USA

MATISSE AFTER 33 YEARS

Now I'm thanking Matisse after 33 years
of seeing his painted fantasies
hanging around--because mostly,
when I think of him,
I think of what a lot of trash
we add to whatever it is
--the way we look at things--
the way we think about color.
Still, his women are too passive
to be believed; in fact,
I don't trust Matisse at all
because he is so undark,
unconflicted, a little too pure to be
acceptable on my plate, in
my palette of things.
But I felt a little thanks
for the heat of color he left;
the red especially of
Le Studio Rouge, oven-opposite
heat of the holocaust
Hallmark Card of Hitler--if
it is Hitler--
"The Oven Master" himself--
flaming to death in his bunker
doused with Texaco gasoline--
it was Texaco
he imported until 1942 or so;
a modest, well-negotiated
stockpile for his bombers, for his tanks,
for his what ever, but, in fact,
for his day in the fire, his ritual;
immolation was big
in every way for the H. man.
I think Matisse made
an Eros of color a flood in the eyes
lives to ride. True
for some of us.
His color labia opening
on my eyes, right into their
dripping source, the color nest
in every one of his strokes. So not
every damned thing I think about
is blood-wash overtones from 1914-to 9-11--
not everything is left gouged out,
necrophiled, stomped into burnt stubs,
burnt sleeves' ashes; thanks.

FOUR FAMILY

We didn't know anything--we were four people
living in a one-bedroom four-plex and they couldn't pay
the Seaboard finance company again. I heard that a lot
between ages four and seven: "Ralph, how the hell are we going
to pay Seaboard next month?" We didn't know what was what.
My oldest aunt, the communist with a purple-silver perm,
showed us a wood-block print and a drawing
of Kathe Kollwitz's mothers and children--
the wall the mothers made around their bodies--
we didn't really get it. My own mother's expressions
bewildered me. I remember my father washing the dishes
and my mother sitting at the cutting board drying them,
crying and talking about Seaboard
through the dish towel
in front of her eyes
bunched into fetal curves.

Packets of art reproductions would come in the mail.
Where did they get money for that? She kept them in a drawer
in the kitchen for my brother. Gaugin, Van Gogh, Rembrandt,
Michelangelo, Toulous-Letrec. Rembrandt drowned my eyes

with that portrait of himself, of the bottom
of his eyes, at the end. My brother tried to copy it,
he was always drawing. Ma said she could
just give him her eyebrow pencil wherever she took him
and he would sit there on the floor and draw

people's faces and women's legs. My brother knew more.
His expression when he took me out of the kitchen
had the surface and depth of shock within it, but not so much
I didn't trust he would cover me. I always had reason
to trust him. That comfort. He saw more misery than I did.
My mother and her three brothers raised him during the war
and for a few years after. The faces in the Kollwitz drawing
and wood-block print scared me--where were the fathers?
Familiar mother's big hands' leather covering children.

It was just 1954 or something. The dieseled ashes of Germany
and more than Germany were still a fresh part of the soot
in the eucalyptus in our yard. Ma feared
that the eucalyptus would fall on our bedroom
and kill us in our sleep. She had it cut down.
None of us knew a thing. We were four people
living in a one-bedroom fourplex.

Some years later at the old La Brea Theater the four of us
audibly cried out of our eucalyptus mouths. We were watching
the film of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. We didn't know the book.
I read it all in two days when I got it. Kollwitz's mothers showed
on the ash mouths and eye lids of those two mute guys in the book,
they struggled
to watch over each other.

I follow it that way in mind. I can't separately
reason that I'm here feeling this and not back
in the Longwood Avenue kitchen or in the La Brea lobby
with what I felt. Experience has not nearly increased
accuracy enough.

Working with my father in the garage I used to
make boats out of scrap wood and metal.
My connection to assembling things, my connection
to accuracy began there. But I didn't know anything.
Some hammer and nails, some glue, some blowtorch did it.
We owe a lot to the materials. Every tool lives in a shrine,
every shrine stands in for the other--it all gets mixed up:
the mute lovers with the ones at the sink, with brothers
reborn in a mother's towel with the fragile wall
of mothers, with the reborn eucalyptus, with the ash
mouths and eye lids, with the sheet metal sail.

OFF EVERYTHING

Goldwater died last week,
finally. Several years of
cancer, and heart this, and heart
that. Not much to go on
there. Continuous dominant?culture
sentamentalization on the news
about his death. We egged his
presidential headquarters
on Sunset Strip in '64 because
our parents said he didn't
give a shit about working?people,
or minority people, or
immigrant?people. Like who was left?
But I don't know what
we were really thinking of.
I know what I think now.
Maybe some of us
were better informed in '64.

I've been back on the coast
for several weeks. Out there,
that kelp bed remains sleepless, some
kind of circulatory feeding
and dying trough. It gives me anxiety.
But I don't idealize it anymore.
I died, but I've been back long enough
to stop idealizing what happens
on the coast. All in all, something I see
in the kelp bed that I don't like.
Could be my paranoid envy of its production
and self?sufficiency, the threat of losing
or being diminished for the little I have. I don't know.

The virus I had for eleven months
--whatever it was--you couldn't
do a thing. Someone recommended
a high?colonic. I wasn't too sure
about that. And what if during such a procedure
the doctor is naked? I felt like
I was chewing down to the particles
of a mirror to get through it,
and even that image might just as well
be another inflation
to cushion myself. And problems like these
used to have the opposite effect,
or they used to strike me with less force.
Or is it kindness to remember it
to myself that way? However that may be,
as a result: seven weeks
I went off everything, everything!:
wine and caffeine, kishka
and Cognac, Lame Deer and Black Elk,
pork?tits and chili fries.
When it all passed, I was well enough
to go out again and chip away
with my finishing hammer at the ice caked
on the gate hinges out back.
Farther up north I had the same habit,
or was it necessity to deal with how
that weather transforms things? Habit.
Discipline. Both. More…No kelp
visible farther north, only ice.
I smoked a brittle cigar, my mind
was brittle??now I remember,
now I remember, I couldn't do anything
any longer with my hammer up there.
It was the night after I dreamed of myself
with two backsides. In the same
dream I had two sets of teeth.
I was eating a dog's head
in the dream, then the flies ate through
my collar and buttons, flies
ate my hair and nails, they ate
the shoes I just bought,
a fact so annoying and perilous
to me??even after waking up
from the dream, I couldn't bear it.
God damn those flies!

NUMBERED EVENTS 6 THROUGH 10

Until (6)
I am at Fairfax Avenue
and Portland Street where the poet
Muriel Rukeyser is a clerk
in my camera shop and I am
23 and 11/16 years old again
when (7) I first memorized
her poem that begins:
"I lived in the first century of world wars,"
or was it the poem after both lovers
have exhilarated themselves
that ends and begins with the line
"yes we were looking at each other,"
and I realized, as retold
in the following three mental events,
that (8) rage and compassion made her sexy
and that I also would attempt to (9)
just talk the body basic
for the sole purpose of saying
I could almost never turn away
from someone who told me
she was or he was struggling,
sometimes beyond common sense
I couldn't turn away. And I learned
to talk the body basic for the other
sole purpose of simply getting
a little electrical again
in my body. All of this
came back to me as I drove
one of the 313 miles to work
and back while (10) listening
to the old Velvet Underground
"Venus in Furs" rock music
expand what I was always
trying to absorb from any
source about rhythm. And I
never really thought about
or worried that my camera shop
was actually Muriel's Camera Shop,
and that she made ownership
cooperative, though she might have
tricked me into believing that
because she didn't want anyone
to know she liked
being an owner. I had Muriel
right where she wanted me,
which was probably why,
after I told her about my weakness
in the darkroom, she could let me
pretend the camera shop was my shop,
possibly, maternally, seeing the odds
against getting over
being weak. But by this time
I stopped questioning, in what
was the long event of
number 10 whether it was
still me as an owner, me as
a communalist, me as a worker,
or me as a timid step-son who
came in to review the work schedule
for Mr. Robbins who had in fact
given notice to Muriel
several days before and was by now
in his car--the blue Chevy box--that
would become famous (in his mind)
for taking him away the first time,
which outlasts all of the other times;
that car he found a little necklace
replica of in a car wash he took it to
once, arriving there early
for the free air freshener;
that car, metallic blue, I bought
from my youngest uncle, his third car.
Nevertheless, I don't see any of this
as some kind of a mirror,
I see my life in panels, passages,
and photos torn imprecisely
out of larger pages, not always
definite pages. I don't see that blue
Chevy Super Sport with bucket seats
or any of the other events as a mirror--
even in the bathroom at
Muriel's Camera Shop,
doing everything I did with my hair
to get it right, I didn't know what
I was looking at when I looked
in the mirror. I had to see a man
with his back to all mirrors, somebody
eleven years, nine cars, two trucks, one van,
and something like 73,448.14
events later, leaning excitedly over the rail
of a boat on the Agean Sea, somebody
envying the leap, the arc, of dolphins.

© All Copyright, Doren Robbins
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.