by Mary Karr
We’re the naysayers, the risk-takers. I came here cowed
and heartbroke. The first rat I saw scramble across my path
heard a shriek. Now, the vermin catch my boot sole.
Roaches flee from my light switch.
Bring us your fuse lighters, your bomb wirers.
Ply our teeth from our mouths we’ll scream bloody
curses against your progeny.
VIII. Obadiah: A Perfect Mess
I read somewhere
that if pedestrians didn’t break traffic laws to cross
Times Square whenever and by whatever means possible,
the whole city would grind to a halt.
Cars would back up to Rhode Island,
an epic gridlock not even a cat
could thread through. It’s not law but the sprawl
of our separate wills that keeps us all flowing. Today I loved
the unprecedented gall
of the piano movers, shoving a roped-up baby grand
up Ninth Avenue before a thunderstorm.
They were a grim and hefty pair, cynical
as any day laborers. They knew what was coming,
the instrument white lacquered, the sky bulging black
as a bad water balloon and in one pinprick instant
it burst. A downpour like a firehose.
For a few heartbeats, the whole city stalled,
pauses, a heart thump, then it all went staccato.
And it was my pleasure to witness a not
insignificant miracle: in one instant every black
umbrella in Hell’s Kitchen opened on cue, everyone
still moving. It was a scene from an unwritten opera,
the sails of some vast armada.
And four old ladies interrupted their own slow progress
to accompany the piano movers,
each holding what might have once been
a lace parasol over the grunting men. I passed next
the crowd of pastel ballerinas huddled
under the corner awning,
in line for an open call—stork-limbed, ankles
zigzagged with ribbon, a few passing a lit cigarette
around. The city feeds on beauty, starves
for it, breeds it. Coming home after midnight,
to my deserted block with its famously high
subway-rat count, I heard a tenor exhale pure
longing down the brick canyons, the steaming moon
opened its mouth to guzzle from on high . . .
IX. Ecclesiastes: Amok Run
Who could deny that one in twenty thousand would as soon
Run among you wheeling an axe. I myself confined
In a subway car befumed by the farts of strangers do wish them
Heartily dead, which I text my son who texts back,
You are so not a shepherd. My America has Glocks in it.
I growl most days over the bones of whatever I’ve paid for.
Mine own neighbor in his slot across the hall
From my slot used to strike me as a bachelor eccentric—
Collecting opera scripts and papers stacked floor to ceiling
Like kindling. Then I came in at three a.m., up
The old tenement stairs to find him squiring a street boy
Perhaps fourteen out his apartment door. Furtive, this man
Scuttling past like a scorpion, the boy moving as if drugged
Holding the banister. He looked Native American
And had a hickey on his pencil neck and black scars
Inside his arms from recent needles.
How long that night I stared at my spackled ceiling
Till at dawn I knocked on said neighbor’s door
To declare: We won’t have any more
Drugged-up boys in here now, will we?
X. Psalms: Carnegie Hall Rush Seats
Whatever else the orchestra says,
the cello insists, You’re dying.
It speaks from the core
of the tree’s hacked-out heart,
shaped and smoothed like a woman.
Be glad you are not hard wood
yourself and can hear it.
Every day the cello is taken
into someone’s arms, taken between
spread legs and lured into
its shivering. The arm saws and
saws and all the sacred cries of saints
and demons issue from the carved cleft holes.
Like all of us, it aches, sending up moans
from the pit we balance on the edge of.
XI. Hey Jude: Prophetic Interlude by the Ghost of Walt Whitman
Out of the ether I have come to speak to you
Off the right-angled sidewalks of this city,
A place whose food carts scorch the flesh
Of many slaughtered lambs.
I am a scout sent to label what’s vanishing, to capture in bell jar
The whiff of lime leaves and coconut milk from Go-Go Curry
Where the prayer rugs unroll five times per day so men
Can bow to the eternal while huffing taxis double-park outside
Unmolested by pumpkin-orange parking tickets
And the Now Baking sign never stops flashing. There are buns
In many ovens, and I record their rise and the passing
Of minor saints: the woman whose lavender hair
Is the shade of faded irises as she conducts a discourse with
The Invisible: finger raised in a pose that evokes Confucius
or Socrates. I chronicle the industry of the Garment District
Where a giant speaking some Slavic language into his headset
Shoulders a box of rolled-up Chinese silks—gold butterflies,
Scarlet dragons, white chrysanthemums like fireworks
On emerald cloth. The rolls poke up like organ pipes.
The pedestrians this day are not maggots on meat,
But dancers who weave and heft their packages
To clear a path for each gliding profile.
XII. Malachi: Truckload of Nails
In the bright stutter of neon, the truck’s driver
feels the stock prices fluctuate
across his newly shaved face. His shirt is white linen.
His mouth is now shaping the name
of Jehovah, who set us loose upon this hurtling earth.
The truckload of nails is packed
to explode among the soft pink and black
and beige bodies running
to and from their separate containers—many
gnawed up inside, serpents
hatching in heads, while in one of the city’s
sewers oozing steam there’s a device
wired to a cheap drugstore alarm, the scarlet digits
counting down, and only the rats watching.
XIII. Hebrews: The Mogul
Some childhoods are so powerful
they drag on a man’s soul like a magnet.
By day, he stands in boardrooms
silhouetted by the slide projector’s beam.
Above twelve hanging neckties, a dozen faces
tip up at him like kids watching a cake carried out.
His laser light sweeps across a landscape.
It always lands in the spot
where the treasure can be dug for.
At sunset, they escort him to the limo.
Each man presses into his palm a card
with name embossed. They wave
from under the awning as snow falls.
Because it’s Berlin, the consonants spoken
are sharp as barbed wire in his head
yet muffled by memory and snow.
The black car glitters inside with crystal,
amber spirits, VSOP. One sip, and his head
nods. The man’s soul is sucked under time
as through a pneumatic tube.
He goes burrowing back and back
to anot
her century when the mother figure
slips her wedding band under his tongue.
She ties a bundle to his back, her face wet
as the train doors seal her away forever.
Auf Wiedersehen . . . Then a long gauntlet
of gargoyles his stubby legs flee
across brown stalks in a frozen field.
He balls himself up all small in a haystack
as pitchforks jab, and every scream swallowed.
Later, he’ll stand at the wall
of windows on the world, snapping the neck
on a water bottle as one might murder
a wounded bird. The tower he stands in
is flown at by two planes aimed at his unblinking,
the sky flawless blue when his line ends.
XIV. Lamentations: The More Deceived
(for George Saunders)
The jackhammer the man in the crosswalk wrestles with
He also leans on. It shimmies the cage holding his heart.
He wears royal blue tee over jelly belly, and his yellow helmet
Casts a gray veil over his face. The shaking moves up
Through my legs so the bone marrow shivers.
The air swims with swirling particles that make us ghosts.
At the crosswalk, the worker pauses to lift his face. We see
Each other: Hello, fellow sufferer! Many ways to become dust.
When the towers shed their flaming skins we’d first seen
Bodies falling from high windows like acrobats.
Those flights so brief, and Hell too endless to ponder.
It lasts and lasts. That’s the point, repeating its evil
Self to the damned in detail.
Weeks after the attack, the masked firemen
In rubber boots melting from the heat wore asbestos gloves
Like oven mitts to labor in the pit.
Alongside George, I clung to the hurricane fence
Around the perimeter encased in stench of burnt rubber.
We couldn’t stop
Watching before everyone was saved,
Though it was a form of porn, of course.
The worst wasn’t when firemen found
A bit of human matter — finger or tooth —
And it was placed on its own stretcher (so small!)
And some signal was given and all work came to a halt,
And men cupped their helmets over their heaving
Chests. The worst wasn’t even the work starting back up
And men sliding their helmets back on and bending down
To rubble again as the stretcher with human matter
Snaked across the smoking pile to some tents —
The worst was looking into George’s round glasses
At his dark blue and brimming eyes
As he said we were enjoined
By that smoking scene to live fully awake
Every instant after, for only presence
Could honor the lost, and yet neither of us was capable of it —
Not even for two minutes however much fasting and prayer,
For that big slutty whore of a city was beckoning,
And we wanted pizza and hand sanitizer, and had to hit
A fundraiser and, ergo, must shower the stench off ourselves.
And to escape the smoke, which we feared was scorching
Our otherwise pristine lungs, we walked down over rocks
By the water to find the fence where kids of the dead had wired
With baling wire stuffed bears and dolls with stiff arms
Outstretched for fucking ever and those last notes
Laminated and drawn in listing block print
By the small and weak and mostly illiterate.
Blue crayon tear, x eyes, frown face, prayer hands.
XV. Kings: The Obscenity Prayer
Our Falter, whose art is Heavy,
Halloween be thy name.
Your kingdom’s numb
your children dumb on earth
moldy bread unleavened.
Give us this day our
wayward dead.
And empower our asses
that they destroy those
who ass against us.
And speed us not
into wimp nation
nor bequiver us
with needles, for thine
is the flimflam and the sour,
and the same soul-
sucking story in leather
for never and ever.
Ah: gin.
XVI. Marks and Johns: The Blessed Mother Complains to the Lord Her God about the Abundance of Brokenness She Receives
Today I heard a rich and hungry boy verbatim quote
all last night’s infomercials — an anorectic son
who bought with Daddy’s Amex black card
the Bowflex machine and Abdomenizer,
plus a steak knife that doth slice
the inner skin of his starving arms.
Poor broken child of Eve myself,
to me, the flightless fly,
the listing, blistered, scalded.
I am the rod to their lightning.
Mine is the earhole their stories pierce.
At my altar the blouse is torn open
and the buttons sailed across
the incensed air space of the nave,
that I may witness the mastectomy scars
crisscrossed like barbed wire, like bandoliers.
To me, the mother carries the ash contents
of the long-ago incinerated girl.
She begs me for comfort since my own son
was worse tortured. Justice,
they wail for — mercy?
Each prostrate body I hold my arms out for
is a cross my son is nailed to.
XVII. The Like Button
Back in the before time
those days of amber
desire was an inner
and often ugly thing.
And if we wanted,
my brothers and hungry
sisters, we were oft flung
far from each other. Think
tin-cans-and-string far,
plum-colored-smoke-signal
far. No web wove the pinpoints
of ourselves into a map. No
upward thumb could be pressed
to say yes or its detractor: no.
Soon, we may each evolve
a glow button maybe mid brow,
so as we pass each other we can vote
praise or scorn to light up yay
or nay on a passing stranger’s face
a thumb. At first the young celebs
with asses you can serve drinks off
will rack up zillions of votes
till we tire of such bodacious butts,
and then the smart, the brave,
the strong will take their turns,
but what if we start to like,
say, the stout, the schlubby
neighbor raking leaves or that
subway sleeper who’s woven
yellow crime scene tape into
a jock strap—Police Line: Do
Not Cross—till all the undeodorized,
the unloved all their lives, start to feel
their foreheads blip
and blip as it becomes hip
to love the oddest, the most
perilously lonely. Imagine
the forever dispossessed
transforming as they feel the thumb
of yes impress itself
into the very flesh.
XVIII. Petering: Recuperation from the Sunk Love Under the Aegis of Christ and Isaac Babel
(for Amy Koppelman)
If you spend all night reading Babel and wake on an island
metropolis on your raft bed under a patent-leather sky
with the stars pecked out, you may not sense
the presence of Christ, the Red Cavalry having hacked
up
all those Poles, the soldiers hugging each other
with their hatchets. This morning, my ex-man
is a caved-in box of disposable razors to ship back.
He wore a white Y on his baseball cap. Night
was a waterfall down his face.
Marry me meant, You’re a life-support system
for a nice piece of ass; meant, Rent
this space. Leaving the post office, I enter
the sidewalk’s gauntlet of elbows. All around me,
a locust buzz as from the book of Job. Yet I pray, I
pray: Christ, my Lord, my savior,
and my good brother, sprinkle me
with the blood of the lamb. Which words
make manifest his buoyancy in me.
If the face of every random pedestrian is prayed for,
then the toddler in its black pram
gnawing a green apple can become baby Jesus.
And the swaggering guy in a do-rag idly tossing an orange
into the crosswalk’s air might feel heaven’s winds
suck it from his grasp as offering.
His gold teeth are a sunburst. When the scabby man
festooned in purple rags shoulders an invisible rifle
to shoot the do-rag dude, he pirouettes,
clutches his chest. Light applause follows
his stagger to the curb. The assassin bows.
These are my lords, my saviors, and my good brothers.
Plus the Jew Isaac Babel, who served the Red Calvary,
yet died from a bullet his own comrade chambered.
That small hole in his skull
is the spot on the map we sailed from.
XIX. Philemon: Notes from the Underground
Tonight this subway car is permitted
to bear me in its belly through a black tunnel in rock.
And in the evil of my pride, I get
to forget I am You-formed—needlework of hair
stitched to my scalp growing outward,
stonework of bone, fret lines of tendon.
In this dark vehicle, I sit unstrapped
among other similarly shaved animals.
The long light above us is sick green,
the rivets holding our vehicle together are regular
the way stars are not. They foretell
fuck all. I place my palms together, fingers unlit
tapers invisibly burning for you.
Thirst is the truest knowledge of water.
XX. Revelation: The Messenger
