The Certainty Dream

by Kate Hall

  the golden mountain. They’ve had a hard time

  proving something non-existent doesn’t exist.

  Meinong allowed for all logical

  subjects of sentences to have some kind of being.

  When the crate of giant cockroaches arrives,

  I don’t know whether or not to find it reassuring.

  (b)

  When the window cleaner spills

  into the sink and runs down the drain,

  I try to imagine all the fish suddenly going

  belly-up but all I can worry about is

  the dirty mirror. When seen as a drip from a tap,

  water is not remarkable. But what we rarely

  consider is that water is more dense

  as a liquid than as a solid. At the end,

  Tennyson was so short-sighted

  he couldn’t see to eat without an eyepiece.

  As a child I was afraid to go to sleep

  in case I didn’t wake up again and went to hell.

  I can’t remember when fear was replaced

  with resignation and I moved into the apartment

  behind the funeral home. On an exam,

  one of the essay questions was Speculate as to why

  ‘Crossing the Bar’ has been ‘criticized for

  a falling off in the last stanza.’ What could be

  more obvious? What I wanted to know was

  why is God the pilot instead of the compass?

  You can’t end with a poem about the end;

  the poem is always a precursor.

  There’s a bestseller that documents the suicide notes of

  famous people. One guy addressed his note to

  the whole world and said he was just bored.

  Narcissus fell into himself because of

  light rays and surface tension.

  Virginia Woolf collided with herself.

  She listened to herself talking to

  herself and finally understood

  she wasn’t going to recover from any of it.

  IV. Methodology

  We get jobs stuffing experience

  into manila envelopes. I put

  the Thousand Islands in one of mine,

  hanging on to each by the pine trees

  and dropping them in one by one.

  It’s scary to loom this large in

  the world of tiny experiences.

  People are the size of ants. They’ll

  carry their small purses and backpacks

  and go about their business

  while you can pick up the whole of France.

  Somebody tells me they’re not sure

  this is the right way to do it, and oh,

  the trembling of insecurity. I look for

  the big boss and finally suspect everyone is

  doing the same thing and no one really knows

  whether it’s just a lunch break or the boss is

  on permanent leave. So we continue

  using sticker labels and writing in various

  coloured pens and making it up as we go.

  When the corners get torn and torn again in

  the process, things sift out. Usually the finest grains

  go first; usually that’s us. Sometimes I have to

  imagine places I have never been and

  stuff them in secretly. Sometimes I wish

  the job satisfaction survey was

  a multiple-choice questionnaire. There’s a point at which

  we realize we have nowhere

  to send anything. It’s amazing

  how the envelopes start to pile up.

  V. Results

  What’s really happening is happening

  simultaneously in secret in the attic while

  I’m busy watching the morning cartoons. I buy a lot

  and build a house and everything

  goes well until it starts sinking into

  sediment. The ground is still the same

  ground I paid for but the house is not in the same spot.

  The problem is the frequency with which our diagnostic

  strategies fail, the gigantic margin reserved for

  wrong guesses. We’re cellular interactions

  and brain chemicals we don’t even understand.

  We sent two robotic vehicles to Mars.

  They survived there much longer than we expected.

  Scientists speculate Mars might once have had water on its surface.

  I hope there was an inland sea on Mars.

  I don’t want us to be alone

  in this expanding, black space.

  It’s winter. I put on my mitts and wrap my scarf tightly

  over my ears. The snow is so different

  from anything I can think about it.

  These were not the results I was expecting.

  I had hoped for so much more.

  VI. Discussion

  (a)

  Faced with a choice of lures

  in the bait-and-tackle shop, I was forced

  to rely on visual composition. In the absence

  of any fishing experience, it became

  a kind of Rorschach test. I chose

  spinner pattern 208, meaning I chose a tool for

  dark days or waters where the forage base was

  crayfish and other dark species.

  The literature said the fish would bite. To achieve this

  required a lot of subterfuge. Each cast

  had a plink that started a lure spinning

  and blinking under the surface. Down there,

  it must have looked like a beacon, but

  this is a trompe l’oeil.

  Sometimes I get the urge to scream warnings

  at the fish as I reel them in.

  I never want to be the one to pull the heart out

  and watch it beat its final struggle on the granite rock

  but when someone else does I am happy to sit and watch.

  The lake becomes a doctored environment.

  When the fish get wise, we’ll think of something else.

  Philosophy warns that it’s important

  to establish a basis for distinguishing

  between persons, or between processes, in

  classical demon-worlds. The ducks are really tragic.

  They look at decoys and think

  they’ve actually found someone else.

  (b)

  I have followed the only line of

  inquiry available to me, and still I think

  I’ll be judged epistemically defective.

  Experience is a starting point

  for speculation, a point of departure

  from which there are delays

  at the baggage counter, delays

  at security, until eventually

  the flight is cancelled

  due to mechanical complications.

  The weather channel is often wrong,

  but when the sun and snow have already

  happened, they make gorgeous graphs

  that make a lot of sense of it.

  Dad, your heart is working like

  a leaky battery. This can be explained

  by electrical impulses and wear.

  An ultrasound specialist sees

  the shape of the imperfect container.

  He’s a stranger but he has a better picture

  of our internal organs than we do.

  I try to follow the rules of responsible

  evidence-gathering. Cardiologists don’t necessarily

  read the ecg, they learn to listen

  for the faltering beat, diagnosing problems

  by sound. NASA’s probe

  burned up in the Martian atmosphere

  as a result of a simple error: they forgot

  to convert to metric. A team of investigators later concluded the

  mission planners hadn’t envisioned the mission as a whole.

  I’m not justified in my beliefs and I don�
��t really care.

  In a room full of thirty people there’s a 71 percent

  chance that two of them will have

  the same birthday. Every now and then, the forecast is

  dead on. And no matter how much evidence

  I’ve gathered about the storm,

  the storm is still its own thing.

  VII. Conclusion

  Tracking a package can be so easy,

  going backward from any point to

  the source. Other times, my watch

  falls off my wrist and I don’t notice

  until I reach for it and it’s gone.

  You are like an old cotton sweater –

  your bones clasped together by ligaments

  slowly losing shape and deteriorating.

  The twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity,

  were abandoned on the red planet.

  There was never any intention of bringing them back.

  The watch was an expensive thing to lose.

  The clasp on my necklace keeps giving way,

  which is a kind of certainty I’m waiting to lose as well.

  I’m waiting to find myself

  huddled in the empty bathtub. Some days I wonder

  if I ever had a watch in the first place.

  I cried through your speech about money

  and mortgages. I didn’t want to know

  that you could add up so many things

  and have them equal less than nothing.

  INSOMNIA

  If I were to sleep, it would be on an iron bed,

  bolted to the floor in a bomb-proof concrete room

  with twelve locks on the door.

  I wouldn’t ask for a mattress

  or decorate. I wouldn’t ask for beautiful.

  I’d let the philosophers in,

  but not into my bed.

  They’d arrive cradling their brass instruments.

  I might let them play

  but only very softly and only if

  they didn’t fight or sing.

  If I were to sleep, there wouldn’t be any windows.

  There would be a skylight,

  but in the middle of the floor.

  I’d press my face against the glass

  and stare down at other floors upon floors upon floors …

  I’d do a sleep dance right on top of the skylight.

  It would be a new game.

  It would involve amazing feats of sleep contortion.

  It would involve letters.

  If I were to sleep, I would be spread-eagled across the bed,

  and even with the iron struts and screws cutting into my back,

  I would protect the metal frame.

  I would protect the springs.

  STORY TO CRANBERRIES

  And I will call you obelisks and you will call me nothing cranberries. And something cranberries will be made into sauce and the turkey will be stuffed with not toast. And the cranberries. Turkey prepared with pumpkin seeds and it cranberries. The blackbird comes crow eats and shits also cranberries. Underground he fed her kept her part-time cranberries. And everything the king touched it cranberries became solid in here cranberries. Is arbitrary and confusing and I am lost in it. Continue. Everything moves forward because you cranberries.

  SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT

  There is a cat outside my front door.

  Sometimes I have a headache and I wonder what it’s from.

  It could be a tumor, something I have made

  from some crazy cells rioting in my brain.

  Sometimes when I’m not at home I wonder

  if the cat is still waiting outside my front door.

  I bathe in futility. I try to make it fun.

  I lose my toothbrush and I don’t even try to find it

  because there are so many stores.

  I count on this fact.

  There’s a square composed of flat polygon tiles.

  You’re supposed to make a tiled elephant. It’s classic.

  I want to make a cat. I want to pull the cat out of the box

  and make sure he’s okay. I don’t want him

  to suffer in anyone’s thought game.

  Decay, even on the atomic level, is cruelty to animals.

  At night I think about my overdeveloped sense of intuition.

  It’s not really a sense but it makes me happy.

  It allows me to think I know without looking.

  Sometimes it occurs to me that one day

  all the stores are going to be closed.

  One day I’m going to commit some kind of cruelty

  and it will probably be toward myself. I might not know it

  until I get a headache. I really want the cat to be outside

  licking his paws. I want him to drop dead birds on my doorstep.

  Someday I’m going to have to get up and turn on the

  porch light and check for him. The cat is made of polygons.

  When he swishes his tail I hear the ivory tiles clicking.

  At night he climbs the tree next to my bedroom window.

  I sleep with my back to it.

  THIS IS A DREAM LETTER

  1

  this is where the throat gives way and the Achilles tendon

  we glimpse our black dog at the edge of the forest

  we try not to stare

  his ribs can be accounted for, his hip bones

  this is the version where you bear up the universe

  you build an animal skeleton

  you breathe life back into the dry bones

  this is where I want you to empty your pockets

  this is the version where you approach from across the field

  and this is where we go gently

  and this is where you rip out our intestines and stroke our hair

  and this is where the water seeps in

  2

  this is where the throat gives way and the Achilles tendon

  where I don’t want you to breathe on me

  the ball of twine and the horse become one thing

  this is where I am weighed in the balance and found wanting

  this is the version where the lion is prowling the house

  tell me why you think we’re a diptych

  tell me again

  this is where we’re backed into a corner

  and this is where you offer the dog a femur, smash a hole in his head

  and this is where we peer in

  and this is where we watch the dog crawl around blindly

  PASCAL’S WAGER

  ‘If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing.’

  – Blaise Pascal

  We have a stainless steel pepper grinder.

  When the kitchen light is turned on

  there is another bubbled room reflected in the bulbous top.

  This is the problem: duplicity is always shining

  forth from ordinary objects.

  Pascal developed his equations because he was losing

  at cards and dice. We like to play games but only if

  we get to keep our shirts.

  At the casino, striped ties and slinky dresses

  are calculations. We show a lot of skin. We’re practically naked.

  I waitress at a restaurant with limestone walls.

  Pasta is the cheapest thing on the menu.

  It’s very popular.

  It’s my job to grind pepper for the customers.

  What I’ve learned is this:

  some people like a lot of pepper and some people don’t.

  You can never tell.

  Pascal understood that probability is triangular in nature.

  Cardan was also working on this problem

  for noble reasons. He was in debt.

  In an amazing act of clairvoyance he accurately predicted

  the date of his own death. He had the probability thing down.

&nb
sp; He marked the cards and rigged the dice.

  They arrested him when he discovered Jesus Christ

  was a Capricorn. Cardan loved pepper. I can sympathize.

  I used to be a croupier.

  I liked watching the dice roll across the green felt,

  especially because it wasn’t my shirt.

  Pascal, I think God would know

  you were hedging your bets.

  Cardan hedged too. He committed suicide.

  The God equation is absolutely clear.

  God could be hiding inside the pepper grinder

  and there you are, shredding him to bits

  on top of your farfalle, gobbling him up

  with the chunks of tomatoes and kalamata olives.

  What are the odds? You can never be certain.

  POEM TO RENOUNCE MY RENOUNCING

  My apologies for not titling you

  Your Grace or Captain or

  Father. In the end

  you didn’t call the unearthly

  coast guard to pull me

  from the shoal when I’d had enough

  and couldn’t drive the boat

  home. Unfortunate as you will deem it,

  I’m taking it all back, each little thing,

  and placing it inside

  the old blue steamer trunk. The one

  with the faded orange tag, specifying

  my name, destination, occupation:

  tourist and instructs HOLD.

  When my possessions are all there, together

  as in the beginning, before

  I learned to flush shit away and leave

  myself empty and porcelain,

  I’m going to climb inside

  with all my crappy belongings and

  breathe until I can’t breathe

  anymore. But permit me to hold on

  to my wickedness. Just that.

  ONLY IN SHORT SENTENCES

  the lady asked directions

  to the pier the same pier

  buttressing every seaside town