The Blue Buick
NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
B. H. FAIRCHILD
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923
NEW YORK | LONDON
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FOR PATRICIA LEA FAIRCHILD,
the air that I breathe
Perhaps they found this front-line trench
at break of day as fully charged as any chorus-end
with hopes and fears; . . . Certainly they sat
curbed, trussed-up, immobile, as men who
consider the Nature of Being.
—DAVID JONES, In Parenthesis
CONTENTS
FROM
The Arrival of the Future
(1985)
The Woman at the Laundromat Crying “Mercy”
The Men
The Robinson Hotel (from Kansas Avenue)
Flight
Angels
Groceries
Night Shift
Hair
To My Friend
The Limits of My Language: English 85B
Late Game
FROM
Local Knowledge
(1991)
In Czechoslovakia
In a Café near Tuba City, Arizona, Beating My Head against a Cigarette Machine
Language, Nonsense, Desire
There Is Constant Movement in My Head
Maize
In Another Life I Encounter My Father
The Machinist, Teaching His Daughter to Play the Piano
The Doppler Effect
Toban’s Precision Machine Shop
Speaking the Names
Local Knowledge
Kansas
The Soliloquy of the Appliance Repairman
Work
L’Attente
FROM
The Art of the Lathe
(1998)
Beauty
The Invisible Man
All the People in Hopper’s Paintings
The Book of Hours
Cigarettes
The Himalayas
Body and Soul
Airlifting Horses
Old Men Playing Basketball
Old Women
Song
Thermoregulation in Winter Moths
Keats
The Ascension of Ira Campbell
The Dumka
A Model of Downtown Los Angeles, 1940
The Children
Little Boy
The Welder, Visited by the Angel of Mercy
The Death of a Small Town
The Art of the Lathe
FROM
Early Occult Memory Systems
of the Lower Midwest
(2003)
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest
Moses Yellowhorse Is Throwing Water Balloons from the Hotel Roosevelt
Mrs. Hill
The Potato Eaters
Hearing Parker the First Time
Delivering Eggs to the Girls’ Dorm
Rave On
A Photograph of the Titanic
Blood Rain
The Death of a Psychic
Luck
A Roman Grave
On the Passing of Jesus Freaks from the College Classroom
Brazil
Weather Report
The Second Annual Wizard of Oz Reunion in Liberal, Kansas
The Blue Buick
Mlle Pym (from Three Poems by Roy Eldridge Garcia)
The Deposition
A Starlit Night
Motion Sickness
A Wall Map of Paris
At the Café de Flore
At Omaha Beach
The Memory Palace
FROM
Usher
(2009)
The Gray Man
Trilogy
Frieda Pushnik
Usher
Hart Crane in Havana
Key to “Hart Crane in Havana”
The Cottonwood Lounge
Les Passages
Wittgenstein, Dying
The Barber
Hume
Gödel
from The Beauty of Abandoned Towns
1. The Beauty of Abandoned Towns
2. Bloom School
3. The Teller
4. Wheat
Madonna and Child, Perryton, Texas, 1967
What He Said
from Five Prose Poems from the Journals of Roy Eldridge Garcia
Cendrars
Piano
Moth
Triptych: Nathan Gold, Maria, On the Waterfront
Nathan Gold
Maria
On the Waterfront
New Poems
The Story
Red Snow
The Left Fielder’s Sestina
Betty
The Game
The Student Assistant
History: Four Poems
1. Dust Storm, No Man’s Land, 1952
2. Shakespeare in the Park, 9/11/2011
3. Economics
4. Alzheimer’s
Three Girls Tossing Rings
The Death of a Gerbil
Pale from the Hand of the Child That Holds It
Three Prose Poems from the Journals of Roy Eldridge Garcia
An Attaché Case
The End of Art
The Language of the Future
Language
Abandoned Grain Elevator
The Men on Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, 1975
Getting Fired
On the Death of Small Towns: A Found Poem
Leaving
Swan Lake
Obed Theodore Swearingen, 1883–1967
Rothko
A House
Poem (from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest)
Poem
Notes
Acknowledgments
FROM
The Arrival of the Future
(1985)
The Woman at the Laundromat
Crying “Mercy”
And the glass eyes of dryers whirl
on either side, the roar just loud enough
to still the talk of women. Nothing
is said easily here. Below the screams
of two kids skateboarding in the aisles
thuds and rumbles smother everything,
even the woman crying mercy, mercy.
Torn slips of paper on a board swear
Jesus is the Lord, nude photo sessions
can help girls who want to learn, the price
for Sunshine Day School is affordable,
astrology can change your life, any
life. Long white rows of washers lead
straight as highways to a change machine
that turns dollars into dimes to keep
the dryers running. When they stop,
the women lift the dry things out and hold
the sheets between them, pressing corners
warm as babies to their breasts. In back,
the change machine has jammed and a woman
beats it with her fists, crying mercy, mercy.
The Men
As a kid sitting in a yellow-vinyl
booth in the back of Earl’s Tavern,
you watch the late-afternoon drunks
coming and going, sunlight breaking
through the smoky dark as the door
opens and closes, and it’s the future
flashing ahead like the taillights
of a semi as you drop over a rise
in the road on your way to Amarillo,
bright lights and blonde-haired women,
as Billy used to say, slumped
over
his beer like a snail, make a real man
out of you, the smile bleak as the gaps
between his teeth, stay loose, son,
don’t die before you’re dead. Always
the warnings from men you worked with
before they broke, blue fingernails,
eyes red as fate. A different life
for me, you think, and outside later,
feeling young and strong enough to raise
the sun back up, you stare down Highway 54,
pushing everything—stars, sky, moon,
all but a thin line at the edge
of the world—behind you. Your headlights
sweep across the tavern window,
ripping the dark from the small, humped
shapes of men inside who turn and look,
like small animals caught in the glare
of your lights on the road to Amarillo.
The Robinson Hotel
from Kansas Avenue, a sequence of five poems
The windows form a sun in white squares.
Across the street
the Blue Bird Cafe leans into shadow and the cook
stands in the doorway.
Men from harvest crews step from the Robinson
in clean white shirts
and new jeans. They stroll beneath the awning,
smoking Camels,
considering the blue tattoos beneath their sleeves,
Friday nights
in San Diego years ago, a woman, pink neon lights
rippling in rainwater.
Tonight, chicken-fried steak and coffee alone
at the Bluebird,
a double feature at The Plaza: The Country Girl,
The Bridges at Toko-Ri.
The town’s night-soul, a marquee flashing orange
bulbs, stuns the windows
of the Robinson. The men will leave as heroes,
undiscovered.
Their deaths will be significant and beautiful
as bright aircraft,
sun glancing on silver wings, twisting, settling
into green seas.
In their room at night, they see Grace Kelly
bending at their bedsides.
They move their hands slowly over their chests
and raise their knees
against the sheets. The Plaza’s orange light
fills the curtains.
Cardboard suitcases lie open, white shirts folded
like pressed flowers.
Flight
In the early stages of epilepsy there occurs a characteristic dream. . . . One is somehow lifted free of one’s own body; looking back one sees oneself and feels a sudden, maddening fear; another presence is entering one’s own person, and there is no avenue of return.
—GEORGE STEINER
Outside my window the wasps
are making their slow circle,
dizzy flights of forage and return,
hovering among azaleas
that bob in a sluggish breeze
this humid, sun-torn morning.
Yesterday my wife held me here
as I thrashed and moaned, her hand
in my foaming mouth, and my son
saw what he was warned he might.
Last night dreams stormed my brain
in thick swirls of shame and fear.
Behind a white garage a locked shed
full of wide-eyed dolls burned,
yellow smoke boiling up in huge clumps
as I watched, feet nailed to the ground.
In dining cars white tablecloths
unfolded wings and flew like gulls.
An old German in a green Homburg
sang lieder, Mein Herz ist müde.
In a garden in Pasadena my father
posed in Navy whites while overhead
silver dirigibles moved like great whales.
And in the narrowing tunnel
of the dream’s end I flew down
onto the iron red road
of my grandfather’s farm.
There was a white rail fence.
In the green meadow beyond,
a small boy walked toward me.
His smile was the moon’s rim.
Across his eggshell eyes
ran scenes from my future life,
and he embraced me like a son
or father or my lost brother.
Angels
Elliot Ray Neiderland, home from college
one winter, hauling a load of Herefords
from Hogtown to Guymon with a pint of
Ezra Brooks and a copy of Rilke’s Duineser
Elegien on the seat beside him, saw the ass-end
of his semi gliding around in the side mirror
as he hit ice and knew he would never live
to see graduation or the castle at Duino.
In the hospital, head wrapped like a gift
(the nurses had stuck a bow on top), he said
four flaming angels crouched on the hood, wings
spread so wide he couldn’t see, and then
the world collapsed. We smiled and passed a flask
around. Little Bill and I sang “Your Cheatin’
Heart” and laughed, and then a sudden quiet
put a hard edge on the morning and we left.
Siehe, ich lebe, Look, I’m alive, he said,
leaping down the hospital steps. The nurses
waved, white dresses puffed out like pigeons
in the morning breeze. We roared off in my Dodge,
Behold, I come like a thief! he shouted to the town
and gave his life to poetry. He lives, now,
in the south of France. His poems arrive
by mail, and we read them and do not understand.
Groceries
A woman waits in line and reads
from a book of poems to kill time.
When her items come up to be counted,
the check-out girl greets the book
like a lost child: The House on Marshland!
she says, and they share certain lines:
“the late apples, red and gold, / like words
of another language.”
The black belt rolls on. Groceries flow,
coagulate, then begin to spill over: canned
corn, chicken pot pies, oatmeal, garden
gloves, apricots, sliced ham, frozen pizza,
loaves and loaves of bread, and then the eggs,
“the sun is shining, everywhere you turn is luck,”
they sing. Here comes the manager, breathless,
eyes like tangerines, hair in flames.
Night Shift
On the down side
of the night shift:
the wind’s tense sigh,
the heavy swivel
turning, turning.
Pulling out of the hole
from four thousand feet
straight down,
we change bits, the moon
catching in the old one
a yellow gleam wedged
in mud, a shark’s tooth.
The drawworks rumbles
like a flood rushing over
flat stubble fields
that stretch for miles,
all surface, no depth
until now, swept under
ocean, the moon wavering
behind clouds
like a floating body
seen from underwater.
I see small eyes,
feel the hard gray skin
slipping past, and think
of origins, the distances
of time, the absence
of this rig, these men.
On the long drive home
I’ll head into a sun
that stared the sea away,
that saw a dried tooth
sink into the darkness
I return to.
Hair
At the
23rd Street Barber Shop
hair is falling across the arms of men,
across white cotton cloths
that drape their bodies like little nightgowns.
How like well-behaved children they seem—
silent, sleepy—sheets tucked
neatly beneath their chins,
legs too short to touch the floor.
Each in his secret life sinks
easily into the fat plastic cushion
and feels the strange lightness of falling hair,
the child’s comfort of soft hands
caressing his brow and temples.
Each sighs inwardly to the constant
whisper of scissors about his head,
the razor humming small hymns along his neck.
They’ve been here a hundred times,
gazed upon mirrors within mirrors,
clusters of slim-necked bottles labeled WILDROOT
and VITALIS, and below the shoeshine stand,
rows of flat gold cans. They’ve heard
the sudden intimacies, the warmth
of men seduced by grooming: the veteran
confessing an abandoned child in Rome,
men discussing palm-sized pistols,
small enough to snuggle against your stomach.
As children they were told, after you’re dead
it keeps on growing, and they’ve seen themselves
lying in hair long as a young girl’s.
Two of them rise and walk slowly out.
Their round heads blaze in the doorway.
They creep into what is left of day, fingertips
touching the short, stiff hairs across their necks.
To My Friend
To my friend they all look like movie stars.
“Here comes Herbert Lom,” he’ll say, and a guy
in a low-angle shot looms over us, bulging
forehead shouting treason to pedestrians.
This history of personalities repeats itself each day.
“Take a look at ZaSu Pitts behind the pineapples”
or “Jesus, Zachary Scott sacking groceries!”
He collects them like old stills, hunts for them
in every bar, smoke-curls and clicking glasses
whispering sly promises of Sidney Greenstreet.
Or at traffic lights: Ginger Rogers in a Dodge,
Errol Flynn on a blue Suzuki. The glamour
of appearances. The way montage erases vast
ontological gaps. A wino as Quasimodo as Anthony
Quinn explains the brunette cheerleader, who is
really Gina Lollobrigida. Life connects this way,
but huge sympathies are lost in a single shot.