Elegy Owed (4 page)

This whole thing, this way of living beside a can opener

beside a microwave beside a son beside a daughter

beside a river going to college, you get up

and kiss the mortgage and go go go with coffee-veins

and burger-fries and pack your soul on ice

till sixty-five, when you sit down with a lake

and have a long talk with your breath

and cast your mind far away from shore, fish nibbling

the mosquitoes of your thoughts: they will whisper of this life

a hundred years from now to children before sleep

who will call them liars, “Once upon a time,

they had two and a half bathrooms and tiny houses

for their cars and doctors who listened

through tubes to their fat hearts, they named

their endeavors and beliefs
four-wheel drive,

twenty-percent-off sale, summer vacation, colonoscopy,

variable-rate loan, inheritance,”
and we will be

as gods to them in that they won't believe in us,

and we will be spared the eternity of their worship

as they will be spared money, the counting

and the having and the memory of the middle share

of what gets harder and harder to call a pie

for David

A man plays guitar beside the second-oldest river

is low in the world. That can change any minute. The Nile

is older than guitar, more Egyptian than the porch

is falling. A house from 1854, undulant floor, a train

goes by between the river is falling and guitar. A song

derived from the tango runs like a shudder through his hand

to the night is soft with the pliancy of bats. This one

javelins his voice at the stars have removed their veils.

This one lifts her anvil to the moon keeps to itself

but shines its diffidence upon the elms. A man

sets his guitar free on the river muttering homeless

to the north, fingerprints of music on the sandbar

I have been in various guises of my drowning.

Folding chairs applaud as grapes appreciate the chance

to live one hundred years as wine. A man plays a song

that is eternal as long as we're here to listen

we might as well paint the river with our faces. The tango

shudders like a hand up the dress of how hard it is

to be what experts call “yourself.” If you set your breath

by the river, it's always time to shine to go.

People keep flicking the porch-light on like they miss

the sun is doing meth on the other side of the world

if you ask me to stay I'll stay receptive to the chance

we can strike the matches of each other's heads

without burning the minutes down. Don't take my word

for the juicy fragility of beauty: ask the baklava.

When the wind died, there was a moment of silence

for the wind. When the maple tree died, there was always a place

to find winter in its branches. When the roses died, I respected the privacy

of the vase. When the shoe factory died, I stopped listening

at the back door to the glossolalia of machines.

When the child died, the mother put a spoon in the blender.

When the child died, the father dug a hole in his thigh

and got in. When my dog died, I broke up with the woods.

When the fog lived, I went into the valley to be held

by water. The dead have no ears, no answering machines

that we know of, still we call.

Up and up, the mountain, but suddenly a flat spot

exactly the size of the house they would build,

and when they went to dig for the foundation, the foundation

appeared, just as the beams for the floor, as they started

to set them in place, revealed they had always been there,

it was like coming into the room to find your diary

writing itself, she told the interviewer, who wanted to talk

about her paintings but she kept coming back to the house,

including the sky above the house, how it resembled

her childhood, forgetting how to rain

when it wasn't raining, remembering blue

just when she needed to be startled most, don't you think

it odd that my life has always had just enough space

for my life, she asked the man's recorder

as much as the man, hoping the recorder

would consider the question and get back to her, then you moved

to Madrid, the interviewer was saying, and started painting

your invisible landscapes, I remember the first window

we lifted into place, she replied, that the view of the valley

it would hold was already in the glass when we cut the cardboard box

away, we just lined them up, the premonition

with the day, he had twenty more questions

but crossed them off,
I have always wanted to build a room

around a painting,
he said, Yes, she replied,
A painting

hanging in space,
he added,
A painting of a woman

adjusting a wall to suit a painting,
she said,
Like how the universe

began,
he suggested,
Did it begin,
she wondered,
is that

what this is?

Looking for someone to mug, asking politely

Can I mug you,
a kindly grammarian responds,
May I mug you,

and hands me her purse, her child, her mortgage,

I have to feed the child and pay for the house, a small thing

like the smell of piss in the streets

makes me nostalgic for New York in ‘82, when everyone

was mugging everyone, it was more

like a cultural exchange or a kind of greeting, I'm worried

about the child's standardized test scores,

about how I look carrying a purse, it's not my color

and styles are always changing, just last week

I was looking for someone to kill, the week

before that, someone to scold me

for not being an intravenous drug user, these things,

God does these things like send us halfway out

on a rope bridge before telling us

He's changed His mind about rope,

it shouldn't exist, it's not going to exist

any moment, like we are not going to exist

any moment, and I have never applauded a grape

in an alley, I have never put my hands around the face

of a stranger like a chalice, there's so much to do

if I want to be fully human, not three-quarters

or half or sort of human, I have to hoist you

on my shoulders so you can jump over the wall,

I have to build the wall higher, I have to catch you

on the other side, I have to shoot you

for trying to escape, I have to call your mother

and tell her you won't be coming home, I have to set

another place, I have to gather rain

into a body and make love with the rainbody

and teach the rainbody to moan and be taught

by the rainbody how to fall apart

into the most beautiful future reaching of grass

with its billion billion somnolent tongues

into the quiet applause of sunlight, into the pliant embrace

of air, may I mug you, may I kiss you,

may I sit with you on the veranda or build with you

such verandas as we need, such skies

as will hold the verandas in their arms, such martinis

as Plato never went on about or I'd read him

more often, sure the cave, sure the fire, sure the shadow,

sure we're stuck, but a drink now and then

makes philosophy more bearable, in that it's hard

to hold a drink in one hand and a book

in the other hand and a hand

in your other other hand, I choose the drink

and the hand hand over the drink

and the book hand, these are my priorities,

if they suit you, we can may share

Then I stopped hearing from you. Then I thought

I was Beethoven's cochlear implant. Then I listened

to deafness. Then I tacked a whisper

to the bulletin board. Then I liked dandelions

best in their Afro stage. Then a breeze

held their soft beauty for ransom. Then no one

throws a Molotov cocktail better

than a Buddhist monk. Then the abstractions

built a tree fort. Then I stopped hearing from you.

Then I stared at my life with the back of my head.

Then an earthquake somewhere every day.

Then I felt as foolish as a flip-flop

alone on a beach. Then as a beach

alone with a sea. Then as a sea

repeating itself to the moon. Then I stopped hearing

from the moon. Then I waved. Then I threw myself

into the work of throwing myself

as far as I can. Then I picked myself up

and wondered how many of us

get around this way. Then I carried

the infinity. Then I buried the phone.

Then the ground rang. Then I answered the ground.

Then the dial tone of dirt. Then I sat on a boulder

not hearing from you. Then I did jumping jacks

not hearing from you. Then I felt up silence. Then silence

and I went all the way.

The movie was over except the credits,

music like but not Satie, I don't remember

if I felt the loss of the child deeply

or needed people to think I did,

as when you stand before a painting

in a museum for as long as you hope

says something good about you, even

when you're not sure what that good thing is,

that you're considerate of red or appreciate

the historical significance of the brocade

or know that the woman in the foreground

holding the scythe was the painter's lover,

Mary Blake, who went on to swim

the English Channel twice, once forward,

once backward, but the vision was clear, I wanted

to carry tiny people around in a box, actors

who longed to perform
Our Town

for an audience of any size, the numbers

didn't matter if their attention

was complete,
You would feel like the sun,

wouldn't you, when they applaud,
I longed

to ask the tiny actors in my arms,

and to feed them like the grasshoppers

I believed as a child only needed grass

in a jar to thrive, then we had cocooned

ourselves in our coats and were outside

with the gargoyles on the library, a gray sky,

I was carrying the box of actors

in how I believed the world was trying

to be perfect, nothing has to be real

to be real, like love, how often it makes me want

to eat you, not figuratively but actually

devour the hours you fill, one by one

or fill you, however that works with time,

and we walked until we couldn't, so far

there was no more light from the city,

and built a bed there, a garden,

a perspective, what you might call

the staples of a life, and stayed.

In college, I stole a human heart from the anatomy lab

and bowered it in a bird's nest that had fallen, I make

symbols, not whales, plagues, thistles, stars

are the moms and pops of everything

except themselves,
inanimate
's the one word

I'd execute by guillotine to excise the lie

of lifeless, since bite into any bit of dirt

or dust and you've got a gob full of electrons

and quarks, the whole menagerie of matter's

in there, pinging and swooping, steel's got a pulse

as far as I'm concerned, and while I'm French

Revolutioning my way across the lexicon, I'll nix

miraculous
too, for what isn't, what stone

doesn't do a number of things I can't

very well, avalanche and slingshot and skip

at the shore, where compared to my one, water speaks

with infinite mouths, and the simplest chair

is sometimes the most mystical being

in a room, animate with the knowledge

of how to be wood and supportive, alive

with the atomic breath of being, this is god,

small g, no Bible, Koran, I stole a human heart

from the anatomy lab in college and bowered it

in a bird's nest that had fallen, they looked

lost alone but thrived as partners, the dead heart

and dead home alive with the promise of shelter

We went to the top of a building to jump off.

She could no longer deal with having been raped.

I was tired of falling asleep by looking forward

to never waking again. It was a perfect day

to watch a documentary on famous parachute-

folding mistakes. Then we had a final meal, final smoke,

final shower with the window open and pigeons watching.

Are you sure you wouldn't rather shoot the man

who did this,
I asked, adding that guns are easier to buy

than “get well soon or whenever you want” cards. Of course

I knew her mother would never forgive her

if she shot her father, she'd have to shoot her mother too,

which would anger her sister, also raped, who'd wonder why

she didn't think of that herself. The only time

they talked about it, they were drunk on the steps

of our brownstone and throwing peanuts at cabs

until one cab backed up and a man got out

who was three feet tall but his arms were eight feet long

and it was the arms that did the talking. They ran.

A three-foot-tall man dragging eight-foot-long arms

is an interesting nightmare to watch run. They ran the whole night

together, all the way to Brooklyn and bloody feet

and crying most of the way out and laughing

most of the way back, I think what's known as a bond

was formed. Still she wanted to die and I wanted

to be with her, so we went up into the winds

people don't realize are in love with tall buildings

and debated a long time the virtues of taking turns

or going as one by holding hands and not shouting

Geronimo.
I've often wondered why people shout that

when they jump and not
Ulysses
or
Grover Cleveland,

I'm sure there's a reason like I'm sure her father

could explain himself if she held a knife to his dick.

We didn't jump — this is a poem — but she's still raped

and I still wish I could articulate the point

of breathing and her sister's still fun to have around

because she juggles really well and they lean

against each other in doorways without knowing

they're the only two trees of a very small forest,

in which I think of myself as a wild animal

sheltered deep within their shade.