December 2004

Two Poems by Richard Tillinghast

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We Kept Missing Each Other

Those nights I anchored the far end

of the bar at the Black Mariah,

spilling drinks and feeding

the jukebox with lugubrious quarters,

you'd be halfway up Mount Analogue

hooded in that weird white kaftan of yours,

sitting in the lotus mumbling your incomprehensible mantra,

inhaling moonlight through the business end of your kundalini.

But when I tried to join you, belaying up

a rubble-choked crevasse—

my knuckles bleeding, one knee out of whack—

I found the hut empty,

your devotional candle still a-smoulder.

Years later I heard you had something going on Wall Street,

were getting pretty good at puts and takes.

Myself, I was always shy around girls.

You had if anything too many of them.

“A thirst for loving shook him like a snake,” they quoted.

Porfirio Rubirosa just didn't measure up, they said.

The word Fred Astaire was mentioned.

We kept missing each other.

I was living on a commune in Venezuela

shrimping off a houseboat

drift-fishing for sharks.

You were cultivating the perfect lawn.

Your garage was in perfect order.

The wax job on your Buick was dazzling.

I paid off my debts, got a job

writing for The Wall Street Journal.

My rental properties were starting to pay off.

That's when I found you working as a shade-tree mechanic

outside of Yuma, Arizona.

Brought you a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon while you

rebuilt a Volkswagen engine on a riverbank under cottonwoods.

I felt most at ease in a hotel,

liked putting my belongings into impersonal drawers.

You were spending most of your time at home by this point,

smoking your pipe by the fire looking Victorian,

a pater familias surrounded by the next generation.

Just to think that Richard was your name too!

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The World Is

The world is a man with big hands

and a mouth full of teeth.

The world is a ton of bricks, a busy signal,

your contempt for my small talk.

It's the crispy lace that hardens

around the egg you fry each morning

sunny side up.

The world is the last week of August,

the fumes that dizzy up into the heat

when you fill your tank

on the way to work late, again.

The world is “Please take a seat over there.”

The world is “It'll have to come out.”

The world is “Have a nice day.”

The world is “What is that peculiar smell?”

The world is the button that popped off,

the watch that stopped, the lump you discover and

turn on the light.

The world is a full ashtray, the world is that grey look,

the world is the County Coroner of Shelby County.

The world is a cortege of limousines,

an old man edging the grass from around a stone.

The world is “Belfast Says No!”, the world is reliable

sources, a loud bang and shattered glass raining down

on shoppers.

The world is a severed arm in a box of cabbages, “And then

the second bomb went off and we didn't know which

way to run.” The world is Semtex and black balaclavas

and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The world is

car alarms silenced, and a street suddenly empty.

The world is one thousand dead today in the camps.

The world is sixty thousand latrines, the world is

bulldozers pushing bodies and parts of bodies into a ditch.

The world is dysentery and cholera,

infected blood, and vomit. The world

is mortality rates and rape as an instrument of war.

The world

is a 12-year-old with a Walkman, a can of Coke, and an Uzi.

Richard Tillinghast's Web site is:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rwtill/

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