Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 5, Number 2. November 2022. ISSN: 2581-7094
Taxi Rank (Oil on Canvas, 1931)
"My pictures, like music, should speak for themselves"
-
Clarice
Beckett
 |
| Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Clarice_Beckett_-_Taxi_Rank,_1931.jpg |
A
train ride from the cliffs of Beaumaris,
far
from the arrays of vertebrate fossils
buried
in a gravelly bed, the seal bones
and
shark teeth, corals and crustaceans,
a
solitary woman pulls a homemade cart
of
paints in the rain. It’s hard to explain
atmosphere.
Overcoats and shoegazing
umbrellas
smudged in streaks of light,
hazy
with the ache of waiting for a taxi
in
the mist to return to care for an ailing
mother
and a bank manager father who
would
set ablaze most of his daughter’s
canvases,
painted en plein air, soon after
she
died of pneumonia. Distant intimacy
or
intimate distance glistens, almost still
wet,
blurry, a viola solo faintly rising
behind
a windowsill no more than a story
above
your head, beckoning but always
just
out of reach like the memory of a trip
you
have yet to take this life and never will.
Laundry Haiku
Between my fingers
wet cashmere in warm water:
I can’t wring you out.
The Shoebox
Mourning aurochs
& passenger
pigeons, we
nurse dreams to bring
them back
through de-extinction.
Could I bring us
back that way?
Splice this
orchid you once inked
pink on the back
of a Vietnamese
Dong bank note
worth two cents
twenty years ago
with this shard
of mesh torn
from the black garter
you used to
wear, which I imagine
still smells
faintly of you if I ration
the number of
times I unearth it
from this
shoebox hidden away
until I’ve
forgotten that it exists.
It’s a genetic
scrapheap floating
in another
dimension, the pieces
of the life we
could have lived
and the one
where we snuck up
to moonlit
rooftops wherever
we were so you
could photograph
the wooden water
towers from
a bygone gas
lamp era, then fall
into me on
precipices under over-
hangs above a
stream of traffic.
Perhaps there’s
some conjunction
of archaic units
of measurement,
a distance
briefer than the barley-
corn, more
sustained than the spat,
brighter than a
sun’s candlepower,
yet buried
deeper by fathoms
in memory than
anything on earth.
That’s how far I
am from you now.
Saturday Morning Reruns
"No
single imagination is wild or crass or cheesy enough to compete with the
collective mindlessness that propels our fascination forward."
―
Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange
"Hiyaaah!"
slobbers Hong Kong Phooey;
slurping
a similar sound, a new kid clobbers
me
on the neck from behind. “Chop suey!”
Cowboys
and Indians, cops and robbers,
Dick
Tracy and Joe Jitsu—and guess who
I
always was? Behind the castle drawbars,
peering
intently, so as not to misconstrue
what
to do, I wouldn’t play, unless asked,
then
deftly would transform—peekaboo!—
into
stereotypes from cartoon broadcasts:
Hadji
Singh with a jewel in my turban
or
over by Squishee machine, miscast
again
as Apu by some drunk on bourbon
slapping
my back. Thank you…come again?
I
grew up in Northern Virginia, suburban
as
a kid on Growing Pains. No campaign
against
Asian immigrants works as well
as
Oddjob in James Bond to create disdain,
or
Long Duk Dong to craft an absurd shell
of
masculinity into which we are shunted.
Outsourced, a call center sitcom? Go to hell.