Jim Klein

The Goat (Left Hand Drive)

El Dorado Village, Trinidad

1

I don’t want to kill the animal.
I don’t want to kill the goat.
I don’t want to bring the machete
of subjects and predicates down
on Bobby’s wedding for his daughter.

By hack saw, cleaver, and knife
I don’t want to render
the body and spirit of Boyo
into edible bits,
no matter how delicious.

2

I want the goat whole.
There is nothing to prove to the goat

as Hannah and her sister watch
in black hijabs from the second floor.

He doesn’t need to be led by a rope
and relieved in a little spurting fountain,

or trussed up by a hind leg
in the face of his own cage

beneath the flimsly galvanized
in service to what blank red Vatican

he knows not what: the poem.

3

Bobby hangs his hat where he can’t reach.
Forty lbs. of garlic, 200 lbs. of flour for roti,
heart of palm stacked like whale bones,
and, I’m ashamed to say,
boxes of cubed, frozen goat.

But he has to sell his truck
because sugar cane is a weed in Trinidad now.
Before that, his top-shelf restaurant failed.
And, he also has a prior:
ten years in the slammer in Barbados,
smuggling drugs.

My wife estimates his “marriages” at four.

4

While light rain drums on the roof,
I watch from the dung-jewelled pen,

as Bobby loiters in across his muddy dump.
roped this last time to his goat.

It doesn’t take a genius
to see something mythic is happening,

and I am proud to be here,
if only by default.

Besides, I’m being roped into this
by family ties.

I resolve to do my part,
but, like the man being ridden

out of town on a rail,
if it wasn’t for the honor,

I’d just as soon walk.

5

There was talk that someone knew
the short version,

and someone else the long,
but the truth is

that no words as words at all
were spoken.

Of course, Bobby’s trying
to be a good Moslem

(the rest are Pentecostal),
and maybe killing his good friend

will take his mind off
his daughter’s wedding.

6

Bobby tips the goat
like a dining room table

and the white-haired, white-capped
Old Factotum despatches

voiceless Boyo fairly
routinely. I admit it,

I thought of Daniel Pearl.

7

We hoisted the flapping sacrifice
like an engine in a garage.

Cleaving the hide (whitish inside),
drawing and quartering, as they say,

the phosphorescent guts ballooning
onto the white plastic pail–

at Bobby’s order,
I retrieved the muddy skin

from beneath the swinging goat.
I straightened out the coat,

divided it on the side of the pen
and gave it a little pet.

Just then, a little Black boy
showed up and began an interrogation.

8

[Lucien] Freud is suspending
the customary meanings of portraiture,
its purposes to identify and honor.
“I would wish my portraits to be
of the people, not like them”
he explains. The more he dwells
on the body that is actually there
in front of him and how he might
physically transfer its alien
substance to a flat surface,
the more that “of,” that dangling
little preposition, becomes the crux
of his art; for in a sense the exercise
is hopeless, the paint can never
in truth be a person. . . .
To produce paintings means
to rework the truths of personal
experience, converting them into
gratuitous curiosities–something
the world has no need for. The only
way to reclaim the truth is to face
up to this grandiose redundancy.
“I’m completely selfish and only
do what I want to do.”

“The Way to All Flesh”
by Julian Bell
The New York Review of Books
Vol. LV, No. 3
March 6, 2008

9

Let’s review: We’re having at reality
with mythoplastic razors–the poem
is the goat, Bobby’s the goat, I’m the goat;
and it is what it is: the goat is the goat,
ribs being sawn from the spine, the four quarters,
the furry, off-center, severed head.

10

Bobby’s cut up goat before, possibly once.
Somewhere in here I should use the word halal.
The still tepid flesh. The still tepid flesh.
It’s a bit of a joke that all these people
think Bobby’s crazy.
Like poetry, Sitzfleisch is required.

Everyone should cut up goat.
Meat is so damned labor intensive.
Yes, it would be hard
to get rid of the human body.
The evolved brain got a meat-fueled liftoff,
with stone implements yet.

The goat is winning, I opined. Bobby agreed.
But some of that flesh was so lovely
I thought of Ishmael squeezing case.
A wedding guest thinks this fine red mess
is sheep, the final insult.
Goat! I hollar after him.

11

On the way home from Second Sunday,
Halima says, “Jim dance chutney,
Jim cut up goat, Jim plenty plenty.”
Stag is a man’s beer. Guinnes is good for you.
Be free of yourself. Chant and be happy.
To be born and to live every day is to kill plenty plenty.

*

Max

If poetry is the manipulation
of levels of abstraction,

and I believe it is, why can’t
the work all the time

like the painter does?
Max says,

“Not tongue and groove,
or mortar and pestle.

You have to remember
the Cavalier poets,

Sir Walter Raleigh.
The poet writes his poem

between the saddle
and the ground.”

*

Blue Chevies

1.
The parking lot behind George and Eddie’s
pushes back in a jagged shape.
We have one working car engine,
one heater, six Rheingolds,
a joint of “good Colombian,”
and a country music station.
Two empty cars are frozen in with us.
We keep expecting their owners,
who never come. We kiss, often
glancing out at the snowdrift
piling up by the side door,
red from the Schaefer sign.

2.
Used to spend free afternoons
speeding on two-lane Indiana highways.
Continued existence due to the savvy
and foresight of oncoming motorists.

Easterners in the Midwest complain
they are surrounded by cornfields.
The East, to me, was the reverse:
no way to get out of town.
Just west on Rt. 3 felt like release.

Totowa
a case of beer
and Thou!

Red neon sign (out of repair)
STRAT MO
TV $12, no TV $11
no TV

3.
Until I loved you,
I never knew
there were so many
blue Chevies.
4.
An early spring morning, the sky’s a silver coin,
and we haven’t been to bed, if that is the truth,
and maybe it is, that would be something.
But the truth, as I understand it, is probably doomed.
Right now, the truth is passed out in the back seat
of her car. Besides, I’m sick of the truth.
The truth is very free with herself. The truth
is beautiful, and stays beautiful through a lot of abuse.
The truth is heavy to carry too. By herself,
the truth can’t take care of the truth. In fact,
the truth’s a real punishment to be around.
But if the truth’s not involved, I don’t care.

5.
George called yesterday
to say he had some bad news.
For once, George didn’t exaggerate.
I sat down to eat again.
In the driveway outside,
my landlord was spray painting a fender
in a motion like the Almighty
wiping you out.

6.
She gave me her breast in a bar
out the neck of a red sweater.
She knew every cop and bartender.
She ran everywhere she went.
She loved pissing out of doors,
bouncing moonbeams off her ass.
Everyone should be understood,
at least once.

*

The Apple

This apple I am eating is your body,
Mom, I am biting through the red
tensile skin with a few of the old
front teeth you were once so anxious
and solicitous to feel bumping up
through the repaired gums I have said
and yelled many unkind words through
at you, often in retort. This is your
white juicy of mixed flavor human
flesh sliding around on the tongue
I have suckled you with and on
which you embroidered your
wisdoms, like don’t waste food
and it’s always something,
the apple going down and down,
but nothing goes to waste, Mom,
it just goes around and around
like we did, and it really goes,
as I know you know.

*

Two Orderlies

Two orderlies,
like matched black
Judas goats, in white,
lead two deputies
holding hands with her
and two plainclothes
nurses with syringes
in procession
to the Quiet Room
where she will fight
like an old pig.

It is remarkable
that this ordinary woman
in an orange sweatshirt
should merit an entourage
reminiscent of bishops,
Aztecs and Fellini
for this little walk
down the hall.

forthcoming in Court Green, 2007

*

The Furring Strip and the Pear

I am the furring strip
angled longingly in the arm
of the pear tree

awaiting the little black girl
and her dad
on their way home
from Union School

for their use
to joust you down,
lone pear,
aloft for months
like a Tiffany objet.

Other years,
pears aplenty like suds
on the Passaic River,
but this year squirrels
like flame throwers.

Unreasonable!
Unreasonable!

No berries on
the dogwood either!

Oh pear,
how have you kept
yourself so chaste
where no squirrel
can reach you?

Of everyone,
only the little girl saw you,

and by her father’s
strong brown arm
and my blunt end
she shall have you!

*

About Jim Klein
Jim Klein has published more than 100 poems in such literary magazines as Unmuzzled Ox, Beloit Poetry Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, Oxford Magazine, Journal of New Jersey Poetry, and Wormwood Review. While an English professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, he founded Lunch, a nationally recognized college literary magazine whose contributors went on to found The Paterson Literary Review, The Passaic Review, and Lips. Jim Klein also leads the poetry writing workshops at the Rutherford Public Library on Wednesday evenings (except Second Wednesdays).
Blue Chevies by Jim Klein is available on audio at http://dirtynapkin.com/
Jim Klein has poems on http://noutopia.com