or, The Whale

Sherry Robbins

BlazeVOX [books]
Buffalo, New York

or, The Whale by Sherry Robbins Copyright 2010 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Book design by Geoffrey Gatza First Edition ISBN: 9781935402329 Library of Congress Control Number 2010926422 BlazeVOX [books] 303 Bedford Ave Buffalo, NY 14216 Editor@blazevox.org

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ETYMOLOGY
(Supplied by a late great-grandfather's dictionary, used in his chiropractic office)
[Nothing of him to see but the odd flower or coin hidden in the great book's crotch between colored plates of all the gay flags of the known nations of the world.]

EXTRACTS
(Supplied by generations of unsplintered hearts) Lets go down to Sears and look at the boys, Geneva Donnelly, 1961 I hope you have ten girls just like you, Dorothy Robbins, various occasions, 1957-1967 They all pick their noses and think theyre kings, Anna Farber, 4th grade Im out of books, All of the above

or, The Whale

Loomings
Call me irresponsible. At work a desk littered with yellow Please Return Call Urgent slips. Drawers at home jammed with unopened bills. Dear friends, their needs (their needs? their names!) sometimes elude me.

Who ain't a slave? Tell me that.

I can't knock hats off. No one wears them anymore. Can't bring up the rear of funerals, death grown so private and curtailed. Fish-laced ocean air curls in under the door jambs nevertheless. Something fishy. Something salty. Infecting me with the vague disease that Ishmael knew so well and I am all of a sudden all at sea in this town, this time.

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Carpet Bag
We cold-climate women who have assiduously avoided wealth know enough to wander south when we can't take it anymore.

Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here?

The odd thing is that we wander north again all out of season contralogically. Magnetized, attracted to what will surely be the death of us, we pass by windows glowing with cozy TV warmth. The hut we head for is an edge of town thing. No sign outside of anything inviting.

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The Spouter Inn

Driving through darkest Pennsylvania, Saturday night. There are no lights in the houses. No one goes past thirty-five. What is it about this state?

It is a blasted heath.
The kids are hungry but the only place we've seen open asked Who Cares? in nocolor neon, a martini glass falling from its question mark, and we drive on. Somebody lied about 219. It is not the most direct route to the oldest mountain in America. Dark slouching hump of a hill impaled on the windshield wipers occludes the long view. We drive into it endlessly, hungry for our dumpling dinner, our shared bed.

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The Counterpane
These savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will.
First light. First color. Grandma's quilt, the one made from our old cowboy and Indian pjs, her house dresses, aprons. I lie under generations of genetic code this morning with a strange brown arm flung across my neck. I smell her before I see her, a family smell refreshed by the wild truffle scent of a young girl. I know she came out of me more intimate than any spouse and yet she is unknown. Pinned, claimed by her small arm, I have no claim on her. She is a stranger, strange as that summer solstice I lay awake alone all night picking at mystery, resisting the urge to kneel, when, just before day, a dent in the quilt, a pushing down at the foot of the bed, a weight not waiting for me to open up, not needing to, as every awe-stunned atom made an O. These are not mortal weddings. They have no linear logic, no witnesses. Unless you, across the way, have been keeping watch through the window all these years.

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Breakfast
Last night it was kind of funny to tune in the World Series and find instead shaken sportscasters falling again and again in the retelling toward the crack in Mother Earth. This morning though we stab at our oatmeal in silence as body after body is pulled from beneath stone or steel on the small screen. Rare meat. Some woman, red in tooth and claw, hunkers down beside us to break her fast. This is a journey I would put off taking if I could.

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The Street
Everyone in this town knows it was built on water and what that water carried grain and lumber and power west to east. Mansions stand on that history, parks and avenues fan out from it like Frenchmen on parade. The only things that flow through now are themselves liquid: words, drink, hallucinations. Still, Buffalo is a queer place. Our pride perversely swells with each loss. You can hardly find us on a map now. You can hardly hear us, though wild-eyed prophets and refugees from around the globe show up daily as if in answer to a call. And we give off a musk here our sweethearts smell when they are far from home that guides them back again. Like Salem, you might think this place more myth than city, but we have long since ceased to know the difference. You can hardly see us if you're not from here, we grow so translucent.

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The Chapel
Color sound texture temperature shape flavor fragrance attraction pressure memory dream song breath

All these things are not without their meaning.

There is death in this business of the corporeal chapel. There is birth. And all things in between. Take this body if you want it, eat it up. Or come inside to sit a minute quietly. Every kind of prayer sticks to its walls.

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The Pulpit
There is a shape in the stomach when a body falls off the end of the watery world. A shape to the way it swims back up toward distorted light. Mother, father, pack up their past for the future in this way. A leaf falls. Moss twirls on stone. Stars reel apart. Soup stirs. Hope fades. Bees crawl down to their queen this way.

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The Sermon
Sometime during grade school the drone from the front of the room pinned hot legs under sticky desks while our green thoughts flew out the window. Tell the truth sing the green bird thoughts from the green leaves. Tell the truth. No more disembodied songs.

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