On Break
Thomas Piekarski At a gift shop on the bay where Spanish galleons once sailed past huge pods of majestic dolphins women cashiers on break met by a small table. One a victim of fibromyalgia slouched on a stool thumbing People magazine. Another on a voyage of steady weight gain munched a tuna sandwich enhanced with tangy chipotle. The artist enthused about her painting hung in the local library, all with eyes peeled watching the clock to make sure they’d get back on the job in the nick of time. Meanwhile a development undisclosed to them, fallout from the Fukushima reactor in Japan was slowly making its way through ocean waters and could reach the shoreline where they toiled any instant. I knew of this and yet said nothing. Sometimes it’s best to let ignorance have its say, for what isn’t known unlikely to cause distress according to the haughty logician aboard the bus that left Istanbul at exactly the calculated minute to nail its arrival at the depot of constitutionality. With such an abundance of possible strategies to choose from when one is painted into a corner the best way out isn’t always the most obvious since we can’t know what’s behind the mountain. Though the women may think a single glass slipper can fit all, and that a phenomenal glowing coach drawn by amethyst-horned mustangs will come, mascara won’t be able to hide eventual wrinkles. Yet despite this each of them dons a glistening tiara that beams in some special man’s mind. This is the way the wind glistens, the way breakers smack instant knowledge upon granite headlands when a storm from Hawaii pounds the Pacific coast: astonishing tiaras flow from the immeasurable sky, wisdom unleashed, smashed, tossed and scattered, coating the long wide beaches with busted shells within which whole universes of sight and sound can be discovered. Still human pain never goes away, can’t diminish come high or low tide, this because the controlling moon in its humility was born to die. But that isn’t the end. Immortality incubates in the link between thought and action. As a good example of this I once attended a dream auction at which a lion tamer with a fat bull whip sought bids for a little girl balled up at the bottom of a filthy bird cage.The skinny auctioneer became blue in the face in his attempts to draw a bid. He kept lowering the price but nobody would bite, until the crowd disassembled and her value sank to nothing, at which point the little girl quickly ballooned, breached the cage’s bars, ascended and then faded into the clouds. |
About the author:
Thomas Piekarski is a former editor of the California State Poetry Quarterly. His poetry and interviews have appeared in Nimrod, Portland Review, Kestrel, Cream City Review, Poetry Salzburg, Boston Poetry Magazine, The Journal, Gertrude, The Bacon Review, and many others. He has published a travel guide, Best Choices In Northern California, and Time Lines, a book of poems. He lives in Marina, California. |
