discards from Bergamot

I was trying to write a new poetry novel, this one about vampires and memory and preservation(ism). But I can't make it work. I am dumping some discards here--things I like but need to remove.

from the old Bergamot

When she’d been a girl, old enough to drive a car but not old enough to know a thing, she’d been a lifeguard at the swimming pool of a fancy apartment building. There’d been a family. A littler girl fell into the water. One girl plucked another girl from the deep end. The family raised their happy hands. The father was friendly and kind. The mother was friendly and kind. Thereafter they brought elegant and simple lunches to the girl: a slender sandwich with turkey and a simply sliced baby dill. The summer was tinged with this small victory. There was a festive kind of trance on the blue cement of the pool deck. When she was no longer a girl but not an adult she’d been a waitress at a well regarded but modest restaurant. She arrived at a table with menus. Right there was the father from five years before. The girl from the pool was grown. The lovely mother, with her short French hair and tasteful clothes, was not there. The father did not recognize her. The girl said nothing. She wondered over the absence of the mother. The more she wondered the more uncooperative with herself she became. But anyway all had been revealed: she’d served the family at the pool as she now served them inside of the restaurant. 

A long time ago, I wrote a story in a notebook. A flood took all of our boxes. There was a vampire calling in to a radio station with the call letters WLUV. It was not a story. It was a deep and unknowable sensation. It was like a sound I could hear in touching. It was like a memory of a memory and you can’t find the real source. In the notebook were many mirrors of this sound. I finished the story and tucked away the notebook. The girl and I put on gobs and gobs of eye makeup to go into the alley and light firecrackers. We lurked in the alley’s hot sun in our long legs and short shorts and high-heeled ankle boots. The boxes of our stories and feelings peeled off and away in the floods. The vampires were able to capture the transition between our forms: green bottles lined up in descending order on a ledge, paint peeling, a fox statue.

She’s in her flannel nightgown when a haunted face selling some charming Gibson Girl spoons does not appear on her porch. The filmy dish of this near encounter remains over her own face from now on. Later on but at the same time, the girl’s green spooned face 

 

turns to remember 

 

her premonition, anchored unsteadily to a call-in voice on a radio show. She can’t access the memory. The memory is a premonition, or anyway it feels like that. It’s horrendous, but she so warms to the opera of this small surgery of thought. The caller’s timber or the caller’s particular pattern of tones tells to her the subterranean transmission,

 

and really after all 

 

that’s just that.

When she’d been a girl, old enough to drive a car but not old enough to know a thing, she’d been a lifeguard at the swimming pool of a fancy apartment building. There’d been a family. A littler girl fell into the water. One girl plucked another girl from the deep end. The family raised their happy hands. The father was friendly and kind. The mother was friendly and kind. Thereafter they brought elegant and simple lunches to the girl: a slender sandwich with turkey and a simply sliced baby dill. The summer was tinged with this small victory. There was a festive kind of trance on the blue cement of the pool deck. When she was no longer a girl but not an adult she’d been a waitress at a well regarded but modest restaurant. She arrived at a table with menus. Right there was the father from five years before. The girl from the pool was grown. The lovely mother, with her short French hair and tasteful clothes, was not there. The father did not recognize her. The girl said nothing. She wondered over the absence of the mother. The more she wondered the more uncooperative with herself she became. But anyway all had been revealed: she’d served the family at the pool as she now served them inside of the restaurant. 

 

She and I were putting its arms back on into our thinking.

It’s true that in every room and in all of its books, we made a killing.

It’s also true that the night I saw him grimacing with a big TV set in his lap, aping the cord twisted around like jewelry, his lace-up black boots caked in the crushed dandelions, I pushed him 

 

into an echoing lake.