The Brooklyn Rail

A TALK ABOUT LIFE

I’m still trying to remember
the dream, but it’s all just shapes,
opaque colors, like mauve
and puce, paint cans on fire,
a blamming, jamming dance floor,
crowded with strangers
rubbing sticks against each other
in off-off the shoulder dresses
and clinical regalia (bowties,
stethoscopes, and rolling
IV hangers / ivy hangers/
intravenous pole positions,
north and south and
barbershop). Behind
the frictive dancers
a backdrop of the ocean,
obviously the Pacific,
but I couldn’t tell you why.
The rest is just a blur, because
it’s always a blur, so always about life
and what it’s like to be barreling
through this goopy, burning consciousness
balletic. In another blur, later—
though much less smeared around, I was
in a log cabin, skinning a squirrel
and heard myself saying
about punk rock
to no one in particular
that “It wasn’t all nihilistic
the way people thought,
but more a matter of negation,
and in symbolic logic, a tilde
ain’t nothin’, you know?”
The squirrel didn’t answer—
looked in fact very sad
at that juncture—its skin
a wet sock and its body
so shiny, slick as a pork loin
wrapped in plastic at Kroger or Albertson’s
or wherever you shop, and I was
trying to be smart about something,
but I wasn’t sure what.
I’m still not sure now.
What I mean is the goddamn
blur (the goddamn blue)
is real, and nothing needs to be
decided or focused
until it does, until dust. Anyway,
I was going through something
just then, doubting myself,
a weird furry wall, a cavernous
yawn, and my armpits itched
through my shirt into space.
I floated there alone
and tried not to breathe.
I didn’t want to squander
my cosmic reserves.
When I looked up
it was down, and when I fell
I ascended. I was transposed
into an opaque shape.
The sun was the moon
and then it wasn’t.

ROMANTICISM

The word was zinc.
I thought it was zine. Later
I will tromp up the hillock in error,
or meander in the meadow
to configure the dream.
It all still ends, “Do I wake or sleep,”
but now I also wonder if I’m wearing
a poly-blend w/cotton t-shirt or a mink coat?
I wonder if the bird on my window ledge
has a name other than “Warbler”?
When the monster ends up
on the glacier—and the monster
always ends up on the glacier—
I imagine a giant frozen tear drop
and a small pack of huskies
laying around a large fire
in a circle. I draw a pentagram
in it, or an anarchy A. Then I say
the magic words, and wouldn’t you
like to know what happens.
I float between crying out
in anguish or crying
out of mirth. Everybody’s talking
about assault weapons these days
and capital insurrections
and SCOTUS leaking
something arctic. Poor oafish monster.
You aren’t really much of a monster,
and I’m not really much of a poet
or a musician or a father
or a husband. And to think is to be
full of sorrow. Am I a satellite
of Lifesavers or a pile of dry leaves
disheveling in a quiet breeze
one or two or three
at a time, until the pile
is only a scattering—
until the mastodon
of a monster throws his life
upon the pyre of mostly invisible flames,
sometimes reportedly blue-ish
or blue-ish green? Sometimes
an elfin maid or a damsel
with a dulcimer, in a vision
once I saw coos on dully
in disrepair a lot of zzzzzzzzzzzzzs,
which is easy to interpret
and kind of difficult to read.
Do I glow in the dark, or bring
the dark with me? Am I
the teardrop glacier, or
the stitches in the monster?
How can I reach you
so you might understand me, since
I’m a confusion that no one
may dissolve? The warbler
warbling goes off with the leaves.
And this is not an ode
now that no birds sing.
I hope all goes well
this morning with the hearts.
The dogs huddle closer
as the pyre burns low.
Am I sidelines or sideburns
or sightlines or snow?
How does one tie up the loose ends
of a life? It can’t be done
or it candles or it candies. The word
was zinc, but I thought it was zine.
The rioters were shooters
or the shooters were a riot.
The star in my body
is a long line of shadows
palely loitering or waiting
for something/waiting
for nothing. The tear ducts
empty, so the fire expires.
Do I wonder or wander?
Do I glacier or monster?
At the beginning of the ending
Do I stare or blink?

A NATURAL ARDOR

When one animal bites another
on the neck it’s usually not
a good sign for the animal
being bitten into, just like when
one company bites into another
by buying up all its stock
for a majority stake, so it can
bleed its competition and extend
its reach like a wire brush
up a nostril. Suddenly,
the Red Sea pours over the top
of Pharoah’s army—that is, at least
figuratively in the Old Testament
which is all retribution and promises
to God’s children. God is good
somebody says, but always
that goodness is complicated.
What all of this has to do with you
and me is, frankly, not clear yet.
What I do know is that,
after two days of being
stand-offish, Bear finally ate
the food in his bowl.
He must’ve been hungry
since there are no baby gazelles
or chickens in our living room
running around for him to bite down on
with that wild look in his eyes
that he gets whenever anyone comes
to the door. Bear is a good dog
someone says—except when he’s not
or on one of his hunger strikes
or loose running the neighborhood,
having escaped us. The prodigal dog
doesn’t come when we call. So anything
with Bear is always complicated, but not
in the same way that God’s goodness
is complicated. I was talking about this
with Agnes when she received the good news
that she got a full-tuition scholarship
to Ohio University and admittance
to their Honors College. Congratulations
Agnes! But she will turn it down, she tells us
later—with a lot of pomp and circumstance—
because OU’s in a rather isolated small town
in Southeastern, Ohio, and she wants to study
Art History in a big city. She thinks
the prestige of the school she ultimately chooses
and whether it’s situated in a hard-hearted metropolis
near Artworld-type people and museums galore
will make a massive difference
both now and in the future,
even though we know it doesn’t really matter
where you get your undergraduate degree, nor
really what you study, unless
you’re trying to learn to take a giant bite
out of someone else’s neck. Things aren’t
always so cut and dry or dog eat dog
or god eat god, or, maybe they are, or
at least more so than we’d like to admit
when the world is always clamping down
its fangs on the meek. They shall not
inherit the earth, very clearly. Inheritance,
in economic terms, is a privilege
of the rich, and we are not that. But
we aren’t meek either, so
what difference does it make
one way or the other? Clearly,
we’re in the middle of something,
but it feels like the end. And God is not
good. Or maybe everything isn’t always
a matter of good and bad or right and wrong,
black and white or opaque and transparent.
Maybe God’s irrelevant. Or God’s a good dog.
Or God is dead meat with a wild
gamey look, biting down hard
on a part of us that’s soft.