| Robert Thomas USA
The Nocturnal Toy Peddler Sometimes you hear him in the distance, the tin bells of his cart waking you, his voice hawking in Slavic or Illyrian. Who are his customers? The children are in bed. Perhaps a mother unprepared for next morning's birthday, or the father of a child who has died, looking for a pinwheel or wooden train to set on a grave. Tonight I've had enough. The streets are deserted except for pots of blue lobelia on balconies, and taxis cruising the avenues, masters of the night. I follow the voice and a ratcheting sound like the propeller of a toy plane, until I round a corner and see him, wheeling his cart through a dark playground. There are ribbons on the spokes, and a mask turning on each hub. My mother's face, speaking to me: I want you to know, I was happy once, before you were born, a girl in a lake, water streaming from my black ponytail. The peddler breaks the spell, asks what I want. I tell him I came to look, but again he demands, What do you want? The stars in a box, I tell him, buzzing like lightning bugs. He pulls out a machine that looks like a coffee grinder, and he points to the crank. As I turn it there are loud skirls from the drawer like whale songs. When I open it a white moth flies in my face and into the night; the old man laughs. I pick up a black scissors from his tray, but don't know what to do with it. He takes it back, cuts through the skin of his wrist as if it were a leather pouch. Gold coins pour on the ground. He laughs again. Don't you know your own father? Enough of this craft. Take me home. "The Nocturnal Toy Peddler" first appeared in Poetry Northwest. Wild Onions I could write a poem that no one could tell was for you, or for anyone. It would just be about the doors, the old glass doorknobs in my apartment, and Mission Carmel-the rickety stairs dense with pigeons all the way up the sealed belltower; the brown fountains, dry but overrun with geraniums; and the cemetery with its smell of wild onions, irregular stones in adobe shade for two centuries, and stray white cats-it would just be about a silver candle snuffer and a windmill turning in the rain.
Foxfire God is my secret; he knows I'm his girl. You don't know what he's like. Sometimes he licks my face like a cat lapping cream. I almost caught him once, but he disappeared down the bole of an oak tree. I know he loves me because he gives me presents. I found a bottle cap once, Red Fox Root Beer, on the path I take through the aspens. You've never seen it in a store, have you? A sign clear as candy. And a bar of soap by a bend in the river, scented with Rome apples and never used. I bathed with it for a month, my evening prayer, till it was gone: God wants his gifts used. The suds down my leg like apple blossoms on a branch in the dark. You say he's not real? As soon tell a mother the child's not real that suckles at her breast. I stayed with him all night when he had a fever, fed him shards of ice to keep him alive, and when I had no water, I cooled him with my own spit till I couldn't swallow. Who are you to judge? Come out and you might see something-foxfire from the rot of a fallen cedar, hawk shadow crossing a shaft of cockshut light: he's mine. "Wild Onions" and "Foxfire" first appeared in The Iowa Review. The Poetry Merchant There is a man in Buenos Aires behind a rosewood desk who will pay well, very well, I assure you, for a tin ring stolen from the soiled hand of a man sleeping on the streets of Manhattan. If I can give him the address of the doorstep where I found this man, if I can bring him the street sign from the alley, it doubles the price. Believe me, you can make a good living. If I drive out to the desert and collect shell casings from rounds shot at the moon by men drunk on beers named Fools' Gold or Orina de Jesús, if I can bring a broken bottle with a handful of bullets caked with ash from a desert fire, there are women whom this excites, who will pay dearly to possess them. But best of all are the children: it is easy to trade a pack of gum for a lock of singed hair from a girl's ponytail, and not much harder to get a swatch of blood from a boy's knee skinned on a playground. I open my satchel, and the pupils in the eyes of the affluent grow wide, but they know their business: they know the genuine from the fake, and what they do to those who try to deceive them, well, to see it once is enough. They know they can trust me: when I tell them the water in the tiny blue cruet is rain from Kashmir that has never touched the ground, they know that it is different from the tears of the gang member's sister that cost me an hour's conversation on the fire escape of her family's apartment, distracted by the pregnant bitch bathing itself in the dirt, and different from the water I skimmed from a tidepool in the Galápagos Islands. Once I sold a broken string from the guitar of a musician who played old country blues like "Peach Orchard Mama" on the sidewalk of 101st Street for a phenomenal price to a man with box seats at the opera. Once I sold an hourglass full of fine sand I had scavenged from under swings where children were playing at dusk, too intoxicated to go home. "The Poetry Merchant" first appeared in The Cream City Review. Thinking About Sex It's everywhere. The mystery of horns and hair. I put on my black shoes in the morning. Blues on the radio, fog burning off the ridge. Don't you see it? No one promised it would do any good. Like God, it's everywhere but some places more than others: it has its tabernacles, its mosques. You can smell it in old bookstores and new cars. It likes windows and especially window coverings: damask curtains, hook-and-slat shutters, Venetian blinds. It loves black-and-white movies and Mediterranean colors: Etruscan red, Naples yellow, Alexandrian blue. It frequents all points of departure: piers, terminals, lobbies, bus stops. It loiters in hallways and sidewalks, knowing time is on its side. The redbird perched alone on the longest branch of a red cedar is full of it. The apple snail coiled in its pink shell feels it in its slow breath as it crosses the pond floor. You can hear it in the song of the diva and the metal- on-metal shriek of brakes. A woman in a broad-brimmed hat gets into a taxicab. A man holding a flashlight walks across a bridge. Don't you see it? A white-masked woman makes one incision and spares a bank clerk's life. A man looks through a telescope at a comet that will not come again in his lifetime. A woman dives into a river. A man zips shut a suitcase. What are you doing? Climbing the stairs to a room that smells of rosewater? Turning out a brass lamp? All around you clouds are forming and reforming, blown on a dry Santa Ana. "Thinking About Sex" first appeared in North American Review © All Copyright, 2000,
Robert Thomas. |
