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for my father and Sarah
Contents
Title Page
Note to Reader
Little Voice
Never Before
Yellowtail
You Have Astounding Cosmic News
Poem for Tony
Poem for John McCain
When It’s Sunny They Push the Button
Work
Lesser Heights Are Bathed in Blue
Minnesota
Starry Wizards
Paper Toys of the World
Poem
Poem for Ferlinghetti
III
Journey Through the Past
Travelers Among Mountains and Streams
Poem for San Francisco
Kingdom Come
Letter to a Lover
Frankenstein Love
White Castle
Screaming Skull
Ceasing to Be
Sad News
Poem for Jim Zorn
The Pavilion of Vague Blues
Fortune
Charmer
This Little Game
To a Predator
Global Warming
A Summer Rainstorm
The Painted Desert
For You in Full Bloom
This Handwriting
IV
Come On All You Ghosts
About the Author
Books by Matthew Zapruder
Links
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special Thanks
I
Erstwhile Harbinger Auspices
Erstwhile means long time gone.
A harbinger is sent before to help,
and also a sign of things
to come. Like this blue
stapler I bought at Staples.
Did you know in ancient Rome
priests called augurs studied
the future by carefully watching
whether birds were flying
together or alone, making what
honking or beeping noises
in what directions? It was called
the auspices. The air
was thus a huge announcement.
Today it’s completely
transparent, a vase. Inside it
flowers flower. Thus
a little death scent. I have
no master but always wonder,
what is making my master sad?
Maybe I do not know him.
This morning I made extra coffee
for the beloved and covered
the cup with a saucer. Skeleton
I thought, and stay
very still, whatever it was
will soon pass by and be gone.
Aglow
Hello everyone, hello you. Here we are under this sky.
Where were you Tuesday? I was at the El Rancho Motel
in Gallup. Someone in one of the nameless rooms
was dying, slowly the ambulance came, just another step
towards the end. An older couple asked me
to capture them with a camera, gladly I rose and did
and then back to my chair. I thought of Paul Celan,
one of those poets everything happened to
strangely as it happens to everyone. In German
he wrote he rose three pain inches above the floor,
I don’t understand but I understand. Did writing
in German make him a little part of whoever
set in motion the chain of people talking who pushed
his parents under the blue grasses of the Ukraine?
No. My name is Ukrainian and Ukranians killed everyone
but six people with my name. Do you understand
me now? It hurts to be part of the chain and feel rusty
and also a tiny squeak now part of what makes
everything go. People talk a lot, the more they do
the less I remember in one of my rooms someone
is always dying. It doesn’t spoil my time is what
spoils my time. No one can know what they’ve missed,
least of all my father who was building a beautiful boat
from a catalogue and might still be. Sometimes I feel him
pushing a little bit on my lower back with a palm
made of ghost orchids and literal wind. Today
I’m holding onto holding onto what Neko Case called
that teenage feeling. She means one thing, I mean another,
I mean to say that just like when I was thirteen
it has been a hidden pleasure but mostly an awful pain
talking to you with a voice that pretends to be shy
and actually is, always in search of the question
that might make you ask me one in return.
Schwinn
I hate the phrase “inner life.” My attic hurts,
and I’d like to quit the committee
for naming tornadoes. Do you remember
how easy and sad it was to be young
and defined by our bicycles? My first
was yellow, and though it was no Black
Phantom or Sting-Ray but merely a Varsity
I loved the afternoon it was suddenly gone,
chasing its apian flash through the neighborhoods
with my father in vain. Like being a nuclear
family in a television show totally unaffected
by a distant war. Then we returned
to the green living room to watch the No Names
hold our Over the Hill Gang under
the monotinted chromatic defeated Super
Bowl waters. 1973, year of the Black Fly
caught in my Jell-O. Year of the Suffrage Building
on K Street NW where a few minor law firms
mingle proudly with the Union of Butchers
and Meat Cutters. A black hand
already visits my father in sleep, moving
up his spine to touch his amygdala. I will
never know a single thing anyone feels,
just how they say it, which is why I am standing
here exactly, covered in shame and lightning,
doing what I’m supposed to do.
Automated Regret Machine
My friend and I were watching television
and laughing. Then we saw
white letters begin to crawl along
the bottom of the screen.
People were floating on doors and holding
large pieces of cardboard
with telephone numbers sc
rawled
in black fear up to the helicopters.
The storm had very suddenly
come and now it was gone.
I saw one aluminum rooftop flash
in sunlight, it would have burned
the feet of anyone trying to wait there.
My friend by then had managed
to will her face into that familiar living
detachment mask. I thought
of the very large yellow house
of the second half of my childhood, how through
my bedroom window I could reach my hand
out and upward and touch
the branch of an elm. At night
in the summer I heard the rasp
of a few errant cicadas whose timing
devices had for them tragically drifted.
And the hoarse glassy call
of the black American crow.
Though I am at least halfway through
my life, part of my spirit
still lives there, thinking very soon
I will go down to the room where my father
carefully places his fingers on the strings of the guitar
Picking his head up he smiles
and motions vaguely with his hand, communicating
many contradictory things.
Poem (for Grace Paley)
People say they don’t understand poetry.
Meaning how must we proceed. Be extremely
tempered. Dream a careful dream. People
say we’re living a quiet life, lost in a forest
of pronouns, asleep for a thousand years.
People said his wife passed through him
an arrow made of smoke. People say whatever
you do don’t hitch a ride on a sepulcher.
People said it was the future then, and we
liked falling into mirrors. People said
we were never sorry we couldn’t travel both
and be one traveler. People said what
was it like. It was like an airport terminal
without any televisions. Like waiting
a long time for a door to arrive. In Outlaw
Josey Wales Chief Dan George says that
rock candy’s not for eating it’s for looking
through. In 1981 an announcer said Ralph
Sampson’s so tall he could reach out
and touch Uranus. I was thirteen, Earth
was a couch, without any irritable reaching
after fact or reason I placed thousands of
Sweet Tarts into my mouth. Five years
later someone said they saw Diane P.
kissing a girl in a car, and they punched
the window on the passenger side
in and I laughed, and it’s all been as
people say downhill from there, meaning
until this moment I have been coasting,
but from this one forward Grace I vow
I shall coast no more.
Pocket
I like the word pocket. It sounds a little safely
dangerous. Like knowing you once
bought a headlamp in case the lights go out
in a catastrophe. You will put it on your head
and your hands will still be free. Or
standing in a forest and staring at a picture
in a plant book while eating scary looking wildflowers.
Saying pocket makes me feel potentially
but not yet busy. I am getting ready to have
important thoughts. I am thinking about my pocket.
Which has its own particular geology.
Maybe you know what I mean. I mean
I basically know what’s in there and can even
list the items but also there are other bits
and pieces made of stuff that might not
even have a name. Only a scientist could figure
it out. And why would a scientist do that?
He or she should be curing brain diseases
or making sure that asteroid doesn’t hit us.
Look out scientists! Today the unemployment rate
is 9.4%. I have no idea what that means. I tried
to think about it harder for a while. Then
tried standing in an actual stance of mystery
and not knowing towards the world.
Which is my job. As is staring at the back yard
and for one second believing I am actually
rising away from myself. Which is maybe
what I have in common right now with you.
And now I am placing my hand on this
very dusty table. And brushing away
the dust. And now I am looking away
and thinking for the last time about my pocket.
But this time I am thinking about its darkness.
Like the bottom of the sea. But without
the blind fluorescent creatures floating
in a circle around the black box which along
with tremendous thunder and huge shards
of metal from the airplane sank down and settled
here where it rests, cheerfully beeping.
After Reading Tu Fu, I Emerge from a Cloud of Falseness
wearing a suit of light.
It’s too easy to be
strange. I glow
reading a few pages
of an ancient Chinese poet
to calm me, but soon
I am traveling down
terrible roads
like an insect chased
by golden armies.
Then I am tired in a little boat
filling with smoke.
cold morning I am
once again missing my friends.
Some have been sent
to the capital to take
their exams or work for a while
or be slowly executed. I
cannot help them, I am trying
to build a straw hut
beside the transparent river.
The sky is a perfect
black dome, with stars
that look white but
are actually slightly blue.
I have two precious candles
to last me a night
that has suddenly come.
I feel the lives of cities
drift through me,
I am a beautiful scroll
on which the history
of a dynasty has been written
in a dead language
not even one lonely scholar knows.
I see sad crushed plastic
everywhere and put
some thoughts composed
of words that do not
belong together
together and feel
a little digital hope.
The Prelude
Oh this Diet Coke is really good,
though come to think of it it tastes
like nothing plus the idea of chocolate,
or an acquaintance of chocolate
speaking fondly of certain times
it and chocolate had spoken of nothing,
or nothing remembering a field
in which it once ate the most wondrous
sandwich of ham and rustic chambered cheese
yet still wished for a piece of chocolate
before the lone walk back through
the corn then the darkening forest
to the disappointing village and its super
creepy bed and breakfast. With secret despair
I returned to the city. Something
seemed to be waiting for me.
Maybe the “chosen guide” Wordsworth
wrote he would even were it “nothing
better than a wandering cloud”
have followed which of course to me
and everyone sounds amazing.
All I foll
ow is my own desire,
sometimes to feel, sometimes to be
at least a little more than intermittently
at ease with being loved. I am never
at ease. Not with hours I can read or walk
and look at the brightly colored
houses filled with lives, not with night
when I lie on my back and listen,
not with the hallway, definitely
not with baseball, definitely
not with time. Poor Coleridge, son
of a Vicar and a lake, he could not feel
the energy. No present joy, no cheerful
confidence, just love of friends and the wind
taking his arrow away. Come to the edge
the edge beckoned softly. Take
this cup full of darkness and stay as long
as you want and maybe a little longer.
Burma
In Burma right now people are screaming.
Inside their monasteries the monks are sealed.
“Blood and broken glass.”
I feel I would drink a glass of poison,
In order to help,
But that’s probably a lie.
Another perfect day filled with perfectly vertical light and crickets.
I feel the presence of lithium.
They are pumping it into our waters.
I want to do important work.
People not places are haunted.
Who is in that chair?
I want to stop pretending.
I don’t feel like I’m pretending,