1.
My monolith makes a shadow
across my face, and I stand in it, I stand
my face in the shadow, I stand still
the shadow, the shadow of my monolith
stands across my face, still, still it stands
slanted, like a sunbeam in a window in
a city bedroom on a round rug
in a circle of dust. I waver in my
monolith’s shadow. It moves in the sunlight,
and I move into shadow, back, back,
I keep to it, my face, I keep my face gray
as a line. Across my face, a line
slanted, side down, I was half-open, standing
for a soup and a sandwich, a half-
sandwich, half-sandwiches in the pockets of
my monolith’s shadow, eating half-
sandwiches standing on a floor stain, standing
in a flavor, holding cups flavored
that way, like coffee, like flavored coffee, like
formula, like math, like see, here, there,
there are formulas everywhere. I would like
to get it right. I stand myself in
the shadow of my monolith, centered, like
a rope down a window, my window
has a rope down like a shadow, a rope is
like a shadow down my face. I have
a rope on my face, piled up there, it’s heavy
like a shadow, and I don’t want to
move from under its weight, and I feel like I
could lose it, all of it, a shake of
my face, handfuls of my eyebrows together
in my hands, and what, what was it, where
did it go. There’s nothing here but sun. Take my
hand into the sun, out of the sun
into the sun. It’s so bright and even. Like
a banana. A hamburger in
the air into someone’s mouth in a cartoon.
I took my monolith to the kids’
table, sat down outside the conversation
the adults were having, listing what
went wrong, one voice went right on top another,
voices stacking up aluminum
as points, points for voices, towering over
their faces, what they said, continued
to say, releasing their thoughts, they opened up
like mouths, bit into each other with
teeth coming out of their thoughts, bubbling out of
them, flurrying, overrun, a dish
sink loaded with too much soap and knives.
2.
Blood on the carpet. White like snow. Shades
drawn, light from the big tv. Tennis season.
Everything smells like seltzer. Blood on
the tile, on the sink counter, on the mirror.
This is the part of the book you peel
the cover back and glue falls out. It cracks in
half. Right in Hoeller’s garrett, right when
Hoeller or the narrator seem like they’re each
about to kill themselves, at least to
me, when the chair breaks, this is the Chicago
edition, snap, the book falls apart
so now each page you peel off, read, and drop to
the floor. You make do. Don’t touch the blood,
grasp the door handle with your hand inside your
dress shirt. Walk out into the hallway,
stairwell, parking garage, desert sunshine in
the open air. A list is unlike
a monolith, but my monolith is like
a list of one thought, one thought thought up
as the day spins round, spits out particulars,
pleasures, dangers, routines and roadways,
interruptions, off-ramp lane closures, cop cars
on both sides of the road, lights turning
like a cannonball jellyfish rolling out
the surf, interruptions in your mind,
everything looming like a bunker, a bad
word in your chest, growing there, lodged up,
senators walking the senate floor
after a vote, with their hands at their sides, with their
animated hands speaking, saying
things coming out of their shirt sleeves stretched toward
each other. The day spins round and spits
out bunkers and coliseums, spits out wide
wavering sheet glass, elevated
walking carpets for speakers on to make more
monolith out of everything they
say. I say. I say they say look it’s run up
on me, us, you. It’s running speeches
into speeches like this is plate tectonics!
It’s lithospheric! All this talking,
and it’s not a narrative! It’s escaping,
looping back but not ever playing!
Someone puts their lacing hands together at
moments, walking, separating them
at others, holding up a second, touching
their own hand to their own heart, subtly.
It’s in their nature. Breathe in. I’m as here as
a scent sent across a parking lot.
I scan my eyes from side to side. Everyone
is ridiculous. Everyone is
alive, pulling into their choice of spaces,
taking out folding maps from their glove
compartments, spreading them out on the hoods of
their cars, moving their hands over their
maps, smoothing out the creases, moving their hands
over these places like they’re their necks,
like they’re their scarves.
3.
Turn the noise up. Lots of
number fives. Machinery raising
movements up, movements forward, across empty
arena floors, boards splitting under
its wheels. This can only go on for so long
until clouds, back and bright, turn round as
storms, as wind boxes smashed with brick sticks across
our lawns, bricks, bodies on bricks, bricks for
walls and walkways now bloodied up in body
falls on paver bricks, bins broken, spread
over garbage bags, ripped and spilled, rotting where
they were, fell, where they’ve rotten into,
rot clods tossed up where we fell, dragged them with us,
with our monoliths, with me, I am
dragging my monolith through batteries of
slurry, acid staining its sides with
which direction I drag it, like all of us,
I can show, make, we make readable
which piles of shit we walk through, have walked through, which
way we walked, paused, how long we paused, where,
breathing in shit, we walked again, until we
stopped, sat down and said no more. Said no
more. July, a saturday. I see,
held in the air by a swing-set chain,
like a misplaced heavy bag, shaking the frame,
my monolith. Like walking your head
into a wall. It feels like there’s a burn to
everything, my skin, what my skin touched,
touches. What is me. I am touching. What brings
to mind a metal bar, and should you
touch it. So hot you don’t know if it’s cold. Now,
the bunker rains are rising, we hear
they are relentless, patient, cold as a thick
metal like a folder tab stuck out
from the earth. It feels like blood touching this tab
of metal, and there’s a scent, wrong
as water. I touch my skull, fingers
fresh as air sloping how an airplane rises,
I run fingers over air above
my head like an airplane rises. Second whoosh.
Second service. I will eat not from
the computer, I will eat the computer,
waiting for old men to die. Today,
I swallowed and ate the computer and no
old men died, but tomorrow I will swallow
and eat, swallow and eat, swallow and
eat until I see the old men die.
I will eat the computer until it is
done, and I will eat the computer
again until I grow, again I will eat
the computer until I grow old.
First service. It comes in volleys. It comes in
rhythm. It is unrelenting. It
comes like the rain. It comes like the rain won’t come.
4.
That’s a hard relief, to say nothing, I hear,
if you keep to it, keep the tangles
out of what could be taken from what you said,
what I said, trust me, I said it, when
I couldn’t stop myself, I didn’t stop, I
wouldn’t try to, as I was, and am,
and ever always will be like my mother
coming home from school, in the front door,
up the stairs, their house in Torrington, talking
before she shut the door, talking up
the stairs, past her grandparents’ floor, up, she talked
her way right into the kitchen, in
the kitchen, I placed my monolith right where
I was talking to my mother, that’s
how it happened, if we’re going to get real
about it, and we might as well, here,
about my monolith, about how I got
my monolith, let me stop you there,
if I interrupt you, if my mother, if
I interrupt my mother, if we take all
those interruptions, if we stack them
up so that we can’t even tell what we were
talking about when, and how, and so,
I take my monolith, and but where, I place
my monolith in the middle of
my life, late in my life, in the part at least
where the early part was over, this
monolith I placed in the middle of what
my life was like. And boy, it held there.
It snapped right into place. A car door swings shut,
and someone settles into their seat,
someone I haven’t seen, can’t see, and do see,
though they’re gone, my dead friends drive with me
into fog, into a city, my city
where they’ve never been, and never will,
taking them with my monolith out into
unending fog, glowing in patches,
like torches, my friends, my living friends, any
of them, of you, I take you with me
as the satellites crash, each to each, scissor
space as they speed and break faster off
each collision, as I take my friends up Fern,
to Whitney, to Asylum, through fog,
past Sigourney, Blue Hills, racing into it
like a board breaking over waves, then
back on Homestead, as forests knot themselves shut,
and burn, as mines collapse, and a haze
comes together, releases, and comes closer,
and I can’t see through it, and I don’t
know if that’s what we’re driving into, held up
in a veil of red light at a red
light on Park Street, that won’t turn, with no one else
on the road, as far as we know. If
you see me there, if there’s no one with me, if
you’re standing on the sidewalk at Park
and New Park, in the cold, in the summer heat,
if you see a 1999
Nissan Altima, as swift as it is green,
walk up, and hop in, any of you,
we’ll shut your door, we’ll put your seat belt on, click
the removable stereo face
back in place, do you hear me, whoever’s there
on the other side of the drywall,
in the back of the walk-in, behind the white
boxes of breakfast sausage, sitting
there on a milk crate, you, there, whispering in
titanium, staring out the air
lock, in the dark, in the garage of open
paint cans, smoking a few cigarettes
under the counter of the auto-parts store,
there sitting criss-cross applesauce on
a heavy beige teacher’s desk left on the curb,
you, why don’t you, might as well, hop in
my car in Hartford, we’ll drive out to a field
between mountains, or an empty yard
where a three-family house burned down, and we’ll
see where I found my monolith, where
I left my monolith for a moment, where my
monolith got away from me, where
I made my monolith, where my monolith
was made clear to me, and we’ll get it,
it makes sense doesn’t it, to tie monolith
to roof, to drive it places, hilltops,
swamps, tree circles, outdoor amphitheaters
no one ever seems to use. We’ll take
my monolith to computer screens someone
put a hammer through, we’ll take it to
cracks in plexiglass bus-stop wind shelters, to
broken landscape windows of state-park
rest areas, to piles of console tvs
in cabinets collapsed and shattered
behind a Goodwill, we’ll take it where glass is
shattering, right now, in the windows
of facial production centers, output to
input brokerages, and scanner vaults.
Image credit: Four Fairy Chimneys in the Valley of the Monks (Paşabağ), Cappadocia, Turkey. Photo by Feridun F. Alkaya.
