50 Easy Pieces was written in the months preceding my 50th birthday. I wrote 50 scenes on colored swatches of people and events I have encountered. The swatches started deep blue and gradually transformed to bright yellow (the blue portion is depicted above).
I composed each by laying out lines in open form, meditating on them, then finishing the contemplation with a prose poem.
He was so street working “on the docks,” even though he knew he wasn’t. Algren? Ferrell? What city did he know? What city knew him? A pickup truck with boxes of cherries came by the loading dock. They sold five pounds for a few bucks. Later, he walked to the subway with his box, a little too proud. While waiting for the el underneath Grand Ave a junkie stumbled down the stairs, teetered near the edge, then fell onto the tracks. He set the cherries down, checked for the train, and jumped down to save him. He was about to grab the shoulder when he noticed snakes of smoke from the ears and sharp, the smell of burning flesh. The junkie puked, convulsed and his hair was on end. He drew back in horror. It was stupid to carry the cherries home, but he did anyway. There was a pit in each one.
Shaquana, Dequan, Jacquetta, Tanisha, Tamara, LeKeisha, Shawana and James. Tamika, Treana, Kareem, Violet, Whitney, Markeesha and Anthony. Tenth & Peralta, Oakland, CA. He was white; his previous teachers on race were racists. He brought his young poets to San Francisco to hear Nikki Giovanni. She read a poem that said black laughter is like black love. She did not read “The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro,” for which he was grateful. When he started, he was wary in the BART station. A drunk IBM employee had mistakingly gotten off at the stop two weeks earlier. He was robbed and slain. Temetrius, who was so much trouble to him, Temetrius’s brother did it. He coached track and taught his young poets about Henry Dumas.
The area near Grand and Western Avenues is an old Italian enclave surrounded by, as they say in Chicago, “bad neighborhoods,” meaning pigmentally brown or black. The Stock Yards company has been in the neighborhood since 1893. A union shop, it butchers and ships meat for corporate gifts. Senior butcher Frank leaves the locker at 10am and with his knobby hands prepares fine cuts for the crew’s lunch. As the purple in his nose softens, he cleans up, then waits to punch out. During Christmas season Stock Yards employs temporary laborers to handle the onrush of orders. One winter this includes a community organizer, poet (who writes “Infidelity as a Creative Act” on break), the sweet niece of the owner Mr. Katz, and a hobo in from the cold. “A hobo has wanderlust,” he keeps telling the poet. “A hobo is not a bum.”
From scraggy hills, river rat towns, from deep hollers and flat, rich soy fields grow the rural bohemians. Weed smoking whiskey drinkin canvas paintin music playin folk. New York City? Blue collar under blue skies, Missouri has its own homegrown avant-garde and Ozarks to boot (heel). Not all pastoral though, unless Corydon’s toothless, tweaking in a shack with towels for window shades. Grant can paint, drink, rig a Hollywood set and plow a straight cornrow. He’s after paddlefish with Aaron, filmmaker and musician. Aaron’s drunk and falls asleep at the helm. Unaware, Grant yells, “Finally, you’re steering straight.” The yell wakes Aaron up and he says, “I just had the strangest dream.” That’s Missouri rural insurgency, straight only in dreams.
She was the woman in the poem in 1990, “clean as white paper,” but had been the woman in the novel since 1961. “I’m going to beat you,” she said to her boyfriend when she wanted to pound the futon. Surrounded by a trail of boric acid to repel pests, it couldn’t keep him away. Could sex be the one act without interruption before dying? She has a pale, delicate face and wan blue eyes-- a pre-Raphaelite beauty not constructed by projection or male necrophiliac desire. Motherhood surprised her; she was so happy when her womb was full. Though the business of literature would judge her by her facebook status, she works out of the economy into feminine ecriture. Though the business of literature would have her manic to curry favor, she sits.
The childhood home illustrates spacetime. Time accumulated there, walls marked by selves that change in the same character: Jimmy, Rosemarie, Margie, Mike, Mom, Dad. 6046 N Nickerson Ave is also internal, a memory theatre. From the second floor window facing north, he saw the world with awful clarity that scared him shitless. Maybe the aura for a migraine to surface years later, maybe consciousness emerging to find its name. A tabernacle tiled in grey asbestos shingles, esoteric, sacred family camp. He often walked around like a stranger when, troubled, he sleepwalked. Now, with a family home of his own, he dreams his way back, an interloper. He wants to wrap the building in his arms and absorb the time again before he wakes.
Mike Barrett Archive 