Already the World

Victoria Redel

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 1995
• ISBN:
  9781612779225
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

"I like Victoria Redel's poems because of their braveness and their lucidity….There is no flight here to incoherence; the poems speak plainly and, in some cases, beautifully. The music is lovely and the tone, distinctive…." —Gerald Stern

I

THE PLAYER

At noon I watched men playing basketball.

I hung against the fence envying them,

the way they didn’t look at each other

but drove the rough ball up and down court

passing it through their ready hands.

I wanted to be these men.

They were not the bodies of soft edges.

It was vertical jump and wrist, their breasts

shook tensely coming down from a shot.

It seemed that nothing in the city loved a woman,

even the street where steam

rose through the black grates lifting up my skirt.

There’s not much more from those months.

Yellow lilies arranged in Mason jars,

when the petals unhinged and fell—

little rafts on the furniture.

I lay around in front of a rotating fan, listening

to a woman close by practicing her opera scales.

Italian songs twisted in air currents through my room.

All around me the buildings were fat with women

singing about love or saying nothing for days.

I cared nothing for Traviata or Don Giovanni.

I wanted only to be a player

with a disciplined body;

to pass the ball like a globe,

easily and without looking,

dunking that round world, hoop after hoop,

with no other ambition than to move.

TALKING ANGEL

It was an American Bluebird—painted turquoise, racks for backpacks, hash rolled with tobacco. It got stuck overnight at the Swiss border. She says she watched an Australian woman fuck the bus driver. It is my roommate’s story from her trip across Europe. I keep asking her to tell it to me. She says the driver said something over and over. The seats, covered in green plastic, made a damp popping noise. A word starting with the letter D. Tonight I tell her he was cooing Mon Dieu, though other nights it has been doucement or diable. Last time they were sitting up. She was crouched above him. Now he is kneeling, her back to him, an outline of moisture where her hands press on the window. Her brother is on the bus asking questions. “Where is the food?” “Where is the extra blanket?” At dawn the bus continues to Athens. They all get off. Now my roommate wants to tell me what else she saw. It is all monument and historic event. I say, “The popping noise, that’s the Australian girl.” If months later the girl tried to lift the driver’s face up to the face of her imagination, I could not say. And could I say if later the brother and sister spoke of the night or could never speak of the night? I want to know who my roommate would be if she could be any of them. “But I was there,” she says. I tell her I am the girl. I am her shadow flung across other seats. I am that girl talking angel. She is talking angel rising, blue wing net, angel updraft, wing beat. He says this time in slow American, “Damn baby, that’s nice.” My roommate says, “One more time. And then that’s that. There was snow. That was why we waited out the night.” “By the end,” I say, “it wasn’t really sticking, just flurries settling on the window sashes. The driver could have continued.” Think of the shushing sound that cars make, tires passing over snow, yellow light from headbeams slicing through the bus. Think of the light slipping over the spent couple. That is something, don’t you think? To wake for a second, see a thing all lit up. What was it? Whatever it was, now it is everything.

SOME CRAZY DANCING

I think I must have spent great chunks of those years

watching the girls and boys on American Bandstand,

the frug and the boogaloo shaking through their furious bodies.

I stood by the TV and danced along. I wish

I could say I was another girl, that my stories were those

of the girl who walked off-set, leading a boy—his license

snug in a back pocket—into shadow. I wish I could say

I was the girl who knew what to do with her tongue.

What I wanted in those years was mostly everything:

The neatly belted torsos, the girl’s high tits,

all the worn places on the guy’s jeans.

What I wanted was not to have to do one thing.

And in front of that TV as I shimmied, ponied and posed,

one afternoon I heard a man’s voice somewhere close by saying

—and this I remember exactly—Fuck me, fuck baby, do me.

Of course the voice was inside me. Not hard to imagine why,

but harder to imagine how my own indecency undid me.

I flipped the channel, then shut it off and went out

into a nest of suburban streets; walking past landscaped

lawns, shaped bushes, cut-back flowering trees, the slate

front walks up to d...