heart

heart

Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois Follows Deke Through The Michigan Winterscape, Calypso And Reggae Tunes, Grand Rapids, Hailstorms, The Crusades, And The Heresy Of Joan Of Arc

My Friend Can’t Seem to Let Go

 1.

My friend Deke
drives his Corolla
through the ice and snow
of a barren Michigan winterscape

 and worries if the tread on his tires is thick enough
to hold him to the slick pavement
or if it’s been worn too thin by his
daily rural commute

 He wonders if he’ll end up
dead in a ditch
in the service of
academia

specifically an obscure, mediocre liberal arts college
whose architecture pursued the style of

late Greek Revival Automobile Manufacturing Plant

and in whose faculty lounge hovers

a pall of dejection, defeat and decay



Deke also regrets that Global Warming will not progress fast enough

to cover the low hills with palm trees

and the fields with sugar cane

during his lifetime—

his prediction is that the transition

won’t complete itself

for at least another century



As he drives

he simultaneously visualizes the Age

when mile-thick ice crushed the land

and the future in which waving stalks of sugar

smell so fragrant, so sweet

and erase everyone’s childhood traumas

and fill their nerve endings

with pleasure



The Michiganders will turn ultra-violet dark

dark as Sri Lankans

their hearts thawed, to their own amazement

their prejudice and hate dripping away



They will leave the taverns where they’d been hiding

stand in sunshine

and strip off their flannel shirts

blue jeans soiled with mud

boots caked with cow shit

From now on they will go barefoot

and will open their hearts

to Jesus

They will strive to be

like Jesus



A woman

plays the fool after she stops a coconut’s

fall by catching it in midair

Am I an Olympian, or what, she asks her young son

who is crawling in the dirt

collecting multi-colored tropical insects

who never bite or sting

and, with their antennae and hind legs

sing calypso and reggae tunes

He puts them in a tray to

form a choir

He is careful as a Jain

not to hurt them



When Deke is in a Grand Rapids nursing home

the staff will ridicule him as the old prof

who thinks he is living in Hawaii



2.

Deke is on his way from the frozen lake

next to which he lives

to Frozen Lake College, at which he teaches

and he wonders:

Why do I continue to do this?

Why am I a captive of decisions I made decades ago

when I was closer to being a Boy Scout

with all its frustrations

than to the age I am now?



A couple of students see Deke enter the college’s circular drive

and say, not with great fondness: Here comes Lumpy

because his car is covered with dings



from when he visited me in Denver

and one of our infamous hailstorms caught him unaware

He ducked his head and ran

onto a stranger’s porch

while his car cowered naked in the street

Let’s Go Places, Toyota’s slogan

never meant: Into a fierce hailstorm



Meanwhile, after receiving only two hard blows

that sounded like a furious pitcher

was launching fast balls against the side of my truck

I fortuitously pulled under an overpass



Later, Deke, seeing my largely unscathed vehicle said:

You bastard

I boasted:

I have New York parking karma

and Denver weather mojo

When Deke looked skeptical, I continued:

I’ve never been electrocuted hiking in the mountains

which proves it



Deke considered my existence

my hikes onto fourteen-thousand-foot peaks

with my childhood’s purple

lucky rabbit’s foot

in the pocket of my nylon REI pants,

and how I move from place to place

allegedly collecting species of luck



3.

In Michigan the skies are dark grey

six months out of twelve

Sunshine is hostage

with no ransom offered

It weighs Deke down

keeps him also a captive



(He and the sun are held in the same vault

but they are blindfolded

cannot see each other

cannot feel each other

Deke is cold all the time)



History is a grimy snowbank

shoved into existence by the rusty blade of a plow

at the edge of the Wal-Mart parking lot

where the morbidly obese

go to die



and Deke wonders: Why?

I don’t remember

what crime I committed

to subject me to such a long sentence



The students also call him Lumpy

because Deke is sort of fat

though not as fat as true Michiganders

for whom Obesity is

e pluribus unum



Deke is a professor of Medieval Studies

His head is full of

the Fall of the Western Roman Empire

which set everything in motion

counter-urbanization

Invasions, mass migrations

though he himself is stagnant



His head also reverberates with his wife’s voice

nagging him

to do something about the dented car

The hail was big as golf balls

He can’t bring himself to respond



4.

Deke worships the events

that occurred before he was born

for example:

the Crusades to wrest the Holy Land from the Muslims

by soldiers mounted, gleaming, and shitfaced on ale

sworn to defend an ancient mythology

the same ancient mythology we defend today

against the same enemies

though now we have better dentistry



One of his graduate specialties was Scholasticism,

the movement that joined faith to reason,

and the forming of the Universities--

he shared the impulse

perhaps a compulsion

to pass on knowledge

a “noble” calling



Do you know that the Black Plague took down sixty percent of Europe’s population?

Dante mapped their Hell

Wasn’t it amazing how Marco Polo’s men carried so little baggage with them

and drank milk from the horses they rode into battle against the Chinese?

Isn’t it all so interesting?



Deke is Deke because his parents named him Deacon

They, especially his father, wanted him to be a religious man

a leader of the Church

but Deke didn’t have the feeling for it

nor the ambition to meet God

He had little ambition whatsoever

That he received a PhD remained a constant source of wonder for him



So how could he just drop

the transmission of a knowledge collection

that he tried to make colorful

but which

for his students

never quite came alive?



The idea that they could understand the world they lived in

by understanding how it got that way

never gained traction

They were the children of farmers and merchants



5.

How could he just walk away?

Who and what would he be if he wasn’t displaying his Wisdom

to the ignorant

like a missionary

working to bring Jesus to the savages

of darkest Africa?

Could he drop the mantle and succumb

to being just an

Ordinary Man?



Who would admire the vast volume

of learning he had consumed

but which sometimes threatened to come up

like acid reflux?



6.

He was like a rabbi

squeezing the Torah to his chest

as the world tried to wrest it away

and burn it

Torah was God Himself

The rabbi would never let go



Deke held the hope that one day

--quite miraculously--

his students would

“get it”



and atmospheric conditions would cause the large pockmarks

on his hood

to simply pop up

and disappear

as if his car had never endured that hailstorm



The anti-Vaxxers and their children would all die of Measles

the public school system would be lavishly funded

stupidity and ignorance would vanish from America

and Republicans would lie down with lambs



7.

He sometimes thought of retiring to Mexico

but was afraid of the diseases

that were rife down there

and the fact that seventy journalists had been murdered

in just a few years’ time

and that none of the murderers had been

captured and brought to justice



Deke felt that a historian was a kind of journalist

which made him vulnerable

 to bandits, revolutionaries and

other desperados



8.

His commitment to the past

anchored him

How could he mindlessly fly into the future?



9.

His students—what did they want?

Not wisdom

not even knowledge

All they wanted was

for someone to treat them kindly

and to keep treating them kindly

as their lives dribbled into the interminable future

as they lost their youthful beauty

and aged into ugliness



Unfortunately, like all of us, they believed that they must

keep jumping through hoops

to collect enough win signifiers

(like college degrees)

to prove that they

were good enough

to qualify for kindness

that they were loveable



(Deke doesn’t treat them kindly

when he writes his snide, red comments

on their awful papers)



10.

Those were dark ages

that Deke had chained himself to

and a dark state—Michigan—

in which to teach it



Joan of Arc was convicted of witchcraft and heresy

and burned at the stake at age nineteen

the age of a large proportion of Deke’s students

so many of them, boys and girls, still virgins

Deke looked at them

marking his roll book

and casually wondered which ones were experienced



which of them had

floated in the Purple Haze

and which of them were still locked

in fear and isolation



The Pope had fled to France

but where could Deke flee to?



He only had a hint:

somewhere warmer

and brighter

somewhere like Hawaii



Work by Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois appears in magazines worldwide, including RASPUTIN. Nominated for numerous prizes, he was awarded the 2017 Booranga Centre (Australia) Fiction Prize. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and as a print edition. His poetry collection, THE ARREST OF MR. KISSY FACE, published in March 2019 by Pski’s Porch Publications, is available here. Visit his website  to read more of his poetry and flash fiction.  

No comments:

Post a Comment