a few minutes later / another, more difficult task, namely
that of distracting one’s thoughts from the burden of
at every moment / that which one has striven to acquire.
That some grave mistake, inoperable, nests in the cog-
as I entered the church / work of that life proves abundantly
clear: through a chambered air, a convergence of needs
while I uttered these words / hard to satisfy, whose short-
lived satisfaction achieves no more than a pause in the
midnight / noise devolving in time into a boredom that is
at once beachfront property and proof of the emptiness
at last / of existence per se. If existence held intrinsic
positive value, then there would be nothing left to refer to
as I set the lamp down / as boredom: it would be enough
merely to exist. But mischance cut the power without
the clock struck two / which we are powerless: moonlight
confuses us with its statuary: we find nothing adequate
while I poured out my heart / to strive after or fear that
doesn’t disappoint. Little wonder then we should cast
into the garden / hours into distance, difficulties, gambits
designed to perpetuate the illusion that our goal might
with dropt and wordless lips / satisfy. Intellectual activity
removes us briefly from the swelter of existence. This is
the clock struck three / its interest. Any sensual pleasure
fades on attaining its object. We know when we are not
on the verge of extinction / lost in such pursuits, thoughts
lilt back to the terms of this existence, its fundamental
feeling my fear about to be / insignificance, leaving one
furious with it, but protective nonetheless, as one might lay
in a fever / one’s hands in tenderness upon the heaving
animal one is given to destroy, even though I have come
over and over / through long experiment to abhor being
nothing terrifies me more than the prospect of it stopped.
EPITAPH BY HIS OWN HAND
From the morning he started
peeling his first potato
he felt like he’d been peeling
potatoes for eternity—
all that fell about his ankles
like clouds’ inky shadows
smudged across the pastures
of an afterlife clearly
put farther away from him
the harder he worked for it.
POEM BEGINNING WITH A SENTENCE FROM THE MONK
Far from growing familiar with my prison
I beheld it every moment with new horror.
Thoughts to which a mind should not be driven
drove me through a bank of devilment in flower.
Thoughts to which the mind had grown immune
soon sickened me against me, turned me
in among me stranger than before, my quarantine a panic
room bricked in, a tightening around me
in increments only animals know. And now I inch
the walls like ivy, probing the brickwork
with patient cheek for cracks admitting outside air.
And now I feel, or feel I hear, a livid spark
through an old antenna on the tower’s top. And now
I wish what others spoke were stilled inside
the mind in stoppered, mouth-blown bottles,
and I’d place these bottles in cabinets made
to resemble faces, and what was said would stay
where you’d expect to find it: in the cabinet
pertaining to the face of the person who had said it.
It may or may not be necessary to point out
this isn’t the first I’ve been seized by the thought.
I have in the past found pleasant distraction
assembling a taskforce to distill speech data, another
to oversee its placement in cabinets, a third
to tend to the general upkeep, a last to awaken me
with a mild ringing: I have the gong already.
Storage of this nature should, but can’t, be infinite—
one’s archive’s blueprints echo one’s anatomy.
Something mere about the word brides my crazy.
It may or may not be necessary to point out
it could be said, to revise a statement made above,
I feel a strange degree of familiar discomfort,
as if the closeness of my skin went atmospheric, aglow
with insignificant warmth, as when a flashlight
lights the mouth, or burning hot, as when Pazuzu
visits from the south, bearing storms and fever.
What interests me is forever can’t tell a difference
without dissolving it. If certain cheerfulness
comes with the territory, apparently some sacrifice
does too, but it’s a kind that goes unnoticed.
Standing before the cabinet of your face, I unstop
a bottle; I savor its phrase’s nuances. And although
you are far from this undertaking, you are closing in
in spirit. And although I have often felt buried alive
like an architect in the tomb it was his dumb luck to design
for a paranoid king, looking around here as if
I were its visitor, really taking it in on its own terms
and not just paying lip service to the big idea,
doing the work of putting words to the way I feel
in the thick of it, a little like building a birdhouse
underwater, I see no reason why, given a modest
number of revisions, I couldn’t grow to love it.
HIS AGENDA
All these empty pages must correspond to the days
devoted to lying in the bygone style, the head
buoyed for hours in a harbor of jade pillows, eyes
turned to the window where the hours bled from blue
to deeper blue then burned away—the whole day
dazzled into night without innovation, the sky again
the temple of the mind perceiving it, the clouds
becoming thoughts like pilgrims chance had carried there.
I think of them arriving in the bygone style, in light-
colored robes and lamblike manner, their simple
fluctuations visible through the linden branches
that would not have been in leaf or flower at the time.
I think of him attentive to the pilgrim voices, softest
silver audible to inmost ear, and also of the pleasure
that he must have taken there, a pleasure I admire
somewhat more than I admit, and put the shut book down.
THE RUMORED EXISTENCE OF OTHER PEOPLE
I dreamt my household consisted largely of objects
manufactured by people I would never meet or know
and some of these objects dangled down from the ceiling
while others towered dizzily upwards from the floor.
If most of them stayed where I left them as if dozing
in embryonic thought, still others came with features
conducive to movement, making them appear more
endearingly alive as they powered up and off in search
of excitement, an hour’s diversion—no harm in that.
Intuition stopped short of determining whether or not
any of the objects kept in contact with their makers
via some kind of bond, perhaps a physical connection
explicable through science, or else a spiritual affinity
notoriously difficult for an outside party to understand.
But the more I gave it thought the more it seemed to me
believable. A silver line, a souvenir, a sieve of relation
&n
bsp; meaning to release something lovingly means always
remaining tied to it. As to be somewhere completely
means never having to leave. I thought to figure out how
many presences collected around me at that moment.
Did they possess consciousness, would they cooperate.
Should I expect a new kind or the mundane damages.
Everywhere I might be now in light of where I’ve been.
I dreamt I held out my hand and before long a banana
flew up from the industrious parenthesis of Costa Rica
and provided for that hand before it knew it wanted.
Start slow, be consistent, and your levels will increase.
I dreamt the will of manufacturers to produce goods
was shed from those goods long after they were made.
All the windows overlooking a landfill or production site.
The more I gave it thought the more it seemed to me
obvious. Also touching. Whoever built that warehouse
across the way built it thinking someone would one day
look at it in wonder. Also sorrow. To keep an endless
store of that feeling. To make, to provide it. That I might
turn my back on a building like that will have become
unthinkable tomorrow, when my sympathy with most
abandoned things is effectively cut from the budget.
I dreamt in increments of three, five, and eventually ten.
Not the way the objects at hand rubbed me but more
the way those beyond me made me pang for them there.
I might even say the walls, the floors, the plush carpets
unrolled on the floors and the furniture, the refrigerator
and any item in it, nautical tchotchkes and the curtains
clamped tight as August quahogs to optimize my output.
The shedding of the will, too, takes place incrementally
across decades, late at night, the little shifting in a room’s
air profile comparable to a ghost’s entrance if not quite
equivalent. At work beyond the warehouse, everything
else: droplets on navy felt, protection sensed in a system
whose products had begun to forecast accurate wants.
I dreamt a body’s indentation beside me on the mattress
vanishing as the presence found the door through a film
adaptation of silence. Child with gifts for ravens in pockets.
Lady affianced to alien abduction. Figure of the human
experiment almost over. I open my mouth and in no time
lasagna, Chianti, a greater than expected rate of melting,
atrophy, military action, and a ravenousness that shook
my confidence and the hinged box I keep pin money in.
The rumble of it recalls the convulsion Plato says the gods
sank Atlantis with to chasten its inhabitants, whose vast
majority descended from Poseidon and one of the island’s
earth-born shepherdesses. As long as divinity remained
predominant in their nature, Atlanteans kept obedient to
the laws of their progenitor, but over time, what was divine
diminished, and love of wisdom and virtue gave way to
love of wealth and luxury, which in the past had seemed
merely distractions. To those who lacked the ability to see
through the radiance of things, theAtlanteans appeared
to be thriving: palaces, baths, mines rich in orichalcum.
Herds of elephants. Vineyards, orchards. Access to upwards
of a dozen sherbets. The chance to astonish houseguests
with golden oblongs and lozenges. To watch as vampires
turned mortals into vampires for cash, despite the fact
that vampires could easily devise a life without having to
dirty their pale hands with money again, but apparently
nothing restores that old vitality like a night of spending.
I dreamt a percentage of my money had been touched
by entrepreneurs of the undead. I dreamt I’d never guess
how much. Dreamt no idea where my money had been.
What bathroom floor or choir stall or Alp or what disgrace.
Dreamt I couldn’t taste a difference. Dreamt my money
might want company, and I had better not keep putting it
in my mouth in that case. As drawing from a songbird’s
coloratura, I dreamt the secret to prosperity is being
commonesque. Profiteroles, remote control, the ruin of
my body. And tremulous as horses hidden in old plaster.
Confused as vinyl siding. Certain as what’s happening
can’t have all at once, or even all that fast, but by degrees
imperceptible until too late, eyes trained to other tasks
as the sheep took to clover, distracted as a vortex of plastic
debris measuring twice the size of Texas patched itself
together mid-Pacific, a swirl like a god’s intoxicated eye
but not surveillant, voyeuristic, a bright new continent
only in it for the kicks, its culture to bask, its historiography
accidental, with every bit of flotsam serving as a double
record of one product’s manufacture and consumption.
I dreamt in complex packaging that posed no less a threat
at the factory warehouse than up among my cupboards
or dropped in the superabundant trash bins at airports.
Found it simple and good to forget that threat by letting
perception of such objects eclipse true knowledge of them.
Any worry washed in umbra. Like being in the moment
my dumplings but experience insists what makes them
mine is money. I open the door and I extend good money
into ancient night, night prosperous with stars, order heavy
in my hand. I’m immortal that way. I lie down and I feed.
3
NO MISSION STATEMENT, NO STRATEGIC PLAN
When loathing’s narwhal thrusts its little tusk
deep into the not-for-profit of my thought
and anchors in the planks across which I have
stomped unfathomable hours, and thanklessly;
when I feel the panic of it struggling to dislodge
and all the damage done to the ship thereby—
the prow, to be exact, if we agree this is a ship,
and now I fear we have no choice—when lost
in drear blue Baffin Bay, if night’s first voice
says Quick, we’re sinking, yank that narwhal out,
it must be night’s second, less impetuous voice
saying Not so fast. Why not leave it where it is?
THE NEW HISTRIONICISM
When the actor on stage slams his fist against the table
one last time, his other hand holding a worry-heavy brow,
half-shadowing his eyes, we can almost taste the thumb
of circumstance bearing down on him, and we know what now
he has to become: a man of action, opponent to the forces
that brought him to this crisis. We’ll watch as he chooses
his moves with caution, demonstrating as never before
what we have come to call free will, his plight felt so acutely
we have no choice but to believe in it, even if we know
that the path our hero manages to cut through the hedge
maze of opposition was actually penned forth centuries ago
in the looping longhand of an author now conveniently
apart from the drama which seems to reveal the illusory
nature of free will even as it attempts to excite our faith in it.
All my life, I thought to myself, asking for the tre
mendous
embarrassment it drew up in me and against which I fought
whole- to half-heartedly, making of my mind a religious
rite observed by no one but me and my understudy, static
windowside as cloud shadows advance over ancient pastures
monks tend sheep in. I send my latest bulletin their way
by way of thought but it can’t be made out above the fuss
gathering in the herb garden as, true to form, a massive ship
flying head-to-wind, sails luffing, cuts through the chill air-
waves raveling upward from the mouths of distant heather.
I signal to the monks again, only this time via semaphore,
as in ship to shore, but they’re still too distracted to notice.
Meanwhile the hero places his hands palm-down on the table.
He pushes his chair back, starts to rise. Then the house goes
black, pitching us into the dark at this—the decisive moment.
A struggle between the darkness and the sense I control it
ends abruptly.The darkness is not nice.The ship steadily
approaches the monastery as if sailing on the surface of the sea.
When the lights come back up, the hero reappears, pacing
across the ship’s deck’s planks in what we have come to call
anxiety. I drop my typewriter out the window to show I know
what is expected. That the hero and the others on board
will notice monks pacing on the earth below them and drop
anchor right then and there. It lands in the bed of lavender.
Monks crowd around the anchor and seize it as if their own,
though the rule states clearly that none shall receive a message
or a gift without first informing the abbot, and that even if
the abbot knows and orders the article to be accepted, it lies
within his power to present it to whichever brother he chooses.
Moreover the brother for whom an article was intended
mustn’t grow angry, inward or upset should it find its way
into another’s hands, as such behavior only serves to present
the devil with an opportunity. As the air takes on the scent
of crushed communal lavender, in the darkness comes a voice
that says that it belongs to me. It comes to test one’s mettle.
Meanwhile the hero, red with the monks’ untoward behavior,
leaps overboard to reclaim the anchor, moving deliberately