Patrick Lawler
Mickey Mantle Sees Isabel Allende Holding the Head of Hermann Hesse as he Dreams of Mother Eve | audio
| Mickey Mantle on Youtube
•
When I’m in Mexico,
Mickey Mantle
is dying of cancer.
Once I burned
his baseball cards
in a shoebox—
a symbolic gesture
of leaving.
•
The seas are rough around Cancun.
Black flags on all the beaches.
•
Everyday I go looking for a milagro,
miniature figures: body parts, inner
organs, animals. They are offered
to a saint to commemorate
a miracle or to ask the saint’s intercession.
•
How do you say:“I am an American,
and I am prepared
to buy everything you have”?
•
I’m going to go swimming with the dolphins.
I’m going to go diving into the strange—as if words
were a species, as if desire were a species, as if pain
were a species.
•
I dream about
parachutists
in bright colored jump suits
falling through the sky.
•
This is the week when we celebrate
dropping the bomb on Hiroshima.
The usual parades.
Shadow floats. Balloons filled with tears.
Helium carried by men and women
with melted hands.
•
On the way to Tulum,
I dive into a cenote,
a hole into an underground
river, a lavish mouth,
a fantastic eye filled
with holy water and forgiveness.
•
Everyday I look for a milagro,
little medals made of tin or silver or gold—
wax or wood or bone.
If you have a headache,
the milagro will be in the shape of a head.
If your heart is hurt,
it will be in the shape of a heart.
You pin them on a saint
and everything is made better.
•
How do you say:
“I am an
American,
and I will sell you
everything
you will never
need”?
•
I am afraid I will not find
the appropriate milagro.
•
It is 8:15 a.m. August 6, 1945.
A six-year-old boy waits
on the platform of the Hiroshima Station.
He waits for a train that vanishes as it arrives.
•
I dream about parachutists—
1,000s of them in brilliant yellows,
whites, and oranges dropping out of the sky
in the field next to the house
I grew up in as a child.
They are on a secret mission.
•
A woman rubs my hair and says it will cost
a certain amount of pesos for the room,
a certain amount of pesos for her body.
She offers me the cenote.
The delicious waters of her skin.
•
A Mexican friend and his wife feed me
in a bungalow of sticks and tar paper.
La casa de mis suenos. They are proud.
She is pregnant. I am American.
•
I needed someone else other than my father
to be my father. Mickey Mantle
stumbles around the bases.
The ball will never land.
•
I look for a milagro for Mickey Mantle—
something in the shape of lungs or wings.
•
Fifty years ago we set the sky on fire.
Robert Lewis, the copilot
of the Enola Gay, writes in his
journal,
“My God, what have we done?”
•
I look for
milagros
with meltedhands.
•
It is 1961 and I am dying.
My eyes don’t need me any longer.
It is 1995 and the parachutists
come and announce
I’ve been dead a long time.
•
I want to give my Mexican friend
a milagro the size of a fetus.•
The sea’s shoulders are collapsing
under the pinned moon.
One-hundred-fifty-thousand people
come out of the sea waving black flags.
•
How do you say:
“I am an
American”?
•
In Hiroshima they float
brightly colored umbrellas and lanterns
on Hiroshima’s seven rivers
to remember the dead, to remember those
who drowned trying to cool
their burning bodies.•
Tonight, there will be an aluminum moon
pinned to the sky.
I won’t go swimming with the dolphins.
It’s 1995, and America
will put Mickey Mantle in a shoebox.