by Angela Sorby
don’t let the hairs on my chin grow.”
No clots yet: our spines
climb up to our minds,
node after node,
though lately the ladder
seems long, and the sky
is comatose
in the bird bath,
its whole weight
half-floating, half-drowning.
How strange, murmur the bearded
irises, how entrancing,
to drop petals into the dirt.
Slowly they cede
their beauty,
except on posters
in suburban kitchens
where Van Gogh’s irises press
predictably against the wind,
as if color were muscle,
as if it were possible to resist
the copyists, the corset-makers, the stylized
forces of nature. Tonight I’ll pull
on my scuffed black boots,
where there’s space
to stash a razor.
The Ghost of Meter
1.
“The fault lies with an over-human God,”
wrote Wallace Stevens (bless his brittle heart).
His balding broker’s head began to nod,
then, Humpty-over-Dumpty, broke apart,
all smash and scatteration. There’s an art
to making chickens hatch. His spacious mind
compelled him to consume the yellow part
for salt. His daughter knew: he could not find
the words to leave ought but his words behind.
2.
Our father, Wallace Stevens, you are blind
to all we see. We walk you in our arms
like corpse-walkers in China, poised behind
the body, passing factories and farms
en route to the home province. No alarm
can jolt you from your sleep. The black-eyed girls
who pass on bicycles are swift and warm,
and as they ride the road they need unfurls
as if there were no fathers in the world.
Petition
I don’t want to pay
all the parking tickets my junkie
handyman racked up
using my Honda
while I was in Asia
on a Fulbright fellowship,
but hey! The judge says his wife
also did a Fulbright,
“had a fantastic time,”
and packed her white
privilege as a carry-on.
It was oversized. The airline
didn’t charge her a dime.
The judge declares
all fees dismissed,
but it takes me awhile
to find the exit,
because there are two elevators:
one for courthouse clients,
and one for prisoners.
Wide Boulevard, Tiny Apartment
At night Seattle’s scenery
sinks into Elliott Bay.
No toga party, no everybody limbo! No.
Limbo is stalling on the floating
bridge. Limbo is look out a cop.
Limbo is the Frontier Room’s closed—
even that guy Ben with scars for a chest
went home. A young woman lives
with a man she doesn’t love:
this is deep structural corruption,
the way the Pacific Ocean
keeps acting like an ocean,
even in dead zones
where toxins are man-made:
PS oligomer, bisphenol A.
So why does the brain bother
to rebuild itself in sleep
(carefully, nerdily)
as the blacked-out woman
dreams of drunk-
driving off a bluff?
O but they love her,
these organs she shreds:
gently the pons and the meek cerebellum
follow her to bed.
Boom Town
Raven scours the Pike
Place Market. He’s bereft:
the sun he once kept
in a cedar box is lost,
“replaced by an exact replica,”
as his brother the human
junk-picker mutters,
combing a dumpster
for cans. In the version of history
that didn’t happen,
everyone’s Salish,
Makah, or Tsimshian,
and under the Sound
a squid the size of Vashon
spurts ink enough to blot
out the Constitution,
but in lieu of that, what?
Sales stalls. Hipsters. Blind
buskers by the pig sculpture,
bending notes with a slide.
The singer bangs a crate.
The ground vibrates.
There is a fault,
a fault under Seattle,
from Fall City to Whidbey,
not fault as in guilty,
but fault as in geology,
bigger and deeper
than any historical error,
which is why Seattle can’t gentrify,
not entirely,
no matter how tightly
the newcomers close their eyes,
no matter how hard they visualize
a PDF copy, not dirty,
not bloody, as if the Coast
were not the West,
as if some app could elevate
the city above the quake.
Blood Relative
When my grandmother
was cremated she relaxed
enough to dissolve
off the Pacific shelf,
but alive she moved
neck-deep in nerves,
the way a spiny dogfish swims
even when it slumbers,
picking up electromagnetic
fields from the sea.
She’d disappear
to jump off the Aurora bridge,
and though she never did,
I still sense her slow surreal
fall in my chest. She always said
Light up to make the bus come,
which makes me miss smoking,
how it fills the lungs
with poison
that feels like heaven:
one suck on a Winston
will draw the Ballard #10,
its driver seeking
fire in the fog.
Letter to Hugo from the Land of the Living
Flew through White Center in a borrowed Volvo.
White Center, where they tried to snuff your ghost.
They used a tin can. They didn’t know who the hell you were
but they knew how it smells to suffer. Still you drift.
Excuse me while I block your path. Your eyes glide past,
seeking a type of female English major (younger, prettier)
who doesn’t exist anymore. The current crop would sue your ass.
So listen: soul retrieval. I know, it’s crap—a New Age metaphor,
so let’s call it fishing. Fishing from the hood of an old car
as bait floats down the Skagit. You’re parked at the edge,
waiting to yank—what—salmon? No, too heavy. Yuck:
in the Northwest (until recently) souls weren’t sexy.
This one’s moldy and mossy. Light rain falls on the scene
like a net. You can’t start a fire with wet wood. In this state,
no one freezes to death. They rot. Look: the soul walks,
like a deer under the overpass as if its legs were barely up
to the task. Drunk, fat, and dead: only the latter lasts.
You must remember this: matter persists. Beer
still resembles beer when it’s piss. Fresh water turns
to salt at Deception Pass. Richard—Dick—your shadow
can’t be cast. Instead, clouds cover the mountains.
&n
bsp; End of the Century
Chris “Slats” Harvey, d. 2009
1.
Post-millennium,
post-Lou Reed,
post-Elliott Smith,
it’s too late to subsist
on three chords
and a leather jacket,
so your corpse looks tiny now,
floating out to sea,
much tinier than a human soul
ought to be.
The waves move autoerotically
because they don’t give a damn
2.
about us velveteen rabbits.
We thought we could make ourselves real
by knowing the words to songs.
Nonsense
Colorless green
ideas sleep furiously,
but hang it all, Noam Chomsky,
you can’t drain meaning out,
not entirely,
because say you have a sealed can of Diet Coke
in your messenger bag
(not that you are a messenger)
and it’s dented and the dent
weakens the aluminum so it leaks all over,
then still, dammit: wet
Kleenexes and a wet wallet.
That dream you failed a math class
and now you have to retake it at the age of forty
but you can’t find the classroom
and you’re in your pajamas,
even that means
and keeps on meaning,
which is not the same as thinking:
it’s an outside pressure,
a chemical insoluble in water,
as is evident when the moon crinkles
Lake Michigan so it shimmers
like a black plastic Glad bag
but bigger, and inside
there’s more stuff (not all of it trash)
than any one sleeper remembers.
Flatland
At 46 I climb
the Cascade Mountains of my mind,
which is easier on the knees
than physical climbing,
but harder than dreaming,
since every step reminds me
I’m far from childhood,
far from the State of Washington,
“in a dark wood,” in midlife,
like Dante, only Unitarian,
and therefore stripped of all faiths equally
as I walk two pugs
through a nun cemetery
behind the boarded-up
Archdiocese of Milwaukee.
The nuns recuse themselves:
they don’t care whose sacred
text was right,
and I’m edging closer
to their neutrality,
which is a hum in the trees,
mingled with crickets,
but firm enough to ease
all opinions, even righteous ones,
off like a habit shed.
The Virgin bows her head:
she’s plastic, presiding
in a blue molded gown
over a shrine strewn with flowers.
She’ll never biodegrade—
she’s eternal as a juice box straw,
which makes me thirsty
for what she can’t give me:
salvation, an abstraction
that flooded my limbs
in eighth grade
when I converted, briefly,
to a Christianity
that promised to carry
the girls’ cross country team to victory.
We stood in a circle, praying
so fervently the field rose,
though the team lost State.
Now we’re close
to sea level—
Mary, the dead nuns, and me,
and my phalanges are collapsing
into crooked bouquets,
so when paleontologists
dig up my bones, they’ll wonder,
What was the ritual?
Who were the priestesses?
Where was their grove?
I want to leave them a note:
walk the dogs.
Let the oracles keep their secrets.
Double Neighbor
When I tire of unclear people,
their skin matte, their retinas black
as raccoon-masks, their vocabulary dense
with grit and fog,
I think, but what if they were clear?
We are not clear, you and I.
We are not vases, not lenses, not directions given
to a rapt class on the first day of kindergarten.
We are not rainwater: look, when the deer come up
to drink from the bird bath, their tongues
cloud it up, but cloudy
is a subset of velvety
Canadian whiskey,
a dram to calm
the lees of the day, a way to relax
into the dirty easy
chair on the porch. The sun sets,
and our unclear neighbor
drives up with a grocery bag full
of God-knows-what,
but there’s no God,
so her mysteries are intact. She’s 95 and still
all we know is her name,
Mary, a name she carries lightly,
in common with thousands of others.
Mary: the word tells us nothing about her,
but what word would?
Our lawns adjoin,
and the deer use all
the back yards on this street as one long hall leading
through this, our present tense—
our strange, indivisible evening.
Errand
The star and the star’s child
are both stars,
as is the star’s child’s child—
the universe goes on and on,
which is not news, but gossip.
No one can substantiate
such sweep. Walk the enormity
with me, son, but let’s not forget
the grocery list, milk, rice, sugar,
because matter consumes
its way greedily into eternity,
the pug with its large eyes,
the rust on the dry-docked boat,
and the clouds—
how they drink rain,
and are rain.
Interstate
Is it because I am finally old
that my young body passes by?
I catch it in the corner of my eye.
It has no clear gender.
Its shoes are in its hand.
It is condemned to wander
the lots where truckers park
their big rigs. Wheels are taller
here. Drivers log fake
numbers in their books
to make long hauls last longer.
And on the dark shoulder,
a stranger: that body. Its skin
fits too tightly. Its face
is drawn,
more notion than person,
like a pencil sketch of nightfall
fallen. Don’t look back,
wheezes Bob Dylan,
on the radio between stations—
that body’s heart is not your heart,
and all its cells are dead.
But Officer, I’m wide awake, I swear.
Go ahead. Slap my face. Pull my hair.
The Obstruction
Xiamen, PRC.
A bare apartment.
We speak no Chinese,
so what can we do
if our middle son eats
a fish head that sticks
in his throat?
When he breathes,
the bone breathes:
a sharp out and in,
more gill than lung,
more scale than skin.
We feed him hunks
of bread, hoping fiber
will force out the head.
Go, fish, go, we u
rge,
until, at last: goodbye.
Later, we burn amber
incense on the porch
and watch the fish’s
spirit leave our lives
in a curl of smoke—
still flexible and strong,
like the old monks
in Speedos who swim
out to sea at dawn.
Celibacy keeps us fit,
they say. To love
is to cede power.
At birth the infant
is helpless,
but so is the mother.
Duct Tape
To make the soul solid:
a Hohner harmonica.
Breathe out chords
and slowly it grows
sweaty and warm.
How many roads …?
When the screws fall out
it’s fixable, unlike children born
with normal skin,
the kind that age thins.
At airports harmonicas
rattle security.
The X-ray tech asks
Why so many holes?
What is it?
Will it explode?
Duct tape can keep
an old harp together,
and keeping’s not nothing—
it’s the opposite of terror:
fixed notes,
sticky integrity.
Steady now, breathes the B-flat
Hohner. Hold me.
II
The sheep, too, stand around—they think no shame of us,
and think you no shame of the flock, heavenly poet;
even fair Adonis fed sheep beside the streams.
