To survive sadly is still. At a boat’s bottom, allegedly a boat. Allegedly an anchor. Allegations of a law. Oh splinters that split us, oh those who spit on our black gaberdine. The skin rolls the water off. That is what ash is, actually. Accumulation of spittoons and the water’s detritus.
Hump day is a whale, freer than us even in capture, even in tallow. No one said: this isn’t a whale, even as they strung it up to cut its meat. No one said: this is something tbd. They said: mammal, leviathan, child of god, named by Adam.
We got a new name. Something made up. We managed to live. In that hole name.
He’s been coming around a lot but I’ve only recently started calling the dog Jesus because if Jesus were to return, this is how he would do it. In this shape, in this form, in these times. I’m sure of it. My best and only friend, Holy Amy, who thinks of herself as a kind of very powerful and sexually budding nun, disagrees. She says Jesus would return in the form of a handsome kisser, not some ugly mutt. Someone with a beautiful face, so we would know it was him. I say he’s not ugly. She says I am “vexed,” “cursed,” and that I am doomed to repeat the mistakes of those before me, though I’m not sure whom she’s talking about. All I know is it’s true: he’s not ugly. The dog suit he wears isn’t even a dog suit.
When the Reverend Houston was seventy he was retired from the ministry with a pension, paid by the national church organization, that was slightly in excess of the salary he had been receiving for nearly fifty years from his parish at New Babylon, Missouri. There were no strings attached to this pension. He could do with it and with himself, thereafter, practically anything that pleased his rational fancy. Naturally enough, he quit preaching. He had been preaching for nearly fifty years and he was getting just as tired of it as his congregation was. One Sunday morning during the summer of his seventieth year he shook hands with his successor, a vigorous young man who would attract plenty of spinsters to the Sunday-school faculty, walked calmly out of the church and never returned.
He walked for two years across the putrid surface of the solid crust: he learned how not to die by gnawing on it and how not to dissolve in its salt at night; he healed his own bones when the wind whipped him through the air like a rag and flung him onto the stiff waves. He was perpetually dazzled by the glare, but every once in a while he glimpsed shadows beneath the crust, brooding their bodies from one side to another and bashing themselves against the surface. Once he caught sight of an old man, inexplicably gleeful, jigging from one little plastic islet to the next. They waved at each other, arms aloft; he managed to make out the other man’s silhouette, stretched tall against the glare of the crust, and at that precise moment an enormous, jagged mouth rose up around the old man’s feet and carried him down to the depths of that filthy chowder.
At dawn, as police made plans to arrest Father Marek, a pilot whale washed up on a nearby beach. The priest himself was the first person to come upon the stranded animal, its sleek black skin glistening in the surf, its huge body writhing and flopping, its mouth pressed into what looked like a carefree smile. Another passerby might have been alarmed by the discovery, but Father Marek’s whole adult life had been a series of sudden arrivals and departures. His name, for instance, was a fabrication, though he had grown to like the sound of it on parishioners’ lips. Nor was the priesthood his actual profession, though he had briefly studied at a seminary many years ago. His only occupation, one that took many forms, was convincing other people to place their trust in him.
He’s been down under five times today, taking his turn, searching for the sailboat, believing he might be the one to find a child inside, skin violet, nerves tremoring, alive in the sweet torpor of hypothermia, fluttery heart almost but not yet still, breathing slowly, hushed, floating face up, a bliss of air trapped above her—
In the last minutes of twilight at the surface, in swirling silt underwater, Nic Kateri risks a final dive into the murky cabin of the sailboat, finds her with his hands, not his eyes: yes, where her mother left her, the child curled into herself, lungs full of water, pressed high above the bed in the tightest corner of the berth where yes, it’s true: there might have been bubbles of air once upon a time, hours earlier—
Recently, your wife has left you. She’s reading Frankenstein, and there’s nothing in the world she’d rather do. You’d think talking about the book would be an option, but no. Books lose their power when she tries to speak about them. So do movies, songs, news articles, and most of what she does with Nathaniel. Only in passing did you hear her call him Nightingale, and then you learned he was reading an alphabet book of birds. You adopted the nickname. You find him on the pink couch, whispering to an Ernie figurine. Where’s Bert? you ask. Birch in the vent. Time for dinner, Nightingale. Time for dinner, he sings.
The birth of color begins in the entanglementof water. Color is the birth of light.
Low clouds morning visitation, the words areforming separable from their origins. Stars
crease the heavens. I have been movinginto their stream, heavenly bodies, the architecture
loose and ungainly. I’m not one but two, the occupancyof a system, here in the apparel of another’s
light, to come down these stairs, dawnweighted with silver, a perimeter that hooks
sky, bleeds our nights into day. There is thissanctuary, intricate respite, cut-out, here on the floor
The Way
If only the waters were still this blue,the boats this innocent. The sea,the clouds, the cliff faces: blue, blue, blue.
And me in a red dress with a blue mantledraped over my lap to keep my legs warm.It’s true, I’m sitting on a coffin
with the lid down. The lidis called a crown. The coffin is filledwith what happens when evil takes over
the world and says yes to givingthe lost unlimited hateand all the weapons they want. You’ll say,
“That wasn’t my fault, I’m like you, Mary,I was only ever being fabricand two hands, harmless arms and a mind
filled with maxims—only ever on my wayto tomorrow, my right foot at reston the head of a cherub.” Do you hear
In Situ
Sometimes the language tenders its own resonant edge, as when one reads
of how the remains remain submerged, as in in-place drownings of forests.
I first read of their somber strains in a letter speaking of being consumed,
in French la noyade, the name of a scent mixed from blood cedarwood,
maritime pine, cypress, onycha tincture, seaweed, a song sunk enough to
call it sodden. There is nothing heavier than an unnamed waterlog that longs
to be sounded if not instinctively spelled. I should say must, instinctively, note
Hello, piggies, who snore, root, farrow and brave. Welcome piggies, though, more accurately: welcome to me. I welcome myself into your midst. I’ve arrived here after a long journey from that plane only marginally lower than this one, but from which it’s nearly impossible to ascend.
Piggies, as recently as two clicks ago, you would’ve found me down there, pouring molten gold into small mammalian skulls tidily excavated from owl pellets and spring floods. Mole, vole, shrew, more. Cauldron, ladle, funnel, fill. Cool. The cracks and hollows, sockets and circuits, now gaping, now all silent gold.
The relict lay reading in the contractor’s bad grass. I used to breathe sleep eat poetry. Until could not see to read except the large-print books, mysteries, tell-alls, and how to build waterfalls, but could see the hollows in the small of his buttocks, the fair hair feathering into his pitchy seam.
I could see rings of brilliance beyond any visible human means.
Alice was actually a labeler and not a pickler. Still, she knew what Mr. H’s picklers did was nothing like her grandmother’s pickling, sweaty and stained and clouded by hot vinegar steam, shoveling already rotting vegetables into their boiling bath like some kind of unbelieving prayer. Everyone winced when eating what came out of her grandmother’s pickle jars. Mr. H’s were made of faceted clear glass, and the bobbing pickles inside were a bright, inviting candy-green. To look at one was to feel it snip crisply between your teeth, to set your mouth watering. Alice was midwife to that salivary burst. That was what she dressed up for. Today it mattered even more than usual.
Day Book
One wants to grasp a latch. The broken star, the cellophane. One suffers if untethered from the pain that brought a lock. Across the way the husband tends his teeth. The wife redresses, parted from her paper. To emblemize, to separate the word grief reaches. Grief reaches, unseduced.
He had thought for a while of having his ashes placed on a ship propelled out to sea while being set aflame with burning arrows—in his dotage, my father grew obsessed with Norse myth—but in today’s regulatory environment, bringing him here was the closest feasible compromise. “The best moment is when Fenris the giant wolf appears,” he’d told me on Zoom, his voice trembling only slightly. “It draws everyone’s attention, so nobody will be watching you. Do you remember how you used to cry when we got to the wolf?” This sounds more like something Ulf would do, although Ulf doesn’t remember coming here either. Most likely it was a lost intention of my father’s. He might have spent a day talking to strangers in a bar about planning a trip here, an imagined bout of quality time so vivid it became real for him in retrospect. Towards the end, the winter and the lockdown getting to him, my father was drinking forty ounces of vodka a day. I may not have been his favorite son, but I was the one who agreed to scatter his ashes here once, and if, the park reopened after COVID. Ulf would never violate theme park rules.
Slay
“O orzchis ecclesia … es chorzta gemma” – Sibyl of the Rhine
O measureless church … you are a sparkling gem scored from the lingua ignota, the language of the unknown. Secret tongue of the sleepless alphabet. You probe the lowest bass of body’s dark matter. I swing my hips to your rebel science of spheres.
When you asked if your poem was controversial I consulted a Penrose diagram made to see the entirety of spacetime through a black hole. Light rays at the beginning of everything null infinity, the channel we now ignore.
So here I am, back at the counterculture, that open tower in the sky. It travels through the city within the floating city, wavering like heat on flexed concrete. I dream of the fractal fuel we used to turn into optimal stanzas.
She named the dog after a Hollywood actor, someone she had shared a scene with once. She had only one line in the film. She looks straight at the camera with her famous dark eyes—someone once called them wounds—and asks or says, A beautiful view? This was supposed to hint at one of her current scandals. Once, on one of those rare nights when she asked me to sit with her after dinner, her face red with port, which she drank out of those miniature crystal glasses you have to hold with your fingertips, she said, That’s your father’s name. Of course, the years don’t add up, but then my mother was never interested in the truth, or rather, her truth was fluid, changing with circumstance or whim. But she didn’t lie, she believed whatever she said completely. This, more than anything else, was why men fell in love with her.
The Inside of a Wolf
I gut the wolf. All I find is a hole/and I follow/the hole farther in and farther/into earth shaped like a great sigh./The earth, open and airy/as sky. The earth is blue/as thought inside, farther/and further, the wandering/into earth, until a great opening opens/up beneath the hole/and suddenly nothing has a body. Nothing/has a body but me. Into the belly/of the wolf I fall, farther/and forward into emptiness. Inside/the earth is blue. Blue/is the absence of all/earth, all body, and I tumble into blue/so shattering, so empty/all body comes/back, a kind of courage, holding on to one’s body, so/tight, while tumbling/and turning/into a sigh. Holding on/to one’s body so tight/all breath is lost. Falling/into the earth, so careless/with its emptiness, so daring,/hiding inside a wolf, the moon’s mouth.
Olga’s coworker, known privately as her Work Wife, had said the wrong thing about Olga’s new haircut. “It doesn’t look like the photo you showed me,” she’d said. This is what the Work Wife fixated on, rather than the glory of the haircut before her. The Work Wife said something else about the staff potluck later that day, but Olga could barely hear her. She cut the conversation short and walked back to her cubicle. Olga could feel the Work Wife rolling her eyes. It was ruined between them now, at least for the day. The Work Wife had said other things to her over the years. During a discussion of celebrity lookalikes: “You have a striking resemblance to Anne Frank.” After Olga had accidentally, horribly, dug a deep, slow-to-heal hole in her cheek while popping a pimple and tried to hide it with makeup: “What happened to your face? Asking as a friend.” And yet, how Olga loved her, the Work Wife. And yet, how she hated her, the Work Wife.
Amid the storm, a phantom
formerly Coronado remarks:
“I was the beating heart inside
that insidious breastplate.”
Between bursts of hailstones
his companion confesses,
“I was the low-level prelate
sent to raise a clay church and
ring the altar with paintings
of the most fantastic torments.”
The rain’s fierce silver slashes
red hills above a spatter of cactus.
A fringe of lightning, unfurling
from a black cloud, tears apart
some first and final place.
Old ghosts fade out, become
songbirds at the cusp of
the mating season.
When you were the size of a fist, a coyote dragged a three-year-old Angeleno out of the living room by the Peter Pan collar of her pale yellow shirt. She survived but was left with a sizable scar on her cheek. The scar resembled an American flag, pocks for stars and gouges for stripes. Her mother was on the news all the time, which led to the child signing a deal with an agency, and quite soon after that, the child and her scar started appearing on billboards as the new face of a California restaurant chain that sold bratwursts. Last month, for reasons unrelated, the little girl passed away. The querent used to say we come back as either human or animal, that in the spirit world, there is no delineation. It’s nice to think the end isn’t the end. Though I wouldn’t dare say that to the dead girl’s mother.
What we had done was trample on Johnson’s city, four sheets of paper, loosely placed side by side, with buildings growing in no particular visual perspective, some upwards, some in profile, some in three dimensions but others in blueprint, and this, we felt intuitively, was a triumph of Johnson’s city, or would-be city, it’s resistance to confinement, its ability to transcend.
And we sat with Johnson. We consoled. We patted Johnson on the back and said that we might rebuild it, that it could be rebuilt. That it could be better and that we could help.
We collected the roll of white butcher paper from its mount and unfurled it across the linoleum, gathered the colored pencils, the crayons and scented markers and watercolors and even the Sharpies we’d hidden in our cubbies. We collected scissors and Scotch tape, and began to connect the sheets of paper, for there would be no limit to what we could design.
Nocturne
Midnight at the pit of my irrelevance: a hair’s breadth away, I step closer to the mouth of it, no more afraid to shake hands with my lacuna than a bird is of the air whistling in its bones. To stay possible as long as possible
had felt like enough now—a persistence of streaks in soft butter yellow shed from the clock tower onto the indigo- freaked slate-to-black vagueness that indicates the river. The light lives
Silence
I thought I was good because I had borne the brunt of society’s manhandling, because through halls of terror I fled and gangs of girls followed me, seeking to press thumbs deep into my arms, cheeks, back of my neck, thighs, because goodness lay heavy in the air around me, because most around me were powerful underprivileged role models, I thought it good enough to know and read vexatious histories and in my own private sanctum feel the pain, to dwell in sorrow through theater and dance, that just by being around, goodness could rub off on a person
