The Problem of the Many, page 7
briefly as if his own, even as his method of vanilla pollination
belonged first to his master, then Madagascar, and then the world,
with nearly all vanilla produced today as Albius taught us, including
the kind in Breyers since 1866, fourteen years before Albius died
unrecognized, in poverty, in misery to be exact, while everyone white
around him grew rich with vanilla, adding it to candy, Coca-Cola,
Chanel No. 5, and even in effigy to the air freshener dangling
down in my Uber, its waves whispering Albius, Albius, but inaudibly.
Escape into Time
Back where the start was
in time I came to feel, before
or without any basic understanding,
the hands holding me down
wanted likewise to reassure me
there was no place other
than right where I was kept:
chair, table, void-side window
overlooking the nothingness
and the hands that held me there
must have held me without
understanding in time
I would come to feel to keep me
implied other places must likewise
exist, otherwise what
was I kept from to begin with,
and by extension, everywhere
apart from where the hands were
congealed into one
comprehensive elsewhere, all time
not the present became one time,
and even when denied
any movement not a form
of leaning forward, nonetheless
I arrived at the border of
all other places every time at once,
so that to hold out my hand
would bring it no closer
to the garment of my caretaker
than to the first known garment
of its kind, or to the hand
that designed it, or to the hand of
the godhead etching into stone,
a stone rolled back from
the mouth of a tomb, or the mouth
of a painter of clock faces
numbering the void with light
steps around a pit the uranium rises
out of like a crib in Colorado
where a dirt path into the endless
distance erases itself as I too
will erase myself when I take it
the way I always have
reverberating inwardly, a machine
through time, each future inescapably
historical, but I am traveling
back where the start was
not yet waiting for me all along.
Traveler
Admittedly, there have been times, as after antihistamines
and a lager at the airport bar, when I can make like
I belong here, minding my own carry-on behind me
like the nonchalant, buoyed through a mount in cheer
or cheerfulness I can’t call false, or can but just plain
don’t, my fixity dissolving like some paper boat on blue
carpet scrolling down the gate and aisle, shoulders brushed
to others’ gently, neighborlike, and often, and as if
I hadn’t noticed, but I do, it is my task. A sudden flash
of what might happen when it did, but days ago, and then
the rope of calm around my neck again, I settle in my seat,
a window in the back, and pray to what I pay for,
which is an empty sky, or else a cloud in what appears
to be the center of the sky, to feel the fade of what I only
recently eased into, this lack of history between us
making it all the easier. (I think I hadn’t expected life
to be kind to me, not in light of the pounding of it, so I must have
thought I could trick it, lead it into thinking I wasn’t
really there. Later on, I think I changed my mind, but by
then it was too late.)
Gone forward, pulling it off
but awkwardly, timed as if time’s artichoke had wept in
front of me in the white kitchen, or on a pond on which
intoned a lotus, then a moon; greased in plenitude, up to
and including—then all its little hands, which knit
a lifework out of hours, days; centuries unstuck like yellow
vinyl from the tabletop, the noise of it so common-
place we didn’t notice it, or when we did, we let it pass
by tacitly as nails until all the landscapes they held up
dropped out of custody, and now it can’t be heard again.
Or say the flatness of the tabletop were the known
universe, all of it, and I’m just a random smirch residing
in the northeast corner, comparable to many other smirches,
nothing special, until I vanish from this flatness into another
layer of it, into depth. We might think of it as traveling
under the table, but the smirches, who only experience
flatness, know no under. They only know that I was there
and then I wasn’t. And when I resurface in an instant
somewhere in the south, it’s still just an instant to me,
but to the others, who are nowhere to be found, it was an instant
three hundred years in the past.
White birches lean
through a mist like plastic drinking straws, the same
kind a tribesman from Papua New Guinea once drove
through the hole in his septum in lieu of the traditional
wooden spoke or bone. The anthropologist in the back of
the room cried. She had seen the documentary many times before
but still cried. She sensed in this image the collapse
of a culture, its unstoppable tumbling into the corporate
fast-food abyss. I could see this. At the same time I couldn’t
look up into his face and make myself see anything less
or more than a person, one with the capacity to choose
or choose not to do what he had done. I knew I had to
be wrong. I knew I should want him not to choose what
he possibly only appeared to have chosen, meaning external
forces might have compelled him to take up the straw
instead of materials his ancestors used, but I couldn’t distinguish
between wanting this and wanting to preserve him
in time like an object, even if to do so meant denying him
his ability to choose, permitting him only to do to his face
what left Baltimore comfortable.
Anyone moves through
days less than completely, the washing of dishes
start to finish, water half-scalding the hands so the feet
don’t remember events that the land underneath
them supported, a hope for gain so consistent in the humus
it becomes for us an unavoidable drink, the whole
crow family chuffing overhead as we trust our taproots
to skirt the bad aquifer. Anyone oftener in the soft-
scented borders abuzz beside museum doors will anchor
thoughts elsewhere than in insects on whose loud labor
we depend unendingly. As for me, I like to think of myself as able
to function at a certain level, equipped to walk among
a company of bees at ease with my place in an ancient
relation, a live participant in a pattern whose longevity
is a thing of beauty, admiring our symbiosis in Sunday
sun as an abstract love with benefits, but then I think
we’d cloud them in a stink of toxins if they didn’t pollinate
the fruit we ate or vomit honey, and they don’t think
of us at all, they’re too busy, or aren’t equipped to, or don’t
see the point, if there is any.
Half-aware in the dark
air above New York, a common swift, known to doze in flight
the way a dolphin does through the sea, one hemi-
sphere of its brain set to slow-wave sleep while the other
maintains vigilance, the inner eye of us widening
as it beams back and forth godlike across the soft office
floor of our experience, the outer and inner divisions of it
parted by a cleft that looks from this height like nothing
but a papercut, I drop in on red activity filed in the
fourth quadrant outer division, labyrinth of mismanagement
as far as the eye can see, its index cards alone the size
of antlers on Irish elk, which is to say so large they prevent
successful completion of “the normal business of life,”
I’ve heard it said, or else it was just some idea I had
once about futility in a bathtub, but when I reach out
to grab the file, having been lowered down to the air-
space just above it, the antiquated suspension system up
and reverses, hauling me backward through the element
I belong to, torn as if from the hand that would spare me
the burden of remembering.
Nothing to be afraid of but
nothing now, a light-absorbing liquid tucked behind a dam
constantly wanting to unknit itself, thinking to fail by plan
might be better than to succeed for a stretch through
violent worry, only to fail in time anyway; you sat beside me
on the green chair, birdlike, fidgeting in your girlhood
as we read together from a magazine, facts about the lives
of honeybees, nothing to be afraid of: to generate,
on average, a single pound of honey, a colony has to draw
nectar from two million flowers, or enough red roses
to send a dozen red roses to every resident of Columbia, Mo.
And to visit all those flowers, the colony has to fly,
collectively, fifty thousand miles, over one-fifth the distance
from the earth to the moon, which holds our thoughts
in place if we have nowhere else to place them, as when
we read the average worker bee, in all its lifetime, will only
produce one-twelfth a teaspoon of honey, meaning that I
have stirred the lifework of a dozen bees into my teacup
thoughtlessly, a devourer of lifeworks, this present only
one example, I turn my head away.
Awake again in under-
brush, helmet of scrub pine and sassafras, an earth beneath
my hooved feet elastic with its mosses, I walk out
to the human clearing, late winter, under a surplus of stars.
Gently, neighborlike, my animal ear upheld against
the wigwam, the stripped-bark sides of it like the surface
of a rumored planet, discernible at last in the late winter
sky that appears, as noted, invested with more stars
than necessary, although necessity would seem to have
no place in the matter, and it must be I who has imported it.
In the firelight the colonist feeds the dying sachem
fruit preserves with a blunt English knife, nursing him back
to health, and it’s my task to determine, through
the tension of the wigwam, whether he performs this
kindness out of love, strategy, or else some mixture of
the two, and if this last, I am asked to determine whether
the two feelings stay distinct in the mixture, or do
they fuse, and if the latter, what known apparatus might
best take the measure, or what new one might we devise,
and is it love-strategy then, or strategy-love, is one half
always stronger, or is it not like that at all.
When I fly
back to where I’m from, or feel I must be, will I be thought
a failure to the others there, because I am, but only
in the strict sense, having failed to accomplish what I felt
I had been asked to, which was to undertake what
can’t in fact be done, not the way we had been made to
think we might be able to. That was our mistake, if we were
more than one. If not, then it was mine. I worry that
I won’t be able, in the strict sense, to make the others
see the beauty of it, all of it, which I admit I can only
see in part, even after lifelong travels, and then I think,
this must be what they want, for me to return incapable,
brokener, insisting on the beauty of what can’t be
understood, not the way we thought, and they, if more
than one, will welcome me, nodding in time like the holy
entities on a diptych, and if otherwise, I will be there
to becalm myself, and to be the ship I wait for, and the ocean
will be ocean, no matter how I cross it, and late winter
sky will still be sky, until there’s no ship left to wait for.
Jonah
If I don’t speak to
the darkness it
swallows me.
The Death of Print Culture
There’s a sort of meteorologist
Jeremy Jacoby Joffrey Jagger Josh
that likes to make a show
of his sensitivity in the hopes of
winning the favor of strong
female onlookers, particularly those
who resemble his primary
care physician, and watching it
“all play out on the screen”
my friends, it is like watching
Storm Spencer Pomponius Vince
an anthropomorphized pistachio
ice-cream cone incrementally
baring its pale ass to a category-
five hurricane, which is not to
comment on the conduct
of meteorologists categorically
or to compare them all
to cartoon food or strong women to
dangerous weather, it’s just that
increasingly there are all
these sensitive meteorologists
Connor Conover Constantine Wolf
peering through their tears
to notice the anchor tilting her
head noticeably as if to measure
a previously undetected depth
when in truth she is remembering
a rapidly bitten-into falafel
sandwich falling apart all over
our nation’s leading news periodical
dampening gloss pages
as she wonders if she should just
throw it into the trash or else
surreptitiously return it to
the stack of other periodicals
compromised by happenstance
in the network kitchenette,
wash hands with rose geranium
foaming hand soap and call it a day
but not once does she ever
consider taking it home with her.
The Death of the Author
One warm Good Friday after having fasted
I rode my azure Huffy to Benny’s Home & Auto
2.5 miles away with David Simoneau
for what I can’t remember, a good deal farther
than ever before, much less on a rumbling
holy empty stomach, and the strange air turned
impatient with me, palpable, and the new-tire smell
of small business blurred my vision
in from the edges as I walked automatic
to the sliding door but missed, banging pins
and needles of my face against the plate-
glass window, dying in public the first time ever
backwards for a minute on the rutted welcome mat
till flights of angels did around me sing
He’s on drugs is what he is, but all I was
was Catholic. As for drugs, some years later
for all I could tell I was dead again all over
on Scott and Kathy’s bathroom tile with a stone-
cold paralysis I still access on occasion
as I wish, only this time I was shall we say
eager to be revived, and then the green foil
cylindrical canister of Comet scouring powder
told me to muster all my strength and hurl it
down the hall in an arc like the celestial
object from which our product draws its name
whereupon rescuers would come the way the magi
came to the Christ child guided by a star.
Lynn was dead too but probably remembers it
differently than I. Something tells me for a time
I might have been torn between the Comet and Kathy’s
marquetry jewelry box, which would have been
too personal a sacrifice so I’m happy to say
I chose the cleanser in the end, not that marquetry
for all its repulsive involvement and dizzy
suggestiveness of hands isn’t almost always better off
destroyed, at least to someone whose most vivid
if not earliest association with hands is
about which probably the less said the better,
but between these deaths I was in fact killed
on the regular, over and over, albeit in the iffy
safety of a home, where the dead in time mistook
me for one of them, or to put it accurately
came to know and stand around the bed of,
intending then, I thought, to terrorize me more
but since the art of what went down is left
mine to decipher, I say what they did was keep
part of me alive, wrapping it in the plastic of
cloud architecture, for some other world than this.
The Death of Truth
The world is a horrible place. —Think Big, Donald Trump
But my own value fluctuates, falling up and down
with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings,
even my own feelings, but I try. Studies have shown
how I try. The sheer force of numbers. The ceiling
shakes with it, which only goes to show—all the science
is on my side. If I want more, I put an order in. I sing
the body mac and cheese, deep-fried: Tom Jefferson’s
