once the book has been returned and the lock has clicked shut.
Many years later, while those at your bedside await your last breath,
you remain serene. There has been no orangutan, you murmur.
No orangutan whatsoever. In this moment, you begin to recover.
The Difficulty of Holding Time
The silliness of clocks and watches,
weather vanes with no wind, spinning
to correlate a thing they don’t measure
but suggest. Perhaps a large ceramic
bowl with its round mouth opened
always to sky would be more accurate.
Days pass: the sun rides its staring white
road. And again. Always again, opening
and closing like a dutiful flower. You
put entire hours in your pockets and later
find nothing but lint. You slip a minute
into your coin purse and it transforms
into foil wrapper. You chant is and is
and is which already was before touching
the world. Such relentless translation:
a well-trained man with a gun cannot
stop it, neither can a word carved
into a mountain, nor mountain itself.
The Same Bones
the face slack and whiskered in silver
the sag of the curtain beneath the eyes
the crepe-paper crinkle of skin in the hinges
the translucent browning vellum of the pate
the signs have been coming for some time
and now his ridged skull is rising
up through his softening features
like an anchor drawn hand over hand into the light
the clay of his face has grown tired
enough that nothing firm will emerge
until its bones are freed to tumble in the river
he knows me, this man
well enough that I crave his good opinion
we share some version of the same bones
having fathered the same children
with the same woman in a shared bed
though neither of us necessarily knew it
at the time: this is not a new form
of perversity but an old one
a mirror with an unusual time signature
delivered by means of a story
in which I somehow gaze upon the man
I will become
and though I can press my fingers to the glass
there is not a question I can ask that he could answer
without falling into crude pantomime
or mouthing platitudes of the moment
so we simply stare
into what we hope is the intelligence of one another’s eyes
as we once did in the primate house
that time the orangutan sidled up to express
what struck us then as such a peculiar interest
tapping persistently from the inside
until at last we understood
and lifted our wristwatch up to the glass—
Some Party
Ah, tomorrow, said the important guest.
Though the day has yet to be seen,
the evidence of its existence
is well documented in the folklore of your people.
Then someone said, Tomorrow is an animal
that can be tracked but never captured.
So this cold night may not end, murmured the hostess.
I sleep deep in these long nights, someone said,
and when I wake I still want more.
The hostess nodded knowingly
and the rest of us went to the window
and watched the moon scrape itself
clean on the snow outside, while bits
of white hair sifted from the chimneys,
signifying an indifferent wind.
Thick candles stood on tables, alongside bowls
of salty nuts stirred by the fingers of strangers.
Someone said shells serve as coffins to the wind
and the white smoke we were watching
was the soul leaving the body of the house.
Some party, I said, actually beginning to wonder
if the night might not end and the whiskey
might run dry. I imagined falling
asleep deep in the upholstered couch
and waking to the darkness of the same party,
candle wax spread on the bookshelves,
embarrassed headaches, raised eyebrows
but then someone said, Look, and pointed
at the table where the important guest
was riding the hostess, her breasts quivering
like twin gelatins above the punch bowl
and I knew the night would end
before I ever saw such beauty again.
The Building
sense of momentum
as he entered the strange city
crowded with buildings
prompted him to lean forward to ask the driver
about one they had just passed
painted a pale blue trimmed in white.
It is prison for the insane. (He pronounced it with a hiss:
Priss’n. Then he shook his head, unhappy.) Not prison. It is—
He knotted his face and paused
then cracked open when he found it, smiling and sighing,
Asylum.
Asylum, he repeated, delighted with the word.
The passenger looked back through the rear window.
The building seemed to glow in the morning light.
The driver held a compass made of cast-off sounds and letters.
The passenger is seeking a hut
a possible place of shelter
some remembered form
of asylum.
That evening he takes a ball-
peen hammer smashes the headlights then climbs
in and drives a blind car through blind curves
on a road above the sea:
airplanes come in low over the water:
the flickering illumination wipes the road clean.
The car has become a song where he knows the melody
but not the words.
It could be a reel about a lamb in a meadow.
It could be a dirge about the loss of a child.
He takes turns in the back seat
as well as behind the wheel, praying
the song will open its eyes so he
can see the white line in the road
and the green eyes of jackals on the shoulder,
floating like fireflies above roadkill
before dipping back down with moist jaws.
Inside the asylum
there is a woman
who is luminous
inside her skin.
The car murmurs along the evening street.
The engine mutters its age with a guttural thrum.
The woman wears white cotton
underwear and a loose shift.
She sits in the darkness of the courtyard
beneath the greater darkness of a magnolia.
Its waxy leaves are coated with dust
rising from the road beyond the wall.
She hears the sound of the passing motor woven
into the sound of clinking utensils and the chime
of wine glasses being cleared from a table.
Her thoughts are as flat as a table
as she takes a ballpoint pen and copies:
the building sense of momentum
as he entered the strange city
She traces the words
in pale blue ink on white paper.
Strange might not be the perfect
word for the city
but she has always suspected
there is another one beneath it. Tunneled
with caves and scattered with old bones.
Entering those ruins
to make marks
upon the walls
might be the only trick she knows
and so she lives inside the pale blue
walls. She knows there are no men
with wings, despite the stories.
She does not look to the sky
for gliding silhouettes
to blot out the starlight.
She prefers to become a silence
and filter out through the slatted shutters
into the open
window of the passing car.
The Sinclair Gift Emporium
The man smiled as the heavy door closed behind him, yet he was
perturbed. His palm went flat on the counter, rapping the glass with
a gentle clack.
“This doesn’t work,” he said, then removed his hand to reveal the
slender cylinder.
The gesture was somewhat theatrical, as if the shiny silver rod were
the fine bone of an android. The clerk looked at the pen and said:
“Let’s take a look, shall we?” The man nodded his consent, and with
a deft twist the clerk removed the cartridge and examined it.
“Perhaps you were unaware this is a custom cartridge?” The clerk
raised his eyebrows and waited. When there was no reply, he contin-
ued: “You see, this particular ink is silent.”
“Silent?” asked the man.
“Yes, silent,” said the clerk. “Much like the t in listen. Inscrutable, I
know, but some of our clients simply can’t do without it.”
The man stared warily at the clerk who stood behind the counter,
his hands folded before him.
“Was this perhaps a gift?” inquired the clerk.
The man nodded, perplexed. “It seems she would have sent a note,”
he added.
“Perhaps she did,” said the clerk with a placid smile.
“You mean—” said the man, his voice trailing off.
“Was there any card at all?” said the clerk. “A blank one, perhaps?”
The man reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a crisp square
of vellum. He studied it, then said: “How exactly does one do it? Do
we need a flame to read it, like lemon juice?”
The clerk smiled broadly now, and instantly looked younger. “Not
at all. Just cup it over your ear, like this. Then wait. It’s more a feeling
than anything else.”
The man held it lightly, like a delicate leaf, and placed it over his ear.
“Good Lord,” he said, as his face went strangely still. “She loves me.”
Rather Than Read Another Word
Perhaps you could loosen your self within your skin.
After all, you’ve worn it
since childhood’s earliest onset.
No wonder it’s grown tight. Soften the muscles around
the eyes and there in your knotted
jaw unclench what’s held by habit.
There is no need to talk. Let your tongue grow fat.
Listening can be a balm. Those lines in your head
are still forming, and not of their own accord: we
share the tools that deepen them: emotion, repetition,
emotion, repetition, and the requisite mouthfuls of air.
The Last Expedition
When you settled in the soft silt
of the bottom
you were on your back
looking up through the wavering
water toward the light
and something happened
to your eyes: they grew
solid as the river
stones that line the bank.
Damn, you said,
when we pulled you
dripping from the water,
I can’t see. I can’t
see at all.
We laid you on the nubbled
deck of the pontoon,
your sodden clothing
wrapping you so tight
your nipples
pushed like fat thorns
through your shirt
and you kept saying
in a calm voice:
I’m blind. I’m completely
blind. We did not
notice the gill-slits
until later
when you began
convulsing on the deck
the thorns grown
into fins
your body one long
muscle as you
flexed and writhed
until you shook
yourself into the green
current and were
gone.
Holder Strand
It was there I discovered him,
the drowned boy
out on the cold flats.
I rolled him over with my boot,
flipping him like a slab.
His dark wet locks
were breaded with sand
and the memory of blue
hovered everywhere
just beneath his skin. It was
me at twelve, I think.
Or maybe thirteen.
The way the sodden
clothing wrapped him
flecked with bits of weed,
the wet jersey pasted
to the wicker of his ribs.
He was raw boned and solemn,
black cuts in his knuckles
from bashing rough rock.
I cannot tell you how long,
how many years have passed
since I have been myself.
II
Oil and Ash
What’s organic emits carbon when burned so animal
dung or dried seaweed picked from rocks or a child left
we used to think God lived: among the clouds on a big chair.
So apparently it’s come to this: the way to save the sky is sell
the sky to those who would release ash into it, through pipes.
I understand this economically, and I’d rather not
mention the resemblance to prostitution, but when I open my
mouth it also fills with something called sky, each inhalation
drags sky across the fine hairs of my nostrils stirring them
in patterns resembling the locomotion of centipedes.
The inverted trees of my lungs filter sky into blood a shade
darker than a cardinal, blood so red it seems it should sing.
The seashell whorls of my ears hold barely two-thimbles-
worth of sky but without those twin pockets of stratosphere
thrumming my drums the world would fall as silent as a world
where they had inexplicably fed their own kind into steel machines.
Later, visiting archaeologists might ponder what had driven them
to do such a thing? There might be conjecture about belief systems
or native religions but for the first thousands of years there would be
nothing but the sound of ash sifting through dried leaves, a sound that is
in some ways similar—but also different—from the sound of falling snow.
Look, he said, and pointed
the clouds were different
from the blue ones
that had carried
so much cool rain
and broken the back
of the heat last night
these clouds were
knotted tight
and made of human
limbs and torsos
towering into the sky
that’s why
they call it
whether, he said
but no one got it
or if they did
no one cared
because someone
was passing binoculars around
and even though
we all took turns
&n
bsp; we could not find
a single entire human
body in that towering cumulus
only different part
after different part
woven tightly
and threatening
to pock the roofs
with bone-hail
and fill the gutters
with warm red rain
Aria
I have a particularly thick shaft
is something a porn star might say
using a deceptively mundane tone
in the midst of a job interview
at a Santa Monica café. He might
slide a Polaroid across the table
nudging aside a basket of hand-cut
fries and a small tin of lemon aioli
so the man in sunglasses could
make sense of his tumescence.
What if that producer began to sing
in gorgeously enunciated Italian
an aria of unornamented intonation
that bespoke genuine emotion
regarding the loneliness of the flesh
caught in a flashbulb and framed
like some sort of battered criminal.
Would the rest of the seated crowd
raise their voice in swollen chorus?
Perhaps the man who slid the picture
would fall to his knees weeping,
astonished at the understanding
finally granted to his member,
astonished to have found himself
crying in a poem about his cock.
from A Natural History of Silence
So many silences: think
the clink of poolside gin and tonics,
ice clattering as it spins in the glass then the underwater
hush of submersion
as you sink below the surface, hair wavering like fire.
Also, the sound of bitter words unsaid
hovering in the room like a loosed eel
momentarily stunned in the chill.
Then there is the pause of locked eyes
in the midst of lubricious wrangling
upstairs, before the shudder.