On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (5 page)

Trees bare. Days short. And at dusk

crows pour through the sky in strands.

From a point in the east too small

to feed your eye on, they pop

into being as sharp dark stars, and then

are large, and then are here, pouring west.

Something chilling about it,

though they are birds like any birds.

What's fishy is the orchestration, all of them

with a portion of the one same mind: they fly

as if the path were laid, as if

there were runnels in the air, molding

their way to the roost. Whose location

no one seems to know— if they did,

you'd think there would be chitchat

in the market about the volume

of their screams, as if women were being

dragged by the hair through the woods

at night. But everybody keeps mum—

it seems we're in cahoots with them

without knowing what's the leverage

they possess (though we can feel it)

to extract from us this pact, this vow.

Now my body has become so stylish in the ancient way—didn't Oedipus

I remember him tied by the ankle in a tree, after his father heard the terrible

for the animals to peck and lap, same way the dog likes to lap my bloated foot

meant to squeeze it down. He likes to eat my epidermal cells before they fly

the tallest trees one valley south, where great blue herons build their nests

do their legs glide down my binoculars' field of view. The twigs they ride on

the tensile strength of cellulose versus their hollow bones? I thought of this

as I stared down an oldish woman's half-cubit of shanklebone, exposed

oldish skin I lapped until scowled at by her companion, who reached to the hem

rule of decorum gently pulled it down?

The dogs of the childless are barely dogs.

From tufted pillows, they rule the kingdom.

They'd stand for their portraits

in velvet suits, if they had suits—

holding hats with giant feathers.

And ousting the question: who loves the dog more?

the question becomes: who does the dog love?

The woman says: you are the one who plays him

a drum, you tap the anthem on his head.

No, the man says, you debone him the hen,

you tie the bow of his cravat.

The dogs of the childless sleep crosswise in bed,

from human hip to human hip—a canine wire

completes the circuit. The man says: I wonder

what runs through his head

when he squeaks and snorls all through his dream?

And the woman says: out

of the dream, I'm in his dream,

riding the hunt in my lovely saddle.

When the masters are gone, the dogs of the childless

stand in the mirror with swords on their hips.

They'd stand for their portraits with dogs of their own

if we were kings, if they weren't dogs.

Light passing through the leaves obliterates the subtitles

when the thief overtakes the swordsman

and forces his bride to submit. This is why

I need a new 42-inch flat-screen
TV
—

so I can read the dialogue of foreign films

that will improve me, though frankly it is horrible

to see the swordsman tied up and to watch him watch

the change in his wife's fingers

on the thief's (somewhat doughy) back. First

it looks as if she's fighting him, but then

she seems to pull him close,

saying
Now I am stained and must be killed
or

How do whales strain such tiny krill
—these problems

of interpretation can be solved by money:

we need larger words. I have not abandoned words

even if with trepidation I now enter

the kind of store where they sell plastic polygons

that hum and blink. As the swordsman's wife

enters the forest on her pony, her trepidation draped

with a veil that renders even the biggest tv powerless

to show much of her face. But she shows the thief her foot

in its fancy flip-flop: that's what rouses him

to rape her in the leafy grove, I'll say what I saw

in the plainest words. I am not asking to be forgiven

for desiring 1080p, though I
am
asking

whether or not she asked for it: you'd think

we would have laid that one to rest (it seems

so strident, air-lifted from the 1970s

when I did not watch tv and also called myself a womyn—

a word it's hard to dress in a kimono) but apparently

we will never. At his trial, the thief (Toshiro Mifune)

sits wigwam-style in tethers and laughs maniacally

as he tells his version, though in somebody else's version

she's the maniac who laughs. We ask, but the new machines

refuse to say much more than this: that everyone

will get their chance to laugh and everyone

their chance to wield the knife—

be careful, it is sharp and growing

sharper, the more I spend.

When first I was given the one lily

chaperoned by two green pods,

I strapped myself in like a cosmonaut

to absorb the
whoosh
of seeing

its pods open one by one.

Because what mind cooked up such extravagance,

spot speckle pinkstripe smudge
—

someone call a fire truck

somebody call a bomb squad

somebody call a pharmacist

for a Valium prescription.

Because the beauty of the world is soon to perish;

everything is burning up too fast—

lily number two goes off like a bottle rocket, leaving

the bloom and withering on the same stiff stalk

and the heart torn between them as the petals drop.

Oh, I might have asked for a simple daisy, something

to inflict a subtler vanishing…

without all this ocular pyromania

and the long-bones-dressed-up-in-a-coffin

scent. Plus there's one pod yet to detonate,

which the yellow pollen grains are trying to defuse

by lying scattered on the table,

precisely scattered on the wooden table

in a manner calibrated to this trapezoid of winter light.

My friend said: write about the dog in
The Odyssey
—

four hundred pages in. I found him lying on a dungheap

where ticks sipped his blood, though in his youth

he'd taken down wild animals, eager to kill

for a man the gods favored! Who comes back

in disguise; you expect the dog to give him away

with a lick or a yip, but this is not what happens.

Instead we're told that “death closed down his eyes,”

the instant he saw his master after twenty years away.

And I wondered if my friend had played a trick—

setting me up with this dog who does not do much

but die. When the gods turn away, what can we do

but await their unturning? That means: don't think

that after so many years of having such a hard pillow,

the dog wasn't grateful. But I wonder

if, for the sake of the shape of the plot,

the author ought to have let him remain

for another line or two, if only to thump again his tail.

Because the old feeder feeds nothing

but squirrels, who are crafty and have learned

how to hang so it swings sideways until

gravity takes the seed—I bumble down

to this store of bird knickknacks and

lensware for the geeks, and while

the clerk is ringing up my Mini

Bandit Buster ($29.95), spring-loaded

to close the seed-holes when a heavy animal alights,

I read a pamphlet about bird-feeding, which I had not thought

was complicated, but turns out

is. Yes I bought the costly mixture

—not the cheap stuff full of milo—

which the birds kick to the ground, where it becomes

an aggregate of shit and chaff.

But I'd not known you must sweep it up

so as not to spread the pathogens, and space

your feeders far apart and dump

the seed each week and clean the feeder tube with bleach.

And you should whitewash the windows of your home

so the birds won't crash—you'll live in twilight

but your conscience will be clear. Otherwise

it's best not to feed the birds

at all: your help will only kill them, has killed them,

I killed them says Wild Birds Unlimited—thanks,

now let me tell you that your wind chimes

turn this place into a gong-tormented sea.

Outside, it's just another shop in the strip mall;

used to be that this place was a grove

of cedars where I knelt in the purplebrown duff

while something holy landed like a lunar rover

on my shoulder. But listen

to what sings in the grove's bright stead—

computer chips provide what you would hear here

if they weren't—mechanical birds

on plastic boughs, always flowering.

Light leaves the air like silty water

through a filterpaper sieve:

there is a draft created by its exodus

that you might think that if you rode

you too could slip away quite easily.

Is this why they call to mind the thought of death?

Squeak squeak, their song: I want to go

but I am stuck here, it is a mistake

being incarnate; I should be made

of the same substance as the dark.

If they must stay, like us they will be governed

by their hungers, pursuit

without rest. What you see in their whirling

is not purity of spirit. Only appetite,

infernal appetite—driving them, too, on.

On my wedding night I drove the white boat,

its steering wheel a full yard wide. The dress

bellied out behind me like a sail

as I gripped the lacquered wood

and circuited the bay. The poem

by Akhmatova having already

been read, the calamari and cake

already eaten, I stood alone

in the wheelhouse while my friends

danced to the balalaikas outside

on the deck. I could not speak

for the groom, who left me

to the old motor's growl

and the old boards' groan; I also

couldn't speak for the moon

because I feared diverging

from my task to look. Instead I stuck

my eyes to the water, whose toxins shined

with a phosphor that I plowed and plundered.

And no matter what has happened since,

the years and the dead,

the sadness of the bound-to-happen,

the ecstasy of the fragile moment,

I know one night I narrowed my gaze

and attended to my captaining, while the sea

gave me more serious work than either love or speech.

I followed your red stocking hat

down the river of summer snow

until you carved the turn that stopped us both

with a spray of crystals. A prosthetic leg

lay on the ground, wearing a red

running shoe; we almost took it

to the Lost and Found, but skiing on,

we found more legs

perplexed the mountain. Leg

with thermos, leg with scarf, tableaux

with legs like bowling pins

struck down, though some were propped

erect, against a rock. Art installation

or object lesson?—first the body loses,

then it loses what it puts in place

of what it loses?—I thought

Mount Hood had come to life

to hammer this in. But I kept on

after your red hat and soon was overtaken

by one-legged men, a human wind

I whirled among for just a human minute.

Below, I saw them swallow you, then leave

you with the mountain shadowed on your back,

your red hat wagging, happily, it seemed,

despite the tons of rock you wore.

was a gift from Angus, came with his new Harley

which no ladies deigned to perch their buttocks on

and was therefore sold minus the shirt—

net cost: three thousand dollars, I wear the money

in my sleep. The black braid flowing from the man

herding dice at the Squaxins' Little Creek Casino

cost me two hundred thirty-five, well worth it

for the word
croupier.
Work seven months on a poem,

then you tear it up, this does not pencil out

especially for my mother who ate potatoes

every day from 1935–41. Who went to the famous

Jackson Pollock show after the war—sure, she was a rube

from across the Harlem River, snickering

at the swindle of those dribbles until death squelched the supply

and drove the prices up. I've known men

who gave up houses worth half a million just to see

the back of someone whom they once bought diamonds.

And I've known women to swallow diamonds

just to amplify the spectacle of their being flushed.

The Gutenberg Bible—okay, I get that:

five-point-four million dollars for a book of poems

written by God on the skin of a calf. A hundred years ago

the Squaxins could tell you easily

who the rich man was. He'd be dressed in a red robe

made of epaulets from redwing blackbird wings.