Copia (2 page)

I

L
ITANY OF
O
UR
R
ADICAL
E
NGAGEMENT WITH THE
M
ATERIAL
W
ORLD

Objects around us are emitting light, transgressing,

Objects around us are blank and seamless,

Objects around us can be carefully etched

Objects around us are Oh my God.

Objects around us shimmer in air-colored suits,

Objects around us depend on fracture and fragment,

Objects around us are durable,

Objects around us are not strangers.

Objects around us are expecting again,

Objects around us wrap us in compassion,

Objects around us are no substitute for anything.

Objects around us moan.

Objects around us wander the aisles,

Objects around us dismantle the city.

The doors are wide open. Go in.

N
IAGARA

White towels folded into swans

the floral bedspread: polyester,

on desolate paneling.

and shine like the glossed doors

lawn chairs out front.

on parking lot asphalt.

between two white parallel

behind the dumpster you lay

melted butter. It is the blue hour,

Love on damp pavement. Love

In the velvet night. He kisses

I haven't fallen like that in a very long time.

B
IG
B
OX
E
NCOUNTER

My student sends letters to me with the lights turned low.

They feature intricate vocabulary, like
soporific
and
ennui
.

Like
intervening
and
kinetic
and
tumult
. He strings words together

like he's following a difficult knitting pattern. He is both more

and less striking without a shirt on. I know this from the time

I ran into him at Walmart buying tiki torches and margarita mix

and, flustered, I studied the white floor tiles, the blue plastic

shopping cart handle, while he told me something that turned

to white noise and I tried not to look at his beautiful terrible chest,

the V-shaped wings of his chiseled hipbones. I write him back.

I tell him there are two horses outside my window and countless weeds.

I tell him that the train comes by every other hour and rattles the walls.

But how to explain my obsession with destruction? Not self-immolation,

but more of a disintegration, slow, like Alka-Seltzer in water. Like sugar in water.

I dissolve. He writes
enthralling
. He writes
epiphany
and
coffee machine
.

He is working in an office, which might as well be outer space.

I am in the mountains. The last time I worked in an office, he was ten.

I was a typewriter girl. I was a maternity-leave replacement for a fancy secretary.

I helped sell ads at TV Guide. I was fucking a guy who lived in a curtain-free studio

above a neon BAR sign on Ludlow Street and all night we were bathed in pot smoke

and flickering electric pink light. Here, the sun goes down in the flame

of an orange heat-wave moon. The train thrums and rattles the distance,

and I think of his chest with the rounded tattoo in one corner and my youth,

the hollows of his hipbones holding hard, big-box fluorescent light.

C
ORRESPONDENCE

I drive around in my small, old Honda Civic

and play music that reminds me of driving

the same car when it was new but no larger.

The Civic held four people, but now, with the car seat

and its five-point safety harness, it holds three.

There are Goldfish crackers ground into the floor mats.

My husband is the bassist in a local bar band.

They play classic rock covers, and though my husband

hates classic rock, he loves his powder-blue bass.

He loves playing in a band. He loves when Frank,

the owner of the bar, gets drunk and tells the band

how much he loves them. They have a monthly gig.

He makes fifty dollars a night when he plays 622.

There are things that are broken beyond repair,

but my marriage isn't one of them.

I am not telling you any of this.

Everything I am telling you is in that letter.

I will not tell you about the fact that I thought

praying mantises were an endangered species

when I was a kid. That was in the seventies.

If I think too much about my childhood,

I will feel too old to write you a letter.

The Internet tells me that this is a long-standing

urban legend; killing a praying mantis was never

illegal or subject to a fine. The origin of the myth

is unknown. Mantises are beneficial to gardens they live in.

Here it seems to make sense to evoke Eden,

but I won't. My son loves praying mantises.

He goes outside each night after dinner to
look for guys
,

and finds them tucked into the spiky barberry bushes.

I will not write you about my son, and if I mention

Eden, it would be to tell you that there's no such thing.

That you are not the talking snake and I am not

the woman without clothes who offers and offers.

The apple has no knowledge to give us. Our cosmogony

is unclear. This is not a love note, or a prayer,

or a field equation. I hold my cards close to the vest.

You send me a picture of a tattoo you'd like to get

of a compass, and the road unravels in front of my Civic

like a spool of thread. We are a gravitational singularity,

a theory that implicates epistemology, but I am not

rigorous enough in my approach to uncover anything.

You write me a letter.

I write you a letter back.

We go on like this for some time.

WITH/OUT

And the mornings were detritus,

bent bottle caps, chrome diner matchbooks,

always the pack of playing cards in cellophane

with the tab half-pulled, and the unearthed voice

of the drive-thru pricked by shined key chains

jangling like tire irons. And the nights were detritus,

expired gas station receipts, mall vapors, a half-used

tin of tattoo salve, all of Bayonne, New Jersey

mapped on your back in chalk. The moon was detritus,

shining on a pickup dodging the curb, trailing nail clippings,

onion skins, translucent stars, five beat-down Nikes

that wound up phone-pole hopping in Ditmas.

And you were the detritus of magnifying glasses,

half-done lanyards, award ribbons fluttering

like condom wrappers at the shore, the wreckage

of contour lines, a hand-tooled leather souvenir

from a red rock abyss. The scent of your drawer

was fresh rubber and guitar picks, the metallurgy

of scattered loose change and blood. Your bed

wore charcoal detritus, lip-gloss and pot-dust,

ill-fitted sheets. And the detritus the July heat let loose:

gnawed Bic pen caps, a glowing Duncan Hines yo-yo

tangled in dead 9-volt connectors and envelopes

whose lips sealed shut from humidity that swelled

the windows into their frames. If you had scrawled

something on the inside of my wrist back then

it might have been a Venn diagram: your contented breath,

six glove-box necessities, the muffled places detritus would take us.

S
TAKING A
C
LAIM

It seems a certain fear underlies everything.

If I were to tell you something profound

it would be useless, as every single thing I know

is not timeless. I am particularly risk-averse.

I choose someone else over me every time,

as I'm sure they'll finish the task at hand,

which is to say that whatever is in front of us

will get done if I'm not in charge of it.

There is a limit to the number of times

I can practice every single kind of mortification

(of the flesh?). I can turn toward you and say
yes,

it was you in the poem.
But when we met,

you were actually wearing a shirt, and the poem

wasn't about you or your indecipherable tattoo.

The poem is always about me, but that one time

I was in love with the memory of my twenties

so I was, for a moment, in love with you

because you remind me of an approaching

subway brushing hair off my face with

its hot breath. Darkness. And then light,

the exact goldness of dawn fingering

that brick wall out my bedroom window

on Smith Street mornings when I'd wake

next to godknowswho but always someone

who wasn't a mistake, because what kind

of mistakes are that twitchy and joyful

even if they're woven with a particular

thread of regret: the guy who used

my toothbrush without asking,

I walked to the end of a pier with him,

would have walked off anywhere with him

until one day we both landed in California

when I was still young, and going West

meant taking a laptop and some clothes

in a hatchback and learning about produce.

I can turn toward you, whoever you are,

and say you are my lover simply because

I say you are, and that is, I realize,

a tautology, but this is my poem. I claim

nothing other than what I write, and even that,

I'd leave by the wayside, since the only thing

to pack would be the candlesticks, and

even those are burned through, thoroughly

replaceable. Who am I kidding? I don't

own anything worth packing into anything.

We are cardboard boxes, you and I, stacked

nowhere near each other and humming

different tunes. It is too late to be writing this.

I am writing this to tell you something less

than neutral, which is to say I'm sorry.

It was never you. It was always you:

your unutterable name, this growl in my throat.

I
NTERROBANG

As an advocate for the precision of communication

I have to tell you that the typographically cumbersome

and unattractive combination of an exclamation

point sidled up to a question mark could be replaced

by a more compressed pairing; if the two separate

pieces of punctuation merge totally

into an outpouring of astonishment

to express modern life's incredibility—

Who forgot to put gas in the car

You call that a hat

Did you see the way she fell to her knees

in the supermarket because she was suddenly

overtaken by an erotic paranormal experience

—then faster breathing implies candor when we

shift these two elements together: I send

my love! You must carry yours in a luminous

tent rounded at the top? Latin for query

with a shout, in the dark I

seek you out as a witness because I adore

curiosity wrapped around wonder:

and in the second coming when I bare

my interrobang, located in the lower right corner

of nowhere you've seen, my skin does not tremble

before you, but rather

becomes punctuation for this illicit

almost-run-on sentence. My interrobang

should not be used in formal writing

as it's socially irresponsible and tangled

in knots over our inappropriate situation

which is exactly the shape of naked John Lennon

wrapped around clothed Yoko Ono, their

intertwined bodies (eternal, glorified) captured

just hours before he was shot—can you see

the way he clings to her as if he's drowning

in astonishment at his good luck?

John Lennon is dead and you and I—

you and I
are separated by miles

of ticking, snarled night.