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The Sleeve Waves

Page 2

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.

 

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