The Unbeautiful Banker, and: Houses at Night

The Unbeautiful Banker · Michael Burkard Perhaps the unbeautiful banker Is exciting to a woman, a man Not a boy gasping For breath over a girl's body. —Geroge Oppen Since I refuse the moon I refuse the girl's body also; being the unbeautiful one I must, I say I must, I say goodnight from behind a corner, a towel on my head, and nothing more clear in it then maybe I shall write clearly down some small thing they said I won't remember. The best book of dreams, if you want to know, is at best unbeautiful; there are a few sections you might say that basically say fuck it, amen, you do what you do. This dream stance or sort of giving up doesn't intrigue me in the least, but it is an angry way, no just a way, of getting rid of people. Amen. Since I refuse the moon I briefly excuse even them, and in the morning after find no solace, just an unbeautiful hole in the wall where the best book of dreams slept, wrapped in the towel, which has now walked down into the cherry orchard to make amends with those who are doing the picking. The banker is still 18 · The Missouri Review unbeautiful, even with his wife and his baskets; I allow them four for every two baskets they pick for me; as for the dream book, it is resting by a small stream where a few local ducks go wading, and a few jerks on horseback go innocently into the woods. It's all for the girl's body, the breath and the hands of the riders and pickers always a second or two ahead of themselves; and isn't this like the book, or even the towel which accompanies it, spending the day aside, just like the banker, and just remembering the basic fuckovers that inhabit all our lives, even the towel's, and even the bad memory the book has. Amen. I can see tilted up at the sky a reflection of a face, as being the unbeautiful owner me and my midget friend are always looking for faces; he gets two for every three I see; a game of chance. There's a poem by de Andrade—it isn't the seven-sided one, it's the one I think of with four sides, where someone named Raymond doesn't figure in; in that poem everyone seems to love each other, he almost says so, then they go off and leave it to me to educate myself, Michael Burkard THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 19 to tilt and see where I fit. There is much room in this poem— like on the trails into the rider's wood—for me to figure in—that's borrowing from "Quadrille," the figure in part—but when I have my scotch and stuff and wait for the towel and my midget friend and I go following after we have all by now forgotten everyone—those being the pickers and the unbeautiful and the unbeautiful lack of memory each of us seeks out in these hazy mornings, and we are very happy, picking up each other's things and going off into false stories and sided ones as all stories are, into the hole which began as a boy, an unbeautiful boy, now walking closer with the woods. 20 ¦ The Missouri Review Michael Burkard Houses at Night ¦ Michael Burkard Leftenant Morgan dreamt October was a bag, and having no money in this dream, he came home with none, holding his own as the dream said. Spring and fall and the white cabin and the white river: these were same seasons and locales for him, when the leftenant did not dream, being so far from home it took him more than awhile, his dreams had to adjust to the little articles of faith a dream incorporates, takes on; and even in the storm of '39, with the trees thrashing against the house and the trees thrashing within, he had little to make with his sleep; there was the one of a shoe shore, laces and terrain and even old war boots abandoning the...