Eggman, Voter, Librarian
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Subject: Eggman, Voter, Librarian
Date: Wed, 06 Oct 1999 17:51:34 CD
Aloha to all of you....
Poetry begins now to overwhelm me, from the first sliver of light prizing my gummy eyes open throughout the hours of the day. The connective tissue between that which is holy and that which is me. And is there always a difference?
I am forever scribbling, it seems.
Yesterday, a flock of birds wheeling overhead like bright white leaves caught up in a whirlwind. I could see the dark bone of wing and the translucent feathers where the light shone through as they soared in tightly turning arcs.
What birds? I asked of no one. Gulls? Didn't know Lawrence had gulls.
Yes, the lady by the wall said. Gulls. Like so many in Lawrence, they're just passing through.
I got up, went into the alley where there was a gap in the buildings to watch them circle away. Three blackbirds flew through that maelstrom without colliding. Thus do miracles so often unseen fill the day. Within minutes the sky was once again blue, empty, and the only whirling going on was within my head.
Today, Watkins Museum. I'd been planning to stop in for ages, and this morning felt like the right time to do it. Locked the bike and trudged up the stone steps, to be greeting by a fat man in a chair, wheezing a greeting. From the neck down he appeared to be an egg swathed in clothing, belted at the middle. How I admired the sphere of his being. Tweedledee or Tweedledum?
Singsonging, he sang, This building cost $100,000 when it was built in _______ (I forget the date). If constructed today, it would cost twenty million.
Suddenly I envisioned a cap with spinning propeller atop his head.
If you wish to visit the upstairs, please leave your bag here with me.
I didn't wish to visit the upstairs just yet, so I sat there on the steps and looked at a book whose cover proclaimed it was for viewing purposes only, not for sale. Old photographs, engravings, drawings, paintings of Lawrence.
If you were to come visit me, I would have you close your eyes, then take you down the steps into the basement where there are other exhibits, some tactile enough to be an exercise in touch. I would have you touch these things and enjoy the questioning of your mind as it tried to make sense of them. Smile.
So. I got a bit of a sense of Quantrill's Raid, just a touch, a taste. I want to *know* it this time passing through Lawrence, not just that cursory stopping by the polished granite marker which tersely states, "Here near a score of unarmed recruits were shot/August 21, 1863." 17, to be exact, white recruits. And an unknown number of blacks.
Perhaps we've all heard of that raid, at one time or another. And there is nothing real about it now, no sense of what it must have been like, that horrific day when Lawrence was once again burned to the ground.
Eggman sings, "The greatest single memorial Lawrence has to the Raid is downtown Lawrence. Those buildings were erected in the aftermath of Quantrill."
So, were you to come, I would hope to share with you, discover with you, a bit of the *feeling* or the poetry of that time. It is so far away, we are so disconnected from it, it seems so unreal. And yet it happened.
I read the entire list of names of those killed. Unnamed baby of so-and-so, reads one entry. A ride-by shooting, perhaps?
There was simply too much to absorb at one sitting, so I took just that brief walk-through, then left Eggman sitting there in his chair, looking somewhat out of time, as though he should be wearing suspenders and those old man shoes which were so "sensible," but which now seem nowhere to be found.
A dress shirt at Penn House, bearing the label L.L. Bean, pale yellow with a rough weave to the fabric I like, a pocket which buttons. Like new. I put it on and it cleaves to my torso just right, a caressing thing. And carpet slippers made of soft leather for those times when I get up during the night to sleepy-eyed moisten the daisies. I become rich now in "things."
At JavaBreak I sit outside on a white plastic settee near the wall of the building. A young man with earnest expression and clipboard approaches me.
No, I tell him, I am not a registered voter.
No, I tell him, I do not wish to become one.
I have lost faith in the process, but that is something I need not tell him.
A young blonde girl, perhaps 14 or 15, *does* wish to become registered, as soon as she can lock her bike and tie her dog. He waits patiently beside the wrought iron fence.
Across the street is the old post office, rising up massive and somehow perfect in its setting. It now houses an interior decorating firm, while down the street a couple of blocks or so, sits the new post office, all pastel-colored and mediocre, aging gracelessly, a blight going nowhere. An ugly duckling never to become a swan.
A college student walks by, left nostril ringed, braless, nipples erect. She greets a couple on the ruby-red painted benches and they talk. There is a tattoo of a woman on her upper right arm with some kind of ribbon or banner winding about it. Ring on her finger. Retro glasses, horn-rimmed. She looks like a librarian slumming or trying to pass, hair dyed some kind of maroon and sort of...hanging there. In my mind I age her quickly three decades, and she is suddenly mad about me. Now, I am an old geek sitting on a white plastic bench, looking like a professor, scribbling something. Unworthy of a second glance.
A young man walks by, then stops and looks at me. Earlier he had looked at me as though he expected me to say hello, as though we'd been introduced.
Now he says, Thanks for reading the other night. It was great. Appreciate it.
Suddenly shy, he is, looking away. Thank youuuuuuu, I say, pleased. The lingering looks now make sense and my day is made. The Slam, of course.
The Librarian walks by and I ask if she'd mind telling me about her tattoo. She seems pleased I've noticed it.
It's my own design, she says, and shoves her arm in my face. Neolithic, kinda, y'know? A woman with breasts much like her own, attached to a torso which flares into hips which narrow through the legs to a kind of dagger-like point. The ribbon, the banner turns out to be a snake, green, and I immediately see an error the tattooist has made. I do not mention that to her.
The snake is for, like, rebirth? she says. A question which is really a statement.
Or Kundalini, I say.
Yes, she says uncertainly.
I thank her and she walks away. I see that her nipples have flattened out. Was she cold earlier or did seeing the couple on the bench cause all that? A warmish day, this one. Ahhhhh.
Registered Voter holds her hand up high and the tethered dog stands on hind legs and eats the offering.
She loves ice, the Voter tells me.
Olive Oyl, the afternoon waitress, comes out for a smoke. Her emaciated boyfriend sags beside her, pale and glum. He looks like he lives within a cave and only comes out during the night. Olive Oyl. I love her eyes, all mascared and her lips a peachy kind of red. Dark black hair. She looks a bit like Umma what's-her-face.
And in the late afternoon, early evening, I point the bike toward the Hill. Or hills. At 17th, I turn right and begin the climb. Across Kentucky with cars going like hell one way, then Tennessee with cars going like hell the other way. Midway up the hill I stop for a breather. A woman pulls out of the driveway, motions for me to go.
I'm resting, I tell her. Part of the aging process.
She grins, delighted. I know *that* one, she says, and pulls away.
Then I am suddenly here, at this computer, reading my incoming mail, making notes to myself, promising myself to answer you all soon.
I will, I will.
I promise.
~~~~~~~~~
