The Choreographer

The Choreographer

Gerald Fleming

Download

At last, he understood that all his life had been choreography for his funeral. He came to this not through therapy, but during a walk in the woods on his friend Bernstein’s sheep farm in southern Oregon.

It was January, he’d been invited to spend the week, and early Monday before the others were up he went walking in the cold, the maples still holding brilliant leaves on their lowest branches, his boots crunching ice along the path. He stopped at the pond, broke off a pane of ice from its surface, held it up, saw his own crazed reflection there, an abstraction he was proud to appreciate, and he wanted to tell Bernstein about it, Bernstein a painter, tell him about the fascinating distortion, the outline of the nose limning a raised ridge in the ice, the chin line carved along the edge—he wanted his friend to know that he understood abstraction. And when he came back into the house, went into his paneled room overlooking the sheep pen, took off his jacket and gloves and rehearsed his quick speech about the glassy ice, he knew then, in the quiet of the house, that the entire speech was meant to plant in Bernstein’s head the possibility, the suggestion, of his painter friend rising at his funeral and saying, “I just want to say that he understood abstraction.”

He sat on the bed, and in a moment less of honesty than of a long life’s filtration, saw that almost everything he had said or done in his life after, say, age thirty, had been funeral choreography.

For decades now, he admitted, he’d pictured the exact room of his memorial: warm yellow light, metal chairs, a bank of windows revealing a mature garden, wine and hors d’oeuvres on a table at the rear, a crowd larger than the capacity of the place. A winter afternoon—perhaps not unlike what today’s afternoon will be, he thought.

How familiar he was with that place. It had been his, detail after detail added, for thirty years now—was always there when he spoke, didn’t speak, acted, didn’t act.

When he was a lover, he was a lover in order that the beautiful woman he was caressing might, at that memorial, stand—only at the end, mind you—and in a soft voice say I just wanted to mention that he was a wonderful lover, and then ten women, emboldened, would stand and in a quickly accelerating crescendo say He certainly was, and it would be a moment of great humor, memorable.

When he took time to speak with the postman who brought his mail and he asked after the postman’s kids, it was in hope, really, that the postman would rise that same day and say, He always asked about my family, always remembered my kids’ names.

When he was a teacher, he taught not so much to share knowledge but to assemble a legion of potential memorial-goers, each of them standing to say He taught me so much, and He was so important to me formatively, and The world will never be the same . . .

And so it went: when he visited the sick, helped a neighbor change a transmission, bought season tickets to the symphony, studied the Ramayana, traveled to difficult places—all was toward memorial accolade: He brought tenderness to everything he did. He’d give you the shirt off his back. He was an underground scholar. He knew more about John Cage than most musicians I know. He could name the streets of Nairobi in his sleep, and of course, his friend Bernstein’s abstraction comment, and his good wife positioned at the side of the room surrounded north, south, east, west by his four kids, all of them laughing and weeping.

He couldn’t know, though, on this clear winter day in southern Oregon, that his memorial would be nothing like that.

His wife would have arranged a simple service in the Presbyterian Church, word of his death would not have gone out widely—one of his sons having missed the deadline for the obituary—and there was a storm: brutal rain, dangerous driving. Family and extended family would come, but Bernstein would be in Hawaii, the postman long dead, students spread around the globe, most of them hearing of his death only months later, and no lovers: not one. Why would they have heard? A neighbor would rise to say He helped me change my transmission, and I still have the scars to prove it, but the little joke would have gone over badly, sounding strangely bitter.

But for this Monday morning, he was at peace with himself, the confidence of a choreographer just before opening night, certain that his dancers know their moves, that the stage is clean, the music cued, the lights just right, the understudies stretching in the wings.

From The Choreographer, Sixteen Rivers Press (San Francisco), 2013

Gerald Fleming is the author of The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2013), Night of Pure Breathing (Hanging Loose Press, 2011), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2005). He lives in California.

At a Late Age

We sat in the place, asked for a half-jug of white wine; it was day when we sat down, just night when we left, & what we got was this: rain clouds goose-wing grey from the west but not near—this to be the next day’s rain—& as dark fell the lamps in the square came on, jaune, & from a soapstone dome flowed a font whose sound was new to us by night—how had we not heard it? But the best, this: the young, who sat on the rim of that font, black baseball caps, some bent as if to throw dice, some to their long-haired loves, French lips to French lips, all limned black in new night, backlit with lamplight as in an old snapshot, that same light caught now in a bank of glass from a fifth-floor flat, sent back to us—then from nowhere, somewhere, in full sail, a half moon.

Can this be real? you said. Don’t pull back the veil.

–

Gerald Fleming is the author of One (Hanging Loose Press, 2016), The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2013), Night of Pure Breathing (Hanging Loose Press, 2011), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2005). He lives in California.

The Drawer

The Drawer (Gerald Fleming)

Gerald Fleming

Dad’s got a gun in his drawer, he’s got a dirty book.

And a jumpknife, too.

That drawer’s not taller than me anymore.

Dad’s got a gun in his drawer, he’s got a dirty book.

And a jumpknife, too.

Sometimes when I come home ahead of the others

I go back & get out the gun & sit on the bed.

The drawer’s quiet when it opens.

Get the gun sometimes & sit on the bed.

Sometimes get the book.

The gun’s got a leather holster. Smooth,

worn smoother. Darker where a man’s hand goes.

But it’s got no bullets. How heavy it is, how good

it feels in my hand.

Dad’s got a gun in his drawer: I heard him call it

Luger. But he won’t talk about it,

won’t tell us how he got it.

Dad’s got a dirty book. That drawer’s not

taller than me anymore. What’s a book doing

in a drawer? Sometimes I get home early—

before the others. Get the book, sit on the bed,

sun coming in.

The book’s beside the gun. It’s a stupid book, a stupid

story, lots of pages folded back. He’s got a jumpknife, too.

It’s about a man unbuttoning a woman’s shirt.

He runs his hand across her tits, it says,

and she rises to meet him with her lips. He pulls off

some of her clothes and throws them on the floor. Take me,

she says. What does she mean?

Sometimes I get home early, before the others.

Sometimes I go for the gun, sometimes the book, sometimes

the knife, but last week more for the book

than the gun or knife. I like the way no matter what day

I come in it tells the story again.

The gun, the book, the jumpknife—

springblade, sharp. He got it in the paratroopers, won’t talk about it.

Got it in the 101st. All he said was You need a quick knife

when you hit the ground. All he said about the knife.

Sometimes I get home before the others & get the knife

& sit in the sun on the bed & flick it. Close it. Flick it.

Close it. Flick it. I love its silver button. First

it’s nothing, then it’s a knife.

Sometimes I spread them all out, there in the sun:

the book, the knife, the gun, on the big bed.

Mostly I wish the gun had bullets.

From Swimmer Climbing onto Shore, Sixteen Rivers Press (San Francisco), 2005

Gerald Fleming is the author of The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2013), Night of Pure Breathing (Hanging Loose Press, 2011), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2005). He lives in California.

The Rats: a Malediction

The Rats-A Malediction.Gerald Fleming

The rats are not doing well, and I want them to do worse. Ten days rain: Harold’s bin of chicken grain across the road tight in its tin can, the duck grain & goose grain gone & tucked under the house, unattainable. None of the neighbors chucking kitchen-scraps out the windows anymore, no fruit in the trees, no nuts. Leaflessness, no grass seed, no dead deer, just deluge: water off the hills, rivulets on the slightest slope; meadows recall their lakes. Wet nights for the rats, wet nights.

I want them to shrivel, stumble, starve. Prolific in the attic, I want them desperate for the peanut butter on the ten traps I set—traps that smell of old death—let them smell that death but be hungry, hasty, and let each trap snap & snap well—slice a neck, crack a skull, flip & sink them into insulation, stinking in dead rat silence.

Because I hate their entry, which I can’t find, I have caulked & filled, found each hole larger than a dime, stuffed coarse steel wool, cut screen, nailed it in, gone up the extension ladder & down, reshingled, soffited, and still they get in.

Because I hate their acrobatics, clawing across the rafters, gnawing the soft joists smooth, rolling their goddamn acorns across the false ceiling or squealing as they’re screwing, I see every one of their beady eyes from our bed.

Because I hate the smell of their sweet piss in the attic—unmistakable—on summer days it rises through the vents, rides the breeze.

Because I have tried poison, which they take, seek water, sway across the fields toward the creek, speared by an owl, now the owl’s poisoned, so I poison no more.

Because they are huge. Because they are healthy—the one who flipped down from the attic last week, dead from the trap, his coat shining, lamp-black & gray, lovely.

From Night of Pure Breathing, Hanging Loose Press (Brooklyn), 2011

Gerald Fleming is the author of The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2013), Night of Pure Breathing (Hanging Loose Press, 2011), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2005). He lives in California.

Crucifixion, Kinetic

Crucifixion, Kinetic: Gerald Fleming

Often, the scene depicted as tranquil—fait accompli, three men in their proper places, on crosses, assorted provokers and grievers below, sky leaden, sense overall not meat but vegetal, varnished, tableau.

Let’s say it did occur.

Then: cross? This planed and surfaced lumber in pictures we knew long ago—in Giotto, Raphael, even Goya?

No. Rough spar. Oak, or cedar. Maybe an adze hacked away the bark, maybe a few draw-knife marks, but it’s still tree, still round, chunks of its skin left on, bleeding sap, lots of knots—strong enough, though, to hold a man.

Each upright so tall no mother at night might take down a son, no brother a brother. And the cross-strut surely not mortised, fit tight/square to its vertical other, but cruder stuff: hemp-rope to lash the X together, coarse fiber, the cross-strut at front, main beam behind, rope laps raising it farther so that a man’s deltoids and pectoralis majors are either racked backwards, spine arched out from the upright, or else his arms straight, pinned at wrists and elbows, thoracic vertebrae torqued inward, rolled; he’s hunchbacked.

The tying’s done on the ground, of course, crowd gathered ’round, a few protesting at first, most goading, quick-tempered, spinning to kick dogs fighting underfoot.

And of the three: do they accede, span themselves over each cross? Not likely.

Struggle, boots to the gut, the men blindsided, bare-knuckled, yanked down, faces struck and kicked, clothes ripped, and their cursing—all three, and all three self-mucused and bloodied and pissed, pinned now at the wrists, ankles crossed and bound, four soldiers to a man, More rope! More rope! Knives tossed to slice the hemp, and they’re stilled now, fixed, the crowd cheering Yes!—one of the men in the crowd with a hard-on.

Some few curse the soldiers, their epithets kept under breath.

Three tall crosses, one by one to be raised.

Who dug these goddamn holes? Not deep enough! One-third the length of each pole! Who trained you fools—your mothers?

And the laborers, new men, bend again, fifteen minutes’ work, their blades shear rock, much complaint, the tied men still supine, new rubble beside the postholes, and now the call to raise: a soldier at each side of the struts, two at the vertical, they count, lift, the wet wood heavy and the bound man heavy, no balance to be had, pitching backward, swaying, Lift higher! says one with a helmet on, and the cross is lifted, lowered into its hole, voice of man on pole dolorous and lost in the crowd, but still it’s not plumb, It’s leaning, and they heave too far left, foolish workmen, compensate now too far right, finally straight, the workmen shamed, angry, There—now fill it in, shovelers packing rubble into the hole, slapping it with the back of their blades, the pole-holding soldiers still shouldering it, heroic poses in opposition to each other, more rubble, more soil. Done. Next one.

The second one plumbed, and now to the third man, still on the ground, bound, the one they were told to nail. The nails flat-shafted, pounded on an anvil, tapered, black. The man’s right wrist bound tight, one nail straight through the capitatum. That’s no pain, they say, you woman. Want nails in the tips of your fingers? Now the left.

The man’s feet, wrong in literature and tableau, here crossed at the ankles, bound in hemp, loosed briefly so that each crossed foot can find a surface for nailing. Two men on their knees—each takes a foot, jerks it downward, works it around the side of the post, nails it in. The cord tightened again.

The man himself now, as if oiled: in blood, in sweat, in piss, and the noises he makes animal noises, inhuman. He is raised, the skies leaden, yes, the birds already circling, the soldiers folding their arms, well pleased.

From The Choreographer,  Sixteen Rivers Press (San Francisco), 2013.

Gerald Fleming is the author of The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2013), Night of Pure Breathing (Hanging Loose Press, 2011), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2005). He lives in California.

The Others

 "It is the absence of facts that frightens people:
the gap you open, into which they pour
their fears, fantasies, desires.” 
― HILARY MANTEL, Wolf Hall

The Others

Gerald Fleming

We’re having a good time—bottle of red wine, spaghetti, we’re here in our garden, warm breeze scented with lilac, light on its way out.

Others, though, are having a better time. In Newport it’s three hours later—already more advanced than we—and those others sit not only with their spouses but with four friends on a verandah overlooking the Atlantic, torch-lights behind them, the ocean a swath of black, only its sound in the cove—easy waves, rolling pebbles—announcing it. Theirs is an understated ocean. Their wine is better, their dinner later, and there’s laughter. One of the women has on your favorite perfume, and were we there, its scent would come our way. Someone in the kitchen with deft hands has cooked their meal, another serves it attentively, and there is no guilt.

But each guest knows in his longing that elsewhere others are having an even better time. Just outside D.C., for example, on a marble terrace overlooking the Potomac there’s a similar dinner—the same number of couples plus one—and it’s the addition of that couple that has made all the difference. The wine a little older, and the food, though served in smaller portions, richer—ah, but that one couple, the man black, the woman white—has energized the group, put everyone at their best. Listen: people are joking in German, saying sexy things in Italian, cursing in Russian, laughing in French. They’re almost raucous, but just shy of raucous—they know exactly where the line lies—it is there, in the mist above them; it will not descend. And look how well they’re dressed: the men in linen shirts, earth-tone slacks, the women’s breasts exposed slightly from each trimmed dress, each guest almost completely in the moment, this warmest night of the year.

They, too, though, know of those others, those betters, off the coast of Carolina in the stateroom of the hundred-foot Harmonium as it drifts in its easy private sea. The same number are there, but there’s a confidence, an intimacy lacking in the others. Same wine as Washington but more of it, plates garnished more imaginatively, dinner not even on until midnight, a little dancing just before, a switch of partners for one spin around the circular floor, and now they’re at table: how hearty they are, each of them an artist, not a banker among them, each smart & funny, intuitive & wise, their humor more subtle, implied. When they speak—which is often—there’s a largesse about them, a sense of kindness toward their host. They know each other well, the ship rocks languorously, honeysuckle scent from the coast. They could communicate simply by looking into each other’s eyes.

And we all know that after dinner that is what they do. A little tipsy but none drunk, they move to love each other on the deep carpet of the stateroom floor—all of them there, each knowing the others’ secrets, fit bodies melting into fit bodies, one moving being, many skin tones, many special sighs, the ship swaying imperceptibly, each to each to each, and as the first rays of sun fall across the bow someone says, Let’s sleep…

And we here, in this pitiful garden...

From Night of Pure Breathing, Hanging Loose Press (Brooklyn), 2011

Gerald Fleming is the author of The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2013), Night of Pure Breathing (Hanging Loose Press, 2011), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2005). He lives in California.