12 Stan Friedman The Beaten Path A house in the woods is singing. Her red floorboards warp in rows of gradual smiles as the walls grow ripe with termites. In a summer like this one half a million can breed between the studs, massaging the plaster to talc. A family of field mice nuzzle in the knife drawer and their fur is glazed with a sweetness that drizzles from the ceiling, a ceiling soaked not with rain, but with the produce of fifty thousand bees that slave in the attic. After the investigation, the men took away a whisker, a sampling of bone, a garbage can of honey for each of their wives. ~ . Reservation for Two Ask the guard: Who's buried in Grant's Tomb? and she'll point down, not only to Ulysses S. but also his missus, Julia, there at rest in their twin red-granite sarcophogi. See, they aren't really buried, and they come as a set, so the old joke is really a trick question duplex. And to think that at his funeral the bishop said, "Side by side they shall sleep in the same tomb, and she shall share whatever homage future ages shall pay." Who knew an homage recession could last 107 years? And to know how she closed her memoir: "The light of his glorious fame still reaches out to me, falls upon me, and warms me." Not through three inches of rock it doesn't. You traveled around the world all right but your radiance was sucked up by the black hole of history. You're cold, Ms. Dent, a pile of bone smaller than that of his horse, Cincinnati. "Bought the farm" would have been a fitting phrase for you in 1902, but the plantation he called Hardscrabble, he drove into the ground long ago. Yet when you went, you went wealthy thanks to his autobiography, the one written with the sole purpose of ensuring your comfort. He died the day he finished it; that's true, I've seen it in print. I hope you didn't blame yourself; he was chock full of cancer after all. Sure, it's one thing to live in the past but to do it while dead takes perseverance. Sharing a national memorial helps. Just ask the tourist who, with but a single flower for the dead, whispers: Oh, of course, his wife. ~ . Mama's Boy I won't stand for this any longer, you sneaking back inside my womb. Bad enough when you reached adolescence, slipping up under my housedress while I washed the dishes, banging the walls of my belly, moaning the names of girls I'd never meet until you fell fast and uncontrollably asleep. Should have put a stop to it in high school, yes sir, but you'd come home past curfew, spend the night counting my heartbeat, touching the tip of your nose to my extra rib touching the tip of your nose to my extra rib when I exhaled. I knew right, you grew out of it when you left home, too caught up in a hurricane to want back in the eye. But ten years is storm enough without a port, so over the phone tonight you breech right out of my earpiece and slip like an amnio through my navel. Your marbles are still there, shooters and cat's eyes that otherwise would be your brothers and sisters. They are smooth and hot. Beside us in bed you-know-who is watching my face so I must tap to you in code that this simply must stop, that a place as safe as it is dark should be inhabited only twice. ~ . A Brush With Desire She's biting down and licking his nose she's tied his feet with her bra his hands with her hose he's bouncing into her laughing uncontrollably fragrant lust-rotten guffaws, her whispers hot cuss words their steam rising to his nostrils like coke then a scissor of light, a cloak, strikes from under her mane from beneath the pillow itself reveals a pair of wings gossamer as the bubble of spit inflating on his lips and Shit! it's the Tooth Fairy risen from his childhood bed (now of all times) to redeem the cuspid he would not surrender that he tried to glue back but ended up swallowing and the woman is blaring clawing his back the imp not even embarrassed as it frees itself waving a wand and she yells there's no such thing it was your mom late at night he is having an orgasm and a halo of stars spins around the wand he feels the hollow in his gut conks out till daybreak when she and it and it are gone his limbs still bound a silver dollar wedged between his knees. ~ . The Devil's Tool Place an ear tight to your mattress and whimper into the sheet. The springs breathe, they amplify your low moan and the whole bed brays with the sound of cattle at the realization of morning. The transistor radio is dead so lick the battery. Your tastebuds, flat against the 9-volt's tips, tingle as if the tongue had been tied across your lower lip and tickled way past the point of pleasure. The battery is fine. You decide you want to boil milk, a lot of it, a gallon in an aluminum pot. There are white bubbles like a cloud drowning or a bedsheet stalked by blisters. You can place an arm above the disturbed surface and think that this burn was born from an animal mouthful of grass or how your mother would test your formula in much this same way. The binoculars are ancient but your act of magnification is not consumed by time. The woman's legs are just as long, the green tattoo on the man's back just as hard to discern. Blocks away she looks right at you, you handsome postcard: Nude Reposed On Windowsill. You are so hungry for a salad doused in vinegar. You are sprouting stubble even as you watch. Turn the spyglass to the clock and see the space between each second. This is how long the day can be. ~ . In Praise of Sex, Fully Clothed Again, you pull me down on your unmade bed. Cottons and silks contain us like wine skins, straps and buckles keeping our precious mettle under wraps. Your legs give hot substance to your tights which press then steam my pants. Unbutton my shirt, your dress, to release a complexity of texture superior to that of flesh on flesh: a tee of the teeth, a slip of the tongue. This can last for hours. Our fabrics rise and fall, our naked voices filtered in cloth, carnal kazoos. Does a sheet with a low thread count turn you off? That weaver on public TV, fingering his loom, is he Eros for the long-winded or merely a pimp for the shy? Fertile stains tease us inside our undies as this familiar motion lulls us to sleep and wrinkles our duds. Another night neither out on the town nor wowing the masses, but the lights are on, Sweetheart, and we're dressed to kill. (Stan Friedman's poetry has appeared in Sulfur, Open City, and the Beloit Poetry Journal, his poetry criticism in The New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly. Other non-fiction credits include an internet Q&A column which was syndicated for two years by United Media, dozens of theatre reviews for Punchin.com, scores of cookbook critiques for Publishers Weekly. Friedman has an MFA from Columbia's Writing Division, an MLS from Rutgers, and a BFA from Bowling Green State University. He is the Senior Research Librarian for Condé Nast Publications in New York. This is his first contribution to the magazine.)