13th Balloon

Home > Other > 13th Balloon > Page 1
13th Balloon Page 1

by Mark Bibbins




  13th Balloon

  MARK BIBBINS

  COPPER CANYON

  PRESS

  Note to the Reader

  Copper Canyon Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size:

  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque euismod magna ac diam dignissim condimentum.

  Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so that the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible.

  When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.

  Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.

  This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Note to Reader

  13th Balloon

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Mark Bibbins

  Copyright

  Special thanks

  Why is there so much useless suffering. Why is there.

  —Gertrude Stein

  13TH BALLOON

  As a house burns sparks

  land on the roofs

  of houses nearby

  Some of them also will burn

  Some of them will not

  Someone asks Are there people inside

  Sometimes there are people inside

  They may walk out alive or be carried

  out alive they may be carried

  in pieces they may

  be carried in bags they may

  be carried in smoke

  Others in dreaming may wonder

  whether they ever will wake

  from the endless dream of sparks

  clinging to their roofs

  floating through their windows

  landing on their beds

  ///

  A few months after you died

  I came home on a black and freezing night

  to find a small cardboard box

  on the steps outside my building

  I opened the lid and inside

  was a single newborn animal

  hairless pink and clean

  a rat a guinea pig I couldn’t tell

  Was it moving I don’t remember now

  why can’t I remember that now

  It can’t have been moving

  it couldn’t have

  been alive

  I considered my cat asleep

  in my apartment would he

  kill this creature if it lived

  Did I have any milk

  and how would I get any milk

  anyway inside this tiny thing

  that surely could not be alive

  What kind of person

  might have come and left

  a baby possibly dead

  animal there in a box

  on my stoop what kind

  If this was a test I failed it

  I carried the box

  three long blocks

  to the river and threw it in

  I have never so much

  as in the moment the box went under

  the surface of the water

  stabbing and stabbing and stabbing itself

  with the moon’s million obsidian knives

  wished that I were dead

  If death is a test I fail

  If death is a test I pass

  ///

  During the storm your ashes drop

  out of the sky in clumps

  and birds with sutures for eyes

  peck the outline of your silhouette

  onto the trunk of a petrified tree and clouds

  shit mud on the sheets at night

  and the trees piss phlegm and weep blood

  that covers the ground and we slip and we crack

  open as faceless birds descend to drink

  as they hideously flap their hideous wings

  and gorge themselves on ashes and pieces

  of teeth and fragments of bones

  that once were yours

  Featherless birds dive into the furnace

  where you burned

  They swoop in and out of the windows

  of hospital rooms and heavily horribly swirl

  against what could be clouds or could

  be the ashes of others we’ve burned

  until the last of the birds engorges

  itself on so much of your death that finally it

  bursts like a boil in the sky

  ///

  What might anyone have made

  of you and me as babies

  born into the mess and ferment

  of the late 1960s

  Working-class babies born to parents

  who themselves were babies

  during World War II

  Were they worried already

  about Vietnam or about some other

  monstrous hand that would grab us

  from our cribs by our feet

  and throw us

  into the war that would be

  the war after that

  They could not have known

  that our war because everyone

    lands in one

  would be with a virus or that one

  of the hands that failed to close

  quickly or tightly enough around

  it to stop it from killing you

  would also belong to the state

  At the beginning of every war

  every baby is replaced

  with a picture of a baby

  In every eclipse the sun

  is replaced with an x-ray of the sun

  ///

  A person I knew for a short time

  a short time after you died

  guessed incorrectly that I would sleep

  with him and furthermore that I slept with

  a copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations

  next to my bed Though wrong

  on both counts he was right

  when he said I blushed absurdly

     and too easily

  but when I told him about you

  he was taken a little aback

  perhaps surprised that I had lived

  through anything

  I should remember now

  what Velvet Underground song

  after I turned him down

  for the last time he left

  on my answering machine in order

  to convey that I was no

  longer worthy even of his disdain

  I never told him the book

  that was next to my bed was the copy

  of The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara

  you had given me before you died

  Yesterday someone told me that Frank’s friend

  the painter Mike Goldberg had died

  and from here I can see myself

  in my tenement room

  on a night more than two decades gone

  opening to Frank’s birthday ode to Mike

  when I reached down

  to the floor next to my bed

  to pick up the book that had been yours

  ///

  Since you died the house style could best

  be described as leaves that cling

 
; to trees too long into winter

  I understand how

  to miss a hint

  as I regularly watch the anger

  harbored against queer people inflate

  like innumerable soap bubbles

  in what passes for real time A truce

  can soothe for as long as it lasts

  and the extent to which it’s meant

  I set foot in a jungle once

        so I know

  how things on Earth can work

  There were fewer animals than

  I expected but I did see some

  leafcutter ants and I climbed

  an ancient pyramid and may

  have heard a monkey

  before returning to the lot

  where the bus had dropped me off

  Near the gas station some children

  were taunting a dog

  with awful mange

  On the way back

  to the beach town where I was staying

  a unit of young soldiers

  stopped the bus to search

  for whatever a soldier searches for

  I remember their rifles and their boots

  and their silky eyelashes and that they

  looked like children to

  me then

  To whom must they look

  like children now

  ///

  Scraps of magazines

  hoarded by boys

  in our fort in the woods

  The pictures were what  nude women

  cavorting in a gym

  nude women lying on a tile floor

  I told myself not to look

  at the boy next to me

  in the horny grim leaflight

  as he studied page after seedy page

  I told myself don’t wish

  for us to be nude together now

  nude in the branches nude in the clouds

  Don’t look at the other boy

  in case he sees me looking at him

  Look down at the dead leaves

  on which are projected

  nude photos of me nude photos of him

  nude photos of him all slippery with me

  Don’t look for the two

  of us nude on the rocks

  where the sunlight cuts through

  the two of us

  nude at the edge of the stream

  Don’t look at him don’t look

  don’t look at his hand at his crotch

  better to look at the ground instead

  ///

  When I was a teenager I smugly told

  one of my teachers I wasn’t worried

  about going to hell

  because all my friends

  would be there too and she just

  as smugly responded

  Yes but you won’t recognize them

  Now when I ride the escalator

  to hell I have to kiss

  everyone on it

  even the drug lobbyists

  but we’re all fine now

  very wealthy down here

  Drop a kiss on the floor of hell

  the three-second rule applies

  I may not care who

  I’m kissing anymore

  but neither do they

  Hell is full of delicious flowers

  and we keep scooping out

  deeper hells for their decapitated stems

  How cold could I have been to have said

  that this is the way Celan ends

  Celan ends Celan ends

  not with a bang

  but a river

  Woolf too I mean

  wind any creature tight enough

  pull any creature loose enough

  it does what it has to do

  Still the flowers I can hear them

  are singing Don’t leave

  you haven’t finished

  eating us yet

  ///

  You and I never called each other

  by the name we shared

  It would have been like eating an echo

  each of us checking

  opposite sides of a two-way mirror

  for fog left by his own breath

  Months after you died I saw someone

  in a nightclub in a different city

  than the ones in which our story crossed

  itself out

  someone who knew us both

  but as it turned out

  not very well

  He looked shocked to see me

  a look I didn’t need him to explain but

  Holy shit he said

  I thought you were dead

  We celebrated my notdeath with shots

  of something too sweet and an hour later

  I was vomiting

  into a mop bucket

  in a corner of the club

  The coelacanth was believed

  to be extinct for millions of years

  until the sea coughed one up

  off the coast of South Africa

  after a great storm

  Its name comes from the Greek koîlos

     meaning hollow

  ///

  One of the only facts I can find

  online about you is wrong

  You didn’t die on a Saturday night

  you died on a Tuesday

  It was a Tuesday morning the sun was frozen

  and Mars or Venus barely glowed somewhere

  or Mars was hidden in Tuesday

  or Venus had broken into a billion splinters

  of ice and covered the grass

  outside the hospital

  and the sun dragged with it your death

  from the frozen pit

  out of which daily it rises

  Unless I too am wrong and Thursday

  was the day

  the nurse called and told us It’s time you should

  come now he’s getting ready to go

  Ready to go after how many times we thought

  you were going or were ready

  to go or had gone

  after how many times I’d arrive

  at the hospital

  thinking it would be the last

  only to find you

  sitting up doped up cockeyed grinning

  You’d lift your head a little

  and say Hey what’d you bring me Boo

  and I’d climb into the bed

  with you and say Nothing good just me

  ///

  William S. Burroughs said cut

  into the present and the future leaks out

  When I cut into the past

  what leaks out is you

  ///

  I grew up nowhere

  near a sea  We had swamps

  and ponds and creeks

  and deer and jays

  and every now and then

  we’d find perhaps the tracks

  of a fox in the snow

  but no sharks no jellyfish

  no rays burrowing in the sand

  When we are young we wish

  with uncertain fervor

  for what is not at hand

  The first time I kissed a man

  I was seventeen and he turned

  out to be a minor criminal

  He said his name

  was Rich and whether true or not

  it seems at least fitting now

  Where he grew up

  who knew for sure

  the South or so he said

  which was also where the army

  put him for a while instead of jail

  for forging checks or so he said

  But before he told me that

  he told me he was bi

  and his drawl made him sound

  like a handsome sheep bah

  The kiss was real at least

  One night he’d said we should pull

  into someone’s driveway

  as I d
rove us home from the mall

  where we stood bored in stores for hours

  and called it work I bobbed

  in the fading waves

  of that kiss for days

  The first time I saw the ocean

  I was twelve and the body

  of water was technically a sound

  Connecticut January freezing rain

  I could only see a few yards

  through the fog that turned

  everything gray as a sock

  Alongside a breakwater

  lay a tangle of garbage

  and next to that the black

  and brown back end

  of a German shepherd

  sticking out of the sand

  ///

  We didn’t have a word for us but what

  could have been the word for us

  Not lovers

  though we loved

  Not boyfriends though we were

  friends and still

  boys in most ways when you died

  Not partners though we parted

  These last two I realize

  are false cognates

  the first of which derives from sharing

  the second from taking leave

  I have only language for you now

  a language

  that morphs like a virus

  to elude to survive to connect

  but I still don’t

  have the word

  ///

  Come on stage and be yourself,

  The elegist says to the dead.

  —Mary Jo Bang

  From here I can see a fountain

  and a statue of a president

  against a backdrop

  of not yet spectacular oaks and maples

  rows of your friends

  in white folding chairs

  Whatever flowers would still

  have been thriving in the park

  in the middle of September

  I’m sure we were grateful for

  When it was my turn

  to speak at your memorial

  what did I say

  a version of you aren’t really dead

  or see you again some useless thing

  any other deathstruck boy

  lightly educated at state and city schools

  might have said

  Had I the gift of song I might have sung

  as another friend sang

  an optimistic Irish song

  Afterward we collected

  the chairs to take back to the restaurant

  from which we’d borrowed them

  and where you used to work

  We turned off the microphone

  and wheeled the podium away

  Is there any song and if there is

 

‹ Prev