Station Zed (8 page)

I want to write, but only foam comes out,

I want to say so much but it’s all crap—

there aren’t any numbers left that can’t be added up,

nobody writes down pyramids without meaning it.

I want to write, but I’ve got a puma’s brains;

I want to crown myself with laurel, but it stinks of onions.

There’s no word spoken that doesn’t dissolve in mist,

there’s no god and no son of god, only progress.

So come on, to hell with it, let’s go eat weeds,

eat the flesh and fruit of our stupid

tears and moans, of our pickled melancholy souls.

Come on! Let’s go! So what if I’m wounded—let’s go

drink what’s already been drunk,

let’s go, crow, and find another crow to fuck.

Right in front of the Comédie-Française

is the Regency Café; and right inside it, there’s this room, hidden,

with a table and an easy chair. When I go in,

house dust, already on its feet, stands motionless.

Between my lips made of rubber, a cigarette butt

smoulders, and in the smoke you can see two intensive

smokes, the café’s thorax, and in that

thorax an oxide of elemental grief.

It matters that autumn grafts itself into other autumns,

it matters that autumn merges into young shoots,

the cloud into half-years, cheekbones into a wrinkle.

It’s crucial to smell like a madman who spouts

theories about how hot snow is, how fugitive the turtle,

the “how” how easy, how deadly the “when.”

Look, at the very best, I’m someone other—

some guy who walks around marble statues, who enters

his adult clay into indexes of blood, and feels

the rage and fear of the fox chased to its hole—

and if someone anoints my shoulders

with indigoes of mercy, I’ll declare

to my absent soul that there’s no hellishly

paradisal elsewhere for me to go.

And if they try to choke me on the sea’s wafer,

telling me it tastes like His flesh, more acid

than sweet, like Kant’s notions of truth, I’ll cough

it all up:
No, never!
I’m other as a germ, a satanic

tubercle, a moral ache in a plesiosaur’s molar:

in my posthumous suspicions, all bets are off!

I’ll die in my apartment on a cold bright day,

with nobody around, the apartment next door gone

dead still while wind shushes through the balcony,

though the branches somehow aren’t moving, just as the sun

doesn’t move, everything’s so quiet, so frozen.

Parked cars, plastic bags bleached in the bare trees,

a couple of those Mylar balloons tied to a chair on

the balcony next door, celebrating something, maybe?

… now sagging listless on the floor,

as if every last molecule had been pierced by a needle—

Tom Sleigh is dead, he stared up into the air,

the sky was pale blue as usual and he couldn’t feel

the cold coming through the window, and there wasn’t

much to say or not say—and nobody, anyway, to say or not say it.

My cell’s four walls, whitening in the sun,

keep counting one another—but their number

never changes, despite my jailer’s

innumerable keys to chains

wrenching the nerves to their extremities.

The two longer walls hurt me more—who knows why—

their salt-stained cracks like two mothers who die

after labor, but give birth to twin boys

whose hands they still hold. And here I am,

all alone, with just my right hand to make do

for both hands, raising it high into

the air to search for the third arm

that between my where and my when

will father this crippled coming of age of a man.

How childish is the spectacle of the stained

glass’s holiness: the night doesn’t give a shit what

goes on inside human beings, the night

has its own web of dendrites refuting the inane

prayers prayed for the dying, for the confessions

going on between earthworms and earth, between

the way a man argues with his own shoulder bones.

All the while, barracudas in a coral canyon,

a sea turtle flying, swim through fathoms

and fathoms of images that keep crashing

on the shore of the eye that never shuts—

and smarts in its sleeplessness staring

up into the dark shadowed by stingrays, gas stations,

the slow flapping wing of a lottery ticket.

Sitting outdoors in perfect fall weather, waiting

for the waiter

inside to see me, I’ve put on my mask of
No-worries! No-way-scared!

that now starts to slip

—it’s dumb to think of water rising and sandbags holding

a plastic tarp

in place against waves onrushing that won’t ever stop

slapping against

plate glass, the fear so intense it’s almost like my dream

of silence

when I can’t move a muscle and the taxi

runs me down—

the iced tea in my glass sweats in crystal-beaded rivulets

but it’s such perfect weather

who can think of global warming? But I did, I do,

I went online

and tried to find the places on earth where,

when all the shit

comes down in the next twenty or thirty years, it might be

OK to live—

there goes that woman again, talking to her brown mutt

she thinks is so cute

she stops almost every time she sees me sitting at my table,

“Isn’t he the cutest little bug,”

the bug-eyed Pekingese with the long brown fur darkening

to sable at the tips

looking oddly mongoloid, though really pretty friendly,

“Yes, cute” is all I

can ever manage, though now she’s off to the next table

where some college girls

don’t mind that liver-colored tongue licking them: ugh!

But so what, live and let live,

Mr. Fussy should just relax and go back to his doomsday:

apparently, Great Britain

is a good place to live out global warming because the land mass

of an island not too big

will still be temperate enough in the interior to benefit

from the ocean’s moderating

influence: first time I ever thought of the ocean

as moderating: I used to surf

in it, and get high before paddling out to get knocked

off my board in a thousand ways—

man, I was no Mike Doyle—Mike paddling out about sunset

just north of the PB pier,

and in his jams a baggie with a match and cigarette—I always

wanted to have Mike’s muscles,

long swimmer’s muscles, but rounded and thick

from years and years

of paddling, his short legs and lithe torso perfect

for walking up and down

his long board: just as the sun touched the horizon, he’d take out

his baggie, strike the match

and cup it from whatever wind was left (the wind always

dies at sunset)

and touch it to his cigarette (a
Camel? Parliament?
I never knew)

and then wheel

around on his board and paddle hard to catch the swell

you could see mounding up

under the pier, and when he’d caught the curl and his board

found an edge and spume

flew back behind him, he’d walk out to the nose and hang ten,

and take a long slow drag

before letting his hand drift down to his side, where he’d hang

that way forever, profile

the acme of cool, beautiful, I’d later think, as the statue

of the Winged Victory

at the top of the Louvre’s staircase—Mike smoking his cigarette

mixed with dope,

one hand behind his back, weightless and ineffable as an astronaut,

chest thrust out,

long hair briny and shining from foam tattering

as the wave

kept breaking behind him, or barreling on big days

over his shoulder

so he shot the tube, crouched down inside the green room

like crouching

inside that old chandelier store so crowded with chandeliers

you couldn’t move two inches

without glass pendants swaying and clinking against

your head and neck, brushing

against your shoulders, the glass chill, the light diffusing

all around your head.

All afternoon of Frankenstorm Sandy I walked down

by the waterfront (my ex-wife

who’s right about most things called me a thrill-seeker)

and watched the water

surging toward shore as the tide rose, swamping the pilings

over by the River Café

and breasting the ferry landing, gusts of wind tearing

at the trees’ heads

while the East River turned to overlapping scales’

dull gray and duller silver

that the gusts drove before them, trash whirling in

eddies against shore,

plastic bottles bobbing madly in scum-froth, driftwood

with nails glinting

washed at by the tide cresting, the flooding over

onto concrete

leaving tide-wrack along the waterfront walkways—

at least the ones

not shut down by metal fences weighed in place

by sand bags—

though chainlink fences also sagged in the wind and looked

about to topple

while ailanthus and elms lashed in heady arcs

that stripped limbs

off branches shedding leaves going yellower

and yellower

in the fading light contrasting with how gray

the sky got, the violence

of the storm convulsive, falling silent almost, then whipping up

even stronger so the wind

pushed you along, then stopped so abruptly my leg muscles

braced against its force

stumble forward wildly when the wind lets up

before roaring again

in a movie-Cyclops voice so that I thought more than once

this is like Cyclops’ cave

and I’m trapped here with the crew, though the crew would be

Sarah and Hannah, both safe

thank God up in Syracuse, and Ed and Lesley safely indoors,

Ellen up in Providence,

and only me stupid enough to be out: so Cyclops

starts shouting

that as a special favor,
You, thrill-seeking Mr. Fussy, will be the last

among the crew that I devour

and the stoplight above my head suddenly sizzles out

and I wish I was indoors

or sitting where I am now, drinking my fourth iced tea and I’m

like a not-so-wily

Ulysses (and just how wily was he anyway, getting himself

and his men walled up inside

the cave of a giant, hungry, one-eyed cannibal) who has to risk

his life because he’s

trapped inside his own myth, his hero’s story that he tells himself

even as Cyclops eats his men,

caught between the monster and his own self-image

entrapped like greenhouse gases

that have no place to escape to, while what he wants

to see himself be

here in the traffic noise and calm of fading sunlight

may just be the guy that’s me

who watches reflecting off the window across the street

and right into my eyes

bright streaks of glare flashing brighter as if the light is a knob

turning up and up in volume

so that I hear the movie voice start shouting,
Noman is killing me
,

Noman is killing me!

to which very sensibly the other Cyclops shout,

Well, if no man

is killing you, stop making all that noise
.

Up on stage in the three-quarters empty auditorium,

the lights turned down, up where the auditorium resounded

to
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
performed

clumsily by me reading out Bottom’s speech when he turns

from an ass back into a human while the rest of the class

sniggered or flirted, sat back and chewed gum,

the words in the auditorium lived out their hour—

and after rehearsal, when I got on my bike, red bike, fat tires,

to pedal home under cottonwood trees, I turned round corners

I’d never seen in our tiny mountain town,

years and years went by, I was still pedaling—

it wasn’t a dream except maybe in the way logic works in dreams—

I had two heads now, my ass’s head, my human head,

my ass’s bray more eloquent than my human bray

of wonder at my change:
The eye of man hath not heard
,

the ear of man hath not seen
… my stumbling

tongue piecing through Shakespeare’s

bitter oratory about
no bottom
to Bottom’s dream …

I put my bike in the carport and started throwing

a tennis ball against the brick wall, thinking

over and over,
no bottom no bottom
—

the harder I threw, the more the words

weren’t mine, the ball smashing brick

while there in the auditorium the words

were like a taunt, like Theseus’s

taunts spoken behind my back because I was just

an ass, not Duke of Athens: but after the play, the cast

gave me the
papier-maché

ass’s head and I kept it first in the room I shared

with my two brothers, putting it on to sniff

the dried glue, feel the claustrophic fit, and stumble

half-blind to the bathroom mirror where I looked