by Mark Bibbins
with a call to action
An artist places broken
figurines in beehives
and the bees build their honeycombs
on them mending and mutating
the shards
Grief operates like that
its collaborators unwitting unaware
of the work being done
Grief arrives as shadows
of bees
darkening hives of loss
///
A poet had just taken
his own life and a group of us
met to see how everything
was going to feel a humid night
a glass of wine another’s hair against
our skin when we hugged
on the sidewalk outside the bar
where we had assembled to compare
the size and shape
as we experienced it
of this poet-shaped hole
newly gouged into our lives
I was older than most of those
who were there that night
One woman told me that
at twenty-three she had
never before lost anyone
not a parent
not a grandparent
I flashed to myself at her age
my stupid hair and baggy jeans
and of the friends around me dying
and all the strange species
of luck that in any of us evolve
///
Let the balloons go outside.
Let the balloons go outside.
—Trish Keenan
Not long ago the pope decreed
that unbaptized babies would
no longer be banished to Limbo
and that their little souls languishing
there would be released
Imagine them getting the papal memo
and rising in unison unsure
of where to go
except up twirling like colossal flocks
of river martins
in dark enormous coils their outlines
becoming eventually lighter
then translucent then clear
We might guess incorrectly
that the accompanying sound
would be the usual celestial
harps and choirs
instead of the intolerable shriek
that trapped breath makes
when it escapes from a balloon
whose opening is being pulled taut
or tens of thousands of these
Sebastião Salgado talks about traveling
through parts of Brazil
where babies died so frequently
that churches rented out coffins for their funerals
and reused them dozens of times
A local vendor might sell bananas
and ice cream alongside shoes in which
babies could be buried
Salgado also says that when
babies end up in Limbo
it has something to do with whether
or not their eyes are open or closed
when they are buried
or is it when they die I’m not sure
The transcription
of the interview is unclear
When someone in a movie dies
with their eyes open
the lids are made to look
so easy to close
A priest for instance or a doctor
passes a reverent hand
over the corpse’s face
perhaps not even touching it
and the task is complete
The morning you died
our friend and your brother and I were
in your bed with your body
that overnight had decided
it was no longer you
but some awful machine
designed to lurch and wheeze
until it sucked in one
more breath and did not let it out
Your eyes were open and when
after a few minutes
no one came to close them
I tried to do it myself
but the lids kept popping back open
like busted window shades
The word limbo derives from the Latin
word limbus a border an edge
It also is a dance that also is a contest
in which the winning dancer
is the one who doesn’t fall
///
IL 4 NOVEMBRE 1966 L’ACQUA
D’ARNO ARRIVÒ A QUEST’ALTEZZA
This year I should turn fifty
twice as old as you were when you died
One night the year before you were born
the Arno flooded the city of Florence
and now when people walk
down certain Florentine streets
or into certain churches or museums
they can still see a smudge several feet
above their heads
often with a small plaque
next to it to indicate
that this was the level the water reached
There are days when everything
feels like a metaphor
for your having died
There are days
when nothing does
///
In one of the Star Trek movies the crew goes back
in time to our time to save the whales
Along the way they have to retrieve
one of their injured number
from a hospital and the Enterprise’s
crotchety doctor is disgusted
by the crude equipment
and barbaric treatments
to which the patients
are being subjected
He asks one of them what her illness is
kidney disease
and with an eyeroll
he pulls from his pocket a pill
that cures the afflicted woman
How many of us
in the theater wanted
to reach through the darkness
for that pill on the screen
How many of us just wanted
to touch the doctor’s hand
///
After you died we took what was left
out of your apartment To me
came a few stray objects
a book a pair of dumbbells
photo album shoes
Maybe some clothes
went to charity everything else
you’d already given away
Once when I came back to town
after you died I slept at the home
of the man you had left me for
and who years later you’d leave for me
give or take some others in between
I saw what you might have seen
in him a steady job
in catering I think
or maybe family money
hair that behaved
and a big apartment with a piano
he could play
Even if we felt desire we didn’t
let it roll us into each other
as we slept or pretended to sleep
together in his king-size bed
Why had we done that
Was there no couch
I could have slept on instead
In his bathroom closet
he had numerous tubes
of toothpaste rows of boxes of kleenex
antiperspirants bought in bulk It struck
me as at once decadent and frugal
but why not
when someone has room
for such things and foresees
living long enough to use them
///
I wish I still had some
of your ashes
so I could throw them on
the White House lawn We had plotted
with you about dropping them
fr
om a hot-air balloon but we ended
up instead in a tiny airplane that felt
more cramped than a Volkswagen Bug
as we flew low over the rippling mountains
the greens of the pines
below us sturdy and real
We were the same three
who had been in the bed with you
when you died plus the pilot
who in piloting
our mission was probably
risking a significant fine
I don’t know which of us was holding
the bag that contained what remained
of you but when we tried to shake you out
a bunch of you blew back in
making the inside of the plane
look briefly like a snow globe
How strange the bits that landed
on my tongue didn’t taste
of anything that could ever have burned
///
When David Markson died
all of his books with his
annotations in the margins
were boxed up and sent
to his favorite bookstore
where the staff released them
into the wilds of the shelves
Don Quixote Don DeLillo
Heidegger and wretched old Pound
Word went out in the ways
in which it does now
and a kind of scavenger hunt began
Markson’s books drifting off like leaves
on a hundred breezes
to land in a hundred strangers’ libraries
his marginalia becoming
an untethered archive
an elegy both fracturing
and perpetuating itself
Borges could have written
the story of this story
in which a writer dies and his books
are bought by strangers
and taken away then decades later
after the last stranger dies
word again goes out
in the ways in which it will
and all the books come back together
all the books come back
///
I was looking for a song for you
and in looking found two others
but neither was the one
I had in mind
We were in a room of gorgeous noise
together then we weren’t
It was not sad though I wanted you
to come back
Should I have
said searching instead of looking
for instance in grade school
if a friend reaching
for what I was holding
said let me see that I’d say you see
with your eyes not with your hands
and pull whatever it was away
I was clever
in a severely limited sense
synesthesia and synecdoche
could have been distant
afflictions for all I knew and still I find
too many ways to grab
a world or what was lost
from it with no way finally
capable of doing so
completely enough for me
The song I still am looking for
is a song without words my favorite
kind lately not because words
are precious and not because I live
already in them even though
they are and I do
Someone said writing about music
is like dancing about architecture
and I have no real gift for description you
already know how charmed every time
I was by your charming hat
which I won’t describe
here except to say that touching it
felt like touching you
What if I could tell you I was striking
with someone else’s hands
a drum made of pure light
and that I could find the sounds
my striking made
only at the unraveling edge
of sleep where they dissolved
into the competing noise
made every morning
by terrible jaws of sunlight opening
to swallow a song I could never
hold for long but wanted you nevertheless
and always to see
///
NOTES
The book’s epigraph is from the “Rooms” section of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.
15 [When I was a teenager I smugly told] Paul Celan and Virginia Woolf committed suicide by drowning in the rivers Seine and Ouse, respectively.
25 [From here I can see a fountain] The epigraph is from Mary Jo Bang’s “The Role of Elegy” in Elegy.
30 [When finally everyone was granted their childhood] “Two Feet off the Ground” is the title of a song by Thom Yorke.
36 [I have been terrified] The quote is from C.D. Wright’s “By Jude Jean McCramack / Goddamnit to Hell Dog’s Foot” in Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil.
40 [Here in the spectral academy] The quote is from Candy Darling: Memoirs of an Andy Warhol Superstar.
42 [Inverted wooden tables] Doris Salcedo retrospective, Guggenheim Museum, New York City, 2015.
43 [Not often but sometimes I look] The song “God Bless the Child” was written by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr. in 1939.
48 [The night David Wojnarowicz died] American artist and activist David Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of 37. The phrase “little ounce” is from Lucie Brock-Broido’s “For a Snow Leopard in October” in Stay, Illusion.
58 [There are many ways to get] The Gerhard Richter painting is Gegenüberstellung 2 (Confrontation 2), 1988.
60 [It’s halfway through October 2017] The Caravaggio painting is The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, c. 1601–1602.
64 [One night John Ashbery came over] The quote is from John Ashbery’s “The Tomb of Stuart Merrill” in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
70 [Twenty years after you died] The artist referenced is Aganetha Dyck (after an article by Sarah Zhang, “An Artist and Her Bees Create Beautiful Honeycomb-Draped Sculptures,” on the Gizmodo website).
73 [Not long ago the pope decreed] The epigraph quotes the song “Lunch Hour Pops,” from the 2003 album Haha Sound, by Broadcast. Lyrics by Trish Keenan (1968–2011). The Salt of the Earth is a 2014 documentary about photographer Sebastião Salgado, directed by Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and Wim Wenders.
76 [This year I should turn fifty] The epigraph is from a plaque near the entrance to the Spanish Chapel in Museo Santa Maria di Novella, Florence, and translates roughly as “on November 4, 1966, water from the Arno reached this height.”
82 [When David Markson died] David Markson (1927–2010) was the author of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Reader’s Block, and other novels.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My sincere thanks to everyone who has been supportive of this book, including the editors of the following: the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, DIAGRAM, Guernica, Lemon Hound, Narrative, The Ocean State Review, Poetry, A Public Space, VOLT.
An earlier version of [Here in the spectral academy] appeared in T Magazine (the New York Times) accompanied by a collage entitled “Candy Ruins” by Rachel Feinstein. An earlier version of [There are many ways to get] appeared in Dear Another, which accompanied an exhibition of paintings and collages by Jessica Rankin.
Extra love and gratitude to Mary Jo Bang, who read the manuscript and suggested several helpful edits, and to the marvelous crew at Copper Canyon.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Bibbins is the author of three previous books: They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full; The Dance of No Hard Feelings; and Sky Lounge, which received a Lambda Literary Award. Bibbins teaches in the graduate writing programs of The New School and Columbia University a
nd in NYU’s Writers in Florence program. He lives in New York City.
ALSO BY MARK BIBBINS
They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry,
They Kill You Because They’re Full
The Dance of No Hard Feelings
Sky Lounge
Copyright 2020 by Mark Bibbins
All rights reserved
Cover art: Mark Bibbins
ISBN: 978-1-55659-577-6
elSBN: 978-1-61932-214-1
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LANNAN LITERARY SELECTIONS 2020
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