though you globulous yet advanced beings
have surely taken a gander of our sizzling planet
and can see us even through our garments.
So you know about the little line—
how a soft animal cleaves from her
and how we swaddle it in fluff,
yet within twenty years we send it forth
with a shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled-grenade launcher:
you have probably worked out a theory
to explain the transformation. And you
have noticed how she looks a bit uncertain
as she stands on her right leg, her left thrust out
as if she’s put her foot on top of something
to keep it hidden. Could be an equation
on a Post-it, or could be a booby trap—
now comes time to admit we do not know her very well, she
who has slipped the noose of our command. Be careful
when you meet her, riding on her shaft of solar wind:
you will have to break her like a wishbone
to get her open, she whom we filled with teeth
and knives and snakes and bees.
Fireball
The TV knob was made of resin, its gold skirt
like a Kewpie doll’s, but it was gone.
So we changed the channel
with a pair of pliers (on the flat spot
on the spindle): chunk chunk
and then lo, Jerry Lewis. Chunk chunk and lo,
the marionettes with giant hands. The song went:
my heart would be a fireball. And in the chunking
and the singing and the watching, lo, my heart became one.
Less pageantry in the now. Say Sputnik: no other word
climbs my throat with such majestic flames.
Gone, the marionettes in flightsuits made of foil
gone grainy on the boob tube. The tremulous way
their bodies moved, my fear for their well-being.
The comic stupidity of the child,
which is forgiven. Unlike the stupidities to come.
The boy had a guinea pig named Fireball, so I taught him
the song by way of mourning
when it died. He still possessed his sweetness,
unlike older sons who think you are a moron without big
subwoofers in your car. To that son I say:
you may think you’re one of the alpha-carnivores
just because you’ve shot many avatars of whores
on a video screen that you will never have the Cuban missile crisis on;
you do not even really have the bomb, and how can anyone
command their cool without the bomb: Sam Cooke, James Dean,
those boys lived kitty-corner to their annihilation.
But my son glazes— what’s so special about the past
when everyone has one? And yours, he says,
is out of gas. Then vroom, he’s off—
you might think his car is breathing by the way the windows
bend. Welcome to the new world, Mom,
he says, if you hear singing, it ain’t a song.
To Carlos Castaneda
After the physics final, Gina and I, in our mukluks
scuffed past the swanky shops on Sherbrooke
then climbed the mountain in the city. December 5,
1975: I tried to will myself to have a vision, though the stars
would not cooperate— instead of a sweat lodge
or a kiva, the warm-up hut at the top of Mount Royal
looked completely un-aboriginal, a replica in miniature
of the Château de Versailles. With night all around us
cold and thick as glass, I don’t know how the starlight
managed to pass through it to sting me, it was hard enough
to lift my hand to knock the door, a joke,
it was so late. And here past the midpoint of my life
I think I’ll die without a paranormal apparition
to which I could wholeheartedly attest. I am not sure
I even have a soul, a corny soul, a little puppet
made of cream and feathers. Yet the door
did open (turned out to be only six p.m.)
and the old man said, Ah jeunes filles, il paraît que vous
avez froid. Then he unstacked two chairs and set them
down before the fire, still chewing its meal of logs
in the giant hearth. Inside the château of our silence,
we sat and chewed our lips: wasn’t the sacred knowledge
supposed to involve telepathy with animals, and astral travel
to planets made of light? Kindness (b) seemed too corny
to be the answer (Restez ici pour le temps que vous
voudrez) though we were given no other choice
except (a) his sweeping, and (c) the mice inside the walls.
300D
When he was flush, we ate dinner
at Tung Sing on Central Avenue
where my father liked the red-dye-number-toxic
bright and shiny food: spareribs, sweet—
and-sour pork— what else
was there to care about, except his sleep
under the pup tent of the news? And the car,
which was a Cadillac until he saw how they
had become the fortresses of pimps—
our hair may look stylish now,
but in the photograph it always turns against us:
give it time and it will turn. Maybe it was in 1976
he went to see the enemy, the man
(with sideburns) who sold German cars
and said: take it easy, step at a time,
see how the diesel motor sounds
completely different. So off he went tink-tink-tink
around the block in the old neighborhood
where he imagined people (mostly black: by now
his mouth had mastered the word’s exhale,
then cut) lifting their heads to look (-kuh).
And he, a short man, sat up taller as he swung
back into the lot to make the deal, although
to mitigate the shift in his allegiances
(or was this forgiveness?— for the Germans
had bombed his boat as he sailed through Gibraltar)
he kept the color constant. Champagne,
the color of a metal in a dream, no metal
you could name, although they tried
with a rich man’s drink. He could afford it now
though it made him feel a little silly, his hand a lump
of meat around the glass’s narrow, girlish stem.
Photograph: The Enemy
Great-Uncle Stefan wears the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s sailor suit,
its cap flat and black, his long
dark hair pomaded in a stiff
blunt skirt behind his neck.
There’s something about the nose’s
bulb-and-nostril conglomeration that we share,
and though I’m not a man I like to think
I am a sailor, with a waxed moustache like his
whose curled-up ends provide
an occupation for our nervous hands,
twirling it so as not to betray
with a squint or smirk his sympathies,
which lie with the murderer Princip.
Who shot the Archduke in Sarajevo, where
it took me a long time in the assassination museum,
reading Cyrillic via the osmotic method
of translation, before I figured out
Princip was the hero of the place: a person
could match her feet with his imprinted
in the sidewalk and pull the trigger of her fingers.
And enter the fantasy of being The One Who Caused
The Greater Past, which I could not resist:
my knuckle crooked, and clicked.
However I did spare th
e Duchess Sophie.
Photograph: Grandfather, 1915
It’s the Bronx, Barretto Point, so the sea
cannot be far away. But all we have to go on
is the lone pine in the distance— the rest
bleached by the chemistry of time. Also
there’s this young man in the foreground, squatting
with his forearms balanced on the fulcrum of his knees,
speaking to what’s disappeared. It is a blur
resembling a woman with her arm extended,
urging him to follow. Soon the Great Depression
will also call him, and for lack of other work
will send him downstairs to the boiler
where he’ll nurse the chromosome of sadness
while his words turn into coal. But he was not really
down there with the onions and potatoes—
in a moment, he will follow her
into the waters off Barretto Point, which will turn his good white shirt
translucent. Like the translucence he was led by,
but in this picture he hasn’t risen yet
to cross the muddy shoreline. He’s still crouched
in the upland, growing misty with the nebula who touches him,
misty at the prospect of his likewise turning into mist
as the camera makes this record of their betrothal.
Gleaner at the Equinox
Dusk takes dictation from the houses.
Sometimes sobs and sometimes screams—
laughter, too, though it doesn’t settle like the others
into the hollows of the Virgin Mary’s face.
In her concrete gown, she’s standing by
the satellite dish absorbing for the trailer on the corner,
wearing shoulder pads of Asian pears I stole some of
before the windfall fell. When the dog
lifts his leg to soil a withered rose I say Good boy.
Nightshade vines overtake the house of the widow,
their flowers turned into yellow berries
that there are no birds in nature idiot enough
to mistake for food.
after Dick Barnes
Lubricating the Void
Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper: I can barely pronounce your name
but have been thinking of you ever since your grease gun
erupted into space. Causing your tool bag to slip
beyond the reach of your white glove, when you were attempting
to repair the space station’s solar wing. Thanks
for that clump of language— solar wing! One of the clumps
of magic shat out by our errors. And thanks
to your helmet camera’s not getting smeared,
in the inch between your glove and bag— irrevocable inch—
we see the blue Earth, glowing so lit-up’dly despite the crap
that we’ve dumped in its oceans, a billion tons of plastic beads,
precursors to the action figures that come with our Happy Meals.
Precursors to the modern Christmas tree and handle of the modern ax.
Precursors to the belts and jackets of the vegans.
The cleanup crews call them mermaid’s tears, as if a woman
living in the water would need to weep in polymer
so that her effort would not be lost/so that there would be proof
of her lament, say for the great Trash Vortex
swirling in the current, for the bellies of the albatrosses
filling up with tears that can’t be broken down.
For the smell of mildew in the creases of ruptured beach balls,
for seabirds strangled by what makes the six-pack possible,
for flip-flops that wash up so consistently alone
they cause disturbing dreams about one-legged tribes
(described by Pliny before he sailed across the Bay of Naples,
into Mount Vesuvius’s toxic spume).
Dreams logical, Heidemarie, given the fearful data.
Dreams had by us who live 220 miles below.
Queasy from our spinning but still holding on,
with no idea we are so brightly shining.
Not Housewives, Not Widows
Bad luck to enter the houses of old women, a commandment
broken when I entered their stone cottage, two streets over,
covered in vines that twirled around a rusted swing set
though they had no child. That they were witches: a conclusion
come to, given that they wore the clothes of men,
their wool caps covering their secret hair, their house
so laced in greenwork that it seemed continuous with the woods
and its nettles and the nickel in my pocket, which they paid
for bee balm I tore out of their yard and sold
back to them, the dirt-wads dangling.
“Don’t let the birds out,” muttered while I slipped
into the room with its stone walls, the backdrop
for a wounded jay who lived in a tin tub rattling with seeds.
Birdfeed, newspapers, feathers, guano— I saw
one substance splattering into the next in the life undivided,
windows open, birds flying in and out.
They worked their conjurations by feeding chopped meat
through a dropper, and wiped their hands
onto their jeans so you could see their long black fingers
streaking up the whole length of their thighs.
Freak-Out
Mine have occurred in empty houses
down whose dark paneling I dragged my fingernails—
though big-box stores have also played their parts,
as well as entrances to indistinct commercial buildings,
cubes of space between glass yellowing like onion skin,
making my freak-out obscure.
Suddenly the head is being held between the hands
arranged in one of the conventional configurations:
hands on ears or hands on eyes
or both stacked on the forehead
as if to squeeze the wailing out,
as if the head were being juiced.
The freak-out wants wide open space,
though the rules call for containment—
there are the genuine police to be considered,
which is why I recommend the empty vestibule
though there is something to be said for freaking-out
if the meadow is willing to have you
facedown in it,
mouth open to the dry summer dirt.
When my friend was freaking-out inside my car, I said
she was sitting in the freak-out’s throne,
which is love’s throne, too, so many fluids
from within the body on display
outside the body until the chin gleams
like the extended shy head of a snail! Even
without streetlamps, even in the purplish
penumbra of the candelabra of the firs.
My friend was freaking-out about her freak-outs,
which happened in the produce aisle;
I said: oh yeah at night, it’s very
freak-inducing when the fluorescent lights
arrest you to make their interrogation! Asking
why you can’t be more like the cabbages,
stacked precariously
yet so cool and self-contained,
or like the peppers who go through life
untroubled by their freaky whorls.
What passes through the distillery of anguish
is the tear without the sting of salt— dripping
to fill the test tube of the body
not with monster potion but the H Two… oh, forget it…
that comes when the self is spent.
How many battles would remain
in the fetal pose if the men who rule would rip
their
wool suits from their chests like girls
in olden Greece? If the bomberesses
stopped to lay their brows down on a melon.
If the torturer would only
beat the dashboard with his fists.
Maypole
Now the tanagers have returned to my dead plum tree—
they sip the pond through narrow beaks.
Orange and yellow, this recurrence
that comes with each year’s baby leaves.
And if the tree is a church and spring is Sunday,
then the birds are fancy hats of women breaking into song.
Or say the tree is an old car whose tank is full,
then the birds are the girls on a joyride
crammed in its seats. Or if the tree is the carnival
lighting the tarmac of the abandoned mall by the freeway,
then the birds are the men with pocketknives
who erect its Ferris wheel.
Or say the tree is the boat that chugs into port
to fill its hold and deck with logs,
then the birds are the Russian sailors who
rise in the morning in the streets where they’ve slept,
rubbing their heads and muttering
these words that no one understands.
Matins
Every morning I put on my father’s shirt
whose sleeves have come unraveled—
the tag inside the collar though
is strangely unabraded, it says
Traditionalist
one hundred per cent cotton
made in Mauritius
Which suddenly I see is a haiku
containing the requisite syllables and even
a seasonal image
if you consider balmy Mauritius
with its pineapples and sugarcane.
And this precision sends me off
down the dirt road of my fantasy
wherein my father searched
throughout the store to find this shirt
to send an arrow from before the grave
to exit on the other side of it,
the way Bashō wrote his death poem:
On a journey, ill
my dream goes wandering
over withered fields
It suits my father to have hunted down
a ready-made for his own poem,
not having much of an Eastern sensibility,
having been stationed in China during the war and hating it
despite the natural beauty of Kunming.
They say a man dies when the last person
with a memory of him dies off, or maybe
he dies when his last shirt falls to ruin. Now
its cuffs show the dirty facing all the way around
and a three-inch strip of checkered flannel dangles down
into my breakfast cereal:
I have debated many days but
here it goes—
On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths Page 3
