Le Mot Juste

More prose-poems. An homage to three of my favorite poets.

New Songs of Orpheus

Ginsburg
He followed them before me. Through the pages of the book he held and the poems he wrote. He followed them. Through the drug-induced sleepless streets of New York. To Mexico and California and Colorado and Rockland—wherever that is. He sat in the park and contemplated jazz and anticipated rock and roll. He watched the blond Frisbee- tossing, name-calling angel whose words pierced him like the sharpest of knives. He returned to the book in his hand; to the poet; the courage-giver and found respite. Watched grocery boys and store detectives and Garcia Lorca hiding in the produce. He refused to sell his soul and shined all the more because of it. Mother finally fucking.

Lorca
Federico—the tormented child. Federico the exotic, flamboyant. Federico, far away. In life there were no footnotes to follow….

He longed, strangely, to hold him—there in New York. To guide Federico even as Federico guided him. “El amor oscuro…” Dropping clues everywhere; almost lost in the translation, but still there. Federico crossed swords with Dali. Federico going home with blood in his mouth. Did they really make him dig his own grave before they shot him in the back? His head resting eternally on Whitman’s chest.

Federico—walking through the park, his black hair turned white with death. People don’t even recognize him. He likes it that way.

Except when the two boys pass him by. Speaking Spanish so white people won’t know what they’re saying. But Federico hears them. And it makes him sad that so little changes.

Whitman
That’s the reason he liked summer. Afternoons and old movies where everything ended nice and neat if not necessarily happy.
Of course, he knew better.
Nothing ever turned out right, it seemed. Nothing came easy, even he knew that. People rarely got what they really deserved.
So much for karma.
It had been a day like this. One summer. When he first found his escape; this little island. He had run into the Men’s Room and washed the blood from his face.
“Fag!”
“Faggot!”
”Queer!”
The words still rang in his ears; the words still cut to the quick; the words still wounded; he still bled. He wanted to hide; there was no place to hide. He wanted to run; there was no place to run. The words were written on him somehow; there for all to see.
Fag.
Faggot.
Queer.
Was it the way he walked? He was afraid to move. Was it the way he talked? He was afraid to speak.
He was frozen, silent, hard as stone, except—somehow—his heart still beat inside him; his blood still ran warm through his veins. Though sometimes he wished it would stop.
And then he found him. Smiling from the inside out. The voice that gave a name to a nation. Our own continent indissoluble. Our own race redeemed from silence. Whitman drifting lazily across the Brooklyn Bridge. Ginsburg and Lorca on either arm.