Leaking 'em out

Dear Folks,

Here are a few prose poems from my practicum project. I've included the first piece, a the final draft of a piece that Brooks posted on his blog, and a piece about Eldorado, where I spent many of my childhood years. I did twelve of these. Each tried to explore a specific scene or an association of scenes. I wouldn't mind expanding these in number and tone (to included more irony and more secnes about myself for instance). I notice I tend to observe and explore from the perspective of myself as a passive eye. It's just the way they came out, I swear I don't have any complexes!


I.

Mum sits, hunched over a light table. She wears goggles. The box’s top glows yellow. Mum moves slender tools in her hands. She is slicing glass. I hear sizzling and a submerged guttural hum. A sautering iron smokes. These are mum’s glass tools. Peering through a doorknob hole, I watch mum with concern. I shuffle to the left. My knees meet carpet. They burn. My little sister screams from the crib. Her rhythmic protest rocks the wooden cage. A glowing halo of reddish fuzz crowns her head. Her hands are white lumps around the bars. A cloth diaper clings to her loins. Her mouth is a black hole surrounded by red flush and her eyes are wrinkled around the clenched slits. The room is cold grey. The bridges of my feet ache. I peer again and hear sizzling and humming between sister’s screams. Sister wants out of the crib. I put my hands on the cool white surface of the door for balance. This is the memory speaking in my head. It is framed in inky, embryonic blackness. I see myself crouched in front of the white door, peering through the doorknob hole. Dad has not put the doorknob back in. Sister screams, mum cuts. Soon I realize I am allowed to watch myself. The detachment of self-consciousness blooms. I experience dualism. I watch the world; I watch myself. Other, self, consciousness. My first memory. A vocation of observance.

V.

When the thunder spoke it precluded a downpour. Run inside. Run inside now. Between cloud and mountain a black swath rushes toward us. The earth becomes dimpled, then dappled. The chickenpox of the monsoon covers the sickly terrestrial skin every afternoon for a few months. I was born in the summer, the time of desert monsoons. My birthday partakes in the rhythm and ebb of sloshing rain drops. You know in Pecos two men died in the lightning, on a softball field. Before the thunder speaks, the sky must be vast, so vast you could swear space shuttles passed discretely just beyond the places where the blue faded and your eyes gave out in the profusion above. The vampire has been at work sucking desert life. The air sizzles. The servant said, there is a cloud, as small as a man’s hand. We saw a hand over the desert, over the Jemez, over us every bone-revealing, flesh-sucking afternoon. The sky became black with clouds and wind, and there was a heavy rain. The hand becomes plural, became a congregation, soon becoming an apparition. The vampire slouches back to the cholla cacti. The dust quivers. A bilious warhead emerges, erect and strong from the cumulus apparition. It clarifies, defines, columnifies itself. They have said that it is an irony the first nuclear warhead was sparked in the deserts of New Mexico. A massive natural warhead with a sloped anvil top loomed over the desert floor every monsoon afternoon. The ovoid grey drops plash in the junipers, becoming muffled in the fine dust. We ran outside thrusting ours hands toward a cloud, aching for comparison. The earth is quenched. It settles down. The vampire creeps back out. I sleep. Next morning my feet tamp the earth. The desert dew swirls in minute clouds around my ankle. The sky slumbers.

IX.

Eldorado in three scenes. Coyotes spill like a fluid current, split like knifed foam, pass around in desert ripples, and spread out in a wake. Coyotes scramble over folds of buffalo grass and around the junipers, break off into kinetic couples, slink smoothly around the house, and lope out into open dirt fusing with the road. Oreo howls. We breathe gossamer clouds on the window pane. The coyotes stammer. It is some rabid and profane litany, cursing the dead adobe walls. Oreo barks. Oreo whines. This is the spirit of the place. Biking every summer night with my sisters. An amusement park of high desert hills and carpets of yellow, rattling buffalo grasses. Golden air swirling with dust, dust, dust. My loin flutters, my bike dips down, my bike dips around. The path snakes. I do not brake. Sister swears she will beat me tonight. A chilly pocket of air. I remember to breathe in deeply. Our heads trail each other, poking out in the gold dust air. This is the name of the place. The azure sky swallows us from the Sangre de Christos to the Jemez, those ancient and silent volcanoes. Next to a dirt road my sisters and I peer at the depths of a mud puddle shaped like Manhattan. Grotesque amphibious heads peer back at us. Frilly tails flash in and out of the coffee water. We stare harder with more solemnity. I clutch a pea-green aquarium net. Sister pinches a mason jar by its neck. The tadpoles elude our net. A breeze rattles the chamisas crowding around the road edge. I dip the net, I am the quick one. It reemerges, quivering. A bit of flesh gyrates within the mesh. We cannot breathe. Eldorado, this is the life of the place.