Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But we meant more than weather-air-and-traffic-controller receiver-monitors-you-can-live-with, two screens in every relative home itself tilting always tilting round as we approach. We meant renewable duals between newer screen substitutes that for a day trip or night might accommodate Grace Kimball (who is more or less the multiplier of her workshops) and James Mayn (with his by our calculations parallel and intersecting populations) hear the noise, duple music from two really wonderful people as human as any angel-san could role-model, though two who may yet not meet in person to make (and brand name) exploratory history Recipro-Cal.

But happy with any proven home, we don’t argue with that femoral limb they share: thigh in the beginning angles cohering among the legs holding assembly under that conference table where agreement was general that a power vacuum was a real possibility: power vacuum a daughter found in and (para) for her Dad, but gap of such inner route it sings beneath your skin as if it thinks it’s that quaint spawn the worm we have been out of contact with: not our fault, it’s its turn to phone us we sort of remember on principle. For the one who calls, needs; but the one who is called, is that the strong or the weak?

The mother who left those sons or double-son is still somewhere and so is the promise she left behind that not she but they were the ones to leave. And if receding, she could still be reconstituted at a later libration point ‘tween pulls, because one looks after one’s mother, too, though rebirth’s what we were into, winging it or waiting on it, and if you are going to start taking responsibility, you might let your relations know.

Whatever. It was an intrahemispheric tapeworm yet slower than a gas-sped bullet spun out the rifling of a Colt revolver’s barrel belonging to the Mayn family: a tapeworm slower than the ready-to-eat horses loping down a western valley of red, brown, gray, and darker stone, past a thousand natural sundials, cantering so gently it’s in a slow scale, side by side mindful unmindful of their riders — the East Far Eastern Princess upon her gift from the Navajo Prince, as she called him, a compact black-and-white pony the Princess’s pale bird refrained from consuming; the Prince beside her upon the midnight-blue Mexican mare, his own thick-withered, tempered mesa-bird, whose land of monumental stone and desert-sea, of spring firmament starred red, petaled white, spread blue-violet, among the green of owl-eyed cactus and sinewy pihon scrub, and of winter space, finds its own four corners infinitely outward-bounded god-given; while still further, but, in the gridthink of territorial plot, less than a generation away from a state called statehood, the Four Corners are also, for administrative (read white Anglo, which is — just in case — redundant) clarity, ordained interior (the better to clear you with, my dear, my Laughing Antler, my own Doe Water escaping me yet lingering) and that administrative intersection neat as four joined squares of document paper or an idea in someone’s basic-four-color brain, where the mapped lands of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona meet, abstracts in an infinitely vanishing cross divisions within, willed from a distance remote as that departmental will must always stand from the far corners of the Prince’s cosmos that’s held like his people in his heart where one day this cosmos of his is in part told to the visiting East Far Eastern Princess, who knew only then what she had come to understand, and thought the Indians had something — it all worked together quite sensibly, the forces were visible, by and large — but she thought, too, that there was something more the Prince himself was after.

And to go on (against the returning undertow of an interrogator’s interruption— had come? he demands, had come so as to understand? he complains as if he had not the wherewithal to implement his feeling by juicing our embedded electrodes: you spoke out of both sides of your face): to go on, to bypass these continental sentimentalities Mayn was clandestinely formed by until they questioned themselves one day, our noted tapeworm, intrahemispheric spawn though slower than trajected bullet or breathing horse, has, in case temporarily forgotten, other speeds, other inferred breathing like sound we picked up with our ear to the thigh of the divine that could make us, who now breathless need somebody to recapitulate by, forget that it was just any old fish tapeworm to be flushed out by gently acting bacteria prescribed by him who’s been your G.P. since not even your dying great-grandma can remember; a tapeworm taken out of Minnesota’s thousand lakes by air accompanied by the Ojibway medicine man’s diamond squint (now increasingly embedded in, if not pegged to, the soft swells of the dollar sign), this tapeworm arrived via the Manhattan physician’s fond attention to his diva, tapeworm extraordinary, which was perhaps not hers alone to do with as she pleased, for even after it got flushed away down the diva’s silver toilet, its track clung like experience to the insides of the slowly self-understanding society we’re in that’s capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale world views, even after it had been flushed by the afternoon diva, the swinging, well-sung songbird (read mezzo, read mezzo persona) from her soft system during the two hours between the exit of the brunched, rueful physician and the intercom announcing the elegantly lapeled, mustached, infamously gifted mufti officer whose hands upon neat-cuffed wrists delegated in his other, political sphere to marginal interrogators themselves trained in the best amputation may have crashed clapping through the earshot of friends of her father’s and perhaps her old father’s own amplified earshot head (faraway under house arrest) tortured but not by doubts. But this mufti officer’s elsewhere delegated hands have also here in New York (these very hands alive with knowing knuckles) clapped for her at two performances: Rosenkavalier we remember and (with a significantly different audience) Norma, the Druid priestess — slimmest she’s been during this several-weeks diet campaign, rather dangerously slim as danger approaches across the footlights of opportunity in the officer’s passion and across the intrahemispheric league-upon-league in awesome fear for her outspoken father back (down) home in South America where she the diva no longer hangs her passport, she of the divinely resonant (formerly-until-last-week tapeworm-echoing) thigh (daughter, priestess, officer’s lover, and, in today’s last act, beyond biweekly physic brunches and the hard-core soft-wear spawned much later over every half-lighted inch of her shared bed, now, in her brisk but high cuisine, sacrificing her stomach to her ringed pyre’s flame and a ghastly multiple spawn — (Norma’s little children-san to eat —) she offered in her Manhattan apartment to the military but naked appetite beside her at the stove, his breath upon her shoulder, trading for the omens of her duplex kitchen the real love she’s had of him in her own hemispheric-feeling bed) — where his hands that were out of sight she felt but hands right here, not delegated, also clapped for private performances where each of his "strong-arms" moved each hand to clap on its own in a silence not Zen-proof though contemplative because heard in the warm light of the diva’s bedchamber by the twain. And self-helped by feedback, awareness nowadays gets refined in some adepts such that the soul picks up within the common thigh a noted tendon’s oath that the next rash stride around this jogging track around New York’s Central Park reservoir will cost this lonely jogger a pulled hamstring, but through this oath that the soul picks up it can send back its fine tune to monitor the blood pressure risen expressly to this occasion of two independent observers watching the jogger if not his blood pressure which has risen to turn the neck muscles bound to the shoulder slope to stone (to lead, to consolidated scrap metal he an economist has thought) which in turn made him throw forth his middle-aged knee with a kick so his hamstring foresaw itself about to be yanked and thereupon flashed its elastic oath into that soul-center that’s everywhere but nowhere, and a painfully hobbling hamstring pull was spared the tall, bald, distinguished foreign jogger-economist who’s being watched, he knew, through the sunny trees and rocks of Central Park by the mufti naval officer and elsewhere by the journalist James Mayn, who, unknown to the jogging exile-economist and his enemy and fellow-national the mufti officer, came there to watch the officer as well, whose subtly callused palms even at this moment of political action (read surveillance, read commitment) hold the memory of those dual clappings joint and one-handed in the diva’s bed as, elsewhere in this city which is also an articulate structure accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units, that dimpled, divided, but stereo-attuned buttock-life he clapped also remembers: as when, in turn, bent into a spinal twist in a basement yoga class, the diva’s body complained, except then she could not be sure where the complaint was you know coming from, her upper thigh apparently all kinked but a pulse banging along her other instep thence brinked spaceward — across the room, the roof-like carpet, the floor under the carpet shared by the others of her yoga class — space anyway outside herself like someone’s coat hung in the hall while her soul’s complaining she’s not together.