|
What I know is a slur of memory,
fantasy, research, pure invention,
crime dramas, news, and witnesses
like the girl who liked to get high
and the one who was eventually
returned to her family unharmed.
The rest I made up.
The fathers drank beer in the grandstand,
flattening cans and dropping
the dull coins into the underworld.
It was daylight – we went right under,
down into the slatted dark,
the smell under the bleachers
where lots of men peed,
paper cones and dead balloons,
people jostling and whispering.
Down there were the entrances
to the dark rides, the funhouses:
Death Valley and Laff-in-the-Dark.
Of course that’s not true;
they were right on the main boardwalk
under strings of bulbs lit up all night.
Mom says, To remember something,
go back to the place where you forgot it.
But the place was torn down
forty years ago; there are motels
there now, where the Ferris wheel
lurched up and over the trees,
over the fathers at their picnic table
close enough to feel the Tilt-a-Whirl’s
crude rhythms through the ground.
They make the cars go faster or slower, depending.
After hours the boys loosen up the machines
and take girls for rides.
Hey kid! I flipped a coin in my head
and it came up tails. Want to take a walk?
He looked older than our parents.
How old did our parents look?
He was fifty, or thirty. I remember
the smell of whatever he put on his hair,
and the blue nail on his thumb.
He could flip a lit cigarette around
with his lips so the fire was inside.
I rode a little metal car
into Laff-in-the-Dark to dance
with the skeleton (possibly real
since some teeth had fillings)
that flung itself at me from the dark.
A dog watched me from a pickup window.
The World’s Biggest Pig lay
beached on its side, heaving.
The tattooed lady had a tattooed baby.
No one ever tattooed a newborn child
for real, did they? The ‘Chinese Dragon’
was only an iguana.
In the Maze of Mirrors
I was fatso and skeleton,
skirt blown up by a fan. Not true.
A fan blew a girl’s skirt up.
It wasn’t me. I was a tomboy. I wore pants.
At the stable girls in love with horses
visited and groomed and fed them daily.
For girls it was about trust,
being part of a couple,
the horse and the girl,
but for the man in the barn
it was about making girls feel
groomed and visited.
Come on over here. Didn’t a guy ever
brush your hair with a currycomb?
I don’t believe it! Not once?
Little honeycomb like you?
And kittens, always good bait.
A little dish of spoiled milk.
Do you think they don’t pass them around?
They pass them around.
Marked kids get shared,
little pink kid tongues lick lick licking
like a puppy! Good dog!
And on the carousel a man appeared
from nowhere to help her on,
hand palm up on the saddle just as she sat,
squirming there until the horse pulled her away.
Little cowgirl, giddyup!
Thus she became half human half animal,
and remained so her entire life,
now a shepherdess, now a sleek young
she-goat, so lithe and small-hipped,
half tame, little goatskin haunches –
hand-fed on SnoCones and cotton candy –
the girl who was eventually
returned to her family unharmed.
Tell me, little shepherdess,
how this bodes for first love,
the centaur pissing outside your tent
in the afterlife, having come down
over the stony pastures to claim you
and feed you trout and fiddleheads
and take you to bed on the high ledges
where the wind holds you down for him.
But he won’t be the first.
Sweet-sharp bouquet of darkroom,
holster with toy six-gun,
hot umbrella lamps nudged into place
by his fat pink fingers.
A little maraschino light presides over
negatives strung up like game to dry.
The tomboy’s showing her rump,
hard little buttocks under the tender wrapping,
the skin. Little wonton.
|