The infinite arrives barefoot on this earth.
— Jean/Hans Arp
Clothing twists with repeated wear
and, when you fold it as clean laundry,
you must choose: to fold it as it should be
or to fold it as it is—thought Howard Danielsen
watching Carter’s inauguration interspersed
with car commercials while folding clothes in
his bare feet, his hands turning with the liquid
precision of an crash dummy—we spend our entire
lives driving toward death, resembling it, like
Arp’s semblable, which means some blah-blah.
The Mercury Monarch made him think alliteratively
of the Maserati, which itself sounded like a long stick
broken in several places, like he’d heard an old
Florentine man enunciate it once, criticizing some
skinny rich kid speeding off toward cypress shards,
hence the association of the Maserati with the dead
James Dean, even though he arrived at his Cholame,
California crash in a silver Porsche Spyder.
Bea had said with her long blonde hair
draped seductively over her face, You might
get lucky later in the week, but How wasn’t sure,
since they were phoenixes conversing on ignition
perches that may have had no sparkplugs,
whether the emphasis was on lucky, later, or might.
Disinterested in politics, she was in the other room
listening to Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and he
could see her through the French doors rubbing her
thumbnail against her lower lip while Stuck Inside
of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again played
again. How preferred the smoothness of the
middle bone of his index finger against his upper
lip to something more like Love Rollercoaster,
but when Dylan asked, Oh, Mama, could this
really be the end, How knew that it could not,
for the irritating song would go on for sixty more
verses, and Jimmy Carter had only just been sworn
in, and Jimmy Dean had gotten stuck inside his
mobile with the Cholame Blues again. To avoid
such a fate, How wanted to go into the other room
and calmly, silently put the Dylan record back in
its sleeve and fold it like a shirt, snapping it crisply
each time, and run his fingers through his own
blonde hair, ensuring that he would not be folding
his blonde onto her blonde that night. He knew
the kind black-and-white peanut farmer would do
no such a thing, but would the technicolor movie star?
Dean was born in ‘31, Dylan in ‘41, and Danielson
in ‘51. Did ‘55 mark Dean’s fall into paradise, ‘66
Dylan’s stasis in purgatory, and ‘77 Danielson’s
flight from inferno? Did significant things only
happen every eleven years? What would
happen in ‘88 or ‘99? Glancing up toward
Carter’s hand on the Bible, invisible behind
the podium, How noted, I am neither a great man,
nor do I come at the right time, as an infinitely
black bra slipped his hand and arrived on his
Earth. He picked it up slowly, felt the middle of
his index finger against its silk and lace,
and folded its black on black, as it
should be folded.
Robert Cowan is a professor and dean at the City University of New York. This piece is from his book project Elsewhen.
