Dan Marlin (3.26.06)

BEFORE THEY LET YOU SUE

The good mailhandler Breader
Educated me
As we watched a wild truckyard storm
Whirl out to sea

"They'll pay for your codeine
For your splint for your nurse
For I.V.s and transfusions,
If they have to, for a hearse
They'll pay a million dollar bill
For anything you break,
They'll pay for jacuzzis, acupuncture, witches brew
--But you one stone fool
If you think they'll let you sue!

They'll pay you compensation
For all the time you take
Then put detectives on you
To see if you a fake
--But one thing they won't ever do
For man or pity sake
Jesus Christ will come again
Before they let you sue!

It don't matter if what fell on you
Wasn't made right
Or if they'd been warned about it
40 days and nights,
Or if they had you doin' shit
You ain't supposed to do
They'll truss up your guts
And phenobarb your seizures
Pay for your ultrasound
Catscans and procedures
They'll pick your veins for blood
Til your arm is black and blue,
But you'll pitch in the World Series, boy,
Before they let you sue!"




RONALD REAGAN'S ENTRANCE TO HEAVEN
PORTAL OF EL SALVADOR


Ronald Reagan was welcomed to heaven by a manicurist, her black hair pulled tightly back from a widow's peak. She took his hand, looking up at him.

"What do you see?" he asked, from his chair of gleaming combs.

"The book of your eyes."

"And in them?" ( ' It goes well' he thought, ' Truly as on earth, so is it in heaven.' )

"I see....myself".

" And what are you doing in the blue field of my eyes?"

" I am looking for my mother," and she lifted his hand to her mouth.

" Where is your dear mother?" ( ' The tenderness in my voice has perfect pitch ', he mused.)

" She is deep in the village well with the other women, packed like pigs' feet in a jar.
She lies in the field of bones, unburied, in a skirt of mud and spiders. I see her torn in the vulture's beak, where you left her."

She curled her tongue around his little finger, sucked out a microphone, a cowboy shirt, a papaya, and spit them at his feet.

He jerked his hand away, hissing, " You're not from here, are you? Go back where you came from!"

" We've all come here from the same place" she spoke slowly, " We can only go back to each other."

Ronald Reagan closed his eyes and prayed, " Our father who art in Heaven"

" Yes? "

" This woman does not belong here! Send her away!"

" I will send her where she belongs."

"Thank you Lord", he sighed, opening his eyes.

The manicurist, her hair black as obsidian, sat before him.








BESIDE A RAIN CANAL IN MUKONOSO


The first warm evening in March. I'm walking beside a rain canal in Mukonoso, across which I can see the open back door of a small restaurant's kitchen, where a pair of mops lean into the yellow light. There's a swift, sudden shadow at my shoulder; I turn, watch it dip and climb, blend into the penumbra, then reappear.

I recognize this bat by the red gold spot at the base of her left ear.

"Hey, I know you, rice paddy down the road. May 14, 2000."

" You have a good memory" she replies, " Where has the wide world taken you?"

" I'm trying to find room for it in here " I say, tapping the hard bone of my brow, " And you?"

" Just heading out for the fields. By the way, have you been by the field where we spoke last time? A quarter of it has disappeared."

" When did that happen?"

" A week before New Year's I saw the old farmer out there with a couple of guys in business suits doing a play by play on their cell phones. Couple of weeks later a truck came by and they unloaded thick--I mean manhole-thick iron plates --and covered the rice stubble in the southeast corner of the field. Pretty soon people started driving over the little ramp the farmer used to wheel his tractor down on. First there were only three or four; now you got cars crowded in like so many billiard balls. Each model has to have a name, you know: Mellow Cruise, Swift Glow, Cuddle Cube, Every Jerry, Sambar."

" Sambar? That's a weird name for a car. "

" Tell me about it! Do you know what Sambar means in India? It's a kind of lentil soup. Add a little dumpling to it, and you have Idli Sambar. I had a cousin travelled over to Madras on a container ship. They don't call cars Sambars in India, though."

" You're not thinking of Samarkand are you? "

" I do know the difference, friend, between Uzbekistan and Mother India. But as long as you mention it, the bazaar in Samarkand is fragrant through the night, especially when they unload summer melons."

" Sounds lovely" I reply, " but back to the field? Maybe those iron planks are temporary, until Spring planting. Could be the old farmer is having trouble paying his land tax."

"That's possible, but here's how I see it: the less planting, the fewer bugs, the fewer bugs the harder to feed my bat babies and my own face. Tell the truth, I'm getting hungry right now. If I don't eat six, seven bugs a minute I get light-headed. Where are you headed?"

" Me? I'm just walking no place in particular; that's how I find my sense of direction. It makes it easier, when I get home, to enter my wife's eyes."

" Huh? Sounds interesting, but just because we're both mammals doesn't mean I know what you mean. Never have expected human beings to make sense."

A bit self-conscious, I look at my shoes for a moment.

" You know, I'm not sure I know what I mean either. Give me another couple of years to think about it, OK?"

But when I glance up I realize she couldn't wait, and I am talking to the wide, empty face of the neon-sprinkled darkness.




NO BABIES TONIGHT


The lovers arrive in the country night,
Slip off their shoes
At the kitchen door.
As the old florescent bulb flickers on
Crystal lenses glint
In the brown moons of her eyes
Where the cataracts' clouds were lifted.

They will make no babies tonight.

His sperm, tainted once
By chemo poison
Cannot pass on the genes
For foolishness, narcissism, ardor.

Her one ovary
Cannot drop an egg
To the altar of the womb,
Which was taken long ago
To stop a great bleeding.

The weave of their tongues
Will be real
Though all of their teeth are not;
The warmth of cheek and thigh
Smoother now
That the liquid nitrogen torch
Burned their warts away.

Deep within his scrotum
Spent radioactive seeds
The size of rice grains
Float in the withered prostate--
Vigilantes once,
Who hunted down renegade cells.

Tonight, though, they do not think
Of death or tumors
As they sweep the tatami floor,
Lifting away a weightless, knuckle-size spider,
Unfold the futon and sheet,
The flowery faux-wool cover
And lay themselves down.