misc/poetry

The awake, all straight-backed
and well-groomed, wait at a table
made of sharp sunlight. I’m late
as usual, but this is the morning

I give in, sign over everything:
pillow-gluttony, sheet-sickness,
the blanket’s wrapper like skin
on my skin, clock meaningless.

This solo has gone on far too long,
this cat’s life, drunk, disappearing,
the bed itself my ravenous lover;
goodbye, we will be acquaintances.

I must be alert to my own dying,
push away dreams’ hot reason.
I must walk on gravel and not hide
in cakey layers. The soft cloth

around me will bristle, hairshirt
an alarm: You’ll miss everything.
Get up, the day is waiting,
that crooked clown.

The house passes a bailout for time. Every day

is shortened by two hours. It’s ratified

in the senate; the president, may he die, applauds.

They underpay workers to go around adjusting clocks

so the minute hands can keep up the pace. Watches

go on strike, then grandfather clocks, then phones. We go

back to sundials, and when it rains we hold each other’s

contacts up to our floor lamps (we have so many

floor lamps now) and wherever the spotlight falls

we wait until it turns green. No one assassinates

the president yet. Why depends on where

you’re reading this. There’s a law against spit now.

A city ordinance for limelight. All the op-ed pages

are in agreement about the uselessness of forms,

and in Alabama, we’re told a man had himself declared

legally miraculous. I disagree with the premise.

The alarm clocks have a picket line: they march

in figure eights around city hall, waking everyone up.

Young radicals get tattoos of the hours.

Nothing is done so much lately. There’s talk

of the rich being able to buy themselves another week.

The days are laid off. The seasons tighten their belts.

On Day 1, the photographer walks into camp
and immediately starts shooting. She shoots us

at breakfast eating our C-rations, in our hammocks
reading Stars and Stripes. She shoots us in her sleep.

You’re supposed to thank the fumes. To be grateful
for the toxic patch on the rail track.
For the craquelure
in the asphalt, seeping green—
it reroutes you, proffers with each commute a forced
adventure. Who’s to say what you’ll find
in your course of avoidance?
Ideally a willing stranger.
Maybe a glimpse of the most
expensive painting per square inch.
When you can no longer meet your needs
by working, you should feel joyous. No more daily
wear and tear on the blazer.
Now you can keep it pristine. Superlatively
inky. It’ll look smart at funerals.
Of course they’ll invite you to make some brief
remarks, and when you move to retrieve
from your pocket the paper,
out will come a whole sheath of solemn statements—
you’ve lost this year
how many? You’ll shuffle
through the pile. Where is the life
that lived in the body before you? Where is the right
one gone?

When you leave the museum

of contemporary art, opening

the doors to midday, you may need

a few minutes to reset context:

the bike shackled to the sign

is only a bike, the sign only a sign,

no small white exhibit labels.

Out here birds are nothing

but their crumb-begging selves,

shitting on cars and waking us

before our alarms. Cars are cars,

shit is shit. You walk by some café

where a woman sits alone unless

you count the two dachshunds

eating torn bits of French bread

she’s tossed under the table.

Aren’t the dogs perfectly

curated and aren’t the branches

like bicycle spokes, the noontime light

a playing card whirring between them?

As if sunlight as sunlight isn’t

art enough, as if trees need to be

more than themselves to deserve

attention, which is a kind of love.

You’re a stranger in this city,

finding your way to the hotel

where you’ll sleep only tonight,

though when you arrive,

you’ll text your husband,

I’m home. It’s more than enough:

the city as itself and you as you

inside it, and home as home,

etcetera, forever.

I think of all the ways
the women in my family have died,

the slow disease of genetics and childbirth
here in the curve of my cheekbone.

The doctor speaks as if this bloodwork
were routine, and I smile to make it false,

make this procedure only a safe precaution.
I’m told to focus on the opposite wall,

on the poster of a record-breaking runner
whose breath I imagine leaving

in heavy strides toward a finish line.
But what I want is to forget

that a body is capable of losing.
The first time I saw the dying,

[...]

I can write the saddest verses tonight

Write, for example, "The night is full of stars,
twinkling blue, in the distance."

The night wind spins in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest verses tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like this I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times beneath the infinite sky.

She loved me, at times I loved her too.
How not to have loved her great still eyes.

I can write the saddest verses tonight.
To think that I don't have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the verse falls onto my soul like dew onto grass.