Galatea East and West

I live in a rear apartment of a 1920's New York style apartment building, behind which is an elementary school. At 10:30 in the morning, children are screaming in the courtyard. I remember recess. Today, I realized it was raining (rain in Los Angeles! pure magic) because the pitch of the screaming suddenly jumped a few decibels. I heard that first, and then I heard the rain drops. In the past, I've mistaken certain sounds for rain drops, but it always turns out to be something else, window fans, someone rummaging through plastic bottles in the alley; I'd given up on rain, but the heightened screaming in the schoolyard could mean no other thing. It must be exciting to be a child in sudden rain during recess at a grade school in Los Angeles.

I know the kind of stubbornness required here, plodding forward without considering whether it is any good. Bulldoggedness. The rest is vanity. Who is waiting at the other end of this line, tapping her fingers...? I am.

The atmosphere of this place that feels closest to home than anywhere I've lived before is made up of these things: the schoolyard screamers in the late morning -- and this is why they make their way into the textured folds of daydreaming -- the chatter of the birds in the afternoon, the chatter and bad music of the Italian guy whenever he is home, the cricket frogs at night. It's the rumbling and the smell of laundry from below, the flat light peeling off the brick face opposite my window. I could use another window. One curtain hangs in the window; a matching one hangs from the heating pipe, where a window should be, if not for earthquake reinforcements. I can't stand to see that wall from outside, my phantom second window bricked up as if to keep the gypsies of Madrid from squatting. I would have welcomed that gypsy sun every afternoon and would have bought whatever it was selling. Ack! Afternoon to late afternoon, my favorite light, my favorite time, save Sundays, all day, and I want to be back in the New York City of my brain, standing on the sidewalk outside Bar 6, smoking with a girl named Aiden. That hour, that city, that sidewalk, that girl, unbeknownst to all of them, have come to represent a minor paradise before a minor fall.

I spent the afternoon banging away on my powder blue Webster XL-500 -- grace be to the proliferation of makes and models -- bounding back and forth between it and the electric robot, checking facts, definitions, spellings, checking my temperature and the temperature in Bakersfield. It is a worthwhile experiment, alternating between the two machines; I can actually feel the doors to the other world closing, to the sound of sand draining through the waistline of an hourglass. Quickly! Leave the robot and resume the tapping, return to the impression of ink as a consequence of tapping. Is it the action of the keys? Is it the sound? That sound is like a zip code 90027 YOU ARE TYPING IN LOS FELIZ.

What is relevant to LA, to elections and financial crises? We could start with definitions. Or the correct pronunciation of Aeschylus. Or favorite aphorisms by Sam. Let's do it backwards: "Poetry is an amazingly courageous thing. To be sitting down at a table, still as engaged as you'd be in bed with your muse -- very hard." ES-kyuh-luss. Haptic: adj. 1. relating to or based on the sense of touch 2. characterized by a predilection for the sense of touch.

I pulled off the covers and moved into the pathway of the sun. The books in my friend's room were stacked, it seemed, in no particular order, and yet their order had the effect of a kind of meditation. Gogol resting on a volume of Richard Feynman lectures. Rachel Carson and Chico Buarque -- who knew he writes fiction -- Italo Calvino and Alexis de Tocqueville. One gets the point. Since I can't endow the sun with fingers, much less curiosity, I'll say that other fingers in their haptic curiosity ran coolly from a shoulder to the back of a thigh, a line that, had it been drawn in graphite, would have been a soft, even-weighted contour of human topography. Shoulder, spine, buttock, thigh. I felt like Galatea. Not the original, loved by Pygmalion, who lost her name among the rubble. The Galatea who claimed her milkwhite definition, rewriting her own story: her name has always been there, alongside Pygmalion's. Sunlight traced a continuous vein in the marble; the touch quickened the stone, which arched like a spring-pole, snapped and came to. Voila. Good morning. Santa Monica.

I like those stacked books, that light, that room on 10th St., free of complication, chantage and cliche, free of little notes on mirrors saying, "The truth is we're afraid to look into the pools of each others' beings." Bah.

I asked Jacob, "Are you afraid to look into the pool of my being?"

"You don't scare ME," he said.

Patrick Flynn Eckenrode

As it turns out, Flynn was neither a first nor a last name.
Here is the whole poem, in all its splendor. Thank you, Michael.

Of All the Epiphenomena You Were My Favorite

It seems like everything nowadays has something to do with eggplant.
Not that I'm against this. I'm a product of it. First, of course, a system was
Erected, which was brash and had lots of thought behind it.
Several of us planned to put an end to it, but we were
Neglected by the wealthier peasantry, who were quite pleased
To see an infrastructure spring up overnight like that. Then
Came the pleasantly cool complications of
Aftermath, which will long be associated with a collapse of the fathers.
Finally, the system produced 'children.' I think that's
What they were called. Others have called them other things and
I would not be the first in a long line to call them pernicious.
They infested us with their systematics and put us on the maps
They were writing. From down there, of course, it all looked very similar
To another system I'd heard of, and I don't doubt that the two
Are related somehow and could probably even be triangulated
With the help of some new third system that is still
In its operative stages and hasn't been translated yet. Alas
For the slowness of language to create the bigness of systems.
We all live in your lack, back to back, castigating our homelands,
Finding for every correspondence something that responds
Inadequately and makes matchsticks of our eggplant
Strictness. Belatedly we recognize our eggplant discoveries,
After years of eating nothing but Cheerios and
Corn-on-the-cob. My daughter likes to say things now like,
Isn't that wildebeest coming too near us father? And when I
Remind her of principles like Zeno's paradox, she just shrugs her shoulders
And gets carried off to the wildebeest festivals, where everyone
seems so 'in the know' all the time. I guess that's youth for you.
It creates boredom out of things you thought were pleasurable,
Like wildebeests and their grazing patterns. But then, of course,
It also fills you with a glow of self-satisfaction that looks a lot,
I'm told, like the glow of self-radiation. So there's another bell jar for you.
It's a variation on the funnel effect that's been setting outside
My window for hours now. Tomorrow I will go to school all day and learn algebra.

To read Patrick Flynn Eckenrode's entire book on PDF, go to:
http://chelagallery.org/portfolio/flynnbook2.pdf

Sleepers and Boys Throwing Snowballs

"Of all the epiphenomena, you were my favorite." This is a line -- or the title of a poem written by a young man named Flynn, who, I found at some point from Kamran, had died. I have been trying today, without much success, to recover his other name; all I've got is Flynn, and I don't know if that's his first or last. But I do remember that the poems I'd read of his were very good, and had lines that stuck like ice picks in Trotsky's head, the one about the epiphenomena, or "Isn't that wildebeest coming too near us father...?" Which made me think of other ice picks, too: "maybe I'd like to take a good whack at the pinata," a line from a poem written by a Westover student whose name I don't recall at all. My memory may have taken some liberties with the exact word choices, but the poetic facts are there, intact. And if a bullet plowed through the playground of my synapses, as it does through Anders' in the Tobias Wolff story, what would be the phrase that I'd remember? It might be "Are you speaking French?" what the French girl asked after I had tried to explain to her, at the request of the flight attendant, why our plane was going back to Heathrow instead of continuing on to New York. It was September 11, 2001, and we were misinformed and terrified, releasing fuel into the atmosphere so we could land, and I knew even at that moment what I'd remember most vividly about that day would be the way her face soured at the offensive broken French coming out of my mouth, and my humiliation. Later, I read an article in the New York Times and found another phrase that seemed a likely contender for permanence -- and I wasn't wrong -- written by someone who'd been sitting in a cafe in the East Village that morning. He wrote, "Then suddenly, all the pigeons in the street flew up."

Poetic facts lodge themselves rather unassumingly into the wrinkles of my brain also as images, and I have to wonder what effect my compulsive photograph-taking has on my ability to access them freely out of my imagination. Some photographs feel as if they were my own projections. Gage and Jacob sleeping, no more than 45 minutes after Gage's arrival from New York, Jacob in his T-shirt and jeans, bundled in disheveled sheets on the bed, Gage relegated awkwardly to a corner of the couch, although the whole thing was free, the entropy around them almost visibly in motion in the diffuse afternoon light. And that red spare gas tank. What does it mean, sitting there bright as a lollipop, its phallic spout pointing...

Maybe because he inspires mischief and play, Gage excites my poetic brain, and proximity is a powerful aphrodisiac. This time the three of us sat under Alex Trebek's house, and I got sicker as Gage and Jacob went on endlessly about the differences between New York and Los Angeles. We'd just been peeling around downtown at 2 o'clock in the morning, screaming through the 2nd St. tunnel in Jacob's pick-up truck. Once. Twice. Three times. Gage and I went sliding down the railings of all the escalators around Hope and Grand, with Jacob and the majestic bronze nude watching over us like some complicit chaperons. Los Angeles is a vortex of lost pairs of Ray Ban sunglasses, and "different" is a euphemism -- the woman with the LED-rimmed sunglasses at the H.M.S. Bounty is "different," the ever-bare-chested-daisy-duked Vietnam vet cruising Sunset Junction with his chihuahua is "different," yes -- but why compare it all to New York? Unless to define both cities in the juxtaposition.

Sitting between Gage and Jacob, I meant to define something else: boys throwing snowballs. It's become a short-hand phrase I use to describe a childhood angst of mine, the feeling I used to have watching boys hurling snowballs at each other, and especially if it was at night. There always arose an indescribable yearning to participate in what felt to me like a secret language, brutish, playful, free. My aim was good, and once in a while I could throw as far. Never as hard. But if a boy threw one at me, he couldn't win; if it was as hard as he would throw it at another boy, he'd catch hell for "hitting a girl," and if he lobbed it or missed deliberately... well, I might be relieved, but the purpose, and I, would be left defeated. Sitting between the two boys in Griffith Park, or in the truck, my head on Jacob's shoulder and my arm woven under Gage's, passing beers and cigarettes between us, I was a fool to think I could define my childhood angst. All I could do was relive it.

Fitting, somehow, that the photographs Gage took of me were lost. In fact, they never existed. I am the camera.