On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths Read online

in a miniskirt, to make sure I see.

  Cold Snap, November

  That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

  JOHN BERGER, The Sense of Sight

  In 2006, in Ohio, Joseph Clark raised his head in the middle of his execution to say, “It’s not working.”

  The salmon corpses clog the creek without sufficient room to spin:

  see, even the fish want to kill themselves this time of year

  the therapist jokes. Her remedy

  is to record three gratitudes a day—

  so let the fish count for one, make two the glaucous gulls

  who pluck the eyes before they fill

  with the cloudy juice of vanishing.

  But don’t these monuments to there-ness

  feel a little ostentatious? Not just the gratitudes,

  but also what they used to call a hardware store

  where you hike for hours underneath the ether

  between the ceiling and the dropped-down lighting tubes,

  muttering I need a lock-washer for my lawnmower shroud—

  huh? You know

  you should feel like Walt Whitman, celebrating

  everything, but instead you feel like Pope Julius II

  commanding Michelangelo to carve forty statues for his tomb.

  When even one giant marble Moses feels like a bit too much.

  This year made it almost to December without a frost to deflate the dahlias

  and though I stared for hours at the psychedelia of their petals,

  trying to coax them to apply their shock-paddles to my heart,

  it wasn’t working. Until one morning when

  I found them black and staggering in their pails,

  charred marionettes, twist-tied to their stakes, I apologize

  for being less turned-on by the thing than by its going.

  Not the sunset

  but afterward when we stand dusted with the sunset’s silt,

  and not the surgical theater, even with its handsome anesthesiologist

  in blue dustcap and booties— no,

  his after’s what I’m buzzed by, the black slide into nothing

  (well, someone ought to speak for it).

  Or it can come in white— not so much the swirling snow

  as the fallen stuff that makes the mind continuous

  with the meadow that it sees.

  Auntie Roach

  Courage is no good:

  It means not scaring others.

  PHILIP LARKIN

  One day George Washington rides around Mount Vernon

  for five hours on his horse, the next

  he’s making his auspicious exodus

  on the spectrum of possible deaths.

  Rasputin was fed cyanide in little cakes

  but did not slough his living husk,

  and so Prince Felix sang to him, then mesmerized him

  with a gaudy cross. And though he dropped when he was shot

  he popped back up and ran outside: it was

  Purishkevich who fired three times in the courtyard—

  but even with his body bound

  in the frozen Neva, one arm worked

  its way free. Now, he must have howled

  while his giblets leaked, though the cold

  is reputed to be kind. Sliding his end

  toward a numeral less horrible; it falls

  say as a six on a scale of zero to ten?

  Shakespeare went out drinking, caught a fever,

  ding! Odds are we’ll be addled—

  what kind of number can be put on that?

  One with endless decimals,

  unless you luck into some kind woman,

  maker of the minimum wage, black or brown and brave enough

  to face your final wreck? My friends horde pills

  for their bad news, but I wonder if it’s cowardly

  to be unequal to the future. Someone should write a book

  for nursery school, with crucial facts like: how,

  as the sun drops, shadows lengthen, including a sharp

  or blurry one that is your own. And you scuttle from it

  like a cockroach fleeing light— an anti-roach,

  running from the dark. See my feelers, long and feathery:

  I am more than well prepared.

  Ulysses Grant lay in misery for half a year,

  after eating a peach that pained his tongue.

  Versus Ivan the Terrible, last heard singing in the bath,

  who fainted dead while setting up the chessboard.

  Another Treatise on Beauty

  The boyish foreign tyrant wears faun-colored desert boots

  hooked boyishly around the rungs of his chair

  on this talk show where he speaks with the voice of a woman

  who interprets from the ether. He’s smiling

  like the naughty boy in school who picked his teeth

  with a stiletto: mister, you may be despicable

  but my boyfriend wore those same boots once,

  and I loved him in them, despite the stolen tape deck

  in his car. How small a blemish does your narco-trafficking

  shrink to, what with that comely stubble on your cheeks,

  your brocade cap and wool cape tossed

  across your shoulder like a cavalier’s? Perhaps we need

  to recalibrate the scale or set your crimes

  in one pan of the balance, so when we set your beauty

  in the other it will rise, as beauty does, instead of clunking down.

  As beauty rises, even when it goes unseen. See

  how many of the famous modern paintings

  were made by men who have such vigor in old age?

  And when I flip open the back covers of their books,

  the famous lady poets all have shiny hair.

  Bad French Movie

  Isabelle Huppert in a peep show booth

  with the wilted bloom of a used Kleenex,

  and not her Kleenex, une mouchoir étrange—

  this is not a promising get-go.

  But can’t my hopes be phototropic

  as I sit in the front row with my head cocked back

  like a newly fractured dicotyledonous bean

  uncurling on its sprout?

  The popcorn here is not just bad—

  for years the hopper has accrued its crud

  so that sometimes you crunch down on what

  tastes like a greasy tractor bolt

  and are transported to a former Soviet republic

  instead of some seedy part of Paris.

  You have to swipe the burned nib off your lips

  before scuffing it back, toward the lovers who’ve come

  to make out in this habitat, upholstered

  in the velvet mode of tongues. And when

  I turn to see if they’ve noticed

  their ankles’ being pinged by my scorched old maids

  all the hardware bolted in their faces

  glints like moonlight on the road after the crash is cleared away,

  as the projector beam keeps on doggedly charging

  through a googolplex of twitching motes.

  Giving us Isabelle unclothed again,

  Isabelle in the tones of the wood of a cello,

  Isabelle if you’re trying to save us now

  all your skin is not enough.

  Proximity to Meaningful Spectacle*

  Monday

  Wednesday

  Friday,

  I swim with the old ladies, hurry:

  the synchronized swimming team arrives at three.

  We ride the wacky noodles

  through blue pastures

  lit by chemicals—

  I like to go under in my goggles

  to watch their them-ness bleed

  into my me

  until we are evi
cted by the lifeguard, Danielle.

  In the locker room, some retreat into the changing stalls

  to sequester their mastectomies,

  but your walker will not fit there, no;

  you have to peel your swimsuit in the open

  with the girls on the team. I’m staring

  at one long strip of mostly leg,

  daring her to

  reciprocate:

  but all this future-flesh has made her shy—

  the way the belly sometimes flabs from having kids

  and doubles down.

  I thought this was a them-trait, not a me-trait,

  but was mistaken about the boundary—

  which turns out not to be a wall, but a net

  in which we each hang like a sausage

  in a shop window, liquefying in the sun.

  Good luck synchro girl, trying to wriggle

  into your spangly suit

  without taking off your bra—

  not wanting any of your you to bleed into your me

  as you reach around yourself to pull out what you pull out

  by the scruff of its neck:

  your limp blue animal

  of lace.

  * Joe Wenderoth

  Hokkaido

  War Emblem, the famous stallion,

  will not mount a female rump

  on the island of Hokkaido

  in a pasture near the sea.

  It is hard to imagine anyone not being overcome

  by the sight of two dozen mares

  surrounded by volcanoes (is the problem

  that the metaphors are too direct?), and yet

  War Emblem is still not in the mood.

  A thousand years ago the courtesan Shikibu

  wrote a thousand poems to her lover,

  the references to sex made tasteful through concision

  and the image of their kimonos intertwined.

  Either her heart was broken or it was full,

  either way required some terse phrases to the moon.

  Was that all it was? Dumb animal hunger?

  All those years when I thought I was making Art

  out of The One Important Thing?

  And how to apologize now for my lack of adequate concision?

  Once I was so full of juice and certain of its unending.

  At the Hatchery

  The woman who wears dark glasses large as goggles

  has her hand wrapped around the elbow of the young woman

  who is beautiful. Where does it come from,

  this compulsion not just to know their thinking

  but to live inside her for a while, the one

  whose eyes are hidden as she looks

  down into the impoundment where the salmon who’ve swum upriver

  end their travels? It must sound large to her, the clang

  a loose piece of metal makes against the cement wall

  whenever a fish leaps in its fury, I am claiming

  the privilege to impute its fury as we listen to them

  thrash. Dozens were killed an hour ago

  because their future fate is better if the eggs are stripped

  than if they’re left to their fandango

  in the frothing of the creek. I have tried to live inside them too,

  these fish who strain against the world, or into it, why

  am I not so intent on battling my way into the young woman

  who moves from one thing to another without hurry?

  I would eavesdrop, but they talk in Spanish,

  thwarting my attempt to learn if the blind woman can detect

  the coolness radiating from the pile of slush, all that remains

  of the ice in which the dead were packed

  before being trucked off to the food bank: if she could see

  she’d see the vapor rising, as from a fire not quite put out.

  Victor the Shaman

  I feel the need for more humanity

  because the winter wren is not enough,

  even with its complicated music emanating

  from the brambles. So I relent to my friend

  who keeps bugging me to see her shaman,

  tutored by the Indians who live at the base

  of Monte Albán. Tutored also by the heavy bag

  at Sonny’s Gym: Box like heaven / Fight like hell

  his T-shirt says; the graphic shows an angel’s fist

  buried to the wrist in Satan’s brisket, while the prince

  of dark jabs the angel’s kisser. Victor

  has sandpiper legs, his ponytail a mess of webs,

  but he has eaten the ayahuasca vine

  and chanted in the sweat lodge

  and entered the fight-cage in a bar in Tucson,

  Adam’s apple jiggling his Star of David

  when he writes me out a prayer.

  He says he flew here to visit his grandma,

  only she died before the plane touched down—

  the dead leave yard sales to the living,

  who shoot staple guns at telephone poles

  and soothe their eyes with slabs of meat.

  No matter how many rounds you go in practice,

  he says you always come out unprepared

  om ah hum

  vajra siddhi padma hum

  for the mountain of junk inside the house: cedar canoe

  in the rafters and the box of Kotex he found

  from her last menstrual period in the 1950s.

  Wheel

  I sat, as I do, in the shallows of the lake—

  after crawling through the rotting milfoil on the shore.

  At first

  the materials offered me were not much—

  just some cattails where a hidden bullfrog croaked

  and a buckhouse made from corrugated tin—

  at first I thought I’d have to write the poem of its vapors.

  But wait

  long enough and the world caves in,

  sends you something like these damselflies

  prickling your chest. And the great ventriloquist

  insists

  you better study them or else:

  how the liquidmetal blue gleams like a motorcycle helmet,

  how the markings on the thorax wend like a maze,

  their abdomens ringed like polecat tails,

  the tip of his latched

  to the back of her neck

  while his scrawny forelegs wipe his mandible

  that drops and shuts like a berth on a train.

  But when I tallied his legs, he already had six—

  those wiper-legs belonged to a gnat

  he was cramming in his mouth. Which took a long time

  because the gnat struggled, and I tried to imagine

  a gnat-size idea of the darkness

  once the mandible closed.

  Call me bad gnat: see how every other thing strives—

  more life!

  Even with just two neurons firing the urge.

  Then the she-fly’s abdomen swung forward

  to take the sperm packet from his thorax,

  and he finished chewing

  in this position that the field guide calls The Wheel.

  Call me the empress of the unused bones,

  my thighs fumigated by the rank detritus of the shore

  while the meal

  and The Wheel

  interlocked in a chain

  in the blue mouth of the sky

  in the blacker mouth beyond

  while I sat, as I do, in the shallows of the lake

  where sixty thousand damselflies

  were being made a half-inch from my heart.

  After Reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead

  The hungry ghosts are ghosts whose throats

  stretch for miles, a pinprick wide,

  so they can drink and drink and are never sated.

  Every grain of sand is gargantuan

  and water goes down thick as
bile.

  I don’t know how many births it takes to get

  reborn as not the flower but the scent.

  To be allowed to exist as air (a prayer

  to whom?)— dear whom:

  the weight of being is too much.

  Victor Feguer, for his final meal,

  asked for an olive with a pit

  so that a tree might sprout from him.

  It went down hard, but now the murderer is comfort.

  He is a shady spot in the potter’s field.

  But it must be painful to be a tree,

  to stand so long with your arms up.

  You might prefer to be a rock

  (if you can wear that heavy cloak).

  In Bamiyan, the limestone Buddhas stood

  as tall as minor mountains, each one carved

  in its own alcove. Their heads

  eroded over time, and the swallows

  built nests from their dust,

  even after zealots blew them up.

  Now the swallows wheel in empty alcoves,

  their mouths full of ancient rubble.

  Each hungry ghost hawks up his pebble

  so he can breathe. And the dead

  multiply under the olive tree.

  The Black Rider

  There are blows in life, so powerful…

  I don’t know!

  CESAR VALLEJO, TRANS. CLAYTON ESHLEMAN

  Driving past the Masonic graveyard, I see a boy

  skateboarding down the new asphalt of the walk

  that he veers off so he can jump

  and slide along a tombstone.

  He has such faith in the necklace of his bones

  he will not let a helmet wreck his hair—

  why does the brain have to be buried

  in the prettiest place? You little shit, don’t you know

  someone slaved at the brewery to pay for what was

  supposed to stand as shiny as your hair

  two centuries or three, when all your ollies

  will no longer stir a moth or midge?

  But what kind of grump would rather be eaten

  by wind and rain than the glissando of a punk

  riding off with a whump to the door of the oven

  with a few bright flakes of someone else’s death?

  Pioneer

  Let’s not forget the Naked Woman is still out there, etched

  into her aluminum plaque

  affixed to her rocket

  slicing through the silk of space.

  In black and white, in Time, we blast her

  off to planets made of gases and canals,

  not daring to include, where her legs fork,

  the little line to indicate she is an open vessel.

  Which might lead to myths about her

  being lined with teeth,

  knives, snakes, bees— an armament

  flying through the firmament. Beside the man

  who stands correctly nonerect, his palm

  upraised to show he comes in peace,