On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (4 page)

It's the Bronx, Barretto Point, so the sea

cannot be far away. But all we have to go on

is the lone pine in the distance— the rest

bleached by the chemistry of time. Also

there's this young man in the foreground, squatting

with his forearms balanced on the fulcrum of his knees,

speaking to what's disappeared. It is a blur

resembling a woman with her arm extended,

urging him to follow. Soon the Great Depression

will also call him, and for lack of other work

will send him downstairs to the boiler

where he'll nurse the chromosome of sadness

while his words turn into coal. But he was not really

down there with the onions and potatoes—

in a moment, he will follow her

into the waters off Barretto Point, which will turn his good white shirt

translucent. Like the translucence he was led by,

but in this picture he hasn't risen yet

to cross the muddy shoreline. He's still crouched

in the upland, growing misty with the nebula who touches him,

misty at the prospect of his likewise turning into mist

as the camera makes this record of their betrothal.

Dusk takes dictation from the houses.

Sometimes sobs and sometimes screams—

laughter, too, though it doesn't settle like the others

into the hollows of the Virgin Mary's face.

In her concrete gown, she's standing by

the satellite dish absorbing for the trailer on the corner,

wearing shoulder pads of Asian pears I stole some of

before the windfall fell. When the dog

lifts his leg to soil a withered rose I say
Good boy.

Nightshade vines overtake the house of the widow,

their flowers turned into yellow berries

that there are no birds in nature idiot enough

to mistake for food.

Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper: I can barely pronounce your name

but have been thinking of you ever since your grease gun

erupted into space. Causing your tool bag to slip

beyond the reach of your white glove, when you were attempting

to repair the space station's solar wing. Thanks

for that clump of language—
solar wing!
One of the clumps

of magic shat out by our errors. And thanks

to your helmet camera's not getting smeared,

in the inch between your glove and bag— irrevocable inch—

we see the blue Earth, glowing so lit-up'dly despite the crap

that we've dumped in its oceans, a billion tons of plastic beads,

precursors to the action figures that come with our Happy Meals.

Precursors to the modern Christmas tree and handle of the modern ax.

Precursors to the belts and jackets of the vegans.

The cleanup crews call them
mermaid's tears,
as if a woman

living in the water would need to weep in polymer

so that her effort would not be lost/so that there would be proof

of her lament, say for the great Trash Vortex

swirling in the current, for the bellies of the albatrosses

filling up with tears that can't be broken down.

For the smell of mildew in the creases of ruptured beach balls,

for seabirds strangled by what makes the six-pack possible,

for flip-flops that wash up so consistently alone

they cause disturbing dreams about one-legged tribes

(described by Pliny before he sailed across the Bay of Naples,

into Mount Vesuvius's toxic spume).

Dreams logical, Heidemarie, given the fearful data.

Dreams had by us who live 220 miles below.

Queasy from our spinning but still holding on,

with no idea we are so brightly shining.

Bad luck to enter the houses of old women, a commandment

broken when I entered their stone cottage, two streets over,

covered in vines that twirled around a rusted swing set

though they had no child. That they were witches: a conclusion

come to, given that they wore the clothes of men,

their wool caps covering their secret hair, their house

so laced in greenwork that it seemed continuous with the woods

and its nettles and the nickel in my pocket, which they paid

for bee balm I tore out of their yard and sold

back to them, the dirt-wads dangling.

“Don't let the birds out,” muttered while I slipped

into the room with its stone walls, the backdrop

for a wounded jay who lived in a tin tub rattling with seeds.

Birdfeed, newspapers, feathers, guano— I saw

one substance splattering into the next in the life undivided,

windows open, birds flying in and out.

They worked their conjurations by feeding chopped meat

through a dropper, and wiped their hands

onto their jeans so you could see their long black fingers

streaking up the whole length of their thighs.

Mine have occurred in empty houses

down whose dark paneling I dragged my fingernails—

though big-box stores have also played their parts,

as well as entrances to indistinct commercial buildings,

cubes of space between glass yellowing like onion skin,

making my freak-out obscure.

Suddenly the head is being held between the hands

arranged in one of the conventional configurations:

hands on ears or hands on eyes

or both stacked on the forehead

as if to squeeze the wailing out,

as if the head were being juiced.

The freak-out wants wide open space,

though the rules call for containment—

there are the genuine police to be considered,

which is why I recommend the empty vestibule

though there is something to be said for freaking-out

if the meadow is willing to have you

facedown in it,

mouth open to the dry summer dirt.

When my friend was freaking-out inside my car, I said

she was sitting in the freak-out's throne,

which is love's throne, too, so many fluids

from within the body on display

outside the body until the chin gleams

like the extended shy head of a snail! Even

without streetlamps, even in the purplish

penumbra of the candelabra of the firs.

My friend was freaking-out about her freak-outs,

which happened in the produce aisle;

I said: oh yeah at night, it's very

freak-inducing when the fluorescent lights

arrest you to make their interrogation! Asking

why you can't be more like the cabbages,

stacked precariously

yet so cool and self-contained,

or like the peppers who go through life

untroubled by their freaky whorls.

What passes through the distillery of anguish

is the tear without the sting of salt— dripping

to fill the test tube of the body

not with monster potion but the H Two… oh, forget it…

that comes when the self is spent.

How many battles would remain

in the fetal pose if the men who rule would rip

their wool suits from their chests like girls

in olden Greece? If the bomberesses

stopped to lay their brows down on a melon.

If the torturer would only

beat the dashboard with his fists.

Now the tanagers have returned to my dead plum tree—

they sip the pond through narrow beaks.

Orange and yellow, this recurrence

that comes with each year's baby leaves.

And if the tree is a church and spring is Sunday,

then the birds are fancy hats of women breaking into song.

Or say the tree is an old car whose tank is full,

then the birds are the girls on a joyride

crammed in its seats. Or if the tree is the carnival

lighting the tarmac of the abandoned mall by the freeway,

then the birds are the men with pocketknives

who erect its Ferris wheel.

Or say the tree is the boat that chugs into port

to fill its hold and deck with logs,

then the birds are the Russian sailors who

rise in the morning in the streets where they've slept,

rubbing their heads and muttering

these words that no one understands.

Every morning I put on my father's shirt

whose sleeves have come unraveled—

the tag inside the collar though

is strangely unabraded, it says

Traditionalist

one hundred per cent cotton

made in Mauritius

Which suddenly I see is a haiku

containing the requisite syllables and even

a seasonal image

if you consider balmy Mauritius

with its pineapples and sugarcane.

And this precision sends me off

down the dirt road of my fantasy

wherein my father searched

throughout the store to find this shirt

to send an arrow from before the grave

to exit on the other side of it,

the way Bash
ō
wrote his death poem:

On a journey, ill

my dream goes wandering

over withered fields

It suits my father to have hunted down

a ready-made for his own poem,

not having much of an Eastern sensibility,

having been stationed in China during the war and hating it

despite the natural beauty of Kunming.

They say a man dies when the last person

with a memory of him dies off, or maybe

he dies when his last shirt falls to ruin. Now

its cuffs show the dirty facing all the way around

and a three-inch strip of checkered flannel dangles down

into my breakfast cereal:

I have debated many days but

here it goes—

snip

and am overcome by an Asian wash of sadness.

Because the washer spins so violently, like time—

perhaps its agitations can be better withstood

with the last-memory theory, which means that a dead man

reposes longest in the toddlers that he knew,

which often are not many,

children being afraid of old men,

what with their sputum-clearing rasps

and their propensity for latching on to cheeks,

though my father was not much of a child-cheek-pincher,

not that he had anything against them;

he had a grandson he tolerated

crawling under the table at La Manda's

where between forkfuls of scungilli

as his kidneys chugged with insufficient vim,

he composed his other death poem,

the one that came in his own words, it went

Soon I must cross

the icy sidewalk—

help. There goes my shoe