By the Numbers

by James Richardson

  He could tell from their pistol shots of laughter,

  their bucking and surging

  like someone learning to drive stick,

  their pretense and collapse,

  their talking on two cells at once,

  how they down strange solvents,

  their voices sax-raw or helium-high,

  how they take each other harshly,

  grinding together like stones,

  grinding alone like stones, that the young

  have statues in them, tall white statues

  they must dance out, drink to sleep, outspeed.

  Like a finger moving under a line of type—

  O god, slower than that—

  their future comes, the party they’re late for

  where people are saying incredible shit about them

  that they have to get to, and say, and say

  like how it really is, so they pile in and floor it

  till their backs stiffen and their faces change in the wind.

  IV. Twilight of a God

  That girl who drank from her hands

  huge wastes of wine,

  and his awe,

  was it? So that he surfaced,

  his head in a little clear spot above the music

  and a good bet was

  that whatever happened next

  wasn’t going to happen to him.

  Suddenly he wasn’t the minor deity,

  coat still on, in the corner booth,

  smiling benevolently upon his children,

  but a guy walking out, head down,

  into the cold of an outer borough,

  the signs unreadable, the age of Changes over.

  Though aren’t those still his angels

  at the gold bar of Heaven

  who lift glass trumpets to their lips?

  V. Orpheus at Last Call

  One of those dreams: you struggle and fail

  for years

  to dial a number, read a page, remember

  not to look back…

  (her hand confused in mine, soft struggle of a bird)

  I’ve drunk so much

  it rises in me: something like soft roots

  parts softly

  and my head sweeps down the singing river singing…

  VI. Apollo in Age

  Spring,

  I am no good with pain.

  Stop,

  I’ll tell you anything.

  Zeus: A Press Conference

  Eons we rule in our tall pale closets

  and all your talk is the few failures of distance

  even a man can read, in Ovid, in a few hours:

  brute swan, tsunami of gold, bull

  sliding the girl shark-swift into open sea.

  The robe drops, the sun widens to half the sky,

  the tachycardic certainty of death…

  So similar the stories, maybe all one.

  Whereas a god, on a million channels,

  is all thoughts always. Once a millennium, maybe,

  in his whited-out daydream he meets dark eyes

  and is rapt into an endless morning after:

  one man, one thought, one cup of coffee

  for what, to a god, feels like a millennium.

  You vultures, if you have to write, write

  this: the humiliation of a human story

  no god, with all Time, has the time to live,

  or even read to the end. No questions.

  State-Sponsored

  Oh dear, say the Tyrants, sex

  is naughty and intense

  and might save you.

  Please mistake it

  for what you’re not supposed to do.

  Echo

  And since she could only say back what she heard,

  she had to listen for what she needed to say.

  She haunted the edges of schoolyards first. Not it.

  Lovers’ lanes: hopeless. Cell phones seemed promising,

  but really. She started reading novels

  to put herself in the way of secret lives. It was the old story,

  speed that was made to be followed, not repeated:

  she remembered the ends of sentences, of sentences.

  Why hasn’t anyone said…? she thought, but couldn’t say it.

  What I want is… lilies in time-lapse bloomed, faces, explosions,

  which she tried repeating. Stares, curious at least.

  And if it had never in all history been uttered

  would accident help her? She tried mishearing

  flags snapping in darkness, the rumble of subways,

  misquoting the birds even, two-wit, twang-a-wire, sorry-sorry.

  Not quite, but there was something deep within them:

  hadn’t it been there at the world’s beginning,

  a silence? Yes, she could hear it still. It was like,

  like a dumbstruck boy who looked at her as blankly

  as if she were a pool, or he was, it was a question

  spreading out larger and smoother, time itself,

  to which she could hardly wait to hear her answer.

  Bit Parts

  In that monster epic of the checkout girl

  I’m the guy setting groceries on the belt

  in order of decreasing density, or maybe the one

  whose Did you get that coupon? is the last straw,

  so she streams out, shedding her smock, through automatic doors.

  In that later movie of the two old friends

  stopped dead in the whitewater of the crowd

  with sudden love, I’m the Excuse me sidestepping them,

  or the waiter they hardly see, clacking down two plates

  with tolerant amusement, which is my specialty.

  And in the film of the autumnal Liebestod,

  I’m the guy sliding her the desperate ticket,

  the arm hailing a taxi against the sunset,

  the blink of a bike going by. If you notice me at all

  you never ask Who is that? just

  What else was he in? since I am small, and they

  are large, these lovers, comets, and so swift,

  fast-forwarding their whole lives in two hours,

  hair blown back, that their whispers, stooping to us,

  would be sonic booms, their hot touch catastrophic.

  I sit, hand on your arm, as the Wave of the Century,

  some poor lifeboat poised on its crest

  like a sparrow lost in the whited-out sky,

  collapses, a terrible powder of light

  against the screen, roaring, leaving us dry.

  I’m the abrupt laugh, or the back of a dark coat

  up which, like rain on a windshield, climb the credits.

  I am that faint curve graphed on the sand

  in wrack and paper cups and foam that shows,

  as the light comes up, how far the night had risen.

  The God Who

  It was the small gods we talked to

  before words, though soon enough

  we forgot, and sadly, that what dawn

  or the shine of hips made the heart do

  was prayer.

  The god of a particular

  slow bend in the river, his friend

  god of the white boats swung around it,

  gods of moderately impressive rocks,

  of spots warm where someone was just sitting,

  of the deep sharp scents of shoes, of sounds

  whose direction is unclear, of silver linings:

  they appreciated whatever small appreciations

  came their way and, ignored,

  were not so much vengeful

  as doubtful in that early world,

  where the workload, if it can be called that,

  of their divinely inefficient bureaucracy,

  left plenty of time to enjoy the specialties

  of their fellows, god of just sitting around,

  god of the nasty slider, of low-batt
ery gleeps,

  of wine that gets better by the glass,

  the god (the high god!) of too excited to sleep.

  Actually, with considerable power

  over one thing, or a couple—a book maybe,

  tennis, unusual salads—but only average

  at, say, getting lovers or starting a car,

  they were a lot like us. Distinctions, in fact,

  were not rigidly maintained, it being proverbially

  difficult to be sure you’re immortal

  or that you’re not. There was intermarriage,

  bargaining, and respectful confusion (once

  language got going)

  about what constituted worship

  and what was just delighted

  saying of the names of things,

  which persists. So as for the god

  of the squeak of clean hair,

  of your hand out the car window

  wind-lifted, of the small shades under hat brims

  and not excluding

  the banned gods of leaf-fires and tobacco,

  oh and definitely including

  she of the coffee-breath and fine cold hands

  who says Sit down friend and let’s see,

  let’s just see, and certainly

  my other god, he of Least Resistance

  who decrees what is going to happen anyway,

  who listens only to prayers that end

  Let all be as Thou will’st, who grants

  only my wish to believe in him,

  and with the possible exception only of the god of making a list

  of all the other gods, who gets distracted and forgets so many

  that suddenly the universe is His and only His,

  praise them.

  II. Vectors 3.0

  Vectors 3.0: Even More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays

  1.

  The odds against today were insurmountable, until it happened.

  2.

  If you can’t take the first step, take the second.

  3.

  Experience afraid of its innocence is useless: no one is rich who cannot give his riches away.

  4.

  Spontaneity takes a few rehearsals.

  5.

  The days are in order, the months, the seasons, the years. But the weeks are work. They have no names; they repeat.

  6.

  Nothing dirtier than old soap.

  7.

  Office supplies stores are the cathedrals of Work in General. They forgive, they console, they promise a new start. These supplies have done work like yours a million times. Take them home and they will do it for you.

  8.

  When it gets ahead of itself, the wave breaks.

  9.

  Few plans survive their first success, which suggests they were less about their goals than about the possibility of a little success.

  10.

  The heart is a small, cracked cup, easy to fill, impossible to keep full.

  11.

  Hard disk: the letter I remembered as embarrassing is OK after all. I must have revised it just before sending. I never confuse what I dreamed with what I actually did, but this is different: which draft am I?

  12.

  Work is required play.

  13.

  My mistakes are not mine, but they are embarrassing because you might mistake them for my sins, which are.

  14.

  Perfection is besieged. Happier is the man who has done just a little better than he expected.

  15.

  How proud we are of our multitasking. What is Life but something to get off our desks, cross off our lists?

  16.

  I find my marginalia in an old book and realize that for decades I’ve been walking in a circle.

  17.

  The reader lives faster than life, the writer lives slower.

  18.

  Snakes cannot back up.

  19.

  First frost, first snow. But winter doesn’t really start till you’re sure that spring will never come.

  20.

  No one in human history has ever written exactly this sentence. Or anyway these two.

  21.

  Nothing important comes with instructions.

  22.

  The modesty of avoiding repetition is the vanity of thinking they must have been listening the first time.

  23.

  It can’t hurt to ask is a phrase favored by those who can’t quite tell people from institutions, thinking of both as randomly dispensing or refusing favors. Actually, it hurts me to be treated like a slot machine, maybe enough to pass the hurt along to you.

  24.

  I need someone above me—the Committee, the Law, Money, Time—to be able to say No. Sad my lack of integrity, though I suppose it would be sadder to need them to say Yes.

  25.

  The knife likes to think of itself as a mirror.

  26.

  The tyrant’s self-esteem is just fine, thank you. It’s you he doesn’t care much for. And yes, he recognizes that he doesn’t feel what you feel. Which is a good thing, since your feeling is so weak that it makes him need to beat you up.

  27.

  Self-sufficiency clings… to itself.

  28.

  He’s angry at the wronged for making the world unjust.

  29.

  If you do more than your share you’d better want to: otherwise you’re paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.

  30.

  The ascetic’s last pleasure is blaming you for all he has forgone.

  31.

  There are two kinds of people in the world… and who is not both of them?

  32.

  Beware speaking of The Rich as if they were someone else.

  33.

  We’ve learned to wonder which neutralizes truth more effectively, the tyranny’s censorship or the democracy’s ten thousand media outlets. In the former truth is too costly, in the latter there’s no market for it. In Freud the facts get around the censor in the metaphors of dreams, in Shelley we live in a dream of overfamiliarity and dead metaphor that only the poet can revivify. Does repetition emphasize or hypnotize? Which is clearer, what we see or what we don’t see. Are we new or old? Do we love hate or hate love?

  34.

  You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don’t.

  35.

  Somehow the guy who’s really interested in absolutely everything is really boring.

  36.

  Sophistication is upscale conformity.

  37.

  The mirror’s so quick it only sees what’s in front of it.

  38.

  Knowing how to be pleased with what’s there is a great secret of happy living, sensitive reading, and bad writing.

  39.

  If you think you might be lost, you are. If you know you’re lost, you’re at least free to look for the way.

  40.

  What keeps us deceived is the hope that we aren’t.

  41.

  Everything is about politics. No, wait: everything is about sex. Money, art, God, self, work.

  42.

  For those who tread lightly enough the air is a stair.

  43.

  I often find myself intoning Clarke’s Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, or anyway half of it, since everyone’s heard it already and interrupts. Actually the technology doesn’t have to be very advanced. I drive a car and grasp the basics of internal combustion engines but I still treat mine as halfway between pet and malevolent deity, muttering reassurances, curses and spells. Maybe a chip designer gets computers well enough that they are purely technology, but he can’t know that much about meteorology or gene-splicing or, well, poems. What differentiates technology from magic is not our knowledge but our faith: that someone else understands.

  44.

  Clarity is neither transparency nor light. It’s the angle t
hat suddenly lets you see through the window’s glare, the pond’s reflections.

  45.

  Faith is broad. It’s Doubt that’s deep.

  46.

  How badly I’d like to believe that my cherished moderation and heavily defended calm could rule the world. But as things are, somebody has to feel too much, somebody has to speak too loud, somebody has to be completely unreasonable.

  47.

  Don’t trust the revolutionist with your freedom: he’s an authoritarian who just happens to be out of power.

  48.

  Patience is easiest when it’s the best way to make Impatience really mad.

  49.

  Is he talking about world hunger or just hungry to talk, is he angry at injustice or just angry, is he ruled by conscience or does he just need to rule mine? Probably my scruple about purity of Faith is irrelevant, but so, if the standard is Good Works, are his words.

  50.

  Listen hardest to the one you hope is not telling the truth.

  51.

  The coy and impotent self-importance of subversive. A bunch of kids in black who can’t think of anything better to talk about between drags than how uncool their parents are.