Jim Elledge
From The Book of the Heart Taken by
Love
I did not know it at the time, but now
I know I was taken to the doctor to find
out if I was really feeble minded or crazy
. . . Had I known what was going to be done
with me I surely would have run away.
—Henry Darger, The History of My Life
Burlesque adj. [It. burlesco <burla,
a jest, mockery]
Heart’s daddy, a German tailor, taught
Heart how to read newspapers before he even
went to school, how to sew with a tiny needle,
how to measure a man’s inside leg with
a tape, asking, on his knees looking up and
in perfect American English, “On which
side do you lay, sir?” through straight
pins between his lips. Heart traces (not faces)
little girls and boys from coloring books,
newspaper ads, and circulars, then erases (not
embraces) their clothing, a striptease so clean
not a soul gets bruised. But to Heart, winds
gusting from his pencil snatch off their blouses
and skirts. Tornadoes rise from his pen as
he draws penises on them freehand. Weather
is the key to Heart’s strategy: It’s
so much easier arriving at the naked truth
when you storm across whatever lines have been
strung in your way.
Carotid adj. [<Gk. karoun,
to plunge into sleep or stupor: so called because
compression of the two main arteries of the
neck causes unconsciousness]
Heart will die. It’s then, when they’re
interviewed, his neighbors will claim that
Heart has two voices. The one he uses at work
washing dishes, sweeping floors, rolling bandages
into rolls big as your thigh; the one he uses
to respond to Sr. Rose when she berates him
or puppy-pats him atop his balding head. The
other? A woman’s. Maybe his mother’s
escaped from Oak Woods Cemetery and haunting
the space under his aging tongue, a bitter
pill. Or his godmother’s ringing in his
ears that he finds and follows him home as
he wanders along sidewalks, in alleys, under
the L tracks among the twine and eyeglasses
and empty Pepto-Bismol bottles he collects.
Maybe his sister’s—adopted into
a family not his, a home not his, and now all
grown up. Or maybe just his own, pitched higher,
more refined, but his (tee hee!) all the same.
Jim Elledge’s most recent books are The
Chapters of Coming Forth by Day, a prose-poem
novel (Stonewall, 2002) and Masquerade:
Queer Poetry in America to the End of World War
II (Indiana University Press, 2004).
back
|
