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equipment

      parked nearby in a nest of wire

      belonging to some good old boy named…

      what? Leldon? Lemuel? But sorry:

      in no barn did the whiskey bottles lie

      like Confederate casualties at Appomattox —

      no tent revivals, no cousins with red hair

      and freckled hands, no words as exotic as po’boy

      or chifforobe or muffuletta. Which meant

      we had no means to wrangle Beauty

      into the cathedrals of our mouths,

      though on occasion an ordinary cow

      could make the car’s eight-chambered heart

      stop dead beside a pasture, where none of us

      dared get out for fear of stampedes or hay fever

      or maybe even fangs hidden behind the lips.

      Call us ignorant: everything we knew poured out

      those two-at-a-time black-and-white TVS —

      one for picture, one for sound — & antlered

      with coat hangers that gave even Hawaii Five-O

      the speckling of constant winter. The snow

      fell like the fur of our fat white dog

      for whom my mother cooked lamb chops every night

      in an attempt to cure its baldness,

      while we dug our fingers in the chopmeat

      before she slapped it into patties.

      Then Star Trek came on. Then for an hour

      the men faded in and out of light.

      And there is nothing about this past

      it does any service to the language to recall:

      Art was what the fire department sold tickets to,

      raising money for the hook and ladder.

      It took place inside the school auditorium,

      where an old Italian couple hid

      by donning black and standing

      just outside the purple spotlight.

      Then music surged that was vaguely familiar

      though we’d fail to lure its elaborate name

      in from the borders of what we knew,

      while the marionette-swan bobbled to its feet

      as if newly born. I can say it now:

      Tchaikovsky. Of course, the whole time

      they worked the sticks and strings,

      the puppeteers stood right out in the open.

      Yet how silently they moved, how easy

      a thing they were to pretend we couldn’t see.

Foley

      It is Harrison Ford who just saved the world,

      but when he walks down a dirt road toward the ultralarge sun

      what sound like his boots are really bricks being drudged

      through a boxful of coffee beans. And the mare you’ve seen

      clopping along those nineteenth-century cobbles —

      she’s a coconut struck by a ball-peen hammer.

      And the three girls riding in the hansom,

      where the jouncing rustles their silk-and-bone:

      that’s a toothbrush moving across birchbark.

      Even the moment when one kickboxer’s perfect body

      makes contact with the other kickboxer’s perfect body

      has nothing to do with kickboxing, or bodies,

      but the concrete colliding with the abstract of perfection,

      which molts into a leather belt spanking a side of beef.

      This is the problem with movies:

      go to enough of them and pretty soon the world

      starts sounding wrongly synced against itself: e.g.,

      last night when I heard a noise below my bedroom window

      that sounded like the yowl a cat would make

      if its tongue were being yanked backward out its ass.

      Pain, I thought. Help, I thought,

      so at two a.m. I went outside with a flashlight

      and found a she-cat corkscrewed to a tom,

      both of them humped and quivering where the beam flattened

      against the grass whose damp was already wicking

      through my slippers. Aaah… love, I thought,

      or some distantly cousined feline analogue of love,

      or the feline analogue of the way love came out of the radio

      in certain sixties pop songs that had the singer keening

      antonyms: how can something so right feel so wrong,

      so good hurt so bad… you know what I’m talking about.

      And don’t you think it’s peculiar:

      in the first half of the sixties they made the black girl-groups

      sing with white accents and in the second half of the sixties

      they made the white girl-groups sing with black accents,

      which proves that what you hear is always

      some strange alchemy of what somebody thinks you’ll pay for

      and what you expect. Love in particular

      it seems to me we’ve never properly nailed down

      so we’ll know it when we hear it coming, the way

      screaming “Fire!” means something to the world.

      I remember this guy who made noises against my neck

      that sounded like when after much tugging on a jar lid

      you stick a can opener under its lip—that little tsuck.

      At first I thought this must be

      one of love’s least common dialects, though later

      when I found the blue spots all over I realized

      it was malicious mischief, it was vandalism, it was damage.

      Everybody has a story about the chorus of these,

      love’s faulty hermeneutics: the muffler in retreat

      mistaken for the motor coming, the declaration

      of loathing construed as the minor reproach;

      how “Babe, can I borrow five hundred bucks?”

      gets dubbed over “Goodbye, chump”—of course,

      of course, and you slap your head but it sounds funny,

      not enough sizzle, not enough snap. If only

      Berlitz had cracked the translations or we had conventions

      like the international code of semaphores;

      if only some equivalent of the Captain Midnight

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