CONJUNCTIONS:44, Spring 2005
Forrest Gander
Picking up
toward evening, bay breezes
cool The Mission and
fuchsia petals plop onto
slabs of root-tilted sidewalk,
local tectonics we maneuver,
you and I fecund with our
renewed vows en route
to La Cumbre with its Aztec
mural and gorditos—beside us
at the curb, its windows opaque,
a black seventy-five Cadillac
rocks high up and drops
back on pneumatic shocks, a whiff
of carne asada, poles
mummified with posters: Has Visto
Este Niño/ Thrash Polka at Slims—
while
five blocks away
the imminent lays its egg
in the eye of evening and what
begins as tenderness
will end in Calvary
whose devotion
can I claim
to aim wholly at you if holding
your hand even so my eyes
swivel to see the woman at her door
with dim desire or is it
nostalgia finally, mere registration,
an animal impulse
tightens the solar plexus
invisible to us three blocks away
a white-haired Asian man,
the collar of his jacket
stained with sweat,
leans on his bicycle, all he owns,
against the pharmacy wall while
a panhandler puts down
his bagged bottle
by the lightpost and watches
you reach for
my hand as we cross Dolores I spit
sidewise into my shadow
when you aren’t looking
the monitor on a stool outside
the Mission Revival plays a live feed
of the sermon within
a bleak scene few men
one child about twelve
sweaty preacher’s sthenic rant
dressed well
a parishioner slips out
through front doors but before
they close, one another—one
of us, the casual assembly of voyeurs—
ushers herself in;
so water evaporating
from treetops tugs water through leaf
which draws water through xylem
up the trunk from roots maybe
when one escaped
the other was sucked inside like that
who will rescue her
not I and not a nervous drunk
eyeing the seat bag and full-rack panniers
of a bike against the wall
we do not see
the man the panhandler steal the bike
but other can
two sparrows titter in fescue
on the traffic island
where we continue
to stroll in urban intimacy
a tuned rhythm of synced steps
mark us a couple
a couplet on the page of scrawled noise
men sawing pavement at the corner
thick rap bass thumping
from open cars a Harley
growls around Guerrero
Mexican songs at the café we pass
a splash of Mandarin washes over
the protected inlet of our taking-it-in
we’re quiet as urchins feeding on algae
fallen from stalks of kelp
only at the crossing only through horizons
with roses for sale, approaching the pair
eating at a curbside table,
an ink-haired Guatemalan girls in a red dress
her shyness sits at the edge of their plates like a fly
the bicycle thief wobbles our way
long strips of stratus make it
a worthwhile sunset I stumble and
catch the swing phase of your walk
erotic your left foot pigeon-toed
hips narrow as a boy’s
what is that smell in the alley
fennel urine and two starlings
their wings scissored behind them
like thoughtful rabbis walking
I used to imagine strangers naked
you say now I imagine them
in coffins the back of our hands touch
you squeeze my wrist the body
ambiguously subject and
object a dog tied to a fireplug sneezes
the old man passing by says Bless you
a little sordid and still warm leftover
flan-yellow of day remains
before what they once called civil-dark
when it grew too dim to work and
the ice man with his iron-scorpion
dragged to a kitchen his last block
already the future is cued up and closing in
the thief pedaling though we have not seen him
when you turn
your face to ask me if
Mexicans call hummingbirds colibrí
or chupaflor flower-sucker the vibrant fading
light reveals moth-egg bumps beneath your eye
we suppose we invent this privacy
the privilege to brim with each other
as though our rillet might be
deduced from the mainstream
as if we were stirred
together past mere propinquity
the warm familiar
rapture I assume you feel
with me and I rub my tongue
to prickles in my throat
foretell a cold and step back
to the brink
of thee, smudged
newspaper print where
fingers brushed your nose
at once we sense a commotion ahead
faces by one like cards
when a bet is called
flip their open expression
toward us
what is happening
hurtles our way in shouts shouts
bottleneck to the lip of where we stand
alert as though a knife had tapped a glass
I see the man on bicycle
under a neon taquería sign only at
the crossing only through horizons between
someone yells something inarticulate
almost to us
he is racing
recklessly up the sidewalk startled
pedestrians jump aside
already plummeting
from prospective to present
his counterpoint
divorcing you from me
from the rhythm of our tangency
I lurch and cannot feel yet and fail to rise
into the revision
of circumstance as though
I tumbled from stairs
to a spotlit stage where you were
cut off from me by the light
a sidewalk of strangers
severed from concerns that seconds prior
perfectly contained them
waylaid and yielding their leads
for the role of audience
the drama hurrying on its way
the head of event expanding
the dark head of event crowning before us
its intensity
full bore and as the thief nears
our end of the block it isn’t yet
clear what is happening someone yells
an indecipherable whinny of alarm
the immediate stamping in its stall
I strain for clues in the turned
expectant faces the many
misconstrued bodies off balance on pause
to isolate the bicyclist in his singular
tumult he who supplants
you who makes
his claim greater on me
he himself
custodian now of this present in which
against inertia I strain to act
but
how quickly he penetrates
the blister of my regard
from which you’ve been
extracted as the world goes quiet
handlebar and rear-rack panniers
swinging side to side half
standing on pedals whose
wild joggling wide-wet eyes urge
No no don’t stop me
I grab for his arm as your hand
stays in mine and
from an infinite
distance I recall you
your presence
blows in, a red petal,
three of us
pooling our volitions
you tug my shirt
my hand slaps his neck half-
assed scuffle my
knuckles scrape the stucco wall
as he flails
at me I can hear
but whom do I hear?
my failure
all along to recognize
your full weight and solidity
you say No
the word rings and through the ring
a thin scarf of disapproval
draws across my still vague intent
awkward in the struggle
to hold him to judge what
effort to make with whom
am I thrashing
a question mark for a backbone
my hand touches his shoulder
so tentative and slowly
the gesture might be taken
by those watching
for an act of deputation
he stiff-arms and brushes me off
and I turn on my heel
like the other
spectators, a pure stare
now a singularity uncoupled once again
that readily from you like the dissolving glow
of a clicked-off light
the floater behind a closed eye
and so combined elements
on the stalk of an instant
unpetal their parts in wind
a hand bleeding a man on bicycle
a murky sense of restraint which is you here
next to me but across the caesura
the rent stanza in our accord
what I am cracks into two acts
one replays the scene
revising it toward
some salvific end and
the other gauges
the thief’s increasing
distance from me
instinctively as when flying
I measure the gap
from jet to ground
with an image of my body falling
he veers to the street
and a hard pant
spins me to see
a white-haired man
in a slow-motion run
slather of mucus under
pigeon-hole nostrils, his gaze
nailed ahead at the crossing
my eyes put on his face
his mouth a gasping rictus
as he plods past
never to catch
what
lulled on routine and self
and casual neglect I let slip
rooted in place around me
a block of storefronts and trees
a man on foot falling farther behind
and one on bike and
the rest of us unrescued
stopped in time transfixed
to this stark spectacle of our separateness
making it stand
hammering its horizons home
behind which each of us says I don’t know
who you are
you never broke through me
the key makes no sound
when you go to play
the world shifts
along a hairline crack
you can’t tell
what is happening
until it moves on and is gone as
someone and someone’s grief careen
around a corner