Space, in Chains (6 page)

tapping their chins and wondering—

who were we?

Confession

Like an animal cut in half

Like its stomach full of stones

Like light pouring off of an accident—more light, and more

Like a shadow in a threshold

Like a document at the end of a corridor

Like human beings in pastures grazing

Like mourners, like horses

Like official violence

Torture

Like the hospital room of the child after the parents have left

Like facing your prom dress in your nakedness

Like facing Oblivion in your prom dress

Like black coffee spilled on the lilies

Like milk splashed onto the ashes

Here I come: The man dragging something

The thing he drags: Here I am

You

If you kept walking you would, eventually, step out of this blizzard. You would walk to the place where even a blizzard reaches its limits. The ragged edge of its sum total. The place it stops and says,
No more.

And the sky, suddenly, would be, above you, unabashedly blue.

But here, the flakes still fall in their slow motion, wearing their geometries like trances. Perhaps no two are exactly alike, but they are also too alike to be given names, too much the same to be granted lives. They fall in crowds in the world as well as in the mind.

But you were beautiful, too, and free of illusions, so why—?

Well, I keep forgetting. You never listened to my suggestions. Never asked for my advice. When I built my luminous prison around you, you simply lay down at the center of it and died.

Abigor

He is the demon who knows all the secrets of war:

How a leader wins

the love of his soldiers.

He is also the puppet discarded on the floor.

And the dying dog

panting with the sound

of an empty basket

in the back yard.

He’s the veranda on which the champagne kept flowing.

And the cool shade in which the witnesses

were tortured

until each one managed to tell a more

fantastic tale than the one before.

And the chiming of little birds

in the grass

just after—

And the guests gathered around the—

pretending to laugh.

And also the desperate

shrieks of the mink

caught in a trap

down by the creek

still with the swan’s blood fresh on its teeth—

that unbearable song about the memory of that pleasure.

Forgiveness

Mercy, like the carcasses of animals in a foyer, being burned.

Fragrant, dreaming, unreal, and having to do, terribly, with love.

The sun shining dumbly all over this world and its troubles. The self on tiptoes sneaking away from the self. In the passing lane today, a woman with her mouth open behind the wheel of her car. Singing, or swearing, wearing a coat, driving through her life, and mine.

Hello,
little lifeboat made of straw.
Hello,
floating multitude of my sins in a basket called Forgiveness on an ocean the name of which my son once mispronounced the
Specific.

Hello,
ugly memory of myself crouched down with my fists on my thighs yelling at that child:

Something about a stuffed animal and we’re already late, and the palsied trees of winter behind me reflected for thousands of miles in his eyes.

Pain pill

Today as the beauties slice across the frozen

lake in their bright skates, all

daggerish light in the distance, just

between swallowing

and sleeping, I’ll—

One eye open in a grave.

One star over Bethlehem howling

over all the other stars.

Or the gray

spider sewing some old notion of herself between

the shade and the pane. The way

the memory of pain becomes

just that pale foam

left on the shore by the receding wave

or any of the other leftovers

of those Great Things

that meant you were alive

for a little while, and which

to love

would be too much, and to hate

would never be enough.

Now the skaters

are falling into dusk

one by one, as into wounds. Or

they skate on, but I can’t see them. How, drunk, once

I stood in front

of my own door

unable to open it, until

finally I thought

(such deep thoughts)

Who’s to say whether or not

I’m holding the wrong

key, or jamming

the right key

into someone else’s lock?

That water that swallows us:

There is a heart

pumping at the center of it. So much

submerged thunder.

Or a match burning

between the pages of a book. Or a dove

with a pellet in its side, still

flying, still

wearing

its feathered self around it, but

undoing all memory

of flight

as it flies.

Almost there

The snail crossing the freeway in a rainstorm. A map might have helped. A more beautiful face. More life experience. Expensive perfume. A horse.

Given fewer options, and a grid. If not for uncertainty, the ancient Greeks, the ridiculous cheerfulness of sunflowers, the drifting immemorial ashes of the blueprints, the soup grown cold, the aunts gathered around the fiery cake, chanting,
Make a wish! Make a wish!

The statistical index. The genetic predisposition.
If. If. If.

Sing it all day long. Without it there is nothing but this code of lies, and the traffic of too much music in the mind.
If
is the diamond at the center of every life. The shining woman opening the window out of which her toddler will fall on a bright-white day in July:

Dad on a ladder outside.

Sister blabbing on the phone
.

Not a cloud in the sky.

Not one thing wrong.

Almost there.

It is their song.

The Pleasure Center

It was tucked for us into the hypothalamus.
Thank you,
our lopped-off heads rolling all around the earth.
Thank you,
radio, movies, booze.

And thank you, too, racquetball court, video game, throbbing bass in the car at the stoplight as it pulls up next to ours.

Little fragment of a magnet.

Shrapnel in the attic.

Child on a bike.

Old woman on her knees beneath a suffering Jesus.

ADULT SUPERSTORE NEXT EXIT!

All of it crammed into a thing the size of a tadpole’s eye.

That terrifying tininess. Thrilling, flickering, wet. Space and Time writhing

around in a bit of slippery shining.
God decided to stick that in our minds.

And even the miniature golf course on fire.

The fatal dune buggy ride.

The smell of some teenage girl’s menthol cigarette.

The whole amusement park, and the cotton candy—that

pink and painful sweetness beside you on the seat of some rollercoaster’s silhouette

in the pinwheeling sun as it sets.

We were perfect test subjects for this.

As God is my witness:

I woke one morning when I was seven to find

the most unhappy man I’ve ever known

laughing in his pajamas. “What

are you laughing about?” I asked him,

and he said, “I don’t know.”

Lunch

has vanished. Just

a few crumbs on a plate, and the subway rumbling under us. It was

the Last Lunch. A bunch of us. We

would never be together in this life again.

A vein. A noose. A summer day. A rat crouching low

on the clattering tracks.

A storm. A scarf. A secret game. A man in the massive shadows

of the columns

of the Museum of Griefs-to-Come. A man

who would forever remain

our Observer, our Stranger

smirking in the corner of the photo behind our smug, shining faces.

Trees in fog

These trees in fog, not stirring, not calling:

How insistent they are

that they’ve been here all along

holding their tangible emptiness in their arms.

I admit it, I was wrong.

Here I stand, admitting it.

Like the mistress of the rich man

no longer in love

swallowing the pearls he gave her

one by one:

I was wrong.

But how I walked it—tenacity, my little dog—so

far and for so long. Walked

my wrongness all over the world.

Dressed it up.

Showed it off.

But that’s all over now.

Now, I am a woman who realizes she was wrong.

And how wrong.

Now, I am a woman who would—

No.

Just throw me a veil.

Like them, I will bear it on the landscape.

I will wear it over the face.

Summer

She drank too much

She was after

Some meadow

Some orchard

Some childhood night with the window open, and it was summer, and her own mother was humming in another room, and through the screen the fuzzy blue, and suddenly she was out there swimming, too, in softness, a permanent candle, invisible, beautiful.

She drank too much

For many years

Some stairs

Some cosmetics

Once

I stood in the threshold and watched her disintegrate before a mirror.

My lovely mother before a tray full of bracelets

(
Repeat:
My lovely mother before a tray full of bracelets)

She invited me in to fish the ice cubes from her drink. They were warm. On my tongue. Such calm. Like a small bomb detonated in an isolated barn. Like a beloved pet in the middle of a busy street, simply standing there, looking around.

The organizers

That was the winter the organizers

got so businesslike about your death,

all the little Swiss watches glittering

so efficiently in the snow

The dice and the lots and the shuffled decks—

Goodbye to all that

It had been decided, been planned, precisely

even to the day, and to what you would be wearing, and to the last

word you would say, to the music on the radio at the nurse’s station

For what purposes, then, the denial (that

bag of damp paperbacks and expired medications

shining and smudged in their amber vials)

Except that it was mine

And still I walk the sidewalk mumbling

something about how it will all be fine

Fine
is its own crazy village on the Rhine

Fine
is the name of the cuckoo-clock maker

Fine
is the word the cuckoo cries

every hour after hour on the hour—
scrambling out of its dark little hole

like something being chased with a knife by Time

Four men

1

Too late.

The gods of old Greece

have been reduced to this

disease, stuffed

into a dusty cupboard

in a kitchen full of shit.

I used to scramble after that on my hands and knees.

I used to beg for it over and over.

If not for the longing

and the ire, and the long day tethered to your ankle by a chain—

would you have come home earlier, and sober?

2

Men differ:

locally, and wither. We

sat up all night

arguing.

Men are the same:

the universe, and live forever. We

slept in each other’s arms all day.

3

For a while you wore

your bloody regalia

everywhere you went. All

muscle and movement wrapped

in a damp scarlet blanket. Crowded

offices, and wide-open spaces.

I couldn’t take it.

I told you a tasteless joke, and you hated it.

I wanted to see

what would happen if I took down your fortress

nail by nail. Then

brick by brick.
My

warm breath on your neck.

I told the joke again.

4

Furious rain on a furious lake.

The year of our waste.

Ashes in an ashtray in a burning bar,

and a man holding a woman made of bad moods in his arms.

I made a mockery of you.

You made a laughingstock of me.

A subtle love. The heart. Its

iambic, jellied waves.

Who knew those bees were making

honey of our grief? Who knew

that the workmen,

hired to be fair, would knock down the airy

wall one morning

between us

and neither of us would be there?

Briefly

Here and there some scrap of beauty gets snatched from this or that: One child’s voice rising above the children’s choir. A few wild notes of laughter passing through the open window of a passing car. That pink handkerchief waved at the parade. The tiny Nile-blue tile broken at the edge of the mosaic—all shining accident and awe. And this

last second or two of dreaming

in which your face

returns to me completely. Not

even needing to be, being

so alive again to me.

They say

one-twelfth of our lives is wasted