Christopher Middleton [England/lives USA]

The Laundress

Bothering us for a long time,

This laundry woman: Beneath

A blue segment of sky she is

All brown and profiled against

A cliff so laboriously hewn

That it resembles a rampart.

Like a baby mask her face,

Black crescent moons for eyebrows

And greys to streak her bodice,

But yellow or brown the rampart

Towers behind the woman, as if

Its gravity propelled her—darkly

Her combed hair clings to the head

She launches forward, stooping.

Awkward skirts impede her,

Surely now she has to be hurrying

Somewhere. A little daughter

Runs at her left side, one foot

Lifting off the shadowy ground,

Hurled stooping forward she

Mimics her mother, and the labour

Extracted from the mother, that

She will inherit too. Still,

Goya’s glimpse of them has put

Happy family bonding into question:

Are they running to the fountain

Or to the river at all? Are they

Running away from something

Hidden? Their velocity

Must have to do with bread. Yet

Won’t they have had to scoot,

In those times, across the picture,

Basket on the mother’s haunch

Bumping up and down on it, because

Shirts coiled in the wickerwork

(Where bristles dashed, dripping

White, the profile of a billygoat)

Had been stiff with blood, or wet?

The next up for execution

Needed snowy linen, so the French

Bullets could be met with decent

Spanish gestures, death be dignified,

You now conjecture, whereupon

Some villagers in bleached

Apparel sign to us how best not

To die, if only, in Bordeaux,

Goya, to assuage despair, stands

Candle-crowned for half the night,

Imagining, him, in grief and detail,

Horrors he had likely never seen.

Judge Bean

                   Of him or her who placed it there, and why

                   No one knew anything.

                                                         —Thomas Hardy

Judge Roy Bean of Long Ago

Beheld once in a magazine

The face of Lily Langtry,

And in the twilight often

Judge Bean upon his porch

Rocked in a rocking chair,

Upon his porch he’d rock

And dream and dream of her.

A distant blue, how it pulls

The flesh to Long Ago

And far away, although

Judge Bean had hopes:

Lily Langtry just might come,

Passing through, and sing to him.

Not far from where the judge

Had sat and rocked and hoped

There was a tree festooned

With bottles that were blue.

Over the tips of many twigs

Somebody had been slotting

Milk of Magnesia (Phillips),

His empties, by the dozen.

Well-water there is hard;

Deep canyons through the rock

The Rio Grande, a trickle now,

Had had long since to carve.

There too the mountains host

Various flocks of birds,

Yet not a one would choose

To nest in such a tree.

The tree, so dead its twigs

That pronged the bottles, have

They in the meantime broke?

A striking sight against the sky,

An image not to be forgot,

So many bottles of blue glass

And sips of milk drunk up,

It still explodes to mark

Dimensions in the mind,

A horizon in the heart.

Long before the twigs had pronged

Blue bottles for my sight,

Like Tao it had for sure

No name at all, that place

Where Judge Bean rocked;

But Lily Langtry’s face

Nothing airy in his mind,

Not despairing of his dream,

One stormy day he took his pen

And wrote:

Now Langtry is its name

Senex

Hearing at night the first Fall Norther

I think no more of Artaud’s tantrums;

No more of Ungern-Sterberg’s magnificent beast;

Of balance perfect in the form of a pear

I think, then poof it goes, the Buddha Temple.

That wall: it is the rock face of a mountain.

Fumbling for a handhold, slowly slowly

I step sideways, the ravine at my heels

Deepens, unsteadily I must step sideways.

Nose to nose with my mountain wall,

The path no wider now than a foot’s length,

How will it end, where then shall I go?

I had to limber up, to risk a look:

And what I’d thought was not, was not—

But was a plain, immense, and it was shaping

Soon to become a fair field of folk.

Still it wanted curvature for a horizon,

Still it hid its dells and lakes and alps;

Now in it rose, I see, putting them there,

Many many footholds I had mistaken

For brushes quicker than a breath, contracts

Of clothes in the café, in a shop—

Yet people, singly, clusters, were appearing,

All distinct, each face rich in expression:

Scowling, perplexed, then relief, the smile

Brief or broadening, and grim if in revenge.

Every single glance grew thriftily from the stem,

Unmistakeable, inexchangeable, the body.

And by the halls the horror of it got me:

There was no way to make good

Wrongs of my doing. With one quick breath,

No way, the chuck the humbug; to be done

With dithering; understand at least

A secret dread; so to bring crashing down

As vapour only, absorbed back into earth,

The tabernacle cant, enforced conformity,

Those violations that had shrunk my time,

And to annul in me the predator,

Root out of met he pest, indifference.

Oh well, so much abstract projection

Still is, tooth and nail, a hanging-on.

Symmetry I did perceive, agile in faces,

Story, or in suspense, it might promise

Value, though passion rushed, then halted. Stooping

You could glimpse the star, absurd, it was afloat

Where the well-shaft had no end.

Then I was touched.

                                Then I was free.

I turn, how else, alone again, to the mountain.

felo de se

When he had pulled upright his jingle-jangle cart,

he said he hoped he would not be disturbing me.

He unpacked his kit from the cart and lost no time

but baited his lines with worms from a box of dirt

and made a long cast for the lead to plop in mid-river.

When he says he in Tex-Mex but spoke as a child

no Spanish, he explains that he took himself soon

to school, learning the way they speak it in Spain.

When he was little his father died, says he.

So he helped in the house, cleaning and sweeping,

cooking the beans, washing dishes for mother.

When he had a family of his own, two boys

and a girl, he told them, one by one, as they grew,

there’ll be no lazy nobodies in my house,

told them when it was time to grow up

and that it won’t be easy but here’s your support,

grow up to be somebody with an education:

Now there’s my boy in the marines (this war, it makes

no sense) but then his line is aviation, the mechanics,

in law-school the girl, the other boy in medicine,

and all three speak Spanish as well as they do English.

When he’s et to make a cast with this third rod,

he says his father-in-law’s funeral cost ten thousand,

but his own uncle’s was cheaper for he was cremated.

And when he has cast with a fourth rod far out

into mid-river, he says that he’ll be tonight

in Marble Falls where the catfish bite better,

that because of the funeral he has a week off.

But when he went to Mexico he didn’t like it,

didn’t like the Mexicans, a crooked lying crowd,

says he, they look down on us, call me a gringo.

Me, I’m a carpenter, he says, I can build you

a pretty house, restore, where wood has gone to rot,

repair, adapt, install any kind of cabinet:

anything to do with wood, I can do it with finish,

fishing is just a pastime when you’re needing it,

and it has clouded over now, the fish like that.

Yes, he says, any kind of wood, I can handle it,

and we were standing under a water-cypress,

a very tall tree that has gone brown by March,

the tangle of its roots ran in long looped

cylinders out under water, while he talked.

wearing a cobalt gimme cap with NY in a monogram,

an olive-green tabard (pockets in place of emblems),

drainpipe trousers and spongy-soled suede boots,

yet all I had asked was if he knew perhaps

a meaning of felo de se, supposing it Spanish.

Not theft, he said, thieving is robar, robo;

what you said, might that be in a book?

Noted poet and translator Christopher Middleton was born in England, but for many years now has resided in Austin, Texas. Green Integer will publish his prose work, Depictions of Blaff in early 2007.

Coypright ©2006 by Christopher Middleton