Read Online China Blues by David Donnell - Free Book Online

southerners respect Lincoln.”
                                                               And
    I said, Look darling, my great uncle almost saved
    Lincoln’s life, so get off my back.
                                               Besides I don’t
    think the majority of southerners do respect
    Lincoln.
             Harriet was a girl from Baltimore,
    she was born in Winnipeg
    but her mother was from Seattle, home of the Mariners,
    who lose games & most of whom don’t own
    sailboats. We flew to Vancouver together
    with her hand inside my shirt for most of the 4 hours
    because she said the flight made her feel “queasy.”
    She was bright.
    She had an MA from Princeton & then she switched to
    psychology.
                 But she
    couldn’t tell me if B. Franklin’s parents were born
    over here. He was 3rd or 4th generation, I think,
    & she said, “I think American men are sexier
    than Canadian men.”
                             And I said, What? Sexier
    than Donald Sutherland,
                                   or Harold Town? You think,
    seriously, that Dan Quayle is sexier than David
    Peterson?
             And she said, “O, you’re always so precise.”
    She was curled up in her seat as she said this,
    but she was married; & we were in an
    airplane, I think it was a DC 10,
    I keep track. And it turned out she meant
    sexier than this one specific hoary scotch&soda cheeks
    guy in the VP ’ S office where she worked
    at an advertising company
    that did a lot of stuff for General Motors,
    Canada Malting,
                      BOAC, & the Liberals, they had
    the advertising budget for the Ontario Liberals. She
    thought Emilio Estevez
    was sexier than this vice-president at the company
    where she worked; & I said, Okay, Harriet,
    okay, no kidding. But life is funny
    & as it turns out
    she divorced her husband & married
    the advertising VP, slope shoulders,
    soft hands, the whole suitcase.

BUFFALO DANCES
               Sometimes I think all these farms & highways
    & major factories are about to swallow us. I don’t mean
    physically, swallow, devour, like
                                              an enormous train
    accident. I mean our identity. Myself & Marcus & Evan
    & Carol.
           We will have to restructure some of our patterns,
    produce new national symbols,
                                             it will be raw at first,
    a little bit like those red&yellow daubed figures
    on scraped buffalo skin.
                                   It will have to be different
    than the specific myths of our cousins.
    We should have our own flag, don’t you think?
    And our own national animal.
                                          It can’t be a buffalo,
    they didn’t come this far west of Great Slave Lake,
    not very often. Perhaps a horse. Does anyone else
    have the horse as a national symbol? California, Ga.,
    Alberta? And.
                   There are other dances, where you take
    off the loose black shirt & blue jeans & the Argyle socks
    & walk out in the fields just because you are tired
    of the brass rails & the Mies van der Rohe buildings
    & you are in love or you have a bottle,
    one of those 2 things, & you want to walk
    naked under the moon.

A LOAF OF BREAD ON YOUR ARM
                 When you go into Oliveto on a sunny
    afternoon there is an immediate freshness,
    the plump woman who comes to the counter has flour
    on her hands; there is a smell of olive oil in the air.
    Which makes me think,
                                 somebody compared love to bread
    the other day. It was Pieter, late at night,
    at the San George