On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (2 page)

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?

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.

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 = darling
²
). 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

in a miniskirt, to make sure I see.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Monday

I swim with the old ladies, hurry:

the synchronized swimming team arrives at three.

lit by chemicals—

I like to go under in my goggles

until we are evicted by the lifeguard, Danielle.

In the locker room, some retreat into the changing stalls

you have to peel your swimsuit in the open

with the girls on the team. I'm staring

reciprocate:

but all this future-flesh has made her shy—

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

but was mistaken about the boundary—

in a shop window, liquefying in the sun.

Good luck synchro girl, trying to wriggle

not wanting any of your you to bleed into your me

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

of lace.

*
Joe Wenderoth

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.

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.