Sobriety Medal

A baby rabbit
can already jump and turn 180 degrees in the air
in a split second.

An adult human
can already pass out, fall, and break a tooth
on the way to the toilet.

The Skeleton Remembers Grade School

Every third science-fair entry
was an articulated cat
skeleton.

Victor, part 2

2.

My father had a student, Phillip Imroth,
who stammered throughout childhood.
The Pueblo Public Library owned an Egyptian mummy,
a relic of 19^th century imperialism.
The sarcophagus rested in a special room,
open only on Sundays.
As a high school student Imroth worked in the library
under librarian, Clara Knox, an old,
sunk-jawed, blue-haired lady.
One day when Imroth was stammering, struggling
to articulate a thought, Clara Knox said,
“Stop that!” and Phil did stop.
Her evident belief that he could stop
permanently cured his stammer.
When Imroth left Pueblo,
my father stored several boxes of his books in our attic,
rummaging through which I found,
besides such treasures as
The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris
and The Outsider by Colin Wilson,
two boxes of mint-condition early Playboy magazines,
including the one with photos of MM on the beach.
Victor came for an overnight
and we went through all of them
while drinking a mixture of gin, bourbon, and Catawba sherry,
filched from my parents’ liquor cabinet.
I don’t know what Imroth’s reaction was years later
when he got the boxes back,
the valuable Playboys abused, battered,
pages stuck together.
Perhaps my father discretely disposed of them.
Imroth later choked to death in a restaurant,
leaving an attractive wife and 2 children.

…

In 1967 my family left Pueblo.
Pueblo College had become
Southern Colorado State College
and, partly to escape the necessity of dealing with theater colleagues,
my father accepted a position as Full Professor of English
at Metropolitan State College in Denver.
Two or three times during my high school years
I took a bus back to Pueblo to visit Victor.
I don’t remember how the visits
were arranged, but he was typically
busy with school work and had little time for me.
The last was in our senior year when Victor
was working to be sure of becoming valedictorian of his class.
He beat out a smart girl named Cheryl Copeland,
who felt she deserved the honor
(the same girl whom in Jr High he persuaded
to eat psychedelic heavenly blue morning glory seeds,
so that she was sick in Spanish class).
That night he had to practice singing the Carpenters song,
“We’ve Only Just Begun,” for a friend’s wedding.
To avoid attending the rehearsal, I arranged
to be dropped off at the public library
to work on a paper for my English class in Denver.
Making little progress on the paper, I decided to walk back early, but,
mistaking a turn, found myself walking fast up an unfamiliar street.
I kept walking for a long time
in a panicked state.
Finally, a truck driver gave me a lift to a familiar part of town.
I got back to Victor’s house
just as he was getting back from the rehearsal.
He was relieved to see me.
My experience of getting lost had saved him the embarrassment
of leaving me alone by myself for hours while he
stayed at the wedding bash.

…

On another visit (or was it the same?),
we rode around Pueblo until the small hours with his friend, Joe.
Joe drove. I rode in the back seat.
We had a case of 8-oz Coors cans,
plus a quart of vodka that we passed around.
Luckily I’d eaten 2 dinners that night, one
at Victor’s and another at his friend Jim McGraw’s,
or I might have been poisoned to death.
My tongue must have loosened up
because Victor later said to me,
“You’ve got the inner security of a glass of water, you know that?”
…

Victor hooked up with his high school sweetheart,
Gayle, while I was there.
The three of us spent an awkward afternoon together.
She began writing to me in Denver,
sending perfumed envelopes with her
return address written in purple ink on the back flap.
She was cute, dark-haired,
somewhat chubby.
Victor and I had both had crushes on her in Jr. high,
and now Victor was probably having sex with her.
Gail once wrote that she wished I was her boyfriend
instead of Victor.
She even invited me to take a bus to Pueblo and stay at her house —
rescinded at the last minute —
Victor had finally forbidden it.

…

Victor visited me a few times in Denver too —
once after taking part in a program in Boulder
for supremely talented high school students.
The first thing they did was to test the participants.
Victor had the best overall score, although he didn’t
score first in any individual subject.
On a field trip during that program
he was stung by a bee, had an allergic reaction,
and woke up with an IV tube in his arm.
On one of the visits he said that he thought of me
not just as his past but his future too.
I was happy that he felt that way, but he
seemed to have trouble relating to me,
and in my passivity I always
made him take all the initiative.
In probably my last conversation with him for 4 years
Victor told me about his father’s death.
The old man died hard, delirious at the end,
barking out commands —
“Go out to the shed and bring me the spool!” —
blowing his top when no one obeyed.
In that conversation Victor allowed as how Victor Hugo Sr.
had probably been, besides an alcoholic,
a certifiable paranoid schizophrenic —
but a kind and generous father just the same.
“He would have done anything in the world for me,” Victor said.

…

Then we went to college and lost track of each other.
He went to St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN, with Gayle
and a full-ride scholarship.
Practically the only trace of Victor on the internet now
is his name on the 1973 St. Olaf Phi Beta Kappa list.
I went to the University of Colorado,
and spent 2 and a half years gazing up at the icy flatirons from the student union,
or walking through the snowy Boulder streets in my thin suede jacket.
For a long time I could hardly talk to people.
I undertook ambitious, abortive research projects
on ancient Greek religion and early Christianity.
I learned that if I wasn’t going to class I should
be sure to have the professor sign a drop form before the deadline passed.
Finally, I moved back to Denver.
I spent a semester studying piano;
watched bees create energy fields over plots of flowers in the yard,
or robins in the rain shaking water off their heads.
I didn’t get into music school,
but returned to my English major at the CU Denver branch.
With the stress of living by myself removed,
and having been scared into humility,
I did well. I finally even managed
to have sex with a real live woman.
That’s another story.

Victor, part 4

4.

Then I lost touch with him again for 5 years.
Most of what I know about his life then comes from snatches
of things he said later.
He apparently made one or more trips to Colombia
with his sister’s husband to buy cocaine.
One of the trips must have been psychologically devastating.
But by the time he told me anything about it,
Victor had become a pathological liar and I couldn’t
rely on anything he said.

…
After my father’s death, while I was visiting my mother,
I drove from Denver to Pueblo to visit him.
He was living in a house with his girl friend
(whom I was told I had known in junior high school but didn’t remember)
and a Hispanic man who worked as a
fireman and had recently separated from his wife.
I had brought a joint with me.
Victor co-opted it the minute I arrived.
We smoked it at a strategic moment before his girl friend got home.
Victor’s movements seemed jerky,
and he had developed an odd nervous giggle.
At one point he tried to carry a pot of soup that his girl friend had made
to the stove to warm it up,
but he dropped the pot and the soup spilled all over the floor.
He was distressed, but I suggested
that we just scoop up the soup in our hands and put it back in the pot.
Victor said he would never have thought of that.
We did scoop it up, and he served it for dinner.
He didn’t eat any of it, though.
The guitars came out later on.
Victor complimented me on my flat picking,
which I had finally learned playing in my 7Hz band with Stephen Phelps.
Victor's sister came over.
She regarded Victor and me with the same dubious irony
as when we were 12.
…

The next day the fireman made a big pot of green chili.
I don’t remember what we did for most of that day.
I spent some time in the late morning
watching Victor play Galaxian on a machine
in a 7-11 store.
The three of them were planning to buy a house out
in the country somewhere, east of town.
Victor seemed to set a lot of store by this plan.
I think we drove out and took a look at the place.
Later, Victor took me to a bar on the East side,
and we had a beer and tried to talk.
It was then he told me about the Colombia trips.
He said that on one of them he caught a parasite.
Microscopic worms would collect under his skin
in little red-white patches. When he pressed with his finger
on one of the patches, the worms would scatter,
tunneling away fast in all directions
in little red-white lines. He added that
sometimes they would emerge onto the outer skin,
metamorphose into tiny flies,
and go buzzing around the room.
Drove him batty, he said.
Pretty soon we went back to the house.
We ate the chili with some store-bought tamales while watching TV.
It was the best green chili I’ve ever tasted,
with big slabs of pork shoulder,
stringy New Mexico chili, and pinto beans.
They all went to bed early
because the next day was the start of the work week.
Victor was working for a window installation contractor.
He seemed to have settled down
to a pretty regular kind of life.
I was too restless to go to bed,
so I knocked on Victor’s bedroom door
to tell him I was driving back to Denver.
I think I may have interrupted some amorous goings on
on the water bed. But we said
goodbye, and I left.

…

Not very long after this
Victor must have entered drug treatment
and gone through a 12-step program, because he made a point
of visiting my mother to let her know
that he was clean.
My mother wasn’t particularly impressed by this,
though she did care about Victor as her son’s
best childhood friend.
An advanced alcoholic herself,
she died of cancer within a year of his visit.
…

In the late 1980’s Victor
was living in Sandy, UT,
working for 3M as a computer programmer.
He was married and had a baby son named Joey.
He would call me occasionally,
always when he had been drinking.
I think there was a transitory phase in his drinking binges
when he’d decide to call up his old buddy, John.
Once he told me that his sister and her husband had
both been arrested in a cocaine bust.
He was extremely concerned.
Her husband might do 20 years.
His sister would probably escape prison because of the kids.
“God, I’m glad I’m not into that shit anymore,” he said.
I believed what he told me about his sister,
but my interactions with him had acquired such an air of unreality
that I couldn’t be entirely sure of him.
Once when he called I couldn’t talk to him right away.
When I called back in half an hour, he was too far gone to talk,
kept dropping the telephone receiver.
Another time when I called he was in
too black a mood to talk.
I asked him how his job was going, and he said,
“It sucks.”

…

In 1990, when I drove through Utah on Interstate 80
to join my family in Albany, California,
I didn’t stop to see him,
nor in 1991 on my way back to Minnesota.
When I told him on the phone about the trip,
the implication was obvious,
but he didn’t say anything.
The last time I saw him was in St. Paul.
He came to receive a 3M project award, and I invited
him and his wife for brunch.
They arrived late. He was pale and flabby,
with low affect,
looking like his father.
His wife was another Pueblo girl,
but had grown up on the other side of town.
I had bought lox and bagels and a lot of other stuff to eat.
I think they had already had breakfast.
I brought out guitars,
which seems like a cruelty now.
He scratched a bit at the strings,
but only seemed comfortable chatting
about his mother and sister.
While he was absent for a short time, I understood
from his wife that he was on the wagon.
He seemed to be utterly estranged
from whatever part of his life
he had ever shared with me.
…

I never talked to him again.
Nearly a decade later
I discovered that he died not long after I saw him last.
Searching the internet,
I found an obituary record,
though now all I can find
is a picture of his father’s grave marker -
“Private in WWII.”

Victor, part 3

3.

In the fall of ’74 Victor called me.
He was living not far from me with his wife Debbie
in a nice graduate student apartment building at Denver University.
Debbie was working on a math Masters there.
Victor was in a psychology program at Boulder.
When I came over to see him, everything in his apartment impressed me —
the few books in the bookcase,
including A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy
translated and compiled by Wing-Tsit Chan,
which I later bought.
It turned out, Victor and Debbie were devotees
of the Guru Maraj Ji.
A master (not the Guru himself but an advanced adept)
had touched their eyes and they had beheld
the life-rectifying Divine Light.
Victor was also a devotee
of cocaine powder which he showed me how to snort
through a rolled-up one hundred dollar bill
(though I never thought I felt much of a buzz).
Victor’s money came from a research fellowship.
He spent it liberally on coke, marijuana, wine, and seafood restaurants.
He built complex, impressive-looking models
with orange balls on sticks for studying shape perception.
Subjects were shown a shape and
then tested to see if they recognized a rotated version of it.
I was sure that I would not have performed well at the task.
I think he wrote a big paper on the project in the spring of 1975.

…

We played music together.
In junior high school he had got an old fiberglass guitar from me.
My father had used it as a stage prop
and brought it home, but I hadn’t done anything with it.
Victor learned it right away,
so to play with him I bought a cheap steel-stringed guitar
and figured out how to strum chords with my fingers.
We were a sensation in the 7^th-grade talent show
playing “In the Land of Oden” by Peter and Gordon
and “No Tears for Johnny” by Chad and Jeremy.
When we reconnected in Denver 10 years later
Victor was interested in country music,
so we learned Willie Nelson and Jerry Jeff Walker songs,
also the song covered by The Who,
Meher Baba’s favorite song (next to Begin the Beguine),
the song in waltz rhythm that goes —

                Sometimes they ask me if I’m really happy now
                I say, Sure, I never loved her anyhow.
                But inside I long for you and the way it used to be
                I look around and there’s a heartache following me.

…

That summer he was interested in organicist approaches
to philosophy of science.
I was reading Whitehead,
he Paul Weiss and some other writers.
We never really talked philosophy, which was his major in college,
but we felt an intellectual bond going back to our adolescent days.
One afternoon, after driving around in Victor’s car smoking tai stick,
Victor suggested that we go to the Denver Art Museum to check out
an abstract expressionist show.
I remember the Rauschenberg white paintings in particular,
but in virtually all of those works
it seemed that the technique was not to create images
but to provide a medium in which the eye could glimpse
the vanishing geometry with which it
organizes everything.
Victor seemed mightily defeated by this insight.
What kind of Houdini magic would it take
to escape this mirror world
where all we can see are our own visual processes,
with no path through the web —
the only conceivable way out some kind of Daedalean vertical ascent?
…

Then I went to Minnesota to graduate school.
When I came back to Denver the next summer,
Victor and Debbie were living in an apartment in Westminster,
a northwestern suburb where I’d worked
at a gas station 5 years before.
Debbie was no longer at DU but was working for an insurance firm,
going through the testing process to get certification as an insurance actuary.
Victor wasn’t at CU anymore either,
but was trying to make money in sales.
First he tried to sell some kind of fire alarm product.
He came to my parents’ house and gave a presentation
designed to show how likely it was that the television
or refrigerator would set the house on fire.
My mother listened politely,
but didn’t buy anything.
Next Victor joined a firm
that sold a product called Rainbow Air Purifiers.
My mother didn’t buy one of those either, and anyway
Victor was soon diversifying into frozen food and appliances.
My parents did buy a freezer from him.
The way it seemed to happen was,
he and his associates got some freezers to sell,
sold one to my mother,
and then decided to go into the frozen food business.
The freezer wasn’t delivered for about a month,
and it only worked for a few days. My parents
had to pay someone else to haul it away and replace it.

…

The Denver Broncos went to the Super Bowl in the winter of that year.
I never paid attention to them when I lived in Colorado,
but in Minnesota I started following them.
When I went home for the Winter break,
I found that Victor and his partners had hatched up
a souvenir scheme for the AFC Championship game against the Oakland Raiders.
They collected hundreds of small stones,
and had boxes made with clear plastic tops, inscribed,

Denver Broncos
1977 AFC Champion
SUPERBOULDER

They put together a regular factory staff
to paint the stones orange and put them in the boxes.
Then on game day Victor and I and his older sister’s husband, Caswell,
and quite a few other people,
tried to sell the SUPERBOULDERs for 5 dollars apiece
to members of the crowd as they arrived for the game.
“Send the Broncos to the Superbowl with a
SUPERBOULDER!” we shouted.
Victor paid us 10 dollars an hour for the work.
Unfortunately, people had quite a bit of pent up resentment
going back to the old Pet Rock phenomenon,
and were ready to take it out on the SUPERBOULDERs.
“What kind of ridiculous scam is it this time?” they said.
We only sold 4 or 5 to the crowd going in,
then listened to the game on the radio for 3 hours in the cold.
(Actually, Victor ran into an acquaintance with a spare ticket,
so he got to go in and watch the game.)
The departing crowd, although delirious with victory,
if not actually stumbling drunk,
still weren’t inclined to shell out for a boulder.
Victor must have been disappointed, but later told me
he’d sold the boulders to a department store and made a good profit.

…

I didn’t see Victor much after that.
It must have been the Spring vacation of that year
I went to the dog races with him.
He said you could make a pretty good living
by betting on the dogs if you were smart.
I watched him lose a hundred dollars that afternoon.
He had one legitimate hunch.
The dog won, but he leveraged his bet
by selecting some kind of trifecta package that lost.
He made me promise not to tell Debbie about it.

Villanelle: The Mountain and the Dove

Above the domes of loftiest mosques,
These pinnacles of death aspire.
                        The Poetical Works of Lord Houghton, 1876

Take a ticket to Tacoma!
And while you’re waiting for the train,
think about your sweet paloma!

You won't contract a melanoma
from standing in the pouring rain,
holding a ticket to Tacoma.

You’ll get your doctoral diploma,
if you can tolerate the strain
of disserting on your sweet paloma

in your Valley-of-the-Moon—Sonoma—
take your shoes off, taste the wine!
Take a ticket to Tacoma!

You must adopt the right persona—
fuzzy, sexy, and feline—
to impersonate your sweet paloma,

but you’ll stand up and grab the power,
for you'll have your baby all the time—
striving upward to Tacoma,
remembering your sweet paloma.

Song Sparrow

song sparrow
foundering
in goldenrod

Oolong Villanelle

You’re running to town to get some milk.
I’m sitting on the porch deck watching the lake.
This oolong tea sure does the trick!

I got the tea from my father-in-law, Rick.
He brought it from China. No thanks, I never take
anything in my tea, not even almond milk.

The lake is plenty placid, smooth as silk.
There’s a construction crew next door working on a big shake
house. Boy, this oolong does the trick!

If I go hiking I might pick up a tick.
Then I might get lyme disease and be sick
all the time. I feel hungry. There’ll be milk

soon. My foot is resting on a piece of brick
that I can’t see any other use for. As I sit
here now, I feel I’ve found the trick

to perfect happiness: no internet; birds; trees; the thick
drawl of my thoughts that I can leave or take;
you running to town to get milk.
This oolong tea sure does the trick!

Windwords

Watching fog sink over my path.

What was I thinking?
Whatever I was thinking,
let me forget it now.

Watching mist fall onto the grass.
What was it I wanted?
Whatever I wanted,
let me give it up now.

Good Boy Villanelle

Writing myself into a corner.

I’m showing my true colors now.
What a good boy am I, Jack Horner!

Knowing I ain’t no foreigner
to love—I’ve got notches on my prow
from poaching pigeons in my corner.

You, Love, are the glorious ripener—
I want to marry you right now!
Will you marry Little Jack Horner?

Don’t tread on me! said your flag—a warner,
and there’s a black snake on it, lying low,
hissing me back into my corner.

Now I’m all shaven and shorn, or
else I’m the boy who went out to mow
and pulled out a plum—Jack Horner!

and finally sank into the verdure,
black snake dealing my death blow.
Writing myself into a corner.
What a good boy am I, Jack Horner!