One Eye Open

The Old Goat
Hawthorn Tree
The Diamond
Ghost-Eye
Dennis The Menace Park
Spaghetti Girl
Jerry Lewis
Gomez
Written 4 Days After
Beware Of The Invisible Blob
The Other Dennis The Menace Park
The Flying Nun

Intro:
These were all written around an accident
that occurred in March. (Actually Jerry Lewis
is a bookmark in Raymond Chandler, written
on an airplane ticket stub, July 28, 2000.)
The original idea was for this little book
to be about Super Powers, each story
featuring a different hero.
So that’s what it is.

March 27, 2002


The Old Goat

On the way to the bus each dawn I walked through
a field on a path dug in bracket and thorn. I waited
for the appearance of the mythical beast in leaves
and sure enough he would be there, torn above the old
glass gourds of wine, inside a windowfull of vines.
A long white beard and curling over horns and eyes
like blue marbles sunk so deep in the dew.




Hawthorn Tree

I was carrying an old wooden radio along the sidewalk on
a bright blue Sunday afternoon, looking at my shadow moving
over the pale lawns. There was a loud clack as a witch’s broom
hit the middle of the street. Out of the air from nowhere.
I didn’t see her though, when she fell off of it she must have
landed in a tree. Or she’s holding on desperately to the peak
of a house across from me. I thought I saw her black dress and
wool sweater as she clawed tiles, reaching over for a window,
with a foot on the gutter to steady herself.




The Diamond

After she works a ten hour day, she has to pass through an X-Ray.
All employees are scanned to make sure they’re not smuggling out
diamonds. Waiting to be set free into the warm summer night
beyond the doorway, the screen discovers she is pregnant. Surprise!
Growing bigger in her, month after month, the little baby is grabbed
by the powerful beams of electricity going into her, going into him.
Even though she gets weary, she has to keep working, that’s the way
things are, until the very last evening shift when she is finally due.
She leaves the factory holding her belly. There’s a light snow and
crows looking for food. The Spring is aching to get out of the cold
March ground. Twenty two hours of labor later, a boy is born.
She holds him, feeds him, warms and dreams him. Then she
knows him—The Diamond—he has the power to go through
walls and any eyes that gaze upon him are hypnotized.




Ghost-Eye

Now he can see again, now that his eye has mended
and the patch is gone. The view from this repaired
half of his head confused him with visions he never
knew, glimmers and wonders and floating shapes,
like nightgowns, like the light from pearls. They
would disappear when his other eye roamed over too.
By the third time or so, he knew what that eye could do:
having made a trip to the land of the dead and back,
it kept picture postcard contact with ghosts.




Dennis The Menace Park

John Steinbeck is the Monterey King of Writers
with his cannery row of stores, but we let him alone,
following the road a half mile away to El Estero.
Hank Ketcham lived here too and drew Dennis
The Menace adventures for years. He left us a park.
The flowered hedges reveal glimpses as it appears
before we stop in the air under tall eucalyptus.
We can feel it drawing us. A black train is stopped
by the gate, boys climbing all over its iron. We hurry.
It’s so dreamy we have to run.

Spaghetti Girl

Oh what could be better than
getting limp in hot water?

Jerry Lewis

Jerry Lewis can’t walk by a pool
without falling in




Gomez

What would happen if I didn’t get up? Gomez pressed a button
that mechanically curled a sheet of metal to where the staplers
caught it in the corners. He had been thinking that before he got
out of bed this morning and it was still with him. What if everyone
decided not to get out of bed? The factory would stay quiet after
the late shift left. There would be no replacements to come work
the machines. And then what would happen if the next shift didn’t
show up? He could imagine this big loom of iron arching out from
him turning into rust and wind when the roof broke in and weeds
grew through it all.
Each time the steel velocipede shell was curled over and
stapled, he grabbed it and stacked it on the pallet next to him.
He looked at the other people working around him.
Everyone was in their own thoughts. He imagined them
as radio towers and he couldn’t tune to their frequency.
Except for old C, he was talking out loud as usual.
Gomez smiled, took another sheet of metal and flopped it
on the track. He caught the curls and put them into hinges.
C was competing with the factory sound. His beard unrolled
with each loud every other word. As long as he kept up with the
work, Gomez thought, they would keep him on—he was the token
American and he did work like a maniac.
That’s what Gomez was thinking at 9:37 in the morning.




Written 4 Days After

Let’s get the gruesome story into the open once
and for all so this weary narrator doesn’t have to
relive it again. Early Sunday evening my charming
wife had a startling idea, “Why not have a new
tradition of family game night?” Sure. Our daughter
Tabitha-May picked her favorite board game (and I
paid no attention as yet to the razor-edged cards)
and we set out. I chose to be the duck. Tabitha-May
leaped to a lead with a spin of 6 and picked a card.
It was the Bear! What Joy! She flung her hands in
the air and the card ripped cleanly and quickly
across my cornea.
A half hour later we were at the Emergency Room.
After a forty minute wait in a room full of human
tragedy, I was allowed beyond. Following a
kind nurse who treated me first, appeared the
shuffling green slippers of my doctor. He drew a
Neolithic picture of my eye and gave me a prescription,
while behind the curtain next to me, a man had his
leg turned off. Though I spent the next couple of
days reeling in a Quasimodo nether-world of creaking
agony, now everything is fine. I just have a headache
and my eye has the vision of a Galapagos tortoise.
As for morals, I don’t know, there’s a lesson about
games, or luck, or animals.




Beware Of The Invisible Blob

By the 5th year of Medical School, students are finally
told the truth about the common flu. It’s a terrible
invisible blob that cruises aloft in the air. It picks
people out, descends on them and that’s that. Yet
there may be a handful of people who can actually
detect these phantoms. Ghost-Eye is one who can.
Sunday early evening, he and his daughter took their
only trip outside the house, walked down the path to
their car and drove to Crazy Mac’s video store. There
were no more than three other distant people in the big
room and he and she quickly found a couple cartoons
to rent. They were done, he bought her a 25 ¢ bauble
from the gumball machine and they left the store.
Unaffected by the wind or rain or cars and crowds,
The Invisible Blob could hover and take its time.
It had been fishing all day. The shiny eyes and laugh and
spring of the little girl must have been too much of a lure.
Ghost-Eye never really knew what had occurred until late
that night when his daughter was so ill and fevered in bed.
Then he remembered their trip and that lack of sky-colored
air above the car before he shut her in. Whatever that thing
was, buoyed in space, it had caught her with its cold, deep-sea
creature reach long enough to make her sick.


The Other Dennis The Menace Park

After a while I catch myself getting nervous.
I become the cricket watching Pinocchio and
his friends turn into donkeys. I see the rust
showing through the bright colors, angles of
metal in crashed airplane shapes, ladders
lead up to points, chutes drop out of sight.
A bridge grins twenty feet above the sand
where a boy cannonballs. What’s the matter
with me? It’s Dennis The Menace Park!
Somehow every child is protected from
the dangers the parents see.

The Flying Nun

I was a little surprised how easily
she told him her secret




cover & illustrations: rosa frost
writing: allen frost in 2002 at 1452 Franklin St Bellingham WA