The subject matter has been floating around for a while, but this is just first crack at it. Thoughts?

He takes his daughter to her first
day in the dorms
and discovers that she’s assigned
to a room across the hall
from the room he had when he was here,
the room where he’d first
spent a whole night in bed with a woman.

He recalls her name.
Her first name was Cindy, and her second name was
Moses. He can recall that when they lay together
his hands nested upon her from behind so perfectly, settling into
the curve of her waist and her hip, and from there it was perfectly positioned to
slide forward and down into
her…and damn it, that’s all he can recall.

Dad? Can you help me move this bed?
His daughter stares at him. Are you here?
Sure, he says. I’m here.
Then he says, before he realizes: Good idea to move the bed. Don’t
want the guys in the next dorm to see what you’re up to in there.
She rolls her eyes in something like shock. DAD!
He smiles sheepishly, and reaches for the headboard rail.

Downstairs, they hug an awkward goodbye, he slips her
an extra fifty bucks. See you next weekend, she says, I’m
coming home for more stuff. He nods,
thinks about what he wishes he could remember,
then catches her by the arm: Listen, he wants to say, the learning here
is critical. Learn what’s important. Hang on to those moments.
Don’t come home every weekend, if that helps at all. But they just hug again.

All the way home he takes back roads.
He tries to remember anything more about that night twenty-six years ago
but draws a huge blank while driving through the late summer tunnels
of green, the long light stippling the road and the car.
Exactly, he thinks. That’s it exactly.
It’s like a sketchbook. It’s not at all
like a photo.

OK, another go ’round…

I really thought about some of the original critique of this piece from y’all…although I didn’t necessarily agree with all of it, it certainly informed the edits. Thanks, folks.

AS SLOW AS POSSIBLE

Sept. 5, 2001:
A group of musicians and philosophers begin to inflate the bellows of a church organ in Halberstadt, Germany, in preparation for a performance of John Cage’s piece, “As Slow As Possible”.

Hate’s eyes pop open;
he gets up, dresses,
steps outside.

Hate finds that while most people do not want to talk to him,
there are still others who embrace him, taking him to mean something
he never wanted to be;
and all Hate can do is numbly
submit, for no does not mean no,
when your name is Hate.

Although he’s dragged it with him for so many years,
Hate does not understand his own baggage.

He tries to pretend that his name is
meaningless. He tells himself it’s
simply a breath
pushed through a half smile, ending in a full stop
behind his tongue.
Every other thing it carries
was added by others along the way.

Hate thinks of himself as having had
so much potential.
It’s all their fault
for having robbed him.

“As Slow As Possible” was originally written in 1944, at the end of WWII, as a piano piece that would last a half hour or so, based on the natural decay of the notes being played. This organ arrangement virtually eliminates the possibility of decay, and creates the space for the performance of an indefinitely long piece of music.

Hate prefers silence.
Assuming that to be a disability, everyone who meets him
offers Hate
a voice to speak through.

When he does attempt to speak on his own behalf,
Hate’s throat cracks.
The edge of his own meaning salts his tongue.
Nothing green can grow there.

The vision of those who now inflate the bellows is that this piece will be played beginning to end, and that the distance between the beginning and end of this performance will be 639 years. The people who will play this music will die before completing their service to the piece. The people who will complete the service are not yet born.

In slack moments Hate tells himself:

“If I were to change careers, I’d be a baker.
All the loaves I baked
would split open at the far end
and grow larger as they were eaten.
You’d never want for more,
would never get to the end of a loaf.

If I were to marry
I’d pick a partner named Bread Dancer.
If Bread Dancer and I were to have children
they’d be named Easter and Breakfast.
Bread Dancer would dance the bread dance
for each person
who bought bread.

After many years
I would leave the business to my children,
and they would bake for others’ children,
and that’s the way
it would go for as far out
as I can see.”

The church that holds the organ was purchased strictly to house this organ and this performance. It was unused for years, and is now refurbished as a place for the longest music to stretch out. There are still pipes waiting to be installed. This organ cannot even yet play all the necessary notes to complete the piece.

Hate finally moves from his home, burning it
behind him, leaves in the dead hour before dawn,
taking little with him, no ID, no passport.

Hate becomes a monk
on multiple roads,
plays at pilgrim and tinker,
but always ends up a soldier,
always regrets,
turns away,
always, always,
always.

Feb. 5, 2003:
The first chord of the piece is struck upon that organ. Lead weights hold the keys down, and the notes will sound for the next year and a half.

Hate, after poisoning
many years
with his wandering,
discovers the Halberstadt church
and enters to pray
for amnesia.

Everything must be possible, even if it has not yet been imagined.

First draft…

Goodbye, he thinks, to
all the useful heroes: the grandfather drunk on Sunday
afternoon, his boxers stained and ragged, bellowing
for another beer; the father in brown robe and socks
glimpsed from the hiding place at the top of the stairs
in the act of demanding a fast fuck
from the tired mother in the kitchen;
the neighbor who
pisses in the prize roses after coming home hammered yet again from work,
then slaps his daughter when she says she is “gonna tell”;
the sons and brothers of all these men, who
whispered the lessons from mouth to ear and into
tradition.

Goodbye as well to the helpful menagerie:
the invisible elephants hulking
in colonial-style living rooms, shitting the braided rugs
while alcoholic salesmen and pedophile pastors smile around them,
tiptoeing toward their secret goals; the fish out of water flopping
in the corners of rumpus room make-out parties, hoping to God the lights
don’t come on; the barkers and woofers and pigs sentenced to oblivion by castes
of beautiful people; the goats of football boys, who arm themselves with broomsticks
to stoke the yearning for unconfessed homoerotic brawn
in a bonding ritual on Friday nights before the big game; the gates of the zoo
are open now, and whoever let the dogs out can’t
begin to put them back in.

And goodbye at last, he thinks,
to the women who seemed to him
were always there to make dinner and diaper
and blowjob just happen, who never seemed
to say a discouraging word to those cowboys,
who may have spoken and sobbed and stared into space
when no one was looking, but if no one is there to see it happen
does it ever happen –

goodbye at last he thinks: because
a woman is looking him in the eyes now,
and saying no, and is not tentative or frightened,
just simply refusing;

goodbye at last, he thinks;
and as he sways, drunk and disbelieving,
putting one hand out to steady himself against
the grey-brown side of the newly solid elephant,
he has the newfound decency
to lower his eyes before her.

ENABLER

Call me black ice —
when you see me,
call me the place you skid.

Call me shadow’s fragrance,
named for the way
a bad night stings you raw for days.

Call me water on granite,
wearing you down over time.
Think of me as a sink full of bones
and greasy teacups.
When you come up for air,
slimed in old blood
and rotting greens, I’ll be
your horror.

Call me the technology
of ultimate sleep.
Make me
responsible for
the deaths of Herculaneum
and Pompeii,
finger me for the one who guided
the sulfur rain
and even flow of
death’s mud
over Vesuvius’ flanks.

No matter
what you call me,
I will look back at you
and say:

yes,
I am that,
I am the thing
I am labeled.

You’ll shine
more
that way.

There’s a hole in me the size of a departing flight.
Something taxis up to the edge and takes off, flying out of me toward a horizon.

(It’s not that I can see any horizon; I just know that’s
what planes fly into. It used to be the wild blue yonder that planes

flew into, but no one thinks planes are that wild anymore — they seem to us
more like stale buses full of cranky people eating meals that don’t

fill them, much the same way that nothing fills me now.)
I keep thinking, even after my mind falls into the hole in me and disappears,

that I’m going to rise and follow that vapor trail into the blush,
catch up to the flight before the sun goes down;

you’d think I’d know better by now,
I ought to know better by now,

I ought to be able
to figure this one out.