by Kyle Dargan
of what comes after the last steps
we tread on earth. We are born
to leave this place. We are born
to eventually enter another.
Two realms—and to be human
and still breathing
is to be blind to that angelpath
ahead of us. Still there exists
a third realm—not of bodies or souls
but the miscellany of life sketched
along the interiors of our skulls.
It is primitive and imprecise.
It is memory—our pilot light,
which may not spark each lantern letter
but will make enough flames bloom
so that we may spell the names
of those who have departed,
so that we may breathe
remembrance into this fog of absence,
parting it—not calling our lost back but
proving they once stood among us.
CHARM
Stowed just behind my ear,
hidden yet within quick recall:
this memory of the Mamdouhi sisters
and the dance they danced
before a capacity audience of me.
I had crossed the Lambeth common,
climbed the stairs to the younger’s
dorm room—in need of some book
whose importance withered once
I arrived and they asked if I wanted
to see them move together.
Too shy to say “yes” with confidence.
Too man to not say “sure.” (Today,
I would say “please.” I would
say “thank you” before such a gift
is given.) Precision. Synchronized
sisters. Transfixed—such a stiff word.
Give me a term that blends
guilt and awe, makes a duet
of those feelings. It would name
that swirl in my gut as I trained
my gaze to their sharpened feet, pursed
thumbs and index fingers, blinking
eyes like chimes. I wondered
who was I to be offered their dance
homework. Who would believe
what I was being shown? I studied,
made an art of being present, certain
this recital would never happen again.
As I later floated from their room,
my father’s voice shook my skull:
Son, life is all downhill after college.
I stash the memory of their dance
for the days when I feel my father
just might be right, and I’m descending
midlife’s gyre. I’ve been lucky—I saw
some of the summit. I can remember
that I’m tumbling from an apex of grace.
THE MEDIOCRITY PRINCIPLE
I am watching the stars, admiring their complex trajectories through space, through time. I am trying to give a name to the force that set them in motion.
~DR. MANHATTAN
CONTEXT
I know this about my body—it has edges.
Its surface swelled against, chafed,
my mother’s viscera and was seasoned there.
This truth a truth that fits within another.
You tell me the truth of our universe
begins with a big bang. I say that bang
was simply a body. Thus, there must be a body,
a form, from which the rough energy
and atoms rocketed free. Bang. I cried
when the white coat pulled my slick head
free from my mother. I never made a sound
while within her, but I was there—a pulsing
potential, a fly in a fist, bound but not
crushed. What applied the pressure
necessary to mash egg and seed or dark
matter and fire toward the tipping point
of birth? I’ll accept your theory, your big bang,
but what body first housed those elements?
There are no sourceless starts.
My body tells me a presence preceded, a body
that compressed, propelled what would become
the universe—the ever-echoing wail.
POINTS OF CONTACT
Name one revolution whose inception was unlike a fist.
Factions disparate, then tucked together—coiled like a fist.
Foreign policies are symbol languages—idiomatic, cryptic.
In America, nothing says “We desire peace” like a fist.
The heart is a one-man rave in the body’s industrial district.
Blooddrunk and insomniac, it pumps toward sleep like a fist.
Mammogram magic revealed my lover’s dense breasts.
Behind each nipple I kissed, a soft knot threatened her like a fist.
Our universe’s yet shattered mysteries fear the astrophysicist.
“Damn his galaxies-thick glasses, his mind, relentless, like a fist.”
“Like a glove”—the young groom exalts his wife’s love, its fit.
Sounds romantic. (He means sex—her love’s grip like a fist.)
“An unfocused punch, Kyle, risks a broken hand or wrist.”
So laden the psyches of men. Father, must I also think like a fist?
CALL AND RESPONSE
~A mash-up of the Lord’s Prayer and “The Message”
Our Father who art in heaven,
there’s broken glass everywhere.
Thy hallowed staircase pissed on
by those who care not
for thy kingdom, thy name.
Come—thy will be the smell.
Thy will be the noise
on Earth. In heaven, no
money moves. Give us
this day our rats in the front room,
our roaches in the back,
and forgive the junkie
in the alley, his baseball bat.
But trespass in this place
we try to get away from. Repossess
those who’ve trespassed against us.
Lead us, but do not push—
we’re so close to the edge of temptation.
Deliver us from our lost
heads—this evil trying us.
For thine kingdom is like a jungle.
Sometimes, it makes us wonder
how your power keeps.
We go under. Glory
forever?—a ha-ha ha ha.
Amen.
EUCHARIST
God the locksmith. God
the language. The unfinished
suits of us. God the tailor.
God the light–
house and tempest. God
the immune system. Afflicted,
we. God the earthen
path. God the cross-vaulted
and high. God the un-everything—
as in the alpha inscribed
between the omega’s labia.
God the I. God the histamine
inhibitor. Bless me.
May our heads split to see
the gods within our God.
God the stained–
glass window: spectrum
of unraveled white
light. God the father
of the bait (hook, line,
sink into us)—the word
of prophets and a son
who dissolves on our tongues.
REVERENCE IN THE ATOMIC AGE
Pair me—lay me
covalent—with a breathing
body that would not laugh
were I to proclaim, Salvador
Dalí was god
come to frolic upon earth,
a body who would allow
my fingers to scribble inert
scriptures across her forehead
as Dali brushed Medusa’s visage
over Gala’s blank brow.
Looking into his wife’s eyes
turned Salvador soft, not stone,
&n
bsp; turned him to flammable.
I want that—this world
already full of statues.
My mouth is a plinth
piled with plutonium
isotopes waiting
to be split with a kiss.
DEAR RELIGION
Listen now to something human.
~LI-YOUNG LEE
First is urge, then the urge to act
upon urge—the former absolute
impulse, so cellular, buried
so far within us that to grope for it
would require we delve
down beyond flesh, threaten
to breach that brisk unknown
for which our bodies serve as dams.
What if it is resonance and not sin
that is original? Each heart pulse,
each lung swell: urge, urge,
urge. Steady and metronomic—
desire’s tempo. Urge: the faint
tapping that knows the body
longs to slow drag, to prance,
boogie.
The righteous choir
chides “all the earth’s surfaces
are not dance floors.” Fine,
but cannot we know restraint
without muting the bottom,
corporeal beat: urge, urge, urge.
Our ears must chew the cud of it—
mastication marking us
not cloven but blessedly human.
MAN ON AN IRON SHORE
“What train is this?” asks an adolescent
with burnt peach curls, with cutoffs quite
short for the few years her face holds,
thighs too slim to distend the denim.
She wants New York. She wants you
to assure her that this train won’t stop
at Secaucus—that the line will continue
coring rock and darkness until arrival,
slow and dirty, in the city that awaits
no one, the city whose eyes
crack groggily only to peer above
thousands of feet unclean—multiplying
and pressing down avenues
in search of whatever they believe
the city’s name has promised.
You are not the city. You are a man,
though not a father nor brother by blood.
You could tell the girl, “Wrong train”—
her desired destination is a den
not for adolescents racing against
their girlhood. Feel your own age, recall
a time when you would have longed
to serve as her Charon—young
and bored with ferrying yet willing
to promise her soul’s safe passage
in exchange for a phone number
scribbled into the meat of your palm.
That boy is no longer you. Tonight,
want only to befuddle her, to leave her
wandering Newark Penn’s platforms
until frustration ushers her home pouting
as you want (no, need) to remember her
now that you are a man who has ruined
and has seen ruin.
But one lie will not damn her flood—your noble
deceit no more than a hitch in her evening.
Know she will ask another. Just tell her,
“New York,” and forget the word “girl”—silence
whatever chaste bell it rings in your mind.
Drown it in the chime of closing doors.
ART PROJECT
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and
increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.”
~GENESIS 1:28 (NIV)
I walked among men for a year
with the task of pausing if I heard
one speak the words, “I fucked her.”
At that point, I’d produce for them
a sketch pad and kindly request
drawings of what each man implied.
Those too shy only stared
at uninked pages. No shame,
I assured. God knows what you google—
those “Os” his eyes—and still
you have not been struck down.
So draw. Some began tracing
from memories the curves and buds
of breasts. No, give me symbols.
Give me act, I implored. They drew
boulders crushing other boulders
into sand or guns fired point-blank
through panes of ice. One drew
a pickup truck—its revving tires
stripping pelts from the dirt road.
The trend was one of leaving
something marred if not wholly
shattered.
I was not bold enough
to ask those men-turned-artists
if they’d desire what they drew, to be
themselves fucked. Rather, I inquired why
they thought the women wanted
what their art promised. One: “It’s not
women. It’s their bodies. The earth
breaks, desires to be broken.”
Another: “The girls—I mean, they beg
‘harder, harder.’ They say it—‘Fuck me’”—
deaf to the ways language acts as landscape.
What if the women are only speaking back
to the easels they see behind male eyes?
Imagine if god had appeared before man
as the self-portrait of a woman. Would they
have listened when she did not sketch
the earth as a body men needed to subdue?
MULLIGAN
If I’ve failed as a man, upon expiring
I’ll be returned to this fuzzy rock
as a koi. I’ll swell against enclosure
like an American (again), but
this time it will be my body
bloating instead of my ego.
I pray I do not fail. I lament
the life of bright fish in ponds—
mouths cleaving water, gasping
with no language to expel.
That is why we love dolphins.
They’re what we dream of—talking fish,
what we hope fortune’s wheel will stop on
should the gods dial back our evolution.
But I’m certain that if I fail,
I’ll be brought back as a silent, ornamental
koi and not a dolphin. I’ve already said
enough in this life—me and my big, wet mouth.
NONE OF US SAINTS
~for Ruth Dargan
Tell me who presides over the service
when the minister’s mother has died.
Whose hands attempt to lift him? Who
surveys his self-anointing face, explains,
This is the Lord’s will—the cancer
that swam through and seized the body
in which the preacher’s flesh first firmed?
Thou art a rock. Thou hast shown thyself
firm. Maybe. It’s possible he could
right himself—weak though giving
his weight to the pulpit—and raise
his mother’s spirit skyward with the wind
aid of God’s breath. But, no,
he would be more human than holy
at her passing—more Adam than angel.
Let him remain on the floor—
saliva and tears blended on his lips as he begs,
No talk of God—my mother is dead.
Tell me where I’ll find that preacher.
He is the one I will summon
to send my dying grandmother home—
a man, not a rock—for none here are Peter,
none of us saints. We are braids
tied between birth and death’s buoys.
None of us know that dark
sea beneath, but bring me the preacher
who can cry, who I can see
brims with sa
lt and water.
UNLESS MAROONED
never pen a message and set it adrift
in a bottle you have not drained
with your own lips. Your words
need to be heavy with what once
sloshed within that glass—be it port
or a malbec’s harsh blood.
The tongue should be coated—
not only the enunciating knot
of muscle in the mouth’s locket,
but, too, that subvocal tongue
that hums with each word heard
in your mind as you write.
A bottle’s chance of arrival will rise
if you fill the cavity beneath the cork
with more than ink, paper, and air.
So first swallow. Break down
sugars and tannins—you are
a refinery. With the grape’s blood
now in your blood, write “I have
drunk. I am lost. Come find me.”
PALE BLUE DOT
We’re far enough from heaven. Now, we can freak out.
~DEEP COTTON
Either a romantic or subtle sadist,
Carl Sagan begged NASA to burn
Voyager’s hydrazine thrusters,
rotating her hull so she might
capture one last snapshot
before drifting beyond radio
tether—exiting the literal
edge of our galaxy.
The image she spat back:
bands of deconstructed rainbow
and one blue speck. That’s us,
some astronomer gasped
once the matter of his mind
could discern our infinitesimal
everything wrapped in blue
fabric—atmosphere’s loomed light,
which we recognize from pristine
days when our eyes pan upward.
Though we have that photograph,
only Voyager has felt the cold
pull of witnessing all that we are
fitted on the head of a pin
pushed into a black expanse
wider than any sky we’ll ever face.
NOTES
Opening: Epigraph taken from “Sooner or Later” on N.E.R.D’s album Seeing Sounds (Star Trak, 2008).
“Within the Break: An Author’s Note”: Epigraph taken from Fred Joiner’s poem “Song for Anacostia” published in Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, D.C. (Alexandria, Va.: Plan B, 2009).
“China Syndrome or Slow Ride from Logan to the Heights”: The WMATA 54 bus line, running up Fourteenth Street, connects the Logan Circle and Columbia Heights neighborhoods in northwest Washington, D.C.
