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Contents
Title Page
Note to Reader
Nervous System
Scary Parents
Some of the Men
Kings
My Autopsy
Returning to Church
Little Prayer
My Father Full of Light
Late Meditation
Into the Earth
Good Friday
My Dead Friends Come Back
Ode
We Did Not Make Ourselves
Seeing Whales
Marco Polo
Wang Wei: Bamboo Grove
The End of the West
About the Author
Books by Michael Dickman
Links
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special Thanks
Nervous System
Make a list
of everything that’s
ever been
on fire—
Abandoned cars
Trees
The sea
Your mother burned down to the skeleton
so she could come back, born back from her bed, and walk around the house again, exhausted
in slippers
What else?
Your brain
Your eyes
Your lungs
*
When you look down
inside yourself
what is there?
You are a walking bag of surgical instruments
shining from the inside out
and that’s just
today
Tomorrow it could be different
When I think of the childhood inside me I think of sunlight dying on a windowsill
The voices of my friends
in the sunlight
All of us running around
outside our
deaths
*
Someone is here
to see you
again
Someone has come a long way with their arms out in front of them like a child
walking down a hallway
at night
Make room for them—
they’re very tired
I wish I could look down past the burning chandelier inside me
where the language begins
to end
and
down
Scary Parents
I didn’t shoot heroin in the eighth grade because I was afraid of needles and still am
My friends couldn’t
not do it—
Black tar
a leather belt
and sunlight
Scary parents
They filled holes
all afternoon
then we went to the movies
*
The shit-faced gods swam upstream inside them and threw wild parties
and stayed up
all night
Under their tongues
between their toes
their stomachs
All over their arms
wings
did not descend to wrap them up like babies
As promised
Still
there is a lot to pray to
on earth
*
Everyone is still alive
if not here then
someplace else
Climbing out of their arms
Resting their heads
On what?
No one is singing us
to sleep
Ian broke his mother’s nose because she burned the pancakes
She left hypodermics
between the couch cushions
for us to sit on
Some of the Men
I had to walk around for a long time before I could see anything
The leaves
circling down the street
imitating the insides of seashells
imitating
my fingerprints
I could sense my father
sitting alone in his little white Le Car
staring off at the empty parking lot
No radio
No wind
No birds
Just some guy in his car looking out at the blacktop and the shadows of telephone wires
It isn’t a sad scene, not really
Some of us are getting
exactly what we asked for
Some of us
don’t even have
to wait
*
Think of my grandfather, still drunk or asleep, passed out on top of my
grandmother
so she has to wait for him
to come to
along with the late
Redwood City morning
the light skipping in
across
the swimming pool
The smell of failed sex
bourbon and
chlorine
Dead cigars
He taught me how to swim
with one of his hands beneath my legs and another beneath my stomach
how to cup my hands, how
to turn my head
Inhale and exhale
and move gracefully
through liquid
*
Look at
Josh’s father—
Stumbling into the bedroom at three in the morning the two of us asleep
and all that moonlight
and beat his son’s
head against
the headboard
You fucker you fucker you asked for it
The moon
His jaw splashed across the pillowcase
*
The Parietal Temporal Occipital
The Atlas and Axis
Spheroid and
Spheroid
The real smile
real grin
Your movable and immovable joints
Your eyes
your orbits
Sutures
If given the chance
I would
break them all
*
For a long time my grandfather
tried to kill anyone
who came near him
Wives
Daughters
Stepdaughters
What is it called when insects are stuck forever in a kind of amber?
Then he got sick
and he was going to die anyway
and he stopped
trying to kill people
Then we could fall in love
*
My father’s advice is claustrophobic and flat as it fills the soft leather booth inside the restaurant
Birthday lunch
Cigarettes
What you need to do
is join the Army, the Marines
something
You need to be taught a lesson
*
Some of the men are standing in their backyards at night, looking up
at the stars
listening to the freeway
Their hands in their pockets
Everything’s just
as it was
My hands
in my pockets, curled
into tiny
fists
My belt buckle
gleaming
Kings
Our crowns look nothing like his crown
needles and light and
needles of light
fingers
stamen
Our crowns are made of dead hair and get swept out with the trash
or ripped out by hand
Our capes are bath towels
wrapped around our necks
and fastened with
giant safety pins
Not ermine, not
rabbits
I ran around the neighborhood playing King of the Block
in my red underwear
The trees didn’t bow
I was not on fire
as he
passed by
*
None of my friends
are kings
anymore
They used to be good at being alive, pointing their index fingers at
the trees, passing
invisible sentences
proclamations
knighting the birds
one by one
All down my street the new fathers
beat the kingness
out
of the
kings
when they came in for dinner
and when they
went to bed
The birds knocking against the windows
in the wind
and he wasn’t in the wind
*
When I think of him now all alone
he looks like a mouse
King of the mice
He’s white like we all thought
red eyes
red tongue
yellow teeth
Scampering across the kitchen floor in the middle of the night when
we wake up
and want to make a sandwich
Listen, when you turn back into nothing and disappear forever
down a hole in the floor
I want to go with you
But we can’t go
What a motherfucker that is
The kitchen window
the only light
for blocks
Now we’re going to know what it feels like
My Autopsy
There is a way
if we want
into everything
I’ll eat the chicken carbonara and you eat the veal, the olives, the small
and glowing
loaves of bread
I’ll eat the waiter, the waitress
floating through the candled dark in shiny black slacks
like water at night
The napkins, folded into paper boats, contain invisible Japanese poems
You eat the forks
all the knives, asleep and waiting
on the white tables
What do you love?
I love the way our teeth stay long after we’re gone, hanging on despite
worms or fire
I love our stomachs
turning over
the earth
There is a way
if we want
to stay, to leave
Both
My lungs are made out of smoke ash sunlight air
Particles of skin
The invisible floating universe of kisses rising up in a sequined helix
of dust and cinnamon
Breathe in
Breathe out
I smoke
unfiltered Shepheard’s Hotel cigarettes
from a green box, with a dog on the cover, I smoke them
here, and I’ll smoke them
there
*
There is a way
if we want
out of drowning
I’m having
a Gimlet, a Caruso, a
Fallen Angel
A Manhattan, a Rattlesnake, a Rusty Nail, Stinger, Angel Face,
Corpse Reviver
What are you having?
I’m buying
I’m buying for the house
I’m standing the round
Wake me
from the dash of lemon juice
the half measure of orange juice, apricot brandy
and the two fingers of gin
that make up paradise
*
There is a way
if we want
to untie ourselves
The shining organs that bind us can help us through the new dark
There are lots of stories about intestines
People have been forced to hold them, alive and shocked awake
The doctors removed M’s smaller one and replaced it, the new bright
plastic curled around
the older brother
Birds drag them out of the dead and abandoned
Some people climb them into heaven
Others believe we live in one God’s intestine!
A conveyor belt of stars and saints
We tie and we loosen
minor
and forgettable
miracles
Returning to Church
Walking through the snow with her was enough, quiet enough, white
breaking beneath
our boots
White then dirt
White
then concrete
Not a word
I watched the black branches of the oaks gliding above us
like the shadows of koi
Shadows, she was singing
Shadows!
*
I had forgotten
all the promises they make
at church, singing
or
not singing—
A new body
A living water
I wanted to be very still and listen to her voice moving out in front of me
There are two houses
The dark and quiet
house of God
and the house of her
voice
*
The light through the stained-glass window was snow
Do you want to be home forever?
It’s all right if you do
Kiss me in the pew among strangers who aren’t strangers but His
other homeless children
The light through the stained-glass window
was snow, not Grace
not Spirit
Not, lightly
His fingers
*
Everyone’s so nice!
And they don’t even know me, they don’t think they have to, hand
after hand
they take my hand
A prayer of bone
The old, beautiful
Wurlitzer rising
behind us