Zimmerhouse, and: Flight to Canada

ZIMMERHOUSE / Michael S. Harper The malt is all gone but vapors remain; for $100 you can replenish the bottle but replacements are at sea, and this sea is corn—it is August, and the man who rules is away. The classic music of Pittsburgh, in this man's collection, is the sky almost blue, for steel is gone, and the rivers are almost clean. He remembers the lip he never had, his hearing aid almost attuned to melodies that will not come again, and the repertoire, these days, is on digital: still, his outfit of outlaw brands of techniques on sale, the best of the band, the rhythm section, come alive in the late hours over manuscripts, those that will be printed, those thrown away. Outside are flowers, peonies from England, bottomsoil moved from up the street, which are houses built in the last century, beams from the first forests of the Iowa when Iowa was King; by the river is a park and by the park a band that plays only on holidays, and in tune, like the circus, which is also in tune. Men and women run up and down the street in shorts, and the nike slippers of another age pump at the knee and buttocks. Uptown, in the old library, security guards ease themselves with the music of the soil, which comes from Dubuque and Des Moines and costs little. Tone-deaf, he thinks, as he plays his tapes, for tapes are all he has time for, his hearing loss so great he got the job he didn't want if victory and sacrifice were all they asked for. He writes out his own tunes on his lunch hour, off-beat, self-possessed, in his own tongue; 286 · The Missouri Review he thinks for the malt-makers in Scotland which he knows little about, and the revolution, which is about to take place under his feet. He is of middle-age; his spelling is adequate; the images of the band stuck on the stresses of a carriage; they are grand names, this dukedom, and he won't repeat them for the forefathers. They are invisible, as he is, on his lunch hour, building the groomed song, vocal and true. Michael S. Harper THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 287 FLIGHT TO CANADA / Michael S. Harper for Nancy Part of her stopped breathing before she left Ontario, though she nursed what was left with training in Norwalk, and gave back all she could to America, a version of the northern lights, emergency care in the wards of Connecticut. You sculpt her face and hands from the tools you borrowed, and brought back ashes to spread where she was born. Looking down from the roof on your new pickup I see you loading images, most of them white, for the deathmasks of the Indians were plains; your planes, abstract as your name for tunes on a jukebox, liaisons in the barn where you hid your rock, come forth as children. You know their names. News of the old folks' home will not settle on this ship. I have seen the glow of the ambulance, and the rescue squad, who knew her scope and lore, and what she gave, they will remember ashes; let them drift over the skin of trees, and on the water, and when the pollution stops, let the metal flow into stone, so you can fill your truck with the time of her service, and her name, 288 · The Missouri Review Elsie, milk and honey of delivery service, in the other world: which you make. Michael S. Harper THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 289 ...