The Problem of the Many, page 9
is to air, or tears are
to the dew.
I read the wolf has no
concept of the unsayable.
It meant one thing
at the time, but
now it means another.
Levitation
Apart from loved ones’ speech, the plonk of a wild blueberry
into an empty plastic bucket at the end of July will be the sound
I console myself with as I die again this time in the soundlessness
of deep space. Time runs out. That’s what it does. I remember
a kind scorch of sun, small-scented autumn clematis, old oak
overhanging my room like the grandparent who couldn’t exactly
protect me but had to know what I had to feel. Head on my pillow
certain what was real was thinking, and everything external was
just practice. But there were times, places that did come close
to a completeness, close enough. The blueberry bushes burning
red as brushfire come October under wide cyan sky: early on I felt
most welcome where alone. When the planet dies, it dies despite
and because of human feeling. Hope, sorrow; anger, greed. I never
did grow comfortable with it: splintered glass around my feet
and nuclear terror, the loudness of near people in chemical distress
needing to express it over and over, weaponizing the language
at me as I waited for the beams of light to break through birches
heralding my departure. And not sunbeams, either, but beams
from the gold oblong vehicle all of us saw once interrupting kickball.
Why make a person see something so exceptional if it won’t be
central to their life. Why only this one way of it we fight for
and only when there’s profit. The light, the light. I feared I might
lift above the parish muttering into mass, an arrogance I forgive
of a child: primary narcissism has its time, place. But a superpower
can’t depend on stunting everyone into it interminably and still
expect to progress. Yesterday I walked my darkening circles sick
of how ashamed I felt of everything but sunflowers. Tonight I feel
alright. The light, the light, the light. But what I want to feel is
like Teresa, ground to pieces, hopelessly elect: as I try to create
resistance, it will feel as though some great force beneath my feet
pushes me up, pushes me along the way a disk hovers in the air
through clouds and over oak, over dogwood and the basketball hoop,
the cold magnetic pull of Earth neutralized by an equal force
acting in opposition, Earth’s magnetic current measured, analyzed
and overtaken, forcing a body into space: breath held, counting down
by halves eternally, Earth a memory, weight no intrinsic property
of matter, matter inessential to reason, no reason needed to support
flight: nothing visible, nothing tangible, nothing audible, nothing more.
Some Comforts at the Expense of Others
I dreamed of home invasion, and of a great celebrity
hidden inside a series of rooms, each hermetically
separated by glossy, voice-activated doors, each
bordered on both sides by facsimile rooms, identical
to the real room in every detail, which were in turn
separated from the next room’s facsimile by a sort of
hybrid non-room, its decor partaking of elements
of the two facsimile rooms it served to divide, or rather
of the two real rooms the facsimiles referred to.
Only a verified member of the household could tell
the real room from its two facsimiles, but it was unclear
whether this was due to long exposure, microchip
technology, or the receptivity to signs of life so small
only very hungry or frightened people sense them.
Now in midseason, it is apparent that these non-rooms,
separating one facsimile from the next, breed distinct
moods and possibilities, just as brackish habitats
like deltas, marshes, some lochs and coastal lagoons
inaugurate and foster a plenitude of life forms neither
purely fresh nor purely salt water alone can sustain.
In the confessional, the celebrity appeared to regret
the existence of the non-rooms, deposited as they were
with a ghostliness and quotient of blue found nowhere else,
observing that no verified member of the household
would ever choose to enter them, much less spend
disposable time in them in the cold. This would signal
something was amiss, some danger at hand, possibly
an invasion, and possibly from within, like the buildup
of urate crystals in a big toe, or slight myopia due
to highly reflective skin, or else a simple, seamlessly
engineered distraction, personified through the dream as
an influencer in athleisure remarking on the vertigo
of watching on one’s phone a video of small children
being lowered down by bucket into a dark toxic tunnel
near the border of oblivion to retrieve some fraction
of the cobalt in the battery of the privilege to feel nothing.
Poem Interrupted by Whitesnake
That agreeable feeling you haven’t been able to
put into words to your satisfaction despite
too many white-knuckled attempts to do so might
prove in the end to be nothing more than
satisfaction itself, an advanced new formula
just waiting like product to be marketed as such:
Let my logo be the couch, I can feel it pulse
as the moon like a fool I have come to feel attached to
continues to pull back an estimated 1.6 inches
every solar year, Let my logo be the couch
you merge into nights until you can’t
rise like the shadows in a factory warehouse
in historic Secaucus built on top of old swamp-
land I can feel it: Let my logo be the couch
you merge into nights until you can’t remember
what you wanted to begin with. Let my theme
be the turning of an infinite catalogue’s waterlogged
pages over again till what you wanted finds you
widened in the air above the city as a goldfinch,
state bird of New Jersey, stops midflight and falls
to the asphalt of a Walmart parking lot. Where it lands
is a sacred site, and Earth is covered in them,
each opening an eye within whose whorl
a wheat field generates. As this happens inside
oneself, one has felt oneself to be owner of it.
From the perimeter, quiet, you are watching over
a beelike harmony of workers busy with their tasks:
some cut the wheat, others bundle it; others picnic
in the shade of a laden pear tree, itself a form of
labor, too, unfolding at the worksite, a gentle
pride gilding observation like jellied sunlight
spread through October. And because it happens
right inside you, you feel you must be the owner of it,
owner at least of what you feel, but when you call out to
the workers, even kindly, they won’t call back
in kind, they won’t even look up from their work .
There must be someplace
else where life takes place besides in front of
merchandise, but at the moment I can’t think of it.
In the clean white light of the market I am where
I appertain, where everything exists for me
to purchase. If there’s a place of not meaning
what you feel but at the same time meaning every
trembly word, or almost, I might have been taught
better to avoid it, but
here I go again
on my own, going down the only road I’ve ever
known, trusting Secaucus’s first peoples
meant something specific and true when they fused
the words seke, meaning black, and achgook,
meaning snake, together to make a compound
variously translated as “place where the snake
hides,” “place of black snakes,” or, simply,
“salt marsh.”
Going moon over the gone marsh
Secaucus used to be, I keep making the same
mistake over and over, and so do you, gradually
speeding up your orbital velocity, and thereby
increasing your orbital radius, just like Kepler
said you would—and though I keep trying not
to take it to heart, I can’t see where else there is
to go with it. In German, a Kepler makes hoods
like those the workers wear who bundle twigs
for kindling under irregular gloom. One looks as if
about to make repairs to a skeletal umbrella
or to thoughts a windmill might entertain by means
of a silver fish. Off in the distance, ships tilt
up the choppy inlet. Often when I look all the way
at a given object, I feel it looking back, evaluating
my capacity to afford it.
Maybe not wanting
anything in particular leaves you mildly
wanting whatever, constantly, spreading like a wheat
field inside you as far as the edge of the pine
where the real owners hunt fox. They keep you
believing everything you see and feel are actually
yours or yours to choose. And maybe it’s this
belief that keeps you from burning it all down.
In this economy, I am like the fox, my paws no good
for fire-starting yet, and so I scamper back
to my deep den to fatten on whatever I can find.
Sated, safe, disremembering what it’s like
up there, meaning everywhere, I tuck nose under tail
after I exhaust the catalogues, the cheap stuff,
and sad talk to the moon, including some yelping
but never howling at it, which is what a wolf does.
Poem on a Stair
On every stairway
with the kite-shaped step
I stop on that step
one second
to commemorate
one particular step
in the shape of a kite
I’ll never again
be able to step on
I’ll never again
be able to set foot on
one particular
step in the shape
of a kite
but there’s reason to think
it still exists
albeit no longer
for me to step on
Low light, obsidian,
Florida water, cedar-
wood cone—
I will never again
set foot on the one
step in the flesh
but when I step on another
like it, it’s as if
I’m stepping on
Low light, obsidian,
seashell lined
in mother-of-pearl, to set
foot on the one
is to step on the other
now, long ago—
blown sheets in the wind,
a railing I can feel
the absence supper.
Poem Written with a Pinecone in My Hand
Here in my hand a cone from the beautiful eastern white pine sits
an offering from the tree planted thirty years ago after earth softened up
come spring enough to dig a hole roughly twice the size of the burlap
ball around the root of it. The cone measures six inches in length minus
the short stem; the stem extends into the axis around which whorl
forty-two wood-like scales. Under each scale a pair of seeds with blunt
single wings like aged paper once hid until the cone in its second
year flared open and released them into the paws of a ground squirrel.
Turn the pinecone to the left if you can hear me from the Connecticut
Turnpike of your afterlife. I’ll stroke with focus my left thumb on
adjacent scales for hidden music. The longer I look at it the more human
the pinecone becomes as I become less one the longer I look at it.
The squirrel ate a portion of the seeds at once, tucked the remainder
in its cheeks to carry them back to its nest in the fieldstone wall
around the ruined flowerbed where foxglove used to grow. Meanwhile,
cells in your body had started going wrong. Not that I understand or
can pretend to. Turn the pinecone to the right if you hear me still.
Deep in the brain of invertebrates, the pineal gland gets its name from
its resemblance to a pinecone. Anatomists also call it the conarium
for the same reason. Melatonin factory, vestigial third eye, storied portal
to higher dimensions. The cone weighs approximately half an ounce, or
as many as five ruby-throated hummingbirds. How is it we think
next to nothing of what a hummingbird weighs, or what the bobolink
eats (rice, seeds, grains), or how it might feel to descend from dinosaur
to morsel. We exist in relation to the totality but choose to consider
the smallest portion of it possible. Demonstrate with the pinecone
what awareness outside the constraint of time feels like, if you can.
Foxglove prefer moist, rich, slightly acidic soil. I sliced my forefinger
with a knife on your Klonopin tonight cooking dinner for my family.
I did and didn’t feel it. I think you knew I wouldn’t have it in me to hurt
for long and when I did I died the way when made to feel like dirt
in the first place you come back partway dead or ready for it anyway.
All the while the cone of the white pine was the state flower of Maine.
It’s the nonsense I miss. When people quarrel they forget for a time
that life is meaningless. Our last ended in me admitting to become
a parent solves nothing actually. The pinecone seems like it has a stain
from sap and rain. A wash. I wish the days I’m left were for planting
trees again instead of watering window-box impatiens and confinement.
Here in my hand a cone from the beautiful eastern white pine sits
stone still. Keep it that way. It isn’t true that hummingbirds can’t sing:
I hear them in my head all spring as a seed lost in the squirrel’s haste
trembles into the pine whose cone I contain long after I set it down to rest.
Poem Written with an Arrowhead in My Mouth
Again the sound of quartz pounding quartz
into Neolithic spear points
to be hafted onto shafts with tree-resin glue
and a twine made of fibers harvested from dead plants
comforts me as it keeps me
awake nights, leaving me feeling equally
provided for and covered in blood.
Again history’s blistery tongue in my ear blurts
the cave of the belly goes
deeper than thought, and is less wholesome:
the vapors of the breath condense there, sour
by the hour on the walls, advancing
into pools whose surfaces strobe in archaic code
and whose depths cradle my kind of salamander.
At what point in the mud does an act of what
might be called independence become
possible is the question
on all of our limbs, not minds, not yet, although
we’re getting there bit by bit, and then
we’ll plateau for a period before gliding back
down into the huddle, dragging everything with us.
And when the future arrives in its vehicles
to poke through the mineralized
forms we leave behind, will we all be one to its eye,
or will it make a difference who
among us tried to stop ourselves, or tried to stop those
in charge, or whether any of us put their young
to sleep at the end, and if with poison, or with song?
Flamin’ Hot Cheetos
When I sensed I might
belong, I drew
the cotton duck drape
that hung before
the patio door
to the residency’s
clean white space
to seal me in, to seal
me in,
but my hand had been
where it had been,
and the stain it made
is blazon of my house.
The Lighthouse of Alexandria
Those figures in our literature who walk alone through cemeteries
mouthing what they read on toppled headstones inwardly
are just trying to connect with people in a way they feel
less threatened by. A number of us still don’t find it natural
anymore to be among the living, not knowing what to speak,
when to shut it down, or why to hold oneself oblique
to others mothers violence and a kind of gnarled-up sense
of syntax I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Even when its excellence
pushes back in one’s defense. As in a backseat just last week
I witnessed hatred amp up eyes I couldn’t contradict provoke
in me some pride. I’ll hate myself myself, not at someone else’s
instigation. And so it is we wade: on and into impulses
governing the many, dis-governing, trusting a counterforce
from behind the desk of self-image and -interest will coerce
the animal in us back into its box-length tension. It doesn’t
always, and often you can smell it smolder under pleasant
workaday exchanges choking airspace even when it does.
But then, by the window: graffitied water towers, antennas’
