Human Hours
Page 4
I love that sound especially, the sound of not saying goodbye turned all the way up loud, louder even than the trucks that shouted their way past us, louder than my friend who when it’s time to go answers in his polite English murmur that he’d rather continue this discussion more discretely, upstairs, between the sheets.
I can’t tell a joke but surely one of the best setups is how you men are always ready. What an appetite!
I rarely ask if you love me back or if you’re there when the priest, the rabbi, and a juggler walk into the Vatican bar.
Will I ever admit my indiscretions?
Look for me in the heavenly bodies.
Or way up here on West 98th, stoned on negative capability, eating honeydew, taking these scholarly notes.
For example, the brain uses ten times more energy than any other body part.
Would we were octopuses, with brain cells in our arms!
In the most difficult logic problem on record, there are three gods, called True, False, and Random.
True always speaks truthfully, False always speaks falsely. But whether Random speaks truthfully or falsely is a completely random matter. The task is to determine their identities by asking three yes-no questions.
The gods understand English but answer in their own language.
Doctors agree I need to get laser holes made in my eyes. Laser pulses they call them. The pain will not be too great, they promise, though after it’s over there’s a chance I’ll see more ghost images, nighttime halos around lights.
Go Back: You Are Going the Wrong Way say the highway signs in white lettering against a bright-red background.
I always wonder how they know which way we’re headed.
The real question is not when but who, who will be there when you die?
Instead might I ask where you got your hat? I’d like to wear your hat—
And if it gets late again tonight, I might ask you the time, I might ask you a riddle or straighten my dress, I might commit a little crime or tell you the name of my press, My Body Up Against Yours, yes. My Body Up Against Yours Press.
To an event called “Poetry and the Creative Mind” I wore faux Spanx for the first time, discount Walgreens size L Spanx look-alike that kept me a little bit warm on a late April night. I was lonely when I took it off at home. I wonder if other women take theirs off in the bathroom before checking their faces and returning to the book, the bed, the optimistic erection.
Who put this old copy of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious beneath my Thesaurus? Both titles obscured by dust.
Us, us—
the books so artlessly repercuss.
Tellisa wanted to know how to stop yelling. Ashley wanted to know what to do about her son’s tantrums. Christina went awol. Barb got pregnant again and left with her son.
The mothers are young and on their own, disappointed or abused or simply left by their babyfathers. Can you skip me? one asks. We were making an inventory of apologies and questions:
Sorry, right?
It was two days after Valentine’s Day.
Love is like the universe, could it be the tenth planet?
I’m sorry I missed it, what happened?
Pain Scale
Floating above the gynecologist’s hands,
Dolor looks down at me
with her many expressions.
Someone sketched the eyes, the mouths,
someone pinned them up,
arranged the faces
so they softly say, like this? like this?
The doctor says to choose one,
but I’m no fool, I close my eyes
and the speculum is blind and cool,
widened and distracting.
Like the Chikyū vessel drilling
downhole from the ocean floor
into the untouched mantle,
it shows we’re scarred inside
by what years and use and trespass do.
Every day the women open their eyes
and follow me into the streets,
the cities, like a wind murmur begins
a rumor of waves, the faces of earth
saying let this pain be error upon me writ.
In the Studio at End of Day
From my mother I’ve inherited dark eyes
and the desire to spend hours alone in a room
making things that might matter to no one.
She paints canvas after canvas, so many
she doesn’t know what to do with them all.
Would you like one? Please,
come down to her studio,
she’s giving them away now, as I write,
as I watch her and write and revise draft after draft
while not twenty feet from me she’s spilling her paints
on the floor. She has more courage than I,
painting’s not like writing, you can’t get back
to earlier versions. Failure is hot right now,
said one of the children of her children,
and I think my mother was consoled.
I was, and then we were in it,
celebrating my mother and my father, both.
She made us laugh as she looked around the table
at the mutable world, her vast progeny—
so many of us she doesn’t know what to do
with us all, and two already lost—
then raised a glass to my father
and their ninety years together.
Who’s counting? Time passes
while my mother stands before the painting
as if it were a mirror
and paints the woman’s face purple,
tilts the woman’s head, blurs her outline.
She paints with whatever’s at hand.
Chopsticks. Fingers. Elbow.
If she had a gun she’d use that.
My father built the storage racks
but there’s no more room.
Try to hurry, try to get here fast,
before she leaves. Last night
she went home early,
and I was by myself in her studio,
which is like a womb. Everything
pulses. I turned the lights out
at the circuit breaker, as she taught me.
When they go off they make a kind of bang,
a shudder through the walls.
Tonight let’s leave my mother
working here, she says she’s not finished yet,
but take a painting on your way out
—tomorrow there will be another.
Read this draft, tomorrow there will be another.
Kiss her face.
Tomorrow there will be another.
433 Eros
An asteroid passed us by at 10 p.m. last night.
It was reported in the news.
What exactly is an asteroid?
A star of course I know, but an asteroid?
I’ve seen a few photos of 433 Eros,
where all the craters are named for famous lovers,
and the pictures are very sexy
even if it is just a minor planet
or the shattered remnant of a planetesimal.
Uncertainty Principle at the Atrium Bar
So much static in here,
and glasses clinking, laughter,
everyone talking a little louder
to make himself heard.
Is that why you’re leaning so close
I can even from up here on the mezzanine
smell you smelling her?
Right now under this gauche chandelier
I’m not eavesdropping. Because if I were
would it change what’s being said,
would it change what’s floating from your lips
into the black hair flickering beside you?
I’ve never understood quantum mechanics
but I believe I should propel myself
far from here—
I’d earn a decent wage deciph
ering
sounds from another time and place,
from billions of miles and light-years ago,
sounds picked up in the exquisitely attuned
antennae of the Laser Interferometer
Gravitational-Wave Observatory.
Reports confirm the faraway arms
of the four-kilometer antennae
do nothing but translate waves into sound.
They drape themselves
over no one else’s bare shoulders.
Have you listened to the LIGO recordings?
I play them again and again.
The universe!
Enormous duration
punctuated occasionally—
only a few times so far in my tenure here—
by what they call a chirp, a chirrup,
a transient signal that rises to middle C
and lasts only a fraction of a second easy to miss.
Yes, you are easy to miss.
Uncertainty Principle at Dawn
Come morning I’ll make a list of obsessions
and maybe you won’t still be on it,
only five-dollar bills, telescopes, anonymity,
waiting, beauty, silent comedy,
the silent comedy of beauty—
of waiting. Could I forswear
all these things and just crawl back
into the bed you and I once slept in?
What would happen then?
Play any film backward and it’s elegy.
Play it fast-forward and it’s a gas.
Beckett on the Jumbotron
Samuel Beckett, who to me is very fly,
may not fit everybody’s definition of fly.
My own son, for example,
is not in love with Samuel Beckett,
he says he prefers Josh Beckett,
who used to play for the Sox.
He tries to explain the pleasures of baseball,
saying the game can go on forever,
there’s no clock running down,
and I get that.
Some people want to live forever,
which would give us all time for more balks,
walks, no-hitters, daisy cutters, deep-in-the-counts.
To get through tonight’s game
I brought Waiting for Godot
and already it sounds as if people are clapping
but the game’s not over.
Look around—
The field is lit.
The crowd is lit.
It’s all theater.
Up on the jumbotron they flash Beckett’s pitching stats
and sometimes they flash live footage
of people in the far reaches of the stadium,
people who don’t know they’re being recorded.
I hope I show up there someday,
on the big screen!
With Godot,
with Lucky and Pozzo.
Look for us in the sky of pixels,
where the light gleams an instant,
then it’s night once more—
Prayer for the Lost among Us
I wish we could let him
sleep all winter,
sleep all the way back to Elko,
Nevada, where forty years ago
we watched him take sleeping pills
and drink martinis
and pass out like a dead man
in the back of the station wagon
while we wandered the slot machines
and casino diners
wondering if he’d ever wake up.
We’d had a plan, then.
We’d agreed ahead of time
on a plan though we were too young
to give consent, wanting only
to please him, we were a little scared,
a little in awe,
you understand, he was our father.
When I look at him now
I see all of the fathers
he’s been—
a funhouse mirror of fathers.
It’s not a tragedy, my friend tells me,
and she’s right.
The car was parked
far from the casino lights
and the plan was he’d wake up,
which he finally did, and we’d go to sleep
and he’d drive and drive
without having to listen to us
complain as the miles
passed beneath us on our
ongoing uncertain journey
into this gray morning.
Now we are the drivers,
he the sleeper who sleeps
standing up in the moonlight,
his legs cramping.
He the sleeper at the breakfast
table, folding and unfolding
his dirty paper napkin.
He the sleeper whose antacids
I wish we could replace
with sleeping pills and let him go to bed
without his oxygen mask
and fill his lungs with the mattress
where he sleeps beside my mother,
apart from this world.
His hair is the color of ashes
not yet set free upon the waters,
and his mouth is open,
the mouth of a gambler
who cannot speak
but shakes the dice in the glass,
the pills in his hand,
as if listening for something
and does not know why.
We had a plan for this
but he is not really here to enforce it,
and without him we lack the courage.
I was always afraid of his plans
and am relieved not to have to follow through,
relieved that only the pillows reproach us now
as I lay my head down
for another night as a child.
The Material World
As the writer signed his name he said the drug
was taking away his nouns, but his name is a proper noun
and there he was signing it. And his face is a proper noun’s face,
and I was looking into it,
and his hand holding the pen above the book
was a series of shapely nouns existing in time and place,
which we were both occupying while Dear Katherine,
he wrote, which he corrected a moment later
by writing a large blue C over the capital K,
adding Lovely to see you under the salutation,
a play on words I understand only now.
Many hard years have passed since he wrote
in an earlier inscription
There must be an aesthetic besides death
with the same hand now closing the covers of his New & Selected,
a collection organized not by chronology
but by the alphabet, a more manageable affair.
Eternal Recurrence
I was no longer checked in under his name, Immortality,
but I’d do it all again, were we given such a thing.
Time is a monster, he’d whisper in my hair
before calling down for another hour.
Another hour after that and after that another hour.
As if the hours were ours to keep, to spend neverendingly.
He had to spell his name to the woman downstairs.
I am mortality, I can still hear him say
between kisses I remember to this day.
Accursed Questions, iv
I’m ready to try riddles, which apparently helped cure Henry VIII of dangerous melancholy, but the only one I remember is What did the zero say to the eight?
Nice belt could be the beginning of something and might for a few moments cure my melancholy.
Life, too, is dangerous.
Even days are dangerous. I’m serious. The ones around here can climb the apple tree and shake it to make the apples fall.
Sometimes my questions come out as if I were interrogating you, whi
ch is not my aim. My sister, who has the same upbringing, asks her questions gently.
My dog used to cock her head when I asked, You wanna go for a walk? Now she is ash on my ex’s shelf.
In King Lear, nothing is often the answer. In Augustine’s Confessions, thou is never far.
I don’t think we’re supposed to question God.
Into the Pacific crashed a plane years ago. They never found any piece of one of my sister’s daughters and so there’s the hope we try not to indulge that the girl is alive somewhere.
Is that you, I sometimes ask under my breath when I pass a beautiful child on the street, though of course she is no longer a child.
Is that you, I sometimes ask.
I am blue this morning. High winds again.
Get up, I tell myself, and then I say you need to sleep, look at you.
Should I lie on the floor here for ten minutes and sleep or storm ahead, some brief exhalations, these hands at the ends of these bent arms.
Tomorrow I’ll go through the when’s and try to understand something more about time, which is at the heart of the sonnets, along with love.
There are places in the world where people never ask riddles except when someone has died.
To be riddled with is to be made full of holes.
Jean, in “Sanctuary,” asks:
You who I don’t know I don’t know how to talk to you
—What is it like for you there?
More than any other speech act, a question creates an other.
What are days for?