TAIL

Jack Galmitz

TAIL

Tail Copyright 2013 Jack Galmitz New York, NY ISBN 978-1-304-55427-7

TAIL

The Riggings

I went down as water goes down to seek my level to stop staring at the sky as if moons and stars were mighty and the shrubs and rocks were wrong.

I went down to find her her eyes so blue I fell in and began to swim with fins and gills and wouldn t come out until she pushed me out in time and I was hung upside down and slapped on the bottom and cried.

When we married

and I was told I could kiss the bride, we were already wrapped in one another s arms, for we had known each other since the beginning of time that comes to pick you up when you fall down.

To Begin With

I like it like this: I took out a camcorder and showed her a monkey grooming another in a tree. Oh, you want to be mothered. it. She took out her breasts And offered the nipples to my lips. Maybe that s

I suckled until the sweet liquor of guava dribbled down by chin. Too much of a good thing may not be good. Every mother knows this. She smothered my nose and mouth with those pendulums until time stopped and I couldn t breathe. Thus began our conjugal bliss.

Another Day

The old man was in the hospital for four months in a coma. He had a large family, so they shared the burden of visits. The doctors couldn t predict the ultimate outcome, but they were sure the old man s brain was active and functioning. What they didn t know was that behind the outward immobility, tubes and ventilator, the old man had become a white stallion in the hills of Montana, the dominant male in the group, who fought for his rank fiercely to preserve his mating rights. He was a perfect specimen, bolting and kicking and galloping with abandon when he wasn t penetrating mares. At night, he became a white wood painted horse on a carousel that was a central feature in a traveling fair. Some children so wanted to ride him that they waited extra turns of the carousel to be able to mount him. The carousel was an antique aair, with mirrors and lights and cranking music and the children squealed the whole ride and waved to their parents when they passed them. The fair was only open at night, usually set up in waste places, and though dark the fair was brilliantly lit with small light bulbs stringed on stands that sold hot dogs and corn and pop and the lights hung from all the other rides. The old man loved being a horse in the day and the horse of the night, which was more like another day with its fluorescent glow than outright night. The doctors had no idea that the old man was happier than he had ever been.

In the ground ink night splayed on a green crepe couch a lady bug nake d

INDEX

A Anal (3) Annals (21) Aural (1) Autumn (15) Auxiliary (4) E Ear (8) Even (54) Excess (12) I Indecisive (36) Indoctrinate (73)

B Bali (10) Bellicose (17) Bent (30) Baltimore (24)

F Feral (1) Fist (100) Fog (iii) Fortune (29)

J Jocular (101) Jugular (55)

C Canal (xi) Craft (140) Culture (47)

G Gland (8) Good (5) Graph (44)

K Kire (xxii) Kite (5) Kill (122)

D Dental Fricative (ii) Destruction (13) Disembody (33) The Blind Man

H Half (68) Haiku (xx) Hunger (40)

M Mu (xxiii) Mugger (1) Murder (151)

The man

was blind. With the aid of his guide-dog, he led

an independent life. He lived in a studio apartment and managed his own affairs. He had a piano, which he played every day. He especially liked playing the compositions of Thelonius Monk. They had strong notes, sure syllables, solid measures, and an overall affirmation that they gave him a sense of power, of vibration through his entire body. He felt that he was building a house of many mansions with individual bricks or stones and while he played he also lived there, had run of the whole affair. When he began to touch the keys, it was as if he was a small spring in snowy mountains that trickled down and soon became a stream until it reached a river and then traveled and merged all the other streamlets and rivers until it joined the ocean and slammed everything in its path, so that he was like crystal crashed in a fireplace, feeling the boundaries of things, though there really were no boundaries in blindness, no distinct things: everything in the ocean was the ocean and itself. So he walked the streets as sure as collected water runs its course, traveling through things or around things and recouping its singularity. He even went out at night to the Hudson River to listen to it, to hear the occasional foghorn, to have a casual conversation occasionally with a stranger. He was not afraid, as he carried along the rivers and the ocean. Every sound, slight or sheer, was as if within him, though itself, and it wended back to

Monk s music. He could feel the night, its coolness, its wind, and hear sound as thousands of crickets in a field scraping out music with their legs in love of darkness, grass, air, and the blur of the moon shrouded by clouds.

Decisions
He was a burly man from years of working as a driver and deliverer of kegs of beer to pubs. One day, he decided to change his looks and went to the barbershop and asked for a flat top, or butch crew as it was called then. It looked neat and topped his strong face. Little did he know that his decision was not his own: it was made by tiny men, invisible to the naked eye, who were looking for a place to build a golf course and as the man was sober and a man of routine, he seemed the perfect place. Everything went fine for a long time, until the sport began to catch on and more and more invisible players went out in foursomes on his hair. Naturally, they replaced divots and had a no talking rule. The problem began when he suddenly felt tiny pings on his head. They didn t hurt, but it wasn t right, so he went to a doctor who referred him to a neurologist. A CT scan was performed. When the results were in, the doctor told the man his head was a golf course and tiny men were playing

eighteen rounds of golf on top of his at top.

The only problem

I can see is if they decide to remodel and landscape the course. Then you might develop small bumps on your skull. What should I do? asked the man. Well, I see a few options here. You can shave your head, which would make your head unusable for a golf course. Or, you can grow your hair longer, which would remove greens and fairways. Those would be the best solutions. But how did they get there in the rst place? Well, I can t answer that question. We deal with medicine not metaphysics. The man thanked the doctor. As he was unmarried, he went home and shaved his head. It showed the bone of his skull and he felt as if he looked a bit like a dead man. Which was a third option that the doctor had failed to mention.

For Dave Smith

With forge and anvil built in a shed in Bolton landing, a strong man with big hands and a name as common as Wednesday sculpted steel as if objects were hurled in the air that collided and stayed there defying gravity welded as he was wedded great stainless steel cubes, and globes, and rectangular rails made constellations that he named in this world of his making A juggler, he silenced the crowds as the objects climbed the air at impossible angles and didn t come down working as only God had

A Feral Man
A feral man crept out of the woods one day and walked to the nearest town. He cringed as he crossed roads and their speeding cars. When he entered the town, a policeman at an intersection held up his hand to the man to wait till he crossed. He understood the gesture, but didn t recognize the authority, and crossed against orders. As he approached, the policeman told him to stop and when he didn t grabbed him by the arm. The feral man bit him on the wrist. He was arrested, kept in the small jail house, given a summons to appear in court and released. He kept the appointment after it was explained to him. After the judge heard from both sides, he rst fined the man for not having a yearly license tag for himself and proof of shots, then he ordered him to undergo psychotherapy with other feral men. This strategy proved worse than fruitless. Group therapy with a bunch of feral men sounds and feels like feeding time at a veterinarians when the animals have gone unfed. There was so much howling and growling that the feral man became more feral, seeing he faced more dangers than he at first had imagined.

One day, hungry and without money, he tried to grab food from a woman s shopping bag. When she pulled it away, he bit her on the arm. The police were summoned and he was against summoned. When he appeared this time before the same judge, the judge told him that he would have to perform community service at an animal haven. He did this in the hopes of showing the man which strays were kept alive and which weren t. He was reminded sternly by the judge that if he didn t change his ways he would be a three-time loser and the court would seriously consider putting him down.

As Is
Two continents unmoored crossed the sea and after years of bobbing and grinding became a new thing: you and me.

The Transformation
He was having trouble walking and now when his wife and stepson went to work, he found himself flapping on the oor on all fours. He didn t discuss it, because he had so many doctors already. He also noticed that the thick, dead skin around his elbows was spreading up his arm and onto his legs. Fortunately, his family paid little attention to him, so neither noticed. He was a semi-recluse, and now when his wife and her son had their daily, extreme arguments, he found himself exiting the room and retracting himself, physically removing his head and limbs into the shelter of his defensive shell. His curvature of the spine began to take on a more solid aspect and unique design. He was growing a shell, at first soft, then as time went on it thickened and hardened. To avoid detection in the house, he went around now with a robe, and since he spent most of his time alone in the bedroom at the computer, neither his wife nor stepson noticed. He took showers when no one was home and he soon found an exhilaration in water, one that went beyond mere satisfaction. It was as if water was now as necessary to him as air and a medium in which he needed to exist. When his skin started turning green, he knew it was time to leave permanently. He waited till deep night and then slapped

through the cobblestone streets of D.U.M.B.O. to the Hudson River. He slipped in and found he swam as surely as before he walked. He headed towards the ocean without needing to question the direction. He would now be a master navigator and travel hundred and thousands of miles. He took to it naturally like he had taken to nothing previously in his life.

It
It begins as light what we see are the colors of the spectrum objects reject not in them not the colors absorbed by objects and we see it turned over to begin with things are the other way around I ask you is this anyway to live

The Draft
In the draughty house a wind moved and parted the curtains to the winter landscape in the back woods Nothing rejected light All was white The trees were pitchforks The fence tops spikes ragged barbed wire hung a fellow by the heart and I was inspired to write a love song despite: her body was warm and white cream heavy yet risen and ripe for sipping she was a sea cucumber that could turn into liquid to squeeze through an opening and reassemble her physical cottage. I moved in without

arrangements and stayed there for many seasons to watch her change and change until I forgot the reason

For Delia Derbyshire

The sea. The sky. A chambered nautilus. A sound chamber. A sea cucumber becomes liquid to pass through a crevice then resumes its physical shape. Its shape a sound; the sea; the sky. Where there is no light, the fish. Lantern fish, marine hatchetfish, lightfish, see marine snow falling. It is a sound. The sea. The sky. The fish in the dark, some are blind, feel currents, smell to survive, others are bioluminescent, large eyed that see light where there is no light they are dark so they cannot be seen, they create photons to find mates. It is a chamber. Adapting. A light of sound. The sea. The sky.

Creation
When I go into the forest I m always intrigued by the vines climbing the tallest trees as if they were stepping stones to the sky where they could communicate with the Almighty who they say lives on high; however, as the vines grow they thicken and eventually strangle the trees that die.

The Garden
Being poor and lacking the funds for packets of seeds, one night I sprinkled my spent semen throughout the small garden behind my apartment. I expected nothing to happen, but with insomnia a man will do almost anything to tire himself out. I waited some days and I have to admit I did look out the back window to the garden now and then. It rained for a few days. One morning, I saw clusters of what looked like round rocks, but with the soft fleshy color of mushrooms without their necks in the garden. Something was growing. As the days passed, and I watered the garden, the forms rose to the appearance and height of winter cabbages, except they had human-like faces, each similar yet distinct, like pansies. In a few days, they had grown necks and were singing and praying. In one corner were Afro-Americans, who sang We Shall Overcome each night. At the other corner were conservative Jews who sang Hatikva, which means The Hope, and this always brought tears to my eyes. Towards the garden front were rural Americans, who without instruments played blue grass with their mouths, mimicking the sounds of fiddles, wash basin bases, scrub boards. In the middle were Muslims, who five times a day bent their heads to the prayer rugs I placed there and chanted. It was a wet April, with a lot of rain, and soon the bodies were

nearly completely formed. One morning I awoke to find the garden empty, with the holes filled in where the people had grown. They had gone their separate ways. I liked to think that one day, I d be walking on a street, someone would tap me on the shoulder, and as I turned would embrace me and call me father.

Perpetual War
Undeclared war was fought by my family against the cockroaches in our apartment. Exactly when and how I ll leave to the historians. But war it was and it was being waged for years without any certainty of the outcome. Cockroaches are extraordinary guerilla fighters- moving through pipes, behind walls, cabinets, appearing in the unlikeliest places, like out bedroom and bathroom- and as many as we killed, more would appear. They first produced tiny babies and I, for one, rarely killed them out of pity. But soon, eating our food, they became adult, sleek, fast, big. I, myself, killed twenty- five a day, conservatively, and there were as many if not more than there were before. My wife s tactics were petty in my opinion. If she saw one, she would keep after it until she either cornered and killed it or else gave up exhausted. Her son was a part-time fighter, now and again using the poison spray exterminators used to kill them. But, he was as much sadist as fighter, as he would watch each die, and to me, this was tactically wrong. The problem was larger than our solution. I knew that. But my wife considered herself in charge, since the condominium was under her name, and she would not call a professional, who I knew at this point would have to set o bombs to remove most of them. We had cats and if they bombed, we would have to keep the cats locked outside for at least 8 hours and they would be scratching at the glass door for hours in that event. It wasn t a feasible plan. I also knew that if she would throw away the stacks of old newspapers and rid ourselves of the stacks of unused pots and

pans and cardboard boxes she stored things in in the kitchen, we would reduce their hideouts and thus be able to gain territory. But she was adamantly opposed. I worried what this was doing to us and our future. The roaches were only perpetuating their kind and trying to survive. We were outright killing. Yes, it had to be done when I d be drinking my coffee and I d nd a drowned roach in it, but still I wondered if we were destroying our humanity in exchange for being free of pests. It was a hard decision to press on.