Smoke Break

He wanted a cigarette and looked over his shoulder at his daughter and her friends as he stepped out to the sidewalk to smoke one. He ducked his head to light the Camel and, at first, he thought the butane lighter had exploded in his hand. But, then he realized his hand was empty, that he was on his knees and bleeding. He guessed he must have fallen. He twisted around to the shop behind him but he couldn't see it. He twisted some more and felt sharp pain. He wondered what was going on here, just what the heck had happened. And some part of him was already afraid that he knew.

*

The rest of that afternoon was kind of blurry. The moment immediately after the blast was crystallized, however, and became frozen in such a way that while he and events all moved forward in time together, that moment remained unfinished and attached to each successive moment. It was a lot more than that he just couldn't stop thinking about that moment. He could not get out of, remove himself or move away from that moment.

A man came to where he'd been blown. There were other noises--screams, the last rumble of damaged architecture--but they conversed together in a normal tone.

"I guess I fell down," he said.

"Oh, gosh," the other man replied, distractedly pulling needles of glass from his own forearm.

"That was so weird. What was that?"

They both turned their eyes to the boiling ruin of the shop. They heard the noises, they saw the flame inside the building, they smelled the smoke and meat.

"Oh, gosh," the other man said in genuine puzzlement. "Something must have happened."

And suddenly and very surprisingly, the street and the sidewalk and the area around the store was filled with people. They walked, they darted, they stood and turned small circles, put their hands to their faces. They wore regular clothes, they wore bloody rags, they wore uniforms. Some were shouting and pointing, some were crying, and some were just looking silently about them. There was a lot of junk strewn all over the place.

But even as these things happened, as he noticed these things and these things happening, he was (with the same kind of clarity and attention) still within that moment on the sidewalk before he knew.

*

The hospital was the worst place to have gone but they made him. The emergency room was bedlam; it was an unquiet place when all he truly wanted was a very quiet place. He kept thinking that if they'd only let him go home, he could clean himself up while watching himself for signs of concussion, pour some disinfectant on the worst of his scrapes, rest up a little and gather his wits, smoke a cigarette, and then come back for whatever disaster examination the hospital had prepared for him. As it was, he was triaged off by himself into a curtained area where he sat for a long time until the chaos subsided enough to allow a doctor time for a visit. All that while, even as he peeked at the action through a slit in the curtain, he was at the same time on his hands and knees on the sidewalk in a crust of broken glass worrying about his defective lighter.

"Well, then," the doctor said. "Let's take a look at you."

As expected, his clearly superficial wounds were identified, examined, sterilized, bandaged, and dismissed. The doctor paid lots of attention to his head, though, shining lights at it and in it from alarming angles. He was thinking about how nice it felt to grab a moment to himself after a long day of following teenaged girls as they shopped. A cigarette would taste very good, he thought.

The doctor said the word "observation" and, sure enough, some time later a young man came to take him upstairs in the hospital. They put him in a room and taped wires to his chest and left him alone. He couldn't get the lighter to work, kept scratching the flint uselessly. He turned deeper upwind; he hunched his shoulders and he cupped his palms to shelter the flame.

*

Some time later, another doctor came in.

"Has anybody had a chance to talk to you?" the doctor asked.

He really didn't know how to answer.

"I know you've been through an awful lot today. And, I'm afraid you've got some more to go through," the doctor began. "Your ex-wife will be here in a few hours. She's probably on the plane right now."

He had his eyes focused on the tip of the cigarette, at the place where the flame would be. He could taste the odor of unburned tobacco and the cotton filter; he anticipated the first lung full of thick smoke.

"You've sustained some injuries that aren't too serious," the doctor continued. "Scrapes and bruises, mostly. But, we're a little concerned about concussion so we're going to get some pictures of your head in a minute. You may even have a small fracture...you took a pretty good blow out there. The nurses will come to take you to the Imaging Lab and we'll get a better idea of what's going on."

The doctor moved over to almost sit on the edge of the bed.

"You know," the doctor said and his voice had changed. "You've been through something terrible and a lot of what you're feeling right now is just shock, pure and simple, plain old shock. Sometimes it takes a while for things to sink in, for the body and the mind to prepare themselves for a trauma. And you've already been through one terrible trauma this afternoon."

The doctor paused and looked out past the hospital room, out the room's grey window to another grey window on the opposite wall of the hospital.

"It's so hard to imagine someone doing this," the doctor finally said. "How could anyone deliberately do something like this? I find it hard to believe."

"You can't believe it?" he asked and the emphasis he gave those words must have sounded sarcastic because the doctor apologized but he meant it sincerely, had seized upon that phrase as a confirmation of his own inability to continue past a particular moment in time. If a doctor can't believe it, he reasoned, why should I?

"Listen," the doctor said. "If there's anything you'd like to know...any, ah, questions you might have...anything at all that might be on your mind...anything you're worried about...just ask me or call the nurse. Whenever you're ready...."

He moved his thumb deliberately to create a long, perfect spark, to get this cigarette really going, and he couldn't quite understand the doctor or what the doctor was saying because he was guessing he was about to fall down.

She Was Flexing

she was uncoiling
rhythmically pushing
the bedclothes into a rigid boundary
"Pain? Another sensation
and there are so many sensations..."

I wished we lived on a train
so I could flick my ashes out the window
so the lights from the stations we passed through
would move across her face in interesting patterns,
from back to front

"Watch my mouth. It will become
an interesting shape."
Instead, she kissed me
like the long fields of green wheat
we can see from the observation car




(Originally published in Tyounyi, 1989)

Some Waitresses I Have Known

i.
She was a steamed pudding,
a dumpling,
a moist soft pastry with a shining face and
greasy fingers
ladling huge ladles of noodle soup,
of cabbage and potatoes,
of boiled pork and
the dark spikes of her dark dark hair
escaped from under her white white cotton cap
plastered to her skin with sweat and by steam,
followed the lines of her face, of her cheeks and
if there was ever such a thing possible
as a communist Madonna
in a white cotton apron and
revealed to us all through clouds of kitchen steam
from the communal soup kettle,
she would be one of those.


ii.
I’d sit at the dark end of the cantina
for the last hour of the evening
waiting for her to get off work
so I could drive us to her house and
I watched her steal from the drunks and
the flirts when they weren’t looking by
slipping their money off the table and
by adding my drinks to their tabs and
by altering their credit card receipts to reflect
surprising generosity, an acute appreciation
of her skills as a cocktail temptress.

On more than many more than one occasion
as we sat in my car in the parking lot and
waited for the engine to warm up,
for the heater to kick in,
she would fan her cash
in front of my face and
it was usually a lot and
she would ask me "What did you make today?" and
she knew I hadn’t made anything.

I once watched her chase a bad tipper
into the parking lot and
fling the silver he’d left her
like it was dirt to bounce off his car windows,
his mouth a frightened circle and moist,
some quarters and a dime on an $80 tab
scattered in the dust and pea-sized gravel,
dull gray in mercury-vapor lamplight.


iii.
She was a giantess among Japanese
and she was therefore obliged to buy kimono at the special gaijin kimono store and pay those special gaijin prices
but she was a natural blond.
At the bottle club in the Roppongi district where she worked,
near the Hard Rock Tokyo where she never went,
somewhere east of the enormous television screen on the side of the enormous building that showed the endless loop of dolphins swimming and leaping between
an emerald tropical sea and a turquoise tropical sky,
somewhere down there on a side street above a restaurant where it always rained or at least dripped from the innumerable gray clouds in the city’s gray sky and the innumerable drips and leaks and overflows from all the surrounding buildings,
somewhere where the streets were still to narrow for automobiles,
she would pause in the tidal ebb of the unending flood of very small people with a limitless number of umbrellas
and she would try to remember how to count.


iv.
The sound of the interstate is like a river,
white noise constant with its own rise and fall,
waves or rapids or the surge from a sudden downpour
of diesel washing a steady flow of trucks ahead and forward and past this empty crossroads with the 200-ft. sign
and from the backdoor facing south with the sun setting like it always does on the right and the first stars of another night like always on the left,
she’ll smoke another More down to its filter,
the clatter of thick dishes being washed and
a jukebox version of another hit song behind her and
she’ll look south across an unimpeded plain of soybeans and cotton, of oil pumps and feedlots full of stumbling cattle,
a perfectly flat plain spreading out and away from all highway diners and all the way to Mexico,
just another place she’s never been.


Addendum:
Born a slave, she always served,
was so highly trained, so closely educated
as to preclude even the capacity to conceive of any life
other than service and
she was bred to beauty, to a certain proportion and
scale as to bring pleasure to her masters' eyes and
sometimes to their beds though
for the longest and the most number of days in the short years of her chattel-life she was ignored as a machine or an animal is ignored,
as a device or as one among identical many
is taken for granted.

But what her masters never saw or felt
was the small clear burning of her hatred
nor did they know that
what she brought them when she served them
at their table and at their bath,
whether on her belly or on her knees,
what she gave them was poison, always poison.

Silk Cut

The smoke from a Japanese cigarette
curls backward to this boy's mouth
against the current of typhoon.
No way will any divine wind change
the way these blossoms
fall
in flame
again and again
and then stop falling.


(Originally published in Wild Dog Nights, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1993)