Cold Snap, November
That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.
JOHN BERGER, The Sense of Sight
In 2006, in Ohio, Joseph Clark raised his head in the middle of his execution to say, “It’s not working.”
The salmon corpses clog the creek without sufficient room to spin:
see, even the fish want to kill themselves this time of year
the therapist jokes. Her remedy
is to record three gratitudes a day—
so let the fish count for one, make two the glaucous gulls
who pluck the eyes before they fill
with the cloudy juice of vanishing.
But don’t these monuments to there-ness
feel a little ostentatious? Not just the gratitudes,
but also what they used to call a hardware store
where you hike for hours underneath the ether
between the ceiling and the dropped-down lighting tubes,
muttering I need a lock-washer for my lawnmower shroud—
huh? You know
you should feel like Walt Whitman, celebrating
everything, but instead you feel like Pope Julius II
commanding Michelangelo to carve forty statues for his tomb.
When even one giant marble Moses feels like a bit too much.
This year made it almost to December without a frost to deflate the dahlias
and though I stared for hours at the psychedelia of their petals,
trying to coax them to apply their shock-paddles to my heart,
it wasn’t working. Until one morning when
I found them black and staggering in their pails,
charred marionettes, twist-tied to their stakes, I apologize
for being less turned-on by the thing than by its going.
Not the sunset
but afterward when we stand dusted with the sunset’s silt,
and not the surgical theater, even with its handsome anesthesiologist
in blue dustcap and booties— no,
his after’s what I’m buzzed by, the black slide into nothing
(well, someone ought to speak for it).
Or it can come in white— not so much the swirling snow
as the fallen stuff that makes the mind continuous
with the meadow that it sees.
Auntie Roach
Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others.
PHILIP LARKIN
One day George Washington rides around Mount Vernon
for five hours on his horse, the next
he’s making his auspicious exodus
on the spectrum of possible deaths.
Rasputin was fed cyanide in little cakes
but did not slough his living husk,
and so Prince Felix sang to him, then mesmerized him
with a gaudy cross. And though he dropped when he was shot
he popped back up and ran outside: it was
Purishkevich who fired three times in the courtyard—
but even with his body bound
in the frozen Neva, one arm worked
its way free. Now, he must have howled
while his giblets leaked, though the cold
is reputed to be kind. Sliding his end
toward a numeral less horrible; it falls
say as a six on a scale of zero to ten?
Shakespeare went out drinking, caught a fever,
ding! Odds are we’ll be addled—
what kind of number can be put on that?
One with endless decimals,
unless you luck into some kind woman,
maker of the minimum wage, black or brown and brave enough
to face your final wreck? My friends horde pills
for their bad news, but I wonder if it’s cowardly
to be unequal to the future. Someone should write a book
for nursery school, with crucial facts like: how,
as the sun drops, shadows lengthen, including a sharp
or blurry one that is your own. And you scuttle from it
like a cockroach fleeing light— an anti-roach,
running from the dark. See my feelers, long and feathery:
I am more than well prepared.
Ulysses Grant lay in misery for half a year,
after eating a peach that pained his tongue.
Versus Ivan the Terrible, last heard singing in the bath,
who fainted dead while setting up the chessboard.
Another Treatise on Beauty
The boyish foreign tyrant wears faun-colored desert boots
hooked boyishly around the rungs of his chair
on this talk show where he speaks with the voice of a woman
who interprets from the ether. He’s smiling
like the naughty boy in school who picked his teeth
with a stiletto: mister, you may be despicable
but my boyfriend wore those same boots once,
and I loved him in them, despite the stolen tape deck
in his car. How small a blemish does your narco-trafficking
shrink to, what with that comely stubble on your cheeks,
your brocade cap and wool cape tossed
across your shoulder like a cavalier’s? Perhaps we need
to recalibrate the scale or set your crimes
in one pan of the balance, so when we set your beauty
in the other it will rise, as beauty does, instead of clunking down.
As beauty rises, even when it goes unseen. See
how many of the famous modern paintings
were made by men who have such vigor in old age?
And when I flip open the back covers of their books,
the famous lady poets all have shiny hair.
Bad French Movie
Isabelle Huppert in a peep show booth
with the wilted bloom of a used Kleenex,
and not her Kleenex, une mouchoir étrange—
this is not a promising get-go.
But can’t my hopes be phototropic
as I sit in the front row with my head cocked back
like a newly fractured dicotyledonous bean
uncurling on its sprout?
The popcorn here is not just bad—
for years the hopper has accrued its crud
so that sometimes you crunch down on what
tastes like a greasy tractor bolt
and are transported to a former Soviet republic
instead of some seedy part of Paris.
You have to swipe the burned nib off your lips
before scuffing it back, toward the lovers who’ve come
to make out in this habitat, upholstered
in the velvet mode of tongues. And when
I turn to see if they’ve noticed
their ankles’ being pinged by my scorched old maids
all the hardware bolted in their faces
glints like moonlight on the road after the crash is cleared away,
as the projector beam keeps on doggedly charging
through a googolplex of twitching motes.
Giving us Isabelle unclothed again,
Isabelle in the tones of the wood of a cello,
Isabelle if you’re trying to save us now
all your skin is not enough.
Proximity to Meaningful Spectacle*
Monday
Wednesday
Friday,
I swim with the old ladies, hurry:
the synchronized swimming team arrives at three.
We ride the wacky noodles
through blue pastures
lit by chemicals—
I like to go under in my goggles
to watch their them-ness bleed
into my me
until we are evicted by the lifeguard, Danielle.
In the locker room, some retreat into the changing stalls