The Non-Adventures of Roy and Margarine

Index:

The Box
Belief
The Turk
The Duck and the Typewriter
Waiting for the Movie to Start
The Golden Mean
At the Beach
The Rain Dance
The Rain
Buddha-Nature
The Signs
At the Restaurant
The Expanding
The Sitting
Juggling Fish
The Package
The Dig
Season of Yes
The Little Church
Dinnertime
Joe
A Day in the Lawns
Those Adorable Communists

The Box

Everyone at the dinner party was crowded around Roy,
delightfully clapping and hanging on his every word.

"And you don't believe in God, either?" they said.
"No, I assure you I don't," said Roy.
There was great applause.

"Even the watchmaker-god of Thomas Jefferson?"
"Nonesuch old-fashioned things."
More applause.

"Than what, praytell, do you believe in?"
"Everything I believe in is contained in this box."
Roy produced a buttonwood box the size of a secret.

There were gasps.
He rattled it, and it wheezed like a dying possum.
"What's inside?" they all asked.

"Well, to begin with," said Roy, "there's a landscape."
Ooohs and aaahs.
"A sprinkle of gypwater with a splash of green flame."

"Japanese punk bands. A crumb of St. John's Bread.
All the younghusbandry of the eastern isles.
The green of the gold nose-ornaments of Mesoamerica."

"The weightlessness of a snowbreathing moment
on an ice boat. Shall I go on?"
"Yes, oh yes!" they shouted.

"Well, very small appreciations, the ticklish ones, in vitro.
A benevolent sea monster, although that might just be legend.
Goldenwheated fields stretching as wide as a hug."

"And in winter?" they asked.
"In winter, a frost on the panes like Acidophilus
and the feeling that people are concentrating nearby."

"Is that all?" they inquired.

"Sometimes," said Roy,
by way of bowing to the hush,
"there are other boxes entirely."

Belief

The early morning sun, observed Margarine,
comes in two flavors: drinkable and flammable.
It is a pocket-watch pregnant with hypnoses
and encrusted with nuclear fusions.
It punctuates the sentence in the firmament with light.

The earthquake, speculated Roy,
is a geological burp caused by the overhead flights
of migrating ostriches.
It sanctions the primacy of stomach rumbles.

In China, said Margarine, a solar eclipse
is believed to be a dog taking a bite out of the sun.
As the sky grows dark, the peasants
hit pots and pans to scare it away.

According to Japanese myth, explained Roy,
the earth is carried on the back of a giant spider.
When the spider becomes angry,
it causes a naughty catfish to thrash about,
which makes the whole earth tremble.

The ancient Zoroastrians, said Margarine,
believed that unibrows were signs of sagacity,
and so their kings used to wear a tuft of false hair
where their third eyes would be.

That reminds me, said Roy, of how
in the Dark Ages, there was a Gnostic sect
known as the Lemongrass Tasters,
who decided to grow their own gods
from hybridizing seedlings.
In Outer Space.

Now you're just making things up,
said Margarine.

Not all of what I've said is true, said Roy,
but all it is real.

The Turk

Roy was playing The Turk again.
The Turk was an unbeatable chess machine
from the 18th century
that wasn't a machine at all, it turned out,
but rather a box with a guy hiding inside,
who was controlling all the pieces from within.

Margarine was wearing her famous electric pajamas,
which she always asserted was a good name
for a psychedelic rock group. She was twisting limes.
"There's no use trying to beat it," she yelled,
"The Turk was one of the greatest hoaxes of its time.
It even fooled Baron Von Kempelen."

But Roy was lost in what seemed to be
an undersea garden of thought.
"Do you ever think about death?" he said,
as The Turk captured his queen.

--"Sure I think about breath sometimes,"
said Margarine, "Sometimes,
I'm scared I'll forget to breathe."

--"I'm scared, too," said Roy,
"but what it's like after death
can't be worse
than what it was like before birth."

--"Baba Yogi, for one,
believed that with enough practice
one can learn to breathe with one's skin."
--"Of course, the problem with death
is that it is totally incompatible
with the first law of thermodynamics."

--"Would you ask the Grandmaster
if he'd like a gin and tonic?" said Margarine.
Roy opened the trap door of The Turk
and made the "glug-glug" gesture.
The grandmaster shook his head.

--She continued, "In a sense,
that means becoming
the process of breathing itself."
--"Which states that neither matter nor energy
can be created or destroyed."

--"To become a pure verb, can you believe it?"
--"Sometimes," said Roy, toppling his king,
"I think it's the only thing I ever have believed."

The Duck and the Typewriter

When the winds changed, Roy sat
naked as a shaman in the center
of a room with a duck
and a typewriter. He clasped
his palms together to form the instrument
his grandfather taught him, and made the call.
Kwaa! Kwaa! But the typewriter was a mallard,
and did not seem to care,
the tips of its wings revealing in their flutter
a soft Louis the Fifteenth green.

The duck, on the other hand,
was an Smith-Corona,
a 1946 model with round black keys.
Though it was born long before the Internet,
its @ key showed signs of wear,
as if someone had been using it
to manufacture hundreds of tiny turbans.

He took out a loaf of Wonder bread
and began to crumble it
in front of the typewriter.
But the typewriter was not hungry,
though it had flown from several climates away
and through several mediocre paintings.

Roy thought about all those streets in Chinatown
with roast typewriters hanging in the windows.
He thought about the way they injected broth
just under their skin, to give it a crispy texture.

During the first world war,
an allied ship containing 30,000 manual ducks,
all Olvetti Portables,
was heading for the shores of Normandy
when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat.
Those ducks are all still there,
he thought, on the bottom of the English channel,
their parentheses rusting in saltwater.

He thought about the way they wrapped the beige muscle
of slaughtered typewriters in Chinese newspapers.
What some call blood, others call juice.
In some countries, typewriters are considered sacred,
and are never killed for food. In others,
butchers use every part of their bodies--
even making wine sacks for pilgrims
out of their inflated stomachs.

A good duck is like a good old pair of shoes.
The letters most used become the easiest letters to press,
and hit the paper with a suggestion of touch.
Each duck develops a personality,
growing with that of its owner. Like fingerprints,
no two pages are exactly the same,
even if they are written with the same duck.
Experts can even tell what languages have been written
on what ducks, and can trace any page
back to the duck that was used to write it.
If it is true that all we can know is embedded in language,
then it is true that all we can know is embedded in ducks.

When the winds changed, Roy
sat in the center of a room
empty except for a duck and a typewriter.
“Quack,” said the typewriter.
“I couldn't agree more,” said Roy,
tearing out of the duck the first page
of his lost novel. “I couldn't agree more.”

Waiting for the Movie to Start

“This Thanksgiving,” said Roy, “the magic is back, with a sassy romantic comedy for everyone looking for love...in all the wrong places. Only this time, it's personal.”

“Get ready,” said Margarine, “for the explosion that critics are calling 'dangerous!' and 'sickening'. It just might...be true.”

“What if you had one minute to decide the rest of your life,” said Roy, “but no one saw a thing? Some doors should never be opened.”

“Trapped in a future you didn't create?” said Margarine. “Welcome to the party.”

“If you haven't held her, how do you know it won't be a crime...in the terrifying world of the future? This time, you're fighting an enemy you can't stop, in a comedy spectacular so real you'll think it's fiction.

“This summer, prepare yourself for a timeless terror that'll glue you to your seats. Some games you play, but some games play you.”

“One cop is good, one cop is bad, and together, they'll have to flash more than just their badges.”

“Passion. Obsession. Two people with big plans and no place to put them. You can run, but you can't hide...from science!”

“From across the galaxy, comes the ultimate predator. Three times the laughs. Now there's hell to pay!”

“In a world where money walks and bullshit talks, things are about to get crazy when a priest discovers that the hardest soul to save...is his own.”

“Sssh. It's about to start.”

The Golden Mean

“Let the answers to all our remaining questions,”
said Roy, “be found in these here facts.”
He cleared his throat and pointed
at the blackboard with a long stick.

“Three. Ever since the number of cameras in the world
surpassed the number of eyes,
everyone has had at least one uncle
who gropes around in the dark for a metaphor.”

“Two. Even before a sentence begins to form in the mind,
it must obviously begin with punctuation.”
An exclamation mark appeared above Margarine's head.

“One. The legend says that Pythagoras had a thigh made of gold,
and he liked to exhibit it during the Olympic Games.”

“Then logically, said Margarine,
“the sum of the squares of his remaining limbs, therefore,
should be equal to the square of his thigh.”

“Yes,” said Roy. “This is known as the golden mean.”

At the Beach

I. The Swimmer

In the cold house with the warm bedsheets,
Margarine unfolded her bare feet onto
the formica. Roy entered wearing a hat
made of aluminum foil. “I am listening
for transmissions from outer space,”
he said, “but all I can hear is the seashore.”
“What sort of transmissions?” asked Margarine.

“Calls for help from exploding stars,
private thoughts accidentally broadcast,
bikinis, schemata of impossible devices.”

Margarine shifted her tongue in
her mouth with a wet click.
“Why did you say ‘bikinis?’”

“I have something to tell you” he said,
clearing his throat. “I haven’t always wanted
to be an accountant. I have sometimes wished
I were an accountant, playing the role
of an accountant in an early 1960’s
teen surfer movie with a silly title.”
At that, he began to do the dance called
‘the swimmer.’

“There, there,” said Margarine,
stroking the loose skin on his elbow,
“you may not ever be world-famous
as a minor character in a movie,
but you’ll always be my minor character.”

Roy began the part in the dance
where he mimes drowning.

There, the two of them at last
felt mediocrity like a warm salt bath,
watching the tiny lightnings
of static jump between the sheets
as they slid into sleep, whispering
in a language that will soon be forgotten.

That night, they fell into sleep
like sand that falls through an hourglass
on its way to the beach.

II. The Drowned

In the cold house with the warm bedsheets,
Margarine admired her red-toenailed feet
and thought about drops of blood on albino seals.
Roy entered the room wearing a metal detector.
“I am listening for currencies,” he said,
holding one headphone to his ear like a DJ,
“but all I hear is the seashore.”

“What sort of currency,”
Margarine asked, “are you listening for?”

“Chinese Renminbi, wooden nickels, Yen,
Euros from Turkey, bikinis…they say
trust is the currency of love.”

Margarine licked the smile from her lips.
“Why did you say ‘bikinis?’ ”

“I have something to tell you,” he said,
and with each word that followed
forgot even more of what he was
trying to say.

The Rain Dance

“I have given all my masks to faces,”
said Margarine, “so I have nothing,
nothing to wear to the procession.”
But Roy was dancing solo tangos
around the wet orange of the campfire.

She continued: “I really don’t think
that’s the rain dance.” But Roy had
already started a cycle of sambas.
“Caliente!” he shouted.

“Can you hear me?” she yelled.
“You will anger the gods!”

But he did not hear; he danced.
He danced until the earth became mud.
He was twenty-three dances short of a flood;
he was one cha short of cha-cha-cha.

The Rain

Margarine thought the rain sounded
like ping-pong played lazy as siestas.
“It's raining horizontally again.” said Roy.

“Yes,” said Margarine, “which is bad,
for vertical animals like us.”

And so they prostrated themselves
like silly bodhisattvas
on the liquescent plateau
of igneous New Jersey
and told stories about mad
toe-wigglers in castles made of
red ribbon.

Roy bit off a sliver of fingernail
and held it up to the crescent moon.

Margarine watched the rain slide down
her chest and collect in her belly-button,
where, it was once said, the soul resides,
and from where, according to her,
she was learning to drink.

Buddha-Nature

The first day Margarine slept in the tall grasses
she awoke to find the oats a tickly curtain
for the sky. Her hair had turned to gold
so she cut it all off at McGlinty’s workshop
and had it melted into buddhas. These
she presented to Roy on the second
anniversary of their fiftieth anniversary.

“I’m not a Buddhist,” she said, “but my hair is.”
Roy was reminded of the time the great Zen master
Zhaozhou was asked whether dogs have Buddha-nature.
Zhaozhou had replied by barking like a dog.

The next day she went to see McGlinty.
“Does my hair have Buddha-nature?” asked Margarine.

He responded with a pinkness of cheek.
“This will be our secret,” he said, glancing toward
the rows of bellies. “Your buddhas,” whispered he,
“have hair-nature.” He affixed the last jade eye,
and admired it hoping it would let him forget
about the smell of a woman’s perfume.

The Signs

One hotdog jazz afternoon
Roy walked up Main Street
and was greeted by these signs:
Stop, No Left Turn, Dead End,
Best Coffee in Town.

“This is all so significant,” he thought,
pressing an empty pipe to his lips.
Just then, a shooting star fell unnoticed,
camouflaged by the light of day;
a speck of dust in a book
made a period to be read like a colon,
and all the town began to yawn,
curiously,
because they all insisted that
they were not sleepy.

At the Restaurant

The restaurant next to the Bureau of Departments
advertised pricemeat. Its name ended in “-tastic”.
Roy and Margarine played with their foodstuffs.
“The tumor is giving me bad ideas,” said Roy.
He stabbed his sashimi with a chopstick and held it
to the light, flicking it with his pinky.
“It is impersonating James Dean. It is telling me
to be more responsible.”

Margarine slurped the salmon and smiled.
“In the time of the assassins,” she said slurping,
“it was enough to be a god.”

“Ssh,” said Roy. “Listen.”
It was quiet as a golf course.
They waited until they were hungry again,
and then played footsie
like the daughters of the Republic,
like those who wait for the idea of chocolate
to be born in the mind of a lovely.

The Expanding

“The slow-motion explosion”
is how Margarine described the universe.
“We are expanding, too, can you feel it?” she asked.
Roy said it felt red.

They were lying on their backs,
looking up at the stars,
resting their heads on each other’s hair.
Roy was naming the constellations again.
“That one’s Judy, and that one’s Miranda,
that one’s Annabel and…”

“What about that one, that looks like young Fitzgerald?”
“That’s Felicity.”

Somewhere, a sneeze sounded like
a dragonfly dying.

Margarine was disapproving.
“Those are all the names of your former lovers.”

Roy was silent.
A meteorite fell into the atmosphere,
cutting the night sky to reveal the daylight
that lies behind.
As is the custom when seeing such things,
they made wishes.
They wished they were capable of love.
They wished the expanding would stop.

The Sitting

Roy sat down.
In the hall of fame of the museum
of complicated things he sat down,
a simple thing to do.

On a bench between the human
circulatory system and the New York City
subway system, he sat,
and was a sitting system.

He was awash with an unusual sensitivity
that allowed the rubbing awakes of sleepy colonies
to manifest in his tingling, that allowed the word
'lime' to produce a limey taste in his
cheek-pocket brown with pipe-juice.

With a yawn he communicated with
his tired feet. He had just enough time
to think, “I will sit down,” and “I
am sitting,”and finally, “I sat,”
thereby connecting a line between three points
that can be expressed with the curve that
Margarine kept tucked under the
wire of her brazier for holidays.

“You know what they should have here?”
said Margarine. “DNA.”

“Geneologies,” said Roy.
“and what is more
complicated than happiness.”

With nothing left to say to each other
they felt rest spread through their bones
the way water spreads through the body
of the long desert-thirsty.

Juggling fish

One of the things
that Margarine kept
in the shoebox was
a big prison warden's
keyring full of old dead keys,
keys that no longer opened
doors or diaries,
or the secret compartments
of player pianos.

Roy kept a list of obsolete words
in his left breast pocket,
rusted old parts of magic spells,
which he would whisper
some Sundays
into a dust-covered Mason jar.

Sometimes they felt like
the accumulation of beautiful wastes.

On a stoop in Brooklyn
Roy said to his alfalfa sandwich,
“I don't think it's going to work out
between us,” and he put down
the uneaten portion
as if laying flowers on a grave.

Margarine met him in the doorway
with the glow of the exfoliated,
and shivered. “Are you going to
wash the dishes?” she asked, “are
you going to juggle fishes?”

“We started to feel dreary,”
said Margarine, “the second we arrived
at the banks of this dried-up
lake, in our inappropriate pomp,
and we were as dreary as bison in the rain.”

“Mike Tyson in the rain,” said Roy,
“was never drearier than we.”

“I twirl,” said Margarine,
“because I want to feel dizzy.”

He walked with a sloopy lilt
as if his whole life
he had eaten nothing but liquids.
He took down the Christmas
lights, he held them up in a
rectangle around his face and
wished he were a marquee.

He wished he were more anchored,
he wished he were anchored
to the sky with feathers.

The Package

A package arrived for Margarine.
She put it on the kitchen table
and looked at it with her one good eye.

“What is it you're so afraid of?” asked Roy.
“Maybe,” said Margarine, “it's a bomb.
After all, there's no return address.”

“If it were,” said Roy, “a bomb,
it wouldn't matter if there were
a return address. It would all get
blown to bits anyway.”

“But what if it's the cure?” said Margarine.
“The cure,” said Roy, “wouldn't be so
plainly wrapped. There would be
some kind of ceremony, confetti,
perhaps a carnivale.”

--“Even now that we have pennicillin,
we are all still dying.”
--“Maybe it's a confetti bomb.”
--“In such a package?”

--“Maybe its contents, like the truth,
may never be known.”
--“Maybe we will continue to stare at
this package until we grow old.”

That night, the package lay on the table,
like an autumn lullaby
before a long winter's nap.

The Dig

In only two weeks, a penny-thick
layer of dust had collected on the floor.
Another six months of not cleaning,
Margarine thought, and it'll be ankle-deep.
Another few years and we'll be swimming in it.
Give it enough time and the dust
will bury us good.
70% of dust is human skin particles--
We'd be suffocated by our own
disembodied epidermis.

As Roy sat in his after-dinner way
he thought about Agamemnon.
He wished he were remembered.
The heart he carved into the tree
wasn't good enough. He wanted
an archaeologist's brush to tickle
his long-dead face.

He tried to imagine an archeological dig
in reverse. A team of scientists
painstakingly brushing heavy layers of dust
and dirtcake into the house,
as he sat reading the Sunday Supplement.

“Why,” said Margarine, “is there so much dirt
in the living room? Did the
vacuum cleaner salesman come by again?”

“The sands of time, my dear,
will cover us all in turn.”

“Well, it's making a terrible mess.
Who is going to clean it up?”

As he brushed the dirt back outside,
he uncovered his living room floor,
and some interesting artifacts.
“Probably used for some kind of ritual,”
he thought, holding up to the light
a fragment of an beer bottle
from last Saturday's party.
“But what ritual exactly,
I guess we'll never know.”

Season of Yes

It was that season
when the little gray seeds
greeted the hills.
It was that season
when things seemed to say.

Margarine knew that
by listening to the crickets
she could tell what temperature it was,
but she couldn't slow down
her heartbeat enough to hear it.

She was threshing the cicada shells
into her gunneysack when she caught
Roy's glance from the window, which
seemed to say “all along,
it has been happening all along.”

She folded her hand to wave,
as if to say “Yes. All of our yesses
today, and tomorrow, all the wet places
we had ever hoped to bathe.”

The Little Church

Because Roy had angered them
for a nautical month
with his ebullient bossa nova,
all the gods that Margarine
made out of mud melted
into puddles of dirt
on the floor of the longhouse,
and that's where their noses met,
in a kiss of cold climates,
as they squatted sweeping &
wondering what to worship next.

“Hold out your hand,”
said Margarine,
and held out a little church
the size of a molar
that she articulated from
toothpicks and toothpaste.
“Some nights you can hear
its tiny hymn, and all the tiny
parts of you join in song.”

Roy held it in his whisper-listening hand
like an old secret weapon
and it felt like all the whirligigs
in Alabama slowed to a purr.

“Is it convenient?” asked Roy.
“These kinds of things never are,” she said.
“Is it whimsical?”
“Insofar as a church may be.”

--“Then let us pray,” said Roy.
“For grandoise breakfasts!”
--“Amen!”
--“Fashionable weather!”
--“Balloons in the air!”
--“For so it goes.”
--“And so it shall be.”

Dinnertime

Every evening at about 6
Margarine like a safety valve
would ask what's for dinner,
and no matter what Roy
had been tuning in the wok
he would always say Au Gratin,
as though his life depended on it,
even if what they were having
was beef and potatoes,
which is what they had every day.

The only thing that can be said for sure
about each day was Au Gratin,
that it would never roll so like the leeches
out of the fat in their mouths,
not this winter and ironically, not the next.

They would never, it was sure,
postcard from another's vacation
blue over starboard trying not
to think of Au Gratin, for this was it,
this was the big one, as the captain
with the freshwater teeth
seemed to say so long ago,
that their dramatics were never so alkaline,
and their throes never so tangerine.

“Do you remember the lawns,”
said Roy, “the lawns with the wreaths?”

All the rest that was absorbed by
Au Gratin, all the phosphorous and
flamenco and viscous animus,
was in fact the basement laboratory it required,
if it could ever again be found.

Margarine pulled chopsticks out of her hair.
“The lawns where the babies once fought
to the death?” “The lawns,” said Roy,
“where they adorned us with wreaths.”

Which was no lawn in no country
on this island nation,
but an island that floated on, on
until a violent crash with the continent.

Joe

They were waiting for the train
to take them back to Brooklyn.
The platform was crowded.
“I'll show you how common
of a name it is,” said Margarine.
“Joe!”
Everyone turned to look.
“You see? Everyone's named Joe.”

--“That's purely circumstantial.
They turned to look because you yelled.”
--“Everyone is named Joe and everyone
carries a briefcase of rubber balls.”

Just then, all the briefcases opened
and red rubber balls bounced
over the train tracks
and frightened all of the rats.

A Day in the Lawns

To know that no great thing
ever happened here
made Roy feel so comfortable,
like anything could've happened,
but didn't, and what a nice didn't.

What a great day, he thought,
for other people to be responsible,
what a great day to be here in the lawns
among all the insects that are
named after flavors, in the lawns
that are mentioned in yellowed brochures

Roy imagined a river of intelligent foam
just a centimeter under the earth's crust.
“What do you think?” asked Margarine.
“I agree,” said Roy, “it feels so easy,”
“like self-chewing bubble gum.”

“If we concentrate, we can be an
overhead transparency.”

“Yes. It doesn't matter
if we have the right bodies,
so long as we have the right antibodies.”

It was day for savoir faire and flying kites
in the shape of panoramas.

“Would you rather be...” began Margarine.

“No.” said Roy, “Nor would I rather.”

Those Adorable Little Communists

Margarine always got irritable
whenever it was about to rain.
All the warning signs took place from within a secret lung,
and it made her cough.
The communists, too, became testy.
Soon, that became a good way
to predict the weather.

There was a protest again today
outside the art gallery,
which meant a big storm was on its way.
They were carrying signs that read:
“Oil is for cars, not for canvas.”
Roy was about to go back for his umbrella,
when suddenly a voice yelled,
“Somebody call a doctor!”

Moments later, a mustachioed doctor appeared,
with a gold-plated stethoscope in his ears.
“It appears to be a problem with rising humours in the belly,
and too much blood,” he said, examining the crowd,
which was getting more and more upset about the art.
“We'll smash up your palettes
with our worker's mallets!” they were saying.

Margarine leaned over and whispered in the doctor's ear.
“I know how to stop them,” she said.
“How?” said the doctor.
“With prophecy,” said Margarine,
emptying a bag of fortune cookies out onto the street,
“with sweet prophecy.”

They stood there in haunted wonderment,
watching the redshirts unwrap their destinies,
Roy with a regard of unrehearsed curiosity,
Margarine patting the communists fondly on the head,
and the doctor, who was listening
to their quickening pulses.