Erica Carpenter
ROOM 13
At the foot of the stairs one of us keeps talking.
It is apparent to all of us he does not know what he is
talking about, so when a few of us see fit to cough, we all
are coughing. Compulsively, for sake of something, something’s dry
and urgent plosives. Something fiery, hung like flour.
It’s sounding dry and nervous like a mouse. Behind the walls, fretful
but not frightening is that cleave of lath from plaster, and from
nearby rooms the sound of running water. Water disports itself
somewhere. Behind some walls, presumably. Presumably all down
bird throats of pipes complete with rings and tags and other
markings which, when drawn, communicate pure passages of love.
Someone concedes to going back against the issues
as if patient, as if clinging to a rope, a cause, a lifetime
copyright or patent, and yet even now this one is
picturing a function of some spirit (he’s the soul
of generosity), rising steam before his eyes.
—It’s like a bowl. A bowl of something.
Yes, a bowl.
Now there follows a familiar slow collapse, surface waves
under surveillance of some close or passing storm. Reined in again,
he is the soul of forced contrition, and before his eyes appears a
certain parti-colored ball. It is a ball of a variety
he’s seen, perhaps he’s read about, before. In books it forms
round pools or near the ocean.
Even he had such a ball, once.
Neatly sectioned in its colors, like a grapefruit
in its skin, no, of course he’d never owned it.
Someone else had owned the pool, that is the ball, or else
it’s everyone who owned it. That is, it seemed so bitter
in those cold extremes of grass, and he thought he saw
the ball there like a floater. Like a floater, as his dad was
wont to say, something sifting toward the eyes, the
green, the golf course, on the sea. A buoyant point
beyond a pale and thrifty pass, it kept emerging
out where nobody could find it.
What no one owns, he says (but always quiet,
sinking quick, more like a diction rendered fat
and soft, it takes the breath away) is mine.
He begins to think of that domain so long and
yellow after fences as domain he “mayn’t
be long gone to” (still imagines that the lyrics
might make sense, for once laid out across
the blankets like a tiny civil war)—it reminds him
of his travels in St. Louis, in St. Croix.
Of that obscure locale he can recall only one thing:
a bistro painting, rather odd, which seemed to cling above
a fault line on a bowstring plaster wall. A fin, an end
of something, it seemed ominous and dorsal. Its subject
was some animal resembling a—what? It was a walrus,
with some figment of a boot around the ears, but tendered
heavenward in greasy blasts of blue. He bends and sounds,
suspects the bubbles in his person like a faulty hand blown
glass, attributes them to “battage,” which is local, meaning
something, like the look that warns, bad soup.
A word that sounds like what, crossed with
the memory of what he’d had for supper, every
night of life in that decayed October province
would conceal its lovely name, vague as clerks
who passed him numbers in the market. Wagons
passed him, he decided, every time he moved
his eyes. Otherwise it was the avenues of houses
shipping westward, below board. Hooks and grapples
fastened signage to the storefronts, and would likewise
tow his body through its complement of days.
And no body allowed to touch it. And the ball
beyond the pale, the dipper’s bead and prow.
It would appear it was his luck to be that way
disposed, so that the fear of integers released him
nightly into ecstasies of looking, although sideways,
at the blanks between the stars.