Mystical Tarot Realms
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Rooms that Dream
MANAGING
Daybreak. The old woman screams and moans.
From the room right above hers--pained,
ecstatic groans drift through an open door.
You want me to tell them to shut their traps?
__________
Workers come all day
to fix perverse parts.
Pipes knock, dripping
flop sweat; stoves
pop and smoke; carpets rot
from endless spills and shuffling:
Nothing is exempt. The tenants
demand that the piths
be replaced, the rooms
at evening
holding their breath
as I carefully
lock money
in the essential
metal desk.
__________
I knocked off, hands
roughened with plaster.
Crayons had captured the outline
of light cast from signs outside,
tropes of capital penetrating
the window for hours, as smells
saturated the sink again,
the toilet leaked, the systems
of residuum moaned, each smell
and sound finally recognizable.
The coolest guy left
a butcher knife and gaping
holes in the bedroom walls.
His wife had taken everything
but the mattress, wilting sheets,
and crayons. The family
had danced at the window,
not caring who watched,
while colors emerged
in fragments, the names
quickly filling and emptying.
I've restored the plaster
for other names, clocks, faces,
the past still stinking
and groaning in things.
The glass untouched.
The street a stain
of violet bile--
the light falling
softly
on the walls.
With white hands, I surrender
to the mattress on the floor.
Crayons and plaster darken
on the bewildered carpet.
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They leave what can't be carried
and more: cushion-less
couches, with wounds
like mouths from which faint
odors rise; sad toilet soups;
and the tiny survivors--
ants, cockroaches, thriving
on the stench, crawling
through every crevice,
following the command to pillage
whatever's left, the shoe dark
as a theater, the bottles
translucent spires. Recently
I've found an old man's handkerchief
(he now has less weight
than his book of ancestry);
a stained sheet (the flag
of dominion); and a sticky knife
covered with crumbs.
I've dismantled a palatial estate
built with popsicle sticks
and dried chicken bones,
decorated with bright foil
from small luxuries,
and I've trashed a shrine
with wildflowers, the dried petals
mingling with bug legs
on the windowsill. All morning
I've dumped cast-offs, all morning
cleaning and emptying, until bare,
the rooms finally gleam,
good enough for others.
__________
Last week I discovered a hanging plant
in the pool, the surface ripples
slightly perturbing the wire hook,
a sign of something, I suppose.
Copies of keys to every room
hang on the board above my desk,
which makes me think
that I should know. One day
I gave the copy of a key
to a tenant before I could see
the butcher knife cupped
in his hand, the blade resting
along the inside of his arm. I
twiddled my thumbs until a stranger
leapt, screaming and naked, down
the stairs, before I called
the cops. The same day, checking
the circuit breakers in back,
I surprised a tenant's boyfriend
loading dozens of rifles into a van
and said nothing. The next day, cops
moved in, a detective plopping
his notepad on my desk before
phoning in the description
of a tenant: Fu Manchu mustache,
ponytail, no chin, the perfect
account of a burglary suspect.
I had to call the cops again
after I found a stranger floating
face down in the pool, the water
cloudy with blood. I still feel like no one
ever totally cleaned that up.
__________
A year after the new owner
raised the rent thirty percent,
a de facto eviction of us all,
I still remember them,
even though I didn't know them--
the one I sheltered from an abusive
boyfriend, the one I threw a few bucks,
the tenants to whom I served
a three-day notice, and the ones
who just kept bugging me
to fix one damned thing after another--
the fingerprints on glass, slivers
in the carpet, holes in the walls
remaining long after they'd left;
no matter how hard I cleaned,
something remained--they
were worse than ghosts, more
timeless than ooze or earth.
Besides that, I remember
only the waiting, day after day,
for another knock, and dreaming
of hidden passageways linking
rooms I've never seen, where
tenants lead secret lives
too wonderful to brag about,
the eternal appearing in dirty
windows when I wasn't
looking, the veil of exhausted
surfaces lifted. Heaven
filled the rooms with wholeness
while I dozed--always waking
to blank walls--
and I'll never forget
ever
that small sign on the front door
which revealed
where to find me.
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All poems, stories, illustrations, and music Copyright © 2024 by Jim Robbins.
Ithuriel's Spears, Fiesta Flowers, Fiddleneck
THIRTY PERCENT
RAISE IN RENT
He refuses to clean the bedroom
in the mirror and bats at motes
swimming in an aquarium
of sunlight. Stitches closed
the tunnel between his nose and mouth
and cinched his cleft lip, which had gaped
at the horn of gum blanketed
and rose-tinged by the sloping
pillar of nostril. In a forest
of toys, the mirror world,
a beast bursts from a human
womb, snout whimpering, tail
flailing as it bangs
into the witnessing denizens.
In this nightmare story (overheard
at a picnic) the doctor
stares at claw marks
in his chest while the beast
dies from tranquillizers, still
attempting to scurry away.
But when he was born, his body slowly slipped
from the flesh that clothed him, his eyes opening
to the glare in tile and instrument and mirror.
The nurse took prints of feet and thumb
and handed him to his mother,
who wept, hearing the words harelip
and cleft palate, as he lay, clear and firm,
in her arms.
He slurs that he loses his elbow
just like he loses his lap--
as one loses a world. The neighbors
have moved, emptying their rooms,
taking his little friend with them.
Someone else must screech
and drum the floor with dancing feet.
He stands within the bare walls
and stares at the prospects
of all he loves, the magnolias
dropping shreds of purple paper,
faces without eyes or ears
or noses shining in hubcaps,
and tongues rising from the asphalt
without justification.
__________
Phantom jets scrape the roof. Slow
thunder unravels the air
down to the pig-colored walls.
Bubbles bob, thin cities of light, evade
his frenzied hands and slide
through a mirrored window
where images of the courtyard curve
repeatedly upward, one and multiple.
In the corner, a dented cart,
a philodendron jungle, and a mattress
smeared with yellow dust.
He climbs into the cart,
hanging on a pane where bubbles slid
through, the fading circles
unbroken, his palms, fingertips, and nose
pressed to the glass. Bug-littered,
celestial porchlights switch on.
He wizens a plum with budding teeth
in a clinker of fallen gingko leaves.
He was told about the invisible,
how it lives like air and squeezes
like smoke, how it resides
in his teeth and falls in his hair,
its hour like breath,
how it grows from earth and fire,
providing each table
with light and with water
as cold as winter rain.
__________
Shadows feel through the window
past reflected branches swaying
before his face in the glass. His eyes
follow tiny blackened stars of blood
on the concrete. He pulls his salvaged
wagon out to where the valuables wait--
a mirror, houseplants, stuffed animals,
a stray hand--and stares, timeless, at himself,
the journey already beginning, the dirt
peeling away from the street
as if the cells of everything
were sloughing off into the wind.
Everyone is moving. Back rent unpardonable.
No one allowed to squat on the lawn. No one
allowed to run around. A new owner, a new
manager, and a thirty percent raise in rent.
The old woman who had pinned his Nina, Pinta
and Santa Maria to her frig with a strawberry
magnet might steer a shopping cart
out the door, and he could curl up
below the carriage, dragging the cart
forward like a turtle, his shell heavier and heavier
as they trek down the alley. He goes back inside
and curls, legs up, on his bed, then ferries a Matchbox
ambulance in a stray sandal to bundles of wash,
the Canary Islands. Through the window, he sees
a bus lurching forward, floating into a cross-street
two lights away, vanishing downtown....
__________
Settling into seventy five, he glanced at almond orchards,
the rows between evenly spaced trees slanting south,
south-east, or east as his eyes shifted focus. The trunks
of the nearest trees floated, the orchard dropping to earth
exactly as his car passed, like a net falling short of him.
Another dry river. A night heron, crooked thumb, jutted
from a branch in the river bed. He thought of loose hands,
worn out, single gloves plucked from melon boxes
and clothes-pinned to the conveyor. The case sealer
crushed slow hands that struggled to pull jammed
boxes clear. Anorexia's calm fingers inserted coins
into the slot, pressed a button, and scooped up
a soda, just before she turned, slid boxes
to one side, and rested a .45 against her husband's head,
a hand splattered with mud as it slapped
the gun away. Her husband had abandoned her near
town, and she'd trudged twenty miles through the fields
to the compound. They used to bet about who would kill
whom at the "Okie Flat" packing shed. Frank once smoked
after the conveyor broke down while others loaded
by hand--wasn't in his job description. Frank was found
dead in a car by the road, dents in his skull the size
of a police baton, the case "inconclusive." Steve murdered
Anorexia, cutting her up like a grape stalk and burying her
in his big red toolbox. They all silently suspected something
was wrong when he hadn't shown for work on Sunday--
time and a half. Nor would Fifi do the shuffle for the ladies
while waiting his turn to shower in that outhouse
with a shower nozzle. Fifi had been released
from the "vocational institute" until he was beaten
and raped repeatedly. Driving by the last gas station
for miles, he imagined the land without people, the canals
almost empty, the floodplain of five rivers in wet years
extending from the mountains to north of Tulare,
subsiding into networks of marshes and shallow lakes,
webbed by teeming sloughs and channels, a refuge
from dunes and alkali sinks for birds along the flyway.
Once, while he pissed, so drunk he could hardly stand,
he had teetered above the body of a great blue heron,
its neck a question mark, the wings extended
in the dirt. He was done as an activist after losing
his job at the big box store for chewing gum
and for not coming in on his days off--he knew it
as he neared houses of cardboard thrown together,
just as he recalled again the ash tree
in the compound, a tree dreamed
in childhood that revealed a fate no one
wanted to believe, the trunks
of loaded fruit trees blending
into one as the sun raced
on the horizon, the last light logged
on the walls of the shed.
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All poems, stories, illustrations, and music Copyright © 2024 by Jim Robbins.
Bush Lupine and Poppies in the Gorge
I BELIEVE IN ANGELS
Cocking its black head, the angel calmly gazed
through underbrush, its speckled wings closed
on fire, the white breast feathers slightly
ruffled, aware that I returned its gaze,
both of us still, separated by a few twigs, until
it resumed rummaging in dead leaves.
Trespassing along the river, we were taking
the breath of trees and flowers,
each species with its own piece of heaven,
a brown towhee leaping at titmice
that hid in mistletoe, then at goldfinches
which hovered in a panic, rootless yellow flowers,
returning to their stems after a few moments,
a flycatcher on a snag, butterfly wings extending
from its beak, the orioles streaks of flame
above the earth's tapestry of light--
goldfields interwoven with lupine and poppies.
You told me your dream of floating down river,
the boat suddenly swirling through white water
and just as suddenly slowing into a gentle,
sunlit rain which jeweled the strands of a spiderweb
strung between alder trees, where a kinglet flitted
from twig to twig, missing the web, a newt struggling
up slick rock and sliding down again, and a bullfrog
leaping at eyes floating above the water, vanishing,
and resurfacing by the bank, the kingfisher,
loud and persistent, protesting intrusion, perching
a moment behind sycamore leaves, then whirring
back and forth, taunting from a distance,
testifying as though it mattered, the bushtits
like leaves above the water blown
from one tree to another--the current
carrying you through so many
communities until the river
stopped flowing,
a littered wastewater sump
for the filthy valley. Then
you found your friend and dragged him
to the bathtub, his skin blue, and all
you could do was wait to see if he would live,
but there was no fear, only a strange
radiance in the needle and the skin,
the gleaming drops plopping every few
seconds from the faucet as warblers flitted
in a tree outside. I remembered gliding
by the church we attended
the night we first rocked each other,
the tawdry street teeming with sparrows,
and I realized that I'd worked years later
as a janitor three blocks away, not far
from the market where we'd shopped
in some other life, our range
proclaimed by all the angels.
For you, I have made our dreams
one dream where the angels
never lose their connection
to the range of light, the cedar waxwings
above the still river pecking at seeds,
their faces masked, tails dipped in gold,
startled, and flying....
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All poems, stories, illustrations, and music Copyright © 2024 by Jim Robbins.
White-Tipped Lupine after the Rough Fire
MAPPING THE FLOWERS
Chinese houses are sprouting on north-facing slopes
and in shady washes, sharing their niche with fairy lanterns,
grass nuts, larkspur, while twenty miles away, the skeletal
steel frame of a children's hospital sprouts on the bluffs,
on land donated by the developer, rising above condemned
vineyards and pasture, a "behemoth of bad planning"
inducing the growth of a new city through the expansion
of one clogged artery of traffic just north of the river.
In fields near the hospital, weeds still
hide mice and rabbits, obscuring coyotes
in the dim halls of orchards, releasing clean air
into an ocean of smog. I had almost forgotten
that you can stand in an ocean of breath
and merge your breath with brilliant tribes
struggling into the sun, that you can sit by a creek,
no more than the stillness of the grass, sensing
the timeless spirit at the root of form, forgetting
your face as the battered moon rises again above
the evening hills. Golden eagles sliced through the air
side by side, just above me, down through the wash,
swooping between the trees and gliding out
over the valley until I lost them in the clouds,
and an hour later, as I scrambled up the slope,
the eagles stepped out of the oaks above me
and floated--almost large enough to carry
me away--gliding higher until they were specks
and then gone. Sure of our end, I wanted
to sleep forever in the woods, the valley
stretching out for miles in the haze below me,
the landmarks strangely small, the strident whistle
of the titmouse calling me back, a network
of trails linking the creeks and woodlands--
still pristine (except
for the cattle), the trails webbing
the entire range blocked by pockets
of development, the land owners all
connected. I teetered on the edge
of that high slope, the city so obscured
by smog I couldn't see it--perhaps
gone a century--a web slightly billowing
Bird's Eye Gilia, Lupine, Poppies
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in the breeze, and I chased a meadowlark
at the edge of a large flock downhill,
a squirrel scurrying over its own thin trail
from one rock pile to another, ants slowly
discarding husks from their tunnels. Overhead,
a flock of acorn woodpeckers set up an alarm, cackling
maniacally as I passed through their territory,
the trail weaving into a clearing where I found
a pounding stone, one mortar sprouting grass,
the other black with stagnant water, the roots
of a buckeye breaking the rock in two.
I followed every path by the creek, finding
more pounding stones wherever I turned,
clearly in view of each other or parts
of the village on both sides of the creek.
That day I felt a radiance that remains
in the village sites, the mortars healed over
and sprouting grass, others collecting rain,
most of the house pits quilted by cow pies
sprouting living jewels, the hillsides
nearby torn and washed away, streaked
with ochre, yellow, black, one pit--
with a fence post in the middle dangling
from a strand of barbed wire--so deep
I could not see the bottom, another filled
with lime-green water, the slopes
near the mines scored by mule and horse paths.
That day I lost myself on the trails,
and when I stepped across a creek,
I had a vision of the harmony
of things--a golden, equal-armed cross
behind manifestation blazing
in my inner eye as though it were always
just beneath the outer robe of concealment,
the energy radiant in each leaf and petal--and I
had taken just enough steps to see it.
A massive oak kept reaching higher
within an infinitely vast fabric of energy,
the sun, between its branches, still
weaving tapestries of flowers in its shade.
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All poems, stories, illustrations, and music Copyright © 2024 by Jim Robbins.​
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