At The Politik Republican

Musky soviet books and caffeine-free instant bitter toxified vacuum dried coffee remnants and ideas ideas ideas: the realm of Politik and cider, cacophany and eclectic bears dancing in duck-told Black & White ballet personification. The spoon jumped over the moon and ran away with the dish. One finds himself in a courduroy blazer in some Caucasus Eastern-European country fighting over political tyranny and strife in a three-times varnished cafe table and wooden chair, drinking vodka and tea from among the somnabulent light reflecting off the late evening snow burying window sills, slowly, mercilessly, in Stalinist-sacrilge mounds. Mounds and mounds of it sleeping, unaware, or if not that, submissively letting it cover all but the filthy windows of the grocery-turned-cafe. Black spots and white spots, who is to care? One snow, the other ash, grit, bits of unpaved road, unpaved life lived, strived, and beaten all the way to hell. The egalitarian life can only be found here where it is really needed. Where it cannot be heard. Where when it is heard it is responded to with red-striped papers, red-veiled women, red-paved backs, crimson-inked fingers. Yes, the poverty-ridden academic, tatooed blood-handed in political blasphemy, a fight for resources where none are had. Or, once had, taken from those who destroyed the pilgrimages of those before them. Biting, as heads from Dante's middle purgatory, chewing their way up the ranks in a plethora of inscisors, flesh and eyeballs. Hair and red mouths clawing at existence. Such is the Politik Republican. A front for an entrance into the worlds of the Middle Cacuasus, the crossroads of the world. A back entrace out of Socialistic barbarism to the liberalistic iconogrpahy of a new communism, only to replace one grizzly oligarchy with another. Blind elephant men leading the blind.

The new snow falls. The young academics at the window seats scowl, thrust fingers at much-abused pamphlets. A journalist walks in, bundled in a black trench, a little too-lightly dressed for the deep, merciless Eastern Eupropean winters. No one notices. Trosky-hair and turtle-rimmed glasses provokes another argument among his scholarly associates which ensues violently for a few seconds. Then another tremor. The earthquake finally settles and the dim light of the cafe gradually reveals the presence of the observer.

Harvard Avenue: Samitic Quater

Sea-crusted bagels and jelly-filled cubic-shaped sugar pieces on just-baked bear claws. I love Sundays on Harvard Avenue, where bright sunlight reveals embroidered kepas on men's partially balding heads, tsit-tsi on children, side-locked curls down to their waists, a primary colored elephant-pattenrn on his head, small black shoes and gathered black dress pants struggling to keep up with this father's. Starchy-whites, a clean finish to the morning. Sidewalks filled with wide store-fronts of silver and gold, selling soft-cover children's stories in red and green cloth, elaborate silver candelbra menorahs, and smaller, simpler, clay versions in modern colors and styles. Sycamore bouldevards of mottled moss green and beigge dwarf girls in long skirts and sleeves, a long reveire into verdant summer of lawn mower buzzing and fresh cut grass, hostas, full, huge, overwhelming the garden plots and overflowing onto sidewalks and streets. White fence buffers to wrap-porch Victorians in pink, lavender, and buttercup, the purple flowers of the hostas shape-shifting into the milk-spotted asphalt. Plates of light sliding across teh road in response to a random number sorter: the theory of the universe is in this walk down Brookline boulevards of Jewish bakeries and boufant skirts, human life dwarfed by the elements and colliding, crunching, concentrated on city corners of spilt ice-cream cones, stained glass synogogues, colored lightbulb covered Sukkot, next to the mailboxes and parking meters, bubble gum patties, collecting here, and then moving outward in diminishing relief toward the park, the grassy square, then the woodships beneath the swings, and finally, curling back into the neighborhoods whose streets turn in on themselves or, due to some slight of hand, end abruptly in a carousel of flourescent orange lillies and scattered wildflowers like some mockery to the attempted outlier.

Solstice Day in Diorama

Ra lies on the grass, a beacon of sensuality, stretching out the days of summer like raw Mexican mozzerella stretched out on wooden rafts. All around him the world is amorphous, untouchable, unpresent except for the sky and the fact that I wish to touch the long, stretched out body of Christ. The white-cracked knoll smells like just-cut grass and brings back memories od Southern cream pies, large inland estates, and endless bayous filled with roots in the shape of Roman arches and waters so black they mirror jewelbug leaves and mosquito feelers in a tamped Roman mosaic. A waterly sleep sa dep and dark as the reservoir where the lady of the Lake lies in nocturnal somnabulance is residence to bees, flies, knats, watergrasses, and the occasional alligator. The scarlet ibis dreams in this paradise of Hester and Dimsdale, every minute more aware of the potential of place to isolate, grow and redeem oneself through the antithesis of reflection. The secrets of trees peel open the pearlescent nocturnal lilly, revealing intimate natural worlds within worlds. Red-apinted songs chortle mystirously from anong the reeds, and a nesting bird stirs from within the soft, black humus banks. I reach out and touch him, vying for sensory engagement, his presence a cacophanous escape from the rolled alligator nets of disciplinary focus. A relaxation piece has entered my control group and I struggle to reform the synaptic focus to Ra before me, a continual allegory of calm. I wonder how others fall into and out of the slippery bayous with ibis-like grace. Just to the left, the sky is overcast, and through the lens, a mauve-printed orange.

Solstice Day

Druids, hippies, revelers and curious spectators gather at Stonehenge, the neolithic arrangement of sun-beveling tablet stones and window-wide steps, shallow dips carved into the Beacon Hill of Cambridge. The spread of respite is a sight so rare it might as well be the city's grass farm, the emerald island farm supporting bodies in the supine position, several dozen Welwichia in the Sahara desert, thick brown tendrils the curly-nailed world record holder for longest nails, a foriegn biological taking hostage on the sands of the uninhabited reaches of the continent. The plant was only recently discovered due to its rarity and affintiy for vast, isolated parchment. On a hill across the pond, Celtic ancestors still invest mythology and spiritual meaning into the precariously placed megaliths, festivities in blue woad paint, pasted hunks of braids circling the head in evocative frenzy, the weighted acceleration an inverse relationship with the length of day. The charcoal woodberry-whetted backdrop of carnal vestments and vocalizations is a profession of European association with tribal origins, long attempts to snuff out histories of impecable Edwardian manners and the suffocating collars of Victorian prudence.

Dash surreptitiously into the late evening sunlight and the day presents itself as almost too early for a mead hall visit. Gaze through moist, syrupy air in search of a bean shaped automobile, and look upon a particular Welwichia that waves. "It's the longest day of the year," prompting excitment and the ensuing midnight dip into the nearest inky body of water, a glass of beer at the Politik Republican and a collection of beach rocks of Lost coast flowers. The solstice carnage culminates in the serendipitous hypocracy of lake-effect lunar mapping, the enjoyably unexpected passenger of a hurt bicycle, and the unwilling irony of sweet pickle turkey sandwiches in early morning.

First Swim III (Cont.)

Rembrant evocative kinesis pools into the lake-fulls of memory swallows. There is no hint of anticipatory repudiation slipping into the hippocampic repository. My axial nerves are as thick and sufficiently anesthetized in the grade B syrup, the watercolor painting of pink beach bodies and jeweled greens and blues a vibrant reinsertion to a place made closer to home than home by virtue of absence from it. The crocuses and pine-shaded daffodils ensconce a cool, unblemished reminder of possession, whereby a place remembered is thereby owned when turned over and over again in thick parchment creases of review. Plaster snakes crawl up the veranda and over the Roman arch leading to the kitchen, the closet bathroom, always cold in winter, misanthropically shunning visitors in winter, but close quarters with the grape-vine-covered window say otherwise, as if someone neglected to clip it away from view, intentionally unkempt. It is a place where forgetting is acceptable, even encouraged by grape-vine tendrils and leaves wider than the average palm, or any palm worth contemplating.

This is not my home, but every memory says it is, from the wind that slides through the porch window-casings as I read Catch-22 on the ancient brown and mahagoany flower-patterned divan, to the sounds of birds chirping vivaciously at dawn until they proclaim harbor in the New England attic treehouse, a tropical jungle as exotic and captivating as any balancing the Equator. Thick, blue-striped sailor canvas is parted to let in the sunlight that trickles through the north-facing valley, pine boughs, wide red-varnished window casings, and finally, wooden venetian blinds. Next to me, voices carry up from the drive three cool stories below, and I prepare to slip my book into the floor-to-ceiling casings on the left wall. I read over this cove of memory until worn smooth, transmutated and objectified.

First Swim II (Cont.)

A tease like some Appalachian ideograph, it is more pronounced the longer I am away from it. What makes this day the first swim? Warmth of the water, length of the day, time of the year, returning the way a memory returns like a tulip, a forgotten planting, and suddenly discovered by the front door, pert and demanding. I know I come here every time just for that, the smoldering of ember-caught recantations, lake-side reeds blazing in violent flame. And oftentimes, the mental rendezvous become watershed memory themselves. Settings in silver meld into willow drapings and canoes bouncing gently against the banks. Silver glasses, an embroidered cloth-wrapped basket of challah as the centerpiece, a vivid table-cloth announcing Friday's rest and taking of bread and wine, silt finally disturbed by the first warmth of the season, rendering the water viable for mikvah and long weekends of violently verdant greenery. Awareness. Mindfulness. Alabaster careening ardently measuring day-length. I want to jump with innocuous serendipity into this carefully constructed kaleidescope of chlorofil-birthed eroticism at will, but it is a hipocracy that occurs only once every harvest moon or so. A photograph slipped out in an unorganized attic pile of musk-laden once-savored instances. What is their value now? How shall I place or displace these memories? What is the value in drawing them up (or forcing them back down?) I still play this one because like seeking out an end long sought, I have never been so vitally charged. The central kinesis of wavelength vibration in my cells turns over and over like bread dough at noon in mid-summer and radioactively reconstructs my DNA. I am proteinaciously different. I am, literally, not what I was yesterday. Remnants drag along, a bracelet carried, dropped, stepped on, and one day gone without notice, an absence noted with poignant awareness, the way spotting a lady-bug corpse in dead-winter will pour June lady bugs from window screens for weeks afterwards.

First Swim

Brandy drip intoxication. Some legion away I see the rocks and remember it was about this time last year when memories were formed. They coagulated like mozzerella cheese under enyzymatic influence, curds carefully forming within my fingertips like clouds on a mission to reform the tapestry of the sky. Across the lake are the rocks on which I sat and contemplated ulterior possibility, the possibility of which had never felt real until two people with bicycles thought it was, and then it was almost as if it was. The water refrains from being room temperature despite the sudden deck-card fall of warm days preceding it, but I slide close to shore and dip a hand into something as hot as urine. It is not until about ten minutes out (some floursecent bikini on the dock belies my undercover nature during this illicit activity) that I smell the lake, and everything flows back in carotid waves. I miss that blood, the taste and smell of it, now like some lost opportunity snowed over and in the spring, last winter's remnants remaining like dead leaves, still wet and preserved in blocks of ice, unwanted, distateful in the shock-white light of new spring. My skin was never as eggshell white as when I looked at those leaves, two albino pidgeons in Kansas. Like some Neitzchean revelry, I come to the conclusion that Saturday afternoons are best spent listening to (not waiting for) trains passing lakeside, a reed strewn shore beveling a wire fence and a signed marked "warning" in muddy orange and black, unobtainable except by the few willing to cross the entire lake, a promontory of granite just large enough for sitting and sought so occasionally that they carry memories the way rocks weight debris on the bottom of the lake, a sink for particles, properties, and memories waiting to be tapped by the unsuspecting bather.