I won’t read the chapters about my future addiction
to pain medication, my lepidopterophobia,
my failed marriages, my miscarriages, the fire
that will destroy all my manuscripts, my fall
down the stairs. I won’t ever read the last chapter,
the one that describes in vivid detail the flames
that will erupt from my fatal motorcycle accident
somewhere in the Badlands, how it will take weeks
for them to discover my body. I am only 22 years old.
I want to fake my death on Facebook. I want a pony.
THE SAFEST WAY HOME
Excellent customer service means never crying
in front of the customer, asking him to call or
send orchids. In a photograph taken during the time
when you knew all the constellations, you look
like you knew it would end up like this—stars
are something to talk about at night on a beach.
When they tell you they’re from Nepal you say
you love Nepal. You love Flint, Michigan, you
love that there are roads and wrists and reasons
for the planets and no matter what they tie you to,
if afterwards you run into one on the bus, because maybe
you live in the same neighborhood, you will hold
your suitcase handle because first of all, you
could be any of five names and second of all,
your accordion is in the suitcase and you have a ticket
to Valencia. Tomorrow you will be where the cliffs jut
from the sea. You’ve been practicing. If the stranger
sits beside you and says, Bangladesh, don’t show
that you remember, get off before your stop, before
he says he has a fencepost, a red parachute, an open field.
EVEN THE GAS STATION ATTENDANT HERE IS NICE TO ME
I lost my job at the factory, but before you get mad
I want you to know that last night I woke up in the snow
without shoes, and I didn’t call up to your window;
I let you sleep because I remembered our agreement.
This is what happened: he caught me in the freezer
with his copy of Ulysses and asked me what I thought
I was doing. What could I be doing, I said, what
are my options. I still had on my latex gloves
and I know you won’t want to hear this part, but
I opened a carton of macaroons with my teeth.
You have always wanted to do that, he said. Yes,
I said. He said, I can’t let you do that. So I ate one.
He turned off the lights. I took a yellow cake
off a shelf and lit twenty candles to warm our hands.
How is this night different from all other nights?
There was a time when I didn’t have to sleepwalk
everywhere. You remember. I was here. But
then I got used to waking up every morning
in a different city, without you, without the same
sun, the same lack of a view, all that scaffolding,
none of the sea, every piece of mail a sympathy card.
I can never go back there. I stole his book. When you
go to work each morning, I walk to Jerusalem.
I am answering your letter. You are ruining my life.
KATHARINE TILLMAN VS. LAKE MICHIGAN
Mitsu flips a lot of coins. Katharine told me that once
she was in the middle of a tantrum and a coin
told him he should love her, and yet, he wasn’t
satisfied so he went to the dictionary and closed
his eyes and found a word and when she asked
what word he found, the only thing he would tell her
was that he was one step closer to the secret
of the universe. Can you tell me what it rhymes with,
she asked him. Is it a verb? Is it a country? Have I
been there? Will you write its name on my back
while we sit on the pier and watch the blue dusk
chase the sun to Jersey? The last time I ever
saw Katharine she asked me the name of the lake
in the distance and I said Michigan and she said
she’d heard of it, and then she showed me the diaries
she kept when she lived under the overpass
near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico,
when all she had was a travel Scrabble set and
the reason she’d run away. Milan Kundera
has a lot to say about our tenuous insignificance.
When he wants to decide something he, too,
flips a coin, but in his case heads is Little Rock,
Arkansas, and tails is Little Rock, Arkansas, and
it’s just a matter of who to blindfold and bring with
on his motorcycle. On page one hundred and seven
of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I get lost
driving Katharine to the airport. On page one hundred
and forty nine, Tereza dreams that they take her away.
After I see Katharine for the last time I don’t go home;
I go to Prague and it’s 1968 and the man I love won’t
touch me; he just holds an empty gun to my temple
and even though we both know it’s empty there’s the small
comfort that the worst thing that could possibly happen
would be the thing I want most. Mitsu says the secret
of the universe is obvious in any planetary shaped
object you can find on the floor of a parking garage.
Katharine says how. I say I want to move to Canada;
the only tenderness anyone can get around here
is in the time it takes him to untie my wrists.
KEEPING THE MINOTAUR AT BAY
He takes me to a movie about a bathtub
full of Vaseline and apples and asks me
afterward how I feel about it. I feel pretty
ambivalent about the universe, I say,
like I’ve been reading too many wilderness
guides and spending all my nights
trapped in lucid dreams in which I’m
beneath the deepest, most inescapable
snowdrift and I decide to stay there until it melts
at the end of the world—el fin del mundo,
as they say, acharit hayamim—and the whole time
I’m dreaming I’m thinking, I can’t wait
to get in my boat and sail across the flooded earth.
So, I tell him, I get in my canoe and all the old cities
are phosphorescent scars miles below the surface,
sunken ships without survivors, and I know
I won’t last long. I know the end is near
and yet I paddle on, scanning the open seas
for a waterproof map, a yellow umbrella,
another survivor in another canoe, and I think this
is how disappointed everyone must have felt
when Atlantis sank. In the classic Return to Atlantis,
R. A. Montgomery writes, “Destruction is widespread,
and you grieve for the Atlantean people” (85). Don’t I
know it. It’s at this point in the dream when I realize I am
actually alone and likely to drown and I start to scream
and then I wake up in my own bathtub, water to my knees.
Another nightgown soaked. For the Norse, that’s hell:
wearing a soaked nightgown in a cold, dark room
for eternity, I say, did you know that? He says
he didn’t know, but that I seem like a very
interesting person for a person my age,
which makes me think Theseus must have
said something just like that to Ariadne,
to make her fall in love with him so she
would give him the red threaded clew
to the maze and he could slay the monster.
I used to think I was waiting for a steady shoulder,
for someone to come along and appreciate my
somnambulism, my prophetic knowledge
of the ultimate destiny of mankind, someone
to be with when all the lights in the world go out,
but look what happened to them. Theseus killed
the beast, and they got married and then sailed
to an island, where he abandoned Ariadne in her sleep.
And when she woke she hanged herself. Why
did she hang herself? And if I find the reason am I
less susceptible? Both unanswerable questions, and
yet I still go home with him, submit to a strange
bed in which I lay awake all night, without him,
listening to the restless pacing of something familiar
in the room beneath us, the haunt I cannot kill.
HOW TO MEND A BROKEN HEART WITH VENGEANCE
We stretched a ladder between our second-story
windows and tried to get the dog to go
across to see if it would hold but it didn’t.
My ambivalence must have made the dog fall, I
called across to him. He picked up his tin can
and said, I can’t hear you unless you speak
into the tin cans, remember? What did you just
say? Sono spiacente, I said. Nevermind. Slicha.
You are probably wondering now if the dog’s okay,
but do you think you could stay with me, anyway,
even if I never gave you the answer? This was
so long ago, further back than yesterday,
when you and I spoke for the last time. You said,
Why did you leave so early? And I said I couldn’t
sleep and you asked me why I didn’t tell you
at the time; you would have hit me on the head
with something hard. Let me ask you, could you
imagine a cloudless sky above a Nebraska plain?
Could you draw it? Could you imagine yellow birds?
Could you visualize the soft sound a door
makes when it closes and sticks and I thought I
had problems, but seriously, look at yourself.
Look. I had this incredible dream last night
and I’m not even going to tell you about it.
In Russia, the young girls who die violent deaths
either end up like birds in Pushkin or like fish
at the bottom of lakes, where they comb each other’s
hair all night long, where they teach each other
the lyrics to every Talking Heads song
so they can lure sailors into their shadowy grottoes
and drown them. They say there once was a rusalka
who wished to be human so badly she gave up
her voice to be with her beloved and of course
he loved her because who wouldn’t love a girl
who can’t talk back, but then one night
at a masked ball he got distracted by a foreign princess
with an elegant neck and the rusalka was so despondent
she went to a witch and somehow communicated, I’ve
never been so unhappy in my whole life. What should I do?
And of course the witch told her to stab him with a dagger,
and of course the rusalka considered it. Like, seriously?
Seriously stab him with a dagger? But ultimately she
decided she would rather lose her human life and
go back to being an underwater death demon.
At least in the opera version the prince realizes
his terrible mistake and goes hunting for a doe
only to find the rusalka in her last moments and
kisses her knowing it means death and eternal
damnation. Here I am now, watching the moonlight
dance across the water in the retention pond, staring
at this scalpel and trying to forget your address.
JUNE 14, 1848
Weather: hot. Health: fair.
Dear Diary, had to leave the baby
behind because she wouldn’t eat.
Sent Jon out to shoot a buffalo,
but he said they all looked so peaceful
he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
Figures. We’ll all be dead soon
enough. Waiting for the Indian
to get here so we can cross
the river. June 15, 1848.
Weather: still hot. Health: same.
Dear Diary, Chastity’s doll
drowned. She wanted to dive
in after it, but I reminded her
that she doesn’t know how to swim.
Dove in anyway. Another one lost.
Jon says he’ll skin us a buffalo
so we have something to eat, but
only if the buffalo has recently
died of natural causes. Get
a grip, Jon, I told him.
June 16: wagon broke.
Eating wild blackberries while
we wait for another wagon
party to come by and help.
Jon has gone off on his own
to meditate and ask forgiveness
of the earth. Prudence might
have dysentery. Figures.
June 17: Some days
in a game played by a sick,
sick person, who has sent me
on this journey only to kill all
my loved ones along the way.
June 18: help came, but
in the night they stole our oxen.
Guess we’ll just have to walk
to Oregon now. Are you there,
God? It’s me, Mary Jane.
Send me some oxen and
a son who likes to shoot things.
June 19: Lost Prudence
to dysentery. Should we
eat her? Tough question.
June 20: Another river!
You have got to be kidding!
June 21: Managed to swim
across with diary on top
of my head so it wouldn’t
get wet. Jon and I have found
a tribe of Indians who will let us
stay with them. At least,
we think that’s what they said.
We don’t speak their language.
They seem to have indicated that
tonight we must follow them,
blindfolded, into a grove of trees,
and in the addled darkness our
dead will return and speak to us.
MAROONED
Mother, I have been devastated all my life. I never said anything.
That’s why I wear a parachute. Why I tiptoed from my bedroom
to yours, and lay my head on the beige carpet for fear of worse.
Were there sirens? There were. Were there familiar songs? Yes.
I am afraid of the beds I have been in. In the morning there was
the heel of your boot sharper than before. Mother, what do I do
with your mail? Do you want to keep this snake in the basement?
What about the kitten? Do you want all these photographs of other
people’s children? The temperature in the lizard’s cage is dropping.
Let’s be realistic. If I open the windows the birds will come in and
eat out the eyes. Mother, I am bereft. Mother, I wear your necklace
and nothing else. Mother, I never. Nevermind. Let’s be fatalistic.
The neighbors know I’m down here. I can hear them watching.
Mother, after they take your eyes I will sew the lids myself.
CIRCUS MUSIC
Count back by sevens beginning with the last number
you remember. I’ll wait, said the Serbian Jew to the l
ame girl
who blushed at her wet shoes. West 72nd Street was a puddle
from Broadway to the Hudson and the traffic came and returned.
In Brooklyn you could lie in the street in front of the hospital
and not die. Sixty-three, she said, like a question of him.
For the last eleven hours I had worn a feathered headband
and taken dictation from a woman in Utah. I wanted
to know what had happened to the girl’s leg, but I was also
thirsty. He had to know. If I were him I’d ask her every day.
The night the circus marches the elephants through midtown,
the girl would say, have you ever been? Yes, I would say,
once. Well, she would say. No. Yes. No. She might say
it wasn’t an accident. Pretend to hold a knife in your hand
and people will think it’s your own. Her cane was on my foot,
but I stood still. Fifty-six and forty-nine. If she had picked
a larger number to begin with, I could have stood with the cane
on my foot forever. I was so cold then; I wore so many hats.
Can I get you something? His yarmulke was secured to his head
with gold hairpins. No, I said. I don’t know what I want, I said.
The girl stopped counting and apologized for her cane. Don’t
apologize, I said. Please, I said. It was a lion, she said. Forty-two,
I said, right? It was a land mine. I didn’t ask, I said. It was my mother,
she said, in our bathroom. Thirty-five? It was me. I did it. It was me.
ANOTHER SPECTACULAR DAY WITH PLENTIFUL SUNSHINE
Good news: you still won’t leave your wife for me,
but there is a horse tethered to the scaffolding
in front of my building and I think he might be mine.
Stealing horses means never having to say I love you,