prague, venice and burl ives (or “another renting-the-walk-in-closet in-viola’s-house poem”)
by John Repp
Why collect Peace Corps brochures, call about foreclosures
in Cape May? Unappeasable hunger remains the reigning guess
though habitual cowardice & Aquarian dreaminess have ceded
no ground. Who was that masked man? my wife says. The Shadow
I say, chuckling over a cup of sodbuster coffee. Oh, I know
she says, plucking her three-hundredth basil leaf. I’ll leave
you to your questions. It’s fun (& unavoidable) to wallow
in the insoluble, no? Let’s test yes. Someone no one knows
how many years ago said I want to fuck you silly. Oh,
to have a come-to-Jesus talk with the haole whose brain
crystallized that diamond of syntax from aural slag only
to have Um, thanks squirm out his mouth! The Shadow
always knows, hungry ghost snuffling a fungal web
soon to fruit as The Incredible Shrinking Man reclines
on a toadstool, a fractal mandala black as basalt pulsing
on his left wrist. The evil in Everyone’s heart doesn’t lurk—
it basks, it sloshes, it kills & fucks joyously. The Corps
said forty wasn’t too old to dig wells & fire bricks & otherwise
do good in, say, Burkina Faso or Belize, where Viola caught
not just hepatitis, but the plague—in 1979! Labor renders
unto the Lord, or so Habitat for Humanity implies via blurry
spots the last community-access station in Pennsylvania
broadcasts between, say, a middle-school play & one
of Jazzy Jeff’s Hammond organ lessons. The Baptist camp
north of Newfield forbade cars, so how’d Marge the candler
get to work? How could fourteen homes huddled in the shade
of primeval oaks be a “camp”? I wanted to help Chuck Molzon
rewire his aunt’s cottage there, but voltage terrified me.
The denizens of Sunshine Park (Bare Right On Route 50!)
savored their heartiest summer when buying a bungalow
in Carney’s Point (let alone Cape May) wouldn’t for half
a century mean you’d need to shit gold nuggets to win
a sheriff’s sale & joining the Coast Guard could almost
guarantee no ‘Nam & the twelve-foot Shasta jacked up
behind Howard’s hadn’t disintegrated & anyone mucking
in similar material contradictions & historical coordinates
could pine for poverty in Paris or the South End or Brooklyn
or crave a raw frolic in the Great Egg Harbor River or moon
unto sickness for permanent bliss while sunk funkily
in a stupefying job & rented hovel (or Viola’s closet!) as sixteen
beloved bluesmen testified through a pair of stolen Jensens,
reconstituted potato flakes drenched in A & P Beef Gravy cooling
on gray formica in—1975? After one of my rare epiphanies,
my second shrink said Well, Freud wasn’t a plumber. After another,
he said The Unconscious doesn’t fuck around. How did Burl Ives
end up at Mount Auburn Hospital watching shattered anchorites
trudge through invisible blizzards? Slumped tear-soaked
in a red brocade armchair that smelled of stale farts, I’d shut
my eyes & hum “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” till Dr. Burl
gently coaxed me back to the mundane muck of the present—
mallet-throb, temple-thrum, savor-free odyssey from sleep
to sleep. Replete with mangos, shortwave radio, a lithe
male nurse, the sweetest water outside Escanaba, Michigan
& fevers pulsing visions that made mescaline weak tea,
Viola’s convalescence sobered her not. Her sculptures sprouted
barbed wire, razor blades, Army surplus chest bandages,
Polaroids of muddy goats & she once slipped her sweats down
so I’d marvel at the nearly vanished bubo a few inches southeast
of her right hipbone. Oh, don’t worry! She emphatically did not
want to fuck me silly & vice-versa—no, really! I’d wager she’s 1)
kayaked the metaphysical rapids at whim these fifty years; 2)
pining for visions this minute; & 3) fashioned mobiles for the past
eighty-two days from linoleum scraps, crochet hooks, mussel shells,
spent cans of 3-in-1 oil, souvenir Minié balls & monofilament
as an Amex reel-to-reel funneled a LaMonte Young drone into air
acerbic, headlong, radiant Viola must this very second breathe,
please. Ah, the cozy freedom of pining! The hum & wet of it.
The Tom-&-Becky-in-the-cave of it—pining not for nostos
but for the Madrid bus terminal, Ship Bottom’s gargantuan
plane trees, Bonnyrigg, Mays Landing, Prague, Venice
& Phillipi, West Virginia. Shaddai be praised for the will
to power & its dissolution, for six sessions of the Talking Cure
& the plan that miraculously paid, for the wobbly human
schlepping in the shade of angels’ wings (or awnings) down
Powderhouse in the sopping blaze of dailiness. The more dug-in,
the more thought gets thought or so a note affixed to a June, 1978
cast of the I Ching has just reminded me. It takes a truckload
of digging (root cellars, graves, all those fire pits upon which
freezer grates glowed as crabs boiled & Carl Brown’s corn
roasted to black-speckled ambrosia) to find no number
of mangled or veil-parting metaphors (or dumbfuck clichés)
will ever suffice. Choose necessity said Hayden Carruth,
flint-scraped anarchist, years-long-not-quite-catatonic
devotee of plain talk & cordwood whose astringent poems
Viola gave me the moment I most needed them, saying
You’ll love these. Please I say. Please fuck me silly, oh Everything.
Photo of John Repp
BIO: John Repp is a writer, folk photographer, and digital collagist living in Erie, Pennsylvania. Sheila-Na-Gig Editions published his most recent book, Never Far from the Egg Harbor Ice House.