The Brooklyn Rail

LATE SKETCHES & STUDIES 

contained between parenthetical apocalyptic “covers”

Global Prelude (Front Cover, Open)

“Now get going, Bigshot,”
whispered the louche enchantress
to the prime minister of the elements
that she had nursed back to savagery, after
deleting the extraneous moons from our eyes . . .

*

            Re-creation, or Recreation

Now listen carefully: All that you imagined  
you must now reimagine, or you will never  
get to the next level, 
and you must get to the next level, 
otherwise you will remain on this level,  
bereft of reimagination to the bitter end
of a pathetically monoplanar existence. 

            Out of State 

In this hand-tinted Polaroid of the Three Graces:
Gossip, Revision, and Ambiguity,
it is Ambiguity, as usual, who answers the phone
while Revision goes to another level
to reimagine the scenario
and Gossip will make sure it is interesting.
That the call is from the Harrisburg airport  
may surprise you, but I believe
I was expecting it. What may surprise you  
even more, is that I have been pre-approved   
to take part in a study that will not only cure anathema 
but will virtually bottle the mind, literally; 
and after all, who doesn’t enjoy being pre-approved, 
even if indistinctly and from out of state? 

               Backstory 

Now 81 years young, as the Euphemists would have it, 
I was retired from the verbiage industry and the correction business 
and the reimagination racket at 65 years young
because I was already way too old not to have been replaced; 
and the doors shut behind me and I wander off the set,
looking for a soda fountain or a phone booth 
or a stationery store where I can buy a new typewriter ribbon 
among other futile quests, as we stalk the empty shelves
through time and space, and a phonograph  
somewhere plays music I didn’t even like then. 

               Buzz                 

Did Barry Fitzgerald really 
knock the head off his Oscar 
while practicing golf swings? 
and Joel McCrea say that his wife was too short . . . 
But wait, Fitzgerald was never married! 
No, McCrea said that his own life was too short 
to make two pictures with Veronica Lake, 
so she must have been cast in some very long movies, 
or maybe he said “make two pictures” — like in sarcastic italics.
For me, life has been too short  
to make just one picture with anyone at all. 
However, it is rumored that I have unfinished screenplays, 
in a drawer somewhere or under a bed,
one of which I would like to discuss with you, 
the one in which you will have a minor but vital rôle 
in a drawer somewhere or under a bed, regrettably, 
but as comfortable as the director can make it. 

              Follow-Up 

The other way is more interesting — 
81 years young back to three years old  
seems goofy, doesn’t it. Eccentrically 
I did feel, when I turned nine years old
that I had taken a giant step of maturation
as if from eight years young. Now, at  
nine times nine, I should be in a miasma
of numerological rapture, but I would
take 32 in an atrial-fibrillated heartbeat!

            Transition 

To the next person who asks how I am,  
I will respond: “As young as I’m
ever going to be, but I hope not as old,”
because that’s what an old person 
might have quipped in the old days;
but really, I’m just trying to hold my ground —  
as tenaciously as a tree does, would be the goal;
like the young tree across the street did one night
against an immense and lethal wind,
with arboreal stubbornness: its thin branches  
waving wildly in resolute defiance,  
or perhaps in distress, or perhaps in ecstasy.
But then the tempest noticed me
and took aim at my window, but could
only get half way through the glass, baffled
by a transparent but adamant molecular defense,
and soon it had to move on, up
the Atlantic coast, and in three days
it was no more. Clearly, this shared event
led to a personal bond with the tree,
though we rarely speak of it. 

           Choices 

You’re either speeding down a deserted highway 
through a menacing landscape toward a baleful distant glow, 
while singing a muffled duet with your carburetor 
because the hood ornament has forgotten the words;
or spending an excruciating evening
listening to the ghost of an ancient pig, expounding
at tedious length about how it died tragically on the way
from Dalmatia to a religious festival in Macedonia — 
intoned in either Illyrian or Thracian: your choice. 

          Outtakes

When Clark Gable delivers the line
“I’m all ears,” in 1931, in The Secret Six,
Darryl Zanuck comments: “I know you are,
that’s why I wouldn’t hire you,”
to which Clark replies, “Sorry, I can’t hear you,
I’m on my way up to the pinnacle of stardom.”
Years pass. I am born and grow up. When
Darryl’s son Richard is making Patton
in 1969, I could have told him: in the scene
where George C. Scott as George Patton
lectures his officers on the future, in 1944,
in front of a map of Europe — i.e., during the war —
make sure it’s a pre-war map, not a post-1945 map,
or audiences will be upset by the anachronism. “We
couldn’t care less about that kind of stuff,” audiences
interject, “but our deepest thanks for noticing.”

          Special Delivery

Let me mention for the record
that my still life, Rustic Morning
did not require the last-minute addition
of freshly culled sheep innards
dumped haphazardly on the kitchen table,
but their pinks and mauves echoed splendidly
the pastel emanations of dawn, and gave
a contrast in texture to the overturned tea cups
and abandoned toast, proof, if such were needed
of the off-putting effect this revision
must have had on the now-absent breakfasters,
whose nonappearance persists, even
after the arrangement has been reduced
to the size of a postage stamp; the letter
in the envelope we affixed it to contains
an awkward and unconvincing apology, as well
as a disingenuous promise that the very next day
I would return the scene to the way it was before,
but I don’t remember the way it was before.

          Production Notes

“If you’re going to fly over the weekend
make sure you’re high enough,”
said the drug dealer and the metaphysical poet
in unison; and if you don’t touch down
by Monday, the poet continues, be sure your alibi
is ironclad enough to weather the ordeals of rust,
enemy fire, and questionable construction better
than many of the ironclads themselves did, or you too
could end up unemployed at the bottom of the deep.
Apropos the Holy Roman Empire, when James Madison
wrote that it exemplified imbecility, confusion, and misery,
how could he have known it was a prediction of us?

          Transparent Thinking

In a vitrified brain that came into my possession,
from a corpse oxymoronically “frozen”
by the volcanic ferocity visited upon its hometown,
Herculaneum — in 79AD, in case you’ve forgotten
one of the more notable eruptive tantrums
thrown by Mt. Vesuvius — we discovered that
both verbal thoughts and visual impressions
were actually retrievable from the glassy substance,
on infinitesimally thin chronological layers,
thanks to the latest transphotoscopic laser technology.
The topmost layer was a sort of an undifferentiated
“splotch”: the inarticulate shock of sudden death;
in the next few (lower and earlier), “plebian” concerns
were in evidence, such as the need to fix a table,
or gathering ingredients to make a sort of stew,
but without enough information to make it now —
so there was nothing relevant there. But in the next layers
we hit the jackpot: high-rez images of all kinds
of sexual cavorting, accompanied by obviously
pertinent Latin dialog. As my business partner enthused:
“Who wouldn’t shed some coin to see ‘actual’ ancient Romans
getting it on? It’s 2000-year-old authentic holographic porn!”

          Gardening

This is your brain on autocracy:
smooth and unfurrowed
like a species of melon, but harboring
seeds of resentment, revolt
and sarcasm — don’t neglect sarcasm;
it infuriates the opportunistic dirt bags
and loathsome minions who fawn on the P.C.,
the Primary Charlatan, the one people thought
it was a good idea to defurrow their brains for.
And there is much more to be whispered
on this subject, but safer transposed into
coded dots and numbers, so historical research
has indicated; however, safest, simply, if different
events had taken place, a future spokesperson confides.

The protagonist had read somewhere that an ability  
to stand on one foot could bring advantages in life,  
but would negotiating a mortgage contract  
turn out to be one of them? Fortunately, that
question became moot when the loan officer 
slowly lowered his leg, and our applicant gratefully
followed suit. They continued seated, on
the elegant marble floor, which was good for the back
but would it lead to favorable terms? The banker in
fact sat straighter, after all. Then, as stubborn details
were being weeded out, they were interrupted
by lunch and, in the fullness of time, by dinner.
Crickets are said to signify the neutrality of stasis,
but the continual chirrups and scratching that came
from the filing cabinets were disturbing, and seemed
unpropitious. And thus the underlying import
of the hieroglyphs went unnoticed. They foretold that
a crocodile or an ibis would provide the determinative
inflection, though finality will be organic in either case.  

            Tale from the Crypt

“The process,” I assert, “is to take a grouping of
alphabetic symbols, adjust for the evanescence of digraphs,
and set it apart: you have a word. Consider it 
methodically. Then take another such agglomeration,
give it the same inspective treatment, and place it ‘before’  
or ‘after‘ the first one. Replicate this procedure several times
and you will be 'writing' — although we need to find 
a more environmentally agreeable way to achieve this, 
for by its inherently aggressive forays into nothingness, 
writing upsets the balance of the void.” “I didn’t ask
for a goddamn think-piece,” my instructor fulminates,
“You’re here to learn how to sell. Utilize  the ‘Three T’s’:
Terror, Trauma, and Tendentiousness: Give
the smoked salmon a terrifying elegance, the brie  
a traumatic vulnerability when faced with a cracker —
then make the cucumber dip tendentious and we’ll be all set.”

          A Marketer’s Tale

“Stuck for an idea of how to put food on the table —
though I didn’t have a table, only a chalk outline
drawn in one corner of the dirty floor of a shabby room
that had just enough space for the additional outlines
of a desk, a chair, a threadbare rug, and a memorably
uncomfortable bed — I remembered a college lecture
about how ancient societies had gods and goddesses
of the sun and the moon who contended with each other.
I thought this dichotomy could still resonate in people
and that there could be a way of cashing in on it. I decided
to stage a solar/lunar ‘throwdown’ — rejecting the vulgar
‘slugfest’ — by renting a hillside and selling tickets
to two performances: In the late-afternoon version of the argument
the sun would inexorably be pushed down into the horizon,
succumbing to the moon and the supremacy of night. In
the second, with the customers assembling in the dark
early-morning hours, the sun would push its way back up
and claim victory over the moon. I could foresee that some
of the audience will grasp that these alternating results
will lead to a perpetual draw. To avoid this conundrum of
how to break the tie, or take questions about the fact that
what I had collected money for could have been easily
observed gratis, it will be prudent to take the receipts and,
as the sun is declaring victory, discreetly depart the vicinity,
and let the landlord take back his wretched furnishings.”

Note: In fact, very few tickets were sold to either of the “contests.”
People who had knowledge of or interest in the foundational concept
were skeptical in the extreme of the promotional assertions, while
those more likely to accept such a far-fetched program without
question, such as the audiences at political rallies, saw
the scholarly aspects as suspicious, or even threatening.

          Openings

Some will find the impending oppression insufferable:
I will take the opportunity not to talk so much.
Some will find the deepening poverty soul-crushing:
I shall learn to live a bare and simple life.
Some will be troubled by the chaos of lies and propaganda:
I will expand my repertory of tolerable scenarios.
And most foresee climatic catastrophe
and the end of a habitable world. I see merely a long
meteorological vacation cut short by inclement weather.

          Parables

So a wolf strolls into a hospital . . .
Or, rather, a wolf lopes into a hospital,
causing me to stroll out of that hospital;
or, rather, I skedaddle out of that hospital
after turning the tale over to the admissions nurse.
The wolf asks her a professional question:
“Can you do anything for the rabbit
I was carrying in my mouth? No?
Then do you guys have a kitchen?”
The nurse recalled a previous occurrence,
before the talking wolf, in which
a talking doctor counseled: You must follow
the implications of your designation. All
should be admissible but, oxymoronically,
admit nothing.” Everything admissible
except cleaning up a kitchen after a wolf
has been using it,” she said to herself,
“Someone else is going to have to do that.”

          A Day Like Any Other

I was hoping that Superman would appear
to help rearrange the furniture, but it was
Batman who showed up; he told me
that Superman didn’t exist. Then, putting
a finger to his lips, perhaps to emphasize
a pensive moment, perhaps to indicate
copyright issues, he jumped out the window.
That was in the morning. After lunch, I forsook
the dark world of fantasy and returned to
reality, where, as usual, my heart twisted in
hyperbolic fear. Curious as to why this happened
I pressed Learn More, which came back with
“Why bother? You never remember anything.”
Superman enters while I am thinking up
a riposte. He says the furniture is fine where
it is, sits down on the sofa, opens a Batman comic
and begins making sardonic marginal notes.

           Dear Melanie and/or Melody 

I’m sorry we couldn’t get together while  
our scenario was still three-dimensional,  
before the narrative devolved  
into this flat, overdue epistle. Anyway,
one of you asked me for advice on
how to write poetry, regarding which
I would suggest that chipping away at
amorphousness as if it were Neolithic flint,
and hoping to shape an incontrovertible point
which, when attached by figurative rubber bands
to an actual broom handle, could be driven deep
into the world’s mammoth indifference
is the kind of muddy and overly elaborate metaphor
you should avoid as beginning poets. Yes,
write only what you know, like everyone
will tell you, but you won’t know what you know
until you start writing — and again, after you stop. 

           Now or Then

Before you leave, would you like to know
how much your credit card is worth in gold?
or in vaporous luminescence? or in idolatry?
Seek the answer to the first in the spot prices
of the precious metals listings;* the second,
through a magical app that awaits your
discovery; the third lurks among the dark
possessions of your ancient soul, ransacked
against your will under the fullest moon.

*One- quarter ounce of gold today is 468.5.

          Blanks 

I have always stood up to reality 
but sat down for unreality, 
and lay down, out of the way 
when I couldn’t be sure. “Sit up!” 
“Stand up!” the voices call in unison: 
“You’re not finished yet. You’ve got
to decide; you’ve got to make
a decision in unvarnished prose!” 

        Annulment 

In the meantime, a letter arrives 
from the Board of  Regrets: 

PLEASE CONSIDER YOURSELF REDACTED,
EXCISED FROM ALL CONSIDERATION.
AND SINCE YOU MANAGED TO GET HERE FROM NOWHERE,
YOU SHOULD EASILY FIND YOUR WAY BACK.

WITH PRETENSIONS OF SYMPATHY, ETC., ETC.

        P.S.

They meant that you did not have a compelling story,
that your biography did not illuminate the poems
or provide a compelling justification for reading them.
That you merely wrote from exile was not enough.

*

Global Postlude (Back Cover, Closing) 

. . . “Now how was that, Sweetpea,”
asked our relaxing seeress
of the Secretary of Final Conclusions,
after it was all over but the last sputter
and the folding up of the cosmos and the quiet.

Tony Towle 2019-2023