Читать книгу Visiting Hours at the Color Line - Ed Pavlic - Страница 17
ОглавлениеI put it to bubbleboy and he popped,
left a perfect semiswirl of razormist where invisible
sun used to be. I put same to circleboy,
you guessed it, snap addict,
flat line. I approached Suci while she memorized
the Presidents. Both pointer fingers up,
eyes closed, she said wait, I love this
one, Millard Fillmore. I’ll admit if put on the spot
I don’t always know if the past
tense of swing is swung or swang
but I know I don’t mean
either one. I mean cause it won’t go away.
I feel dizzy when I think
a pendulum in orbit is always plumb.
I dissolve when I ask Mzée anything
because he doesn’t know
where I begin or end. He looks up at me
from the floor, da da ca po—
When put to, chlorine spill pled triflouride
and moved toward me
in such a way that said, you don’t want to know.
Said, you don’t even want to breathe.
I’ll say I don’t know if the past
tense of put is pat or pit. But I know perfectly
well that there’s no past
tense of put. When I pit or patted it to whole add sugar
packet of Kool-Aid in the mouth girl, she spilled
out a mile of something too bright to be
looked at. Smiled. Gum line a blaze-coast.
I knew better than to ask Milan anyway,
cause he can feel everything
ready to shift, and so I know he’ll lie
which isn’t a lie so much
as a prediction of and against the impossible
odds. If I pit it
to him and he did, I know I’d tell him he lied
when I know I’d have told Suci something
different if the same had happened
between us. Before I got my lips together and breath
back of that for the first part of p
Stacey turned around and told me (she may
have told me then turned around)
in no uncertain terms albeit wordlessly
she was “too busy with the present
tense of her hips and The History of Soul Train
on PBS”—so you know what month it is—said
“half the stuff in your head at any moment
for instance” and back still (or again) to me touches her right
index finger one by one to the tips of each
of her four left hand fingers and a thumb
“unions, real schools, and us, and”—waving at the room—“this
and”—waving at the kids—“them” and starting over
on the tips of her left-hand fingers “and February
and did I say us
are probably illegal in the state of Georgia
with or without The History of Soul
Train on PBS and that pistol in the transcendental
drawer that is legal but I can’t exactly say that
can I about most of what I feel
like doing when I hold it in my hand” and my vision went
