C H E.

A novella in three parts

Peter Money

BlazeVOX [books]
Buffalo, New York

C H E. A novella in three parts by Peter Money Copyright 2010 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Book design by Geoffrey Gatza First Edition ISBN: 9781935402862 Library of Congress Control Number 2009910021 BlazeVOX [books] 303 Bedford Ave Buffalo, NY 14216 Editor@blazevox.org

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In a situation where the important thing is survival, or to establish a new identity, the novel is too long-winded and indirect a form. Per Gedin, The Novel in a Changing Society If there is progress then there is a novel William Carlos Williams, from The Great American Novel The modern theory of tidal oscillation seems to offer the best explanation of such local differencesthe rocking up and down of water in each natural basin about a central, virtually tideless node. Rachel L. Carson, p. 155, The Sea Around Us, Oxford University Press, 1951. It is clear I must find my other half. Hedwig and The Angry Inch [T]here are names that tell their own story, such as . . . hermit crab. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space We are all many selvesEdward Said Love creates something that was not there before. Hedwig and The Angry Inch Everything exists from the beginning.William Carlos Williams, from The Great American Novel [I]n my eagerness to learn what happens, might I miss something occurring at the level of the sentence? Jonathan Lethem (Edwards End) To some extent, each sentence has to be the whole story Lyn Hejinian, from My Life

"All I know is what the words know . . . and the long sonata of the dead." Samuel Beckett The poet is synonymous with freedom. Saadi Yousef Each thing and every moment derives a meaning from a context one is meant to understand. Marianne Wiggins, p. 51, John Dollar The ordinary place where you live is made sacred by your attention to it. Allen Ginsberg Vividness is self-selecting. Allen Ginsberg I would really like, before this whole thing is over. . . to talk about the sentences. . . I was writing for rhythm as well as for everything else Francine Prose; Its all about the sentences, AP, December 2008 . . . [novels have their defects]. But so what? Nature doesnt owe us perfection. Novelists dont either. Sam Tanenhaus, Beyond Criticism; editor of The New York Times Book Review. One hand on this wily planet/ . . . sinking stones fly. The Shins [This] mollusk does not build its own shell but, as everyone knows, goes to live in an empty shell. It changes when it feels too cramped for space. Gaston Bachelard

Sometime in the present.

Celebrate. Every word, even the ones you would think dont matter.

down at the bottom of the sea theres this drop that says Stay and no one hears the sound, bent saw, bubbles on a frying pan, the grainy recording of crowds in unison, terrifyingly exuberant soccer match or nation on a brink, ant walking down against the lines of page, a toy bird whistling, puddling in the palm of two eyes. Except Elliott and the red fish who goes round a minor habitat, not his life but some trap the flowers, wild and picked by two of the prettiest young people youve ever seen, makes pretty Homers stars around a glass vase cave, outside a jungle marathon of birds sing. Everywhere, every day, the farewell of rain makes someone stop in their jittery snap-andrun-devil-whipped-pace they try to say is the best for family, paying the bills with adolescent conscription and conviction commerce has preyed, parentally impaired, a thatch of a life, getting light rain, more light rain. Pick yourself up, fish, pick up the century with you, your orange capped non-clouding flakes. Hes tired of feeling down in the marbles, tired of living with furry crap on the plastic reeds, the poor replacement for model DNA for the fish to intuit change to the suffering world. The shake of a skirt, a drum at slow rattle and tap and boomboom-boom there it is: the lift, help coming on, the planets of flowers starburst over the ancient stems, the candles burnt to diaphragms and lilies folding over ponds. Even now the dead lady speaks to flesh and bone, like her black eyes havent gone anywhere at all but needle your waste of time like a boyfriends stretched sheet over no cadaver but lips, slippery fall lips above winters sled runs, the pen as lube making it overand over, and over, and over, and over, sucked breath
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RAIN.

and century: there. There you have it. Here you had it. Have it now, again, turn it over, combine sense and flux to formthe next thing, which is vapor right now compelling you to answer in lunar rhyme. See, now, forever rises in the minute color you name: oyster, fishtail, curtain, little drip of red, blue thumb, pink labia that tents panorama around and over us. First breath: celebrate. Last breath: celebrate. Struggle no more. STACK OF CHANGE, a gun and a tape, his own ink they said he made with blood, spit, water and newsprint, novels written on toilet papers and wrappers of smokes, the tar of which helped the words singand he laughed, captive too he laughed the grin of every exile in liberation, an escape over the border of barbed wire and naysayers. He pushes off his buggy at dusk, not dawn, and makes a new damn dawn.

BUSH, the fatal, falling toward nothing, heres the cup of ash Elliott smudged on his groin: fuckthedecisionIdidntdecide. Yellow wooden ball tied by string hanging from pussy willow branch freeze frame apocalypsed out of a vertical bouquet of ceramic fish, silk yellow ribbon noosed in butterfly wings whirl on the outer limits of a fragile end, a paper piano without sound. Until now, now the divisions are in and out of the word, punishments of lovers sneaking twice a week Sundays, bicycle waltzes under Yak breath and crow claws, coming straight out of the wood fired oven like bread.
They cant say for instance He should be Shot, a terrible thing, a bee sting to the back of the neck (every day), how the history of the world is fucked by one human beingwere not sure. News gets recycled every moment of the day but thats not mud in the shoes thats blood. Float in an ocean of alphabet and soon other alphabets nudge sweet-sour commissioned from gravity, seaweed rubbing against seaweed, and soon oceans fucking, alphabets
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screwing, mixed languages, overlapping meanings, an attempted piracy to speak the same language: goo and get and wanna, divine until the arms strike out. Strike down into belly roll stink and snatch of old flowers, begin again revolution of two fighting through the whole bayonet reduction of what you may or may not do: no more confines only love of alphabet and let the body open into forms lasting in the dust of where you had been, revolution salting the seed of a taxed planet, the colors of the flags long ripped and strung into wave spray forgiving the violence with which every force came to grip pulverizing the globe, balls in the fist of unarmed angelswhat they were, what we were before flowers had to grow spikes, topple and tear, only the gum and a spirit of the globe survived.

WARS AND GIRLS. When the wars returned to the girls most girls felt they would return to the mills which earned them so much money spreading cotton and singing nationalistic songs and then getting pregnant and dicing cookies onto a sheet and on come the birthday parties except Jenny who invited Jenny and went into open hiding to build boats in a cove where people would not find them unless these were people who also wanted boats and then they would come bearing shells and corn and sandals and coconut skirts and lean on the world from the long bone midway down from the bow where an oar should be.
Salt on the lips, salad cool over the heart, hot under skin of resistance, ligaments frayed at the ends where body bridges them to bone, one hums to the other as the tiniest of fish do, peck-peck-nibble-peck, just as the sun starts to come out and a whispered song begins to lick the inner drum of their heads, letting anything wet come down to the center where a mound of sand was being patted by the child the adult was, firm until the slow tide let it go.

LAND AND SEA. Green swirl of rain on the pond, vortex from a South African song made rich by the birth of daughters and sons rises to mist around the base of what we hiked to celebrate, that mountain where in another generation gunmen stalked to find bounty in the fate of who would become a frightened prisoner. A line arrows out of an arc and the torn edge of treetops mount this talisman into descending cloudscape, the living walking willingly into the space craft, which breathes out a dragons tea cup rain of season. Seaglass, hunger, genital, oil in the lamp for later, a rag around the head holds back the hair released into the wind a tiny machine makes as another language whirls through the direction the pot on the wheel thought it was cutting, cuts, opens, enters, a newly configured chamber of oxygen and conversation, all of it wanted, desired, what you had been waiting for, and keeps you alive, inside, beside, above the surface and from beneath at once one rhythm ready at the segue for any change--------; ; ; ; ; Believe the beating of breath to ash which now waters again, eyebrows and countenance, hairline, breasts bared tree of mango and peach, pearl below the neck, another eye from a tradesmans language, rolls, legacy, over and around the tongue, slippery egg, memory bead, sparkles, offering small fires each time your favorite fingers pluck three guitar stings. Down into a depth the ear has heard when cleaned by saliva, and words, the organ question marks dipping and strengthening into lasting dashes with eternal pause everything ephemeral saves because savoring remembered two hands holding packed wet sand pushed gently under a fishy pool wading in a grains eye of earth, tide flats, seasmell, alive present and alive past, let out into space just like the language of the slo-mo homemade movie, vector of past in and out of the grand floating foggy scrim, gestation of the next script, contour of face, line in a rock, purple scale, glistening flitter long sustained walk invisible or hands on; spoken, wetted here and imprinted, carried as vapor holds patinas pigments, imaginations
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precursors, undenying sponged one bodily island one never leaves when one puts down impairments to the process. The opening of the sky replicated in the closed eye, tangible kin of continuing, ash absorbing every long day, pears peeled and juiced the sauce of song you will hear once you let your ear, let your ear, SWALLOW and give out, soar, smooth over the jag, give your nod a jig, failing is sailing with another letter. The rain is not bored, neither these silent speaking tongues. DOOR. This door opened and I didnt walk through it. Breeze opened one in the near direction and the one doors force opened another I thought further. Where I was was between. Wherever you go, the floor said, is a boy or a man, or a girl or a woman. I admired the door, delicate iron handle, blown glass solid central pane, wood framing loved by more than one carpenter, inhabitant, painter, poet. Thatch. A white binding blinding the sail kept her spine up straight but also washed out anything she could want to see. A burka or, what is it you call it when the same is worn in other countries, hajib, dress and scarfloose around areas where otherwise clothing would give credit to form, a sheet, to be articulated around and about the eyes, and a train of cloth, a wig of ink having written its unspeakable story, holds together three hundred and sixty five bare born pages centerfolded posters in the drawer of the Office of the Librarian of Reasons, rescued (some would say) from the walls of slaughter houses and government agencies, theaters and the restrooms of cafes (when there were), each a cry against the injustice silencing their given lips. William Blake sunflowers or bugs on the column of Roman law, blistering raven taller than a man, wider than his own coffin, takes the moonlight under his wing and darkens all
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gods childrens curtains while they sleep. The love is all around, only clouds and gas keep it from growingas if bullet holes had patterned smiles through a blankets terror; its no funa stem with a hundred shattered chads of a panel, collecting, what--: air, they patio above the ground and without introduction give up, like conscripts, into history which makes them common again, like matter that will become a particle of petrol, to light a spark. Who allowed the ladder to be left was no longer remembered by anybody. The ladder stood for several months through tides, gale storms, rain, beauty, remarkably. People who came upon it returned to where they were from now as pilgrims. One Jade rabbit fit the hand of a stranger and so the shopkeep said take it. In the end, that alone saved them. With sacks placed over the heads of prisoners, stripped nude, they were to become classical. So many museum goers wanted to fuck the alabaster mound that would absolve them. If they loved the image they would not have to love the prisoner. Soon, calendars across the world featured these classical figures, icons of pity, and we suddenly too late wanted to know them. Who loves a war parade with coffins, almost as handsome (more!) as boys (and girls) in uniforms! Situation comedy not yet under contract. Sunlight made it less black, harder for the average viewer to understand. What with all the channels to choose . . . The poor didnt necessarily choose him. But, as the unalarmedly rich do, the poor got colored by the same pens that stroke their destruction. The zip lock bag contains the last breath. We write with our blood. With what do you write? Dust, guns, and fire. The wax hands complete the painting in the
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middle of being never finished. Landscape, sumi ink, the heartbeats heard with a drinking glass held down to the paper: it started to say something we can relate to about centuries of regret. These roads have been traveled before, whether you see the tracks or not. Forget the sky but the sky does not forget you. The silence is threatening too much now. Thunders the front page of every front page in your mouth. Go ahead, choke on silence. See if they care. * Pink toed kid wouldnt you know shocked her hometown when after a long young marriage drove off and joined a circus. Her children would never recognize her, she had changed almost everything public about her. But since she was never a clown among those who knew her, at least as a young woman and later as a wife and mother never, she was transfigured, literally by desperate acknowledgement that if she did not make for herself a new life in the community of lost and found others, she could no longer make any life. In the puddle her shoes, bloated red fins, tapped out the rain score. The painted black smile on her face, a boat on a thin rail of channel, carried her into the sympathies of others. Her audience gave back in waves.

SHE rose early, before the sun, at least in this place, and while the world was going on she walked to the back gate and ran the three miles into town before town woke and on the way back she saw what the delivery man did, where the homeless slept, what the new weather felt like on her perspiring skinfor now sunlight wanted to be day in this town too, and she saw what hard news was going to be spread from its bundle into the shops and neighboring towns, a hard nut, yet here you are along the sand at one of the many ends of the world (she breathed in air: partly dry sand, wet oiled wood, seasalt water, bay and boat bottom, season=old
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clapboard paint, slick beaded rigging, a still cold hook and eye, violin resin, musk from a window sill seeming to hold everything, everything. Yellow, red, green. More orange than banana, fresh blood rather than rose petal, evergreen in shade not fern. Little birds, dots, nobody ever thought of their name, scampered across the view as if themselves encoded for the surface of the eye: these were the answer, sharp dark pixels across the full color of emerging day. Now is that light, now are the words. The whole scene a poem I can hang onto just as it changes, each moment, for good. I am a lost poet, but then again every poet must be lost to try to ride a word which, as much as a bird, cannot determine its pattern ahead of time--like the composers piano and violin in the middle of every note; these lines the outgoing tide yawns, incessant skirt, shes saying hello even as she stands there saying goodbye, reduced to the provocative word and enlarged, handily by the eyes inner personage, beneath the skin . . .

IF I could eat them all the time I would, she says, patting her
belly where yesterday nothing kept company. A little fiddle goes a long way if head and heart and hands have experienced the country of memories making: Glen Car, County Er, Mistyville. A freefall at eleven thousand feet is a hundred and fifty dollars. Its nothing expected but you surprise yourself when, at first, what is it: the altitude. Plain PACKAGE of squeeze, What I should be doing, what she should.