Brained by a
falling turtle
or run over by
a laundry truck:
a spinster in Metz
with the leisure
to dwell on death
will chat these
simple endings,
a tiny 3” headstone
on the mass grave
of her importunate neighbors.
I wouldn’t name them, if.
Meat-eaters move among
the anarchist herd, to grind
to gristle the rose utopian
bits. To lift the perfunctory
end-notes of an obscure
fugue, awfully fulsome,
and exciting in the way
all plagiaries receive
their victims, their
consumptive bodies and
cheerful desperate optimism.
New and sweet
and virtuous as a patch
of wild mint.
Aesthetics become the
disclosure of eyesight,
focused brilliance
gambling that the spiders
will not hatch more
than the occasional hallucination.
Come with me into the
chapel, dearie,
with drawn blade and
bated breath and all
the attendant clichés
of your murderous undeserving
art.
Champion of hours in idler’s lane.
And every pleasant remembrance
is rivaled by one of
squalor, charmless emptiness
or base cruel stupidity.
Looking back the world is
tainted and you find you
took things too seriously.
Over your shoulder
a shallow sea mocks
your premonitions, the
broadcast fury of a tart.
A squirrel scrapes its
way up a courtyard tree
and behaves exactly like
one seen ten years before.
Same tree, presumably different
squirrel, but gay with
equivalent folly, leaping about
as though on the nice
edge of rabid.
Night follows day and
death follows night.
A blaze of pale girls
against a violet backdrop,
as the sound winds down
and the scatterings of nausea
become the tang of surplus vanity
and one cannot be alone.
A month and year, capstone
to seal the closing lids,
the medicinal ache
as memory fades,
from root and cornerstone
and bright mosaic.
The craftsman who
forges tendril and trellis
breeds himself a hybrid oddity.
A strange occupation,
like reading poetry
or being an opinionated
mistress.
Even the most edified, sacred,
and utilitarian can be tamed
or made silly. Still, building
a house of cards is nobler
than knocking one down.
The opposite for a dungeon?
Well, whose dungeon?
Order, with disorder, also fades.
The horizon, the meadow, the bedroom
made neat.
The passionate play
or one long amble
to the grave.
Not tidy but clean, utterly.
Stale and transiberian, with eruptive
isolations of trauma and joy
until the world, like oneself,
is known, subdued, ventilated,
with access points available to all.
And still there is the
compact tiny corner of the brain
where nothing makes sense
or can be made sensible.
Though the invader is marshaled,
to occupy and decimate,
assimilate and hang,
a guerrilla war goes on,
headquartered in the slovenly
valley where luggage is misplaced
and found again, where angels
find themselves often
embarrassed, mediating between
the ambassador of
the asphalt hordes
and those shambolick urchins
who paint ‘fuck you’ on
Death’s private pavilion.
Gay leapers after cancelled lines,
men want attention paid their opinions.
Women even more so.
Little deaths, then,
a topic not easily exhausted
nor atomized in a mist
of knowing, fragrant words.
What should have been done,
or a compromise of half-regrets,
omniscience of minimal foreknowledge,
God among the nursery lights,
altering the world by altering oneself.
Instead, the split-
second shift from the secretive
arrogance of mid-adolescence
to the formidable wrack of middle-age,
the intervening and supposed years
washed out in a glaze of pain,
false-starts and amnesia.
A peninsula mined by rodents of doubt.
The shirt was not blue,
the oath was not taken,
the sun was not down,
it was not snowing in August,
the girl’s name was not, alas, was not …
Come off it, seraphim. Blowsy tiny
truths may compromise
but not redeem.
Walking one New Year’s Eve,
I hesitated as the hour died
and stepped free of the shatter
of flung beer bottles.
In itself, a little death.
Not taking it as such, then,
but later, under judicious interrogation,
tempted to ask ‘and who could possibly
love the real me?’
Tempted but unseduced.
Inanimate rose at the end of a
hallucinated corridor;
indistinct murmurs from the
girl beside me, the girl whose
veins I leech. Music
of synthetic oceans, the offer of a
closed room, once into the darkness
no words can comfort or call back.
Just as well, for tone of voice
survives meaning in such cases.
Confused as to the exact nature of
revelation, nothing like the
solitude of another naked body.
A cup of tea, a few tears,
the faint scratching at the back screen,
all is forgiven, all is over,
let me in, I’ll sleep
under the bed tonight please.
An afternoon nap dense with bad dreams.
From the base to the rim
of the birdbath, a graveyard
reminder of stone, and summer,
of unfulfilled purpose lapping
like rainwater in a basin.
Which reminds me, as such
things do, of another death.
I once set myself to read Boileau
(not task but treat)
and when done, was astonished to find
no sense, whatsoever, of accomplishment.
A children’s game, for
my friends are hidden there.
In manners, soft, like
careless joys, and laughter in the
shadows no human ever walked through.
It’s as well this way as another,
erecting obstacles to serious philandering.
The melancholy charm of
a dead, lewd, note,
sprung like a mouse
across the hour’s pastel.
And looking up
I saw the bird was gone
though in which direction or why,
a poor detective.
Brained by a
falling laundry truck
or run down by a
maddened turtle,
one’s own little death
would make a cat laugh.