Inner Life, The

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 1997 by Sadoff, Ira

I'm jittery, sleepless, I hover over a chair instead of nesting in it. I live for a few bites of chocolate, my hand grazing her hair. The inner life excites me unbearably, listening to a woman grind her teeth, finding out what makes her slap her husband, what makes a job a treadmill, what charms me about the neck scent, why do we pour everything out, as if ears were the swirl of a drain?

I live for the jabbering auctioneer, his lips like the wake from a canoe on Lake Witaka, selling a canopy bed where grandma told grandpa a terrible secret. She lived in the desert once. In 1933 she slept in a railroad car. Where is she now, the one who ran off with a seamstress?

I could live with a few more hot baths, inspecting the sweat as steam infuses the skin, inhaling and exhaling it like a Santa Ana. Before it rains, I think of kettles of tea. A few Polish aunts and uncles fighting over the Talmud while comparing stitches on the linen tablecloth.

My people crossed the desert, all the while chattering "How unbearable the heat, how thirsty we are." Those are not my people. My people are thinking what a joy to slash the throat of an enemy. My people stole leftover sandwich crusts from the Automat.

I want to live a few more minutes for my people, the ones who say CaU me sounding like crows on the side of a highway when no raccoon decorates the Interstate. I live for a few more minutes of the inner thigh. To make up for skulking around with my eyes closed, believing the God of pain a private thing. Ennobling. I have a few meals in mind. My people love to feed, to inject pleasure and pain, to wound or annihilate, to comb and burnish the flesh so we can strut and preen.

The thingness of us. Going off like a buzzer in a factory, where we charge out the doors denouncing the one who sticks his head in a stack of papers then comes out shrugging, giving us the thumb. They're going to Mexico without us. To the beaches and factories, to the pinatas and dredl-sized milagras of severed arms, goddesses and crosses. Mexico,

a country without statutes, where they fit tiny chips on a board with tweezers, then do it again and again. Nothing but a few greased-up windows, a picnic table in a chain-linked yard where a Doberman slobbers and growls. To be looked at like that, inspected, to miss the surf and the streetcars, that's what hell is. When others are working harder, cheaper. Talking in another language. Hiding. their faces.

I don't want to live in a cave. I want to hear what they're saying. My ear's to the wall with a glass, I'm shushing everyone. My people don't need a god to make speeches about shedding the flesh we want to get on with it, to be the seismographs who register sensations, who store them in a vase like a key to the cellar. To be the ones who open the basement door with its smell of mold and enchilada, who make out the first notes of the Mariachi band, the steel guitars, who think red and black silk crinolines, just when our eyes adjust to the darkness.