Patrick Rosal
Man Hanging Upside Down
"I never knew the body could bend so many ways…"—Melissa Roxas
Here is a man hanging upside down,
from a makeshift cross.
No credible witness can seem to tell us
his name or where he comes from.
Let the record show,
he did lie in at least seven dozen bits,
until the local birds plucked his scraps
from the river. They carried first an elbow,
then a toe, then half a skull and so on,
piecing the body together again
incorrectly: left arm for right,
an eye for a thumb, a moonlight for knees,
until he hung again from the cross
he was nailed to in the first place
at the intersection of Jordan and Faith,
and truth be told, few of us notice
how often those ragtag blackbirds
have come to squawk at every window in town.
Who is to say if this man hanging upside down
was corrupt or loved, only that some birds
set themselves in the middle of the night
to the aerial miracle of silt made flesh,
a crew of winged scoundrels, some half-mute, half-blind,
that plucked a body’s remnants from muddy banks
and at the crossroads of Faith and Truth Be Told
reassembled the figure of a man
who must surely ache, the way he strains to turn
his gaze away from so many nations at once.
The Parable of the Disappeared Man
I’d been alone a long time on the rotting pier when an old man finally came upon me.
And with my first mouth, this is what I offered him: the story of a soldier who spent six months repairing a beat-up tractor in the crumbling plaza of a forgotten town. I offered the town’s bright murmur of children as they came out in twos and threes to watch the soldier bang at the relic and crawl about it with a rusted c-wrench. And then I offered all the bells the soldier stole to adorn the tractor, the ten-foot spire of wire and mesh he erected on the back of the tractor to accommodate the bells that wouldn’t fit on the tractor itself. I offered the old man the day the soldier drove the tractor around the plaza. I offered the children who chased him and the air about that plaza simmering with chime.
The old man didn’t laugh but he gave me a pair of feet, and though they fit me well, he said I couldn’t yet leave.
So I put the shoreline of the east in my second mouth and offered the old man this story of a boy who ate his own caca and grew to be taller and stronger than anyone in the village, taller and stronger than the tallest and strongest men in the surrounding villages, how he grew so big he bruised his mother’s tit when he suckled, and this is how he grew up to be ashamed and only spoke when the whole village was weeping or asleep.
The old man didn’t laugh at this either, but he gave me eyelids, and though they suited my face, he told me I couldn’t yet shut my eyes.
I put the battered cities of the north in the third of my mouths and told the old man next about the dog who saved the rooster from the blade and the story of the seven identical violins and the story of the bullet that struck the stone for wine and the naughty old women who carried that wine nine miles in their mouths to bring it to their lovers. And I went on like this for days, offering stories until the old man gave me ears, knees, the nerves of my left hand, everything I ever had before I was first human.
And then I put an archipelago on my last tongue, and what I couldn’t hold there, I kept in mismatched hands also given me by the old man. I held out the archipelago and its excess like this, so the old man could see all its islands, and I told him the story of the lieutenant who packed all the families of seven barrios — the rich, the poor, the vagrant — into a mansion, clothed them, fed them well, and when the people were done feasting in the cavernous salon, the lieutenant told them to stand together at the mansion’s massive front windows. They were to face the road. They were not to speak or move. They were not allowed to cry or else the lieutenant’s boys would shoot them.
And the lieutenant tied the conductor of the choir to a hefty post in the road so that all the citizens crammed against the glass could see, and the lieutenant pricked the man of music three times with no more than the tip of a corporal’s bayonet. His squadron followed, pricking, for hours, the choirmaster with no more than the points of their bayonets. And the people of the barrios didn’t turn away. They held their children still, gagged them with their fingers still reeking of pork and rum. They didn’t cry, even after the choirmaster fell slack.
By the time I finished the last story, the sun had come up on a Tuesday on both the old man and me. I looked at the old man with my only eyes, and the pupils of the old man on the pier widened. They grew and grew. They grew until his head burst open, and he reached inside the skull, through the throat, and into his thorax, and from the grotto of his chest, he pulled out a sad red bird still beating, and gave that to me last. I knew then he meant for me to go out and tell the story that begins: A long time ago, there was a man who gave a stranger a fat red finch to carry in his bosom, and in those days, you should know, that was all the sadness in the world.
Guitar
For Shiela who wants to learn to play
The bottom end’s a little shallow
and you might need to shim the bridge
to hush the fifth-fret buzz. The action’s low
and the neck, a tad warped, but I swear,
this thing sings. For ten years,
I’ve accompanied lovers, convicts, and children
with this guitar, bought it with my last
hundred bucks, fifty more perhaps
than it was worth that day.
I just wanted to touch nylon again,
to play the way my Uncle Eli used to,
‘til cancer mugged him for his lungs. He sang, Sheila,
and the guitar did too. And that kind of singing
was like eleven acres of sky to a nine-year-old kid
terrified of a 50 mile-per-hour hard ball.
The summer my father came back
from burying his mother in the Philippines,
he told my brother and me, the two oblong
boxes he pulled off the luggage conveyor
were ours. Once home, we pried the cardboard
apart, tearing the packing tape
and snapping the industrial staples
loose with our bare hands. I ran my fingers
slow around the slick soundhole edge.
I stuck my nose into the strings to smell
the jackfruit wood stewing inside
and when I pulled my face away,
the instrument made its first silken hum.
I don’t know if you believe in time
the way I do, but when history touches us
it’s like hearing a skinny uncle sing
with a cigarette dangling from his lips
without one note of misery in his dying,
and the guitar he’s holding is yours.
You might not understand the words sailing
past you, but one day, years later, on a drive back
to Rockland maybe, where an old woman
scolded you as a child or kissed the small bones
of your shoulders, you may find yourself
singing, out of nowhere, that tune. I mean to say,
I never thanked my father for that first guitar.
I smashed it in a tantrum against my heel
and didn’t own another until this one.
I should warn you, every guitar has its ghosts,
and they’ll ask you whom you love and how much.
As for learning. your hands are going to ache
a little while, but one day, when the chords come easy,
the guitar will whisper to you some old secret.
Whisper back. The most beautiful intervals are ancient
and imperfect. They will teach you to love
something so deep, you will want
nothing better than to give it all away.