3 Poems by Doren Robbins

DURING THE COMMERCIAL

I had to find a Hungarian Jew some Ritz crackers and a compass—
reminding myself—hurrying to zip it all back in—if I can walk
through the doorway, make it all the way back completely into the
room, if I stay on Ogden Drive or Longwood Avenue, if I don’t go
near Queen Ann Park where the vatos throw bottles at the Jews, if I
don’t wear a star, if I leave my kinky hair in the oven—coming
through the hallway, in the trash somebody threw in my head, if
the fan inside the refrigerator doesn’t suck me through the vent—I’
m eating somebody’s chopped liver—if I bring a little extra rye
bread for the makers of lamps out of themselves made, if I save a
little paprika to powder the broth, if I bring my mother’s Old Gold
spun filter cigarettes to barter for a little short rib drippings to drop
in their watery stew—somebody takes and then numbers the
cigarettes, somebody quantifies and then calculates the drippings,
it’s not a good deal, it’s the deal without recourse or no deal at all—
if I made it through the hall from the bathroom to the kitchen and
back to the television before I left the underground tunnel I dug in
the hall that no one entered in time, in my mind—if I returned
before the commercial ended, if I didn’t forget the kosher salt, if I
didn’t forget my father’s Okinawa souvenir army blanket scratching
misery to touch, a scratching misery to remember it made him sick
for life to be shipped over there—if I could steal the neighbor’s car
and fill the trunk with Jews and cover them, if I could say, “no
matter what,” if I could say, “the worst is over,” if I could say, “the
stew soothed them,” if when dragging the blanket from the hall, if
it wasn’t an eight year-old’s dumb illusion relief, the cigarettes and
the bread, the food in my mind in a pot on the blanket, the combat
boots my brother bragged about winning in a card game, if the
somber, odd, un-doowop-like, un-Colgate commercial jingle-like all
violin abscess eyes shaved starvation corpse footage musical score
didn’t return pulling through me starting again.

FOR THE LAST OF THE JUMA

There were two La Breas in the time of my first love.
Her house was one block east of one and 3,000 miles north
of the Amazon cashew baron La Brea province judge
who sent his "revenge battalion" into the cashew heaven
of the rain forest to cut off the remaining ears of the Juma people
for crowding up his cashew farm jungle with all their huts.
Twelve Juma escaped, twenty-four ears in all.

I didn't know the La Brea Juma were so close
to our La Brea—outside my La Brea was another one—
inside the world of my first love a burning hive carried
another burning hive—a simultaneous La Brea mutilated itself
with government machetes. One block east of the La Brea
simultaneous to the mutilating one, I was rushing inside
the wet pulled aside bottom piece of her bathing suit–
I thought I held everything worth holding–her scent
another memory tightened blossom—in my mind, another mind.

Does anyone believe the savage Juma people
had a mystical connection to parrots? And I ask this,
someone who might as well be a donkey with a parrot's head,
someone in Jerry's-Deli, someone in here trying to eat kreplach
soup–
you have to cut it with a knife. Gold miners, loggers, poachers,
rubber freaks, nut barons is the mysticism that's going to last.
The three-time champion governor of La Brea said:
"Why keep the Indians in a time bubble?"
Why is it after statements like that the mutilations begin?
Lack of seeing both LaBreas: that's the madness
of pretending you're going to see the Juma return
with prosthetic ears, that's the madness of standing
right at Auschwitz and LaBrea
without noticing shaved girls busy-BUSY
making synthetic rubber wheels—
why isn't there yet another La Brea in which
lack of memory and lack of insight is not madness?

Thirty-five of the last forty-three, seventy Juma ears in all
survived the first attack. Does it matter the Juma people
had what they called A Sobbing Ritual?
They believed weeping literally allowed them
passage into each other, into the past, into the plain
of sparks the rain forest floated upon. And they thought
through their ritual they contacted the human deer
that care for the dead...
thousands of their ears are in a government vault...
Juma means "fierce." Neighboring tribes called them
"giants with feet." They've been going out of there
in cashew and rubber coffins since 1880.
The colonel Antonio Rodrigues LaBrea
ordered clearing the jungle of "hostile savages."
"They fight fiercely for their freedom," wrote the colonel.
This was the beginning of the rubber boom,
out of which a lot of wheels and falsies,
a lot of dildos and girdles and work shoes
and diving suits were manufactured.

It's nothing but a bunch of legends:
that a priest with a female parrot's genitalia
converted the Juma to rubber, that the poachers
mutilate parrots for their mystic vocal chords,
that there's an alligator with the eyes of Jesus
hunting for the governor of La Brea and for his children
who eat silver dollars, and his children's children
all TV stars in Rio, and their grandmother's
dog-fucking valet, and her cook
with the 10" tongue, and his pet albino tarantula,
and the tarantula's dung which the governor
sprinkles himself with. Governors have rituals too.

The corrugated blade shapes of the bark tear a little
when I touch them. It's all La Brea in there,
cashews and rubber, and Auschwitz and synthetic rubber,
the jaws of the flying rats in there are covered with bloody fat,
so are their wings, so are their almost adorable paws,
and so is the spout their lumpy embryonic sacks pour from—
it's a bloodbath in there—Juma's ears without Juma's
Jew's underarm hair without Jews, a shoemaker knifed up the ass,
tufts of spinal debris, food coupons, infant cartilage from Paris,
cancelled transit papers from Marseilles stick to the uplifted roots,
and the governor of La Brea is in there—
Eichman's blonde toupee flies inside his mirror—
he waves clipped bunches of newspaper lingerie sections at me,
he is part of the blade of open bark twice the thickness of my back.
Under the unraveling rubber tree he's petting a laboratory rat
curled at the bottom of the rubber broth,
a Juma in his mouth, or is it a Jew?
Everybody's naked I can't tell,
everybody's mutilated I can't tell, it's a heavy broth,
Brazil, Germany, La Brea, Odessa, Odessa-Schmessa,
there's a lot of gristle in there, there's always enough gristle.

LORCA


I remember Lorca holding a paper plate with some Greek figs, he was looking at that child
who sometimes looked like him.
And because he, Lorca, is comprehensible at all times, and every one of the cries
––and all poems slang some cry or they’re swindled out of carrying the cry
for the uterus
of sound, you don’t repress it without regret. Generations of blood on those hands already.
Generations of verbal carcinogens for that boss if he speaks
down to you.
I was leaning more toward the surprise of what you pass through when nothing covers you
or heaps up inside of you. And that side, that adopting a tone you think you’re safe
coming through side of you, researching something like the Latin phrase for someone
that encourages you into apologizing excessively, assholia unendica, for example, when,
factually, it’s pitiful, what unshittable nonsense: a hundred and three years to see through
––just to begin to get a look at yourself.
When I was nineteen and read Lorca, I said, this guy could turn a leaf into a sail. He could’ve
trained a clown’s dog easy.
Did I understand what he was talking about? Of course I did I lived in the imagination
with my cold fruit cup and twenty-three pencils that were ecstatic without me.
I lived on the corner, however much that mattered since every place on the street
was abandoned.
I couldn’t explain it then,
I could barely begin to add up the cracks at the curb, at that corner.
I don’t know if he, Lorca, would’ve found his quieted down side or if he needed one.
The fate of fierce consequence maybe never occurred to him as a way to think.
One of the thugs that shot him shrugged when they said,
“the assassinated man was a poet, and a faggot.”
The Spanish Civil War was a topic people that read books or lived through
still talked about back then. When I started reading him people I knew
were trying to figure out Surrealist dream language alongside his missing body alongside
Spain cratered toward…toward, like there is a sufficient way
to describe the condition we arrived at? And the maintenance of the condition?
The dream language I couldn’t turn on took
on a way to dim the view, dim the world dim, dim the proverb that he, Lorca,
with his whole language was against: the proverb: the destruction won’t come quick enough.
It consumed him one of the first.
I believe the horse vine leaking out the end of the last rain resolved
the way only a plant can resolve
to grow next to him, close to his thighs. And Lorca,
the pitcher of water, the tense Camilla against the window,
his mouth full of melody, full of the dancer
opening his fist…

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