| Author: |
Robert Ziegler |
| Dated: |
Wednesday, May 26 2004 @ 08:32 PM EDT |
| Viewed: |
1746 times |
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The Polar ice-caps are melting; polar bears are losing weight, unable to feed out on the soft ice, now air lifted to new grounds; natural gas prices are sky rocketing and many poor are unable to pay, freezing. Pipelines in developing countries are leaking millions of gallons out into the rivers and forests, covering parrots and piranhas and pineapples. George W. is sinking billions into War. Our children will inherit this bleeding earth, thought Wilbur. Across the embankment, birch and spruce trees were sparkling with frost, like angels covered with sky-blue diamonds.
Wilbur forced open the shed door, blew into his cupped hands, and passed the lantern over the unfinished statues. Matthew was dead, laid low as Miles Davis' blue trumpet. Wilbur lifted the first of the statues, hefted it from the shed. The wings were heavy and covered with snow. He dragged it to the frozen Packard, strapped it to the roof. It was destined for the oval room of George W. Bush's big white house, just before spring thaw. "Don't thaw yet", muttered Wilbur, "not till the others are finished an done."
The Packard was dented along the driver's side from the night Wilbur rolled it over the embankment. The left headlight dangled like the eye of The Cyclops. Wilbur's teeth were coming loose and his money was running out. He found his mind turning over books he'd read, darting into half-remembered passages, like his tongue did each time another filling fell out. The
angel's face was looking down and stared in through the cracked windshield; her icy wings lifted in symmetrical curves straight up into the moonlight.
Wilbur was mulling over Sam Sheppard's early play, about the Buried Child. He liked how the dying alcoholic father named Dodge recited off all the farm tools in his will:
saddles & harnesses, spurs & bits,
roofing nails & dead seeds,
rusted-out Combine & wrenches, Winchester & bullets &
blankets
on & on & on,
willing his dying American dream to no one,
when into the living room wanders his prodigal,
half-wit son Tilden
carrying bushels of corn he's harvested from fields fallow over 20 years
dumps the tasseled ears on his impotent father's
lap & exits, eventually returning with the
bones of an aborted child he's found in the field
& hands it to his iron mother and the phony preacher
she's been committing adultery with. Wilbur wanted to write something like that, something that could stand-up to the steady erosion of
teeth & dying friends & disappearing freedoms
something about the Rich & Dante's Inferno; something about an angel in a forgotten Packard, like in that
James Dickey poem where two teenagers sneak
into the backseat
out on the back-acres of her father's
junkyard, sitting there nervous,
staring at the seat covers peeling away in
that scorching sun, her red hair pressed against her hot temples, her head
back over the seat, ready,
while he's worrying abut stories he's heard about
her old man's shotgun full of rocksalt but he opens up his buttons anyway.
Her, like some Brownsville girl with her Brownsville curls, ready to run away to anywhere.
Wilbur tightens down the canvas straps across her wings. The moonlight on ice shines them silvery blue. Long ride ahead. He caresses her left wing and prays for a spell that could twist the heads of bullies who
hunt down weaker kids in schoolyards, for a spell that could raise Matthew up again. The next lifetime seems a long time to wait for the dark angel's
terrible sword to strike, for those flaming swords that promise justice
to the homeless and the street kids,
the Indians & the Blacks, those starving
millions over in Africa, child prostitutes
in sweat shops & porn rings, thousands of
one-legged trip-mine victims in Viet Nam
Afghanistan, war widows...
Wilbur's thoughts trail off as he breaks a trail through the snow and makes one last trip back to the shed, lights the lantern again, and passes it over
his angels. Wilbur's work in stone has taught him patience. But there are deadlines to meet; things couldn't go on forever as they were, and the
angels were so awfully silent.
Just a simple poem might do it, flickered through Wilbur's mind, that will add that final feather of critical mass and tip the golden scales of the
collective unconscious into the laps of the marginalized millions. He stepped closer to the Muse of Dreams: her eyebrows arched ironically, one hand palm up to heaven, the other hand resting lightly on her naked breast.
One bone-clean poem like Robert Creeley writes, about keeping yr eye on the rd,
not talking too much, though sur-
rounded by darkness, to look out for
embankments. Or a new arrangement of those stained-glass images William
Carlos Williams incubated & left in his will: the red wheelbarrow glazed
with
rainwater, broken greenglass between
hospital buildings
wet branches, that corpulent
black woman clutching a fistful of
marigolds on the streetcorner at dawn.
Wilbur blew out the lantern on the half-finished angels in the dark shed. He was ready as he'd ever be to transport his completed angel clear on down to the Whitehouse. Something simple, Wilbur whispered, his breath making feathery plumes in the chill midnight, something Zen, like a welded bell, tolling for the
unemployed people who could no longer pay their mortgages, becoming drug-dealers, driven to crime, or heading up to oil-patches, creating
northern ghost-towns.
He slides into the stiff-cold seat of the Packard and
stares into the unblinking eyes of the angel. The frozen engine of the Packard turns over without the missing key, and the one headlight slices
like a lighthouse beacon through the darkness. Wilbur drops her into gear and his gums tighten purposefully around his teeth; the radio plays a Yiddish polka as the Packard rolls out from behind the frozen shed.
Wilbur invokes Leonard Cohen, hums the Sisters of Mercy, tries to tune into Radio America, hoping to pick-up Dylan, too; seeks support from Myth,
for the border crossing into Big Brother's territory.
It's lonesome, driving all alone all the way down to George Dubbya's enormous house,
bound to be lonely, is what Wilbur is beginning to realize,
when the great EarthPoet, Gary Snyder, flies past him in
a pick-up truck green as Turtle Island
doors tied on with baling wire
an eaglefeather tarp flung over his begging-
bowl, rucksack, Pulitzer Prize, Ginsberg poems,
Gertrude Stein's Making of Americans,
early Bob Dylan records,
thumbs-up-grin, Rolling Thunder the Medicine Man
next to him, asleep.
Wilbur wonders how he could've covered so much ground so fast,
wonders is he in the high Sierras, Snyder's stomping grounds, or is he
in Oregon, or Butte Montana, nearby the Buffalo Run?
Gary's waved Wilbur to
a dust-cloud stop, and is instantly stroking the thawing hair of the angel.
With a wave of his redhand, Rolling Thunder gestures a campfire into existence
gold sparks crackle up to the stars, he
introduces Political Speakers from
the Dolphin-Nation
representing the Seven Seas; introduces
Grizzly & Squirrel;
Snake, from the Crawling People;
Red Hawk, from the Winged Ones;
Sequoia & Redwood:The Standing People
Wilbur says he's from Fort Despair, B.C.
which has hitherto also been unrepresented.
Wilbur is an unborn poem, a voice from the north, raw & real as a Packard
which has rolled over & over, down an embankment
& has proven it can carry the message of an angel
right into the dooryard of Mistah Double-You
Bush, the mouthpiece of the Righteous-Winged Church
of the World.
The campfire dwindles, the conclave condenses,
& Wilbur noses the
great northern Packard into
inner-city-anywhere
Chicago Syracuse Philadelphia
Baltimore
past drug-thugs child-hookers
abandoned housing-projects
drive-by shootings school massacres broken
treaties burning trees cardboard shantytowns skateboard punks
dreadlocked rappers
handcuffed addicts & Wilbur's
thinking about Dante again &
while his right hand riffles through the
glove compartment for a detailed map of the Inferno,
he rolls smack-dab
into the highest-security driveway
of America's Hopes & Dreams.
"Uh-oh" says Wilbur,
glancing up at his Angel:
guards & sentries on every tower.
The angel's hair was
spilling down across his
spiderweb-windshield
her Medusa-eyes were opening, blinking.
Wilbur slowed the tired Packard to a crawl,
pulled off into a convenient
flowering honeysuckle bush,
stepped out into the warm
rose-colored air, and took a long piss.
A phallic tower gleamed like a spear
in the yawning dawn. The huge,
round, breast-like House lay exposed
on the crew-cut lawn. Wilbur shook himself off,
then searched frantically through
the Packard's trunk for a clever idea:
a pile of fish scales & tree bark a
NAFTA contract
glass beads Monopoly $$
a case of Canadian lakewater
some cheap hydro-dams, a
Pipeline
horns from one Mad Cow a railroad a long
piece of
Borderline some
blackmail but...
nothing useful for a disguise.
Wilbur's heart
sank,
his crest about to fall, when he felt his hair being
pressed lightly down by a pure white Stetson cowboy hat, the old-time
ten-gallon hat
worn by the good guys like Tom Mix,
Hop-Along Cassidy, Roy
Rodgers & Gene Autry. Wilbur started silently singing along with the Sons of the Pioneers: something something... drifting along
with the tumbling
tumbleweeds
oh Dan & I with throats so
dry & souls that cry
for water, cool, clear...it was the Angel
put the magic hat onto Wilbur's
swirling-thoughts head! There she stood
thawed & wordless, wearing nothing but
a form-fitting cardinal red
Royal Canadian Mounted Police
uniform. Her eyes were severe as she firmly
grasped Wilbur's arm and pressed him up against the Packard.
"Get in" she hissed. "This has to look
official. This is no love poem." Wilbur eyed the big empty back seat, but the Royal
Canadian-Angel pointed towards their destiny.
"Maybe later; if we
are successful," and she took the wheel in her marble hands, like some
modern-day Salome, and drove her cowboy- redeemer
past the grinning security
agents and straight to the towering front door of the famous WHITEHOUSE.
It's up to the Angel now, thought
Wilbur, as the door swung open like a giant bell, and a column of blinding light flashed, momentarily, across the miraculous Packard,
then closed with a hush.
Standing before Wilbur was the infamous president, his own identical
long-lost twin. Bullet eyes
looked straight into Wilbur's and never once
blinked. Wilbur's hat flew right off and the angel turned into clear black ice. Wilbur
could vaguely feel himself being lifted and transported up a long spiraling
staircase, into the egg-shaped room.
(He understands nothing more than you or
I do.) Through the French-windows he sees the Packard being towed away while
the sun bathes its dented body in a molten fire.
Dolphin & Dylan & Cohen & Chief Seattle wave
goodbye from the front seat;
a miniature Canadian-Jay & beaver
dangle from the aerial; Martin Luther King
&
three Muslims bearing frankincense & myrrh
&
tombstones
are being dragged from the
Packard's trunk.
"This conference appears to be one-sided",
Wilbur mumbles through his gag.
As he is being dragged down the spiraling
stairs, Wilbur looks back with wide-eyes at
the Angel
who has wrapped her tremendous
heavenly wings around his long-distance-double
&
has twice-twisted
his head around backwards
his human hands rising and
falling in futile protest,
but he can now stare only into the past.
On his reversed head sits Wilbur's
big white Stetson,
balancing at a comical angle,
and his cousin resembles nothing more
than a rodeo clown riding an invisible
bucking-bronco, round & round the
oval-shaped
corral of history.
Wilbur had never previously heard much about the back door of the white house, perhaps because it was as small as any ordinary door, so
he barely took notice as it closed quietly behind him. It was bound to be a longer drive back to his Canadian home, what with all the snowy roads tilted uphill,
and especially now that the Angel was gone. Wilbur slid into the driver's side of the Packard,
glanced once into the rear-view mirror,
and headed her north, towards the shed full of shimmering statues, where by now,
big, ice-water rubies would surely be dripping down off their purple wings.
______
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this work was published online in Reflections on Water. This revised version of A Packard for the Millenium is published on Scroll in Space with the permission of the author and of the editor of ROW.
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