whether he still has what he once had.
Is impressed with how promises of sadness
are so often fulfilled. Wishes he could push restart.
Understates. Is accustomed to therapy.
Plans to pull his inner and outer lives apart.
Hopes online is where love becomes clear.
Doesn’t know his friends. Cannot make it cohere.
Just got cable. Is unable to state his decision.
Feels like a knife balancing on its own incision.
Home
You leave your emotions all over the apartment
like the empty glasses you leave all over
the apartment, wine rings at the bottom, dregs
I mostly fail to scrub out. I feel you
seething under every paper towel, starched
and stained with coffee and applesauce.
I pick them off tables like a quiet maid.
You know I shiver at the mess, left in trade
for the piles of my books left blocking,
then killing your thirsty plant, for the dishes
piled high in the sink until you can’t
rinse your hands or find a fork. You spread
your books across my side of the bed.
While you sleep I press my foot against your leg.
Fame
I sleep like a rock usually, snoring like a rock grinder.
Mostly it’s Brenda who can’t fall asleep—any reminder
of tomorrow’s work, or today’s, makes her thoughts spin.
When I’m worried awake, it’s mostly about dying, or Cal, alone—
who will take care of him when Brenda and I are dead?
But sometimes I like to think of my writing with sweet pity.
It’s a delicious hurt, this kind of self-indulgent drone
in which two of tomorrow’s readers remember me:
“He was a prolific small press poet, good, not great.
His wife was a major writer. I think I used to own, or read,
one of his books—it was sarcastic, grumpy, and grim.
A very minor Robert Lowell, with a dash of James Tate,”
is what I imagine they’ll say when they look back,
“and he died sometime in the 2030s of a heart attack.”
The Past Ahead
I find myself looking forward to the past,
confident remembering will lengthen it,
that even forgetting will make it last
a little longer, as all the amassed
memory returns in flashes bit by bit.
It seems so accessible, so near, the past,
as though it were my own very vast
place, neither behind nor ahead, easy to visit.
The fact that it doesn’t last
makes no sense. I hardly have to cast
thoughts backward before I inhabit
—so why not look forward to?—the past,
full of real things I can pick up—the glass
dancer my mother loved, the statuette
my father bought her for their last
anniversary, the anniversary of which just passed.
She’s dead; that’s all that caused their split.
She’s all I’d go back for; otherwise the past
is forgettable at last. The dead last.
Like an Answer, Yes
Death will come like a cool glass of water,
like one among the countless leaves you see,
like a car, any car, driven by a son or daughter,
and like an answer, yes, but there are so many
for each question, and, anyway, the right one
is only right when it happens to be.
It will come in a last breath, or just after breath is gone,
or just before a first breath, or one squarely
in between, a deep breath, say, along your daily run.
It will come like a wish fulfilled, a wish barely
made, which, once granted, is always
different than what you wished. Be safe; wish warily.
It will come like money, which usually pays
the same—there’s always less and always more.
It will come like a messenger from yesterday,
who, though you can’t enter, holds open a door,
or, even before you bring her home, your new wife,
who is already carefully keeping score.
But it’s not death that scares you. It’s the rest of your life.
BOOK TWO: A CELEBRATION
Beginnings for an Essay in Spite of Itself
I can’t precisely say how but I always knew, for instance, I might. Yet in my dream he was standing and dirty playing in the dirt while those of us on the committee drank and deliberated and our dear one took care distractedly. I have to go somewhere in a car. And so it begins. Or so it begun, and it goes on.
I’m thinking of something. It almost starts as a finished product, loose, changing (kind of like how Saul Bellow used to phone Ringo Starr all hours of the night), so things won’t feel out of place or, worse, rejected. It might be what goes on in that head of his.
Because ninety-nine percent of secrets are kept by accident, those revealed on television let alone social media account for less than the way the sun is so small. It can’t be seen from another vantage point in the universe, should anyone attain such a perspective alone. The phone rings, but I wouldn’t have wanted to answer it.
I don’t believe any of that about the self in the world being parceled out, not really being the self, and I have no faith whatsoever that the “I” in one sentence bears any relation to the “I” in the next. The reader could close his or her eyes and reopen them on someone else’s prose.
Ever in the midst of a fashion show, the heart is concerned about career. The part of you that was laughing at you is still laughing at you though now another part, not the one the first part was laughing at, but another that was watching for a while, is laughing at the laughing part.
The most painful are the things you would do most tenderly. An ending isn’t a cure for anything, yet, as a child, I believed myself fated for greatness or luck so dismal it could be a kind of greatness. But I would still have had to make all these choices, which is why all poetry has been suspended.
The earth and moon will fall out of orbit if either closes its eye. So it is with the two of us. I want to have the nature of an essay—a hypothesis, proofs, a conclusion—crossed with that of a confession (here is what I did and why; I regret but would not have done otherwise)—but the various sentences should ignore each other, have ends that simply won’t knit together. Perhaps in the middle the piece could mention itself as a clue.
But is it truly suffering if you survive, are remade, even enhanced? Is suffering an upgrade, a walkway toward booby-trapped tune-ups? Whoever answers gets $3,000 from the Administration for the Preservation.
Bragging rights to him who suffers most, to him who suffers most dramatically. The performance of suffering is a social contract between person and pain and fans taking notes against the dawning of their own pain, like the day a ship first leaves port marked with a soldier’s beautiful scar.
A nest of flowers: what made it? A bird?
If only I could start to speak from his vantage point rather than my own, to know what he does, to be one of them, lucky few. Every night for an hour in his bed crying like a staple in his foot like he wants to spit up blood before finally letting himself fall.
He was so tired, speaking of the luck when a lion crosses your path.
Life is not an antidote to itself. That’s how plaque was discovered between most library books. Snow fell, denoting a required field. You have mixed feelings aboard the train speeding from love to love, where you can sense me grinding.
Thank you for grinding. You could be so sad if only you’d try. She who looked upon you would weep. She who touched you would grow cold. She who talked with you hours into the night w
ould tomorrow find only water where her ears had been. She who promised her life to you would have all the tears she wanted and good company beside every deathbed.
I wanted my story sideways, without asking anything of anyone or presuming I felt anything anyone else couldn’t. I wanted, finally, to author a story that wasn’t mine in particular, but belonged to me and anyone who read it, a story no one would be jealous of or shun, a story no one would ask questions about nor be able to anticipate, a spontaneous story as old as a fable, a story someone could give back to me as a gift. I’d be so grateful.
Grief: A Celebration
Heaven must be dying on time
at the end of a long life, family
at hand, goodbyes hovering
like hummingbirds, which,
if one is absolutely still,
sometimes land on a finger and sip
honey as if from nowhere. One would feel
full as at the end of a rare meal
prepared by an old friend, for which
one has brought a dessert to say
thanks. Whatever one feared,
it did not come to pass, as it never
does, at least not quite
as one feared. There is nothing
to regret because all has been
forgiven, and, anyway, this was
a trial run. And so, when
a newly-minted angel
of death comes to the door—she has just
earned her wings, her flight
was unsteady—your family offers
a drink and a seat at the table, which,
of course, she politely declines,
before you joyfully take her hand,
walking backwards toward the exit,
both of you blowing kisses and
laughing like newlyweds boarding a cruise.
The distance between us is
actually composed of time
more than space, though there is space
between us, too, but it’s not
as important. Celebration
can be a kind of grieving, an aspect of grief
and vice versa, which is to say
grief is not necessarily sad. I’m lucky
to have had these few loved ones
die on me, and these few others
live on as though dying, on the
very edge of death, an impurity
that nonetheless cleanses, like
the subtext of a very long,
meandering sentence trailing off.
Adulthood came early,
swooping like a hungry owl, beautiful
and dangerous. That
is what I wish someone would offer:
absolution. Great responsibility
overcame me, an illness, a revelation
as when in Swann’s Way little Marcel
is absolved, his “unhappiness . . . regarded
no longer as a punishable offense
but as an involuntary ailment which had been
officially recognized.” Is a few more
hours of childhood so much to ask? No,
but it is far too much to grant.
And who might one ask, anyway,
without annoying them?
The children everyone loves seem to know
the answers already; they ask
the questions just to be polite.
Nobody knows at the beginning.
Only gradually, as the beginning
begins to end, and then after it’s over,
but before the very end, does the self
reveal to the self what the self
has always known.
There are some things you don’t
write down, not secrets, just facts
beneath the necessity of articulation,
of a minor frequency, a local broadcast
in the beat-up, way-out town
in your heart, where some uncles live
without wives or other serious ties
to women. These are things you know
to be true, which would be truer
if you found words for them,
as if they were discovered by someone else
who told the whole school before
you got there one fateful morning.
Don’t pretend there isn’t a high school
in you you just can’t graduate:
you’re not popular there, but at least
everyone knows who you are.
It’s one place you’ll always belong.
Another one about trying to grasp
time, to grip it like a rough rope
sliding through blistering hands,
in which each of his chances
scuttles beyond him, in which he
imagines that through description, naming,
he might make more of his time.
Let’s get to work, try and calm down.
Let’s be nice for a change. Who are we?
It’s the two of us—you and me—or just
myself and another self, also mine,
but less so, like a little cousin,
a drop without a pool to join.
Is it strange that I sometimes feel
like an intruder in someone else’s home town,
despite, or because of, having been invited?
The mind is a little party where one stands
in the corner and waits
for a fantasy girl to stroll up
and coax one into conversation. Of course
she won’t, so one is merely waiting
for an appropriate chance to leave.
As soon as one such occasion
disappears, another comes into focus.
What would it feel like to live
forever? Would you forget sometimes
and assume your death was inevitable,
that this might be your last taste,
only to be struck dumb, suddenly robbed
of your appetite, when you recall
that you have more time ahead of you
than the gods, who will die
just before you do, when the last atom
of your faith expires, O old one.
Even the gods have their doubts.
Even they can’t scratch every itch.
If you could feel no pain, wouldn’t you
long for it, try and try to hurt yourself
just for a change? Even the gods need a break.
And there’s description: as if
to get into words, and therefore into
the mind, what the eyes
or the ears or the fingers detect
could keep the fleeting world
from fleeing. Who hasn’t
chosen a particularly delicious
memory over, say, a tedious half hour
while a band plays and everyone
is watching them, no one watching you?
You’re free to think? Words are souvenirs.
If I could be anywhere now, wouldn’t I?
Not because I would make different
choices, but because it pains me
to think that I now no longer
have the option to have made
different choices. Which is another way of saying
no matter what we did we would end up
at the end of the long hallway without
doors or turns, just a straight,
inevitable passage, like a bad idea.
Nothing feels right. Feelings
are like someone else’s clothes.
Nonetheless you might be identified.
I make lists when I’m most afraid,
as though, if I just keep at it,
I will finally get home to where
my mother and me are how we were.
Life is as fragile as a sheet of bible paper.
There is only one world, and no one makes it
all the way there. I say things like that
&
nbsp; to myself to explain everything I love,
which is trending toward decay.
You are always preparing, preparing,
and then nothing happens,
an eventuality for which you were unprepared.
At the very core of fear is the obvious,
too deep to see and too simple to understand—
professionals have died trying, their bones
lining the path that leads
to the answer, which is complex
but also the same text as the one
inscribed on a plaque by the entrance.
I have yet to meet anyone so different
from anyone else I’ve met. I even recognize
myself reflected in the puddles of others’
mistakes. Did you ever notice how
they pool, making rainbows?
Upon first publication, each page
is like a temple along the pilgrimage
to that most holy shrine, The End.
And so I took the easy way, if only
because I was surprised I found it.
I’ve been tempted since to try the hard way,
just to compare or to have something to say
to the next in line. But there are some steps
you can’t retrace, because something
swept over the footprints behind
or I really wasn’t paying attention. It seems
—doesn’t it?—like the whole world is erased.
There really is no distinction
between worship and superstition.
The heavens are wide enough to hold
everyone’s cries, but too wide
for anyone to hear them. You have
the very pervasive sense that if you just
keep talking you’ll make it,
though embarrassment is only a symptom
of what truly unsaddles you.
You are almost across the covered bridge.
Once on the other side, though, you’ll see
another bridge, this one uncovered.
The snake swallows its tail despite the taste.
You imagine yourself old amongst trophies:
the thick volume of collected works,
dozens of toothy children beaming
To Keep Love Blurry Page 5
