by Tom Sleigh
all alone, with just my right hand to make do
for both hands, raising it high into
the air to search for the third arm
that between my where and my when
will father this crippled coming of age of a man.
6/ INSOMNIA IS THE ONLY PRAYER LEFT
How childish is the spectacle of the stained
glass’s holiness: the night doesn’t give a shit what
goes on inside human beings, the night
has its own web of dendrites refuting the inane
prayers prayed for the dying, for the confessions
going on between earthworms and earth, between
the way a man argues with his own shoulder bones.
All the while, barracudas in a coral canyon,
a sea turtle flying, swim through fathoms
and fathoms of images that keep crashing
on the shore of the eye that never shuts—
and smarts in its sleeplessness staring
up into the dark shadowed by stingrays, gas stations,
the slow flapping wing of a lottery ticket.
Global Warming Fugue
Sitting outdoors in perfect fall weather, waiting
for the waiter
inside to see me, I’ve put on my mask of No-worries! No-way-scared!
that now starts to slip
—it’s dumb to think of water rising and sandbags holding
a plastic tarp
in place against waves onrushing that won’t ever stop
slapping against
plate glass, the fear so intense it’s almost like my dream
of silence
when I can’t move a muscle and the taxi
runs me down—
the iced tea in my glass sweats in crystal-beaded rivulets
but it’s such perfect weather
who can think of global warming? But I did, I do,
I went online
and tried to find the places on earth where,
when all the shit
comes down in the next twenty or thirty years, it might be
OK to live—
there goes that woman again, talking to her brown mutt
she thinks is so cute
she stops almost every time she sees me sitting at my table,
“Isn’t he the cutest little bug,”
the bug-eyed Pekingese with the long brown fur darkening
to sable at the tips
looking oddly mongoloid, though really pretty friendly,
“Yes, cute” is all I
can ever manage, though now she’s off to the next table
where some college girls
don’t mind that liver-colored tongue licking them: ugh!
But so what, live and let live,
Mr. Fussy should just relax and go back to his doomsday:
apparently, Great Britain
is a good place to live out global warming because the land mass
of an island not too big
will still be temperate enough in the interior to benefit
from the ocean’s moderating
influence: first time I ever thought of the ocean
as moderating: I used to surf
in it, and get high before paddling out to get knocked
off my board in a thousand ways—
man, I was no Mike Doyle—Mike paddling out about sunset
just north of the PB pier,
and in his jams a baggie with a match and cigarette—I always
wanted to have Mike’s muscles,
long swimmer’s muscles, but rounded and thick
from years and years
of paddling, his short legs and lithe torso perfect
for walking up and down
his long board: just as the sun touched the horizon, he’d take out
his baggie, strike the match
and cup it from whatever wind was left (the wind always
dies at sunset)
and touch it to his cigarette (a Camel? Parliament? I never knew)
and then wheel
around on his board and paddle hard to catch the swell
you could see mounding up
under the pier, and when he’d caught the curl and his board
found an edge and spume
flew back behind him, he’d walk out to the nose and hang ten,
and take a long slow drag
before letting his hand drift down to his side, where he’d hang
that way forever, profile
the acme of cool, beautiful, I’d later think, as the statue
of the Winged Victory
at the top of the Louvre’s staircase—Mike smoking his cigarette
mixed with dope,
one hand behind his back, weightless and ineffable as an astronaut,
chest thrust out,
long hair briny and shining from foam tattering
as the wave
kept breaking behind him, or barreling on big days
over his shoulder
so he shot the tube, crouched down inside the green room
like crouching
inside that old chandelier store so crowded with chandeliers
you couldn’t move two inches
without glass pendants swaying and clinking against
your head and neck, brushing
against your shoulders, the glass chill, the light diffusing
all around your head.
All afternoon of Frankenstorm Sandy I walked down
by the waterfront (my ex-wife
who’s right about most things called me a thrill-seeker)
and watched the water
surging toward shore as the tide rose, swamping the pilings
over by the River Café
and breasting the ferry landing, gusts of wind tearing
at the trees’ heads
while the East River turned to overlapping scales’
dull gray and duller silver
that the gusts drove before them, trash whirling in
eddies against shore,
plastic bottles bobbing madly in scum-froth, driftwood
with nails glinting
washed at by the tide cresting, the flooding over
onto concrete
leaving tide-wrack along the waterfront walkways—
at least the ones
not shut down by metal fences weighed in place
by sand bags—
though chainlink fences also sagged in the wind and looked
about to topple
while ailanthus and elms lashed in heady arcs
that stripped limbs
off branches shedding leaves going yellower
and yellower
in the fading light contrasting with how gray
the sky got, the violence
of the storm convulsive, falling silent almost, then whipping up
even stronger so the wind
pushed you along, then stopped so abruptly my leg muscles
braced against its force
stumble forward wildly when the wind lets up
before roaring again
in a movie-Cyclops voice so that I thought more than once
this is like Cyclops’ cave
and I’m trapped here with the crew, though the crew would be
Sarah and Hannah, both safe
thank God up in Syracuse, and Ed and Lesley safely indoors,
Ellen up in Providence,
and only me stupid enough to be out: so Cyclops
starts shouting
that as a special favor, You, thrill-seeking Mr. Fussy, will be the last
among the crew that I devour
and the stoplight above my head suddenly sizzles out
and I wish I was indoors
or sitting where I am now, drinking my fourth iced tea and I’m
like a not-so-wily
Ulysses (and just how wily was he anyway, getting himself
> and his men walled up inside
the cave of a giant, hungry, one-eyed cannibal) who has to risk
his life because he’s
trapped inside his own myth, his hero’s story that he tells himself
even as Cyclops eats his men,
caught between the monster and his own self-image
entrapped like greenhouse gases
that have no place to escape to, while what he wants
to see himself be
here in the traffic noise and calm of fading sunlight
may just be the guy that’s me
who watches reflecting off the window across the street
and right into my eyes
bright streaks of glare flashing brighter as if the light is a knob
turning up and up in volume
so that I hear the movie voice start shouting, Noman is killing me,
Noman is killing me!
to which very sensibly the other Cyclops shout,
Well, if no man
is killing you, stop making all that noise.
From the Ass’s Mouth: A Theory of the Leisure Class
Up on stage in the three-quarters empty auditorium,
the lights turned down, up where the auditorium resounded
to A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed
clumsily by me reading out Bottom’s speech when he turns
from an ass back into a human while the rest of the class
sniggered or flirted, sat back and chewed gum,
the words in the auditorium lived out their hour—
and after rehearsal, when I got on my bike, red bike, fat tires,
to pedal home under cottonwood trees, I turned round corners
I’d never seen in our tiny mountain town,
years and years went by, I was still pedaling—
it wasn’t a dream except maybe in the way logic works in dreams—
I had two heads now, my ass’s head, my human head,
my ass’s bray more eloquent than my human bray
of wonder at my change: The eye of man hath not heard,
the ear of man hath not seen … my stumbling
tongue piecing through Shakespeare’s
bitter oratory about no bottom to Bottom’s dream …
I put my bike in the carport and started throwing
a tennis ball against the brick wall, thinking
over and over, no bottom no bottom—
the harder I threw, the more the words
weren’t mine, the ball smashing brick
while there in the auditorium the words
were like a taunt, like Theseus’s
taunts spoken behind my back because I was just
an ass, not Duke of Athens: but after the play, the cast
gave me the papier-maché
ass’s head and I kept it first in the room I shared
with my two brothers, putting it on to sniff
the dried glue, feel the claustrophic fit, and stumble
half-blind to the bathroom mirror where I looked
out at myself through holes in the muzzle,
the ass’s painted on eyes and lips what people saw
when they saw me, Shakespeare’s words booming
back from the head’s suffocating hollows
coming straight from the ass’s mouth, not mine.
I don’t remember how, but it ended in an alcove
above the carport where it softened
on the chicken wire, the paper sagged
and began to flake away, the muzzle and the eye-holes
shriveling into a gray, ulcerous mass—
when we moved from that town it got thrown
into the trash, taken to the dump and burned:
onion eaters, garlic eaters, hard-handed men,
that’s what Bottom and the mechanicals were—
and that’s what I was, what I’ve always been,
riding along on my bike’s fat tires
while that half god half man Theseus
laughs his courteous contempt of us whose
words come out like a tangled chain—which is
why there’s no bottom, why there’s never been
a bottom if you’re just an ass who speaks prose
to the Duke’s verse—an ass who kissed the Queen
of the Shadows and never got over it, my long,
scratchy ears and hairy muzzle pressed
to the ethereal, immortal, almost-not-thereness of her skin.
Stairway
In those days, so many stairways were said to lead to happiness, mainly of a sexual kind—and as I climbed those stairs, I could hear my name being called from the top, as I so often did back then—and the sight of me bolting up the stairs with my eager, cartoon tongue hanging out wasn’t as sad or silly as it might seem. Naturally, there were the avatars of sex, the ones who claimed to hate it, the others who thought it led to universal harmony—they were out in front of the rest of us, and they believed it, and so did I: but as a friend recently said to me, Always having to lead the way, be in front of the troops, all those speeches and sermons and truths you’d have to tell: such a burden. It went on like this, stairway branching into stairway, endless others going up or down to meetings just as I was. And after many years, there we were: to find you, to hold you, led like steps up and down … the sadness and silliness, though just as sad and silly, were somehow more in earnest. Even my doggy-dog instincts, strong as always, understood some reckoning was at hand. The two of us had decided, mutually and irrevocably, to start climbing a stair that we knew was partly ruined, unlit except by the capriciousness of moonlight. But we had a method—and until the day when one or both of us stumbled off into the nothingness below, we committed ourselves to it—when one said, Left, we turned left. Which meant, because I have a terrible sense of direction, that I went whichever way you went.
The Negative
Back in those days, when he told me about his adventures
in sex clubs it wasn’t the whys and wherefores
but technical details, like going rafting
down the Colorado River; and when he wrote
about a gay male friend whose first sexual experience
was with his stepfather, the friend told him
it wasn’t weird, but the best possible thing
that could have happened … I saw then that God,
who I never believed in, was dwelling in my heart
as a negative: that the negative had been developed
into a picture of a man who stares up at the sky
on a day so clear he sees through the mountain’s shadows
to the divinely human-seeming form that climbs it—
a neighbor in running shoes and sunglasses
jogging up the slope with his dog, tongue panting
and slavering, an acute look of happiness in its eyes
that could turn at any moment into exhaustion or pain
as in a maze of cubicles called Asshole Alley, little pyramids
of canvas called Lust of the Pharaohs, different pricing
for what you want, depending on the equipment,
the air thick with a sour, acidic, head-fogging reek
of come. … And my pal the poet, who believed
in infernal chemistry, in the spirit as a kind
of “spooky action at a distance,” he communed
with this God, this eternally dying father of all matter
who made out of our bodies his own maze of cubicles
where he hides himself away—his sanctuary
Asshole Alley where God’s own unholy loves
bubble all around him like a cauldron in his ears—
and my poet pal heard the bubbling, he stirred
the pot, he showed me the holy city, the sexual New Jerusalem
that came prepared as a bride adorned for her husband …
—That was how it was in those days, back when my friend
>
hadn’t yet met the coroner who wrote down
his cause of death as “polysubstance abuse”
that brought on his heart attack while fucking …
And regardless if I believed, whenever
we were together God shone clearer—
those were the days when every morning God woke up
in a blur of ecstasy and went to bed every night
in divine rage. Whoever loved him,
he loved. Whoever hated him,
he hated back: for who can doubt the vitality
of hate or the volatility of love.
Party at Marquis de Sade’s Place
It’s like you’re looking over my shoulder
and saying, as I sway on my third drink at the party
while a woman with pink hair and pierced upper lip
tells me how she did her piercings herself, it’s like
you’re saying, Hey man, why are you still here
instead of putting a gun to your head like I did?
Your voice is broomstraw, wispy, shattered,
sweeping away the woman’s voice who presses
on a scar dead center on her sternum and says, This
hurts, I used to have a piercing here—the light’s so sharp
I can see beneath her silk blouse’s sheer scalloped
edges a tiny patch of skin she rubs more raw, maybe
flirting but maybe not, both of us in our
bodies brushing up against limits that dare
us to go further, but also just doing what people
at parties do, nothing not allowed—and is that why,
my friend, you’ve come back, lonely maybe,
wanting to burst in with advice for what I
should say to her?—but neither of us is really
in this moment of this woman and me talking
but in this moment where your voice comes from rubble
on the mountain framed by the stone arch I’m
looking through, you’re saying, smiling,
Tom, I wanted to go out at the top of my game,
with good shoes on my feet, you know how much
good shoes and a suit, you know how much
all of that costs? And as she and I stand talking
right there at the actual Marquis de Sade’s
actual chateau that Pierre Cardin has bought to add
to his collection of four hundred chateaux, all of it
so ridiculously unlikely that I start to see your point,
I say as a way of flirting you’d applaud,
So how’s the old Marquis treating you? and she, smiling
back at me with her pierced lip says, Sadistically.
