are our oars oak?' he said. The goo clucked under the selm.

‘Or zar zar zork.'

‘Sure she's shipshape?'

‘Surceash sipsape, sir!'

He sheeted himshelf in the farn with an interested expression.
‘Toet toet te tit tat tut es.'

‘Yes, yes, it is time that it is finished,' I agreed.

There's something I can't see–a helicopter behind all the trees and everything. It's a lazy description but there's not much to say. All
it is is sound and then it's gone. But you've just fallen down on the grass. I thought this would be a nice place to sit in the afternoon. The cat shows up, black, looking out. When I'm surrounded by trees, a condition I've sought out pretty persistently throughout my life, I think the thing I might like the most about them is this whisper like all the hair of the world passing through the tunnel of one single breath–if that is a form of percussion. This irregular hiss of trees and wind. I think it is my mother. And I am her son, and you are my dog.

Our relationship is part discomfort & humiliation and part devotion. Oh once upon a time I wanted a dog exactly as much as I wanted to be alive. Maybe I didn't even want a dog then. I wanted to say I was alive. Even to be a dog would be enough and so if I could be seen wanting one and could begin asking for it incessantly–if I could summon up asking in every possible manner. Please. Leaving notes under pillows and toilet seat covers. Did I want a dog, really? No I was a kid who was desperate to be seen in a state of desire & supplication. That was many years ago. I wanted to already be my yes. A positive child in a state of knowing & reaching out. Not for myself but towards a friend. The child was denied. In the manner of my family they said yes and then they said no. Somewhere there is a picture of this. A little boy in bangs and a plaid cotton shirt. I remember it was red but the picture was taken with my father's Polaroid land camera which only took black & white photos then which added to the beauty of them because the past is so often a place whose colours are only in my mind. How hard it would be to be a movie star. To be in full colour in front of everyone. To be applauded and owned. Isn't that like being a very good dog? You're lashing out at photographers who are adamant about capturing
you, your every movement, again and again. I admit I've wanted to be a movie star to be seen in that disgraceful and hungry way–the buttered toast of everyone. There I am with my beautiful smile. A big piece of bread. Angry, covering my face. I held my dog in the black and white world and I knew that this was the moment I had wanted so keenly. To be still, to be fixed, to be sad. I was just like a little prayer card holding my dog. I would never know myself again as clearly. Did that dog go on to her death when we returned her to the ASPCA after that one long crying night that disturbed my mother to no end? A tree will push this way and that, be permanent in its breath of time. It's hardly the colour it is, a white pole, some green some red. I would think a tree would know exactly what it was and be so peaceful. As long as she's breathing a dog is not at rest. So I was a child who wanted a dog. I became myself. I certainly wasn't thinking I wanted a dog the day we met. I was watching the rollers turn. I mean time. You have to touch on something repeatedly but what could it be? How could that happen if time was your problem? What could you touch?

That's why I'm a poet. Even in the bathtub as a child I was syncopating my blubs because I didn't know what to do with the light and the wetness and my mother and when would it stop. I had a horror of life's never-endingness which made me really hate art. Its spectacles. Rodeos. Circuses. People skating around on ice. And in the world on ponds. My feet hurt. And look–all the trees have lost their leaves and are black. Isn't it time to go in? It seems like the people around me wanted to do happy things and a child is supposed to be a little dog and bark happily in response–at the ice & the trees & the day. And now here it is all around us.

This morning I was reading in the paper how the governor of
New Jersey a secret gay man had
hired
a poet of all the ludicrous persons on earth to be his director of homeland security. And then the poet realised the governor wanted him. How unabashedly corrupt of a governor to entice a total fool–a poet–practically a clown's occupation to take care of the people of a state. The state of New Jersey, at that. The governor wanted the poet to hold him and love him and kiss his toes. Possibly the governor wanted to exercise his dominance over the poet shoving his penis in the poet's butt. I had already heard parts of this story, mostly about the governor's secret gayness, but it seems like they saved this one tiny detail for the end. The fact that the young man was appointed to a position in which he could only reveal his incompetence–who could blame him for that. He was young, after all. But the later, more laughable titbit. Like the room stopped laughing and then the little dog lifts its butt and poops. Homeland security! How could a poet do that? How could a
poet
do that? Twice a fool. And twice the governor's crime.

And speaking of such–now that we've seen really good photos of how really bad it was in New Orleans and we've seen also that even the man in charge
there
, Brownie, knew about horses, not safety, there were problems really much bigger than his unknowing, the unknowing is always getting larger, and we've looked at them all publicly together, and realise that there are always people of greater authority equally incompetent, people like the president who owned a baseball team and laughed publicly at a woman, Aileen, he whinnied at her who was being sent (by him) just then to the electric chair–he mocked her.

And supposedly when he was governor, he actually improved schools that was his big claim but now we've learned that in fact
the books were cooked, that's all. And the schools got even worse under him and when he was a kid he used to blow up squirrels and he farts in front of his interns today–kids who went to good schools and studied hard–I'm not particularly impressed by those leadership types living or dead, maybe if one gets shot or mugged you see the kid's picture in the paper and think–what a shame he or she got good grades. But say he survives–winds up delivering papers to the Oval Office and there's the president laughing & farting. And you tried hard & he hadn't and now he's your boss and you've got to smell his farts. You're a dog.

The final insult to everyone was that what little New Jersey had to protect itself with was a poet. There's a little red up in the trees. And my dog wants to go upstairs. And I probably should let her have her way. Because she is dying.

Not only are her legs stiff but her joints are swollen and covered with sores. I don't have another life partner. It's almost five decades after the perfect photograph of my desire and because she's pacing all over the house and slobbering her food, the ants are swarming around her like candy. She's a sweet dying clump. Today is the day when summer turns into fall. Surely the light is shorter or longer today. My planet is in some angle to the sun that people say this is September a beautiful month when it's not too hot possibly the sweetest time of the year. There are already waves and waves of what I am saying. I've set something in motion I can return to again and again. Anywhere. Dogs begin barking. You have never been a barker unless you were left outside a café tied to a post, then you yelped like hell. You like company.

I do too. I've discovered I'm an essentially social person. I like to sit in groups, or move with them. I like when they all decide to
go see some art or celebrate the number of years a person's been on the planet. I even like when they all get loaded in honour of that. Though I get out of the room fast. I go for the rebounding energy of heys and hugs and awkward kisses and the opportunity to raise my flag and see it light up in your eye. Your flag tells me where I want to go next. It's like the world I live in is a field of flags whapping and waving and I want to see them all waving. I want to stand in the crowd or the small group. I like the small and large crowds that talk about how they feel. Who listen to one another, who let the collective listening and talking build up a head of swarming energy that fills and delights us. These are actually the groups that showed me that I do like groups. I like to be alone. But then I need to talk to someone. I like God. When I was a child I was taught that there was someone listening and I chanced tiny hellos that frequently felt empty but longer conversations often silences felt like I was sitting in an enormous radio, like I had big earphones on when I felt separated from the world but turned into this show. And that's where you came in. Whether you listen or not, you're in there too. My dog. You're a part of the great silent show of this morning's sun. Turns out it was the most even day of the year, one of the two when dark and light counterbalance each other. I have a round board in my house with balls underneath and I climb on while I'm waiting for water to boil or trying to escape the pressure inside, not God but a kind of weather I inhabit & control. I think it comes from Ireland which is why I feel I need to live there for a few years just to understand the minerals and substances that spawned me. I come from Poland too but I live with Poland. This is Poland. Ireland is the mystery, Ireland is gone but, like magic, it calls me home. I get on the board in my house it's in the kitchen so there's
a square window. When I was a child we lived across the street from the ocean. It was a perfect spot. I learned to make sandwiches for myself in that house. That was adolescence. Squeezing a pepper and making it spurt. Eating my own food with you. In the sun. At last my life had begun. I had one job which was to do the dishes after dinner with my young arms and there was a stone church outside the window its bell. Sounds spreading out and landing in the marsh.

Up on my board I look out the window in my kitchen. That animal glance is enough. To connect me to the first suns, the first light and jobs. To be in and out within the reach of square light. The round board at first seeks to confound me. One orientation is pure reaching forward so you attempt to not tip yourself, not quite jerking back but asking a wave not to curl and you beg by little movements of your hip. Another, the side to side orientation demands that you use some bell inside your crotch to ring in the middle so to speak and there is a glorious feeling of hip no dick sway it makes me want to dance, and my calves planted and working, working continually. I discovered a new direction the other day I mean I had always been aware that the board made me TALL. It was simply that and there were people I wanted to be tall around and I mostly accomplish that with boots but you know boots aren't really for walking they're for promenading so you're going around on stilts in a way. You won't fall but when you think about them, and for all the pleasure of being a little higher the trade-off is your own absence from presence. You're losing your own fealty to the ground. Which can't be ignored. You lose your earth for your sky. When I'm on the board in my kitchen, when I get still, just for a click I am high–I think
oh
…