Report to Hell #16

letters from hell

PAGES FROM "THE PUNK NIKITA" (1990s)

charles 3ball

circa mid-90s

THE PLUMBER

(an excerpt from "THE BOG POMES")

5:30 when the dark morning bursts open like a plum, I rise and swivel to my clothes. A red squirrel is in the cedar in the humble darkness. Lights drag across the walls, bending eternally. Lights dying briefly. The dog is wiggling in front of me, eager to lift a leg, tempting a bark. So we risk it through the unlit bedroom, into the delay of the motion-activated light. Poems from the bogs. Two scoops and a spoon of yogurt. Coffee in a small mug (he mugs in miniature). Donut preferable. Lights in the panorama weave, blink out. He cleans his bowl in seconds.

I shuffle to the couch, the carpet creaks. too soon for the news I watch. The living room is empty, the dog has gone under the bed. I sip whiskey across from my wife. She is crafting a forest. [“Village of the Pharaohs” swirls in my head] The window is darker now. It is evening. Between the bombs were hunger, horror and a humor blacker than the cosmic drain. The human voice is beautiful as music. Through the dust where the blood has weighed it down, I see a small face, a smile escapes. They’re doing it again. Lust for rage, the petty sweep of a desk, writ large. Silence offstage, pacing in the wings. Encores for the Noise. [They tore up the lobby in frothing exodus]

“It’s a yorkshire puddin’ of a book, Mike!” “Ulysses” was brown bread. “Peig” was a biscuit. “The flute is a mushroom, I get it, I get it.” But he couldn’t have. He’d moved to the island of Midway to kick crack cocaine. He did, but got lost in an exotic drug he could not comprehend. I see it as a big book with very few pages. But I might get the b.b. in the bear’s eye yet.

What a day that from here looks like every other day. What a day that every other looks like every day. Lookalikes these days, these month long days. These lifelong days. I’m preaching, why not? I’m in the Valley. What will happen? Nothing, it’s happening. We take the dog out back and kick the ball [hit rewind]. The bamboo hangs low. It rained this afternoon. It’s night.

I do have a point… “And it’s on top of your head, haw, haw!” My point? It’s dull. A hare in the bog suggests a meatier stew than the thin broth I’m ladling out, a tepid puddle of careless type. Clouds eclipsed the ring of fire. We shrugged and toasted sourdough. What a day. Blood in the sand, Is there blood on the moon? Incense sticks punked all night.

mo'sh

october 2023

YOU CAN LEARN A LOT FROM A DEATH CERTIFICATE

Julia Rotzenberg, my mother’s mother’s mother, died five weeks shy of her eighty-second birthday, at two in the afternoon on a mid-November Monday. I don’t know if she saw that coming: her death, at two in the afternoon, on a mid-November Monday. Maybe as the end neared it made perfect sense, or maybe it puzzled her, perfectly.

This happened in Queens, in the 1950's, but she was born in Hungary, in another century's seventies. She died a widow, in her home of 27 years. That makes about fifty-five years lived somewhere else, in states other than widowhood.

The day she died was clear and cool, and late morning gusts had calmed before she departed. I don’t know if she heard them softening, or if an open window let the breeze to her unreddening cheek, the spectral touch of long-ago love, recalled like a fiction.

I don’t know if she thought, “I’ll never look out that window again. Not even tomorrow.” If so, I don’t know which language she thought it in; maybe neither, or none. I don’t know what she knew. Not a bit of it.

Great-grandchildren would have been coming home from school around then. I don’t know if the two events collided. The infinite! Meeting the infinitesimal! And then the small absorbing the large, unimaginably, in sullen, metaphysical reproach.

The day, Julia’s last, remained a clear one, and in the middle of it, the world lifted like fog, away.

Later, Funeral Director Clarence F. Simonson welcomed Julia to The Evergreens Cemetery. I wonder how he might have done such a thing. Maybe her casket was brought, his fingertips brushing the wood as it passed in a gesture of consolation, and maybe he looked at it and thought, “Bojangles is buried here,” as if he were trying to impress her.

psaur

april 2025