Old Salt

Alternate titles: Don't bite more than you can chew
Spits or Swallows
Rinse optional

OLD SALT

At 21, I took Sheep Production 101, an animal science prerequisite that taught me, among other things, that a dressed lamb was really a slaughtered lamb hanging on a hook. I learned how to diagram cuts of meat, how to sheer, how to butcher, and how to castrate sheep in three ways. I read about ram lambs with rubber bands that shrank so tight their balls would fall off after a few weeks, and that domesticated lambs produced long swishy tails that had to be removed for sanitation. I took notes on the percentages of infection from each method of docking and castration. As a new student to Mount San Antonio College, and a naïve girl searching for approval, I wrote everything down with enthusiasm. Being naïve had its disadvantages. For the final exam our teacher required participation in a fieldtrip to learn the Basque ways.
I hadn’t banded, or used the hot-docker on tails, and the Basque method was still a mystery. “Doc”, my teacher, required full participation for an A, and as a girl trying to get into the Veterinary program at UC Davis, I needed every edge I could get. On that day, after a long field trip in pick-up trucks, our group of 18 male students and I, walked out to the country barn to pen pre-yearling ram lambs.
At first, a farm hand demonstrated sheering with old fashioned, long bladed scissors. He cut with one deft hand and held the animal pinned to the ground in an effortless hold with the other. Piles of perfectly shaped wool lay stacked next to him. He sweated and talked about how many he could do a day, I watched his back muscles through his thin plaid shirt, and could smell the combination of lanolin and his sweat. I could have watched him all day.

The teacher introduced us to the main rancher and he demonstrated a ghastly, but ‘sanitary’ method of castration. On a tree stump cut hip height, a male student struggled to sit the young ram of about 125 pounds in what looked like a wrestling hold. He wrapped his back-legs in between his forelegs and pinned the animal against him in a position that left the tail and the nuts dangling. The teacher first showed us the cremaster effect, that if the inner thigh was stroked, the testicles would jump into the body leaving the sac almost empty. In my own secret way I wanted to try that later, just to see if it had the same effect on a man. He pinched the sac and cut through it like it was paper. The ram lamb rolled its head and struggled, but in no way could free itself. In one smooth motion he pulled the cut sac away and revealed the insides of the sac. The animal bleated, struggled, but couldn’t break loose from the four-legged Nelson.

Knowingly, the rancher waited for the struggle to end, then leaned down, removed his hat, and pinched the first pink testicle with his teeth and lips, then backed it out of the animal. The skin holding it seemed to separate like layers of onion. He pulled it out, spat into a pie tin, wiped the blood off his moustache and went after the other one. Each of us on my side of the circle looked at the other in dismay. Some of the young men didn’t flinch, and didn’t look around. I knew more about their western plaid than about their faces. If it ended there, we would have gladly walked away. The rancher then wielded the scissor like blades of the hot-docker. He pulled the tail out, cut and cauterized it in another smooth motion. The vertebra sizzled and popped like fried chicken, and ran pink and clear with fluid. The teacher grabbed the white severed tail that was swishing only moments ago and flung it into the back of his truck, then dabbed the stump with hot-pink fly killer. The rancher carefully set the hot-docker down and explained that one bout of diarrhea would fix the tail to the sheep’s rear and it would die from fly strike. He proceeded to catch a young lamb with “tail rot” for demonstration. After separating the stuck tail from the haunches we could see where maggots were already burrowing into the flesh, he burned off that tail too. I wasn’t the only one that wanted to puke from the smell of burnt flesh, maggots and diarrhea. I wanted to crawl under the covers like I did so many times in childhood, but I couldn’t move. He flung the tail over with the rest, wrangled another sheep and got to castrating.
What did I know of country life? I was raised in East Los Angeles where concrete and Catholicism went hand in hand. Curiosity compelled me to look into the tin can where the rancher spat the testicles. “What are you going to do with those?” I asked. “Haven’t you heard of rocky mountain oysters?” he added with a big smile. His mouth repulsed me, his teeth were menacing.
I could escape into my own head. Stand with eyes open, but shift into a safer place inside. I gave myself a talk being a small animal vet, about the fact that large animals weren’t my future, that all I had to do was get through this junior college stuff and get into the real school. I had to do this to do what was next. I had to do this because I was a single a mom… The sheep was held there long enough for the teacher to lecture about screw flies, death and all the other maladies of each dock and neuter operation. Another sheep was wrangled and pinned, castrated and cauterized. The teacher would name the next student, and every one of us complied. When it was my turn I worried about my braces getting caught and sheep pellets flying into my mouth. I hadn’t had my face that close to any testicles, and I certainly didn’t want to start. I looked at the circle around me. They were silent. I imagined us as an exile tribe with secret rites. I lowered my head, and a trail of pellets fell from the ram’s ass. I smelled the mixture of dung, dusky lanolin and my own sweat. I ran my finger along the thigh to make the testicle ascend, then cut through the sac. Blood formed in beads along the cut line. I lowered my head, bit the teat of the testicle, pulled it out, spat the fat silvery glob and felt the blood salt in my mouth. When I looked around, no one met my eyes. I swallowed out of nervousness, covered up the gag reflex and leaned down to take the next one.

To Watch His Hands--

My father’s father
Trained his hands with sticks spread across thumb to pinky
To navigate a chord by six.
Sticks and blood, sticks and blood.

He played through the Depression,
Through rotten fruit bereft of bruises
Free from the backs of supermarkets,
Played through train jumping and seeing his brother
Lose his legs.

Raymundo- God of the world on wheels
Sticks and blood, sticks and blood.

Father played until his hands were blue and blood
Crept from his mouth like spiders. Last Rites
In the Sanitarium, three times.
The man, shriveled tuberculin lungs
Shook death, shook death because he heard music.

Saint Cecilia with angels at the piano.
bone and blood, bone and blood.

He rose like Lazarus, tricked death, found he could grow to
Enter women like music and create rhythm in beats inside them.

First Dolores, and great sadness.
Then Alice, Margo, and Regina- my queen.

My father, his daily ritual of scales, fortissimo
through the house. To watch his hands, tender on
Ivory teeth. Headphones--on full blast in his ears with
Franz Liszt’s craziest themes
Reading Goethe, the man’s hands tuned to the beat of the
metronome. All of this for forty-five sustained minutes of daily
Tch, tch, tchs.

He could not caress a child like the ivory, could not separate
The bruised imperfection of childhood to taste the sweet moments
with his own.

My hands are his, sticks and blood tuned to the tch, tch of looms,
The rhythms of Schuman.

When cancer came it left his hands alone. There in the bed
Teaspoons of cold Morphine under his tongue
The liquid of absolution from my hands
To wake the moths of blood from his lungs again.
To let them flutter his soul to a coast I have not seen.

After the first hours of death
I snuck my hands under the afghan that covered him, his
Hands were quiet now, no longer chattering like teeth,
But warm under the blankets, and still
Unresponsive in death.

Sticks and blood,
Sticks and blood.

The Sleep of Reason

What’s all the shouting about? What’s your hurry?
I have not been bit by a scorpion. I am deaf!
I think there will be sleep again at Christmas.
We will have a nice Christmas, Goya.

I am not bit by a scorpion, I am deaf!
Saturn has an erection while eating his children!
We will have a nice snow at Christmas, Goya.
Executions have left the liberal hydra dead.

Saturn has an erection while eating his children.
The Royal Volunteers will surely kill us all.
Executions have left the liberal hydra dead!
The implacable hammer for subjugation is King.

The Royal Volunteers will surely kill us all.
My country’s at grave’s edge where reason sleeps.
Royalty is the implacable hammer of subjugation
Saturn is the King eating in the dream.

My country’s at grave’s edge where reason sleeps.
What’s all this shouting about? What hurry?
Saturn is the King eating in the dream.
There will be sleep Goya, when we are dead.

Thanks For the Letter

Thanks For the Letter
(as it looks back upon itself)



Aa is for

liar listless stirs to not living on
his lens is so mossy just buttons
mining quake in new wound lunar;
stroll out or monsoon in

roll equations third skill or
more than nothing to remain
retreat into soil, mix tinctures
shout lost numbers torrid worried
not run, hire song to isle, nail something.


Bb is for

barker nail roar resume lisps
is it not worst, turn please inscribe poison
mirth in between next write alike sundial or insightful

untinged night it twirls
constructions, always rattle years
limited to its extinction, outlived this figure tawdry

whores otter, remain
nimble, drools money thinking chills
non-ruminant village fallacy of valleys.


Cc is for

smelling ruins river tether,
on activity tomorrows only entourage

outside stet queries none
car lots aisle noisette detritus volume increase;

very regular;
until yearn or trophy

toll-bridge debtors;
mix tin trout again a non letter;

trowel riot or nimble strolls
onto aisle nine again.


Dd is for

Common simplicity
Unmeaning knowledge truncation
Triptophan redundancy neutralizer
Random occupied memory
Labrador retrieval negotiator,
Negotiated windfall pouncing
Linguistic nomenclature towers
London-broil aisle never
Now yerk,
neutron pupal radiation
positive route replicate
sought; next Armin
toddles yond, translate
replete newt miner
transmute cunt renters
out the nameless;
thatch retrorse wittol
runabout clot reverse
shire something lonely
tressel ornaments.


Ee is for

mono in nil nonlip low toy rot run stout sour nun snort tits stunt sinly trots torn lits; mint slow vow purr entomb nix Mr Tutu, lint nitro RPM rows, swill Ron Tony


Ff is for



Flippant


G is for

governments scared to death


Hh is for

Headings such as
American Contractor
Sure Sword a Symbol of Evil
Desperately Pleading
Whose Contents He Learned By Heart
Rabid Jihad is Not One of Ten
Plantings of Homemade Bombs
Great Deal of Ego Here


Ii is for

warned

Chandler, Charlotte and Naomi

Charlotte gave birth to a beautiful girl yesterday, October 12th, at 3:35 pm Spanish time (around 8:35 am central standard). They are sitting around in bliss, just enjoying these next few days together with each other and Mom Freeman. Naomi weighs 3.150 kilos (around 6 pounds 9 ounces) and has curly locks of black hair.

Great JOB
Mazeltov

A Set Sin

The beginning spun all through the called curtain
and produced no memory, no photograph
except for the fragments that drop a mist
onto the motions of the day and scroll
past, eating the dinner of eternity.
This waiting, why will it not introduce

a single sign, a flash to introduce
the coming of a tear in this curtain
which has suffered, hiding an eternity.
Instead these symbols, or a photograph
buried in a library of a scroll,
are all that can be grasped within this mist,

this drink of liquid that makes film, moist mist,
and clouds the eyes. When will it introduce
these names, these words of breath, into the scroll
which contains no missive. Draw back, curtain,
and unveil the blankness, the photograph
that resides before this shown eternity.

This could be the after death, eternity
enveloped in this lit blanket of mist,
simulacrum of a trace photograph
of features, or a way to introduce
the guided, collapsing fiction curtain
that has been frayed since the first grunting. Scroll

on, abyss of whitened slack raging, scroll
on candle within lightening eternity.
Let this city of enclosures curtain
lecture each man and woman in the mist
about the possibilities. Introduce
all to the electric field photograph,

all around this visage, the photograph
that disappears when shown the coming scroll.
Whatever had been made must introduce
its own ruin and this mindless eternity,
perpetuation of last days in mist,
should be broken through, or else drop curtain

and run. Introduce the whole photograph
and the death curtain will dry out; the scroll
of eternity will parse within mist.

It was awhile before I understood what was between the stairs

there is no ring tighter,

this is not an attempt to explain,

these symbols are everywhere
repeating is the function unlike

this morning or even now

but there is no pattern more bound

to itself it speaks of continuous

not a smile or lovingly unlike children

screaming it beckons and even here
it seems silent, a light only itself

but if the ear is pressed

tightly now against the blackness

the birds can be seen scattering
away from the blueness of fire in the evening

unlike the burning in the throat or the smooth
as pinecones against the insides of these toes

of course the magenta of movement and the please

of the expected next, the only way to question

is the through the statement unlike the tunnel

the mountain feels no separation
the mouth merely mimics

Finding My Veils

First I am going to die
inside the tavern inside the chest
but tightness is not an emotion anymore (but it can be a state)

Then I am going to sleep
not because of death but in avoidance
of now (not tomorrow) and of course the fingernails grow even then

Next it is time for washing
the skin slinks like a corner in this unplanned city
where only soap did not begin in endings (where did these ashes come from)

Finally it is dinner
and the mind follows the stomach in reverse from full
and now I am off (with a Persian) for old wine and streets unfiltered

Now it is finally next
then first I am going not because the ice lengthens by seperation
caused if these moments begin to crease we are all going on to die

Williamsburg (for Sivani)

If you were here, I'd build a sukkah.
My home is waterless, but
I am a peninsula.
We will build a hut from our hair.

My home is waterless, but
if you were here, I'd be sleeping.
We will build a hut from our hair
and call it God.

If you were here, I'd be sleeping
outside, the sky constellationless,
and call it God,
jutting out yet still attached.

Outside. The sky constellationless.
I am a peninsula,
jutting out yet still attached.
If you were here, I'd build a sukkah.

P.S. For those of us on Eastern Standard Time, this was actually posted at 7:54 PM.