by Tom Sleigh
But now you’re telling me how some aristocrat stood
gazing from the death cart with undistracted eyes
at the sights of Paris, the crowds gathered on the sides
of the streets no longer blocking the view so
for the first/last time he saw the buildings, windows
of houses he’d visited and got drunk in, as I’m
staring now though my stare’s nothing like your condemned
man’s blinking, infinite leisure—So fuck it, you said,
that’s how I decided to go out, looking
at it straight, OK? And then I’m back talking
to her pierced lip while I watch you watch me play the fool
by staring up into the sun in its million
million years of never breaking down—
though just by shutting my eyes I can make the sun fall.
ER
Don’t look behind you is what I remember telling myself,
scared in the prison opening all around me,
for encircling me were tiers of cells and walkways
in a circle leading up to the skylit dome where a dozen birds
whirled among the Russian prisoners you could visit by paying
a few rubles. They dressed in black uniforms, wore flat black caps
and pushed mops and buckets in front of their black boots,
the slopping water driving a mouse down the corridor,
mops leaving a slick of soap drying on stone floors.
When the doors closed behind me, I could hear
the room I’d been in go silent and the room I was entering
grow louder—and then there weren’t any more prisoners,
no white nights, there was just me and the triage nurse
and my urine sample—black—what have I done wrong
or what has gone wrong and what more is
going wrong before it can’t be helped? And then a Mr. Mohammed,
from Queens, one foot amputated, the other an open wound
wound in bandages, began to shout, despite his diabetes,
Bring me my apple juice! I am a son of Prince Abdullah!
And the nurse brought him a little juice box
but asked him about sugar, should he be drinking sugar,
and he told her apple juice was fine, it was orange juice
that was bad as she quieted him down
by patting his arm—but then he started shouting, Ice! Ice!—
what kind of hospital is this that you don’t give us ice?
And so she brought him ice and quieted him
down by patting his arm, until he asked her in a voice
that already knew the answer, Do you think my foot
stinks? Tell me what you smell. But despite the smell,
and despite the old man groaning in the bed next
to mine, his smashed hip still unnumbed by morphine, Dilaudid,
even OxyContin, while his daughter keeps pleading
with him, saying, so gently, for what seems like hours, Dad,
please, you have to keep covered up—despite the metronomic
drip of the IV in my arm, the contrapuntal
beep of the heart monitors, my panic
begs me to let it go—I’m not going to die, am I? No, not
this time, maybe another, my mind skittering off
into crevices and corners to sniff out
some crumbs left by one of the prisoners who so tames me
that I creep into his hand to eat out of his palm—and when
I finally do die, he’ll put me in a cigarette pack and lay me
under the cross in the exercise yard in the insomniac white nights,
while over the wall, littering the parking lot, lie hundreds of messages
the prisoners write on paper scraps they fold into darts
and through toilet paper rolls joined painstakingly
together into long blowguns, blow out
through the barred windows to be picked up by
what must be mothers, sisters, girlfriends since all of them
are women unfolding and reading and putting
the messages in their purses, ready to send them on
to the address written inside, until they get tired
of reading and leave the rest unread, glinting
under arc lights, each crisp fold relaxing in the summer air.
Scroll
Just as in the movie about Hitler’s brain, in which Hitler
has himself decapitated and his head placed, still living,
in what looks like a fish tank, so that after
Germany’s defeat he can rise again
with the special G gas and rule the world
from South America,
and just as the the dread of watching Hitler’s skin,
clearly made of wax, begin to melt off the skull
as the movie ends and the credits roll
and flames shoot up around his head
so that everything that should have remained
secret, hidden, has become visible,
and just as Bill Freed, the actor who played Hitler,
never acted again, his dialogue consisting
of yelling, Mach schnell! Mach schnell!
while his flesh and moustache burn,
yes, just as the name “Station Zed” in the actual camp
of Sachsenhausen a few miles beyond Berlin,
on a casual Sunday in hot July,
turns out to be an SS joke—you came in at Gate A
and went out by Station Zed—so the tape hiss
of the survivor’s German, digitized down
but not erased to give that feel of This
is real, then overlaid by the translator’s English
that becomes garbled background to the camp walls,
so that hiss turns into an echo, an echo
of an echo in the voice telling
how “Iron Gustav plunged among us
to beat us with a pipe, his slaver flying in our faces,
his hunched-over body and dark complexion
nothing like an Aryan’s,” so all these
echoes and counter-echoes drifting
and unraveling under birch and poplar trees
in the nowhere breeze in the shady cemetery
slowly entangle and blur
into the caw caw caw caw
that rises up where clouds in Technicolor light
turn to an ancient parchment scroll, some mystical notation
summoning pure evil, though really just voices
you didn’t expect to hear, your mother’s voice
calling, calling you back home, or the dead lover
you abandoned and haven’t thought about in years,
your own brain’s canned footage,
their faces like notes that eddy and flow,
whispers and murmurings of fear and dread …
and then strings playing so softly the notes barely graze your ears
as you stand before the gates of Station Zed—
not to see the dead of invisible worlds
but to hear this melody
stolen from another horror movie,
The Creature from the Black Lagoon, begin to play.
Proof of Poetry
I wanted first to end up as a drunk in the gutter
and in my twenties I almost ended up there—
and then as an alternative to vodka, to live
alone like a hermit philosopher and court
the extreme poverty that I suspected lay in store for me anyway—
and then there were the years in which
I needed very badly to take refuge in mediocrity,
years like blunt scissors cutting out careful squares,
and that was the worst, the very worst—
you could say that always my life
was like a patchwork quilt always ripped apart—
my life like sc
raps stitched together in a dream
in which animals and people,
plants, chimeras, stars,
even minerals were in a preordained harmony—
a dream forgotten because it has to be forgotten,
but that I looked for desperately, but only sporadically
found in fragments, a hand lifted to strike
or caress or simply lifted for some unknown reason—
and in memory too, some specific pain, sensation of cold or warmth.
I loved that harmony in all its stages of passion,
the voices still talking inside me … but then, instead of harmony,
there was nothing but rags scattered on the ground.
And maybe that’s all it means to be a poet.
Dogcat Soul
To be hollowed out night by night,
to feel this continuum between envy
and desire, to have the kind of fur that sheds
sparks in the bedroom’s shifting dark,
to sense, when I’m asleep, your whiskers
measuring the void around my face
that expands inexorably year by year,
to know that in your eyes God is just a bird
trapped in the burning bush, and to have
to disappoint you with my dogcat soul,
more dog than cat, really, more nakedly
beseeching, less able than you to be
out there on your own, given all that,
what makes you crave my touch tonight?
When your eyes entrap me, I splinter
into your looking, into what your looking
sees, the seeing itself stripping me down
to flesh and bone, and found wanting—
my face gone vagrant, paralyzed in your pupils
yet heightened and varnished beyond fact:
I fall, am falling, I’ve plummeted beyond
the frame, no internal balance-wheel to land me
on all fours, no mechanism of grace,
no safe harbor under the radiant
engine block, the streets rippling with black ice.
But don’t turn away from me: turn my skinhead
to furhead, teach me slash, slink, creep.
Show me how to survive under a heating vent.
Prayer for Recovery
The cursor moving back along the line erases what was was.
What was keeps existing under Edit so that all you need to do is
click Undo. So much of time gets lived out that way—
at the momentary center of the line erasing.
When I push my IV pole down the dark, glass hall, the droplets’
atavistic sheen drips into my veins with an absolute weight as if
the bag of potassium chloride, hanging in sovereign judgment
above my head, assures me that justice, death or life,
will be done. And though it’s not for me to understand,
when I cross the beam that throws open the door so silently
and swiftly, it makes me want to think that like these rivets fastening
glass to iron, some state of me that was will go on,
either as the will of some will that isn’t mine, or out of mercy,
or from the contract between the rivet gun and some unseen hand.
Second Sight
In my fantasy of fatherhood, in which I’m
your real father, not just the almost dad
arriving through random channels of divorce,
you and I don’t lie to one another—
shrugging each other off when words
get the best of us but coming
full circle with wan smiles.
When you hole up inside yourself,
headphones and computer screen
taking you away, I want to feel in ten years
that if I’m still alive you’ll still look
at me with that same wary expectancy,
your surreptitious cool-eyed appraisal
debating if my love for you is real.
Am I destined to be those shark-faced waves
that my death will one day make you enter?
You and your mother make such a self-sufficient pair—
in thrift stores looking for your prom dress,
what father could stand up to your unsparing eyes
gauging with such erotic calculation
your figure in the mirror? Back of it all, when I
indulge my second sight, all I see are dead zones:
no grandchildren, no evenings at the beach, no bonfires
in a future that allows one glass of wine
per shot of insulin. Will we both agree
that I love you, always, no matter
my love’s flawed, aging partiality?
My occupation now is to help you be alone.
Songs for the End of the World
1
On the other side of praise
it’s time to chop down the tall tree in the ear—
enough enough with the starlit promontories—
a nervous condition traces itself
in lightning in the clouds,
a little requiem rattles among Coke cans
and old vegetable tins
and shifts into a minor key
blowing through the dying ailanthus,
grieving to the beat beginning to pour down
percussive as a run
on a nomad’s flute of bone
while a car engine dangling from a hoist and chain
sways in a translucent gown of rain.
2
Where does it go when it’s all gone?
Coleridge’s son, Hartley,
wants to know what would be left if all the men and women,
and trees, and grass, and birds and beasts,
and sky and ground were all gone:
everything just darkness and coldness
but nothing to be dark and cold.
Which was what my father
imagined all the time,
calculating with his slide rule the missile’s
drag and lift, as he smeared
across the paper the equation’s
figures propelling his pencil lead
into the void.
3
And after splashdown, what?
An emptiness like an empty subway car
stumbled into by mistake
on a drunken night
turning into
morning
with the world
stretching out
like wind walking on a lake?—
the body wavering, almost
disappearing
into the inside-outness of being
in that emptiness, its peaks and valleys
and absolute stillness?
4
His shadow anchored to a semi’s tires,
down there with the mussels, oysters, a starfish even
that twice a day shine up through oily film
where river meets sea meets river.
And I can track him in the sonar
of dolphin, seal
as if his pencil
hit the sea floor
echoing everywhere
filling the sea’s room,
unstringing the current’s loom
in which warp
and weft unravel
into oscilloscoping wave.
5
“He began to think of making
a moving image
of what never stops moving
that would bring order
to eternal being,
and so make movement move
according to number—which, of course, Socrates,
is what we call time …
And so he brought into being the Sun, the Moon,
and five other stars, for Time must begin.
These he called wanderers, and they stand guard
over the numbers of time—and human b
eings are so forgetful,
they don’t realize that time
is really the wandering of these bodies.”
6
An all-morning downpour shadowy
as the stained insides of his coffee cup.
He didn’t look up, didn’t talk,
didn’t rush me to the car, but gave his head
the slightest inclination.
We sat while the news talked on and on,
each of us glad to sink down into ourselves,
to not have to speak: it was enough, more than enough
to know the other knew we could settle
in that silence, and no vow or spoken understanding
would be as strong.
And all we did as we sat there driving along
was move from that point where everything originates
until point to point the line we made together got drawn.
7
The abandoned pit-house sliding down the cliff
sliding into the sea
is lost in fog
wrapped around
the headland’s scree—
and in the mine’s undersea tunnel
where miners walk out (along with my father’s father’s ghosts)
a mile or more under the waves
you can sense the old imperatives like played-out veins of tin
shining up for the men
walking briskly to their unsuspected
deaths, while just above their heads, a moment before the cave-in,
they can hear, as always, boulders rolling on the seafloor,
a job of work to do before the next shift.
8
“I am a dreaming & therefore
an indolent man—.
I am a starling self-incaged,
and always in the Moult,
and my whole Note is Tomorrow,
& tomorrow, & tomorrow …”
Which because it was how he felt
it’s what he wrote.
But now there’s no tomorrow,
only languor and despondency.
And under that shelter in the storm, among rocks
falling, he finally felt free
to say what his Daemon made him say, and looked up into the rain
and was for that instant washed clean.
9
English letters are Greek ones dried up.
The aurora on the screen
