like someone in a hospital bed
completely unaware, waiting to be fixed,
indifferent to everything.
And perhaps what makes us miss things
is that once in a while
we want to stop getting what we’re paying for,
a small Dostoyevskian mutiny
like buying a clear plastic box of salad
that tastes old and poisonous
then throwing the whole thing in the trash.
Our lives are a series of
debts and payoffs that feel barely
tolerable. And anyway
whenever I walk across the sky
to stand in line for the bathroom
I think, finally,
I am just like a ghost
walking over the world
trying to distract myself
from boredom
and hysteria. It’s a kind of
holy moment
that unfills
anger.
Stenographer
Never mind where I was.
It was like 4:45
and the bartender had great hair.
I was breaking apart, taking notes.
I had to stand at the very end
and wave at her for my drinks.
Reading VALIS
by candlelight
I felt like Buddha
losing my mind in a back room
or stenographer women
who type in courthouses
while everyone rages around them—it’s a life
of listening to and typing
sentences
said by other people,
and right now
it seems like no one in this place
wants to mean anything,
which is okay.
In my head I’m saying
in 300+ words,
I’m afraid and very hopeful.
Elegy with a Swear Word
A planet may hide hundreds of planets.
My planet hides in the hands
of physicists.
My heart, stoned and eating everything.
Subspace signature
telling another signature
we understand nothing.
Ghosts in the vocabulary.
Sorrow is a mansion.
A burning bush in the middle
of a transcendental bar fight.
The known universe
is saying Fuck, softly
into the unknown universe.
It’s a very long winter.
I can’t remember anyone’s name
or whether I finished my beer.
Cliff Elegy
for Emily P.
When you’re falling off the precipice
look up at the finger of the cliff you just stood on
where there’s a lemur waving his tiny black hand
getting tinier and tinier; look beside you, when
you’re falling, like Alice, and see there’s a white
horse breaking your mind
in a good way. There’s a whole set of glasses
filled up with different drinks, and someone
who wants to get very close to your cheek
with his cheek, and tell you something loving:
That you came with milkshakes in the evenings
and fed the cat. That this is only partway down.
The air is thin but there are so many particles
in it. And there’re chairs to sit on, and tables
to match. Being partway you can see everything,
the up and the down, the sideways and the
inwardways. You have all this time. All
this time to still fall for him.
The Fates
I cracked open my skull and out flew Mom.
She alighted on the rafters, electric in a massive chamber.
She has abilities accessed by latent genes.
Quietly terrible powers come
with great responsibility—which
you don’t have to honor—either way you still
have the power;
a few lives to fuck up, to
wreck or save—
wind chimes won’t let go of me.
I ring whenever I move.
I feel like the Titanic sailing straight
into the liquor store on St. Marks at Franklin.
I’m watching a TV show
about supernatural detective brothers
who travel back and forth across the United States
avenging their parents’ deaths
until they can’t remember anymore why or how the parents died—
in general
the need to kill demons and vampires
overtakes the brothers’ need
to remember anything.
And who can blame them?
Every night in the hotel the two talk indirectly about their feelings—
manly men, massive in sex appeal, drinking
and killing and talking.
In this episode the Services of Fate are no longer required in the human world.
Thus, everything in the future is affected.
In this reality
I know my brother is living near me,
so close
I can wave from my window
into his.
He’s telling me he’s writing
about the way
the face disappears.
Dear Sister
for Hillery
Dear Sister—After you went, a low wind warbled through the house like a spacious bird, making it high but lonely. When you had gone the love came. I supposed it would. The supper of the heart is when the guest has gone.
—Emily Dickinson to Mrs. J. G. Holland
I
In fear of death we lose out on life. We stuff an owl with arsenic and leave it totally perfectly not alive in the study, like something coveted privately by Calypso, like the greatest line ever written, embalmed with iron, staring down at us from the filing cabinet, never read aloud. What makes us despair is the impermanence of beauty. Until Nothing is beautiful we despair.
II
My sister and I write back and forth about Mom. “Have you talked to Mom?” “No. Did you?” Mom is deep into Jewish mysticism. She sits in the second row of an Elie Wiesel talk at the 92nd Street Y. She makes elaborate notes and drawings in her journal. The row is empty except for her. “I had the whole front row!” she says. “It was bizarre. No one would sit by me!” Mom dreams about Grandma. My sister scrubs the table each morning before the children get up. She feels the insects of the mind against her skin. They lay their precious eggs in her, they climb her, sac, follicle, and feeler. She papers the cupboards with instructions on how to feed everyone. She writes about the body confused, lost, undone. Writes about the currency of children. Her neurons fire and smolder—she wants to be loved right. She arranges the weekend away.
And of those ancient peoples just discovered, who constructed totem poles displaying wolves and demons—where are their bones now? Or the genes, unraveled and rewired, stretched like taffy—do they mean eternity?
III
Truth is always getting closer, vanishing everything possessed by inertia. When Grandma died her forehead perspired and a sickly sweet odor filled us, like the calm urine of infants.
In my mind,
in my mind, in my mind for days
after there was only a nail when I closed my eyes.
A new, straight nail. Upright, unpounded.
In my mind for days after: Antigone.
Antigone, whose portrait I was drawing as a horse that couldn’t be tamed.
A wild horse with goggles who disrupted dinner parties. Antigone, who couldn’t stand the idea of her brother’s body out there with the wolves, and dug a grave with a shovel and her bare hands, all alone in the creepy night.
Antigone, whose sister wanted to row out into the darkest water with her—
wicker and
stovepipe, fluid and skin—the body, not assumed, lies still in the ground—
love’s gross duties—the body is a continuous bloom with a terrible fragrance.
There is nothing to stop you from taking it into your arms, telling it
it is good.
The Gang Elegy
It lies deep in my psyche.
Like neuroscience or whatever.
Like all my old Archie comics.
Like wind, fooling around with me.
Like sweet liquid from a sherry glass.
It lounges in my old punk shadow.
Blue Jays
I
Great men will tell us how they rose from nothing.
But Mom’s a teenage heartbreak, deadly bright
blue jay in the snow, her vivid black beak queenly
inside a flush of blue. She’s a prologue the size
of a whole book—she’s real poppies
that will make you sleep—so much
motherland in her, I’m adrift in an age
of not giving up.
A fog lies over everything when she’s upset.
who snuck down when we went out, to use the toilet and steal the spoons—
Nothing’s up there! I said. Though
I had no idea—
Mom writing down license plates while
we sat in the car outside the bakery
eating croissants—so many similarities in numbers. It can be
beauty to see.
In the fields of Illinois
Mom danced topless for the soldiers headed to war.
“Probably be the last thing I see before I hit the shit,”
one man told her.
And
Blue, here is a shell for you—
Text messages like leaves on a river
moving swiftly toward
the vast sea of misunderstanding.
Wouldn’t it be nice to live more than one lifetime?
I want to be something else for a little while.
I’m the village idiot savant standing at an empty
wishing well, lighting a joint and getting paranoid,
telling one yarn after another to anyone who will listen.
Mom was always changing her name, asking to be called
something different. One day she went into the courthouse
and wrote the name Blue Jay on a blank line; the jay that will gather all the other jays
when a dead one is found, assemble the others to grieve—
the name’s still on her license like a hieroglyph;
unusable, dust long ago gathered upon—
Who are you? she asked one night
standing beside the four-poster bed in the dark—who
ARE you?
You know me, don’t you?
I can’t
remember all the words
to that one lullaby; I’ve grown backward and down.
No room to sit,
no private place to plunder,
tall as the tallest French bisque doll in the house
but I barely fit into these collections of genius,
never shipped
into society, only stockpiled
for the end of the world.
I bought her Mind Whispering. And The Motivation Manifesto.
I bought The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, left it among the Jewish-mysticism books
and later it appeared in a pile by the front door.
“Take your self-help book back with you,” she said,
filling a glass with ice and Diet Pepsi
like an ocean wave foaming over stones—
My holes were empty like a cup,
In every hole sea came up
Till it could come no more.
II
Enough, enough!
Now I start my own cult.
I lead
some commune of rapture
for these wounds. But it does no good.
Instead everyone commits
great big acts of suicide together in my head.
III
Back during our brief Mormon days
Mom wouldn’t let us go to temple
out in Utah and baptize the dead.
“But I can baptize your father,” I insisted,
who’d hanged himself all those years ago.
“He was a Jew,” Mom said. “He doesn’t want
to be baptized into the three Mormon heavens.”
And that was that.
Soon after, we stopped attending, and really
I was glad. I didn’t want to baptize the dead so much
as get into a swimming pool and be held down
by a gentle hand of the priesthood.
“Your brother got too serious,” Mom said, smoking
in the car in her wool jacket with the elastic loops for shotgun shells
and the flannel insert and loose M&M’s in the pockets
(I loved her in that coat). “He said I was sinning for drinking coffee.”
Nowadays it’s, like, two cocktails and my endorphins are spent,
with a big shiny silver dollar, and I’m an old doll
that talks gibberish when pulled apart.
I rush home
with my golden ticket of shit
and pass out in the empty tub.
No one will talk about her father’s death in a new way.
It came out quietly that he liked to wear women’s clothes—
tenderly, Mom tells me this—
His unfinished dissertation that crumbles in my hands;
his poems from 1943, student soldier ballads done
with quivering golf pencils—
I’m so alone, I’m so alone without you
my darling—
Oh, I wish him on her!
Wish him on her to be loved!
To be loved properly by a father probably feels great.
Like winning a medal.
V
There’s so much joy in this poem. I’m trying
to convey how much
I love my mother, the way I love birds.
The blue jay always
is the biggest bird around the bird feeder—makes
strange, loud songs,
a little aggressive, but gorgeous, known
for its intelligence and complex social systems
with tight family bonds, a biblical fondness for acorns,
spreading oak trees into existence
after the last glacial period.
VI
I don’t want you to think I’m stealing these things
from your life. What is stealing when it’s your own
body parts, manufactured and passed down?
Like a cameo brooch looking out across the hills
of the breastbone, layers of skin and fat,
important bacteria from the vagina,
bracelets rattling on an arm—
sometimes it’s just the way the hair falls
off the skull, or the glass eyeball
that rolls around at night
on the floor of the cave in your dark mind.
VII
What of those immigrant Lithuanian Jews
who all married goyim with red hair?
After his wife died, Great-Uncle Jack, your father’s brother,
wouldn’t throw anything out,
filling his house with newspapers and New Yorkers—
but Oh his seders in Baltimore we screamed through, so happy,
the delicious sounds of his muttering Hebrew—
can we go back?
This poem is for you, hoarders of my blood.
VIII
The gentle climate of mothers that shakes the White House
—and other times drives you
insane with silence. The silent treatment,
the defining absence of noise,
like
an expanding stain, damp and long,
face of need,
need more forceful the longer it gets—typing out
sad sentences like a telegram into the hands
of the wrong person—
my sweet placemat I place at my table each day.
When I sit down with a blue jay, the seeds fall out of my mouth.
Do you know the game?
The game is leading you out of the dark
and then you long to go back in—
or blowing into your hands to make a fire
or building something on top of another thing
and one is more fragile than the other.
IX
My sister and I
are stars in our own reality show
that no one watches but us
(“Has Mom responded?”)
spread out in omnipotent banter
waiting for our relationship with Mom to really begin
To be loved without a fight
with a calm center—not
passing a mood around like a screaming infant
this black-market DVD collection
that cannot be watched
except when the moon is waning
and no one paid the electric bill
and they’re threatening to take the house