Susan M. Schultz
The
Activist
He
knew his son’s trauma predated the adoption.
He knew he loved his son, but could not abide his being.
He knew it mattered how one chose, or did not choose, to die.
He knew it mattered that one chose not to die.
He knew cameras were friends, and those who carried signs. He knew to pray for his son’s recovery. He knew it stung when his son’s words were published.
He knew God spoke in sentences.
He knew those sentences were complete, that they began and ended,
that the endings were what He intended.
He knew God was the author, himself the text, that he enunciated
sentences for those who could not. He
knew his son left before he was asked to leave.
He knew it wrong that his son took money for his words.
He knew he did not want his son to die, that death comes early to
those. He knew he wanted to
speak to his son, in sentences, but there was no syntax to embrace his
syllables. He knew their
daughter was dying, so he spoke to them in her voice, his.
The
Real Deal
She
had so loved the word. Turned
it on her tongue because it was real, tasted the bitter Realpolitik
with her favorite sweet –ism. Not
that she had loved Henry Kissinger, for she had not, but his conflation
of "real" with "politik" had made her stomach flutter. Not that she wished to play the Survivor game, but reality-tv affirmed for her the attraction and
repulsion she felt for life, the way some are chosen and some are not.
Reality-based scenarios had been her B.A., her degree in what
connected basis to fact. She
wanted the experience of motherhood, the way it might connect her to the
others, mothers and daughters who walked the Safeway aisles.
Really, she thought, this is what
I want.
When
he came, her child was not like the others.
He was brown to her white, dimpled to her clear, straight-haired to
her curls. She could not
measure him as the others did, against her own, against her mother’s
being. His origins were unreal,
even as questions multipled. Do you know who his real parents are? they would ask, til she
herself became unreal. She and
the boy belonged, but she couldn’t describe their way of walking so that
one’s leg answered the curve of the other’s arm.
They had taken her word, or perhaps it had always been so.
What was his real name? she
asked herself driving to soccer sign-ups, where names and birthdays were as
necessary as cleats, but harder to buy.
It was then she wanted her word retrofitted, proliferated in other
words: original for real, birth for real, feeling for real, karma for real,
the real spinning like tape unspooled from cassettes, or Fellini’s Satyricon.
The
Strangler
He favored blinds, Venetian blinds, those that drew in the light, then shadowed it. His witnesses linoleum tiles, frilly half-curtains over
kitchen sinks, slitted closet doors, the clipped hedges of a midwestern city. He’d studied at the university, wandered its library, copied an
instructor’s poems, collaged them for the authorities. The question of authorship moot, if not the poet’s later bitterness, the failures of his
recognition. Publication the soul’s death, perhaps, but self-publication (without the self’s usual markers) marked the death of an other. He
slipped poems into library books for an audience he wished not to have
so much as refine. He knew their search for meaning took them past the poem’s bounds, if only they knew how to read. Later, he slipped poems in
envelopes, offered up a zip. But if the code was his, none had the key.
His poems proclaimed the referant’s failures, birthing new poems rather than appreciations, of him or his minion meanings. Later revisions moved
toward clarity, ideas found only in objects, like the driver’s license delivered three decades on. Yet it was not the object that spoke so much
as the strangler, his desire to affix his name to what he did with words that gave those words voice, whatever their origin. Who wrote them was
never as significant as who used them to effect, and his was beyond
metaphor, fact. His intent, after all, was to have had the final word.
| Home | | About Tool |
| Five | |
Toolbox: A Press |
| New | | Gallery | | Archive |
| Links | | Contact |