--LOVE IS ALWAYS THIRSTY

 

…I read six books in San Diego—well, either in San Diego, or else to and fro.

They were all quite good in their own way, except maybe the last one.  Perhaps I didn’t get the last one.  In fact, I know I didn’t get it, not like I should have.
The book in question was the latest issue of “Poetry,” a journal that has been around since the 60’s, or thereabout.
It’s a thin volume but very dense, especially the many pages of commentary at the end that made me feel quite stupid, both as a reader of poetry and as a writer of it.
The author spent a great deal of time instructing.  He talked a lot about “unknowing” and sighted various famous poets to underscore his points, such as:

-“I confess to a desire to forget knowing, especially when I sit down to work on a poem.” Mark Strand

-“I hardly knew what I was writing; I just knew that the words were right.”  Elizabeth Bishop

-“To me, poetry has a duty not to know what it thinks.” Alice Oswald

Most of it confused me.  Shouldn’t poetry know what it thinks?  Shouldn’t a writer know what she wants her poem to convey, at least in some respects?

It made me feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. 
I certainly didn’t when I first started out, because back then everything I wrote rhymed, and they were pretty awful.

The first non-rhyming poem I wrote was a short little thing for a college girl I had a massive crush on:

Lady By The Sea

Beauty had never done as much,

nor the sea in all its wonder,
but you,
walking the beach barefoot and free,
have.

I liked it all right, and she did, too, or so she said, promptly requesting another.

Her second poem was inspired by birth control. 
At eighteen, I was still terribly naïve and thought birth control was similar to aspirin—something easily obtained without forethought.  When a friend explained that this was not so, I was a little spun out. 
I know how sexist this is/was, but I thought you became attracted to someone, then very attracted to them, before plotting sexual escapades.  (Again, I realize how ignorant and chauvinistic this makes me look.)
I guess I was just jealous to think this girl could/would/might have had sex with some other boy that wasn’t me if I hadn’t stumbled into the picture.
Anyway, I wrote this, which I thought was bitter irony, but which she thought was a fun little piece meant to induce chuckling.

The Pill

Take a pill,

swallow it first,
then some water to
quench your thirst.
Hop in bed,
your pleasure be,
no need to worry,
you’re pregnant free!

I hope my poetry has improved, but I’m having doubts.  (Most writers I know are insecure about their craft.)

In San Diego, I came about this darling girl and wrote:

Childlike

The child wearing a bug costume,

running through a maze
of waist-high hedges,
skipping and giggling,
this girl,
perhaps three or three and half,
she owns the sun
and sky and wonder
while the rest of the world waits,
desperately wanting her to own it as well,
if even just for a few days,
if even for a few brief moments
of unvarnished bliss.
Her laughter is an earthquake.
It rattles the thickest, tallest trees,
and plucked from their branches,
each leaf floats and free-falls,
for once unafraid of landing or death,
simply content to have witnessed,
by happenstance,
joy so pure and genuine.


At another point during the trip, I was transfixed by the ocean.  A lot was happening on the surface— streaming sailboats, cruise ships, ferries—but I saw the sea differently, and later, on the plane home, I wrote this:

Sea Sick

There is no threat of mutiny,

but then again, the sea
is capable of anything
when she is this blue,
this unhinged and misguided.
Look: even the gulls fly away.
Whales leap, trying to escape her embrace.
Clouds haven’t been seen in weeks.
And so she inhales and exhales,
shooting waves across her crest
in rippled, liquid curtains.
She opens her arms and swims,
treading water, face sun-scaled,
sweating algae and plankton
until that pale peace 
is stripped away.
Finally she holds her breath
and dives deep,
roaming the murky depths,
searching herself for evidence
of mistakes made, misplaced love,
the reason her life has become
so very vast yet devoid of meaning,
surrounded by beauty with
no one to share it.

I wrote other poems.  I’ll keep writing them.  Mine will never be all that clever.  You’ll be able to track what I’m trying to convey. 
They might not matter at all, and that might not be important.

 

 

 

--WHEREVER I HAVE GONE, THE BLUES ARE ALL THE SAME        

 

 I’m So Glad You Woke Up

The moon is quiet tonight,

knitting secrets against her breasts again
like a fastidious jeweler
as clouds shudder and shift
while the universe gazes back awestruck.
Yet, can I admit it,
to you or myself,
how there is a pin or pole inside of me--
a stake, a shiv
a shaft, a pipe
an icepick,
someone’s rusted jackknife or crowbar--
stuck all the way through
my hide and the shallow
measly meat of me,
chest to back,
pinning me to a wall
like a bloody poster left only to drip
and drip
and drip?
And I can’t move
or breathe at all.
There’s nothing to do
but watch your chest rise and fall,
study your back freckles as you doze,
memorize their pattern
and constellations,
close my eyes and pray
that this is really real
and not some dream I’m dreaming,
on my knees and praying
that you’ll be here in the morning,
head cocked on a pillow
with all sorts of flouncy hair,
saying, “Good morning, Handsome.
I’m so glad you woke up
and that I can see your face again.”

 

Small Gods

I am taking the small gods with me,

a trail of butterflies floating above my head,
each meticulously painted, as unique as snowflakes.
Even when I swim the lake, they shadow me.
Even underwater, these insects dive down, too.
On the shore, their beating wings dry me off.
I’ve never had such friends, so generous and attentive.
They lead me to a copse and then a clearing
smelling of moss and honeysuckle
where deer nuzzle the snouts of other deer,
hummingbirds spinning in place
like tiny prisms or tufts of breath,
sunshine breaching through each seam
of the swaying branches overhead
as if its announcing the first birth of human life.

I am taking the small gods with me everywhere,

day and night, today and tomorrow,
slowing down, taking the time,
finally learning to see beauty,
even when there might be none.

 

The Currency of Despair

Around me now

everyone is dealing in the currency of despair,
their hope shredded napkins,
confidence wrapped with barbed wire,
pixie dust locked up in an unreachable urn.
I want to tell them they
must have something to sing about,
someone to sing to,
songs that make the heart jump and hurdle.
The way to defeat despair is to never cash it in.
Pick a bouquet of blue bells instead.
Make crazy monkey love till dawn.
Dance naked in the rain
with hands held high
and mouth open wide.
Catch every drop of chilled moisture
and swallow as much as you can.

 

How To Feel Less Miserable

I am out of orbit again.

Gravity has lost its sense of reason
The sky keeps changing clothes and colors--
red dress, yellow dress, brown dress.
If there are pills to combat a feeling like this,
I want some.

Yesterday a woman claimed to be psychic.

She predicted a three year old girl
would be murdered today, but could provide neither
the name of the girl or her killer.
I’m not making this up.

People without a fear of heights

think you’re a pussy when you stand
far from the window, nervous and sweating.
It’s easy to belittle what you
don’t understand, and fearful people
have little to defend their own phobias.

Maybe it all boils down

to the fact that I’ve got
too much time on my hands,
thinking about things
that would better be left alone.

Like the fact that all the bees are dying,

elephants are being born without tusks,
and somewhere right this moment
a child is being hurt when it did nothing wrong,
but be born by wicked parents.

In two more days the sun will revert,

shine on my uplifted face while
the ocean mists my skin.
I’ll be a tourist, distracted by scenery,
with no time to ponder anything but
my own greedy pleasure.

 

 

 

 

 

--THE BOOK OF LOVE IS LONG AND BORING.  IT’S FULL OF CHARTS AND FACTS AND FIGURES, AND INSTRUCTIONS FOR DANCING. 
THE BOOK OF LOVE HAS MUSIC IN IT.  IN FACT, THAT’S WHERE MUSIC COMES FROM.
 

Talking To Animals

Growing up on our makeshift farm

often became a calamity,
like those times Cathy and Irene,
our Guernsey milk cows,
somehow escaped the barbed wire fence
and made it all the way to 8^th street,
hooves clattering on the pavement
like someone thrashing pots and pans together.

I had two pet calves then,
Go Go and Thunder.
They were exceptional listeners and
for a long time, my only true friends.
I fed them candied oats out of my palm,
milk from a plastic bottle tipped with a rubber nipple.
As they tugged and sucked away,
foam bubbles gathering on their lengthy jaws,
I told them all of my horrible secrets,
how I thought life was playing
cruel tricks on me and my siblings.
I took their wide-eyed stares to mean
I’d shocked them with such confessions,
only to realize later that they were always wide-eyed.

By the time the calves turned two
and were no longer calves,
they became someone’s dinner,
leaving me dejected but grateful that they weren’t ours.
I have a dog now.
She’s a great listener as well,
her eyes shiny and alert as I speak,
sharp ears always upturned at the ready.
Still, I keep my secrets mostly hidden.
She’s a cute little thing,
barely six pounds soaking wet,
unable to bear too much weight
or learning that her owner might not be
the man she assumes he is.
 

 

Learning How To Swim

In our camper,

which was my room one summer,
I found the photos by accident--
a stack of Polaroids stuffed in the back of a cupboard,
cinched tight, covered by a velvet Crown Royal satchel
with script scrolled in navy and gold.

She was topless in everyone,

her bare, swollen breasts oddly lifted upward,
as if they were inflated,
which of course they were,
inflated like the floaties I used to fasten my arms to
while learning how to swim.
It was daytime in all the pictures,
abundant sunshine screeching around each shot
in sprays of pale yellow piss or bright bland ochre,
and so she squinted back at the photographer,
always smiling though,
offering the same beaming grin that had won her
first place in a number of beauty pageants
when she was younger and
maybe not as wicked as I knew her now.

In some she blew a flirtatious kiss.

In others, she cupped the denim shorts
that tightly hugged her ass,
her head cocked back as if giving herself up as a sacrificial offering,
her neck a crowbar of rippled, white metal,
wearing a blonde wig,
a brunette wig,
a strawberry-blonde wig,
a _______ wig,
a _______ wig.
a _______ wig.

If it were anyone else,

anyone but me and her,
it might have felt or meant something different,
might have even seemed admirable--
an older, married couple shaking things up like that,
injecting innovation and spice,
new breasts and new kinky exploits,
a little fun in the sun,
pose-and-click boob job pictures
taken just for them.

But again, this was now about me and her,

about me, and her, and him,
whoever he was.
And so I studied the photographer’s shadow,
the flattened length of his body
angled on the ground in silhouette. 
I searched for a flattop haircut,
for any clue or reassurance.
I bent down and peered as closely as I could,
inspecting grain and shadow,
yet it was impossible to say one way or the other.

Stumped, I burned them one at a time in the sink.

I watched the gnarled hunks of ash
skate around the water-filled basin
before finally succumbing to the drain.
When the last charred piece slipped down,
I gripped the counter, squeezing the fake wood
so hard it seemed to excrete moisture back into my hands.
I knew there’d be all kinds of hell to pay when
Mother found the photos missing,
but it was suppertime and she was calling for me,
yelling that my food was getting cold.

 

--ALL I WANT IS FOR YOU TO MAKE ME SMILE

 

 Sunday Best

We are busy taking photos,

busy being still as totems,
our parents seated in the middle of their brood
like elderly hippie royalty
though we know better,
though we are each sharper than people give us credit.

Dressed in our Sunday Best,

we resemble dime store mannequins
made from faulty plastic molds,
mom’s blonde wig a mass of hair-sprayed waves,
dad’s hair a flat matt of porcupine quills,
all of us something we’re not again.

The photographer is a fastidious ant man,

telling us how to smile and stand,
which way to tilt our chins,
how the backlighting will create shadows
if we aren’t able to hold ourselves together.

Just last week one of us was

a runaway, a soldier and a felon,
a bad poet, two wrestlers, and four abused siblings
quaking in a shroud of defenseless skin.

But today our grins are fashioned with see-through plaster,

our arms hung low like chimps so that no one
—not the photographer,
or those who will view this picture years later—
is able to see our hands,
some scarred, but all fisted tight.

 

Shrink-To-Fit

It was a rare day of glory,

Dad high on sunshine instead of Schlitz Malt Liquor,
so giddy for some reason that he
nearly skipped through the aisles at 2 Swabbies.
When he told me to pick something out for myself,
I believed it a trick and looked the shelves over
to see who might be watching,
waiting to bust a gut with laughter.

But he was serious.  He meant it!

Dad who never bought me anything but meals
because we were what people called White Trash
and because that’s all he could afford.
When I picked a pair of Levis off a stack asking, “Are these okay?”
he tousled my hair with his grease-stained bear paw,
checked the price tag, and said, “Sure thing, Flower Child.”

But the pair I’d chosen weren’t the right ones,

weren’t Shrink-To-Fit, the style all the other kids wore.
These jeans stayed black-blue and stiff as shingles.
Wearing them at the bus stop the next day,
Dad drove by in his white Caddie,
cigarette smoke climbing the car windows
like dragon claws made of fog.
If he was looking my way or even knew if it was me,
I couldn’t tell.

When Steve Pittman asked,

“Ain’t that your Dad?”
I stared at a rusted beer can blinking sunray code
in the pile of detritus behind us.
When he asked again, I stared some more
and breathed through my nose
until the bus pulled up and I got on,
taking the first empty seat available.

 

 The Horse Whisperer

He never knew how much

he scared me,
or maybe he did.
Perhaps that was the idea.
After he’d been released
from prison,
my older brother went
around the table telling
each of my siblings
who would make something of themselves
or who would wind up on Welfare.
He said Welfare had my name on it,
then asked if I was a punk,
asked if I knew what a punk was.
In prison a punk is the guy everyone
rapes because they can,
because it is just that easy.

My brother is a different man now.

He’s a genuine horse whisperer,
out in the middle of nowhere
with his wild mares and stallions,
using secret words to coax them.
I wonder what he says,
what parts they understand
and how much they obey,
or don’t.

 

Spin The Bottle

We played Truth or Dare,

then Spin The Bottle to see
who would kiss who.
I kept getting Monica Westfall,
a chubby girl but kind of cute
with her white bell bottoms
and different colored pockets
that reminded me of a Twister matt.
After a while we retreated to the dank basement
which smelled like a root cellar.
I sat on the washer, her on the dryer,
both of us unsure how to get started.
Even in the shady darkness
I could see that she had the deepest
dimples I’d ever seen,
that, in her own way, she was quite beautiful.
When I said she was,
she applied cherry ChapStick
and told me I was too skinny but
she wasn’t all that picky.
We leaned between the seams of both machines
and kissed for hours,  just kissing,
nothing more than that,
no bases covered,
the heat of those moments
a crimson brand against my skin.
The next day my brother
asked if I got some Nookie.
I didn’t know what that was exactly,
but I swung hard anyway.
It was the first blow I ever landed on him
and the last.
I didn’t mind the beating that ensued,
didn’t even ask him to stop.
It’s funny how the imprint of
someone else’s lips on yours can
erase all kinds of pain,
how it can make you feel
that you might actually have
something to offer another person,
even if it’s fleeting and only temporary.

 

--IF I’M GOING TO BE ALONE, I WANT TO BE ALONE WITH YOU

…I have been trying to get published in SmokeLong Quarterly for at least eight years and it finally happened yesterday, with this essay:

 SmokeLong Quarterly

☰

Will You Please Not Be Quiet, Please?

 

 For Raymond Carver

By Len Kuntz

He was already dead when I found him. There was no one to call. My stomach filled with acid, my head spun. So I sat down, right there in the bookstore row, and read—This Is What We Talk About When We Talk About Love—until my eyes bled.

I was spellbound.

This was before flash fiction even had a name.

Others had known him before me, and I found this disappointing. Couldn’t someone have introduced us? How is any fair writer supposed to make their way without Ray?

From him, I learned to take risks, break writing rules. I learned how to get lowbrow enough to seem highbrow, how to surprise a reader without gimmickry. Ray used small, soft words that could cut your heart out and apologize at the same time. He mentored me through print—stories, poems, essays and other scraps I dug up. He himself learned from Lish—how to edit and kern the way a leather artisan tools animal figures into a belt, getting the goat’s startled expression exactly wide-eyed, making the mare’s flared nostril’s sweat.

Who’s to say definitively where flash fiction originated? I do know that most of Carver’s stories—written before his death in 1988—came in under 1,000 words, four or five pages. They embody all the elements of great flash writing—urgency, compression, language with music in it, plots that take the turn you didn’t see coming, story starts that are immediately compelling such as this from Gazebo:  

That morning she pours Teacher’s over my belly and licks it off.  That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

In just two sentences, Carver thrusts us into the action and kick starts our imagination. We at once have all kinds of questions: Who is this woman? How did she go from having a sexual (albeit kinky) appetite in the morning to nearly killing herself only hours later? What does the narrator think about all this? Was he the cause? And then there’s the specific mention of Teacher’s, which is the name of a liquor company that makes Scotch Whiskey. Why did Carver pick Teacher’s and not some other brand? Inherent in the name is symbolism, and so we’re left wondering what part that will play in the story.

Another example comes from the opening lines in Where I’m Calling From:

J.P. and I are on the front porch at Frank Martin’s drying-out facility. Like the rest of us at Frank Martin’s, J.P. is first and foremost a drunk.

Here we learn that two apparent friends are in rehab for alcoholism, and that the place is called Frank Martin’s. Why Frank Martin’s? How is this place different from other institutions? What circumstances compelled the pair to seek help? Was it their own volition, or did a marriage or career end due to alcohol abuse? Will they be successful in their recovery? Are they hopeful, despondent, angry?

In every piece, Carver is fixated on brevity and intensity, two keystones of flash fiction writing. This, coupled with the fact that most of his titles are compelling enough to catch a reader’s eye—The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off for instance, or The Furious Seasons—each of Carver’s works is as much a sizzling story as it is an instructional for any would be writer. From top to bottom, from title to conclusion, Ray teaches us about the best writing has to offer.

His characters, sometimes named, sometimes not, are always fully individualized, people we recognize at once, but don’t necessarily trust to do the right thing. It’s as if Carver is taunting the reader to Hang in there. Let’s just see what this character ends up doing. I think he’s going to surprise you. And so often he does.

In the late ’70s there were Mailer and Bukowski, and along with Carver, some tagged them a writer’s Rat Pack, but truthfully, Ray never fit in. He had the drinking part down, yes, but he was as shy as a breeze, soft spoken, whispering when he talked, the way one might to a lover. With his voice, as with his writing, he made you pay attention.  

His stories shined a light on small town suffering and broke-down places. He was a quiet king, and anytime I sit down at a keyboard, he’s nearby, always, whispering in my ear, “Take your time.  It’s all about making the words sing.”  

 

Top of Form

 

 

--LIFE IS MOSTLY MADE OF EDGES

 

Dear Annie,

             I’ve been trying to write this letter to you for a while now, and even though I am currently myself a writer full-time, I’ve had a lot of difficulty finding the right words to use and I’ve worried that what I have to say will sound either flat or scripted, or even irrelevant.

            Nevertheless, I wanted to share some personal thoughts with you.

Like so many other people, I was a friend and big fan of your father’s.  We went to Pasco High School together and then later we were in the same fraternity, Sigma Chi, at Washington State University.

I moved to Pasco the day before my junior year started.  I didn’t know a soul and I was very shy back then.  Pasco is a small town and people who live there all grew up together, going to elementary and middle school, bonding and making tight connections.  I felt like an alien.

However, your dad befriended me, even though he had nothing to gain by it.  As I said, I was really introverted back then, almost terminally shy.  Your dad was the opposite of that, so gregarious and accommodating with everyone.  It was rare to see him not smiling.  He had a big, toothy grin that was immediately infectious.  The girls all thought his dimples were adorable, plus they loved the idea that he had hair like John Travolta--long, parted down the middle and feathered.

I spent quite a few afternoons playing basketball at his house and for several years we went to the hydroplane races together on the Columbia River.  Invariably, your dad knew everyone that lined the riverbanks and he’d spend most of the day saying Hello and catching up instead of watching any of the races.  He didn’t care about boats—people were what mattered most to him.

I was with your dad for a wedding the day before Mount St. Helens erupted in May of 1980.  We were in Pasco and when we woke the next morning the sky was an eerie plum color, almost as if it was bruised and in pain.  There was no social media back then, so we were fairly certain a bomb had been dropped somewhere.  Driving back to college in your Dad’s Chevy Nova, we heard the news about the volcano on the radio.  As soon as we did, as if on cue, ash began to fall, thick as snow but lightly gray colored, like dust and lint shook loose from a vacuum bag.  Your dad loved music, and he had an 8-track of Jimmy Buffet, so he played the song with the lyrics, “I don’t know where I’ma gonna go when the volcano blows.”  We put it on repeat, singing along as loud as we could, hardly able to see out of the windshield since it was so covered with ash.

As you already know, most of us called your dad “Rockin’ Rod.”  In high school he somehow landed a gig as a DJ on the local radio station in Pasco.  He worked late evenings, but we’d stay up, call in and request really obscure songs that your dad would play and mention our names in the dedication.  We thought that was pretty cool.  We were friends of a celebrity and this celebrity proudly let everyone listening know that we were, indeed, friends of his.

There was a group of us who were pretty close for a while—Rod, Justin, Rene and me.  Your dad dubbed us “The Four Musketeers” and he always grinned wide whenever he used that moniker.  It made me feel special, included, as if I belonged to this unique tribe or club reserved for only a few lucky people.

I have so many wonderful memories of your dad.  I could go on and on.

Annie, I can’t even try to imagine what you’re going through, but I did want to tell you that your father was a great man--not that you don’t already know it.  Anyone who can leave such a lasting imprint on the hearts of others has lived an incredible life, just as your dad did.

When I think of him, he’s smiling.  He’s wishing everyone else the best and he genuinely means it.  He’s showing all of us how to live life in full, teaching us how to be better than we ever thought we could be.  There’s a welcoming glow in his eyes that says, “I’m here if you need me.”

Sincerely,

Len Kuntz

             2/25/17