Mudlark Flash No. 51 (2009)
A Thousand Kim by Kurt Brown
Kurt Brown founded the Aspen Writers’ Conference, and Writers’ Conferences & Centers (a national association of directors). His poems have appeared in many literary periodicals, and he is the editor of several anthologies including Blues for Bill, for the late William Matthews, from University of Akron Press and his newest (with Harold Schechter), Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems from Alfred A. Knopf, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series. He is the author of six chapbooks and five full-length collections of poetry, including Return of the Prodigals, More Things in Heaven and Earth, Fables from the Ark, Future Ship, and a new collection, No Other Paradise, due out in 2010 from Red Hen Press. A collection of the poems of Flemish poet Herman de Coninck entitled The Plural of Happiness, which he and his wife, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, translated, was released in the Field Translation Series in 2006. He teaches poetry workshops and craft classes at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and was recently the McEver Visiting Chair in Writing at Georgia Tech in Atlanta and a visiting writer at Westminster College in Salt Lake City.
A Thousand Kim
“Dutch Schultz’s deathbed ravings covered a wide range—all the way
from mysterious million-dollar deals to assorted pals
and double-XX guys to Communists, of all things.
One sentence confounded everybody, even
the poets: A boy has never wept, nor dashed a thousand kim.
What did the dying badman mean?” Well, who knows.
History may never repeat itself, but it stutters.
Time machineguns events at us, and we stagger,
bleeding from the holes in our hearts. On television
a veteran back from Iraq boasts “I looked death in the eye.
I fought with death and I won.” He glares
at the camera, minus two legs (below the knee), the left side
of his face disfigured, a ruddy lump of scars.
“How many people can say that?” he asks. No one replies. His image
fades, and a commercial for Ambien splashes onto the screen.
§
It’s hard to rest these days. Nightmares gallop through our brains,
lids jitter in REM sleep, even our legs lurch and need
to be quieted. Suffering and death are of little interest
to the artist, thought Gertrude Stein and as the Second
World War approached, remarked: “I could not see why there being
so many more of them made it any more interesting.”
Well, who knows. A hundred kim, or a thousand,
are hard to visualize. That’s why the government hides the bodies
and lead still kills, leaching into the brain from the brightly painted surfaces
of toys. “No world,” said my friend, “could be stranger
than this one!” and I was beginning to see what he meant.
§
What a poor tool our brains are for making sense of anything.
From the Falx cerebri down to the Teritorium of Cerebellum,
we’re stymied, and a bullet doesn’t help, or a fleck
of carcinogenic paint lodged neatly in the forebrain. Every time I pass
a child on the corner I think: “He could be packing a gun.” Then I laugh
at my own foolishness. But last night in my sleep a child shot
another child, and I did nothing. I didn’t even wake up
until a garbage truck slammed down our street and for some reason
I thought of Will Durant, the philosopher, who calculated that there have been
only twenty-nine years in all of human history during which
there was not a war underway somewhere.
Maybe we should wear seatbelts when we go to bed. Maybe
we should ban lead from the body altogether, so we never have to endure
the sight of a mutilated young boy weeping.
§
If young minds soak up knowledge “like a sponge,” age wrings
it all out again until compassion becomes bloodlust and history
is honed to a single point. Perhaps that point,
smaller than a period, in which the universe was packed
before the Big Bang ripped it open and out sprang St. Francis and Jeffrey
Daumer, Ghandi and Dutch Schultz, each animated by a kind
of brain. “Dinosaurs had two brains,” my friend said, “for all
the good it did them—one in the head, and one in the tail.” Scaly
hook-and-ladders negotiating pre-history’s curves, though a comet
did them in, like a stray bullet wandering a neighborhood
until it found its random target, earth, which some
have likened to a massive brain with its folded mountains,
its bright ideas like evolution or volcanoes spewing lava into the sea.
§
After World War I the Surrealists wanted to go to sleep forever,
and poor Apollonaire did, but not before a sliver of the real world
pierced his skull and a crowd of citizens massed outside
his window chanting Guillaume! Guillaume! like a mother
calling her child home at dusk, while the movies of George Méliès
were melted down to make heels for soldiers’ boots.
This was no dream, but a bizarre variant of beating
ploughshares into swords as the French army plodded off to war
shod in Méliès’ films, winsome illusions of that inventive movie-house magician.
Death longs to infiltrate the world and experience life, if only
briefly, borrowing our bodies before turning back
into its own emptiness. Just this morning, twelve-feet high on the side
of a bus, the picture of a man grinning warmly, with blood spattered
forehead and cheeks, rolled past with the legend:
“America’s favorite serial killer” spelled out in red paint,
a sentence that might confound anyone, while the rest of us
shopped for artichokes and bagels, cut-rate carpets and white wine.
§
The world offers up its runes, its daily figments of reality, though
I don’t mean to exclude myself in any of this, as no one is excluded,
but dragged ineluctably into to a wide net
like that purse-seine Robinson Jeffers imagined, all of us victims
of interdependence until “Now there is no escape. We have gathered
vast populations incapable of free survival each person himself
helpless,” and so on. A thousand kim, a million kim. Like this pale
boy swaggering past, in black denim trousers and t-shirt, chrome studs
glittering in his ears and lips in self-crucifixion, Fuck You Very Much
stenciled across his chest. The world to him is a madhouse,
a threat to his existence. It’s a no-brainer as far as he’s
concerned. Wars and future wars: the same war burning from decade
to decade, as a pile of leaves catches fire from leaf to leaf,
or a forest from tree to tree. The same spark of anger from ten
thousand years ago when Cain picked up that rock and brained his brother.
§
But who can remember that far back? Memory contains its own
erasure, each generation another chapter in history’s
long amnesia. When a politician on t.v. says “we’re going
to see that this never happens again” I laugh out loud,
though it gives me no pleasure. I think of all the “eternal flames”
burning around the world, polished cenotaphs
containing nothing but the memory of unknown
soldiers, their limbs so scattered they couldn’t gather them up
to give them a decent burial. “History teaches us...” he’s now saying,
the announcer on tv, and I wonder what he’ll say next?
If Cain and Dutch Schultz were brothers,
what can we expect from two pounds of marbled
gray matter Hippocrates first located as the source
of the mind—though long before that the Greeks and Egyptians
thought the mind resided in the heart, which is far more desirable.
§
Memories are dreams from which we don’t wake up, until they become
so distant it’s as if they don’t matter at all, or somehow never existed.
Is hope a recurrent dream from which we never
wake? The other night my wife half-sat up in bed and said
very clearly, very firmly, “Time promise in paradise everything is well”
then fell asleep again, and I did too, hoping that dreams
still have validity and forecast the future as they did for the Pharaohs
who ignored them at their peril, or woke in celebration of the coming
harvest, or a daughter’s impending wedding. Who knows. But this morning
in front of me in line at the bank, I stared at a question mark
tattooed on the back of a man’s head, there, at the base
of his skull where his spinal cord met his brain, a curled
blue hook of ink floating over a point, no bigger than a period, out of which
the universe might one day emerge, or into which
it might just as suddenly again, and without reason, disappear.