The Brooklyn Rail

Gold

Gold, I’m cheating with this since I’m committed to writing on the
    elements,

Gold, when I was a boy I sought a father figure to paint my body gold,
    like Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger, the spray or stroke that seals off the
    oxygen, so the girl dies . . .

“You mean like the Oscar,” one boy said. “You want to go as the
    Oscar?”

It was Halloween, night over Smithtown, families stumbling in the
    dark, skeletons knocking on the doors, an air of excitement over
    death games,

    Games of candy, dropping candy in the pumpkin

“Yes, like the Oscar,” I hissed. I wrote about this in first novel, Shy.

I never died, I lived through life and its attendant tin fingers,

Olympic gold, or foil, I grew old like a cigarette, chasing the image,
    went to San Francisco, came to Boulder, at Denver Airport hideous
    demons and red-eyed horses and gargoyles pluck at your baggage

And I look at them, from the other side of Satan’s mask. “Look, could
    you just do me already? Let’s just cut to the chase: press your finger
    down on spray button, tag me.”

Hydrogen

Seventy five percent of everything is hydrogen.
Seems like a weighty responsibility for a

colorless gas, but then I think of how wealth
is distributed around the world and how

millions of people slave and don’t even have TV,
while a handful of plutocrats grow rich on their labor.

Hydrogen, a low rent element, still gets
to be number one in the famous table

like Christ dominating the Last Supper.
Even The DaVinci Code acknowledges,

that hydrogen is like Jesus, a human god,
one of the people, with the ordinary love impulses

all of us feel. In His case they were for
Judas, the man in the corner, scowling from guilt.

The point is, everyone has those feelings. It’s not just
you and me, wandering through this world like

we’re invisible, we’re neglected, our seminar tanked
and nobody wants to publish our poems.

Mercury

When I broke the glass of thermometer, out ran the mercury,

In one liquid blob, matter calling to matter, like not one of its mole-
    cules wanted to be parted from another even for a moment.

Mercury was supposed to be so mercurial—like Ariana Reines, the
    poet who,

we were celebrating her book Mercury, in Chicago for the AWP,

She and Dodie and Peter, and Lewis Warsh, reading together in a bar
    and she cancelled, due to snow in NewYork, but the crowd learned
    that she had deputized Thurston Moore to read for her,

So they were assuaged, but then it turned out Thurston

had missed the same plane. Joel Craig the emcee came out and had to
    announce that they wouldn’t be getting Ariana, nor Thurston,

but me, and this one woman, sitting at a round table by herself next to
    the mic, by herself except fourteen bottles of beer surrounded her,
    when

she heard the news she smashed a bottle on the table and screamed,
    “Fuck that,” and bolted into the snow, so I got up and read thinking,
    worst auspices ever . . .

My mind ran clear and I declared to myself I would be Ariana for half
    an hour,

just assume her identity. To my aid came Thespis on silvery wings, I
    was more Ariana than she herself had ever been I’m sure, and as I
    spoke her words I understood the difficult section of Mercury called
    “Thursday” as has nobody

else before or since. I was writing it on stage, live, giving it to my fans,
    word by word, and I realized that he, the missing Thurston, was the
    god they had coined the word “Thursday” after,
    for he would bless us on a Thursday if we leaned on him

it could be any day of the week,

it could be all the molecules in his body entering and filling mine,

I would be a day. I’d run around after myself. I would cohere.

When I finished, the silence swelled around me, profound, then a burst
    of sustained applause, and even the woman out in the snow was
    sobbing, for she hadn’t heard me.