On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (3 page)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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,

though you globulous yet advanced beings

have surely taken a gander of our sizzling planet

and can see us even through our garments.

So you know about the little line—

how a soft animal cleaves from her

and how we swaddle it in fluff,

yet within twenty years we send it forth

with a shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled-grenade launcher:

you have probably worked out a theory

to explain the transformation. And you

have noticed how she looks a bit uncertain

as she stands on her right leg, her left thrust out

as if she's put her foot on top of something

to keep it hidden. Could be an equation

on a Post-it, or could be a booby trap—

now comes time to admit we do not know her very well, she

who has slipped the noose of our command. Be careful

when you meet her, riding on her shaft of solar wind:

you will have to break her like a wishbone

to get her open, she whom we filled with teeth

and knives and snakes and bees.

The
TV
knob was made of resin, its gold skirt

like a Kewpie doll's, but it was gone.

So we changed the channel

with a pair of pliers (on the flat spot

on the spindle): chunk chunk

and then lo, Jerry Lewis. Chunk chunk and lo,

the marionettes with giant hands. The song went:

my heart would be a fireball.
And in the chunking

and the singing and the watching, lo, my heart became one.

Less pageantry in the now. Say
Sputnik
: no other word

climbs my throat with such majestic flames.

Gone, the marionettes in flightsuits made of foil

gone grainy on the boob tube. The tremulous way

their bodies moved, my fear for their well-being.

The comic stupidity of the child,

which is forgiven. Unlike the stupidities to come.

The boy had a guinea pig named Fireball, so I taught him

the song by way of mourning

when it died. He still possessed his sweetness,

unlike older sons who think you are a moron without big

subwoofers in your car. To that son I say:

you may think you're one of the alpha-carnivores

just because you've shot many avatars of whores

on a video screen that you will never have the Cuban missile crisis on;

you do not even really have the bomb, and how can anyone

command their cool without the bomb: Sam Cooke, James Dean,

those boys lived kitty-corner to their annihilation.

But my son glazes— what's so special about the past

when everyone has one? And yours, he says,

is out of gas. Then vroom, he's off—

you might think his car is breathing by the way the windows

bend. Welcome to the new world, Mom,

he says, if you hear singing, it ain't a song.

After the physics final, Gina and I, in our mukluks

scuffed past the swanky shops on Sherbrooke

then climbed the mountain in the city. December 5,

1975: I tried to will myself to have a vision, though the stars

would not cooperate— instead of a sweat lodge

or a kiva, the warm-up hut at the top of Mount Royal

looked completely un-aboriginal, a replica in miniature

of the Château de Versailles. With night all around us

cold and thick as glass, I don't know how the starlight

managed to pass through it to sting me, it was hard enough

to lift my hand to knock the door, a joke,

it was so late. And here past the midpoint of my life

I think I'll die without a paranormal apparition

to which I could wholeheartedly attest. I am not sure

I even have a soul, a corny soul, a little puppet

made of cream and feathers. Yet the door

did open (turned out to be only six p.m.)

and the old man said,
Ah jeunes filles, il paraît que vous

avez froid.
Then he unstacked two chairs and set them

down before the fire, still chewing its meal of logs

in the giant hearth. Inside the château of our silence,

we sat and chewed our lips: wasn't the sacred knowledge

supposed to involve telepathy with animals, and astral travel

to planets made of light? Kindness (b) seemed too corny

to be the answer (
Restez ici pour le temps que vous

voudrez
) though we were given no other choice

except (a) his sweeping, and (c) the mice inside the walls.

When he was flush, we ate dinner

at Tung Sing on Central Avenue

where my father liked the red-dye-number-toxic

bright and shiny food: spareribs, sweet-

and-sour pork— what else

was there to care about, except his sleep

under the pup tent of the news? And the car,

which was a Cadillac until he saw how they

had become the fortresses of pimps—

our hair may look stylish now,

but in the photograph it always turns against us:

give it time and it will turn. Maybe it was in 1976

he went to see the enemy, the man

(with sideburns) who sold German cars

and said: take it easy, step at a time,

see how the diesel motor sounds

completely different. So off he went tink-tink-tink

around the block in the old neighborhood

where he imagined people (mostly black: by now

his mouth had mastered the word's exhale,

then cut) lifting their heads to look (-
kuh
).

And he, a short man, sat up taller as he swung

back into the lot to make the deal, although

to mitigate the shift in his allegiances

(or was this forgiveness?— for the Germans

had bombed his boat as he sailed through Gibraltar)

he kept the color constant.
Champagne,

the color of a metal in a dream, no metal

you could name, although they tried

with a rich man's drink. He could afford it now

though it made him feel a little silly, his hand a lump

of meat around the glass's narrow, girlish stem.

Great-Uncle Stefan wears the Austro-Hungarian Empire's sailor suit,

its cap flat and black, his long

dark hair pomaded in a stiff

blunt skirt behind his neck.

There's something about the nose's

bulb-and-nostril conglomeration that we share,

and though I'm not a man I like to think

I am a sailor, with a waxed moustache like his

whose curled-up ends provide

an occupation for our nervous hands,

twirling it so as not to betray

with a squint or smirk his sympathies,

which lie with the murderer Princip.

Who shot the Archduke in Sarajevo, where

it took me a long time in the assassination museum,

reading Cyrillic via the osmotic method

of translation, before I figured out

Princip was the hero of the place: a person

could match her feet with his imprinted

in the sidewalk and pull the trigger of her fingers.

And enter the fantasy of being The One Who Caused

The Greater Past, which I could not resist:

my knuckle crooked, and clicked.

However I did spare the Duchess Sophie.