Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Slipped through and left you where? Why do I mean it comes flickering at me that if you needed to speak face to face with the Chilean, you’d know v/here to do it? A lady con with whom I correspond at Bedford now wishes she had grandchildren. She’s been in so long she remembers when she wished for a child.

Oh this old solid familiar place! The sociology substitute, blonde, sizable, sweet, comes five times a week but the legal liaison is on vacation, and the old Bible hawkers have pointed their hand-tooled uppers and tuned their string-tie transistor medallions toward the fat hills of Oklahoma if they still got hills there, and are off, and the Chevy dealer’s foreign wife the musician who plays him to sleep no longer approaches down the mile-like green two-way white-line-divided no-passing corridor, and Shin the Cambodian morale-booster writes Smitty that he got a deal to end all deals in a Minnesota social-work program and will be working with Indians no doubt teaching them to fish and hunt, but a woman who recently became a carpenter having been a foreign correspondent is going to start writing us and visiting. But you, Jim, who came here first who knows exactly why unless to compare colloids, are still with us, food for thought, and the Chilean does not come up in talk, not that you and I have time at the end of the workshop with Jackie and Juan telling you how to place two photos on the front page without unbalancing the makeup, asking you to read thirty inches in two minutes while standing in the doorway there’s the little black guard in his blue blazer who lifts his Sears Roebuck barbells in his home garage in Poughkeepsie, but then you paid me another visit after the time they didn’t let you in and there we are talking about everything in (between us) the (continuum of the) Colloidal Unconscious except the Chilean.

Including Miriam and her father who knew (I say "knew" though he was wrong) that Miriam’s Aunt Iris had tried to toast him on his own garbage cans; and my mother, who once told my father his son being a good Catholic mattered more than a job with the City; yes, including the quest for basic unit of value right back into that overload of Foleynomics giving something for us to live our sentences for besides the Outside — and softened-up enemy scanners to screen from them all that came hereinafter: so without I been taken in, Jim, but since you’re out there and can find out what you want, I must ask in another vein if you’ve gotten what you came here for or a substitute. I don’t mean I played sick the time they turned you away, for I had received a letter from the South American gentleman addressing himself to not only the institutional matter of employed and unemployed women as (shapely) forms of conspicuous consumption, but to his fear that the journalist with speckled wrists named (his contact here told Efrain) Spence who had confronted him with demands directly at the foundation where he carried on research could imperil him and his wife, who herself (and here he said it right out) had initiated a counter-move imperiling her even more. I can name no names, and the excitement of this threatens to thicken inward from the mere margins which is all such international vagueness is worth, next to the colloidal energies we keep sacred. I communicate better or worse. They won’t give me an appointment with the eye doctor — there isn’t one — and my mother needs a prescription if she is going to get me new glasses. Someone out on the gallery comes by my cell, comes in, invited. "Life is in short cycles, or periods," I have read, "rapid rallies, as by a good night’s sleep," you know the mind that said those words, or his knows you; for him the world of this correctional facility breathes close, fades off, fluctuates, and very often (as you said of your past) does not exist. And there are those who write of its ground plan, its power structure, unknown creativity where you find it sticking in your ears or bram-bling your ribs, correction officer approaches Carlos, You better shave; and like the officer has hair to his jawbone and a beard a year old — I have noted the plain, striped shirts you wear, Jim, with the imported-style cuffs; I wager not your brother’s stock in New Jersey store.

San Juan Bautista Day for Puerto Rican families (the guys invite me) and there’s talk to the kids about stay away from drugs; I hear Charlie, who is not in this block, reading his poem he calls an ode in Smitty’s cell on the tape recorder: and it says, "The human spirit is a collective phenomenon," and I don’t know if I add or subtract, Jim; you know what I’m saying? Yet "the poisoned mountain that controls our mind overnight" was vague till Efrain said Smitty got that from him, and didn’t get the facts right: Efrain before he left prison said in workshop his spelling is bad but it’s a part of his history he means to keep so people will be in a better position to identify his writing. Does this add to the collective human spirit? An ode Charles says is a poem that answers the question How should a man live his life? Who would (dare) tell me? Better we communicate this way, Jim, that’s why I didn’t come to the workshop: Private cell, granted not open-ended yet open whether at one end curtained illegally or not. So you see why I sometimes see this barred front end as one side. But it’s the top, too — and the lidless lid — because one night soon after I materialized from Auburn Correctional Facility I dreamt my cell was carried along the beach like it was the promised land like where Miriam and I went Sundays in a borrowed vehicle saving the scofflaw owner from being towed mayhap, which we would leave parked out there and take the bus home; and in this dream cell being lugged along with me in it the bars were handles and all alone in my carrier I was being swung step by step and I would see the bright sand and then the white and blue sky, the sand and the sky; but then I and the one lugging me turned, and the swing of my container showed me the dark wet of the sand and then the gray sea; but wasn’t it raining? — and I was sitting on my toilet, my back to what was now the floor in this tilted cell, raced like one of your astronauts to seed the universe with a grain of surprise — but no countdown — beyond it; but then the rain came down and rained, heavier on the downswing than the up, and hanging on to my seat seeing for the first time that we only think we’re asleep but one’s always awake especially dreaming, I kept hitting the flusher with my elbow to spring the rainwater but gravity kept shifting and the toilet was plugged up and we turned away from the breakers and down the beach and I saw on one back-swing sand all running away and trash barrels and kids charging around, towels tied round their necks in the rain and losing themselves at the edges of my view, and women and men running, and on the down-and-up-swing I saw gray sky and a plane hauling a banner but I had to read it in three, four swings, and someday I’ll know what that banner said but by now I was off the toilet floating higher on the flood of rain, and for all I know calling into the future when through the Chilean economist who had it from his left-handed contact Spence I learn of a weather-freak loner whose hermit-uncle like his before him was an inventor of New York (what’s that mean?) and who, himself an out-of-favor meteorologist, had made good the promise of his more-than-a-century-long line of nephews-uncles by describing a new weather: for before the Chilean gentleman knew it, he passed on to me name and location of this long-shared weather thinker who was beyond rain-making and hail-suppression but has come up with a coastal dynamic that really gets to me because I’m less learning than remembering its tale of—

— of cloud-fragments at the sea-land interface refusing to condense and precipitate yet falling fast as a feather in a void as if their load of uncondensed moisture canceled temperature gradient in favor of a gravity which isn’t the pull they thought but just an economical route for—