On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths Read online

  Note to the Reader

  Copper Canyon Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size:

  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque

  Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so that the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible.

  When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.

  Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.

  This eBook edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this eBook possible.

  For all the Roberts

  No death for you. You are involved.

  Weldon Kees

  Contents

  Title Page

  Note to Reader

  The Second Slaughter

  Again, the Body

  My Father Kept the TV On

  After the Names Are Gone, the Damage Will Remain

  To the Field of Scotch Broom That Will Be Buried by the New Wing of the Mall

  The Caucus

  Domestic

  Skedans

  I Could Name Some Names

  Cold Snap, November

  Auntie Roach

  Another Treatise on Beauty

  Bad French Movie

  Proximity to Meaningful Spectacle

  Hokkaido

  At the Hatchery

  Victor the Shaman

  Wheel

  After Reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead

  The Black Rider

  Pioneer

  Fireball

  To Carlos Castaneda

  300D

  Photograph: The Enemy

  Photograph: Grandfather, 1915

  Gleaner at the Equinox

  Lubricating the Void

  Not Housewives, Not Widows

  Freak-Out

  Maypole

  Matins

  Black Transit

  Heronry

  Les Dauphins

  Rashomon

  Stargazer

  The Unturning

  Wild Birds Unlimited

  Bats

  Autothalamium

  Red Hat

  This Red T-shirt

  The Wolves of Illinois

  Pharaoh

  Samara

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright, Credits and Feedback Link

  Donor page

  The Second Slaughter

  Achilles slays the man who slew his friend, pierces the corpse

  behind the heels and drags it

  behind his chariot like the cans that trail

  a bride and groom. Then he lays out

  a banquet for his men, oxen and goats

  and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat

  until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards.

  The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief—

  in the morning more animals must be killed

  for burning with the body of the friend. But Achilles finds

  no consolation in the hiss and crackle of their fat;

  not even heaving four stallions on the pyre

  can lift the ballast of his sorrow.

  And here I turn my back on the epic hero— the one who slits

  the throats of his friend’s dogs,

  killing what the loved one loved

  to reverse the polarity of grief. Let him repent

  by vanishing from my concern

  after he throws the dogs onto the fire.

  The singed fur makes the air too difficult to breathe.

  When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep

  until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially

  which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets

  and tails like peacocks, covered in tar

  weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows

  at the rim of the marsh. But once

  I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals

  my first lament. So now I guard

  my inhumanity like the jackal

  who appears behind the army base at dusk,

  come there for scraps with his head lowered

  in a posture that looks like appeasement

  though it is not.

  Again, the Body

  I have become what I have always been and it has taken a lifetime, all of my own life, to reach this point where it is as if I know finally that I am alive and that I am here, right now.

  TOBIAS SCHNEEBAUM, Keep the River on Your Right

  When you spend many hours alone in a room

  you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself—

  this is the problem of the body, not that it is mortal

  but that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught us

  do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it,

  from scratching off the juicy scab? Today I bit

  a thick hangnail and thought of Schneebaum,

  who walked four days into the jungle

  and stayed for the kindness of the tribe—

  who would have thought that cannibals would be so tender?

  This could be any life: the vegetation is thick

  and when there is an opening, you follow

  down its tunnel until one night you find yourself

  walking as on any night, though of a sudden your beloved

  friends are using their stone blades

  to split the skulls of other men. Gore everywhere,

  though the chunk I ate was bland;

  it was only when I chewed too far and bled

  that the taste turned satisfyingly salty.

  How difficult to be in a body,

  how easy to be repelled by it,

  eating one-sixth of the human heart.

  Afterward, the hunters rested

  their heads on one another’s thighs

  while the moon shined on the river

  for the time it took to cross the narrow sky

  making its gash through the trees…

  My Father Kept the TV On

  while the books lay open, scattered facedown

  like turtles sunning, the jackets hunched, with a little

  hump in the hunch from the trough of the spine,

  bearing a white sticker with the typewriter’s Courier

  font rendition of the decimal system

  under the wrapper, hazy like fog

  taped to the book, the tape’s yellow orange-almost

  (depending on how old) reinforced with threads.

  Meanwhile his eyes drifted back and forth

  back and forth until the book slid to the floor.

  The flag then. Then snow. Or the corporate logo

  of the eye— all night the night would watch him,

  plural, them. Just ask my friend whose father

  was a drunk, a highball glass on the nightstand and a swizzle

  stick to mark his place. Still, on Thursday nights

  he stumbled down to the reading room

  to leaf th
rough the new arrivals.

  Oh green republic where the pilgrims came to land!

  If I’m going to choose my nostalgia it is a no-brainer

  that I’m going to side with books, with the days

  before the lithium-ion battery, but after

  Philip Roth and John le Carré were born, books not too

  highbrow or too low, but sometimes thick

  and overdue. Books the fathers read to escape us

  who were the shackles that the plodding days

  latched on to them who’d started out their lives with war, so this

  was perfect, courting danger in their underwear,

  feeling the breast of the vixen stiffen,

  slipping their hands into the thief’s black glove.

  After the Names Are Gone, the Damage Will Remain

  Though the twins were not identical, they both had skin

  so thin & clear I could see their veins’ squiggling underneath.

  One with red hair, one with white

  & the veins made their combined colors patriotic

  if a little terrifying

  in the auditorium where we’d assembled,

  their tears falling in a formal style of grief

  reserved for civic purposes, I learned this

  from mothers who’d stood by the mailbox, weeping

  as we filed by them in the school bus

  six years before, when bullets ruined the famous head

  of the famous handsome man. Now

  the girls’ red eye-rims similarly deliquesced,

  their shrill notes ascending:

  President Eisenhower! Has! Died!

  news that made me scratch an old mosquito bite

  & scrutinize the upturned faces of my shoes—

  even in my girlish nerdfog

  I must have understood that some will not withstand posterity,

  that all the bodies on the beach at Normandy

  still lead to the muse’s turning her cool marble shoulder.

  Permissible to insert here the twins’ white lashes

  & the curve of their hot foreheads. But

  how tentatively one must ask the nouns & verbs

  to step apart for Eisenhower, though he ransacked

  more than his share of cities. Like the moon

  his pale head hovers, yet he does not go around

  like some transhistorical Fuller Brush man

  sticking his foot in the door

  the pale girl of my ode slams shut.

  To the Field of Scotch Broom That Will Be Buried by the New Wing of the Mall

  Half costume jewel, half parasite, you stood

  swaying to the music of cash registers in the distance

  while a helicopter chewed the linings

  of the clouds above the clear-cuts.

  And I forgave the pollen count

  while cabbage moths teased up my hair

  before your flowers fell apart when they

  turned into seeds. How resigned you were

  to your oblivion, unlistening to the cumuli

  as they swept past. And soon those gusts

  will mill you, when the backhoe comes

  to dredge your roots, but that is not

  what most impends, as the chopper descends

  to the hospital roof so that somebody’s heart

  can be massaged back into its old habits.

  Mine went a little haywire

  at the crest of the road, on whose other side

  you lay in blossom.

  As if your purpose were to defibrillate me

  with a thousand electrodes,

  one volt each.

  The Caucus

  I had my precinct wrong and went to Garfield Elementary

  where the hall monitors would not let me through

  because I live on the wrong side of the boundary. I could hear

  my neighbors, listening reasonably to one another,

  listening even to the man who is my adversary

  because he leaves his dog’s crap on the sidewalk’s grassy strip.

  If he wants to fly, Peter Pan has to focus very hard on Tinker Bell.

  If he is quiet and he concentrates, then he can fly.

  The girl who spoke sat in the hallway,

  so I asked if she was working on her reading. “No,

  she’s autistic those are her socialization cards,” said her mother,

  who asked if I would watch her girl (whose name was Terri)

  so she (the mother)

  could take part in the caucus.

  He can fly only when he focuses on Tinker Bell.

  He can focus only when he listens.

  In the classrooms, my neighbors sat in chairs

  that shrank their knee-chin distance pitifully. I heard my adversary

  say he didn’t think the candidate looked authentic enough

  and that’s how history gets made. Quick

  write it down before it slips

  too far downstream.

  Peter Pan likes to sing and hear Tinker Bell sing.

  When he hears Tinker Bell sing, Peter Pan is happy.

  In the classroom, something was decided—

  I heard the collective exhale of assent

  before people filed out, looking giddy and grave. When she returned

  I asked Terri’s mother what was up

  with the singing, and she said that other children

  tormented her girl with songs.

  Go tell that to a poet.

  It would explain a lot about the current state of the art.

  Orpheus sang,

  and, like the Beatles, his song made the girls scream

  so loud they drowned the song. Then they yelled

  See yonder our despiser and tore off his head.

  Peter Pan and Tinker Bell like to sing together.

  They are very happy when they sing.

  You know one girl alone wouldn’t have done it,

  and this is not just a matter of strength. There’s a fuse

  running from one of us to the other— lucky thing

  all that’s in my pocket is this old packet

  of moist towelettes

  I mistook for a matchbook.

  She thanked me, the mother, even though Terri

  had been reading her cards to my dog. Note

  I carry a blue (biodegradable and perfumed)

  plastic crap bag, though it hadn’t been used yet,

  there at the school, and I was letting it flap

  from the pocket of my red flannel shirt

  like the American flag.

  Come, my adversary—

  let us discuss the warblers.

  How sweetly they torment us from the budding trees.

  Domestic

  Here the coyote lives in shadows between houses,

  feeds by running west to raid the trash behind the store

  where they sell food that comes in cans

  yesterday expired. Picture it

  perching on the dumpster, a corrugated

  sheet of metal welded to the straight, its haunch

  accruing the imprint of the edge until it pounces,

  skittering on the cans. It has tried

  to gnaw them open and broken all its teeth.

  Bald-flanked, rheumy-eyed, sniffing the wheels

  of our big plastic trash carts but too pigeon—

  chested to knock them down, scat full of eggshells

  from the compost pile. “I am like that, starved,

  with dreams of rutting in a culvert’s narrow light—”

  we mumble our affinities as we vacate into sleep.

  Because we occupy the wrong animal— don’t you too feel it?

  Haven’t you stood in the driveway, utterly confused?

  Maybe you were taking out the garbage, twisting

  your robe into a noose-knot at your throat, when you stopped

  fighting the urge to howl, and howled—


  and did it bring relief, my friend, however self-deceiving?

  Skedans

  I paddled many days to reach the totem poles

  not barged off to Vancouver. Tilting in a clearing,

  gray and cracked, upholding the clouds,

  the grain for a hundred years having risen.

  The ghosts of Cumshewa Inlet kept trying to evict me,

  but I did not want to leave

  because the Haida had left their dead here

  and once you step over a human bone while following a deer-path

  you want to step over another, unless you are not ruled

  by curiosity as I was ruled. Or had already seen a skull

  mossy in its entirety, with three holes (eye sockets

  + the nose) + the palate on the duff.

  Into which the green teeth bit, the moss

  covering it all like luminescent car upholstery,

  what do you do if you are just a dumb American,

  I can usually figure out how to behave, but require years

  to come to my conclusions. Now

  the fact the reparations have come due

  is being made clear by the photo of the skull

  I took when I was young and dumb, this anti—

  luck charm emanating green recriminations,

  though I notice that I do not take it from the wall.

  I Could Name Some Names

  of those who have drifted through thus far of their allotted

  fifty or seventy or ninety years on Earth

  with no disasters happening,

  whatever had to be given up was given up—

  the food at the rehab facility was better than you would expect

  and the children turned out more or less okay;

  sure there were some shaky years

  but no one’s living in the basement anymore

  with a divot in his head, that’s where the shrapnel landed/or

  don’t look at her stump. It is easy

  to feel possessed of a soul that’s better schooled

  than the fluffy cloud inside of people who have never known suchlike

  events by which our darlings

  are unfavorably remade. And the self

  is the darling’s darling

  (I = darling2). Every day

  I meditate against my envy

  aimed at those who drift inside the bubble of no-trouble,

  — what is the percentage? 20% of us? 8%? zero?

  Maybe the ex-president with his nubile daughters,

  vigorous old parents, and clean colonoscopy. Grrrr.

  Remember to breathe. Breathe in suffering,

  breathe out blessings say the ancient dharma texts.

  Still I beg to file this one complaint

  that some are mountain-biking through the scrublands

  while she is here at Ralph’s Thriftway,

  running her thumb over a peach’s bruise,

  her leg a steel rod