Tate, "The Rally"

     There was some kind of rally going on in the
common. Somebody was speaking into a bullhorn to
about three hundred people, who were cheering and
shouting things. I decided to drift over and check
it out. The speaker was saying, "Even my three-year-
old son knows better than to kick a goat." I mingled
with the crowd. A woman yelled, "You got a great big
cherry pie on your head!" And a dozen others said,
"Yes, you do." The man continued, "And then the dog
ate our sofa. Did we kick it? No, we didn't." Someone
shouted, "The saints dropped the ball on that one."
The man said, "I been down there where even the little
birdies fear to roam. I once found an angry viper
in my pocket, but I steered the course. I bonged myself
with a hidden cloud." "And you never lost your way,"
many shrieked. I was working my way toward the front.
The excitement was catching. "If you spit in a burning
skillet, sure, it sizzles, and then it's gone, and what
have you got? You have the memory of the sizzle, but
soon that, too, is gone, and you're poorer than you were
before," he said. "Your duck just sat on a firecracker,"
I cheered. The speaker stopped and tried to locate
the man who had spoken those words. The crowd, too,
was looking around. I acted as though I were looking
also. After a considerable pause, he continued, "Never
before have we witnessed hairy hands with long fingernails
curl around the puffballs of history with such miraculous
dexterity." The people went crazy. They started bumping
one another's foreheads. I was bumping, and getting
bumped. "It was no accident I swallowed an ant this
morning while preparing my remarks for this rally. I
wanted to swallow that ant," he said. People had stopped
bumping, and many of them were wiping away tears.
I had to admit, he was a powerful speaker. "And now we
are on the verge of setting sail the little headache and
the big headache, too, and we can see the fireflies, who
had all but forgotten us, beating their wings like idiot
children coming back from a dull day in the park, and
it is beautiful, can't you see just how marvellous it is?"
he said. "We love the idiot children," someone shouted.
"Fireflies can't drive tractors," another yelled. "What
happened to the pig?" I said. The man next to me looked
disgusted. "There is no pig," he said.


James Tate

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Eavon Boland, "An Elegy for My Mother in which She Scarcely Appears"

I knew we had to grieve for the animals a long time ago: weep for them, pity them. I knew it was our strange human duty to write their elegies after we arranged their demise. I was young then and able for the paradox. I am older now and ready for the question: What happened to them all? I mean to those old dumb implements which have no eyes to plead with us like theirs no claim to make on us like theirs? I mean— there was a singing kettle. I want to know why no one tagged its neck or ringed the tin base of its extinct design or crouched to hear its rising shriek in winter or wrote it down with the birds in their blue sleeves of air torn away with the trees that sheltered them. And there were brass fire dogs which lay out all evening on the grate and in the heat thrown at them by the last of the peat fire but no one noted down their history or put them in the old packs under slate-blue moonlight. There was a wooden clotheshorse, absolutely steady, without sinews, with no mane and no mea
Read more

Sharon Olds, "The Race"

When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk, bought a ticket, ten minutes later they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors had said my father would not live through the night and the flight was cancelled. A young man with a dark brown moustache told me another airline had a nonstop leaving in seven minutes. See that elevator over there, well go down to the first floor, make a right, you'll see a yellow bus, get off at the second Pan Am terminal, I ran, I who have no sense of direction raced exactly where he'd told me, a fish slipping upstream deftly against the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those bags I had thrown everything into in five minutes, and ran, the bags wagged me from side to side as if to prove I was under the claims of the material, I ran up to a man with a flower on his breast, I who always go to the end of the line, I said Help me . He looked at my ticket, he said Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then run. I
Read more

Aria Aber, "Oakland in Rain"

Years before ever seeing California, I wrote a story titled “Oakland in Rain.” Rain served as an easy metaphor for the unexpected in a place known for abundance, and it provided a texture of melancholy. The nameless protagonist—an exiled drunk who was, of course, a thinly veiled version of myself— had lost her mind and believed the weather communicated with her: rain meant soberness, that she had been absolved of some sort of punishment. Plagued by her wild inner life, I imagined her wandering the city, intent on getting lost in the Catholic cemeteries, where she took note   of lemons in the wet grass (an offering?), the sky, a hawk on a tree. But no matter where she went, nothing was ever quiet enough. Despite my best efforts, the narrative was bleak; it lacked tension and a convincing resolution. Now, why am I telling you all this? Well, one day I woke up and it had been raining in the Oakland of my actual life. Outside my window, the cottonwood trees looked like the day before, but
Read more