Vacancies

Jack Galmitz

VacanciesCopyright © Jack GalmitzImPress 2014New York, New York

Illustrations by Ed Baker

Vacancies

The sea of the sea is this place. Here is the source of the vast and the tiniest veined leaf.

It is the shaper of shapes. It is mine and it is yours. We don't share it in turns, but at the same time in the same store.

Which is not a place at all. It has no walls. It travels without moving through the world, shared by the rich and the poor; not measured out by worthiness which it abhors.

It is mine & it is yours.

Revisions

1.Don’t go fishing where there are no fishing signs. There may be hazardous chemicals in the water table that turn male fish into another kind.

2. Don’t climb over fences that bear No Trespassing signs. Even if you studied semiotics. You may be abducted by alien kinds.

3. When it says Beware of Dog beware of dog: you never know if it’s true or otherwise.

4. When a woman at a dance says she’ll grant your every wish don’t call her up: you may get genital warts that you pass on to someone you love.

5. Don’t oppose the social system. It only ties you up.

6. Don’t drink to excess. You may have to piss on the subway tracks and get electrocuted by soaking the third rail.

7. Don’t trouble your mother. She will emasculate you when you leastexpect it.

8. Don’t trouble your father. He may refuse to stand between you and your mother.

9. There is only one God. Or, two or three. Don’t worry.

10. Everyone is out for themselves. Follow them.

Further revisions

1. Always keep lists. Memory goes fast (and first). 2. If they can get away with it, they’ll get away with it. Now that the Supreme Court has given you permission be sure to carry a gun. 3. Shoot first. Clint Eastwood did it and became a star without being able to speak. So did Charles Bronson. This is a lesson in civics. 4. Take your heroes from the lowest common denominators. Remember this is a Democracy. And after the news’ shocks and scandals all is always forgiven. 5. Did you cry when King Kong was shot down from the Empire State Building? If not, do not read on. 6. Do you remember him sitting on a rock with Fay Wray by his side as he looked at the sunset? Did you feel his feelings for the unbearable beauty of the world? 7. Whose side are you on? 8. Would you swerve your car to avoid running over a raccoon? 9. Would you run over a run over raccoon? 10.Would you stop your car to remove a run over raccoon from the road?

Thanks for the Memes

The first words I can remember uttering were “ma ma.”

A psychotherapist mentioned that the word mother was only a part of a phrase. It was missing a word.

Okay, so it was mother fucker.

I liked taking long baths, keeping the water running with the stopper off, until I’d returned to infancy, a state of red wrinkled. I would then dry when I let the water run out by letting the air in the misted room evaporate it.

Were the tub, the water and the drying air substitutes for your mother?

You mean mother fucker?

Yes.

Yes.

It is raining today you know. It is supposed to rain all day.

That’s not good for fishing. We’ll have to cancel our plans to rent a boat.

I cried like a pregnant sea robin. Rubbery sounded.

Ladies and Gentleman, the champ is making his way down the aisle to the ring now followed by his trainer and entourage. You should see his face. It is all determination. No expression. Looking neither to the people seated

in the aisles calling out his name nor towards his opponent already shadow boxing in his corner.

The boy listened to the announcer on the lowered radio beneath his covers. It was way past the hour when he was supposed to be sleeping. He had school the next day.

The moon staggered for one moment as if it had been stunned and rolled back ever so slightly on its heels.

There was a small red spot on the face of the moon.

A bleeder. It could mean something important.

The Master of Ceremonies took the lowered microphone to his lips and began to introduce the fighters, the color of their trunks, the corners they were in, and the fact that this was a twelve round title bout. He mentioned their weights to substantiate that they fell within the perimeters of the division they were in.

The referee called the fighters to the center stage of the ring and told them the rules of the fight, what they were not allowed to do and then finished by asking them for a clean fight and to shake hands before they went to their corners and waited for bell to come out fighting.

I was next on line to have my hair cut. When the barber removed the smock from the patron and finished one last dusting of his shoulders, I began to get up to take the seat. Instead, the barber called a man who had come into the shop long after me. I got up out of the leather chair and in a huff stormed out of the shop and next door to my father’s dry cleaning store.

I would not be consoled when a short while later the owner of the barber shop entered my father’s store and asked him why I had left. He knew very well and I had my pride even at five. The law of the barber shop was first come first serve and this breach of the law was a breach of male society. They, the barber and my father, tried to coax me with the promise of an

electric stimulation all over my scalp and neck after the haircut, but I held my ground. This was no small matter.

It was in black and white. The man being held by one arm was so thin he looked like he lived on rice gruel for years. His hair stood out stiffly and his face winced. The man holding him, an officer of some kind, took the gun he held and shot the man in his temple and the man’s head moved with the impact. We all were as shocked as if we were on the street of Saigon when we witnessed it. The NBC announcer informed us it was the Chief of Police Nguyễn Ngọc Loan who had executed a Viet Cong. We shook through the nation brought into the war like that.

We would go into the pharmacy now every weekend and buy bottles of Robitussin AC. The pharmacist could not understand why so many teenage boys would have a cough at the same time and every weekend. Robitussin AC contained codeine and we would drink the whole bottle at once and get stoned out so that we could barely stand. It was euphoric. I once drank down two bottles at one time and smoked some hashish. That night we went to see Cream perform live for the first time in New York. Ginger Baker looked like a god. I was so stoned I went into the woman’s bathroom to piss. I only noticed afterwards because there were no men there.

We lived on the sixteenth floor of an apartment building. We were both young and poor and not really in love. At least, she was not in love. We didn’t have screens for the windows. Two things happened: first, a pigeon flew in the open window and I was so frightened by the agitated beating of the wings that I lifted a chair from the corner of the room and put it on top of my head for protection. It had to do with something I had once heard about bats getting in your hair and being unable to get them out. My girlfriend laughed hysterically as if my action was the funniest thing she had ever seen. Secondly, I was called down to the draft board for possible induction into the army. I had a letter with me from my family doctor, who was a World War II veteran, stating that I was unfit for duty based upon drug addiction and alcoholism. They had so many young men there that day that I had to come back the next day. That night, during a nightmare, I actually shat in my pajamas in the bed. When my girlfriend found out that I

had literally had the shit scared out of me, she found this the funniest thing she had ever seen in her life.

Did I mention that because we had no screens, our cat tried to jump from the open window to the balcony on a rainy night and must have slipped due to the slickness of the rain on steel and fell to his death sixteen stories below. The superintendent accused me of having thrown the cat off the roof. I nearly hit the roof and told him he must be out of his mind if he thought I was that sort of person. I never forgot what we did to that cat for the rest of my life, long after my girlfriend left and married and had a family and grew old.

The trees rise scaly limbs trunks no surprise yet glimpsed the eyes aspire to know lost relatives risen what they are why not otherwise they make winter a naked sky train ties clatter under tons of speeding sculpted steel electrified and still their spread is singularly magnificent every time

Noises

He’s gone into the sound and silencehe was so much. Now raindrops on five stonesin the garden where they were placedjust so the wind would ridetheir humped bones. He left durationof rain on stone to itself. Isthat a whip snapped or a taut bowstring reverberating? It is an echoing sound.Clay pots in the garden. Somecracked. Some with holes.Cacti and blossoming weedsin most are stout and flip the water dropsback to the air to return again to the stonesand sacks nearly decomposed to fibersof sisal or jute. There are bamboo plantsspread close to the mud wall of the house.One was cut down and in it a flute was found.It is the color of his bones and will be playedlater on if the wind remains, though it doesn’thave to be the same as before.Someone is making a dugoutcanoe with wooden mallet and wooden gouge.Perhaps to cross over in, though this is in doubt,there being no place else.Perhaps it’s to make hollow percussive sounds

of differing depths.The sound is more like that.Think they’re building stairs fromthe knocking that he is hears. A whetstonea blade crosses quietly to an edge. Then the simplescraping of spare pieces of wood out of whichemerges a man and the flute blown with the windof the lips and the wind. Water falls from the gutterinto a basin or a tub left for that purpose nearthe bamboo and the mud. There are dancers movingoutward with their arms held to their sidesfreely on rough soles on a wooden floor. It soundslike scraping until they stop and stare outat nothing there. Suddenly there is what soundslike a two handled saw being whipped in the windthen swung. Then an unsettling of the water in thebasin the sopped earth gulps.Maybe, it’s just children pounding pegs into holes:he would have liked that.Is that an electric violin scratching the trellis of roses?No, it must be a newspaper page caught and blowingIn the hedges.

Some of the Things

Reeds grow thick and wild along the embankment of the railroad tracks as if they ride the rails like men did once who wrote songs of their experience.

Reeds themselves were once writing instruments: the tan stems sharp as a point dipped in pigment scrawled on papyrus the Book of the Dead so it is said. It’s not hard to believe looking at their plumed heads wagging in the wintry sun, the scratching sound they make in the stabbing wind.

In the summer and fall they spread around the bend and disappear with those anointed heads just as do the empty trains and their coupled cars. In the dark they serve as a trail for thousands of fireflies that seem tied in a lengthened cord of unconditional love.

Though some would say they are rank and grow in swamps and waste places they seem with their blossomed heads most elegant and most appropriate to have

served to write hieroglyphs and ancient documents. It’s not hard at all to see them as earth’s penmanship, of what it means to be excellent and to rise above the crusted earth and its chthonic shapeless mud.

Failing Biology

She was serious as seriousas a woman in a white coatcan get outside of a hospitalwhen she looked me straightin my dilated eyes and said youare amongst a select few whocan help humankind and youhave no excuse to throwthat away to get high& step aside and refuseto dissect that fetal pigpreserved in formaldehyde:we don’t abort living thingsfor the fun of it; learningto surgically cut it withoutsevering an artery is important& may someday save a humanlife & that may prove critical.I wasn’t torn. I felt scorn.There must have been thirtystudents or more and all thosepiglets large enough to have livedhad they not been sacrificed to science.I told her tying it with a stringmade it look crucified and I couldn’tbring myself to cut that skin that lookedlike a human’s: and the girl I was in love withwas in the class and I made her laughand that was really all I wanted.I suppose I was immature and wild.I wasn't contemplating what could happenif all the pigs and all those kind were left alive:

we'd end up competitors for foodof the same kind and then we'dhave to kill huge animals, hulkingand feral, tusked and hidden in mountains.

The Primitive

They said I couldn’t paintand maybe they were right.I spent my whole life in Parisyet saw jungles of the night.

They said I was a primitive.Well, what’s wrong with that.The lush fronds of the botanical gardensAnd the big cats in the zoo sat

on their haunches looking at a nudereclined on a red velvet settewho listened to exotic birds singand a man play a flute his way.

I saw huge bursting blue flowersthat were the color of the skyand a moon of day bright enoughto light the woman’s breasts and eyes.

I might not have had much savoir faireyet those who followed after me -Delaunay, Kandinsky, Braque, and Apollinaire -learned from me to transform whatever they see.

It Happened There (For Jean-Claude)

I think there is no reason to believe in reason.Otherwise, why would the dusty hill in season

give forth an underground system of grass,or 40,000 eggs be guarded by the male bass

and the fish fry of the brood swarm eat water fleasthat are there to swallow as they never cease

reproducing whether through parthenogenesis or sex.They look like birds with one eye and the text

says they’ll do anything to survive harsh conditions,even eat bacteria. That’s beyond reason such ambition.

Whence the lakes, ponds, reservoirs, and streams?Why would oxygen and two parts hydrogen team

up and become water? It’s a fact and a fantasyat once. Why do all bodies of water return to the sea

from where they presumably began to be?Why are there pollen sacks filled on the drifting bee?

Untitled I

He looked at the canvas.It was small: 8x10 x 1.5.It was white, unprimed, and he could dowhatever he wanted on it.

This is what he wanted. To beable to decide, make choices, makesurfaces of shapes and colorscoincide or collide without intrusion

from the world outside him. He wantedto believe that privacy existed, notjust in law and print, but in a placethat he had visited and could always visit.

Maybe, he was cornered.This small blank space his only recourse, The brush strokes his illusion of actions.

Even these were already decidedby those who had gone before them, by thosewho had charged geometric abstractionwas painting, the most unlike representing nature.

Yet, even in this art of two dimensions,he couldn’t help but notice that the illusionof depth had crept into the works of those who practiced it and was beginning

to usurp the purity of vertical and horizontaland the primary colors. As one artist said:“I cannot leave the grid. It establishes clarity for us.I stand upright and my eyes are perpendicular to that.”In these words he found his own sentiments.

INDEX: A Poem

AAnal (3) E IAnnals (21) Ear (8) Indecisive (36)Aural (1) Even (54) Indoctrinate (73) Autumn (15) Excess (12)Auxiliary (4)

B F JBali (10) Feral (1) Jocular (101)Bellicose (17) Fist (100) Jugular (55)Bent (30) Fog (iii)Baltimore (24) Fortune (29)

C G KCanal (xi) Gland (8) Kire (xxii)Craft (140) Good (5) Kite (5)Culture (47) Graph (44) Kill (122)

D H MDental Fricative (ii) Half (68) Mu (xxiii) Destruction (13) Haiku (xx) Mugger (1)Disembody (33) Hunger (40) Murder (151)

Assemblage

into fields.holdingbackoceans.apurplefeatherreassembles

In Praise of Wood

lightning.struck.splinteredtree.blonde wood.off a branchfell. brought downthe park swings.womeninkimonoswalkin threes.

Amazing Grace

( For Hawkeye Pete Egan)

rails. the yellow dog. the length of the road. dry. leaves. mulch. the man’s odd smell. maybe death. the family gives thanks for what it is about to receive. the yellow dog. rails. the odd smell. sunset. property. human skin. mulch. maybe death. The earth wet. green sprouts of no one knows what yet. the yellow dog. property. line. the stranger’s smell. other towns. odd. rails. the smell. hay. wells. wagon wheels. please pass the potatoes. the peas. god. the odd smell. the man’s black suit. hat. shoes. may have made the sign of the cross. many foreheads. maybe released from jail. the yellow dog. trails. reaches the soy field. acres. acres. acres. wide leaves. sprinklers. maybe a clerical collar. maybe killed a man. grace. homemade peach cobbler.

Rain on Me

where did it come from? from the sea, I suppose. why suppose that? It has fins and no feet. scales. I listened to archie shepp’ s sax screaming from a stoop in San Francisco. up and down the scales. playing without feet - fixed measure. When the piece ended it was fin, but not finished in a formal fashion. so presumptuous, I said. how did it get into the living room from the sea? through the tap water? she looked out the window at the lashing rain. were those flying fish? cats came out from under cars to investigate. things were thrashing on the street. I think they’re firecrackers she said. someone set off a mat. will you marry me she said. on one condition. you rain on me whenever I come in. okay.

By by Honda

driving. her hands on the wheel as if they were built in by Honda. focusing on the big picture. not what is directly in front of her. frequently checks her side view and rear mirrors. knows what’s around. Indulges herself with a CD. autechre. depresses the gas hesitantly. as if it were a live thing. we begin to climb the mountain road. I trust her enough to look out the window. or I don’t care if we die. we’re together. chassis and wheels. the door locks open and close by the remote on her car keys. we’re like that. only we each have the keys. we’re both the door locks. I ask her to have the car painted. orange. or green. but only the shades BMW once made. this is one thing she won’t give in to. the rock ledges on the passenger’s side. deep colors. fissures. fractures. a sense of intimacy. her face has diminutive features. sunken cheekbones. long free hair. she says wait till we reach the peak and park. we’ll find a private place with deep undergrowth. do it like wolverines. this time.