by Kyle Dargan
began falling into their young laps.
It isn’t your fault. You did not stop the music.
Or if you did, it was Thelma Houston’s cover,
not this bearded prayer of negative capability—
the pleaseplease under each pace your parents took
beyond the cusp of realizing nothing so good
could stay that good so long.
DIRGE IN APRIL
Spend all your time writing love songs,
but you don’t love me.
~LIANNE LA HAVAS
As much as green is wilted white
the color of spring. And when
the public-radio street reporter describes
this morning sky’s hue as gun metal,
I sense, immediately, that he has never
caressed a denuded gun—never judged
its skin against his own hide. This
mauve sky’s threat is too soft a song
to coax a bullet from a barrel-throat.
Overcast atmosphere. I am fretting
spring’s first rain, its larceny—the cherry
blossoms snatched by a cool cascade,
leaving any petals not swept down gutters
to spoil and crisp on my sidewalk.
Renewal’s season always starts with this
extinguishing—before any tulip begins
stripping down to its stamen,
before hosta stems stab free
from the earth. First, this loss
of blossoms—a small heartbreak
followed by bit-lip humming
that somehow heals.
SONG OF THE MEN
There is an awful sound
in your skull—a din
you were not born with.
It is not the ambient noise
from your mother’s womb,
though it is a sound that fills
your sinus, throat, and ear caverns
like an amniotic humor.
Maybe it comforts you, though
its reverb inflames your eyes,
troubles all that you see.
Some have dubbed the sound
patriarchy. Others name it
privilege—both broad
in frequency. What do you hear?
Have you the time to answer—
so busy raising and pounding
your mallet against the earth’s
drumhead, constructing
new noises to drown out
that colonizing sound. In the absence
of a mallet or world to drum,
you become a dangerous being—
unable to make music to mask
that clamor you feel you cannot
silence. No work chant will save
you. Instead, turn the drum mallet
upon yourself—not to batter
but to dig down and excise
whatever within your head whirs
at this pitch that will kill you.
CONVERSATIONS WITH SLEEP
Violent lives ending violently. We never die in bed.
~RQRSCHACH
CONVERSATIONS WITH SLEEP ( I )
When rainwater swamped the lawn,
salamanders fled into the basement,
and when runoff breached
the cellar door, those slight
burgundy bodies groped blindly
for the crawlspace of my dreams.
This winter’s vice has been too loose
to keep daffodils from sprouting through
the earth’s skull. Tiny heads
themselves aching to bloom too soon
—more mouths. Winter still
a recession. Who will feed
more mouths?
I watched
with worry—hung my head outside—
then forgot to shut the window,
and now, Sleep, you’ve crawled in to do what?
What—lay an old lover’s name on my chest
like some big cat offering a kill,
a winged name that should have migrated
beyond memory by now? Must I fold
its flightlessness into my dreaming too?
Must I fit my head between your wild jaws
as though it is you, Sleep, and not I
who has been trained to be gentle?
CONVERSATIONS WITH SLEEP ( II )
Sleep, I looked on while you had your way
with that woman on the metro. How noble—
her late shift hauling baggage at Reagan
left her so weak that you could drape her
body across both seats, her neck and head
cantilevered over the train’s aisle.
Inevitably, when you pose us—our bones
not bones but wire—we go slack.
Your current in the wire quells our muscle,
our will. You odd sculptor, how you work us
from statues back into clay. Always,
you need to see us as earth. Patience—
we will return to dirt one day.
CONVERSATIONS WITH SLEEP ( III )
I know you did not make him, did not weave the flesh of this boy set adrift on his own subconscious and now run aground on my shoulder. I know his breath’s apneic ebb and flow is not your doing, but tell me, Sleep, how did you make him mine, make me his evening dock? He does not know my name. No more than seatmates on a short flight, we ascend and his head sinks into my side with a trust so foreign to me. I am no pack animal. I am only at peace when bedded down within a huddle of my own limbs—no others—as I have always been. Have I not? Tell me, Sleep, have you ever made me rest my body against a stranger’s? Speak. I will not accept the absence of restlessness in this child as an answer—this involuntary truss of his dreaming propped against my disbelief.
CONVERSATIONS WITH SLEEP ( IV )
They don’t lurch forth from the twiggy brush
of narrative—these wolves I dream of, Sleep.
I could be walking along a car-choked road
when, like wind-spun dust, they billow—
packs of fur and fangs. They swirl to life
and rampage around me. I flee.
Any and all in the vicinity run. Though
they are my dreams, the wolves
chase who they choose—mauling
the pedestrians of my mind.
Every door in sight a glass door. Wolf eyes
turn toward me, and I duck into a storefront
or office just before they pounce
—wet noses and snapping jaws mashed
against glass, a specimen of hunger.
Have you read the Dream Book, Sleep?
(Maybe you wrote it?) It claims my middle
brain either hungers or feels hunted.
But our dreams are the anterooms
between quickness and death—where
we divest of meaning’s demands.
So, say I dream
of wolves for their appetites draw them
to my subconscious’s gray habitat, and there
they feed before taking their mouths,
bejeweled with blood, to stalk another’s.
CONVERSATIONS WITH SLEEP ( V )
Each night that we’ve survived you,
Sleep, we’ve spared ourselves
a death. In bed, the restive mind
is a power line snapped in a storm
of earthly ruckus. It thwacks
black pavement, wails hot orange
confetti—all of it an aching
plea to rejoin the continuum,
plug back into the violent world.
Our faces reply with twitching eyes
that jostle beneath thin eyelids
until those shutters part and we squint
our way into a new day.
We do not beg the night
for placid slumber. One evening,
rest will come for us—that release
deemed heavenly, called peace.
But in your grip, Sleep, may our thoughts
riot against rest. May our minds fret
they are under siege by a relentless
world, for that is what riles us
up from indifferent bedsprings—
sweaty, palpitating, awake.
ESCHATOLOGY
IT IS ALWAYS DARK IN EGYPT
by the time tripods erect themselves
and foreign reporters have schlepped
back to their high hotels following sorties
into Tahrir Square. They proffer news
on a platter of night—the camera
scouring the black-green vistas,
then spotting a Molotov tumbling
end over end through the air
until it bursts on the back of a man
fleeing, blooming into wings of flame.
We know burning pinions do not soar
but, rather, embrace the body
until its writhing is no more.
Anglophone anchors pose questions
the dark won’t translate: Are these
protestors or Mubarak supporters
being set aflame, being dragged
into a hollow of fists and kicks?
From this transatlantic vantage,
a bleeding stalemate is all we can see,
and all I know for certain is that
I haven’t spoken with my father
for the past two months—since before
Tunisia even. I can’t remember
a reason. Something about a snowstorm
or about leaving my cell phone set
to silent too often—all his calls
I never seem to receive. A voice message,
my father barking in his language of goddamns.
I want to believe both my silence and this protest
are peaceful, but bodies are sprawled
still on Cairo’s streets, chants beginning
to sharpen the spade for Mubarak’s grave.
This is the point at which good is susceptible
to chaos’s seduction—when a former general’s
stubbornness blossoms larger than a nation’s
rebuke or where my pride grows heavier
than the nudge for a father and son to speak.
A week from now, he’ll give in—
ceding to the Egyptians’ coalition.
Amid so many exhales, a man will kiss
a bottle to then push the liquid, his lungs,
through a flambeau’s head—the fireball
a landing beacon for the new day: here.
And I will be wishing that a winter
storm had not become an ice wall between
my father and I—wishing that we
could be watching the world change
together, a thaw. I never called.
BARCODE
~after “Numberology, AP” by Claudia Vess
Morning does not begin until
the sun’s pupil scans my face,
reads the microscopic numbers
marked by the thin bars
of my pursed eyelids or lips.
Each day, my history is becoming
data, yours too. Even the years’
digits have been assigned
digits. I was born in the year
of the monkey, with an infant
hernia whose ghost pain
still shrieks when I ride
in a car or plane or coaster
that plummets sharply
(info encrypted in the lines
of my eyebrow, etched in thin
integers on hairs’ spines).
How daylight distinguishes us
now, how the moon knows when
our blood has expired—time
to erase our faces, save our data
in the flesh of another,
and order the earth restore
our bodies to uncoded pulp.
This system: such efficiency. Soon
none of us will need our given names.
THE ROBOTS ARE COMING
with clear-cased woofers for heads,
no eyes. They see us as a bat sees
a mosquito—a fleshy echo,
a morsel of sound. You’ve heard
their intergalactic tour busses
purring at our stratosphere’s curb.
They await counterintelligence
transmissions from our laptops
and our blue teeth, await word
of humanity’s critical mass,
our ripening. How many times
have we dreamed it this way:
the Age of the Machines,
postindustrial terrors whose
tempered paws—five welded fingers
—wrench back our roofs,
siderophilic tongues seeking blood,
licking the crumbs of us from our beds.
O, great nation, it won’t be pretty.
What land will we now barter
for our lives? A treaty inked
in advance of the metal ones’ footfall.
Give them Gary. Give them Detroit,
Pittsburgh, Braddock—those forgotten
nurseries of girders and axels.
Tell the machines we honor their dead,
distant cousins. Tell them
we tendered those cities to repose
out of respect for welded steel’s
bygone era. Tell them Ford
and Carnegie were giant men, that war
glazed their palms with gold.
Tell them we soft beings mourn
manufacture’s death as our own.
FOOL’S THERAPY
~for Rob and other dead “Bees”
Robert Peace is dead. Those words, writing them,
should assuage something. They do not—
they say nothing of his gruff brilliance, nor lure
my mind to parse the syntax of his passing.
I still envy the ease with which Peace untangled
derivatives—he helped me feel the relief
of not being the smartest head in the classroom
(a grace that serves any fool well in later life).
Still, Peace could also say the droll things
that needed saying, as he did during religion class
—his eyes absent, off reading through the window
what awaited us beyond senior year, beyond Newark.
He opined, “Beyoncé is so fine, I’d drink her bathwater.”
His hyperbole turned my stomach—recalling too well
what I’d learned of the body and what it secretes,
knowing too little of lust. What was it then
Peace was teaching me? My mind too busy
mulling what Father Matthew meant by saying,
“Sex without love is no more than masturbation.”
(He meant if you seek pleasure, seek pleasure,
not acts of love.) I inflate my basketball
the day after I learn Peace has been shot, has died.
I walk onto a giving plane of hardwood
and flick three-pointers at the hoop—not in love
with the world, just wanting it to grant me
simple pleasure, the release of releasing
the ball from my fingertips. No teenager,
my knees now burn with each leap and drift,
but at least I can predict what follows here.
Peace is dead. I please myself with shooting jumpers.
Sneaker-squeak, tap of landing, swish of contact—
the sequence a sonic salve. I don’t love the world
in this moment. I do as Father Matthew taught us.
GOLIATH
… And there it rises before us—
growing against our own disbelief
that god would grant a mountain legs
and arms and fists. For we phalanx
men, all our resolve wells from muscle
memory, no
t understanding.
We only understand how to aim
our pikes, tense our taxed torsos.
We are the grunts this world needs
to perish first. A lesson of blood
the goliath teaches us—
how the slurry of our defeated flesh
and bones will lube the clicking
gears in the earth’s clock core.
For we small men—not of stature
but of worth to the human
machine—for us seconds are
a deficient measure of time.
More exact are the pounding feet
of fate, that somber opening
rhythm in each of the goliath’s dances,
be it battle’s foxtrot or the sweeping
waltzes of plague or recession.
We are the ones who suffer first
so men of prestige, men of means,
are spared—so their folly may again rouse
the goliath, slayer of common men.
EXIT SEASON
~for 2012, a voracious year
An oak splintered by winter
wind reveals the riddled marrow
termites have made of its heartwood—
a rusted core echoing rusted leaves.
Once, a not-quite-old man told me
he admired winter for its cold
hands, how they tuck the elderly
into their final sleep.
This season’s visual confusion—
rivers swelled to a plush brown,
grasses frost-baked to ash.
Born in November’s anticipation,
each year, I can only long for spring’s
ripening through the frigid months’
dusky whispers. I play deaf as the season
tries its hand at charades. One word,
it pantomimes. Survive, I answer
before snow can remember to fall.
WORDS FOR THE DEPARTED
~for the Batipps family, 06.09.2012
These words, difficult to see.
Their letters hang, sway like paper
lanterns unlit in a fog—faint
outlines, not one shape clear
enough for our eyes to trace
or transmit back to the brain’s
den of interpretation.
For these reasons, we often cannot
speak the words we yearn to give
the people who have left us
for that shrouded spirit realm
that is mute with our ignorance
