Vipers &
Balloonists
by
brian howe
I.
If I should seem, to you, a tad absurd,
“a couple steps shy of the full octave,”
as the once renowned (but now, disgraced)
Great Luthier Say-So was overheard to quip
to an orchestra pit filled with blue-rinsed crones,
it’s because until I was 9, I believed rain fell
whenever God emerged from a chilly stream
and shook her pelt dry, a trout between her jaws.
Until I was 9, I learned the ways of the world
by watching the eminent professional wrestler,
The Machu Picchu Man Sandy Ravage, on television.
Each week, he mounted the ring amid camera flashes
(in his foam ziggurat-shaped hat) to edify his opponents
with a series of secret grips including the Cathode Clutch,
the Half-Nielson Rating, and the Figure Four Simulacrum.
On an Alf TV tray: a feast of Triscuits, burnt diodes and Tang.
Until I was 9, I was mortally afraid of the penalties incurred
by removing a mattress tag or leaving pennies on train tracks.
I wouldn’t let the theater usher tear my ticket in half.
I’d shrink at the mere suggestion of puncturing an overlong belt;
adorning a night table with star charts in gesso and acrylic;
or embroidering my name inside the collar of an Izod polo.
(fear of alligator)
Every single zipper said YKK and that freaked me out.
Until I was 9, I lived in a world of cryptic shadow spires;
a world where invisible surfers hot-dogged on radio waves;
a world where each color in a carpet’s scheme was lava, bog
or safe passage; a world populated by fantastic creatures:
gun molls on velocipedes, wyverns, chain smokers,
card sharps & slum lords, snake handlers, oligarchs,
wild ifreets, piano tuners, stepmothers, Europeans,
vipers & balloonists & stone cold lifers; a world where
my uncle could sneeze the traffic lights green
(I was old enough to know there was a trick to it,
but too young to figure out what it was);
Or a world where evil ballerinas jetéd from the armoire
when the lights went down. It depended on how many
packets of Pop Rocks the preternaturally wise and weary
teenaged babysitter had allocated to me that evening,
when I’d challenged her to justify her existence in fifty
or fewer sullen stares. She sat on a stack of penny dreadfuls
painting trompe l’oeils on her toenails, mute and unknowable
as the severed tongue found in a shoebox in my uncle’s flat
after he succumbed to malaise.
II.
After I turned 9, I guess you could say
that “the bottom” sort of “dropped out,”
as the once disgraced (but now, renowned)
Gravitron Operator Lay-Lo was overheard to quip
to a matchbox filled with professional mites.
Things happened. I told a joke and someone laughed
a moment too late to mean it. The eternity drained
from my summers like color out of overwashed towels.
There were poems I wanted to keep writing forever
even though I knew they were finished,
and relationships with women that followed suit.
Every single zipper said GAP and that freaked me out.
The archeological world was “rocked” to its “foundations”
(as the Grand Museé Curator Swing-Lo was overheard to pun
to a Convention Center filled with skeptical wire-stringers)
when the team designated Lost Magnificence exhumed
a stone replica of a keyboard in The Fertile Crescent.
Until I was 9, I always knew exactly who and where I was:
me, and here. Things were absurd but they made sense.
After I turned 9, nothing was ever so clear again.