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  ************ AAggrriippppaa ((AA BBooookk ooff TThhee DDeeaadd)) ************
  TTeexxtt bbyy WWiilllliiaamm GGiibbssoonn
  Etchings by Dennis Ashbaugh
  (C) 1992 Kevin Begos Publishing
  1411 York Ave. New York, NY
  All Rights Reserved


  I hesitated
  before untying the bow
  that bound this book together.

  A black book:
       ALBUMS
  CA. AGRIPPA
       Order Extra Leaves
            By Letter and Name

  A Kodak album of time-burned
  black construction paper

  The string he tied
  Has been unravelled by years
  and the dry weather of trunks
  Like a lady's shoestring from the First World War
  Its metal ferrules eaten by oxygen
  Until they resemble cigarette-ash

  Inside the cover he inscribed something in soft graphite
  Now lost
  Then his name
  W.F. Gibson Jr.
  and something, comma,
  1924

  Then he glued his Kodak prints down
  And wrote under them
  In chalk-like white pencil:
  "Papa's saw mill, Aug. 1919."

  A flat-roofed shack
  Against a mountain ridge
  In the foreground are tumbled boards and offcuts
  He must have smelled the pitch, In August
  The sweet hot reek
  Of the electric saw
  Biting into decades


  Next the spaniel Moko
  "Moko 1919"
  Poses on small bench or table
  Before a backyard tree
  His coat is lustrous
  The grass needs cutting
  Beyond the tree,
  In eerie Kodak clarity,
  Are the summer backstairs of Wheeling,
       West Virginia
  Someone's left a wooden stepladder out

  "Aunt Fran and [obscured]"
  Although he isn't, this gent
  He has a "G" belt-buckle
  A lapel-device of Masonic origin
  A patent propelling-pencil
  A fountain-pen
  And the flowers they pose behind so solidly
  Are rooted in an upright length of whitewashed
       concrete sewer-pipe.

  Daddy had a horse named Dixie
  "Ford on Dixie 1917"
  A saddle-blanket marked with a single star
  Corduroy jodpurs
  A western saddle
  And a cloth cap
  Proud and happy
  As any boy could be

  "Arthur and Ford fishing 1919"
  Shot by an adult
  (Witness the steady hand
  that captures the wildflowers
  the shadows on their broad straw hats
  reflections of a split-rail fence)
  standing opposite them,
  on the far side of the pond,
  amid the snake-doctors and the mud,
  Kodak in hand,
  Ford Sr.?

  And "Moma July, 1919"
  strolls beside the pond,
  in white big city shoes,
  Purse tucked behind her,
  While either Ford or Arthur, still straw-hatted,
  approaches a canvas-topped touring car.

  "Moma and Mrs. Graham at fish hatchery 1919"
    Moma and Mrs. G. sit atop a graceful concrete
       arch.

  "Arthur on Dixie", likewise 1919,
       rather ill at ease.
  On the roof behind the barn, behind him,
  can be made out this cryptic mark:
  H.V.J.M.[?]

  "Papa's Mill 1919", my grandfather most regal amid a wrack of
  cut lumber,
  might as easily be the record
  of some later demolition, and
  His cotton sleeves are rolled
  to but not past the elbow,
  striped, with a white neckband
  for the attachment of a collar.
  Behind him stands a cone of sawdust some thirty feet in height.
  (How that feels to tumble down,
  or smells when it is wet)


                 II.

  The mechanism: stamped black tin,
  Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,
  A lens
  The shutter falls
  Forever
  Dividing that from this.

  Now in high-ceiling bedrooms,
  unoccupied, unvisited,
  in the bottom drawers of veneered bureaus
  in cool chemical darkness curl commemorative
  montages of the country's World War dead,

  just as I myself discovered
  one other summer in an attic trunk,
  and beneath that every boy's best treasure
  of tarnished actual ammunition
  real little bits of war
  but also
  the mechanism
  itself.

  The blued finish of firearms
  is a process, controlled, derived from common
       rust, but there
  under so rare and uncommon a patina
  that many years untouched
  until I took it up
  and turning, entranced, down the unpainted
       stair,
  to the hallway where I swear
  I never heard the first shot.

  The copper-jacketed slug recovered
  from the bathroom's cardboard cylinder of
       Morton's Salt
  was undeformed
  save for the faint bright marks of lands
       and grooves
  so hot, stilled energy,
  it blistered my hand.

  The gun lay on the dusty carpet.
  Returning in utter awe I took it so carefully up
  That the second shot, equally unintended,
       notched the hardwood bannister and brought
       a strange bright smell of ancient sap to life
       in a beam of dusty sunlight.
       Absolutely alone
       in awareness of the mechanism.

  Like the first time you put your mouth
       on a woman.


                 III.

  "Ice Gorge at Wheeling
            1917"

  Iron bridge in the distance,
  Beyond it a city.
  Hotels where pimps went about their business
  on the sidewalks of a lost world.
  But the foreground is in focus,
  this corner of carpenter's Gothic,
  these backyards running down to the freeze.

  "Steamboat on Ohio River",
  its smoke foul and dark,
  its year unknown,
  beyond it the far bank
  overgrown with factories.

  "Our Wytheville
  House Sept. 1921"

  They have moved down from Wheeling and my father wears his
  city clothes.  Main Street is unpaved and an electric streetlamp is
  slung high in the frame, centered above the tracked dust on a
  slack wire, suggesting the way it might pitch in a strong wind,
  the shadows that might throw.

  The house is heavy, unattractive, sheathed in stucco, not native
  to the region.  My grandfather, who sold supplies to contractors,
  was prone to modern materials, which he used with
  wholesaler's enthusiasm.  In 1921 he replaced the section of brick
  sidewalk in front of his house with the broad smooth slab of poured
  concrete, signing this improvement with a flourish, "W.F.
  Gibson 1921". He believed in concrete and plywood
  particularly.  Seventy years later his signature remains, the slab
  floating perfectly level and charmless between mossy stretches of
  sweet uneven brick that knew the iron shoes of Yankee horses.

  "Mama Jan. 1922" has come out to sweep the concrete with a
  broom.  Her boots are fastened with buttons requiring a special
  instrument.

  Ice gorge again, the Ohio, 1917.  The mechanism closes. A
  torn clipping offers a 1957 DeSOTO FIREDOME, 4-door Sedan,
  torqueflite radio, heater and power steering and brakes, new
  w.s.w. premium tires. One owner. $1,595.


                      IV

  He made it to the age of torqueflite radio
  but not much past that, and never in that town.
  That was mine to know, Main Street lined with
  Rocket Eighty-eights,
  the dimestore floored with wooden planks
  pies under plastic in the Soda Shop,
  and the mystery untold, the other thing,
  sensed in the creaking of a sign after midnight
  when nobody else was there.

  In the talc-fine dust beneath the platform of the
       Norfolk & Western
  lay indian-head pennies undisturbed since
       the dawn of man.

  In the banks and courthouse, a fossil time
       prevailed, limestone centuries.

  When I went up to Toronto
       in the draft,
  my Local Board was there on Main Street,
  above a store that bought and sold pistols.
  I'd once traded that man a derringer for a
       Walther P-38.
  The pistols were in the window
  behind an amber roller-blind
       like sunglasses.
  I was seventeen or so but basically I guess
  you just had to be a white boy.
  I'd hike out to a shale pit and run
  ten dollars worth of 9mm
  through it, so worn you hardly
  had to pull the trigger.
  Bored, tried shooting
  down into a distant stream but
  one of them came back at me
  off a round of river rock
  clipping walnut twigs from a branch
  two feet above my head.
  So that I remembered the mechanism.


                 V.

  In the all night bus station
  they sold scrambled eggs to state troopers
  the long skinny clasp-knives called fruit knives
  which were pearl handled watermelon-slicers
  and hillbilly novelties in brown varnished wood
  which were made in Japan.

  First I'd be sent there at night only
  if Mom's carton of Camels ran out,
  but gradually I came to value
  the submarine light, the alien reek
  of the long human haul, the strangers
  straight down from Port Authority
  headed for Nashville, Memphis, Miami.
  Sometimes the Sheriff watched them get off
  making sure they got back on.

  When the colored restroom
  was no longer required
  they knocked open the cinderblock
  and extended the magazine rack
  to new dimensions,
  a cool fluorescent cave of dreams
  smelling faintly and forever of disinfectant,
  perhaps as well of the travelled fears
  of those dark uncounted others who,
  moving as though contours of hot iron,
  were made thus to dance
  or not to dance
  as the law saw fit.

  There it was that I was marked out as a writer,
  having discovered in that alcove
  copies of certain magazines
  esoteric and precious, and, yes,
  I knew then, knew utterly,
  the deal done in my heart forever,
  though how I knew not,
  nor ever have.

  Walking home
  through all the streets unmoving
  so quiet I could hear the timers of the traffic lights a block away:
       the mechanism.
  Nobody else, just the silence
       spreading out
  to where the long trucks groaned
       on the highway
  their vast brute souls in want.


                      VI.

  There must have been a true last time
  I saw the station but I don't remember
  I remember the stiff black horsehide coat
  gift in Tucson of a kid named Natkin
  I remember the cold
  I remember the Army duffle
  that was lost and the black man in Buffalo
  trying to sell me a fine diamond ring,
  and in the coffee shop in Washington
  I'd eavesdropped on a man wearing a black tie
  embroidered with red roses
  that I have looked for ever since.

  They must have asked me something
  at the border
  I was admitted
  somehow
  and behind me swung the stamped tin shutter
  across the very sky
  and I went free
  to find myself
  mazed in Victorian brick
  amid sweet tea with milk
  and smoke from a cigarette called a Black Cat
  and every unknown brand of chocolate
  and girls with blunt-cut bangs
  not even Americans
  looking down from high narrow windows
  on the melting snow
  of the city undreamed
  and on the revealed grace
  of the mechanism,
  no round trip.

  They tore down the bus station
  there's chainlink there
  no buses stop at all
  and I'm walking through Chiyoda-ku
  in a typhoon
  the fine rain horizontal
  umbrella everted in the storm's Pacific breath
  tonight red lanterns are battered,

  laughing,
  in the mechanism.



     Copyright � 1992 Kevin Begos Publishing. All rights reserved.
                             Brought to you
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