Station Zed (10 page)

as you stand before the gates of Station Zed—

not to see the dead of invisible worlds

but to hear this melody

stolen from another horror movie,

The Creature from the Black Lagoon
, begin to play.

I wanted first to end up as a drunk in the gutter

and in my twenties I almost ended up there—

and then as an alternative to vodka, to live

alone like a hermit philosopher and court

the extreme poverty that I suspected lay in store for me anyway—

and then there were the years in which

I needed very badly to take refuge in mediocrity,

years like blunt scissors cutting out careful squares,

and that was the worst, the very worst—

you could say that always my life

was like a patchwork quilt always ripped apart—

my life like scraps stitched together in a dream

in which animals and people,

plants, chimeras, stars,

even minerals were in a preordained harmony—

a dream forgotten because it has to be forgotten,

but that I looked for desperately, but only sporadically

found in fragments, a hand lifted to strike

or caress or simply lifted for some unknown reason—

and in memory too, some specific pain, sensation of cold or warmth.

I loved that harmony in all its stages of passion,

the voices still talking inside me … but then, instead of harmony,

there was nothing but rags scattered on the ground.

And maybe that’s all it means to be a poet.

To be hollowed out night by night,

to feel this continuum between envy

and desire, to have the kind of fur that sheds

sparks in the bedroom’s shifting dark,

to sense, when I’m asleep, your whiskers

measuring the void around my face

that expands inexorably year by year,

to know that in your eyes God is just a bird

trapped in the burning bush, and to have

to disappoint you with my dogcat soul,

more dog than cat, really, more nakedly

beseeching, less able than you to be

out there on your own, given all that,

what makes you crave my touch tonight?

When your eyes entrap me, I splinter

into your looking, into what your looking

sees, the seeing itself stripping me down

to flesh and bone, and found wanting—

my face gone vagrant, paralyzed in your pupils

yet heightened and varnished beyond fact:

I fall, am falling, I’ve plummeted beyond

the frame, no internal balance-wheel to land me

on all fours, no mechanism of grace,

no safe harbor under the radiant

engine block, the streets rippling with black ice.

But don’t turn away from me: turn my skinhead

to furhead, teach me slash, slink, creep.

Show me how to survive under a heating vent.

The cursor moving back along the line erases what was was.

What was keeps existing under Edit so that all you need to do is

click Undo. So much of time gets lived out that way—

at the momentary center of the line erasing.

When I push my IV pole down the dark, glass hall, the droplets’

atavistic sheen drips into my veins with an absolute weight as if

the bag of potassium chloride, hanging in sovereign judgment

above my head, assures me that justice, death or life,

will be done. And though it’s not for me to understand,

when I cross the beam that throws open the door so silently

and swiftly, it makes me want to think that like these rivets fastening

glass to iron, some state of me that was will go on,

either as the will of some will that isn’t mine, or out of mercy,

or from the contract between the rivet gun and some unseen hand.

In my fantasy of fatherhood, in which I’m

your real father, not just the almost dad

arriving through random channels of divorce,

you and I don’t lie to one another—

shrugging each other off when words

get the best of us but coming

full circle with wan smiles.

When you hole up inside yourself,

headphones and computer screen

taking you away, I want to feel in ten years

that if I’m still alive you’ll still look

at me with that same wary expectancy,

your surreptitious cool-eyed appraisal

debating if my love for you is real.

Am I destined to be those shark-faced waves

that my death will one day make you enter?

You and your mother make such a self-sufficient pair—

in thrift stores looking for your prom dress,

what father could stand up to your unsparing eyes

gauging with such erotic calculation

your figure in the mirror? Back of it all, when I

indulge my second sight, all I see are dead zones:

no grandchildren, no evenings at the beach, no bonfires

in a future that allows one glass of wine

per shot of insulin. Will we both agree

that I love you, always, no matter

my love’s flawed, aging partiality?

My occupation now is to help you be alone.

On the other side of praise

it’s time to chop down the tall tree in the ear—

enough enough
with the starlit promontories—

a nervous condition traces itself

in lightning in the clouds,

a little requiem rattles among Coke cans

and old vegetable tins

and shifts into a minor key

blowing through the dying ailanthus,

grieving to the beat beginning to pour down

percussive as a run

on a nomad’s flute of bone

while a car engine dangling from a hoist and chain

sways in a translucent gown of rain.

Where does it go when it’s all gone?

Coleridge’s son, Hartley,

wants to know what would be left if all the men and women,

and trees, and grass, and birds and beasts,

and sky and ground were all gone:

everything just darkness and coldness

but nothing to be dark and cold.

Which was what my father

imagined all the time,

calculating with his slide rule the missile’s

drag and lift, as he smeared

across the paper the equation’s

figures propelling his pencil lead

into the void.

And after splashdown, what?

An emptiness like an empty subway car

stumbled into by mistake

on a drunken night

turning into

morning

with the world

stretching out

like wind walking on a lake?—

the body wavering, almost

disappearing

into the inside-outness of being

in that emptiness, its peaks and valleys

and absolute stillness?

His shadow anchored to a semi’s tires,

down there with the mussels, oysters, a starfish even

that twice a day shine up through oily film

where river meets sea meets river.

And I can track him in the sonar

of dolphin, seal

as if his pencil

hit the sea floor

echoing everywhere

filling the sea’s room,

unstringing the current’s loom

in which warp

and weft unravel

into oscilloscoping wave.

“He began to think of making

a moving image

of what never stops moving

that would bring order

to eternal being,

and so make movement move

according to number—which, of course, Socrates,

is what we call time …

And so he brought into being the Sun, the Moon,

and five other stars, for Time must begin.

These he called wanderers, and they stand guard

over the numbers of time—and human beings are so forgetful,

they don’t realize that time

is really the wandering of these bodies.”

An all-morning downpour shadowy

as the stained insides of his coffee cup.

He didn’t look up, didn’t talk,

didn’t rush me to the car, but gave his head

the slightest inclination.

We sat while the news talked on and on,

each of us glad to sink down into ourselves,

to not have to speak: it was enough, more than enough

to know the other knew we could settle

in that silence, and no vow or spoken understanding

would be as strong.

And all we did as we sat there driving along

was move from that point where everything originates

until point to point the line we made together got drawn.

The abandoned pit-house sliding down the cliff

sliding into the sea

is lost in fog

wrapped around

the headland’s scree—

and in the mine’s undersea tunnel

where miners walk out (along with my father’s father’s ghosts)

a mile or more under the waves

you can sense the old imperatives like played-out veins of tin

shining up for the men

walking briskly to their unsuspected

deaths, while just above their heads, a moment before the cave-in,

they can hear, as always, boulders rolling on the seafloor,

a job of work to do before the next shift.

“I am a dreaming & therefore

an indolent man—.

I am a starling self-incaged,

and always in the Moult,

and my whole Note is Tomorrow,

& tomorrow, & tomorrow …”

Which because it was how he felt

it’s what he wrote.

But now there’s no tomorrow,

only languor and despondency.

And under that shelter in the storm, among rocks

falling, he finally felt free

to say what his Daemon made him say, and looked up into the rain

and was for that instant washed clean.

English letters are Greek ones dried up.

The aurora on the screen

pulses more real than real.

The post-nuclear, post-holocaust rain he tried to understand

is only another afternoon when the world ends.

And now what passes through him

is a windchime ringing, casting parabolic shadows on the ground

as he hunches at work in his little cubicle,

a cell 8 × 10

which is just another world coming to an end

when twenty years on since the chiming ceased,

I try again to understand the points he plots

where thrust equals gravity and drag

so the rocket can keep soaring on forever.

Glowing on the screen, the initial

capital in the shape of Omega holds inside its void

two flying dragons biting their own tails.

And on another page

Alpha traces out the lines

of the Tower of Babel collapsing.

And just beneath that, a king lies dreaming of a golden statue

crushed by a stone that becomes a great mountain

so that the four kingdoms, gold, silver, brass, iron,

shine in gilt from the vellum—

and across Daniel’s face the shadow of a wing

which is the Lord’s wing whispering to Daniel the dream of the king

turns black as the screen when the screen goes to sleep

and a hand writes an unknown equation across the dark.

The backyard lives of cat and bird

and the way leaves give themselves

away this instant to the all-but-no breeze

creeping across the silver-painted roof where clouds,

reflected, pass dark, then bright

above a book left out by the vacant deck chair

fluttering its pages, signaling to the reader somewhere out of sight

to come back, come back and start the book over,

this all arrives without a valediction forbidding anything,

just the sense of seeing something

or someone for the last time: the poet’s faded fedora

in a tea-store window haunting this October’s primary

blues bringing back mid-May and the missing mate

of the nightingale singing “day long and night late.”

i.m. Seamus Heaney

“The Craze”

Demmies is short for “demolition experts.”

“Hunger”

Ba, Akh
, and
Duat
are terms used in the Egyptian
Book of the Dead. Ba
is a spiritual entity, often depicted as a human-headed bird hovering over the deceased’s body, or exiting the tomb. It’s the part of the soul that can travel between the worlds of the living and the dead.
Akh
is the “blessed or ‘transfigured’ soul” of a dead person whose soul has been judged to be just by Osiris and so is allowed to enter the Afterlife.
Duat
is the dangerous landscape of the underworld, complete with demons and monsters who guard the gates that the
Ba
has to pass through in becoming an
Akh
.

“Eclipse”

A
panga
is a bush knife shaped much like a machete.

A
matatu
is a minibus used as an inexpensive, shared taxi by most ordinary people in Nairobi. They are often decorated with pictures of movie stars, musicians, politicians, and other famous people, as well as religious leaders. They are often equipped with sound systems that blare Motown, R & B, and Afro-Pop.

“KM4”

KM4 refers to a central roundabout in Mogadishu, Somalia, near the Ministry of Education building where a suicide bomber, on October 4, 2011, killed 100 people and injured more than 110 others.

A
macawis
is a sarong-like garment worn by men.

A
chador
is a long robe worn by Muslim women.

UNHCR stands for United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.