Let me lie down
beside you forever.
Mattress
We wrapped it in plastic
and strapped it with duct tape;
we wrestled it out to the curb
where, dusted with snow,
it slumped like a body
the garbagemen fed
through the maw
of a truck that they drove
out the tunnel, to Jersey—
to the dump where a thousand gulls keened,
hovering over that map of old stains
where we’d dreamt, and read, and made love—
where we sweated out fevers
and fought, and gave up,
and once gazed at our blinking
three-day-old babies,
never thinking it would end
full of maggots and fleas,
full of suckling rats and blind moles—
or whatever out there
sleeps where we slept,
as it sloughs its guts into the dirt.
Barbershop
The mirror-reflected
mirror casts
my son’s grandsons
into infinity before me.
My father’s fathers
stretch behind.
When I turn,
they turn.
When I blink,
they blink
their pale green eyes—
as the old man
tightens a paper
band around my neck,
and whets his blade,
and sighs.
Elegy After a Suicide
I picture you leaving
your coat on the hood.
Wallet and keys.
The crisp envelope.
We all know what it’s like
to imagine the thing—
how glaring
and suddenly close
the tools are
if you need them:
a stoplight, a prescription.
A few feet of rope.
Or that joke of a pistol
you chose at the pawnshop
and loaded, and unloaded,
and cleaned,
then tucked in your belt,
like when you were seven,
as you crossed
a hayfield by the road,
where a sudden breeze lifted
the endless gray finches
and lit the bright
backs of the leaves—
your face the stunned face
of a prisoner then,
at the gateway
through which he’s released.
Vesper Sparrow
for Deborah Digges
All I can do
to keep from believing
where, in truth, your last steps led,
is think of the story
you told us, of Procne,
and how she was saved
by the merciful gods:
my vision of you
on the shimmering ledge
turning, in midair, to a sparrow,
your voice to its soft vesper call,
as you left the meaningless
body below you,
falling its meaningless fall.
Old Love
You, lovely beyond
all lovely, who
I’ve loved since I
first looked into
your blue
beyond blue eyes,
are no longer
anywhere on earth
the girl these words
call out to,
though never, since,
have I not been
a darkening wood
she walks through.
My Father’s Friends
sip Natural Light
and make these little grunts
as they unwind
the ACE bandages
and braces from
their elaborately
wrapped legs,
while a waitress
at The 19th Hole
recites the specials
for the second time
since we came in,
half-yelling at the group
of cranky,
stooped old men
who every year
give less and less a shit
what anybody says:
their menus out
at full arm’s length
as Tom Barnett, the doctor,
frowns and squints
through whatever’s left
of his torn retina;
as Wunder grimaces
and orders nothing;
as Gary, the ex-pilot, lets
a loud, horrendous fart
that no one even
seems to hear but me:
“the kid” at forty,
still awkward
and self-conscious in their midst,
like some scientist
in a herd
of big bull walruses,
watching as they chuff
and graze the last SunChips,
debating which
funeral was best
and which a sham,
and which dead friend
was, let’s be honest,
rolling over in
his fucking grave—
which is when
the conversation always fades
and they stare off
at a screen so far
across the room
that no one even sees
the hit, or pitch,
or photo finish
I keep going on and on about,
though out of courtesy to me,
and to my father,
they just smile and pretend—
so exhausted are they
by my cheerfulness,
and my quick wit,
and my long, bright future’s
plain, goddamned
irrelevance.
My Grandmother
squints at the attendant
with his white foam tray
and waves him off like a starlet
as she tells me Someday
you’ll understand, darling.
Everyone will just—vanish!
blue smoke exploding
around her head when she laughs
then stares at her fingers in silence,
flicking the ash.
III
Elegy for Smoking
It’s not the drug I miss
but all those minutes
we used to steal
outside the library,
under restaurant awnings,
out on porches, by the quiet fields.
And how kind
it used to make us
when we’d laugh
and throw our heads back
and watch the dragon’s breath
float from our mouths,
all ravenous and doomed.
Which is why I quit, of course,
like almost everyone,
and stay inside these days
staring at my phone,
chewing toothpicks
and figuring the bill,
while out the window
the smokers gather
in their same old constellations,
like memories of ourselves.
Or like the remnants
of some decimated tribe,
come down out of the hills
to tell their stories
in the lightly falling rain—
to be, for a moment, simply there
and nowhere else,
faces glowing
each time they lift to their lips
the little flame.
Alan the Plumber
and his helper, Miguel,
hit a pothole
on Atlantic last Wednesday:
a nub of raw cartilage
peeking out through the septum
as he told me himself
&n
bsp; how the airbag’s explosives,
and the dashboard’s gray shrapnel,
had blown the nose clear off his face,
over which the young doctors
laid a patch of wet skin
I could see they had cut
from his forehead:
a few gray eyebrow hairs
sprouting through the black stitches
as, deep in a mask
of oozing and swelling,
his big watery eyes
looked into mine,
like some child on Halloween night.
*
What is the meaning?
Where is the message?
Why have I dragged you
and poor Alan
together like this,
after all he’s been through?
There is everything we think
we know in the world.
And then there’s this shit
that just happens:
that falls from the sky,
or sprouts in our lungs,
or flies up from a windshield
without warning,
the whole planet charged
with the power
to open our bodies,
the way lightning lays bare
the pink, meaty striations
of heartwood, deep in a tree.
*
That’s it. That is all
I was thinking,
or trying hard not to think,
when Alan rolled
onto his back
and stared up at the drain,
his sweet, ruined face
turning to stone
in the torch’s blue flame,
while I stood over him
saying, as one knows
one must say, I am
sorry. I’m so sorry,
by which, we both knew,
I meant Jesus Christ. Jesus
fucking Christ, Alan, almighty.
The Guitar
It came with those scratches
from all their belt buckles,
palm-dark with their sweat
like the stock of a gun:
an arc of pickmarks cut
clear through the lacquer
where all the players before me
once strummed—once
thumbed these same latches
where it sleeps in green velvet.
Once sang, as I sing, the old songs.
There’s no end, there’s no end
to this world, everlasting.
We crumble to dust in its arms.
Elegy at the Trinity Pub
The beauty of the fisher-wife
in that sepia-toned tintype
stopped me on the stairs,
cradling my beer
as I squinted at a sea
of tiny schooners bristling
the St. John’s quay:
where she stared back at me,
a toddler almost hidden
in the folds of her skirt hem,
each hand a silver blur.
At work. At work, I slurred,
full of pity for the lost:
for her, for us,
for everyone, I thought,
as I blew a groggy kiss
across the century,
and staggered on.
Sunset Park
The Chinese truck driver
throws the rope
like a lasso, with a practiced flick,
over the load:
where it hovers an instant,
then arcs like a willow
into the waiting,
gloved hand
of his brother.
What does it matter
that, sitting in traffic,
I glanced out the window
and found them that way?
So lean and sleek-muscled
in their sweat-stiffened t‑shirts:
offloading the pallets
just so they can load up
again in the morning,
and so on,
and so forth,
forever like that—
like Sisyphus
I might tell them
if I spoke Mandarin,
or had a Marlboro to offer,
or thought for a minute
they’d believe it
when I say that I know
how it feels
to break your own
back for a living.
Then again,
what’s the difference?
When every light
for a mile turns
green all at once,
no matter how much
I might like
to keep watching
the older one squint
and blow smoke
through his nose?
Something like sadness,
like joy, like a sudden
love for my life,
and for the body
in which I have lived it,
overtaking me all at once,
as a bus driver honks
and the setting
sun glints, so bright
off a windshield
I wince and look back
and it’s gone.
Elegy with Gasoline
The only one the snipers spared,
as their helicopter hovered
above the temple wall,
was a lanky young initiate
who sloshed the amber liquid
from a jerry can onto his head
then bowed formally, deliberately,
to all those watching
inside the circle of their scopes,
as he opened his eyes and stood upright
and touched the stick of smoking
incense to his robe.
Aubade
It’s easy to pretend
that we don’t love
the world.
But then there is
your freckled skin. Then:
your back’s faint
latticework of bones.
I’m not saying this
makes up for suffering,
or trying to believe
that each day’s little ladder
of sunlight creeping
across the bed at dawn
somehow redeems it
for the thousand ways
in which we’ll be forsaken.
Maybe, sweet sleeper,
breathing next to me
as I scratch and scrawl
these endless notes,
I’m not saying anything
but what the sparrows out
our window sing,
high in their rotten oak.
Spell Against Gods
Let them be vain.
Let them be jealous.
Let them, on their own earth,
await their own heaven.
Let them know they will die.
And all those they love.
Let them, wherever
they are, be alone.
And when they call out
in prayers, in the terrible dark,
let us be present, and watching,
and silent as stars.
Variations on a Text by Donald Justice
I will die in Brooklyn, in January,
as snowflakes swarm the streetlamps
and whiten the cornices
of the sleeping brownstones.
It will be a Sunday like today
because, just now,
when I looked up, it seemed
that no one had ever
remembered or imagined
a thing so beautiful and lonely
as the pale blue city.
No one will stare up
at a light in the window
where I write this,
as taxis drag their chains
over the pavement,
as hulking garbage trucks
sling salt into the gutters.
Patri
ck Phillips is dead.
In January, in Brooklyn,
crowds of people stood
on subway platforms
watching snow
fall through the earth.
Yellow traffic lights
blinked on and off,
and only the old man
pushing a grocery cart
piled high with empty cans
stopped long enough
to raise his paper bag,
then took a swig, out of respect,
as a Cadillac turned slowly
in the slush, and slowly
made its way down Fulton.
Will
Scatter my ashes at Six Mile Creek.
Where the slickrock turns to greenglide.
Where the blue striders streak.
Drag Billy Mashburn’s old johnboat
Elegy for a Broken Machine Page 2
