Funhouse mirror & Me and Nash
by Richard Garcia
[ poetry - july 05 ]
Funhouse mirror
I’m just a rube
three feet tall
five feet wide.
Strands of string
brush against my forehead.
Laughing Sal
rocks back and forth
in the window
her crazy laughter
like a dark room
made of glass
shattered by gunfire.
A little man smaller
than me appears
claiming to be the Duende.
Yo soy El Duende.
He leans his face
against my elbow -
Your bones, he says,
smell of blood. Sangre,
sniff, sniff - sangre.
This causes my body
to adopt the sinuousness
of the sigmoid curve.
At least I can’t be accused
of failure to waver
as I slither down
a spiral staircase
and into the mirror,
a red box with pathetic
silver trim. No sound
as the lid slams shut.
I am told that
its yellow lights
have come alive
flashing sequentially
humming in their fashion.
Me and Nash
Nash always laughed at any kind of dark,
Just look at that stupid shadow,
he said as he displaced himself from a doorway
leaving nothing but his absence,
an almost visible impression in the air -
the Australian hat with brim turned up
on the side, the black leather vest.
That big trout we both almost caught was legendary.
Sometimes I hear its jaws clomp like wood blocks
in a quiet, lake-like movement of a symphony by Prokofiev.
Nash went fly-fishing over a puddle in the room,
talked loud in a restaurant about Silvie -I ask her
to kiss the mirror when I’m taking her from behind,
she says, Honey, I just don’t love myself that much.
The aspen trees on the side of the road shook nervously
when we arrived, yes-no, maybe so.
Nash and I liked to stomp through the grove
pushing the most cowardly trees over.
Orlando Furioso. We liked to shoot arrows
straight up in the air, to throw boomerangs in the dark.
I don’t know, Nash said, dropping his self-portrait
into an air shaft from the 17th floor of the Hotel Boston
in Caracas, where he was the only guest, It was dark,
but I do think that woman in the back of that bus
in Algiers had a penis and a vagina too.
He considered waves staircases to the underworld.
The last time I saw him was at the Aeropuerto Maiquetía,
it was full of sleepy-eyed soldiers armed with Uzis,
and we glided toward different gates along moving sidewalks
down an enormous corridor lit up by tiny constellations,
silently, like mannequins, without moving our arms or legs.
