USA

docroy@asde.net

Winter Coherences
Along Myrtle Beach

Clouds snake lazy S curves,
aerial reflections
of washboard sand beds
rippling backwash streams
after high tide.
Underfoot, you feel the little ridges
through the soles of your shoes,
watch tidal tendrils worm seaward.

Dyspeptic Baudelaire went wrong somewhere,
never quite digesting separate essences
that should have mingled
unshaken, unstirred
between ideal and spleen.

Old men, hip boots and headphones
who know enough grammar
and have the pedigree to spell South
with a capital S,
sweep the beaches with metal detectors
as if the shore were one giant minefield.
Fully insulated
they exhume relics,
scoop up piles of sand-caked fictions
their children can plunder.

We lunge across the puddles
we used to jump into,
don jackboots so we never
ever
have to walk beaches barefoot.

Renaming the Voices,
Revoicing the Names

I told you more than twice:
Turn off the car radio,
roll down the windows
to absorb the voices
next time you pack everything
for a trip with no destination.

Better yet: try on unfamiliar names,
let them envelop you.
Not like slipping on unworn clothes
with tags scratching newness into your flesh,
etching reminders that this is temporary,
tailored for no one in particular.

Ingest these names
that have been worn as identities,
also not tailored for you
yet infinitely generous in lending
whatever they allow you to give.
People who do this, we brand
“whores” or “martyrs,”
improvising differentiae.
Names are neither.
Saint and slut know what they give.
Traces of leftover names just give
whatever they leave,
whatever you invent.

Once I walked through an abandoned house,
tried to patch together someone’s story
or maybe improvise my own.
One curled photograph whispered fragments
of a yellowed, scorched testimonial
I couldn’t translate.
Nothing would yank its language into three dimensions.

After hours at a museum,
I still stared at the remains
of a photo captioned:
Unidentified Woman.
Presumably a slave, holding a white infant boy—
someone moderately renowned but now forgotten.
Her voice begged to be wrenched
from the unsmiling pose
before the crumbling edges
would erode her arms, her face
just vanishing into dust as her last
and only syllable wafted inaudibly,
anonymously to brimming dustbins.

As my fingers touched her face,
the photo slid to the floor.
I strained to listen, hearing only
the hush of a rich conversation
that ended just before my arrival.

© All Copyright 12/15/00, Roy Schwartzman.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.