A Genie at the Bottom

The other night I found myself
trying
to fill a cup without
too much foam.
Great and terrible
are those which
find in foam
a mother’s arms.

I had noticed her when I walked in,
no great distinction
as she was not of the quality
accustomed to being ignored.

I am sure that I was staring.

My excuse would have been the
alpine heights
of my mind,
but even with this deep root in fact
my lie would have been
dead and crystalline
like a lake at a recently disused quarry.

She had on a shirt
but I do not remember the color.
She wore jeans
but I cannot describe style or type.
Shoes too,
presumably,
though this list,
admittedly plagued with redundancies,
too closely
begins to resemble
a sermon.

I remember
the delicate curve of her brow,
the way her hair fell like a fountain
beneath a hat perched tenuously
and threatening at any moment to
swim away,
the dimples in her cheeks
and the small imperfections of her smile,
and perhaps most of all
the way she laughed
when I countered someone’s
anti-Semitic remark with,
“Hey, Einstein was a Jew,
which is to say nothing of
Franz Kafka.”

She kept refilling a black
Dixie Cup
with orange soda, room temperature,
and waiting with her weight
slung onto her right hip
as in frantic desperation
I tried to banish foam
from that which I had claimed.

We were standing, accidentally,
on either side of a friend
who seemed determined to loosen
the chains
held tight
by un-played piano keys,
singing along to Modest Mouse
and wondering how we ended up here.
I am sure
that I was staring.

She disappeared among the stars
but came back after a time.

I said
that stars had told me of the death in the water.
Yes, they told me that hollow was the sound of the sea.
They wondered if ever I’d known one so free.
I told them that questions without simple answers
don’t get answered for the dead, no matter how holy,
that I didn’t care much for their fire in the sky,
said we’ve got our own suns with Plutonium cores
to wink at the expanse with a rogue’s lightning grin.

She said
that the stars make you sound like a cynical bastard.
Yes, they asked of you questions as if they were masters.
But I’ve got to tell you that nothing is freedom,
that our minds are as dead as the whales in the ocean.
But I wonder if somewhere there is a brown river
that floods onto deltas and drowns them in murder
and I wonder when the rain will fall.

And I thought
of the women with baking soda and salt on their hands
baking cookies with dirt in the streets of their city,
and I thought of their babies with their hair all tinged red.

So I drank so much
I was sure I’d forget her,
but in the morning I even
remembered her name.
I laughed when I woke up
at the tone
of my visions,
of the doom I’d imagined for the mouth of the world.
I thought of a beer-keg
being bathed in ice-water,
of birthdays of friends
and parties for pilgrims
who were going new places
in search of new air,
of gulls with choked feathers
and fish never born.
I wonder when the rain will fall.