16.2.06

Guernica
(From, The Anthology of the Eye)

Guernica visited me last,..
no I'm awake just now from Guernica
my poems stolen by a man that looked
like Billy Bob Thorton in a baseball cap,
he'd taken all the best ones, folded them
just like I folded up the newspaper article
and crushed it in with that one slide,
an out of work actor and his pooch
him wearing a fur coat leaning on the open hatch
of his country squire at the flea market,
interviewed by a reporter looking for a human interest
story. I realized, the two of us had become famous...
To begin with I wished it upon myself before sleeping,
wanted to go back to Bisbee for a while
but apparently, Guernica wouldn't have it that way
and sent a male lion to chase me and the dog
out the back trail, somewhere up near Higgins Hill,
I can almost remember the place, the lion though
was friendly and where he sent me, it was not.
I waved to my brother as we left..
We ran over the ledge and someone I know was a spouse
pushed a broken down van the other way,
it almost fell into the ravine we (me and the dog)
were trying so hard to avoid.
We made it to the house we seemed to own but rented
for my in-laws but they weren't home, I was checking out
everything while they were away, amazed at the antiques,
a fountain bedroom set in mint condition,
a porcelain bowl, tipped on its side
boiled on the stove, some remnants of bread and water inside.
I turned it off and then saw my father-in-law sitting there
watching me and I scolded him for leaving it on.
Then they started coming...entire tribes of people
with my mother in law carrying a person on a litter,
the person she had been tending in the hospital
while she was away..so many people, I'd never seen before
and all their kids...one group was even black!
I called them niggers when they tried to steal my purse
from the bedroom so they hid it and I didn't even know my
camera was inside. I went back out to look some more through
Billy Bob's collection of goods, mine included
and found out that he was teaching a young kid to paint,
mostly oil pastels but all equally amazing,
one of them barely visible, just a smudge at the top
of the page, like an eye...and then, Guernica,
the fantastic black and white bull charging from the corner,
his head only and a brilliant chiaoscuro rainbow (if that is possible),
flowing out from his nose,
I forgave Billy Bob then, for his indiscretions.
I went outside into the cramped alleyways,
a bulldozer almost took my life
but a small dog ran a diversion and saved me,
a stranger started skipping around me
chanting and threatening me so bad I went back into the house.
I told the family inside, the hundreds and dozens of them,
they seemed to multiply into that much,
I lectured them in perfect arabic
about how this shouldn't happen,
they'd have to leave, there were simply
too many of them. They just looked at me like I was crazy.
Then I remembered my purse and my money.
I found it with a little girl
who had taken my Nikon apart, spit black mucous inside like
a grasshopper and bent the internal parts of the shutter,
I wanted to kill her but just started pinching her really hard
and then held her so I wouldn't finish her off.
Finally, finally....finally and thank God, I woke up....

I'm wondering if my husband's grandmother is going to die soon.
It seems to be the case, she looked fairly gray this weekend.