Did a ripple in air or ether
give up some secret just now
when your head was turned
from the rest of the room?
It seems that you are different
than when you last were engaged with us
here at this terribly good party, as if you were now
less one of us than before.
Did something happen? Some hint of
a better existence, or at least
of how empty this one is? Something
for an artist to chase and capture —
you used to paint, didn’t you?
A man approaches.
Looks like he has dirty arms.
Then I look closer and no.
Arms are inky-pictorial.
Some pictures there are dirty pictures, yes.
But arms themselves are clean arms.
He spreads his arms out.
Wants to give me a hug maybe?
Big arms with dirty pictures and he wants a hug.
Wants a hug or wants to give one and get one back.
Oh, big armed men with art full of sex on their arms!
I have known another like this.
He also wanted hugs and arms full of body.
Wanted to rub his dirty pictures on me or anyone really.
Man, man, man he was a dirty man even after a shower.
Man, man, man he had the grip of a roughneck.
Man, man, man he had the arms of a bear.
Man, man, man he had the appetites of a bear man.
Art on the skin, the teeth of Ursa Major, constellation man.
Can’t be out at night without thinking of him.
He led me to the North Star without my looking up.
I still recall he had a tattoo of the Bear King tearing flesh.
That was the old man I knew with arms and dirty art.
I don’t know this new man.
He might be lovely.
He might prefer Ursa Minor.
He might be less of a bear.
Might not even know the Bear King.
Might not even know I knew the Bear King.
He was walking toward me just now.
He turned into the arms of another, must be a lover.
He’s not the same, even with dirty pictured arms.
I knew there were other Bear Kings out here.
I knew I had only to wait to see one again.
This one might not be one for me to savor.
There will be another.
There will be another.
There will be another.
Breakfast, served at home
with streamed news, steamed
milk, screened comments;
or
breakfast, served in a diner
by the same woman every morning,
the owner’s sister; hot black and brown homefries,
eggs just this side of runny, bacon, coffee — cream only.
Lunch at a desk. Something frozen
warmed in a microwave. Taken late,
taken quickly, taken light;
or
lunch from a box, thick sandwich,
pretzel sticks, hummus,
biryani rice,
empanadas.
Dinner, served
raw, served slowly
to bored foodies, served ironically,
or
dinner, hot and
foil-wrapped, eaten
between jobs, between tasks,
between errands.
Home is where our bellies are filled.
That city next door that doesn’t smell
much like a kitchen at all? Who could live
in such a place?
Suffocating within buried walls.
Don’t understand what has happened…
roads choked, towers broken,
the gates stuffed tight with sand.
No one apparently gets into or out of
the city that is my body:
the alleys of miserable contention,
the boulevards where I sold myself,
the buildings of candied mistakes,
the rare gardens, the more common weedlots;
here is the buried city that is my body
barely noticeable to those who might seek it;
they say “He used to be bigger, didn’t he?
He used to have detail, used to be something.”
Now I’m a burial mound, maybe there are artifacts,
maybe not, but nowadays who has time to dig?
I’d like to poke an arm out and scream, ‘When
did I get so weak and old that I can’t dig out?’
I think I’m going to sleep now, eyes full,
not a scratch on me but dead just the same.”
In the city the streets are finally quiet. A child
running for a minute longer, perhaps — then, nothing.
Edgar, Edgar, it’s me.
Did you see the news?
I think that was Dad
they pulled from the river,
some dead, dead drunk —
it sure looked like
our father from that angle
and considering
the water running off him, well,
he looked just like
the last time I saw him, last week,
when I went to speak with him about
him getting help, maybe AA or something,
and he sprayed me
with the garden hose,
and for the first time ever
I fought him, Edgar, I took the hose from him
and sprayed him with it, the two of us
screaming in the front yard — so, well,
I have some experience
in seeing my father soaked and drowned
and they said this body was unidentified
but dammit Edgar, it looked like him.
I know he won’t answer the phone if I call so
I am going to his building
to see if he’s there and then to the cops
if he’s not. Call me,
Edgar; this is our dad, we need to get together on this.
We have to stand together.
I think it’s him. I hope it’s not.
I swear if the old man’s still alive when I get there,
I’ll give him something to cry about.
No matter how I coax
and stroke,
she will not reveal
truth tonight.
I’m sure it’s there.
I can hear it
hanging somewhere
between us,
but not with my ears.
Bad guitar!
She knows
I’m no good,
knows I’m angry
and that putting the truth
into my hands tonight
would serve war
more than music.
I pull at her strings
trying to make her believe
that if she gives me the truth
I can make one song serve both,
but bad guitar laughs at me
brokenly, cross-rippling splashes
of what I want across my face,
telling me
to snap out of it, saying
maybe someone can
but tonight
you’re neither soldier enough
nor player enough
to do anything like that.
A boulder, it is said,
is turned into sand
by patient action of water,
but then,
what happens
to the sand?
There has to be
a longer story.
It can’t end there.
I don’t care
that I don’t know
the story,
but I care
to learn it
and tell it.
I don’t care
that you don’t know
the story;
I care
that you are among those
who don’t care to know the story,
who are content
to see beaches
of vanished boulders
as a perfect ending
to a long tale
of this world,
who are content
to tolerate the myth
that there are beginnings and endings.
Before it’s fully light,
I step outside in shorts
with my flute in my hand.
I might play a note or two,
something quick before dawn,
a bit of whimsy on my part.
No shirt, no shoes, not nervous.
No one to see me, or at least
can’t tell if anyone sees me.
No one can hear me yet.
No one sees me standing here
round and full and pale
in the last darkness.
If I want to be noticed,
I have to do something
outrageous.
Neighbors, can you see me?
The fat, pale man,
out-of-place moon
on my porch? What am I holding
in my hand — a flute of some kind, or
a gun — is that a problem I’m holding,
something for public concern?
Playing this flute
this early, knowing it will likely disturb
someone if I do, knowing if I do
and someone calls the cops
I will likely at most get a talking to
because I am a round pale man
and I get to be whimsical
and have it called “whimsy”
and I won’t likely get shot if I do —
here is the definition
I have never understood completely
until now,
the one beyond the dictionary
and the dry arguments
and the earnest explanations: Privilege
is the fact
that I get to hold a flute in dim light
and think about playing it
half naked
on a weekday
in a working class neighborhood
because I can, no other reason,
only half-concerned about
consequences, which for me
might involve being an asshole
but probably not a criminal
or a dead man.
Mom, I never trusted you.
Seems like I had good reason.
Seems like something
was telling me you were lying
about something big.
The Monte Carlo? I recall
the black car and the white roof.
I don’t recall the face of the man
who owned it. You say, now,
he was my vanished father,
and not Keith, that rubber-faced twerp,
drunken little man I’ve called my father
since spit was wet. You ended up
with him versus what I recall
of the loud and flashy and wire wheeled
Chevrolet and its plaid coated driver.
What was his name, I asked you. All you did
was cry and ask how this could matter
when life has been so good and plain
and quiet. With him, you sobbed, it would have been
all noise all the time, Fourth of July
every night. Well, maybe I would have liked that,
I shouted. Maybe a few explosions
might have helped around here. Maybe not,
you said. Maybe not for you, I said — and stopped to think.
A huge limb torn off the tree?
More light comes in.
The wind and the rain
were as a hand sweeping hair
from where it had grown over
our eyes; we see now what’s important,
and the house shall be condemned
so a new house can be built.
You can make a disaster
into as many metaphors as you desire
but loss is loss. Pain is pain.
I could give you images to describe it,
concrete and solid and sharp,
but all they would do is cut and crush and cut some more.
Get your pen out of the way
and pick up a hammer. Put a blanket
on someone’s cold shaking shoulders,
and put a sock in it while you’re at it.
Don’t starve the mice, dear;
don’t leave them in their holes
to wonder about the cruel world.
Leave a crumb for them — they’ll have
to climb the chimney bricks like Half Dome
to get to it, but let them know it’s there.
A little sign in mouse language.
A tiny recording device blasting advertisements.
Is there mouse TV? Use every media outlet available —
are there mouse newspapers? “The Daily Mouse Ledger?”
Don’t waste time on social networking as their tech
has not developed to that level. Still, we must do
everything in our power to make them climb for the crumb.
Make them whisper of it in their mouse circles.
Martha, my love, my dear — everything we are
depends on us making the mice climb for the crumbs
we can offer them! To cut them off entirely would be cruel
and we are not cruel people, not as long as I can say something
about it. You say they frighten you, they are dirty creatures,
they carry diseases — and I agree with you; the Black Plague
rose from among such as these…but we must not kill them.
No traps, no poisons. No hard boot on a frail neck.
We depend on them as much as they do us, you see.
We leave them crumbs to amuse us, to teach us how to be
gentle and generous. We are The One Percent. It’s our one job.
The only road
I will travel from here
runs due north from my door.
One day after I leave I take
a left turn and drive into my hometown
with all the small houses
clustered along one street
that runs from the North Road west.
At the end it goes into the river
like a boat landing,
though no one here has boats
and no one swims in the River.
My house here has three stories,
a small front yard, a huge backyard.
I call the front yard “the grounds”
and the back yard “the estate.”
I call the first story of the house
“The Factory.” The second is
“Dramatic Sex.” The third,
“What Is Left Over.” It’s a pretty
house, uncluttered outside and in.
I’m an uncluttered, pretty man in this house
where I spend my days between
the Factory and Dramatic Sex
and fall sound asleep every night
in What Is Left Over. What goes on
in everyone else’s house, I neither know
nor want to know.
Full moonrise over my town
is a party and a half for everyone.
We watch the River silvering, the fish
striking out beyond the reach
of anyone’s best cast.
Everyone’s out of their houses talking
and laughing, the way we didn’t
when we lived south of here
in the tangle of other people.
We are small enough
that everyone knows each other by face
and large enough that names are a bother,
so we laugh and talk and go
in and out of our homes without them.
It’s better that way. I couldn’t even tell you
the name of the town,
not that I would. If you’re meant to find it,
you will.
Thirstier
today than
yesterday and
the day before.
My mouth isn’t dry, so
how to explain my throat?
No sound coming up,
no water trickling down.
A hard road from here
is where I’m going.
Will need a drink soon.
It won’t matter if it’s cold
as long as it’s wet.
There’s not much left here,
just a small spot of smolder
and a thick skein of smoke.
A little water please: enough, at least,
to let me hiss my last.
Put a spark or two in flight:
dying embers, sputter.
Dark Matter 