And while fulfilment of a premeditated outcome
confers a nearly spiritual comfort of indifference
to the time of year, a paradise of fruits always in season,
the span of choice defines its limit, which cannot be exceeded.
The sea rolls over, props on an elbow, and now is heard
the small sound of a daydream running softly aground.
Dissatisfaction, in a Danish sense. On prevailing winds a scent
of compromise; for one tires of the spacewalk outside
what is the case. Beyond immediate luxuries
lives speculation and the tragic impression one is yet
to be born. It could be when all pursuits have been satisfied,
life’s problems will remain untouched. But doubt exists only
where questions exist. The World satisfies its own conditions.
It argues for itself. Herein lies an answer.
YOUR NEWS HOUR IS NOW TWO HOURS
Gratitude toward the houseplants, shame
for what they must endure. Of particular concern,
the azalea, flowering like the gestures and cries
of someone off the trail who sees a helicopter.
A long cold night is coming on.
Is it dying or being killed?
When I’m 100 percent on what’s happening,
there’s still that niggling five. Too much
water, neglect, information. Decisions
made at the executive level.
Science tells us plants emit signatures and responses
on yet another frequency we cannot hear.
That’s all we need. When little,
we were told our heads were in the clouds.
Now we suspect the opposite.
CHILDHOOD TRIPTYCH
I
Whether I’d seen them with, so to speak, my own eyes
was not the point. I may have filed some false reports,
but I’d seen plenty. Many nights they summoned me
in their fraudulent Rapture, discriminating not between
creatures and objects lifted equally into unbelonging
and returned with forms, that is, spirits,
broken. Before the world destroys us, it confirms
our suspicions. And so I kept my incredulity at the irreparable
local disdain for storm cellars to myself, investing instead
in superstition and my firstborn birthright
of being consistently wrong. As atmospheric hydraulics
once more engaged and the home acre prepared to revolve
like a sickening restaurant, as the grain’s hairs stood
on end and rope ladders descended from the gospels’
green windows, my mother, in the manner of someone
who believes wholeheartedly in God’s love and its profound
uselessness, said we’d take our chances in the basement.
II
It was always morning. Premonition like iodine in water
or the smell of malathion and there they were, corrupting
our rural airspace with 1970s speculative anachronism
and the analogue synth that represented the future.
They hovered appreciatively over operational secrets
of junkpile and chickenhouse as our quorum unfolded
its debate at a clear disadvantage intelligence-wise.
If little else, we affirmed the hubris of the Slavic character,
and hoped the Russians were happy now, having broadcast
into the godforsaken interplanetary void a Morse message
like a wren flushed from the bush we were hiding under.
They weren’t fitting in. Simply curious, we hoped,
even friendly, though we weren’t particularly either.
We almost got used to them. Until the altered pitch
and pneumatic exposure of a new bit of gear we’d known
in our hearts was there, and the shooting started.
My dream people, real to themselves, ran screaming.
III
Presumably profiting from the same virus raising the dead
in theatres then, they were days crossing the prairie,
the old joke turned inside out, an antique pace
through pasture and crop assigned by disfigurements
and dislocations of their martyrdom: burned, flayed, minus
hands and feet, exposed to wild beasts, flung headlong from
high places, transfixed, and not in a good way. Catherine
of Alexandria—as featured in the collectible card series
Sister Rose distributed in class to illustrate parables
proving the less-than-evident value of thinking
for the long term—held her disagreeable head before her.
When your heart has been broken, nothing can stop you.
A touchy lot, they didn’t look purified. We made an inventory
of our weapons, which is our way of keeping calm.
There seemed ample time to do what we needed to, given
virtues of the age. But here are the saints already among us,
anxious to communicate the burden of being chosen.
BE REASONABLE
My husband says to set the legs of our bed
in buckets of water is to overreact.
He does not subscribe to the online bedbug registry.
Does not acknowledge on his tactical map the advance
from the Delta, the Odeon, incubation in the warm folds of the greater
film industry, in homeless shelter and the public
upholsteries. A sideboard proclaiming itself free at the curbside
is a Trojan horse. On our street,
posts from #83, then #96, where it’s reported the landlady presents
with an aggressive strain of denial and poor interpersonal skills.
Not my business? They make it my business.
Often I don’t recognize what I’d rather not do until I’ve agreed to do it.
Then I know what I want and what I want makes me weak.
I grew up comforted by coyotes in the evening, but the news
from the suburbs is be afraid.
It seems you can live your whole life with a creature
and only know it one way. The pine beetle and rusty grain beetle
don’t realize the harm they do, they are only having experiences.
I didn’t want to kill the house spiders but they died
in my engagement with the larger project.
The spray bottle of dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride is empty.
Once I leave the room, the job will be finished.
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
From the airplane, fields are an Eric Cameron—
Reds and Yellows on Green—a process
begun as innovation now manifest
in the monoculture. Silent Lake
from an airplane is apprehended
geographically, with visible parameters,
but is all surface, like the past. The future
is an airplane seen from an airplane.
Lorazepam’s sweet fog has burned off.
Here is the present, its landing gear.
And the absence of someone
whose participation as such
is largely involuntary.
March, and the capital lights one dim lamp.
Its restaurants are closed; its thoughts, inward.
The fat of its heart has been spent on winter.
In the National Gallery all the seeds of colour
are preserved. Lit like a mountain
laboratory, its concrete architectural prologue
aspires to stone in the floodlights.
Chambers, anterooms, great halls, rotunda, dome,
restaurant, theatre, gift shop, inside is a landscape
of the unconscious mind.
I can’t find the elevator with the map
&nbs
p; I’ve been given. Around the corner of every era,
every great advancement in perspective, the same
security guard and the twentieth century
is being rehung.
Joshua Reynolds, show me the way,
you whose career, all due respect, never
peaked, but who painted until your eyes
gave out. Your Colonel Charles Churchill,
visual allegories to hand, stares wanly
and imperfectly past the elements
of composition, like a ghost after the fugitive
carmine of his living complexion, another victim
of the experiment. Though the experiment
continues as he fades and is a kind of life.
Our eyes meet in the frame.
Back at the hotel, a message waits,
received through the crowded air’s invisible
wires. The message is a liquid crystal display.
Distance’s droning lecture on policy is interrupted.
Doors of the long grey hall fly open.
ROTHKO VIA MUNCIE, INDIANA
The 1980s. Beginning of the long decade, the century’s
late works. Snow on the grid, field bisected
by a new-model John Deere’s progress in low gear
with a front-end load of straw bales. Its operator’s daughter
dons her brace, thinks her scoliosis the devil’s work
on her, a not-good-enough Christian. Her mother talks
scripture on the phone in the kitchen and the kitchen
smells of coffee and it smells of dog. Christmas lights
strung along the eaves of bungalows, vehicles moored
to bungalows by their block heater cords. Rumours
of drunkenness and corruption sunk the Democrat’s bid
for mayor. For we favour the simple expression of the complex
thought. The large shape’s impact of the unequivocal. Flat forms
that destroy illusion and reveal truth. Now the union’s eye
has twilight in it, and the city dump will stay where it is.
Evening falls, or rises, or emanates from the figures.
The SportsPlex and Model Aviation Museum, the Muncie
Mall and both quadrangles of Ball State University
shed their associations, perform an unknown adventure
in unknown space. Halogens illuminate an anecdote
of the spirit. You won’t see his face around here again.
The violet quarry hosts a greater darkness further in,
the White River sleeps in its cabin of pack ice.
Among the graduating class an abstract feeling develops,
an inclination to symbolism born of the fatal car wreck on
New Year’s, a spike in requests for Bob Seger
to the call-ins from a quasi-religious experience of limitless
immensity. To achieve this clarity is inevitably
to be misunderstood. Their lives take on the dimensions
of the fields, the city, its facades and its plan, whose happiness
will be their own. Rent, food budget, sweaters
indoors. Basketball, basketball, and a second marriage.
INTERIOR
after Jack Chambers
Neither question nor assertion makes sense
when truth is a tone of voice. As if I were a wall,
a former life
walks through me, each
modest architectural feature
an anthology of meanings to which paint
has been applied. They don’t retain
traces, that’s in thinking.
One would do well to adopt
a chemically pure standpoint
of appraisal, to lay down the repairs
and cleaning cloths, to set aside the plan—
there is no plan.
As object of exchange and economic indicator,
it entertains no hopes for us, is escorted
by its infestations back to ground.
Wind plays through its failings. Basement
cells divide toward the water table. The roof
maintains no argument
with rain, with shortcuts in
construction, the storm’s many elements
as the one true storm.
Evergreens, off-street parking, clouds at dusk
like clouds in western art.
The gardener, after a time,
feels the garden belongs to him,
familiar objects extend
his spirit: a malady expressed by drowsiness.
Wind moves likewise the feather and the ash.
You are the spirits, you are the dust.
Take them with you into the astonishing
night alien to us both.
MOLE
Those new flagstones need undermining,
the concrete sundial could use a tilt and while he’s at it
he’ll make a disaster of the borders. His order
is not our order. He prays to his own ingenuity. His desires
feature a plump worm larder and gathering
the tender beechnuts while ducking horrors the surface
churns out: cat-things, dog-things, pellet guns, poison,
trowels to flip him over the fence into the neighbour’s
as though that doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t work for us,
his gross body plan, eyes skinned shut and his front feet
hands, polydactylic and psychoanalytically proportioned
in that they are oversized and hairless. He does not require
an afterlife. When the consequence whose birth
we’ve outsourced, reared extra-muros on the output
of our comfort zone, comes of age, he’ll rejoin
his live/work situation as manager and sole proprietor
of our old estates. He’ll raise each molehill like a flag.
VIA
Only through the train window is the idle backhoe
figurative, do electrical transformers astride
the fine and dwindling farmland pause
spellbound in their march toward the lakeshore.
At Oakville’s irritable limits, hills of scrap aluminum glitter
like a picnic ground in heaven. No one gets on or off
at Ingersoll. Aldershot, Woodstock, Glencoe, Chatham
came of age in the corridor. It remembers where cars
and appliances came from when they came
from there, witnesses the fate of plastics
and obsolete electronics purchased
at big-box developments pinning the new grids down.
Whose architectures are illiterate, but whose lots
are full. Some good jobs have returned,
though diminished, untrustworthy in their refusal to commit,
and withholding benefits. They must be lived with
or left. Descendants of these unions construct
rumours, tributes, territorial admonishments
in fatcap and wildstyle on overpass and soundfence,
life-sized, largely unreadable at speed, though a sense
of form lingers. Of colour. Old service roads
partnered with criminal opportunism end
in abandoned lots, tears, and assurances
to the contrary. I never meant to hurt anyone.
No parties in formal wear await us at the stations,
no family vacations. Here are creosote and allergies,
energy drinks, your fellow passengers:
young mothers, elderly couples, gamers talking shop,
business travellers stuck in the minors, students
clothed in battlefields of competing logos, totally in love
from the neck down. You are a type, too.
Bereft, content, bored witless, anticipatory, according
to your natures, to the capabilities of your rem
ote
devices, deflecting ministrations of a seatmate
with a theory. Or asleep in the mind’s room decorated
in the cathode ray’s flickering blue, maturing perfume
of boiled potatoes and 1970s optimism. By now
you’re far from home. You’ve found out
who your friends are. A passing freight
throws a bag over your head, pushes your thoughts over,
roars and clatters at a forearm’s distance like the exposed
mechanics of a parallel universe and for a moment
you belong to the ages, without affiliation.
Until the snack trolley arrives to restore you to yourself,
to managers and clerks smoking in solidarity
on loading docks of light industrial areas, to mid-morning
in October, pools of remaindered night on leesides
seeding winter in the vacancies. As you coast
into the original neighbourhoods, ruins imply not
failure, but a lesson in patience. Memorial
to all that will neither be remade nor fall apart
completely. In trackside yards roam brightly
coloured polymers of contemporary
playtime, rainsoaked furnitures of early marriage
left with the question of material integrity.
Playing fields, the Park & Ride, nursing homes
like ghost ships. Wholesale Monuments. Everywhere,
motives on display, arguments with the ideal,
though it makes no sense to say we’ve always
played this wrong. One doubt hides another.
A record of our conduct. Standing water. Off-world
junkspace with mysterious distributive protocols,
peevish piles of refuse under a “No Dumping” sign.
For a bit of certainty, you would do anything.
It’s no use to look within. These towns,
like your own, lived in or yet to be, are forever inadequate
to the secret self who forges ahead, calls
from beyond any given incorporation, from the fog
into which the railbed steals, with your own,
better voice. It will catch you living somewhere
nearly by accident, but fluently, to all appearances
the station you were born to.
I LET LOVE IN
When they were together she thought it God’s punishment.
When he left she thought it God’s punishment.
When vermin overrun the city’s boardinghouses