(no subject)

[penguinboy.livejournal.com]

The House of Blue Light

Little Richard comes on the TV at Gold's Gym
           and the first thing that happens is, I burst into tears,
and the second thing is, I think to myself,
                      I can't sing this music, but if I could,
I wouldn't accept a smidgen of public acclaim,

not one iota; rather, I'd be like
           19th-century French historian Fustel de Coulanges
entering a lecture hall to the applause of students
                      and saying, "Do not applaud. It is not I who speak,
but history which speaks through me,"

and as I distract myself from my sorrow with this thought,
           pert Today show host Katie Couric
tries to cut Little Richard off,
                      tries to get the camera on herself so she can go on
with the program, so she waves the crew back

and walks toward them to fill the lens and get away
           from Little Richard's hullabaloo, which is king-sized:
he's saying, "Turn me up! Turn me up!"
                      and then, "All the beautiful women say, 'Woo woo!"'
and the women do say "Woo woo!" and they are beautiful,

that crone there, this four-hundred-pounder,
           and then he says, "All the ol' ugly men say, 'Unnh!"'
and the men do say "Unnh!" and they are ugly,
                      they're beasts, the stock brokers in their power ties,
even the slim, almost girlish delivery boys

are fat and hairy and proud to be that way,
           proud to be selfish and to take big craps,
and I'm crying and not sure whether I'm one
                      of the beautiful ones or the ugly,
and when I tell Barbara about this later,

she says, "It's an emotional time for you,
           what with Ian going away to college,"
and I see what she means,
                      because at least part of my Gold's Gym sorrow
is due to the fact that tomorrow I'll say good-bye

to this boy I've had a steak-and-egg breakfast with
           practically every Saturday morning of his life,
and now he's going away, which he should,
                      though why Little Richard would trigger my tears,
I have no idea, except, come to think of it,

for the strong, indeed necessary, tie between
           pop music and sentiment, as evidenced by the last time
I boohooed like a li'l weiner while listening to pop songs,
                      which was after Roy Orbison had died
and, as part of a tribute show, the DJ had played,

not only Roy Orbison singing "Danny Boy,"
           an Irish father's farewell to his only son
when he goes off to fight in the foreign wars,
                      but also the seldom-heard reply, which is the song
Danny Boy sings at his father's graveside when he comes back

and finds that, irony of ironies,
           while he has survived sabre blow and cannon fire,
Old Age, the surest of Death's warriors,
                      has crept up on his dad and cut him down
as lethally as any of the English King's artillerymen,

and now I see Ian in his farmboy's worsteds,
           leaning on his musket and salting the stones
of my grave with his bitter tears....
                      My son, me, Little Richard, Roy Orbison:
it's a mishmash, for sure—

certainly it's a step into the House of Blue Light,
           the place where Miss Molly rocks
and that is not a house of prostitution,
                      which would involve a light
of a different color altogether, but a fun house,

a good-time house, yet a house where
           the unexpected occurs, sort of like that place
Muhammad Ali called "the near room,"
                      whose door would open in the middle of a round,
and part of Ali would be whaling the tar

out of an opponent and part would be looking
           into that room, where he'd see orange alligators
playing saxophones and dancing snakes
                      with green hats on their heads,
and he'd want to go in there, want to party

with these bebop reptiles and groove-ball amphibians,
           when suddenly whup whup whup whup! his opponent
would remind him what he was there for,
                      and Ali would have to whupwhupwhupwhupwhupwhup!
and take care of business real fast

and shower and have a news conference
           and then go home and wonder what he saw
in that room there with all that crazy stuff in it,
                      including some things he's seen before
and some he's never seen and some he hopes to see again

and some he can't bear to think about
           even though he's home now, got his feet up
on the Danish Modern coffee table and a nice cold glass
                      of fruit juice in his hand.
He's been somewhere, that's for sure!

He's been on an "expedition,"
           a word I recently heard pronounced
as "eks-pay-DEE-shone" by an Italian biologist
                      who was telling me about his latest trip to Antarctica
and who is probably the last person to have said

this word to my face since my brother Albert
           forty-five years ago when I was seven and he ten
and we used to play this game called African Ranger
                      in the woods that surrounded our parents' house,
the one we had to sell when my parents got too old

to keep it up, the two sons talking on the porch
           as the mother sweeps and tidies and the father,
who has not cried at anything since the death
                      of his own parents decades earlier, sobs in the study
as he says good-bye to his books, and it is late afternoon

in the early days of winter, and there is no part of the world
           gloomier than the bayou country at that time of the year,
and Albert says to me, "Want to play African Ranger?"
                      and it takes me a minute to remember the game,
which consisted of starting out on an "expedition"

but soon turned into two shirtless boys shooting blunt arrows
           into each other's hides, and I say, "Nope,"
and he says, "Me, either," and the last piece of light
                      falls out of the sky, and it's dark out there,
the woods are black; you could walk into them, if you wanted,

and a little path would take you farther and farther
           from your old life, and soon you'd see this cottage,
and there'd be music coming out of it, and you'd look in,
                      and Little Richard would be there and Ali
and Roy Orbison and yourself when you were a child

but also a teenager and a young man, too,
           and everybody'd be talking and laughing,
and somebody would look up and see you as you are now,
                      and they'd all wave and say,
Hey there, we've been waiting for you, come on in.

by David Kirby